ustxtxb_obs_1969_11_21_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

deliberately dishonest in not bringing out the fact that his voting on the budget council, so significant for the first vote of 7 to 6 against Caroline, was with the full consent of the philosophy budget council. Despite my inadvertent failure to make this clear, had all the saints in heaven given their consent, I would still have thought the whole decision an unwise one, as Silber’s later surrender of these rights appears to confirm. What I intended to stress was that Silber’s vote, however honorably cast, with all the personal, decanal, and professional integrity you could wish, was crucial. As I see it, with that tiny majority, for which the department as a whole may bear the responsibility, the wheels could be set in motion to pacify regents, administration, and outraged citizens. Indeed, with that vote, Chairman Erwin did not have to do anything except make noises like a rubber stamp, and I see no reason to disbelieve Silber when he says that Erwin played no actual part in Caroline’s severance from the university. I bet Erwin hated that! An interesting subject of speculation is what would have happened if the budget council vote had been split or divided 7-6 in Caroline’s favor. Silber, in his turn, does not account for the fact that throughout the dispute roughly half of the budget council was on Caroline’s side. I believe that Silber did not want to renew Caroline’s contract for his own very good reasons, but unless six of his former colleagues are fools or knaves, then the moral and intellectual case against Caroline cannot be as open and shut as he apparently feels it is. WHEN SILBER says that he finds “most perplexing in this case that the AAUP and the Texas faculty did not congratulate the administration and the board of regents for their decision to honor Caroline’s contract for its second year. To the extent there was pressure, it was to terminate the contract abruptly in June, 1968”: he is, of course, joking, or being ironic, but I of all people wouldn’t want to find fault with him on that. I assume that Silber, whatever he thought of Caroline, must have been one of the fiercest and most persuasive advocates of avoiding AAUP censure or even the possibility of it, given the university’s status in the fifties and the problems it has even at the moment. There is an anecdote that Professor Ernie Goldstein used to tell colleagues at Yale that they may have academic freedom, but that at Texas they have tested it. An AAUP censure would rather ruin the point of the story. Ronnie Dugger’s interview with Silber, then, did not change my mind about the intellectual and ideological bases of their conflict, although more light is thrown upon their personal conflicts, which I shall not presume to judge. I am willing to believe, as I hope was clear from the article, that Silber was sincere in his judgment that Caroline was “intellectually irresponsible,” such irresponsibility being in his definition, we learn, “a man’s being quite willing to state publicly what he knows to be false and to argue in a manner that he knows to be specious simply in order to achieve a rhetorical effect.” BUT I AM still as convinced as I could be that Caroline’s speech, call it radical, revolutionary, idealistic, or even wrong, did not incorporate what Caroline believed to be false. He did not argue, given that it was a public speech on a specific occasion and not a colloquium in the philosophy department, in a manner that was to him specious or even indefensibly rhetorical. Probably more than half the world’s population would have agreed with it; a substantial number of intellectuals, in America and in Europe \(need I mention nothing exceptional in it; and other thoughtful people, who do not share Austin William Arrowsmith, professor of classics, reacted sharply against John Sullivan’s discussion of the. classics department and the Caroline affair, calling Sullivan’s style “feline and pusillanimous.” “He constantly suggests that other people are lacking courage,” Arrowsmith says of his former colleague Sullivan, “but instead of speaking up from here, he lets us have his opinions from Buffalo. He was singularly costive on crucial issues while he was here. “He is admired among younger faculty here for his courage in testifying on drugs at a legislative hearing, but he said he’d never taken LSD within the borders of Texas, and most of his friends know this was a circumspection which you can’t call courage.” Arrowsmith said he did not know about the Caroline case because he was not here when it happened, hut, he said, “I know both these men well, Silber and Sullivan, and I’m really a little bit outraged on behalf of John Silber. “These two men are both liberal, but between the two, Silber is a big league human being, a fine, complex, liberal intelligence. You never know where he’ll come down on an issue, while Sullivan I regard as somewhat of a doctrinate liberal. Even though John’s [ Silber’s] liberalism is constrained somewhat by the job he holds, he is a profoundly liberal man, deeply committed to the reforming of institutions, and gifted with a complex moral intelligence. John’s lost too many friends who take the quick, easy response of cheap and easy liberalism. His is a profound Caroline’s views or who differ with his solutions, would find his speech understandable even if mistaken. Like Silber, I would have welcomed an exposition of his views at length in a colloquium, but I reject utterly the Silberian implications of deliberate “sophistry” or conscious intellectual weakness in his pronouncements. As I tried to explain, I saw a fundamental gulf between their liberal and radical imaginations, as there is between the visions of the Christian and the atheist. But accusations of “insincerity” and “intellectual irresponsibility” should have been excluded from this whole affair. Despite Arrowsmith’s remarks, I did not mean to imply that Silber lacks courage or honesty; what I was most worried about was his closed mind, which cannot see anything but sophistry, intellectual incompetence, or insincerity in unpalatable and unconventional political or other philosophies. liberalism that’s somewhat snookered by institutions.” Arrowsmith, indicating he wanted to respond to Sullivan, said he did not have time to write a response because he was leaving on a trip of two or three months’ duration. Accordingly he was interviewed. SULLIVAN’S discussion of “Harry’s Boys” \(Obs., Arrowsmith as one of them, most of the credit for the growth and prestige of the classics department at the university. However, Sullivan wrote, “Arrowsmith, with his insight into and influence on the administration, has been on leave for four out of the last ten years, which means that he was unable to join in several important struggles in the department and in the college at large.” To Arrowsmith this was in instance of “Sullivan’s innuendoes.” “What he really means is, Arrowsmith kept kind of silent by running about, and his absences were excessive and were achieved by favoritism,” Arrowsmith said. “The cat’s claw technique doesn’t work here in the land of the tiger,” Arrowsmith said warmly. “His whole style is father feline. It’s an Oxford genre, and Sullivan has brought it to the level of perfection. You compliment someone so that only the insiders will realize that he’s being knifed. Sullivan prefers the stiletto to the club. His compliments to Silber and me and all the others are devices of an apparent, but absent objectivity. And, of course, it makes it difficult to respond.” November 21, 1969 9 And Arrowsmith.. .