On the nineteenth of April 1989, one of the huge gun turrets on the battleship Iowa blew up, killing the sailors who were manning it. Debate about responsibility for the explosion continued long afterward, but lost in the emotion of the tragedy was a curious aspect of the story. According to the commander of the ship, interviewed after the event, it was expected to be difficult, if not impossible, to fix the damaged gun turret. The Iowa is of World War II vintage, and he feared that the materials and technological know-how to repair its gigantic guns might not exist anymore.
A similar problem arose about ten years ago when church officials decided it was time to resume construction of New York’s vast Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, after a lapse of decades. It turned out that a few old men in England were the only stonemasons left in the world who knew how to work the giant blocks from which a cathedral is built. If they hadn’t been able to train young apprentices, there would have been no choice but to abandon the project.
I think that our concept of progress prevents us from being aware that skills and knowledge can vanish from the world. Most of us probably imagine knowledge to be cumulative: each advance built on prior discoveries, block piled upon block in an ever-growing edifice. We don’t think of the blocks underneath as crumbling away or, worse yet, simply vanishing. Our worldview does not prepare us for that, although it is hardly a new phenomenon.
There are many disappearing varieties of knowledge besides the making of guns and cathedrals. Boat designing and building, using a lathe creatively, knowing how to garden without chemicals, having the skill to sharpen a pair of scissors — these and ten thousand other kinds of transmitted knowledge are being lost at a terrifying rate. This grand forgetting could be, and no doubt will be, the subject of entire books. But as a teacher I am most familiar with the losses that are closest to me and my work.
The loss of knowledge and skills is a serious, even overwhelming, problem in our universities — in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences — and no store of learning is in greater danger of disappearing than our long-accumulated knowledge of the natural world. The problem is so acute that I do not hesitate to call it the next environmental crisis, although it will never rival for press coverage the hole in the ozone layer or global warming. We are on the verge of losing our ability to tell one plant or animal from another and of forgetting how the known species interact with each other and with their environments.
The process is gradual, and it is affecting the more prestigious, research-oriented schools first. What is happening is that certain subjects no longer have anyone to teach them, or are taught on a piecemeal basis by people from the periphery of the university or outside it altogether. “Classification of Higher Plants,” “Marine Invertebrates,” “Ornithology,” “Mammology,” “Cryptogams” (ferns and mosses), “Biogeography,” “Comparative Physiology,” “Entomology” — you may find some of them in course catalogs, but too often with the notation alongside, “Not offered in 1996-97.” The following year, and the year after, they will still not be offered.
The features that distinguish lizards from snakes from crocodiles from turtles from tuataras are not any less accepted or valid than they were thirty years ago, nor are they any easier to learn from books, without hands-on laboratory instruction. But try getting someone in any of the top-ranked biology departments to teach such a lab. In one Ivy League university, the school of forestry uses retired faculty to teach some of its basic courses about trees; this same university has trouble staffing a general ecology course from the faculty of its biology department. As I write this, there is a large land-grant university that has no limnologist (a person who studies the biology of lakes and rivers) on its regular faculty of biological sciences, and only one plant taxonomist — retired — on its main science campuses.
New students who are attracted to the study of whole plants and animals still exist, but they find themselves in a very hostile learning environment for their kind of biology. Not surprisingly, their numbers are dwindling. It is these students who, after getting their master’s and doctoral degrees, ought to be going out to teach in the nation’s colleges and universities, to be taking over as older professors retire. But the chain has been interrupted: there are many fewer new graduates with this knowledge, and these few will have trouble finding positions unless they are willing to switch to a more “modern” field or use high-tech methodologies in their research, whether these methodologies are appropriate or not. In any event, the result is the same: reservoirs that are not replenished soon run dry.
To prove that I am not crying wolf, I want to tell a true story. One morning at eight o’clock, my phone rang. It was a former student of mine who is now a research endocrinologist at a major teaching hospital in Houston. She had an odd question: at what point in animal evolution was the porphyrin molecule (such as hemoglobin) first adopted for use specifically as an oxygen carrier? It was an essential piece of information for medical research that she was planning. If I didn’t know the answer (and I didn’t), who did? I racked my brains to think of a contemporary biochemist or university department that could provide the answer. Nothing. All I could come up with was a book, I thought by somebody named F. A. Baldwin, that I had read when I was a student. She thanked me politely and said goodbye.
