Historical Perspectives on the Crisis of the University
Michael Schapira
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee
of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2014
ABSTRACT
Historical Perspectives on the Crisis of the University
Michael Schapira
The beginning of the 21th century has not been a particularly stable period for the
university, at least if you trust the steady stream of books, articles, jeremiads and
statements from public officials lamenting its fallen status and calling for bold reforms.
Such a state of affairs has allowed critics and reformers alike to axiomatically evoke the
“crisis” of the university, but this begs several questions: Are universities in a genuine state
of crisis? If so, what are the root causes of this situation and what are its salient features?
Are there historical antecedents that shed light on our present moment? In this dissertation
I investigate the “crisis of the university” theme by revisiting two prior crises – the
worldwide student movements of 1960s and the crisis of German universities in the
opening decades of the 20th century. In both cases I argue that the “crisis of the university”
is derivative of a broader shift in the nature of the economy and the nation-‐state, wherein
once-‐popular justifications for the university are called into question, particularly when the
scale and complexity of universities have rapidly increased. Returning to the present
“crisis,” I argue that current debates should focus on rehabilitating “public” nature of the
university, which has undergone significant degradation in effects of neoliberalism on the
nation-‐state, the “knowledge economy,” and the nature of academic work itself.
i
Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii
Introduction 1
I. The End of the University 1
II. Which Crisis 4
III. What’s in a Word 10
IV. Outline of the Argument 18
Chapter One: The Lay of the Land 25
Introduction 25
I. Crisis on Campus 26
II. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be 30
III. Communiqué from and Absent Future 35
IV. The Lay of the Land 40
V. Summary 52
Chapter Two: The Birth of the Modern University and the German Crisis 55
Introduction 55
I. Kant vs. the Censors 57
II. Legitimate vs. Illegitimate Conflicts 62
III. Berlin — The University of Culture 66
IV. Bildung, Wissenschaft, and the Republican Subject 69
Bildung 69
Wissenschaft 73
The Republican Subject 76
V. The Crisis of the German Universities 79
VI. Conclusion 89
Chapter Three: The Golden Age of American Higher Education, Its Progressive
Inheritance, and the Student Protests 92
Introduction 92
I. Transatlantic Influences on the American University System 98
II. Post-War Expansion 1: Big Science and the Growth of the Middle Class 108
III. Post-War Expansion 2: General Education and Mass Democracy 118
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IV. The Crisis of the American University System 126
V. Conclusion 139
Chapter Four: The Current Crisis of the University Revisited 141
Introduction 141
Vignette 1: Administrative Bloat, or the Problem of Managerialism 143
Vignette 2: The Erosion of the Humanities 145
Vignette 3: Knowledge and the University 149
I. Managerialism 151
II. The Crisis of the Humanities 156
III. The University and the Knowledge Society 162
IV. Characterizing the Current Crisis 169
Chapter Five: Contesting the Public Nature of the University 177
Introduction 177
I. Liberal/Humanist Apologies 178
II. The University in Ruins and the Great American University 186
III. Unmaking the Public University 194
IV. The Public Nature of the University — Confronting Ideas in Their Time 197
V. Conclusion 212
The Nation-State 212
Politics 215
The Effect of the Crisis Claim 216
Returning to the Crisis/Critique Cognate 218
Bibliography 224
iii
Acknowledgements There is a moment in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where Marco Polo, after having regaled Kublai Khan with tales of strange and fantastic cities from his travels until the dawning of the new day, claims that “Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.” Khan replies, unconvinced, that “’There is still one of which you never speak…Venice.’ Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?...Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’” This exchange approximates my relationship to Teachers College, a constant spur for thinking about the crisis of the university and the imperiled state of the humanities. However, despite the difficult conditions under which this dissertation was written, I would like to express sincere gratitude to the following people.
Dissertation Sponsor:
Dr. Megan Laverty
Dissertation Committee:
Drs. Megan Laverty, Robbie McClintock, Kevin McDonough, Eduardo Duarte, and David Hansen.
Academic Community:
Special recognition is due to the following members of the Philosophy and
Education community: My cohort: Ruaridh MacLeod, Beto Cavallari, Holly Brewster, Matthew Hayden, Brian Veprek, Ori Livneh; Classmates: Alex Hunley, Yoshi
Nakazawa, Timothy Ignaffo, Daniel Hendrickson, and Sean Woosley; Teachers: Robbie McClintock, whose influence bears the strongest imprint on this dissertation, his late colleague and collaborator Frank Moretti, George Bond, Lambros Comitas, and the Anthropology department at Teachers College, Eduardo Duarte, Jessica
Hochman, Tyson Lewis, and Daniel Friedrich.
Family:
Parents, Carol and Jeffrey Schapira Sister, Leslie Schapira
1
Introduction
”No one laughs from the heart in his university, W. says. He's noticed that.”1 Lars Iyer, Exodus (2013)
I. The End of the University?
“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” So began a 2009 op-‐
ed in the New York Times by Mark Taylor, chair of the Department of Religion at
Columbia University. Taylor’s op-‐ed, entitled “End the University as We Know It,”2
set out to establish a parallel between the devastating social consequences that
flowed from manufacturing’s late acceptance of its decline in our current, globalized
knowledge economy, and the way in which an outmoded contemporary higher
education system is structurally set up to fail both its students and the economic
and civic goals of the United States. Doubling down on investments in the current
model of higher education, on the both the individual and collective level, would
amount to as much folly as building dozens of new factories in Detroit because 1)
graduate programs “produce a product for which there is no market” (referencing,
for instance, the glut of PhDs facing the trend of declining non-‐contingent faculty
positions), 2) departments “develop skills for which there is a diminishing demand”
(a reference to the kind of hyper-‐specialization you find in largely unread,
prohibitively expensive academic journals), and 3) rising costs are likely to eat up
1 Lars Iyer, Exodus (New York: Melville House, 2013). 2 Mark Taylor, “End the University as we Know it,” New York Times, April 26, 2009.
2
investments anyhow and saddle students with crushing debt burdens (student loan
debts overtook private credit card debt in 20103). “If American higher education is
to thrive in the 21st century,” Taylor warns, it must be “competitively restructured”
to be more “agile, adaptive, and imaginative,” three traits which one would never
ascribe to U.S. manufacturing at the turn of this century.
Such concerns have not abated since Taylor’s controversial op-‐ed appeared,
as evidenced by a recent, far more measured book by Andrew Delbanco, another
Columbia humanities professor (Department of American Studies). In College: What
it Was, Is, and Should Be,4 Delbanco sets out a bold vision for higher education that
recuperates the best aspects of its past, but this cannot proceed before contributing
to Taylor’s sources of disquiet: “globalization; economic instability; the ongoing
revolution of information technology; the increasingly evident inadequacy of K-‐12
education; the elongation of adolescence; the breakdown of faculty tenure as an
academic norm; and perhaps most important, the collapse of consensus of what
students should know.”5 Functional challenges aside, this reinforces Taylor’s
suspicion, captured in Delbanco’s decidedly normative book title, that there are few
truths in the field of higher education that we can take as self evident.
3 For a comparison of private credit card debt and student loan debt see William Bowen, Higher Education in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 21. 4 Andrew Delbanco, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 5 Ibid., 4-‐5.
3
It is one thing for two tenured professors to look back at the changing nature
of their profession and broader trends in education over the past 30 years, but quite
another to feel the weight of these changes condensed into the contemporary
student experience. In the fall of 2009 a series of student protests broke out in
London, Chile, New York, California, and many other locales around the globe,
calling attention to the short-‐term disinvestment in higher education and the long-‐
term consequences of the issues that Delbanco and Taylor bring to our attention.
While the specifics of these protests differed in response to local exigencies, a good
accounting of their overall focus came from a group of students occupying an
administration building at the University of California – Santa Cruz. In a document
entitled “Communiqué from an Absent Future,”6 the students enumerated the ways
in which universities have entered a period of bankruptcy and drift. “No one knows
what the university is for anymore,” they wrote. “We feel this intuitively. Gone is
the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special
advantage the degree-‐holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies,
spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.”
Taken together, these three perspectives speak powerfully to the situation in
which we find ourselves today: one in which the university can be axiomatically
defined as being in a state of crisis, but where crisis can come to signify any number
of topics from a diffuse and growing set of problems. Are we talking about a
problem of administrative costs, the crushing burden of student debt, a betrayal of
6 http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-‐from-‐an-‐absent-‐future/. (Last accessed May 2, 2014).
4
foundational ideals, too much government involvement, too little government
involvement, the obsolescence of tenure, the irrelevancy of many undergraduate
requirements, the disaggregation of research from the teaching function, the
problematic status of truths, or the inability to respond to the new global and
technological context of higher education? If the crisis label can come to designate
so much, can this be the fault of universities alone, or is the blame spread across a
whole range of economic, political, and social forces? Moreover, is the rhetoric of
blame and dysfunction the proper way to speak about the university and its future?
These are the large questions that have been put on the table by recent critics and
defenders of higher education, and it is the purpose of this dissertation to both
understand them as a symptom of a larger phenomenon as well as venture some
answers.
II. Which Crisis?
There are many other accounts of “the crisis of the university” that we will
have the occasion to consider, but already we can see that the muddied field of
possible meanings this term can take will require extensive specification. It will also
require certain limitations in my approach, which I will do my best to address when
they arise. One way to begin this process is to lay out my own position as an author.
This dissertation will primarily draw on thinkers from the humanities, and I
acknowledge straightway that a very different account could be told from the
perspective of the natural sciences, from professional schools, or from a strictly
administrative position. However, aside from being located in this tradition myself,
I believe that the humanities reveal a very compelling version of the “crisis of the
5
university” because of their traditions of critical reflection as well as their privileged
place in contemporary debates over university reforms (often being put in the
position of justifying themselves before resources are potentially allocated
elsewhere, e.g. into STEM disciplines, vocational programs, or anything related to
bio-‐medical research).7 The usefulness of these critical methodologies as well as
their precarious position within the university are two points that I have felt very
strongly throughout my graduate career and both will be discussed extensively in
what follows.
Another point of specification is that this study attempts to appreciate the
“crisis” claim with an appropriate amount of historical depth. While all three of the
above accounts raise issues of history (epochal changes in technology and
capitalism or the lessons that can be drawn from past practices), none draws on a
robust account of past “crises.” This is understandable when the present climate
puts so many issues in a state of uncertainty and pressing practical concern, but
taking the time to examine the past can help clarify what might be peculiar about
current accounts and what concepts and ideas remain rooted in a longer tradition of
academic self-‐reflection and public debate. To this end I will focus on two prior
periods that shared the intensity of the present — Germany at the beginning of the
20th century and the student movements of the 1960s. The historical distance that
scholars have from each of these moments has allowed for a fuller picture of “the
7 For a striking example of the range of concerns that those in the humanities bring to this topic, see The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. Louis Menand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6
university in crisis” to emerge, and it will be useful to see if the contemporary
moment bears any strong family resemblances to the past.
A third point of specification is that I am not interested in adjudicating
debates over which circumstances do or do not reach the threshold of crisis.
Another reason that I have chosen these two prior periods is that, like the present,
they were situations in which people generally accepted the claim that the
university was in crisis, but this could signify a whole range of issues and trigger a
very different set of responses. Thus, I am interested in what these situations mean
for understanding both the history of the university, its present nature, and how it is
imagined to fit into broader political, social, and economic structures. I will come
back to this point later in the chapter when I discuss the history of the concept of
“crisis” and contemporary work on the term by the anthropologist Janet Roitman.
These three preliminary notes move us towards the specific inquiry that I
wish to undertake. Throughout the dissertation I will be evaluating the “university
in crisis” on two different levels. The first looks at the invocation of crisis as a
discursive move in debates about the university. We can see this very clearly in the
three examples introduced above, and part of this study will be understanding how
and for what reasons (beyond the purported one of description) such a term is
employed. The second level looks at the features of particular renderings of the
“crisis of the university.” As will become clear, these two levels of analysis are
necessary to disentangle the descriptive from the prescriptive treatments of the
university, or to see what ideas are being put forth as points of contestation and
7
decision by the crisis claim. The sheer number of arguments that currently swirl
around this issue makes this exercise particularly valuable.8
To specify my inquiry still further, I will not be investigating the university in
isolation, but rather within the constellation of state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture.
My reason for doing so is as follows: the three eras under consideration mark three
pronounced shifts in the relationship between these four components, and my claim
is that invoking the “university in crisis” reveals something essential about the
nature of this shift. The benefit of historicizing each crisis is to provide the
contemporary reader with some guidance in how to evaluate the various “university
in crisis” claims that constitute debates about the university today.
To specify still further, the feature of each period that interests me is the
reckoning with the complexity of the university that occurs in light of sweeping
changes in the nature of the state, the economy, the scale of higher education, and
forces like technology or the communications revolution that shape the social field.
Put simply, different ideas get a different hearing in different eras, and the kinds of
initiatives we find garnering support in the early years of the research university in
Berlin or in the post-‐WWII expansion of American universities are often met with
great skepticism today. How often are calls for cultural ennoblement and massive
increases in public expenditures on higher education given serious and sustained
public consideration in the current political climate? One major reason these
8 For a recent study of the use of crisis in a host of different domains, and what the term does for our understanding of current events, see Janet Roitman, Anti-‐Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). More will be made of Roitman’s methodology later in this introductory chapter.
