Humanities Head

A job requiring intellectual guts was handed out last week by a university which has notably displayed that quality. For Stanford's new School of Humanities, announced three months ago as the university's challenge to profounder troubles than war, a Professor of Humanities was chosen: Author-Critic Lewis Mumford (Sticks and Stones, The Culture of Cities, Faith for Living, etc.).

New York-born Lewis Mumford is no intellectual opportunist. He was long a disciple of the late Sir Patrick Geddes, the sociologist-biologist-philosopher who gave him his enthusiasm for sound city planning. A self-styled "basic communist," Mumford disapproved of Marxists but writhed when he was called a "liberal." A man of parts, he wrote excellent architectural criticism for The New Yorker, lectured at Columbia, Dartmouth and Harvard, got himself denounced as "a sublimated recruiting officer" when he called for a U.S. break with Germany, Italy and Japan in 1938.

Big Machines, Little Men. Lewis Mumford has been concerned from first to last with the problem of working out values by which modern men can live. One certainty about U.S. universities is that, despite their present absorption with wartime training schemes, they cannot evade the ultimate problem of "value." In the light of that long-term prospect, Humanist Mumford, now 46, goes to Stanford with determined ideas of what has to be done.

"If our free democratic world is saved," declares Mumford, "it will be saved, not just by machines and guns, but by our capacity to produce a higher type of human being, whose will and purpose are superior to that of the enemy.

"Big machines are of no use," Mumford points out, "if they are run by little men. During the last two generations, in particular, the community has been paralyzed by the fact that our material organizations have outrun our moral and intellectual capacity to make good use of them. In their technical refinement, our machines have often approached perfection; but no similar development has been visible in the education of men. On the contrary: the typical human product of our time, especially among the leaders of our society, is either a paranoid personality, warped by delusions of grandeur and an insatiable lust for power, or a split personality, in which the intellectual, the emotional and the practical sides are divided into watertight compartments. The first type tends to be destructive; the second, trivial or impotent."

In his basic courses, Mumford sees "a chance for me to put into practice the concept of education I have had for many years, which is that the humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the 20th Century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that 20th-century multiplicity may become 20th-century unity." One technique will be to acquaint" students with "the great masters of reality," not politicians, businessmen and economists, but Sophocles, Shakespeare, Isaiah, Dostoevski, St. Paul.

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