Later I went down to the basement and found the book in a box. It was An Introduction to Comparative Biochemistry, by Ernest (not F. A.) Baldwin, Cambridge University Press, 1964, fourth edition. The flyleaf indicated that the hardcover text had set me back $2.75, new. Much of the information my former student had wanted was in there, brilliantly written. A phone call to Cambridge University Press told me that Baldwin had gone out of print in 1980.
By coincidence, I was scheduled to lecture that afternoon to a group of biochemistry professors and graduate students. So I asked them the question I had been asked earlier. “I’m not a biochemist,” I said after describing the phone call. “Tell me who is working on this sort of thing these days.” They looked at one another and laughed. Nobody does comparative biochemistry anymore, they answered; at least they didn’t know of anybody. There probably was nothing published since Baldwin. As for the graduate students, they had never even heard of comparative biochemistry.
Gone! Not outdated. Not superseded. Not scientifically or politically controversial. Not even merely frivolous. A whole continent of important human knowledge gone, like Atlantis beneath the waves. True, we still have Ernest Baldwin’s book, but this kind of knowledge needs trained, experienced people to keep it alive and to hand it on to the next generation.
At nearly all of today’s research colleges and universities, the teaching is being done by three kinds of “temporaries”: graduate students; non-tenure-track researchers and scholars — mostly women — who work full-time hours for part-time pay and reduced benefits; and an assortment of experts from outside the university who freelance courses a semester at a time. All are skilled workers working for substandard wages with no job security. A few don’t mind — those who are retired and teach an occasional course because they want to stay active. But for most it is a matter of survival, and they tend to feel exploited and to become angry or depressed, or both. Some of these teachers manage to be conscientious, inspiring, and creative, but few are around very long. Teaching, more than other professions, needs continuity.
Despite the starvation of teaching, universities are receiving and spending money as never before. Where is it going? The answer varies from school to school — at one it will be computer science, at a second genetic engineering, at a third high-energy physics — but in all cases the money is going to hire “world-class scholars” at world-class salaries, and to set them up in business. At my university, as at many others, world-class scholars have become a kind of academic consumer item, like fancy computer systems; our administrators refer to them as WCSls, or wixels. They are purchased on the open market. One wixel can cost tens of millions of dollars by the time the university is finished providing the building, space-age equipment, and numerous support personnel that the wixel has been promised. Wixels don’t have time to teach, except for occasional cameo performances; they don’t even have time for graduate students.
Eventually, every asset that the university can lay hands on is hocked to pay for these wixels. Teaching budgets are slashed, teaching laboratories are converted into research space, and the salaries of professors who were foolish enough to teach or whose research is not in one of the glamorous areas are seized when these professors retire or, if untenured, inevitably fail to gain promotion. Soon, the only way the university can afford to keep its teaching program afloat is to hire a flock of temporaries. Not only are they cheap, but if they complain they can be fired.
Common sense tells us that starving the roots of a fruit tree to promote the bloom of a few showy and mostly sterile flowers is irresponsibly shortsighted. What has driven higher education to commit this folly? The ultimate reason why we forget important knowledge is the corruption and loss of our societal values, particularly those values associated with peace and permanence. Values remind us of the importance of certain things in our lives, including special varieties of knowledge. Without values our attention to life wanders — is it so strange, then, that we lose those things that we have forgotten we need? Yet, if the ultimate cause of forgetting in our universities is a problem of values, the immediate, practical cause, as you have surely guessed, is university administration, with its uncontrolled growth and insatiable demand for funds.
Before the Second World War, universities were run by a rather small cadre of scholars-turned-administrators, usually distinguished professors who had reached a point in their careers where pomp and ceremony were more appealing than the library or the laboratory. This was harmless — even useful. Every university needs a royal family to get money and charm the public. But after the war, things began to change. The Managerial Revolution was upon us, university administration became a career in itself (especially for those whose academic work was going nowhere), and administrators proliferated like weeds in a garden. Worse yet, they assumed the salaries and office luxuries of the corporate executives they were imitating: the royal family became a royal mob, losing both its nobility and its utility in the process.
The new administration had new priorities, most of them dictated by an overwhelming need to find money. But taxonomy and other classical fields of biology get comparatively few and insubstantial grants. The overhead these grants provide is minimal. The classical fields simply do not support enough administrators to make the fields worth keeping. For this reason, whole disciplines are administratively branded “not world class” or “unproductive,” and are dumped, like trash, from the university canon. The word gets around; administrators listen to each other, if to nobody else. School after school jettisons the stigmatized disciplines rather than have its administrators be labeled “not progressive.”