8
popular ideals from the past are worth revisiting is that the complexity of the
present moment stretches the conceptual resources of our current concepts,
requiring either for their serious reworking or their abandonment. The crisis
designation is often the occasion for this important work to take place, as will be
seen in reference to these past examples.
To be clear, the goal of this dissertation is to understand the contemporary
crisis of the university with more clarity, but routing this inquiry through a
historical analysis frees up a set of concepts that are not widely used today with the
appropriate degree of nuance. Again, to put it schematically, these two prior crises
provide a template that can easily be modified to fit the present. Each maps out a
sequence that begins with a flurry of intellectual and institutional activity around
the university that garners broad public support, but ends in a period where the
legitimacy of these ideas and activities are called into question, often when the scale
and complexity of universities have greatly increased. Moreover, this occurs when
the four component parts listed above undergo significant modifications internally
and in their relationship to one another.
For example, the modern research university arises in Berlin in a context that
precedes both the modern nation-‐state and the modern industrial, capitalist
economy. When both of these develop the initial justifications for the university,
which emerged out of the intellectual currents of Romanticism, Pietism, and the
German Enlightenment, ceased to provide common ground between academics,
politicians, students, and the public at large. In the case of the student protests of
the 1960s, a similar story can be told about the post-‐WWII project of building what
9
some sociologists later referred to as a “mass society” (growing the middle class,
growing the consumer base, enlarging and diversifying the power structure). The
later breakdown of this project occurred when the nation-‐state moved away from
public investment, the economy transitioned from an industrial into a service
economy, and the stifling aspects of “mass culture” were critiqued by the New Left.
If we adapt this schema to the present context three key phenomena
immediately arise, all of which mark a transition away from what were once
influential ideas about higher education. The first is the decline of the nation-‐state
in light of both globalizing forces and the eclipse of traditional conceptions of
sovereignty. This challenges the hopeful narratives heard in the 1990s about a “flat
world” in which technology and increased movement across countries would
distribute the goods of higher education more broadly and equitably and set nations
on a more equal footing. The second phenomenon is the transformation of
structures of governance as well as the transvaluation of certain public values (or
the value of “the public” itself) by the neoliberal project. Much of this comes with
the transition from a service economy to a knowledge economy, which attempts to
further individualize the purported economic goods of higher education (knowledge
being transportable, not dependent on specific firms, territories, or higher education
systems). The third phenomenon is more general and inscribes the discourse about
university reform in some unresolved tensions that accompany modernity.9 We can
9 Attempts to name our age and enumerate its features are notoriously difficult. The philosopher of education Stephanie Mackler calls our period “late modernity,” by which she means an extension of Weber’s process of “disenchantment” combined with a thinning out of the language through which we could ascribe meaning to our
10
see this clearly in the specter of meaninglessness that hangs over the Communiqué
From an Absent Future and serves as the counterpoint to Delbanco’s claim that
college “at its best, [has been] about helping young people prepare for lives of
meaning and purpose.”10 Much of this follows upon the initial exuberance and
subsequent exhaustion of post-‐modernism and other cutting edge theoretical
approaches that were meant to move us past the dead ends of modernity.
All of this is stated in a preliminary manner and will be developed in far more
detail in the chapters to follow — each dealing with key texts that structure the
thinking about higher education in these eras and then moving through the crisis as
it was articulated by academics, students, politicians, and later by historians. With
the remaining space in this introductory chapter I want to explore in more depth the
stakes of using the term “crisis” and venture a preliminary account of how I think
the current “crisis of the university” can be best understood.
III. What’s in a Word?
In the above accounts the term “crisis” operates as a catchall to signal a
whole host of issues and to trigger a feeling of urgency on the part of the reader. We
are not meant to meet a crisis with calm consideration. But the term has a legacy
lives. Frederic Jamison famously called our era post-‐modernity, which expressed “the cultural logic of late-‐capitalism.” David Harvey and Jean-‐François Lyotard have their own particular takes on postmodernity (Harvey’s concerning “space-‐time compression” and Lyotard’s the decline of “grand narratives”). For Zygmunt Bauman we are in a period of “liquid modernity,” where fluidity and insecurity are the dominant social features. As will become clear, I mean a bit of each of these things, as they each harbor diagnostic tools that are useful to my project. 10 Delbanco, xiv.
11
and a more precise meaning, which Reinhart Koselleck11 provides in a detailed
account of its many uses throughout history. Koselleck begins his account with the
Greeks, for whom κρίσις — krisis, from the verb krinein, “to separate,” “to choose,”
“to decide” — took on different meanings in legal/political, theological, and medical
contexts. Taking these in turn, the legal/political sense of the term foregrounded the
act of judgment and reaching a decision, which Koselleck links to the modern use of
“criticism.” By attaching the term to a point of decision that entailed arguments for
and against a judgment, “crisis was a central concept by which justice and the
political order could be harmonized through appropriate legal decisions.”12 The
theological sense of crisis added to this, linking the term to the Last Judgment in the
Septuaginta, and thus bound crisis to the moment when justice would be revealed in
a more ultimate sense. The medical context provided the final sense of crisis for the
Greeks, and here it again signified a point of judgment, but in the diagnostic sense
where “crisis refers both to the observable condition and to the judgment about the
course of the illness. At such a time, it will be determined whether the patient will
live or die.”13
For Koselleck the three senses converge when “the concept is applied to life-‐
deciding alternatives meant to answer the question about what is just or unjust,
what contributes to salvation or damnation, and what furthers health or brings
11 Reinhart Koselleck and Michaela Richter, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 67, no. 2 (2006), 357-‐400. 12 Ibid., 359. 13 Ibid., 360.
12
death.”14 Such linkages were carried into national languages in Europe, again
finding moments of convergence — for example when the medical sense of an
organism in peril was applied to the “body politic” in England. Moreover, the term
began to be applied more explicitly to politics, economics, the philosophy of history
(e.g. Leibniz describing Europe in an unprecedented state of “change and crisis”),
though its application to these domains proceeded unevenly. For example, in 18th
and early 19th century German lexica Krise was almost exclusively limited to a
political context, with the economic sense of crisis not being widely recognized
outside of technical circles until the latter parts of the 1800s.
These shifts in emphasis are significant and illuminating for the present
study. The specific emphasis attached to the word reveals a great deal about the
most sweeping changes occurring at the time — those which require an urgent
diagnosis, decision, or judgment of ultimate value. In a period of war, expansion,
and changes in the order of governance across Europe, “the diagnosis of crisis
became a formula legitimating action”15 in domestic and international affairs.
However, because the concept still had not achieved a sufficient level of
“integration,” its use varied widely between description (a normal change in
parliament being described as a “crisis” in France) and these judgments legitimating
action. It was only when the concept became imbued with ideas from the
philosophy of history that it took on a more definite shape, lending itself to two
options (with gradations in-‐between): either crisis marked “a possible structural 14 Ibid., 361. 15 Ibid., 368.
13
recurrence” (e.g. an illness that might recur after we have treated it, or, to take a
more modern example, the crisis prone character of capitalism), or an “absolutely
unique event” whose consequences marked a point of no return.16 For Koselleck
this marks the point when “crisis” becomes “the supreme concept of modernity,” for
in either case “it now provides the possibility of envisioning, and hence planning for
the foreseeable future.”17
After the Age of Revolutions subsided crisis became a more permanent
feature of society and retrieved its relationship to critique. Koselleck cites the
Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge: “Our time has now become especially critical…and the
crisis is…nothing more than…the attempt…to break through and discard the shell of
the past, a sign that something new has replaced it.”18 Koselleck interprets the spirit
of this statement thusly: “Because it is able to see the direction of history, this
critique is propelling the crisis.”19 Thus we can later see Nietzsche proclaiming that,
“One day my name will be connected with the recollection of something enormous
— with a crisis such as never before existed on Earth, with the deepest clash of
conscience, with a decision solely invoked against all that had until then been
16 We can see both interpretations inhering in a quote from Rousseau’s Emile: “We are approaching a state of crisis and a century of revolutions.” A strict, linear philosophy of history would adopt the latter interpretation, elevating the stakes of action and often reducing choices to mutually exclusive options, whereas a more prognostic view of history would adopt the former interpretation, laying out a series of possible conclusions to be drawn from this prognosis. 17 Ibid., 377. 18 Ibid., 384. 19 Ibid.
14
believed, demanded, hallowed.”20 Such pronouncements of thought or criticism
having the capacity to shed the limitations of the old world and bring into being the
new marks one side of “crisis” as a feature of modern thought.
The other side, that which looks at the recurring character of crisis, emerged
with the effects of modern capitalism on everyday life in Europe. Koselleck notes
that from the 1840s on, “’Crisis’ was well suited to conceptualize both the
emergencies resulting from contemporary constitutional or class specific upheavals,
as well as the distress caused by industry, technology, and the capitalist market
economy.”21 The development of a specifically economic understanding of crisis
allowed it to assume a less radical, reformist significance, with the job of economists
and social scientists now being to understand the causes of disturbances and
propose reforms.
This compressed history of the term crisis does not end in consensus — in
fact aside from the predominance of historically inflected understandings of the
term its uses have proliferated in modern times, partially as a consequence of
specialized academic discourses.22 The purpose of this review is to put on the table
the range of associations that can and have been attached to the term, in particular
the understanding of crisis as a unique event or a potentially reoccurring
phenomenon, to help locate the “crisis of the university” designations that we will
consider in what follows. 20 Ibid., 388. 21 Ibid., 391. 22 Ibid., 399.
15
In a recent book the financial anthropologist Janet Roitman adds a further
advantage that we can draw from Kosselek’s conceptual history. In demonstrating
how “crisis” became primarily the province of the philosophy of history, Kosselek
also gives us a clue about the stakes of the claim in contemporary debates. “For
critical historical consciousness — or the specific, historical way of knowing that the
world has ‘history,’” Roitman writes, “historical significance is discerned in terms of
epistemological or ethical failure.”23 By this Roitman means that crisis generates a
set of questions — e.g. what went wrong? — by imposing a narrative context on
historical events. Such a narrative of ethical or epistemological failure produces an
absent ideal from which this judgment of failure can be made, and in an
environment where the transcendental measure of God, Reason, or teleological
readings of history no longer obtain for many academics, excavating this absent
ideal is tremendously helpful for discerning the political priorities and possibilities
of the present. Moreover, interrogating these absent ideals points towards a
renegotiation with those concepts that remain in plain sight, and thus can stage a
useful mode for developing an understanding of universities in the present.
Another advantage of lingering on the crisis term is to temper our habits of
thought and action, which aim to close or resolve the crisis moment as quickly as
possible. Roitman’s aforementioned reflections on narrative show that crisis is not
simply a matter of empirical observation, wherein we can distinguish between a
“real” and merely “perceived” crisis, or a “true” and “false” crisis. Rather, she
writes, “the point is to observe crisis as a blind spot, and hence to apprehend the 23 Janet Roitman, Anti-‐Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 9.
16
ways in which it regulates narrative constructions, the ways in which it allows
certain questions to be asked while others are foreclosed.”24 Hence crisis is a
leverage point from which values, priorities, and practices that have drifted into the
background can be revealed, thematized, and made available for discussion and
criticism. Far more will be made of Roitman’s reading of crisis in the concluding
chapter of the dissertation.
However, there are two modern invocations of crisis that can be highlighted
at the outset, for they typify many of the contemporary assessments of the
university and thus speak to the deeper undercurrents shifting in the landscape of
higher education. The first comes from Jürgen Habermas,25 whose conception of a
“legitimation crisis” hangs in the background of the three accounts that have been
introduced in this chapter. A legitimation crisis occurs when an institution — say a
government or a university — retains its formal position in providing certain goods
to a community (or assumes the responsibility to do so), but has lost the widespread
support and faith of its constituents. There are many situations in which this occurs,
but one that Habermas highlights is a systematic imbalance between the demands
that a system produces and those for which it can actually provide.26 Such a crisis
24 Ibid., 94. 25 Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). 26 This may sound complex, but a little unpacking will make his claim clear. Take the welfare state as an example. Citizens reasonably look to the modern welfare state to provide the basic, minimal components of security, opportunity, etc. (all that falls under welfare). However, such an attitude imposes a set of expectations on the state, and when the state begins to waver in its ability to provide for the basic components of welfare, it loses its base of popular support. This could happen for a
17
would either call for a new argument that could restore the faith in certain
institutions, or a re-‐organization of the institution to recalibrate the balance
between demands and what it can provide. In fact we will see these options in the
approaches by Delbanco and Taylor respectively in the next chapter.
Another invocation of crisis, related in many ways, comes from the literary
critic Louis Menand, who speaks of a “crisis of rationale”27 pervading many scholarly
communities. What Menand has in mind is an inability for scholars to communicate
the value of their work to the greater public. This could be the result of many
factors: the public may simply be unwilling to hear this value as scholars have
normally articulated it, there may be confusion within the scholarly community,
scholars may simply be doing a bad job of describing the value of their work, or
there may be distortion occurring between scholars and the public. This crisis is felt
most acutely in the humanities, for the reason that crises of rationale are often
attached to conditions of scarcity in higher education, and for many reasons
humanities scholars have been amongst the least compelling in securing these
scarce resources. In order to come through this crisis intact Menand recommends
that “academic inquiry ought to become less specialized, less technical, less
exclusionary, and more holistic,” which as we have seen has as much to do with
communications strategies as with the reorganization of academic work. To this
number of reasons — there is a functional breakdown in the state, it begins to produce demands which it cannot meet, or the operative conception of welfare undergoes some form of modification. 27 Louis Menand, “The Marketplace of Ideas,” American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, no. 49 (2001).
