Spring 2024

This magazine was begun in the hope that it would survive at least a year. It has lasted ten. And it is going stronger than ever. Our paid circulation is at the highest point since we began; our influence, so …

It has been a great achievement to have kept DISSENT going in this country these ten confused and difficult years. I can say this and applaud the value of our magazine in all humility, since my own part in it …

The civil rights movement has entered a critical period. Without new tactics and fresh approaches, its future success is by no means assured. The struggle for freedom may be eternal, but specific movements never are: they adapt and prosper, or …

Several years ago, a number of students at Southern University in Baton Rouge were expelled for demonstrating against local segregation practices. In his letter of expulsion, President Feltin Clark invoked Rule 16 in the Southern University Student Handbook. The rule …

Factory workers who cringe under the Damocles’ sword of automation might take heart by considering the college professor. This hardy laborer in the mills of knowledge has survived no less than four technological inventions, each of which should have rendered …

One afternoon, when I had finished a lecture on E. M. Forster at a university in the Southwest, a coed paused by my desk to ask, in all stammering earnestness, what I had meant by the inner l-life and the …

One of the striking intellectual phenomena of the past decade is the academic literature on military strategy: a literature produced not by military planners but by social scientists writing from within the academy or from such havens as the RAND …

The freedom of publication, speech, and opinion that is claimed by the university professor is not in principle different from that claimed by other men in liberal society. Difficulties surrounding academic freedom in the past arose mainly from the fact …

I fear I may be writing even these fragmentary observations under false pretenses. In “A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion,” I am writing about Professors. But I am not a Socialist, and I am not a Professor. (It is not enough, …

Massive federal financing of the sciences which in principle should be strengthening American society, in practice threatens to divert science and higher education from their proper goals. In the universities, the influx of government funds has often narrowed rather than …

Over nineteen thousand students registered at San Jose State College this fall, two thousand more than a year ago.  This rate of increase is common among California colleges, where the shock of the population explosion has been felt year after …

In 1956 the University of Michigan entered into a partnership with the Flint Board of Education to establish a distribution outlet in Flint. The purpose of this cultural service station—the Flint College of the University of Michigan—is to provide undergraduate …

“Where we differ,” the administrator said, “is that you think a college should be a democracy; you forget that it is a corporation.” The student wrote: “To be a Negro in America is a perpetual wonder and bewilderment.” The remarks …

If these are, as ever, times that try men’s souls, most academics will soon see to it that the trial is carried on at a safe distance from the American campus. And the consequences will be most damaging in the …