What Drove Me Crazy in Europe

by PERRY MILLER

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IN EVERY session where Americans and Western Europeans meet ECA conference. North Atlantic Pact, Fulbright board the American representatives sit Opposite a row of universitytrained Europeans. The American delegate may be he generally is a man who, as we say, “happened to go” to college, although he won’t give that fact much thought. 11 is fatal error I have seen it frequently is to assume that his opposite number is the same sort of fellow.

The European didn’t just “happen” to go to the university. He is a man with a status. His is aware of it. When you get to the basic patterns of thinking—beneath specific opinions or arguments you find that he reasons, or still more feels, as a man conscious at every moment of status. Furthermore, he knows little or nothing of American scholarship. There are exceptions, but in general his fundamental structure of mind has not been altered, although he may have been much grieved, by what has happened in Europe in the last generation.

Those who make the decisions in Europe also make the opinion, and these determiners, in politics or in business, are a corps of university graduates. Unless the structure of European society is to be violently altered, we shall have to deal, in all our interchanges, with this corps. There may be here and there a party leader or a manufacturer who has come up without attending a university, bill the undersecretaries and the experts, the fonctionnaires, the bank presidents and industrialists, the burgomasters and most of 1 he councillors, earn an academic dignity, ‘I’hey are divided into parties and interests, but when it comes to larger points of view and to inarticulate premises, these people are, throughout Europe, astonishingly alike. Whelher Dutch, French, German, or Swiss, when they have to meet the American mentality, they exhibit the same features. Each university does cling proudly and even fiercely to its distinguishing “tradition” — and yet education on the Continent, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, is standardized.

This may seem an odd charge to come from an American, and I must stress that I am trying to speak only of certain qualities which we encounter in negotiating with Europe in general. One difficulty is that this uniformity manifests itself not in the maany areas ol which Europeans are conscious and they are extremely self-conscious—but in those of which they are unconscious. Consciously, they make much of their disagreements; the American must stay in Europe long enough to read between, or behind, the words before he appreciates their similarities.

Precisely in this area of the unarticulated major premise resides the deep and ubiquitous anti-Americanism that the visitor gradually senses behind the most charming cordiality and hospitality. Or rat her, “ami" is too strong: it is much more a settled and frozen image of America which is so deeply embedded in the educated mind that it does not need to be brought out, least of all in the presence of the American, because it is seldom explicitly’ uttered, and still more seldom examined, it becomes a conditioning factor in all instruction, whether in law, theology, or even in medicine.

Many Europeans my colleagues and friends — will stoutly deny this charge of academic standardization. They will cite the great variety of national traditions, and then the inveterate individuality of even the most provincial academy. I can only insist that to the American eye the pattern demonstrates its uniformity by showing everywhere just those deficiencies of knowledge, or of insight, which now are most desperately needed for the success of our communion. Whether the European comes from Toulouse or Utrecht, Zurich or Paris — whether he be conservative or socialist, Christian or freethinker — he says the same things about America and he asks the same questions. Hy the insistence of their repetitions, Europeans demonstrate how much they apprehend all things within the rubrics of their training—how, even wit h t he best will in the world, they can comprehend America only within those rubrics.

Let me say at once, I am not trying to exalt America against Europe. We must not forget that amid the European schools, often working under heartbreaking difficulties, there are very great scholars; neither can we forget the tremendous assistance American science received in the last decades from the immigrants we were so fortunate as to have to receive. But I am compelled to ask, however reluctantly, whether the European educational system, rather than the American, has not become set in a rigorous and intransigent mold. I am forced to declare that there are respects in which the Continental method has become a hindrance to the Continent’s survival. It is, in short, fossilized.

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RECOGNTZING, then, that this is dangerous ground, where discussion too easily degenerates into insult, l can collect my observations under two heads: the lack in European schools of anything resembling the “college,” and the absence in the pedagogy of anything resembling 1 he point of view* Americans have imbibed, willingly or unwillingly, from the “social sciences.”