18
end a crisis in rationale marks something similar to a legitimation crisis — which is
a moment in a society where something about the university appears obscure,
flawed, in need of further elaboration. However, the language needed to clear up
these issues or consensus on where these conversations should be staged is difficult
to find. Investigating the problems captured in these two senses of crisis will help in
clarifying what is at stake in discussing “the crisis of the university.”
IV. Outline of the Argument
With the foregoing discussion in mind and an understanding of what is at
stake in the “crisis of the university” claim, we are now in a position to lay out the
basic argument of the dissertation. Following Koselleck’s twin poles of crisis
marking a potentially recurring problem or a singular event of epochal change, I will
hew towards the former understanding and take a highly critical stance towards
accounts that call for a radical reimagining of the university, as advocated for by
figures like Mark Taylor. However, I will argue that Taylor is correct in one respect,
which is that the current “crisis,” as with the two prior historical examples under
consideration, results from a significant historical shift in which many of the guiding
ideals and institutional features of universities no longer seem viable. What I mean
by this is that particular state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellations produce
limitations and inflection points in the semantic field as to what one might say about
universities. I will argue that the phenomenon that the “crisis” designation marks is
when ideals that gained currency in one constellation lose their value and legitimacy
in another, especially when coupled with a significant increase in the scope and
complexity of higher education. Such a situation makes accounts that are not
19
conscious of the historically situated nature of ideas and institutional arrangements
misleading or only partial in character. This is a variant of the narrative function
that Roitman identifies as operating in many “crisis” claims.
In our current constellation, raising the status of the university as a public
institution, no matter it’s source of funding, provides a point of leverage for
understanding how people think these components can relate (i.e. descriptive
accounts) and how they should relate to one another in a healthy or unhealthy
manner (i.e. normative arguments). Following my understanding of the “crisis”
designation, focusing on the public character of the university speaks to both these
ends — that of using the university to reveal the nature of the relationship between
these component parts, and then using that diagnosis to make a normative claim
about universities. This is the case because many of the concepts we use were
developed during a period in which “public” signified something that it no longer
does in the current setting. Thus both a legitimation and a crisis of rationale become
especially pronounced in current debates, where an understanding of the public
character of universities is being renegotiated. Or, recalling Roitman’s approach,
something about the status of the public and its relationship to universities is
revealed if we understand this as the absent placeholder of value from which failure
is being measured.
A compressed account of the three “crises” I will cover can make this clearer.
The first period spans roughly a century, beginning with the intellectual and cultural
ferment that gave birth to the modern research university in Berlin in 1809. In
books such as Immanuel Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties and the political efforts of
20
Wilhelm Von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Gotlieb Fichte, a set of key
concepts about the modern university emerged. These included the principle of
academic freedom (especially from the partial interests of the State, Church, or
private industry), the division of the faculties, the course of development imagined
for students, a commitment to advanced scholarship, and using the seminar model
to link teaching with the fruits of research (a template for our current system of
graduate and professional schools). As mentioned earlier, these ideals grew out of
Romanticism, Pietism, and the German Enlightenment, all of which placed a heavy
emphasis on culture and, in Kant’s case, practices of critique.
Throughout the middle of the 19th century these ideals fused to give this new
model of the university a stable place in society and for academics to emerge into a
formidable class of their own. However, the university came under great pressure
as German society underwent a series of sweeping changes, beginning with national
unification in 1871 and followed by Bismarck’s bureaucratic reforms, which
strengthened both the nation-‐state and the development of German industry. As a
result of these changes many of the ideals that had served as organizing principles
for the university and guaranteed its role in society were contested, eventuating in
many claims that the university was in “crisis” in the opening decades of the 20th
century. A crucial component of this shift was the emergence of a powerful nation-‐
state and modern capitalist class, both of which rendered references to culture or
critique less compelling or comprehensible given the emerging features of everyday
life, to say nothing of the new demands placed on universities to train bureaucrats,
managers, and industrial leaders. Or, from the other side, ideals of culture attached
21
themselves to these new forces like the modern nation-‐state and thus changed their
character in often devastating ways (e.g. in the appropriations of Romanticism for
damaging variants of nationalism).
To turn to a more proximate example we can look at the post WWII period,
with a particular eye towards the American expansion of higher education. This
period was marked by a democratizing mission that contributed to a time of
unprecedented growth — often referred to as “the Golden Age” of the American
university. Not only were enrollments increased through policies like the GI bill, but
states and the federal government evinced a commitment to funding research and
teaching at unprecedented levels. The key focus in this period was to broaden the
access to and distribution of the goods universities produced (e.g. widespread
economic growth and opportunity, the broad diffusion of technological and
scientific discoveries, or the inclusion of new groups in the American power
structure). All of this occurred against the backdrop of a strong alliance between
state and economic interests, referred to as “the social compact.”
The student protest movements of the 1960’s brought this epoch to a very
immediate and visible sense of crisis. Whereas the German crisis of the early 20th
century reckoned with the new demands placed on educational institutions by
expanding state and economic interests, the student protests drew attention to the
limitations of the post-‐WWII social compact and the model of state and economic
cooperation which it entailed. Foremost amongst their concerns were structural
injustices that remained unaddressed by current educational priorities (i.e. protests
which grew out of the civil rights movement or those protesting universities’ roles
22
in the military-‐industrial complex) and more holistic concerns about the stultifying
features of mass society (e.g. criticisms that emerged from the New Left, such as
those put forward in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man28). In this context
references to the democratic ideals of higher education rang hollow to students, or
at least required significant elaboration to gain a fair hearing in public settings. This
is in part explained by a renewed emphasis on political and cultural concerns that
marked a concomitant decline in the economic, scientific, and democratic
justifications that reigned during the 1950s and early 1960s for higher education
policy.
If we return to the present crisis with these two examples in mind a similar
account can be given. In brief, this is the story of neoliberalism and its effects on our
“horizon of expectations,” wherein universities can bypass the cumbersome
demands of political or cultural issues (which marked the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s) to
link up directly and efficiently with economic imperatives.29 Following the
upheavals of the 1960s and the culture wars that played out on campuses
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, universities largely jettisoned the cultural 28 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1969). 29 Tom Looser provides a nice formulation of this in relation to the principles guiding global universities such as NYU Abu Dhabi: “Most importantly, in its most basic and generic form, neoliberalism implies freedom from responsibility; especially, it implies freedom from responsibility to any kind of alterity, in favor of responsibility only to one’s self. Logically, carried out as a principle, the result would be a kind of pure self-‐identity, free of relation to others.” For Looser universities operating in Special Economic Zones exempt themselves from local cultures, histories, language, and laws, all of which might slow down their neoliberalized governing agenda. Tom Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the ‘World,’” Cultural Geography 27, no. 1, (2012), 99.
23
concerns and critiques of the state that the student protests raised. Instead there
was a marked shift towards forms of scholarship and organization that reckoned
with the near complete ascendency of global capitalism.30 The effect of this shift was
the reframing of university study as an individual good, linked primarily to one’s
economic fortunes, and a concurrent decline in state expenditures which continues
apace to this day.31
As has already been mentioned, the current crisis can be viewed as a
significant challenge to this neoliberal consensus, and again this is explained in part
by a change in the relationship between the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture
components. By investigating the “public” character of the university — that
understanding which neoliberalism has devoted so much effort to displacing — the
nature of this most recent change can emerge from genres of critique as diverse as
the three that opened this chapter. Furthermore, resources surrounding the public
character of universities can be drawn from the particular history that I focus upon.
This will allow for an equal consideration of critiques that rely heavily on concepts
internal to the history of the university as well as those that place more of an
emphasis on structural elements in society and the economy.
The organization of the inquiry will be as follows. In chapter one I will
develop the three accounts that opened this chapter in further detail to give the
reader a more concrete sense of what is at stake in contemporary debates. The 30 This story is told well by Richard Sennett in The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 31 For a projection of what this disinvestment means for tuition growth, see Mark Taylor, Crisis on Campus (New York: Knopf, 2010), 101-‐3.
24
intent of this chapter is to remain on the descriptive level, as chapters four and five
will be more evaluative of our present moment. However, before moving to
evaluation the dissertation will work back in time and delve into the history of the
modern university, beginning in Germany around the turn of the 19th century and
tracking its development and subsequent crisis within Germany, as well as its
influence in the development of American higher education. The purpose of
chapters two and three are to provide some examples of the kind of treatment I am
proposing for the modern crisis, as well as to generate a series of ideas, models, and
guiding figures to inform the later chapters. Meeting these in their original
historical context will be helpful in assessing what the history of the university (or
the history of the “university in crisis”) can provide to contemporary concerns.
25
Chapter 1: The Lay of the Land
Introduction Without having explored any particular examples in depth, we can still
intimate from the introduction that the “crisis of the university” is a complex,
multifarious point of discussion for all concerned parties. As the dissertation
proceeds we will come to appreciate that there is nothing unique in this state of
affairs — there is “always a crisis” as Andrew Delbanco cautions us.32 However, the
target of my inquiry is ultimately the present crisis – its nature, its broader
significance, and how it should and should not be approached as an object of
practical or theoretical concern. The purpose of this chapter is to give the reader a
more developed appreciation of the lay of the land by dwelling on and
contextualizing some of the more influential voices in contemporary debates. While
there is nothing like a consensus that can be drawn from these accounts, we can
begin to discern a set of dominant approaches and frames. This will precede the
more substantive chapters of the dissertation, which develop a method whereby
claims of the university in crisis can be read against changes in the state-‐economy-‐
university-‐culture constellation.
I will begin with the three examples that opened the introduction. Slightly
different in approach, the three begin to sketch out the diverging paths that
contemporary claims about the crisis of the university can take. I also find them to
be helpful as representative works for different genres of critique, so I will explore
32 Delbanco, xvii.
26
each in more depth. I will then try to further fill out this picture in a breathless
review of some other influential approaches that currently have currency. This is
admittedly a Sisyphean task of trying to take a synoptic view of something that is
still very much in the course of development and change, but including this wide
range of accounts will be helpful in demonstrating how my approach to this topic
represents a novel treatment of the subject (this will become clearer in chapter four,
where I pick out what I take to be the exemplary features of the contemporary
“crisis of the university,” which needs to be read against the historical development
of the modern university that I lay out in chapters two and three).
I. Crisis on Campus
Overwhelmed by the outpouring of public and private responses to his New
York Times op-‐ed piece, Mark Taylor developed his initial analysis into a book
entitled Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities.33
Written in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial collapse, Taylor writes in an
unabashedly reformist mode to underscore the urgency with which we should be
reassessing the higher education sector. In fact the imagery of the collapse of large
financial institutions takes supremacy over the initial comparison to
manufacturing’s decline. “There are disturbing similarities between the dilemma
colleges and universities have created for themselves and the conditions that led to
the collapse of major financial institutions supposedly too secure to fail,” Taylor
writes.
33 Mark Taylor, Crisis on Campus (New York: Knopf, 2010).
27
“The value of college and university assets (i.e. endowments) has plummeted. The schools are overleveraged, liabilities (debts) are increasing, liquidity is drying up, costs continue to climb, their product is increasingly unaffordable and of questionable value in the marketplace, and income is declining. This situation is not only unsustainable, but at the crisis point.”34
The foregrounding of costs is a consistent feature of contemporary debates, and one
that cannot be elided in any discussion of higher education.35 Indeed, in making the
comparison to failed financial institutions Taylor is asking readers to consider the
long-‐term viability of an institution that is overleveraged (which we can approach
from the side of institutional costs or the explosion of student debt).
But beyond economics there is another question of long-‐term viability, and
this has to do with “the restructuring of knowledge now occurring” in our society.
Taylor writes that “technological innovation alters the structure of knowledge, and,
conversely, the changing structure of knowledge results in new technologies that
transform both what we know and how we learn.”36 What Taylor has in mind are
the advances in digital technology and new media that furnish the everyday lives of
students, particularly in the domains of reading, writing, and communicating — all
central foci of any higher education curriculum. All of this goes under the banner of
network culture, which Taylor characterizes by qualities such as decentralization, 34 Ibid., 5. 35 Though how these economic concerns are framed will be a key feature of chapter four. Often economic concerns can be inflated in order to push through forms of privatization or other substantial reforms. Moreover, the causes for this dire economic picture are often misattributed. Tenure and the rising costs of salaries is a large issue for Taylor, but as we will see in chapter four growing administrative costs far outstrip those of the faculty salaries. 36 Ibid., 20.
