Impostors in the Temple. - book reviews

Reason, Oct, 1993 by Charles K. Rowley

Universities, if they stand for anything in the prevailing environment of moral relativism and deconstructionism, are the guardians of good scholarship. By guaranteeing excellence in instruction and rigorous honesty in research, they demonstrate that it is possible to seek out the truth without tarnishing that search by responding to the many temptations of the external environment. Such was their early origin in the medieval monasteries, and such is their prime justification in the modern world.

If this is correct, several (at least) of the country's elite universities, most notably Stanford, are no longer universities in any meaningful sense of that term. That is the principal message of Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple and Thomas Sowell's Inside American Education. These books follow a series of popular works, all highly critical of America's universities, that have focused on a recent spate of scandals, mostly at elite private universities. Anderson and Sowell provide the best contributions so far to the debate over America's universities. Both books are well documented, scholarly, and well written. They are very persuasive concerning the decline and fall of the American academy that has paralleled the closing of the American mind.

In Impostors in the Temple, Anderson explores two episodes at Stanford--one involving a professor's death and one involving overhead charges for government-funded research--that reveal much about the institution's ethos. Allan Cox was a world-renowned scientist, a former dean of the School of Earth Sciences who had just been named acting associate provost and dean of all research activities at Stanford. He met an untimely death, at age 60, in January 1987 when the bicycle he was riding hit a California redwood tree, which smashed his skull.

Cox was eulogized in a statement to the press and at a memorial service jammed by a capacity crowd of 1,000. At the service Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford, lauded him: "We loved him, we trusted him, and we still do. Most of all we wish that he were here so that we could show him." Cox was honored by the Stanford faculty in a unanimous resolution crafted by Nobel-laureate economist Kenneth Arrow: "The essence of Allan Cox is a rare quality--the ability and determination to bring out the best in others." The Stanford administration minted a medal in Cox's honor: the Allan V. Cox Medal for Faculty Excellence Fostering Undergraduate Research at Stanford University. The announcement of the medal stressed that it "honors Cox's vision of the potential for faculty-student partnership."

But the real circumstances surrounding Cox's life and death were dramatically different from the false image projected by senior members of his university. The county coroner later confirmed that the death was a suicide, a staged accident, after three of Cox's close friends told investigators that Cox had revealed his suicide plans to them the day prior to his death. The learned professor had reason to contemplate ending his life. The local sheriff's department had just received a complaint from Bellingham, Washington, alleging that "Cox had molested a nineteen year old youth from the time that he was fourteen."

The boy whom Cox had allegedly seduced was the son of a Stanford Ph.D. student whose work Cox was supervising. Confronted by the boy's father, Cox allegedly had admitted the facts and had offered to help pay for the boy's counseling. Three days before his suicide, Cox learned that the parents and the son had provided Bellingham police with signed statements accusing the professor of molestation, a felony offense. These events were well publicized throughout Palo Alto before the eulogy charade.

Martin Anderson does not pass moral judgment on Cox, although molestation of a minor is a heinous offense. Instead, he passes moral judgment on those members of Stanford University who perpetuated the lie about his life and death. Stanford's Cox Medal, Anderson argues, is an institutional lie, and its existence says a great deal about the nature of the academic intellectual community in the 1990s.

Nor is this the only lie involving Stanford's administration. During the '80s Stanford received hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for research. At the end of 1991, after a lengthy examination of the books, federal auditors determined that the university may have overcharged taxpayers $480 million for research costs. Once again, Stanford President Donald Kennedy was at the center of the alleged fraud.

The thesis of Impostors in the Temple is not complex: The members of the governing boards of America's universities--variously referred to as trustees, regents, overseers, and visitors--are responsible for the death of integrity in the world of higher education. They make the rules, they are ultimately responsible for monitoring, they are the ones who bear the guilt, even if they will not acknowledge the shame. They have proved totally derelict in their duties and, in consequence, they have presided over the disintegration of higher education in the United States.