The Vietnam War confirmed this impression of implacable, irresistible power. When the State Department's "truth squad" rolled into Iowa City (where I was teaching at the time), with orders to correct the dangerous errors spread by academic opponents of the war, I got a small taste of our government's sensitivity to public opinion. I stood up to contest the official justification of American policy, only to be told by one of our helpful public servants to "sit down and shut up." I took heart, however, from the growing opposition to the war, from the formation of a new left, and from the student movement's attempt to explain the connection between the war and the bureaucratization of academic life. Industry's growing dependence on the most advanced technology had drawn the "multiversity" into the military-industrial complex; but while this development had undoubtedly had a deplorable effect on scholarship and teaching, it opened a small window of hope, since a campaign against secret military research—so flagrantly at odds with the academic ethic of publication and open discussion—might disrupt the flow of classified information from the corporations to the Pentagon. Such was the rather wistful reasoning—most fully spelled out, I recall, by the historian Gabriel Kolko— that encouraged some of us to see academic reform, eminently desirable in its own right, as something more than a purely academic affair: a strategic move against the military-industrial machine at its most vulnerable point.

This strategy assumed that the university, deeply compromised by its entanglement with the corporations, the military, and the state, nevertheless honored the ideal of a community of scholars and was therefore open to pressure exerted in the name of that ideal. It soon became clear, however, that the student movement took a different view of the university, one that indiscriminately condemned all institutions and equated "liberation" with anarchic personal freedom. As the new left degenerated into revolutionary histrionics, its spokesmen—clownish media freaks like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, seekers of "existential" authenticity like Tom Hayden, connoisseurs of confrontation like Mark Rudd—obviously found it more and more difficult to distinguish between power and authority. My own reading and experience had convinced me that American society suffered from the collapse of legitimate authority and that those who ran our institutions, to the degree to which they had lost public confidence, had to rely on bribery, manipulation, intimidation, and secret

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