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easy distribution, interactivity, ease of access, reproducibility, and customizability.37
The implication of his argument is that this cultural shift towards a network culture
has been felt, but insufficiently acknowledged by colleges and universities, which
doggedly cling to outmoded forms like the lecture, the expository essay, or the fixed
syllabus that respects strict disciplinary boundaries. He ruefully concludes, “the
university and the wider world have been moving in opposite directions for the past
half century.”38
Whilst Taylor assures readers that his reforms build on the best traditions of
colleges and universities and do not constitute a radical break, he does put a
tremendous amount of weight on innovations that are occurring outside of
universities. For example, he suggests that unless professors can “find ways to
communicate with students in the media to which they were being accustomed”
(i.e., digital media, multi-‐media platforms, interactive media), then pedagogy will
become a growing challenge in future generations. Or, as Taylor puts it elsewhere,
the current models in place for higher education will not serve the “kind of
education people need.” “The outdated ideal of faculty, departmental, disciplinary
and institutional autonomy must give way to cooperative associations that extend
from the local to the global.”39 In these various calls for reform the motivating factor
often comes from some change in technology, in the political landscape
(predominately references to “globalization” or the withdrawal of public support 37 Ibid., 70-‐83. 38 Ibid., 112. 39 Ibid., 217.
29
from the state), or in economics (e.g. non-‐hierarchical organizations that thrive in a
knowledge economy). For these boosters of sweeping reforms the resources one
might draw from the long history of higher education often assume no more than an
advisory role.
Crisis on Campus is an exemplar of one of the dominant approaches to writing
about “the crisis of the university.” It is premised on the notion of an epochal shift, a
move into a technological age that will require a large-‐scale updating (or
“reprogramming,” to borrow a term from one of Taylor’s chapters) of many
institutions, with higher education given pride of place for its link to the functioning
of a healthy “knowledge society.” This type of approach is the most active in
attempting to close the “crisis” moment by proposing bold reforms, most future-‐
oriented in positing a radical break initiated by the technological revolution, and
most dismissive of arguments that rely heavily on the traditions of the university.
But as we saw in the introduction, there is an equally important genre in this
debate that flips the point of emphasis, drawing heavily from cherished ideals that
constitute the “college” tradition in higher education and framing the “crisis of the
university” as a drift off course from the true vocation of academics, which is to
form the character of citizens and human beings. It is to this genre, exemplified by
Taylor’s colleague at Columbia Andrew Delbanco, that I now turn.40
40 As we will see in chapter three, Delbanco and Taylor are representing two important strands in the development of a truly American model of higher education. Taylor focuses on the university’s capacity for innovation and knowledge creation, which I trace back to Vannevar Bush’s Science — The Endless Frontier and the growth of “big science” after WWII. Delbanco represents the “general
30
II. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be
Delbanco’s book carries an epigraph from W.E.B. Dubois: “The true college
will ever have one goal – not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life
which meat nourishes.” As the epigraph suggests, the call for reforms adequate to
some sort of epochal shift, while understandable and perhaps necessary, must
eventually return before the crucible of some sort of normative conception of what
college is and should be.41 Delbanco offers three “central principles” that have
guided American higher education through various periods of growth and reform,
all of which are meant to temper our reactions to the current “crisis.” The first is
that “people should not be constrained by the circumstances of their birth.”42 This
need not just be taken as speaking to justice as fairness (e.g. affirmative action
policies meant to distribute the social capital of colleges more broadly), as Delbanco
goes on to link this principle to the liberal, humanistic commitment to developing
one’s unique talents and interests through the pursuit of knowledge. The second
principle is that colleges serve as both a model and a prefigurative space for
democratic participation in a pluralistic society. This encompasses both the virtues
education” tradition that sees in universities a preserve of civic and humanistic concerns that lay at the heart of a healthy democracy and free society. 41 Note here that Delbanco, who works at one of the world’s preeminent research universities, locates his normative ideal in the college and not the university, which marks a divergence between the English model of liberal learning (expressed most eloquently by John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University, but given an American articulation by Robert Maynard Hutchins) and the German model as it became instantiated in Johns Hopkins and eventually into the flagships of state university systems. 42 Delbanco, xiii.
31
of clear communication and attentive listening as well as the necessary widening of
perspective that allows for those with diverse experiences and beliefs to
productively dialogue and live together. The final principle is that college “at its
best, [has been] about helping young people prepare for lives of meaning and
purpose.”43 Such a preparation obviously goes far deeper than transmitting the
knowledge and skills “necessary to compete in todays global economy,” as the
saying so often goes.
In many instances Delbanco and Taylor converge in their analyses, couching
their arguments in the purported civic benefits of their vision for higher education.
However, we can see their differences clearly in how Delbanco reads the current
reform moment: “At a time when the call for innovation has never been louder, the
biggest innovation we could make is to retrieve these fundamental values and
renew our commitment to them.”44 The book goes on to provide some history as to
where these values came from, beginning with the early denominational colleges of
the Northeast and moving through a broad period of expansion, first after the
Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, and then again after WWII. As Delbanco sees it, this
legacy has basically left us with three answers to the question “what is college for?”:
to further economic ends (both personally and collectively); to educate the
citizenry; and to develop students ethically and culturally (“Columbia taught me
how to enjoy life” is what an alumni told Delbanco, and this sentiment is what he
intends here). Now the latter two ends are essentially interrelated, and the 43 Ibid., xiv. 44 Ibid.
32
sympathetic imagination one develops in the study of literature, history, philosophy,
or religion are equally important for personal cultivation as they are for democratic
deliberation.45 However, the current predicament is that debates about higher
education have collapsed these two into the first, economic end, which is a
consequence of the undeniable problem of runaway costs and the declining
economic fortunes of graduates.
For Delbanco these challenges are daunting, but looking back into the history
of colleges should give us heart that higher aspirations need not be abandoned. For
example, he looks at the early years of colleges that began as institutions of
ecclesiastical study, but moved beyond this to include goals like educating character,
getting students to appreciate the inherent goods of mental effort, and to break
down dogmatism by highlighting the link between teaching and preaching (an
activity that Delbanco views as having an irreducible interpretive aspect).
Additionally, the fact that students have remained a similar age since this period has
allowed many of these goals, premised on the acknowledgment that people at this
stage of life still have a large capacity for growth and self-‐transformation, to persist
into the present. Moreover, the problem of scale certainly changed the nature of
higher education after the Morill Acts, with the large state university displacing the
residential college and research downplaying the importance of teaching. But this
still brought with it important lessons in allowing America to work out its own
45 For a more forceful version of this argument see Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). More will be made of Nussbaum and Delbanco’s approach in chapter five.
33
version of the access vs. elitism debate.46 In these and other aspects of the history of
American higher education a sense of crisis was articulated, but the institutions
managed to maintain their core principles.
It is from this history that Delbanco is able to isolate a series of “best
practices,” for example in schools that emphasize healthy levels of contact between
faculty and students. In fact it is a renewed commitment to teaching, and the
associated goods that come when teaching and learning are viewed as their own
reward, that will guide higher education through these tumultuous times. The
ancillary effects of this change in focus would address some of the major concerns
surrounding costs insofar as the many extraneous aspects of higher education (the
famous “state of the art gyms and student centers”) can be cut back. Furthermore,
faculty and students would benefit from a mutual understanding of what has
gathered them in the first place (i.e. the development of citizens as well as human
beings, or the passing on a contribution to the accumulated fund of knowledge and
wisdom). But ultimately this form of writing on “the crisis of the university” boils
down to the following argument: any discourse that moves us away from these
“cherished principles” of teaching and learning are deleterious for the long term
46 For example, the 1862 Morill Act, which granted land to states to set up public universities, mandated the teaching of both the “liberal and practical arts,” primarily agriculture and mechanical training at that time. These twin goals were often in tension (see Scott Gelber, The University and the People: Envisioning Higher Education in an Era of Populist Revolt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012)), but the tension was productive in expanding the reach of university training to newly admitted graduates (who could take courses in the liberal arts), as well as expanding the sphere of concern for academics, who (especially in the emerging social sciences) turned their attention to issues of labor, public policy, and other issues of local concern.
34
health of higher education, and any calls for reform should use these principles as
guides as opposed to jettisoning them for radical innovation. As Delbanco’s
aforementioned quote suggests, it is a matter of retrieving what is already there in
the history of the institution.
This way of framing the contemporary “crisis of the university” is both liberal
and humanist. It is liberal because many of these principles come from what is
called the liberal tradition of educational theory (John Henry Newman is a key figure
here, and education as its own end is its mantra), and humanist in that their general
orientation is towards education for a holistic form of human flourishing.
Furthermore, the deliberate choice to foreground the nature of the “college” versus
the university has elevated importance at Delbanco’s home institution of Columbia
because it challenges the prioritization of research over teaching in a university that
has far more graduate students than undergraduates, yet derives pride and identity
from Columbia College’s required undergraduate core curriculum.
These two poles of Taylor and Delbanco mark in a rough and ready way the
terrain of the dominant discourse on “the crisis of the university,” with a series of
far more targeted and technocratic treatments filling in the middle ground (e.g.
books which deal only with the question of tuition costs, tenure, labor costs, over-‐
specialization, discipline-‐specific issues, structures of governance, etc.). However, it
is helpful here to introduce a third, far more radical discourse to show that the
mainstream discussions of this issue are not exhaustive of directions that one could
pursue their inquiry. This third approach embeds changes in the university in a
broader logic of governance, and frames solutions using a language of critique that
35
borrows from Marxism, critical theory, and other discourses more at home in
departments of comparative literature than in those of political philosophy,
economics, or faculties of education. And, as will become important in the third
chapter, it takes the student perspective seriously as being equally capable of
framing the “crisis of the university” in a compelling manner.
III. Communiqué from an Absent Future
Though 2008-‐2009 saw a series of student protests in the US and abroad
(most visibly in occupations and demonstrations in the UK, Chile, Quebec, California,
and New York), there is no mention of them in either Taylor or Delbanco’s books.
This is surprising given the nostalgia that academics of their generation often
express towards the student activism of the 1960s. In most cases the current
protests were in response to tuition increases, the implementation of fees where
none had previously existed, or deep cuts to the humanities and the arts. Though
these immediate policy reforms were the impetus for many of the protests, students
seized upon the occasion to register a deeper dissatisfaction with the state of higher
education in their countries and in the global context in which universities operate
today.
A representative document that lays out the logic of this critique came from a
group of students occupying an administration building at the University of
California-‐Santa Cruz. The University of California system was a particularly
important site for understanding the “crisis of the university” in 2009 because of its
scale (the largest public university system in the country), its reputation (it has for
some time also largely been considered the strongest state university system), and
36
its history (the UC Master Plan, drafted in 1960, articulated and achieved the ends of
higher education that led to the post-‐WWII boom, or “the Golden Age” of American
higher education as it came to be known).
As was the case with Taylor the key event on the mind of the authors was the
recent collapse of large-‐scale financial institutions and the global inquietude that
followed. However, unlike Taylor they saw this not as a spur for needed innovation,
but rather as a signal of a significant crisis of capitalism from which universities
were not exempt. They write that “the university has no history of its own; its
history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the
relationship between capital and labor.” Thus the students were sanguine about
universities somehow being able to provide a bulwark against problems embedded
in the current form of capitalism. For them, “the crisis of the university today is the
crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital
no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of
the market by calling for the return of the public education system.”
It is worth pausing here to unpack the position that the students are taking,
for on the one hand it is manifestly false that a history of the university cannot be
understood except as some epiphenomenon that springs from the history of
capitalism (this will be a theme throughout the dissertation, but explicitly laid out in
chapter two). For example, medieval universities emerged from monastic
traditions, and even the birth of the modern research university in Berlin occurred
before the maturation of industrial capitalism in that country. But on the other hand
the position of the students is perfectly comprehensible if we concentrate on the
37
recent history of universities in the United States or Britain and bear in mind key
facts that the protests highlighted: educational achievement has become highly
correlated with prior socio-‐economic status (i.e. the university maintains the class
structure of widening inequality in late capitalism), the financialization of capital in
the new “knowledge economy” has played itself out in the death spiral of increasing
tuition and debt,47 and the general shrinkage of the labor force has been clearly
reflected in high rates of post-‐graduate unemployment and in the casualization of
academic labor. These are structural problems in late capitalism to which the
university can only introduce students in a more efficient manner than they might
have experienced otherwise (e.g. through indebtedness, through the gap between
education received and labor prospects after college, through exploitative working
conditions during graduate or undergraduate study, or though policies of inclusion
and exclusion to the elite colleges and universities).
Such a dire analysis of the university in the current phase of capitalism leaves
the students with little room in which to propose productive reforms. In fact they
take an explicitly “anti-‐reformist” position and call for “partial and transitory” acts 47 A report from UC Faculty Senate member Bob Meister entitled “They Pledged Your Tuition” provides the clearest example of this point. In response to a “fiscal emergency” precipitated by a decrease in state funding, ostensibly as a result of falling tax revenues in the recession, the UC system issued a series of highly rated bonds to make up for budget shortfalls. Meister points out that “tuition is UC’s #1 source of revenue to pay back bonds, ahead of new earnings from bond-‐funded projects.” Moreover this calculation involved a 32 % projected increase in tuition over a three-‐year period, again proposed as a necessity to make up for budget shortfalls. For tuition to be functioning in this manner in university budgets a significant amount of financialization must have already taken place. See Bob Meister, “The Pledged Your Tuition” (http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/wp-‐content/uploads/2009/10/They_Pledged_Your_Tuition.pdf) (Last accessed, May 2, 2014).