By the experience of the college I do not mean sports. Most European students are adequately athletic, although they do not have massed cheering sections or proper field houses. What I do mean is that, the’ serious student, after a high school that consists of intensive drill in memorization and very little else, enters the university at about eighteen (for the European, as compared with the American, still a very tender age), is confined to a single “faculty,” and never, intellectually speaking, gets outside it. Then and there he is committed for life to theology, law, or medicine; the pressures of society do not permit him to gamble with his career by wasting academic effort on anything but professional training. lie cultivates his tastes for the arts or indulges curiosity about other subjects on his own. Many of the students come from households with libraries, or from circles in which there is a premium upon the evidences of what we may call, in the restricted sense, “culture”: those will have in their rooms a collection of paper-backed books, and they do read them. The room may be of a tawdriness that would horrify the janitor of an American dormitory, but the books represent a wider range of reading than most of our undergraduates can showeven under the compulsion of a variegated “course program.” But the university itself takes no responsibility for these concerns; it is a professional training ground, and it imparts standard and formal disciplines. In the university, the professor tells the student, and on examinations the student repeats what the professor has told him.

If you think I am exaggerating, try to expound the conception of the college to European academic groups, especially its relation to the graduate school. 1 have tried it, to persons whose eagerness to comprehend and whose perplexity were written on their faces; even when they hear the words, they cannot grasp the fact. Thai a man should spend four years in a College of Arts and Sciences, pursuing simultaneously a miscellany of courses — which he will never “use” in his profession—seems in Europe an extravagance comparable only to the legends about Americans throwing into the garbage halfeaten steaks. 1 could bring any conversation to a dead stop by asserting that yes, I positively do believe a year spent studying a little something (even if only a little) about, let us say, Renaissance Florence, Racine, elementary physics, and a queer business called anthropology — that 1 do believe this is “education.” In that sense, the word simply has no meaning in Europe.

To put it another way, few Americans can really understand how profound a manifestation of the European malaise is the vogue of existentialism. Especially the cry of humanity it raises against the identification of the person with his profession, of the postman with the function, above all of the professor with the professorship. One comprehends ( be depth of this protest only when he learns with what solemnity the professor does take himself (although there are exceptions), and how the society encourages him never to forget that he is Professor Doctor. There are pompous and pedantic professors in America who also fail to hear the rough and spontaneous speech of men, but let us thank heaven for all the pinpricks this society administers to their complacency. I am proud of my calling, but I come back from Europe treasuring as an indispensable portion of ihe national heritage the American disposition to think the professor slightly ridiculous.

Out of the European universities come, indubitably, cultured persons. The ordinary student is more at home with literature, painting, and music than the average senior over here. What becomes confusing is that these amenities are cultivated, not because they are real knowledge, but as badges of class and status. They are graces and accomplishments, like needle point among Victorian women. This was all very well in the last century, when the Buddenbrookses of Europe were playing a basic role, and so could pardonably embellish it; in the changing society, when these classes employ their culture as a means of marking themselves off from their inferiors, the emphasis becomes sinister. Since the acquisition is unrelated to the lecture room, the university does nothing about bringing these interests into vital relation with any body of knowledge. Hence the careful student of Europe today discovers, with a horror of which Henry James felt the preliminary tremors only as late as 1914, that the so-called culture of Europe does not go very deep. The American olten leaves his campus still vulgar and uninformed, but we do have the opportunity, more by good luck than good management, of impressing upon him the glimmerings of a notion that learning is not something apart from life.