The money chase is a nerve-racking business. Grants and patents, with their lucrative, easily laundered overheads, are not “hard” budget items. A bloated administration requires more and more of these scantily monitored funds to support its growth, but grants and patents are undependable. Inevitably, universities begin to bid against one another to attract those scientists (the wixels) who have the best records of getting large grants.
University administrators now find themselves on a treadmill from which they cannot get off. Wixels almost always cost more than they bring in, if all the costs, including extra administration, maintenance of new buildings, etc., are taken into account. This is true even of the good wixels, let alone the duds. Fortunes are spent to gain fortunes that never materialize. Student tuitions are raised and raised, “unproductive” departments are closed, budgets (except the wixels’) are pared. Many universities, despite massive endowments and cash flows, are now stretched perilously thin. The system is spiraling out of control.
Here is a very ominous positive-feedback loop, like the other positive feedbacks that accompany overmanagement: the fewer research programs and courses there are in a subject, the fewer people there will be to teach the next generation of students. Skilled knowledge is transmitted by people, not by books alone. Make no mistake, I am not talking about the preservation of trivia, but the safe transmission of vital existing knowledge. An example: Agriculture depends on soil. Soil fertility, as Darwin knew, depends heavily on earthworms, and different species of earthworms play different roles in soils. In North America, a quiet but potentially momentous battle is being waged as European and Asian earthworms displace native species. The invaders seem to be quite different ecologically from the local worms, so consequences can be expected, even if we cannot predict them. Yet, at the time of this writing, there is just one actively working scientist who is familiar with the taxonomy of North American earthworms. He is at a small private university in Iowa. Another earthworm taxonomist works at a university in Puerto Rico; she was only recently trained in Spain. A third earthworm taxonomist, trained by his mother, has been working for a post office in Oregon. The fourth, and last, person in North America north of Mexico who has expert knowledge of earthworm taxonomy is presently earning a living as a police lawyer in New Brunswick, Canada. There are no graduate students studying earthworm taxonomy in the United States and Canada. Fifty years ago, at least five American scientists, plus their students, were at work in this field. Nor is the situation different in other parts of the world: Australia, long noted for its earthworm research, now has none; the British Museum has ended its earthworm taxonomy, and so on.
The situation with earthworms is typical. The more advances we make, the more we forget. What use is our expensive technology in a sea of ignorance? It is time to put an end to managerial universities while there are still people left in them who know how to pass on useful information from one generation to the next.
Nor is the problem confined to the sciences. In the social sciences and humanities it is not necessarily large grants that have derailed the transmission of knowledge, but a similar influence. These divisions of the university have their wixels, too — showy, fashionable academic superstars who thrive on publicity and can attract the attention of big donors, thus reflecting glory on the administrators who hired them.
As in other kinds of overmanagement, the way to start braking the administrative juggernaut is to reduce the flow of money to administrators — soon. There is, for instance, no reason why unspecified grant overheads should exceed 8 or 10 percent. In the case of heavily endowed schools, wealthy alumni should also put an end to knee-jerk giving, especially contributions for new buildings. In the modern university, money is increasingly proving to be a corrosive substance.
Turning off the money supply is not enough, however. Teachers need the courage and skill to publicize the importance and the plight of the knowledge that is vanishing. An informed university community may then be roused to demand cuts in administration (starting with higher administration), less secrecy, greater faculty and student influence, a moratorium on construction of “high-tech” facilities and on increases in tuition, a higher priority for teaching, greater communication and interdependence between the university and its surrounding community, and support for a diversity of low-cost research projects that can function without multimillion-dollar grants and that don’t generate profitable patents. And none of this will happen unless we constantly inform people and explain our efforts in light of the values we seek to recover.
But if no effective change takes place, what then? Then we can expect the managerial ethic to continue to prevail and teaching to become vestigial as the existing university structure falls further into disarray. True, a new kind of university may emerge — perhaps already is emerging — and it will have some positive features. But whatever its virtues, it will not be capable of preserving and transmitting our assembled knowledge of the natural world. I fear for us when there is no one left in our places of learning who can tell one moth from another, no one who knows the habits of hornbills, no one to puzzle over the diversity of hawthorns, no one even to know that this knowledge was needed and is gone.
“Forgetting” is excerpted from David Ehrenfeld’s Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium. © 1993 by Oxford University Press. It appears here by permission of Oxford University Press. It also previously appeared in Orion magazine.
— Ed.