38
that push the university towards a more radical direction of “communization”
(short hand for the altered social and economic conditions necessary to rehabilitate
a nearly completely compromised university). This would include, in large part, a
response to the generational imperatives that these particular students name:48 to
acknowledge the foreclosed future that indebtedness imposes on the youth, to
redress the abdication of critical public discourse in the post 9/11 era or in an age of
austerity, to address head on the cultural impact of commodifying patterns of social
interaction, and to acknowledge the limits of technology and innovation in meeting
problems of a global nature (climate change, inter-‐cultural conflict, economic
exploitation, etc.). Beyond the fact that universities have gathered together a
significant number of youths who can recognize these mutual concerns, it is
interesting to ask why these demands are being asked of universities49 when the
changes that are being demanded have a much broader reach (how great economic
and social questions are addressed to universities will also be a theme that I will
return to on several occasions). However we approach that question, we can at
least appreciate the scope of these concerns and see how this third approach insists
48 These imperatives are echoing an earlier document in student activism, the Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. In that statement the university is seen as “a potential base and agency in a movement of social change,” and many of the demands or a generation are routed through the university. 49 A partial explanation is surely found in the history of student activism itself, for example in the demands of the 1960s for higher education to be more “relevant” to the realities of students (an argument made most forcefully in the protests at San Francisco State that led to the development of an Ethnic Studies department.) See Joshua Bloom & Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 269-‐308.
39
on both the radical and the critical perspective. It raises concerns that are not
addressed, at least in a very straightforward and forceful way, by analyses such as
those of Taylor and Delbanco.
I have included this seemingly incongruous account to provide a third
possibility to those put forth by Taylor and Delbanco. Schematically we can lay out
the lesson from these three perspectives thusly: Taylor believes that the resources
we need to address the current crisis of the university are to be found in the future
of our most innovative practices and technologies (often from outside of the
university in the private sector), Delbanco believes that the crisis is best addressed
by retrieving those ideals and practices that emerge within the history of the
university (timeless ideals of justice and human flourishing that have sadly become
disentangled from the educational process), and the student protestors register a
general sense of confusion and aporia, raising the specter of a university that is
irredeemably compromised in the current configuration of capitalism (i.e.
references to ideals of justice and human flourishing must be curtailed, whether
they emerge from our past or from our technologically reformed future. In the
present reality they just perpetuate a broken system).
These positions recall different strands in the development of the word
“crisis” that were reviewed in the introduction. In these accounts a temporality of
crisis emerges (epochal change verses recurrent event), the status of critique as a
prefigurative act of reform is emphasized or downplayed, and issues of health and
sickness call forth different forms of intervention. In subsequent chapters I will
demonstrate how these different uses of crisis can be explained in large part by
40
describing changes in the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation. However,
the remainder of this chapter will further fill out the contemporary field of writers
who identify the university as being in crisis to see what exactly is being acceded to
when the crisis claim begins to circulate with more regularity.
IV. The Lay of the Land
A recurrent (and dispiriting) theme that crops up in debates about the “crisis
of the university” is that of failure. The university is in crisis because it is failing in
certain capacities: to educate students, to produce useful knowledge, to provide a
reasonable return on public investment, or to live up to its noblest ideals. One finds
a bit of all these in Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’ acerbic assessment of
tertiary education in the United States, Higher Education?: How Colleges are Wasting
our Money and Failing our Kids — and What we Can Do About it.50 For Hacker and
Dreifus (a professor of Sociology at Queens College and a New York Times reporter,
respectively) the basic source of this failure is the result of addition — namely all
those concerns, functions, and services that are not directly related to the core
educational mission of teaching and research.
How one defines what is superfluous to the “core education mission” is of
course a matter of great debate, so it is useful to quickly go through Hacker and
Dreifus’ analysis. Foremost amongst their concerns is spiraling costs, the reasons
for which extend from labor costs associated with tenure and growth at the
administrative level to athletics programs (the overwhelming proportion of which 50 Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education?: How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids – and What we Can Do About it (New York: Times Books, 2010).
41
operate at a loss) and competition over prestige.51 Related to these is the nature of
academic work itself and the priorities that it reflects — for example with
unnecessary service (e.g. serving on committees), research pursued purely for the
purposes of advancing one’s career, diminished teaching loads past the early stages
of one’s career, and an overheated concern over job benefits including sabbatical
and tenure, which have more to do with job security than with values like ensuring
research productivity and defending academic freedom.52 Whether it be a case of
budget priorities or the conditions of academic work, the benefit of the student or
the community (whether local or national) has been compromised by another
motivation (in most cases financial or rooted in other forms of self-‐interest like
raising prestige).
Higher Education? is a useful book for understanding the fault lines that
organize debates about the “crisis of the university.” For instance, Dreifus and
Hacker share Taylor’s hostility towards current models of higher education,
venerate the basic teaching function that Delbanco isolates in the tradition of
America’s colleges, and supply plenty of empirical and sociological data to support
the position of the student occupiers at UC-‐Santa Cruz. However, the book suffers
51 Hacker and Dreifus site the example of Ursinus College raising their fees by 17% in an attempt to increase applications. The rationale for this was drawn from behavioral economics, which has found that a lower price might attract less interest because consumers will assume the product is of lower quality. In Ursinus’ case the increased fees brought with it an increase in enrollments by one third in just four years. Moreover, the authors found remarkable similarities in the overall “sticker price” of liberal arts colleges of similar standing (the margin of difference being 1.7 %). Hacker & Dreifus, 115-‐6. 52 Ibid., 13-‐28, 132-‐154.
42
from a lack of historical depth, confronting challenges that they have named with
appeals to common sense (in fact, the final chapter is titled “Schools We Like – Our
Top Ten List”). Once one invokes a historical dimension to the crisis then particular
aspects of Hacker and Dreifus’ study take prominence over others. In the chapters
that follow I will be arguing that historicizing these issues in terms of sweeping
transitions in the economy and the nation-‐state reveal a particularly compelling
picture of the crisis of the university. However, by turning to other influential works
we can tease out a few strands of Hacker and Dreifus’ account to fill out contending
perspectives on the contemporary uses of the crisis label.
There is a growing body of literature tracking the consequences of changes in
the financing of higher education. In Britain, where the introduction of fees and new
forms of competition between universities have raised disquiet amongst many
commentators on higher education, the crisis has turned on the introduction of
market mechanisms into what was once a heavily state-‐backed system. Andrew
McGettigan’s The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets, and the Future of Higher
Education53 is the most comprehensive account of these changes to date. In the late
1990s UK universities were facing budget shortfalls as a result of a large increase in
enrollments, straining existing resources. As a means to ameliorate the situation the
Labour government introduced a plan to increase student fees and the amount that
students were allowed to borrow from the government, from £1,000 in 1997 to
£3,000 in 2006. According to McGettigan the introduction of new fees was a
53 Andrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets, and the Future of Higher Education (London: Pluto Press, 2013).
43
successful temporary fix to budget shortfalls, but continual increases in enrollments
coupled with further reductions in state expenditures on higher education has
shown the problem to be far more systemic than first imagined, leading to a new set
of reforms — this time led by a Tory government. As the book’s opening passages
make clear, the general Tory belief (supported by their coalition partners the
Liberal-‐Democrats) in an austerity policy as the remedy to public debt meant that
the process set in motion by Tony Blair’s Liberal party would only be accelerated.
The outcome has been a rapid and startling shift from higher education as a
public to a private good. For example, the amount that students were allowed to
borrow from the federal government for increases in fees rapidly swelled to £9,000
per year in 2010 and there was a concomitant 80 % decrease in public funding of
higher education (called “teaching grants,” which provided federal funds based on
enrollments). McGettigan understands these changes as reflecting part of a broader
ideological project of marketizing higher education, seen for example in the belief of
UK University Minister David Willets that increased fees will lead to increases in
quality because universities will be forced to improve teaching in order to draw in
students (and their loans). The reason that McGettigan titles his book “The Great
University Gamble” is that there is little empirical evidence to show that this type of
privatization and marketization 1) has the effects of reducing costs (even public
costs), 2) improves the quality of teaching, or 3) empowers students.54
54 See chapters 13 (“Managing the Loan Book”), 4 (“Why a Market”), and 3 (“Student Loans – The Basics”) respectively for detailed analyses of these premises of Tory policy. For other recent accounts of the character of UK Higher Education reform see Roger Brown, Everything for Sale?: The Marketization of UK Higher Education
44
Another side of the financial restructuring of higher education comes
through the composition of the teaching force. McGettigan is largely concerned with
the reforms put forth by governments in opening up higher education to market
forces, but Marc Bousquet, in his book How the University Works: Higher Education
and the Low Wage Nation (2011), looks at universities themselves as agents of these
changes. “Late capitalism doesn’t just happen to the university;” he writes, “the
university makes late capitalism happen.”55 Bousquet points to a variety of factors
to substantiate his claim — the CEO type compensation packages for Presidents and
top administrators verses the low wages of university employees, the diversification
of investments and management of endowments, and the casualization of academic
labor through the heavy reliance on graduate students, adjuncts, and non-‐tenured
faculty to carry the teaching load. On this latter point Bousquet argues that the
imbalance of granted PhDs and tenure track jobs available is not a consequence of
anomalies in the labor market (explained away, for example, by saying that jobs will
be opened up when the large band of tenured professors eventually retire), but
rather illustrative of a system that uses PhD students as cheap and ultimately
Policy (London: Routledge, 2013) and Stefan Collini, What are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012). For the U.S. version of this story see Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation (New York: NYU Press, 2011). More will be made on this issue in chapter four. 55 Ibid., 44.
45
expendable sources of essential labor integral to the educational mission of colleges
and universities (e.g. teaching large introductory undergraduate courses).56
Assessments like these of the financial aspect of the current crisis of the
university have taken prominence in recent debates given their proximity to larger
discussions about the fate of capitalism after the global economic collapse of 2007-‐8.
However, this displaced a longer standing debate about the abiding values of the
university that emerged in the wake of Alan Bloom’s widely read The Closing of the
American Mind (1987).57 For Bloom higher education had lost its bearings in the
wake of the 1960s, with ethnic studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and
postmodernism leading to what he called an abiding “relativism,” one which took us
away from the great works, themes, and questions that, in his view, both constitute a
truly valuable and worthy education and sustain an essential base of national
belonging. Two recent books have kept this discussion alive and brought a renewed
interest in this particular framing of the crisis of the university — namely as a falling
away from core ideals and values.
56 For other recent arguments about the effects on the nature of the professoriate by corporate management models see Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) and Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-‐Administrative University and Why it Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 57 Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
46
The first is Education’s End: Why our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up
on the Meaning of Life.58 Written by Anthony Kronman, a Yale Law professor, the
book is in a sense a restaging of Bloom’s argument. For Bloom the specter of
relativism, the major threat he saw encroaching on the university’s core teaching
and research mission, emerged from within methodologies adopted in the
humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences). Kronman is broadly
sympathetic to this line of argument, though he adds to it a growing fetish for
“useful knowledge,” which in our time is a relatively flat form of either scientism or
instrumental, vocational training.59 As Kronman’s title suggests, the core role of the
humanities in the university is not to efficiently transfer a set of knowledge or skills
to students, but rather is guided by a series of questions that speak to our deepest
existential longings. In a backwards-‐looking glance at the history of American
higher education, he traces this tradition from a classical curriculum (often
religious) to a secular humanist version of liberal education. As a good advocate for
liberal perfectionism, Kronman believes that pursuing these questions in a serious
manner (contra versions of historicism of which he is highly critical) will lead
students to consider purposes beyond those immediately provided by the culture
(to mark two poles he singles out the growing presence of extreme interpretations
of religion on campus and an overheated careerism amongst students).
58 Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 59 Ibid., 235.
47
The argument is not new, and we see a very similar earlier version of it in
Michael Oakeshott’s The Voice of Liberal Learning (1990) or in his idea of education
initiating people into “the conversation of mankind.” What makes Kronman’s work
relevant to the present discussion is his framing of the issue as a crisis, in this case a
crisis of confidence on the part of humanists to assert and model the value of their
pursuits. Moreover he is similar to Delbanco insofar as he isolates the college, or the
liberal arts aspect of higher education as being able to guide our thinking in the face
of the destabilizing influences of both postmodernism (or however we want to term
the movements that Kronman and Bloom are reacting against) and what he sees as
the overheated enthusiasm for the creation of new knowledge, which is being put
forth as a central goal of university reforms.
However, according to the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, not
all is well within this college model, and it is not just a matter of confidence on the
part of humanists that will retrieve a valuable learning culture on campus. In
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on Campus60 the authors speak not of a drift
away from ideals, but rather from a more concrete imbalance in the priorities of U.S.
universities and colleges — in which the pursuit of federal research dollars and
competition for students, both of which have undeniably led to their preeminence in
the world, have not attended to the conditions of learning. Part of this we have
already seen in Hacker and Dreifus’ attacks on the construction of luxurious dorms
and athletic facilities, but Arum & Roksa are more interested in the cultural
60 Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on Campus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
48
consequences (on the culture of learning) of campus policies of the past decade.