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THE universities of Europe were fixed in their present structures by the time ol ihe Renaissance. Then, when winds of doct rine were blowing in gales, the universities spread their canvas to catch every gust. To settle the doctrine of the enclitic De was to rallv the forces of society. To cope with ihe departments of knowledge, the universities were organized in1o “faculties, usually the basic ti\e that corresponded to the areas then discernible theology, letters, law, medicine, and natural science. The last two still are feasible organs for administering the increased learning (hence the good work done in them, particularly on the higher levels of theory), but the other three are totally inadequate to the twentieth century. There is a constant and pathetic effort to pour new wines into old and insufficient bottles. Hence the burgeoning of “institutes,” of little projects for teaching, and research in fields that do not quite fit into the hierarchy of the faculties. These are generally organized around some great (or ambitious) professor, and may survive him; in effect they atomize the life of the universitv, sequester books in disparate collections, become vested interests, and make the whole conception of scholarship something tucked away in corners. The “departmental system forces many distractions upon the American university, and rubrics multiply; but even if it leads to the oflering of useless courses, it does allow scope lor a healthy experimentation, all under a moderately efficient management. (Not that I hold a brief for all administrators.) Here again we have to thank not our prescience but the brute fact that American universities grew up this way because of the pressures of American society. They were never permitted the utter isolation of the self-righteous.

By the same token, the visitor is quickly struck by, and remains to the end puzzled by, the deliberate isolation of the European students from the society around them. Gradually he becomes aware that this is organically connected with the architectonic nature of the instruction itself. Of course, Americans sometimes think of college as the best years of their life, and commencement orators speak of going out into the world, but these matters are relative. Compared with the Europeans, American students live in the center of the world. Our orators talk nonsense: the numbers of students who earn at least a part of their way (European professors and students always ask about this practice, with a dreadful fascination), the undergraduate political clubs, our mores of relations between the sexes, and a thousand other things make it impossible for a youth in America to be quarantined against business, politics, and the radio. In Europe the “tradition”— baneful word! is that the student at the university, acquiring title to the status he will enter about the age of twenty-five or thirty, dwells within a parenthesis in time, lie is out of society and a privileged character. In the Dutch universities, where the tradition is most resolutely maintained, this immunization is dramatized by having all student functions—evenings at the Corps, dances, festival dinnersbegin at midnight, so that in the morning the student, in full evening dress, is conspicuously going home just as solid burghers go to work. He, of course, will be a burgher later on, but for the time being he is existentially another kind of being, with his peculiar capers. For that society of burghers the Dutch students have a revealing word, klllemaatschappc— the chilly outside world. If the world is outside, and is chilly and if the ultimate doom is implacable then the period of study becomes a licensed interval, and learning is rigorously separated from living. It took a little time, but soon 1 began to understand why student after student flatly informed melhat in America all education was of course utilitarian, “while we are theoretical.” He carries that conviction with him for the rest of his life, let us remember, ev en whim lie is negotiating a trade agreement.

In tins happy period ihe student s only task in a vacuum, how could it be otherwise £ is to learn what the professor says. Especially in the study of law, in which the majority are engaged and out of which come the businessmen and cabinet ministers, where the law is not an accumulation of precedents hut the bound hook of t he code, learning consists of what is in the book. In theology and literature the at tit ude is much t he same. I si niggled in vain to drive my own students 1o the original sources, or to persuade them to check what I was saving against their own interpretation of the documents. “Critical” reading, in that sense, I found an almost unknown conception. At an oral examination — significant ly enough, the professor does not give an examination, he “takes it from the student!— 1 wearily tried to expound the conception to one of my better students, and received the candid answer, “Yes, but this way is much easier.”

I should be grossly unfair, however, if I did not also say that this state of affairs is not satisfactory to many of the students. 1 hose I found the more alert, or the more rebellious, would confide to me expressions of complete dissent - possibly in part, because I rather encouraged them. Some of my colleagues will bitterly object to my saying this, yet I found (I think it is a common experience for the American) that as between the world of the professors and that of my student friends, I led an utterly schizophrenic existence. On matters of historv and scholarship I could communicate easily with my colleagues. But I had served in World War II, and my subject was the literature of America—which happens to be much concerned, at least in my conception, with “powerful uneducated persons,” whalers, Gatsby, and Jennie Gerhardt. Of course European writers deal with “people” — François le Champi and Germinie Laccrteux — but the effect was not the same when the European Professor of Literature held forth on “la vie et les œuvres” of Sand or the Gonrourts.

