In 406 B.C., eight generals of the Athenian navy were brought to trial for abandoning survivors of a shipwreck after the great battle of Arginusae. The public clamored for blood; and the state, spreading a wave of terror, intimidated the assembly that was then trying the generals. They were condemned to death. Only Socrates dared to speak out against the abuse of law, identifying the generals as victims of an insecure government. “The true teacher,” he had said, “must offer himself as a model of what he preaches.”

Jorge Luis Borges, in his disquieting story “The Library of Babel,” describes a mythical institution in which all books, all verbal structures, all symbols, all human knowledge is labeled and catalogued. This library, whose stacks contain everything expressed in language—from chronicles of the ancient past to imaginary histories of the future:— inspires, at first glimpse, an “extravagant joy”; each man feels himself to be “lord of a secret, intact treasure.” But the library, like the human experience it records, is constantly expanding; its periodic inventory extends so far beyond the range of man's individual or cultural comprehension that the library becomes identical, not with the finite world of a single volume, but with the limitless, protean universe itself.

“The real world.” How our students love the phrase! An ex-linguist of my acquaintance, bitter from years of mistreatment in English departments, has come to rest at last behind a very large oak desk in a generously appointed office at a large university. She is coordinator of business-writing programs, and a sense of authority informs her words now as she talks of “those of us who work in the real world.” Meanwhile the benighted rest of us, left behind on university faculties, complacently accept the givenness of that extrauniversity “real world.” At graduation rituals we sit smiling under our tassels and hear each speaker, from the head of student government to the chancellor, from professor to famous guest, tell our students that they are about to enter the “real world.”

In 1911, Kuno Francke, professor of German at Harvard and an officially recognized spokesman of Wilhelminian Germany for cultural affairs, edited a multivolume pendant to President Eliot's “Five-Foot Shelf” of World Literature. Francke's presentation of all of German culture is still to be found in almost every college, university, and public library in America. The volumes are never checked out. Even a casual browser in the library stacks cannot but be struck by their datedness. The trauma of two world wars, wars, in which the U.S. viewed Germany in all of its manifestations as the enemy, is part of the reason. But even more it is Francke's hidden agenda that marks their age.