These include an increased emphasis on collaboration as a valued pedagogical
method, the exclusive focus on research in the valuation of faculty work, the
purported goals of integrating students from diverse backgrounds through the
design of campus space,61 or loosening general educational requirements.
The main instruments of Arum and Roksa’s study are the existing National
Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) results from previous years and a
longitudinal study of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) results of students
from 24 schools, from the first semester of their freshman year to the final semester
of their sophomore year — roughly meant to track their fulfillment of general
education requirements before specializing in courses for their majors. “With a
large sample of more than 2,300 students,” the authors write, “we observe no
statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing
skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study.”62 The reasons for this,
according to Arum & Roksa, are multiple and intersecting — e.g. research professors
are uninterested in committing energies to undergraduate instruction, leading to
motivational problems in students. But the over-‐riding concern is that the social
factor of higher education has significantly dispersed the energy that students are
willing to devote to their academic work. They report that students spent “only 12
hours per week studying” and that “37 percent of students reported spending less
61 Or, as we shall see in chapter four, through the establishing of new offices within the administration, e.g. that of VP of Diversity. 62 Ibid., 36.
49
than five hours per week preparing for their courses.”63 These findings are
interpreted as speaking to a culture wherein the hard work of learning is not
instilled as being the central aspect of the student experience.64
Now Kronman and Arum & Roksa represent a conservative voice in debates
about the “crisis of the university,” but they nevertheless demonstrate that crisis
often signals a concern over the values embodied in our institutions of higher
education. Whilst some concern with values is at the heart of all the accounts taken
up in this chapter, it should be clear that there is a difference between approaches
that foreground a debate over values (similar in many ways to the culture wars of
the 1980s) and those that foreground the need for wide scale changes in the
institutional make-‐up of higher education, rendering the issue more political than
existential.
Take the examples of addressing rising costs and integrating new
technologies, both taken up in a recent book by former president of Princeton
William Bowen.65 In a section entitled “Is There a Serious Problem – Even a Crisis?”
Bowen challenges the analyses of people like Taylor and Hacker & Dreifus, who
argue that spiraling costs are a result of additive features of the university (in
salaries of faculty and administrators, in building projects, etc.). Bowen, an 63 Ibid., 69. 64 One of the more troubling findings is that students actively sought out classes that had heavy reading and writings loads so as to avoid them — with only 25% of their sample pool having taken classes with 20 pages of writing per semester or 40 pages of reading per week. Ibid., 71. 65 William Bowen, Higher Education in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
50
economist, rather locates what he calls “the cost disease”66 in the political
calculation of where productivity gains are reinvested. Following the arguments of
Princeton economist William Baumol, he argues that these gains “could be used to
pay the rising relative costs of activities in labor-‐intensive sectors such as education,
if we were to choose to spend them in this way.”67 The question, or the point of
decision called forth by the crisis claim, is thus a broader one of political priorities
given a wide range of options opened up by structural changes in the economics of
higher education.68
The integration of technology into all aspects of higher education provides
another example of how crisis need not merit radical polemics or conservative
jeremiads, but a reassessment of priorities and exploration of possibilities. Bowen
tells what is an increasingly familiar conversion story of the technology skeptic (not
convinced that it is a panacea to solve the “cost disease”) to someone cautiously
optimistic about the benefits of technological innovations. He first references a
study conducted by the ITHIKA Organization on a hybrid statistics course (i.e. 66 Bowen defines the “cost disease” thusly: “In labor intensive industries such as the performing acts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor….As a result, unit labor costs must be expected to rise faster in the performing arts and education than in the economy overall.” Bowen, 3-‐4. 67 Ibid., 25. 68 However, Bowen is aware of the constraints placed on such discussions by the environing conditions of public discourse. He writes, “There has been an undeniable erosion of public trust in the capacity of higher education to operate more efficiently.” Ibid., 63. As costs spiral upwards and productivity is challenged by critics like Arum & Roksa (who challenge the educational “outputs” of universities) the issue of trust becomes more problematic and reduces the kinds of investments (monetary and in terms of support) that the public is willing to make.
51
taught partially online, partially in person) at Carnegie Mellon University which
found no statistically significant difference in learning outcomes between students
in the hybrid course and those in a traditional classroom setting. Unlike someone
like Taylor this finding was not taken to authorize a wholesale technologization of
the classroom experience. However, it was an important moment in the evolution of
Bowen’s thinking insofar as it challenged a common claim from academics that
technology will inevitably harm learning outcomes.69
From this modest insight Bowen targets three kinds of challenges that the
integration of technology into higher education is likely to meet. The first is the
aforementioned problem of skepticism concerning changes in the basic make-‐up of
university life — e.g. in the way pedagogy is carried out. The second is the challenge
of adaptability and customizability as the American (and global) higher education
system becomes more diverse (e.g. online course bringing higher education closer
to groups that were once priced out of the system or squeezed out by the limitations
in the physical infrastructure of campuses, or sharing platforms across different
types of campuses). The third is slightly more abstract, but Bowen sees the host of
changes initiated by technology as a strategic point of leverage to elevate the issue
of leadership and decision-‐making, insofar as these changes are controversial and
occurring within the context of rapid change. Such a consideration may seem trivial,
but Bowen references a generation of college and university leaders like Robert
Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago, who modeled a leadership style that
left an indelible impression on the landscape of higher education. In sum Bowen 69 Ibid., 50.
52
shows how the crisis narrative can also be evoked in a far more measured manner
to reassess the basic ideals associated with the university.
V. Summary
Nothing like consensus is meant to emerge out of this discussion, even on the
point of whether there is indeed a “crisis of the university.” What can be a point of
agreement between these voices though is the effects that crisis is likely to produce
— effects along the lines of which Janet Roitman identifies in crisis narratives across
several different domains. Foremost amongst these is the production of a narrative
through which a version of health and illness, normalcy and deviance, or rise and
decline can be established without necessarily delving into the historical or
philosophical underpinnings of these categories. My task in the chapters that lay
ahead is to complicate this narrative by providing a discussion of these
underpinnings, which I locate in significant shifts in the state-‐economy-‐university-‐
culture constellation, especially at points where the scale and complexity of
universities have rapidly increased.
In the following three chapters I will give an account of the development of
the modern research university, from its origins in 19th century Germany to its
current form in the United States and elsewhere. This is but one version of this
history, and a highly partial one at that, but is essential for historicizing the ideals
that underpin the different genres of critique that circulate in contemporary debates
without a robust accounting of the narrative possibilities they open up. For
example, in an age where the nation-‐state no longer serves as the exclusive
53
underwriter of an expansion in the higher education system,70 models adapted
wholesale from the post-‐war period are not the richest starting point for assessing
the current “crisis.” Or, alternatively, they may be the most appropriate starting
place if an increased role for the state is the political point that you believe is worth
insisting upon.
This historical account that follows therefore can help me advance some
normative claims about the university in light of the story I will tell about its
relationship with historical conditions of crisis. Foremost amongst these claims is
that it is important to be clear about how this relationship between the descriptive
and the prescriptive is operating in diagnoses of the university in crisis. For
example, in chapter four I will enumerate certain features of the neoliberal
university that contemporary critics name as being part of the crisis. By focusing on
new governance structures that lead to a logic of closure, I have implicitly staked a
claim on the logic of critical openness that is attached to the public character of
universities in contemporary society. If I had concentrated on another figuration of
the university in crisis — e.g. financial cutbacks, attacks on tenure, the integrity of
academic freedom — then a different claim would have been warranted and
different narrative possibilities would be opened. The “crisis” claim is, one might
say, the condition for the possibility of these different framings, questions,
temporalities, and calls for action to emerge. It is to this interplay between
70 This statement at least holds for the U.S., where the post-‐war expansion was the most robust in the world. There is massive, state-‐backed expansion occurring in places like China and Singapore, but as will be seen in chapter three, these have different motivations than those driving the US expansion.
54
historically grounded ideals and the possibilities inhering in different assessments
of the current “crisis” that I now turn.
55
Chapter 2: The Birth of the Modern University and
the German Crisis
Introduction Whilst many of the world’s most venerable universities have impressive
legacies dating back to the 12th and 13th century, contemporary thinking about the
university is firmly rooted in the imaginary of what Eric Hobsbawm called “the long
19th century” (1789-‐1914). In the Anglo-‐American context John Henry Newman’s
The Idea of a University (1853) towers over discussions of how to articulate the
intrinsic goods of study in light of social and economic pressures.71 In Europe and in
major research universities around the world there are frequent allusions to the
imperatives of academic freedom that emerged out of late 18th and early 19th
century German reforms. For many academics, administrators, and politicians,
problems of the present are often redressed in part by reminding us of those regions
where our thinking about universities once lingered. If only we could heed the
lessons of the past, to reconnect with some type of origin story, the argument often
goes, then the university would be able to offer a compelling vision on its own terms,
as opposed to those set by external forces.
71 One does not need to look far to find traces of Newmanʼs thought today. For example, it appears in Andrew Delbancoʼs writing, as when he argues that one of the primary aims of college study is to allow students to “make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena.” This way of framing university study is central to Newman, for whom “Truth means facts and their relations,” which sets universities the task of drawing connections between diverse branches of knowledge and human experience.
56
Indeed, one of the central tasks that these 19th century thinkers set
themselves was to develop a vocabulary, along with their correlate institutional
arrangements, that would accomplish just this mission of setting the university on
its own proper course. If they could offer a compelling vision of what a university is
and should be, and how it can emerge into a self-‐regulating system, then you had the
ground to begin adjudicating cases of conflict (internally between the faculties or
branches of knowledge, externally with agencies like the Church, State, or Economy)
and delimiting a proper sphere for higher education. Moreover, the main thrust of
these thinkers is towards unity, or at least identifying a set of unifying principles
that address conflicts that were endemic to universities in the wake of the Age of
Enlightenment. In our current era of university reform, marred by anxieties over
fragmentation72 and what Alan Bloom called “groundless speculation,” it is not
surprising that such thinkers still cut an attractive figure.
This chapter does not have any pretensions of delivering an exhaustive
account of the material, cultural, and political conditions from which the modern
research university emerged and what itineraries their intellectual touchstones
have travelled to assume a role in current debates. Rather, my goal is to focus on a
few emblematic works to see what kind of thinking occurred during this period that
set the modern university on a certain path whereby it felt more and more confident 72 The fragmentation cuts in many different directions, as we saw in the previous chapter. To reiterate, there is the staggering growth of new kinds of universities (online, for profit, global), the overspecialization of research driven by trends in academic publishing and the tenure review processes, faculty speaking at cross-‐purposes with their administration over the allocation of dwindling resources, and competing models of how to conceive of university study (a public good, a public investment, a private investment, etc.).
57
in offering a justification for its activates. Accordingly, I will focus on Immanuel
Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), as well the influence of Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Gottlieb Fichte, and Wilhelm Von Humboldt on the founding of the
University of Berlin (1809). As will be seen, arguments and reflections from this
era, compelling in their own right, share a number of themes that say something
about the formation of common sense that still reigns amongst apologists for the
modern university, in both the liberal-‐humanist and critical genres of writing. In
chapter five I will attempt to recuperate aspects of Kant in particular for addressing
the present “crisis.”
However, pursuant to my broader thesis, I will also show how these ideas
sketched a certain constellation of state, university, economic, and social/cultural
interests. Throughout the course of the 19th century, as higher education grew in
scale and importance, this particular constellation underwent significant change
(either in the self-‐understanding of the component parts, or in the relationships
between them), eventuating in many claims that the university had entered a state
of crisis. Thus the second half of this chapter will focus on the work of two
historians of German universities — Charles McClelland and Fritz Ringer — to
better understand how universities cast a particularly instructive light on how to
conceive of educational ideals during periods of broad economic and social
transition. Building upon the work of these historians, I will conclude the chapter
with a reading of Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation” to summarize the challenges
posed to academics and to universities in general during such periods of transition.
I. Kant vs. the Censors — The University in Relation to the State
58
The Conflict of the Faculties was one of the final works that Kant published in
his lifetime, and it concluded his brilliant career as both eminent philosopher and
headache for Prussian censors. Contrary to Kant’s hopes (Kant, who brought “what
can we hope?” into the philosophical lexicon) the climate of censorship worsened
towards the end of his life as the relatively tolerant Frederick the Great was
succeeded by the more conservative and interventionist Frederick William II. In
many ways the Conflict of the Faculties is a declaration of a form of independence for
universities, and the humanities in particular, from the type of censorship that Kant
ran up against during this period as a professor at Koenigsberg. In 1795 the
government Censorship Committee intervened directly in university affairs,
instituting through the academic senate a ban on any lecture dealing with Kant’s
writings on religion. Thus The Conflict of the Faculties is at once a concrete apology
for a certain conception of scholarly work (hence the legalistic framing of legitimate
and illegitimate conflicts) and an attempt to ground a more comprehensive vision of
how universities relate to society and how their component faculties should interact
internally.73
There are two key framing questions that drive Kant’s inquiry. The first
concerns that legitimate interests of the government in how higher education is
structured and conducted. For example, to what extent should government agencies
be interested in the training of doctors or pastors, and how might they justify
advisory and oversight functions given that this is something universities do 73 These two senses, legitimation and foundation, are a continuation of Kant’s work as a critical philosopher. In chapter five I will come back to Kant’s conception of critique in light of the current figuration of the university in crisis.