So, it became something of a sacred trust, and a problem for sleepless nights, when a Dutch student who had escaped in 1940 and spent four hard years in the Navy confided to me that his contemporaries, by accepting their isolation from the chilly world, were merely postponing decisions which he knew could not be postponed, and that few of them knew what he was talking about. Likewise, when the candidate for the agrégé in Strasbourg confessed that, although Whitman was a required topic this year—an official post-liberation gesture! nobody would dare to write upon him as I had leetured upon him and stiff expect to pass an examination set by ihc Sorbonne. Or when the president of ihc theological students at Leiden declared ihat many of the first-year boys were suffering genuine nervous crises in the cruel transition from domesticity and the routine of the high school to the “freedom” — the highly conventionalized freedom — of the university. He felt that nobody in the community — there is, of course, no “hygiene department” or anything like it — would recognize that these were in truth crises, and he was trying to be of help by reading, entirely on his own, Freud and Jung. So, as I say, I talked one kind of language with my colleagues, which was rich and satisfactory, but I could not carry the terms of their discourse over into that of t he students. Neither could I, no matter how much I tried, explain my predicament to my colleagues since they naturally assumed that they knew their own students better than I did.

For my sins, I have often attacked the influence of John Dewey upon the American schools. I believe that those operating in his name have often debased the intellectual coinage. No one familiar with the American situation can fail to sympathize with the many recent efforts to resist the ultrapragmatical drift — although he may not go all the way with Robert Maynard Hutchins. But all this becomes a tempest in an American teacup when viewed from Europe, where there never has been any John Dewey in the first place. It is one thing to have faced his challenge, to have learned everything from it, and then to resist; it is quite another thing never to have heard it.

Repeatedly I found that these dissident students were reaching out—generally by buying from slender resources such casual volumes as appeared in the booksellers’ — for works of psychology, anthropology, sociology, social psychology, economics, and what we call generically political science. I was constantly bombarded by eager questions about these subjects, which according to rumor were widely taught in America. It is a fantastic situation when one thinks of European names like Weber, Mannheim, Gunnar Myrdal — not to mention Marx. The explanation is simple: great theorists of the social sciences exist in their little “institutes,”but the student in law or theology has too much to memorize against the moment when the examination in his subject is to be taken from him to do more than cursory reading in anything else. And he certainly has no one to give the faintest intimation that these disciplines have any bearing on the corpus of his specially.

The force of those considerations is, indeed, making some headway in a few academies. Particularly, as One might imagine, in urban centers. At Amsterdam, for instance, there bus been newly established a separate “faculty” to teach essentially the social sciences. But again, old bottles are being si rained to receive modern wine; the professors being organized into a faculty, only students specifically enrolled in it receive the instruction, and those in law or literature — who most need it — do not. There is Professor Tinbergen at the Rotterdam School of Economics, but what the student in the faculty of law at Leiden or Utrecht gets in the way of economics is less than the dullest Freshman “Ec. 1" in America. It is not a Tinbergen, who is at home in American scientific circles, who shapes the European image of America: it is the graduate of the faculty of law entrenched in a secretaryship or a bank, the graduate of the faculty of theology in his pulpit. These know vaguely and with distaste that in America the mysterious sciences of which they are initiate are vulgarized and diluted.

The most hopeless task I confronted in lecturing upon modern literature in Continental universities was to explain the power of the recent revolt, inside English and American institutions, against the “history of literature” — the crusades of T. S. Eliot, of Lenvis, of the “new criticism,” to make possible the reading of a poem for the poem’s sake. With some great exceptions, instruction in the Continental faculty of letters struck me as so serenely barricaded behind philology and the morphology of types that the sociological concept was not even there to be revolted against!