59
(though something that is not done exclusively in universities)? The second asks
how we can mediate conflicting knowledge claims between the higher faculties
(Theology, Medicine, and Law) and the lower faculty (Philosophy). This question
asks who has the right to make certain kinds of claims, and in what does that right
consist.
The basic problem that Kant was attempting to think through can be gleaned
from his interchange with the infamous Johann Christoph von Woellner, the
Minister of Justice under Frederic Wilhelm II who initiated the ban on Kant’s
writings on religion from university lectures. Woellner charged Kant, in writings
such as Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason, with “[misusing] your philosophy
to distort and disparage many of the cardinal and basic teachings of the Holy
Scriptures and of Christianity.”74 He beseeches Kant to “realize how irresponsibly
you have acted against your duty as a teacher of youth and against our [i.e. the
State’s] paternal purpose,”75 the progressive realization of which is said to be a
primary responsibility which flows from Kant’s authority as a professor and
philosopher. The issue raised by Woellner is how the university as a distinct
institution fits within the broader social and political sphere (e.g., is it an arm of
governmental aims, or does it occupy a different sort of space?).
Kant’s response to these charges, reproduced in the preface of The Conflict of
the Faculties, principally turns on an ideal division of labor that he sees in university
74 Cited in Immanuel Kant (Tr. Mary Gregor), The Conflict of the Faculties, (New York: Abaris, 1979), xvi. 75 Ibid., 11.
60
work. He argues that the first charge — that of disparaging the teachings of
Christianity — is fundamentally off-‐base because he has “always censured and
warned against the mistake of straying beyond the limits of the science at hand or
mixing one science with another.”76 Because he is treating the subject of religion as
a philosopher and scholar, and not as a theologian with the explicit purpose of
training pastors or influencing their congregation, then to charge him with such
disparagement is to decisively misread his purpose.
This naturally leads to the second charge, which concerns using one’s
position as a professor to challenge the interests of the State, for example in
undermining beliefs that leaders are acting in good faith on behalf of the population.
Here Kant makes a distinction between scholarly activities — teaching in
universities, publishing scholarly books and articles, arguing with other scholars on
topics of the day — and making a play on the beliefs of the public. In an admission
that is likely to bring a smile to the face of anyone who has spent time with Kant’s
three Critiques, he writes that “the book [on religion] in question is not at all
suitable for the public; to them it is an unintelligible closed book, only a debate
amongst scholars of the faculty, of which people take no notice.”77 However, this
kind of scholarly expertise is not negligible. To the contrary, “the crown is entitled
not only to permit but even to require the faculty to let the government know, by
their writings, everything they consider beneficial to the public religion of the
76 Ibid., 13. 77 Ibid., 15.
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land.”78 It is the State that ultimately has the overriding interest in what kinds of
messages are taught publicly “in the schools and from the pulpit,” but in order to
make sure that these messages are based on the best consul available an internally
free form of publicity must reign amongst the faculties. Kant ends the preface
thusly:
“The choice of a wise government has fallen upon an enlightened statesman who has, not a one-‐sided predilection for a special branch of science (theology), but the vocation, the talent, and the will to promote broad interests of the entire scholastic profession and who will, accordingly, secure progress of culture in the field of the sciences against any new invasions of obscurantism.”79
Two important points are established in the preface, which Kant works out in the
subsequent essays of the book. The first is that the State, which represents broad
public interests as opposed to the narrower interests of scholars in a particular field,
has a legitimate oversight role in making sure certain kinds of knowledge are geared
towards the betterment of society. This applies most concretely to the Medical,
Legal, and Theological faculties, all of which train professionals located in critical
social institutions. But he argues that it also has a broader application in the
creation of “republican subjects” who can fulfill their posts (in the bureaucracy or in
the social order) freed from the limiting constraints of obscurantism and reliance on
received tradition. The second point is that Kant posits a unity of purpose within 78 Ibid. We will see a similar idea in the next chapter underwriting the expansion of federally funded scientific research in the post-‐WWII era of American higher education. The idea, expressed eloquently by Vannevar Bush in Science — the Endless Frontier, is that growing the basic fund of knowledge, which scientific and scholarly activity does when left unfettered, has both direct and ancillary benefits for the state and other parts of society. 79 Ibid., 21.
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the university. The various faculties are related in an integrated way that is
different from their relation to the State, even if the State fulfills central purposes
through the regulation of university teaching and research. The key to the integrity
of the university lies in the figure of the scholar and the progressive free use of
reason. Furthermore, as will become clear in the following sections, this bestows a
critical responsibility on the Philosophical Faculty, which best models this particular
Kantian formulation of progress.
II. Legitimate vs. Illegitimate Conflicts — The Primacy of Reason
This commitment to reason settles the first framing question by imagining an
enlightened leader, i.e. a kind of politician befitting the age of Enlightenment who
bases their decisions on justified belief (which is the outcome of rational inquiry and
discussion, to say nothing of a supporting public culture that can accommodate
intellectual pluralism). In order to get a clearer picture of why this new kind of
leader is dependent upon a particular organization of the university — in which
philosophy is the central faculty — the second framing question needs to be
explored. Kant’s main approach in The Conflict is to distinguish a legitimate from an
illegitimate conflict between the faculties of the university. He begins by identifying
the sources of authority granted to each higher faculty. Theologians derive the
content of their teaching from the Bible, the legal faculty from “the law of the land,”
and the medical faculty from “medical regulations.” Recognizing the importance of
preserving the integrity of all three sources Kant writes, “the higher faculties must,
therefore, take great care not to enter into a misalliance with the lower faculty, but
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must keep it at a respectful distance, so that the dignity of their statutes will not be
damaged by the free play of reason.”80
The work of the Philosophical Faculty is of a different nature than other work
in the university, but maintains its central importance by imposing a standard for
evaluating the claims made by the higher faculties. It is not that the free play of
reason has no place in the higher faculties, but that appeals to reason derive
authority from nothing outside of the work conducted in the Philosophical Faculty,
whereas authority is heteronomous in the case of the higher faculties. As Bill
Readings nicely sums up the matter, “each particular inquiry, each discipline,
develops itself by interrogating its own foundations with the aid of the faculty of
philosophy. Thus, inquiry passes from mere empirical practice to theoretical self-‐
knowledge by means of self-‐criticism.”81 Put another way, the Philosohpical Faculty
is indispensable because it is grounded in free inquiry (which Kant calls truth, “the
essential and first condition of learning in general”82), whereas the higher faculties
are driven primarily by contingent notions of utility (as set by the prince or king or
social conventions at any given point in history), or deference to an uncritical
acceptance of tradition. Kant goes so far as to say that the government cannot limit
this activity of the Philosophical Faculty “without acting against its own proper and
80 Ibid., 35. 81 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 57. 82 Kant, 45.
64
essential purpose,”83 no matter how irksome the challenging of heretofore accepted
suppositions may be.84 The kind of conflict engendered in critically interrogating
various claims of authority is perfectly legitimate for Kant, and should be seen so by
the government as well, because it is essentially a matter for scholars, who enjoy a
form of equality that others do not.85
However, a scholarly disagreement becomes illegal or illegitimate when
either the subject of the debate is not suitable for public scrutiny, or when the
disagreement is prosecuted on subjective grounds by appeals to force, bribery, or
unreflective intuitions. The former Kant deems “illegal by reason of matter,” the
latter by reason of form. Illegal can here be read as lacking a compelling
justification, and in a vein similar to his dismissal of “the supposed right to lie” he
concludes that prosecuting these conflicts on the side of the higher faculties and
their uncritical forms of authority leads to anarchy and undercuts the very
conditions for establishing law or a governable public culture. This is premised in
part on a dismal attitude towards the public (“the people want to be led, that is (as
83 Ibid. 84 This aspect of The Conflict was very important to Derrida and a set of French scholars who launched a passionate defense of the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s. More will be made of this in the concluding section of chapter five. 85 This is due in large part to the organizational structure of the university, where professors preside over forms of higher knowledge by establishing procedures whereby one can be certified a doctor. Aside from guaranteeing expertise in a field, this also, in Kant’s view as well as today, attests to a set of attitudes towards learning and teaching that is of a different kind than other forms of teaching and learning (e.g. apprenticeships, the kind of teaching done in primary and secondary schools, etc.).
65
demagogues say), they want to be duped”),86 but more significantly it indicates a
new kind of governmental configuration that depends on the work of the
Philosophical Faculty. He concludes, “it could well happen that the last would be the
first,” and the lower faculty would assume a preeminent role “not, indeed, in
authority, but in conseling the authority (the government).”87 The Philosophical
Faculty will never have the heteronomous authority or content that the higher
faculties have, but its unique work helps redefine the “paternalistic purpose” of the
State to aiding the progressive unfolding of autonomous, rational behavior in more
spheres of life.
To summarize, Kant is the first in a number of German academics and
reformers who articulate a particular vision of social and political life by carving out
a well defined space for certain kinds of university work. The clarificatory mission
of the Philosophical Faculty vis a vis the other faculties is important to the State
because it disciplines the university in such a way that it can provide rational
servants in many critical occupations. This is an early form of public reason that
cuts in two directions, one towards reserving a place for critique in the modern state
(providing a rationale for this), and the other leading to rationalization, which we
can see as a prerequisite for the constrained use of public reason by office-‐holders.
But for either of these projects to get off the ground the Philosophical Faculty can no
longer remain subordinate to the more professionally oriented or deferential higher
faculties. A commitment to non-‐interference in scholarly matters (preserving what 86 Ibid., 51. 87 Ibid., 59.
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Kant frames as “the ability to ask anything”) establishes the university as the
institutional home for reason in an emerging post-‐Enlightenment political and social
order.88
III. Berlin — The University of Culture
Despite its radical injunctions on government interference, The Conflict more
or less upheld the traditional structure of German universities that had emerged
after a period of reform and modernization. There is good reason for this, as Kant
and fellow members of the Philosophical Faculty had a large stake in consolidating
the considerable gains made by university reformers towards the end of the 18th
century. Charles McClelland reports that student enrollments had severely
decreased over the earlier years of that century, partly due to the ill repute of the
higher faculties in which “scholasticism was the method and orthodoxy the content
of instruction,”89 partly due to the ill repute of unruly students. More progressive
“enlightenment” movements in law and philosophy were met with great resistance
and research in the natural sciences was migrating to newly established royal
academies. This trend of decline was reversed by the reorganization of two key
universities — Halle and Göttingen — along lines that raised the prestige of original
scholarship and attracted the backing of the emerging class of nobles who took
88 Why this remains important to contemporary debates about the university will be elaborated in chapter five, where a reading of “What is Enlightenment” will be deployed in order to argue that Kant’s notion of publicity remains one of the more compelling justifications for the existence of the university. 89 Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany: 1700-‐1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 28.
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posts in the state bureaucracy and sent their children to university.90 Thus the
integration of the faculties within a general framework of rationalization and
modernization tempered any kind of radical reimagining of how a university should
be organized.91
However, Kant’s argument for the centrality of the Philosophical Faculty in
the university, and its subsequent role in the emergence of a new kind of culture and
approach to governance was pushed further by a trio of reformers at the turn of the
19th century — Wilhelm Von Humboldt, Gottlieb Fichte, and Frederich
Schleiermacher. These reformers broadened the range of concerns that one might
speak to when discussing the organization and role of the university and laid the
groundwork for the rise of academics as an influential class in German society. They
were emboldened by two key developments, one intellectual and one historical. On
the intellectual front Fichte and others sought to dramatically further the
philosophical program set by Kant’s critical and transcendental philosophy. This
was indicative of the maturation of several philosophical and artistic movements
(Idealism, Romanticism, forms of humanism) which sought in the universities an
opportunity to instantiate certain ideals worked out to a great deal of theoretical
90 Ibid., 34-‐58. 91 To not misinterpret my claim, Kant’s suggestion that philosophy become the most important faculty in the modern university is quite radical. My point is that he did not want to disrupt the organization of the faculties, and went out of his way to retain the traditional function of the higher faculties in terms of training professionals. In this way it is quite different from someone like Mark Taylor, who in fact is quite critical of Kant’s writings on the university and imagines a distributions of the faculties that is more in line with the interdisciplinary nature of university work today.
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and aesthetic sophistication. On the historical front the Napoleonic Wars resulted in
not only the loss of Prussian territory, but also the University of Halle, one of its
preeminent institutions. Such conditions lent reformers a renewed sense of
purpose in setting the course for German universities in the 19th century. Many got
their wish in the founding of the University of Berlin in 1809.
It is beyond the scope of this project to detail the social, political, and
intellectual factors leading up to the founding of the University of Berlin.92 Rather,
I’d like to focus on some key conceptual and organizational innovations that were
introduced during this period to show how Kant’s focus on the University of Reason
was gradually shifted to the University of Culture.93 In particular there are three
concepts that were to assume central importance in the development of the modern
university: the holistic focus on student development (Bildung), the integration of
research and teaching (Wissenschaft), and the articulation of standards by which
universities could evaluate the merit of their activities (the Republican Subject).