It is somewhere in this gulf then, the gulf between the university and the society, that the European image of America emerges and hardens. The student listens with interest to the assertion that in every department American scholarship has been obliged to reconsider the content of learning because the social sciences have connected the most codified learning with conditions and circumstances, but he listens incredulously. Inwardly, he says to himself once more that the Americans are mechanics. He goes into the chilly outside world in the full possession of his stereotype. A charming first-year man at Leiden came to ask me about the possibility of his going to America. I invited him to lunch, whereupon he fell over himself with amazement. He came, and for half an hour descanted on this marvel, that a professor should condescend to find time to talk about a student’s personal problem, and give him lunch into the bargain. Then, getting down to business, in the most matter-of-fact tone, he blandly asked me, “Do you think I would be happy in America, where-all-the-people-aro-so-superficial-and-materialistic?” I wager that this young man has a career before him in Holland!

It may be a reckless divination, but I am convinced that the connection between the insularity of the university and the universal apathy of European students toward the problem of the future of Western culture is direct and fundamental. The apathy is certainly there; by the end of my sojourn, it haunted me. The cry that we must all stand together for the preservation of “values” excites little enthusiasm among European students. Or where there are stirrings, they never lead to the idea that these are a common concern of Europe and America. There is no conception of America w hich permits it to figure as a champion of culture. The widely spreading doctrine of Europe as a “third force” is founded upon an image in which America appears as an entirely different, and repulsive, force. The conduct of our liberating armies and of our tourists helps create the image, no doubt; but deeper than these irritations lies the fact that the student has no idea of the meanings the term education has acquired in America, or of the struggle to find those meanings. Frequently I would get a charmingly oblique manifestation of the hidden conviction that invariably fell into the same pattern: Europeans really cannot be impressed with American art or scholarship, the student would say; we can hardly be expected to admire what you do in imitation of us, but show us your skyscrapers or your mass production and we marvel. They say again and again that they are helpless between the two materialistic giants of America and Russia, that Europeans can no longer influence the one great decision of war or peace, and that they can only abide. If you then ask them why they continue studying at the university, they answer that they are becoming qualified for the special position which will be theirs by right of the university degree.

I am the last one to want Europe “Americanized.” But in an industrial and mechanized century, some things in Europe must change: a continental economy cannot be managed through such minute entities as France and Italy, let alone Holland and Belgium. America has no choice but to urge the union. No wonder there is deep resentment. A typical European character — who has been in America and ought to know better — took pleasure in assuring me that America is an “episode” in history, which is now coming to a close, whereafter history will resume its march along the great European path. This gentleman, I need not add, holds a degree from a faculty of law.

Whatever other kinds of communication we attempt, the real effort must commence on the university level. There arc forces, even if only resentment, making for the inclusion of American subjects — history, literature, economics, social sciences— in the curricula of instruction. There are Europeans who know that the ancient faculties have become strait, jackets. My invitation to Leiden came from a committee of graduates who were not an official governing body, some of whom dwell in the chilly outside world. The students are eager to listen. There are immense difficulties in conveying American meanings, but the least of these is the linguistic. The great problem, I can assure you, is one of semantics.

The Fulbright program, which sends teachers and students to Europe, is a splendid enterprise — although there are defects in its administration. I have found that the really effective agents, however, are not so much the Americans in Europe as the European students who have been in America. At Leiden two young men, one of whom had a year at Kansas and the other at Union, were worth twenty times the visiting professor in making comprehensible American ways of thought. Their parents may lament, and their professors not listen — since professors seldom listen to students anyway — but their comrades will. No dollar spent in bringing a student to America is wasted — considering what we waste, this is an advisedly sweeping statement. It is not necessary that they be brought here to be indoctrinated: it is just necessary that they he brought.

One of my most astute Dutch students said to me in so many words that his education gave him no clues as to how to apply his knowledge to a newr situation. The American colleges do not impart this knack ready-made, but circumstances have forced upon us the realization that it is a handy thing to have. Even while aware of how much we have yet to do, one can take some pride in what our schools have achieved. Yet this very degree of accomplishment— or the extent to which we have fallen short — stands as a main barrier between the mentality of Europe and of America. On either side there are those who keep the barrier up —out of a lack of imagination and sympathy on this side, out of the inertia of “tradition” on the other. If there is to be anything more than a rickety military alliance—which will fall apart under the first blow — this barrier must be razed.