Importantly, all three of these developments unfolded against a burgeoning
nationalist movement. I will come back to the significance of this in the concluding
section of this chapter. 92 For a helpful, brief account see Charles McClelland, “To Live for Science: The University of Berlin,” The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, ed. Thomas Bender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 181-‐197. 93 These terms are borrowed from Bill Readings in The University in Ruins. My understanding of this shift is that there are several practical effects of foregrounding culture. For one it brings universities into far greater alignment with key economic, political, and social institutions (i.e. it helps to solidify the fourfold set of relations I am tracking in this dissertation). This in turn leads to a change in the self-‐understanding of academics as a powerful class in their own right. The implications of these changes will be discussed in further detail below.
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IV. Bildung, Wissenschaft, and the Republican Subject
Bildung
The generation of reformers and academics that I am concerned with here
worked within a framework that was decisive for both the formation of a new kind
of university and endemic forms of tension that continue to plague the institution.
Following the historian of higher education Fritz Ringer, the key move was to try
and chart a uniquely German version of Enlightenment and modernization,
primarily in contradistinction to its Anglo-‐French equivalents. In those two
countries advances in knowledge, pedagogy, and institutional structures were shot
through with utilitarian, instrumental, rationalist, and material concerns, as seen in
reformers such as Mill, Bentham, and Diderot. According to the Germans this was
explained partially by perceived differences in the “national character” of Germany
and their two European counterparts, and partially by the structure of economic
organization set in motion by the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.
In contrast to this German reformers emphasized ideals like culture,
imagination, cultivation of unique personality and character, and meaningful contact
with tradition. These are traits recognizable to students of Romanticism, and indeed
figures such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and even Goethe loomed large in the
imagination of Humboldt and Schleiermacher.94 According to Ringer this difference
in orientation stemmed from several sources. One was the strong influence of
German Pietism, a Protestant movement that placed an emphasis on education as a
94 See Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 140-‐168.
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process of developing the soul to its greatest potential for salvation.95 Another was
the influence of neuhumanism, an attempt to reorient educational ideals away from
the rote memorization of Latin towards a meaningful reconnection with Greek
sources (seen for example in the rise in philology). Furthermore, the early 18th
century saw the emergence of the burghers and academics as challengers to the
vested power of the aristocracy. Both not only tied their status to educational
achievement in place of inherited wealth and prestige, but also began to supplant
the aristocracy in certain sectors of society by assuming influential roles in
emerging bureaucratic structures. Charles McClelland points to the Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister as an indication that “the new Bilddungsburgertum regarded
education as the most promising path toward a narrowing of social distance
between itself and the nobility it admired.”96
As Ringer notes, “the animus against practicality sometimes reached absurd
proportions,”97 especially as these distinctly “German” educational ideals became
solidified in the curriculum of the gymnasium and lower levels of the school system.
It also set in place a tension concerning the enthusiasm or reticence academics
should have when engaging those outside the university — a tension that exploded
with devastating consequences in the run up to World War II. However, in the
hands of Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Fichte it helped secure consensus on a few 95 Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-‐1933 (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 18. 96 Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany: 1700-‐1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 96. 97 Ringer, 29.
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key fronts amongst academics. The first was a general movement away from a focus
on practical training towards a type of education that derived its worth from the act
of learning or scientific discovery itself. The term that signaled this shift most
clearly was Bildung, translated variably as “culture,” “cultivation,” “self-‐cultivation,”
“formation,” or “growth.”
The following definition of Bildung is taken from Der grosse Brockhause, “a
standard German encyclopedia published between 1928 and 1935”:
The fundamental concept of pedagogy since Pestalozzi, Bildung requires: (a) an individuality which, as the unique starting point, is to be
developed into a formed or value-‐saturated personality; (b) a certain universality, meaning richness of mind and person, which is attained
through the empathetic understanding and experiencing of the objective cultural values; (c) totality, meaning inner unity and firmness of
character.”98
As can be seen, the thrust of this definition is away from extrinsically determined
ends (training, or “instruction” as Karl Jaspers would come to call it), and towards a
far-‐ranging process through which unique personalities develop themselves in
relation to their value-‐laden environment. This places a responsibility on teachers
to facilitate this process, first through the provision of these objects of value to
students, and second to finding methods through which learning sustains a
continuous process of inner development. For the neuhumanists, the first part of
this equation came through the reacquaintance with classical sources, as these had
the potential to provoke a more holistic engagement from the students (this is still
98 Ibid., 86.
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the idea behind great books programs).99 For Humboldt this type of reacquaintance
was to occur primarily at the gymnasium, but following Kant it implied a revitalized
Philosophical Faculty in the universities (home to philology, classics, history, etc.).100
However, many in the reform movement put equal weight on the role of
scholarship supported by universities. In fact, Humboldt’s vision for the University
of Berlin had two mutually reinforcing poles: “die objektive Wissenschaft mit der
subjektiven Bildung” (Objective Wissenschaft with Subjective Bildung). Like Bildung,
Wissenschaft has a complicated set of associations101 that were leveraged for the
purposes of these education reformers to give the emerging university some
organizing principles. In its most straightforward sense Wissenschaft means an
organized inquiry, whether it be scientific or philosophical. However, how one
comes to define what constitutes organization and what constitutes inquiry is a 99 This is not a completely novel development in European universities, but was building upon the character of emerging centers of intellectual life like Edinburgh and Leiden. Anthony Grafton describes the 17th century University of Leiden thusly, “In many ways the university acted as a great cultural syringe, injecting new ideas and cultural forms into what had previously been a narrowly traditional culture. The university was a center of sustained efforts to develop classical genres.” Anthony Grafton, “Civic Humanism and Scientific Scholarship at Leiden,” The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, Ed. Thomas Bender [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 67. 100 McClelland, p. 110. 101 For example, Bill Readings cites Samuel Weber’s account of the differences reflected in translations of Wissenschaft. He writes, “Wissenschaft is translated in French as ‘science,’ which stands over and against saviors or connaissances, the forms for ‘knowledges.’ In English, science names the ensemble of knowledges in the hard sciences rather than the unifying principle of all knowledge-‐seeking,” cited in Readings, The University in Ruins, 207. Ringer sticks more closely to the German and writes that “die Wissenschaft must be translated as ‘scholarship’ or ‘learning,’ rarely as ‘science’ and eine Wissenschaft simple means a ‘discipline.’” Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 103.
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complicated matter. Examining how each of the three principal figures in the
foundation of the University of Berlin understood the term will be helpful for
presenting a well-‐rounded picture of what Wissenschaft entailed for the subsequent
history of the university.
Wissenschaft
For Humboldt, the most important aspects of this form of inquiry were its
sustaining conditions and its form. If Bildung was to focus our attention on the
process of self-‐cultivation through learning, then students at university would need
to follow a path sustained and motivated by interest, curiosity, and imagination; as
opposed to pragmatic concerns of career and social requirements (e.g. studying only
in order to pass civil service exams). This led him to consider key features of the
learning environment for students. For example, he aimed to purify the student
base by attempting to restrict admission only to students “whom outward leisure or
inner striving lead to scholarship and research.”102 Moreover, once at university he
imagined a community marked by solitude and freedom — solitude consisting of a
unity of purpose amongst the academic community mutually invested in
scholarship, questioning, and the exchange of ideas; and freedom to pursue these
activities without consideration for the practical concerns of the day or the external
interests of the State.
102 Cited in Horst Seibert, “Humboldt and the Reform of the Educational System,” in Joachim H. Knoll and Horst Seibert, Wilhelm Von Humboldt: Politician and Educationist [Bad Godesberg: Inter Nationes, 1967], 41.
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These views on student life were buttressed by an attempt to draw pedagogy
as close as possible to research. Thus in the seminar,103 still the model upon which
many doctoral programs operate today, students participated in the speculative
thinking of their professors by engaging in the type of philosophical purification that
Kant put at the center of university life, namely the submission of beliefs before the
crucible of reason.104 Professors did not lecture on received wisdom or dogmas
from the past, but were actively engaged in questions that built upon a conception of
research as a perpetually unfinished project. This shifted the emphasis of
scholarship away from presenting the finished project, which was the reigning form
of scholarly activity in the Academies, towards a commitment to a process of inquiry
without prior guarantees as to where this process would lead.
Schleiermacher is in substantial agreement with Humboldt on the form of
scholarship to be undertaken in universities, but his rationale stems more from
philosophical commitments than from a radical distancing from prior locales of
authority like the State or Academies. At the core of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic
project is to find ways to rework history and tradition in light of the progressive
unfolding of reason towards a higher unity. Thus our present conceptual frames do
not displace understandings of the past or of different cultures, but rather allows us
to discover their truth and establish meaningful forms of continuity. This is the
work of interpretation and dialogue that continues in universities to this day — 103 In fact, the linking of the seminar form with this idea of Wissenschaft led to a major expansion of seminars in German universities between the 1820s and 1870s. See McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 174. 104 Sibert, 41.
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however, the key insight for Schleiermacher being that such work is guided by the
ideals of rational inquiry as opposed to resting on the authority of those doing the
interpreting.
Bill Readings again neatly summarizes the point: “Wissenschaft names the
speculative science that is the unity underlying all pursuits of specific knowledge.
Wissenschaft is the speculative search for the unity of knowledge that marks a
cultured people.”105 It is the university, which integrates diverse spheres of
knowledge and experience in the spirit of reason and inquiry, which
institutionalizes this ideal. As Schleiermacher himself wrote in a letter to his
fiancée, “it is only in this most recent time when men divide and separate everything
that such a joining of interests is rare; at other times every able man was fearless in
everything, and so it must also become.”106 The neuhumanist turn to a Greek culture
philosophically oriented towards unity coupled with the progressive spirit running
through Weissenschaft was to be the driver for this renewed spirit to which
Schleiermacher refers.
Fichte offers the final gloss on Wissenschaft, and is often viewed as sitting on
the other end of a continuum from Von Humboldt with the more accomodationist
Schleiermacher laying in between. Like these other two thinkers he highlights the
unifying aspect of rational inquiry, but unlike them he attaches more determinate
content to the direction of research. For Fichte the transcendental philosophy of
Kant marked a significant advance in not only in the field of philosophy, but in the 105 Readings, 65. 106 Crouter, 145.
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general direction of scholarly research.107 In this regard he takes Kant’s inversion of
the hierarchy of faculties the most seriously of the three thinkers here under
consideration, and puts to philosophers the task of developing a rigorous and
systematic philosophy capable of guiding all forms of scholarly activity at the heart
university.
One way to understand Fichte’s position is as a reaction to the growing
complexity of human knowledge, as disciplinary advances push scholars towards
specialization and make the claims of different spheres of knowledge seemingly
incommensurable. If we take Kant’s project seriously, a developed philosophical
system can inquire into the unifying principles that make possible a wide range of
experiences. As was seen in The Conflict of the Faculties, philosophically grounded
inquiry, guided by the progressive unfolding of reason, is a disposition appropriate
to the advancement and healthy functioning of the diverse pursuits of the different
faculties. And as demonstrated by Kant’s three Critiques, such questions can be
pursued systematically, and legitimized by the self-‐regulating movement of
philosophy, not by extrinsically derived ends of the State or tradition (or “dogma,” to
stick closer to Kant’s language).
The Republican Subject in the Kulturstadt
Gottlieb Fichte was named the first rector of Berlin in 1810, but lasted only
one semester after quarreling with faculty who balked at his hardline, normative
vision for the new university. For example, Fichte felt that the model of learning and
107 Fichte develops this in Vocation of Man (1800), On the Nature of the Scholar (1794), and to some extent in Address to the German Nation (1808).
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teaching (marked by the intersection of Bildung and Wissenschaft) should be wholly
untainted by external factors like prior social standing or career goals. To this end
he proposed full funding of students, a guaranteed position in the civil service
regardless of performance at university (above a reasonable threshold), and
uniforms to neutralize differences in family status.108 He also took on the traditions
that had grown up around student culture — namely rowdiness and dueling.109
Fichte’s ill-‐fated tenure at Berlin is illustrative of a general attitude shared
amongst the reformers; that universities were interested in forming a new kind of
political subject, and that this subject was integral to an Enlightened culture and
state.110 Put another way, the key to understanding the task of the university is that
the kind of learning, teaching, research, and communicative practices it engendered
were for the betterment of the State and of society, though perhaps in a less direct
way than unenlightened regimes of the past imagined (e.g. to train competent civil
servants).111 This is, in many respects, reflective of the general tendency of
108 McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 118. 109 McClelland characterizes the 18th century lifestyle of students as “licentious and often terroristic,” in smaller university towns. This was to some extent tempered in the urban setting of Berlin, but in novels like Stefan Zweig’s Confusion (1927) (New York: NYRB Classics, 2012) or in the radical right-‐wing movements seated in student unions in the 20th century we can see the enduring nature of the issue Fichte tried to address. 110 Again, we can think of this in contradistinction to imperialist France and utilitarian England. 111 We can look back to Halle and Göttingen to as the first step in this process, where the focus was to train competent civil servants to help serve a more complex society (which brought better scholarship in tow to meet this complexity). The additional
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modernity or of the Enlightenment that we see across 18th century artistic and
intellectual movements.
Humboldt was perhaps the most far-‐reaching reformer on this issue.
Consider for example the following quotation concerning the status of university
graduates:
“Whence I conclude, that the freest development of human nature, directed as little as possible to ulterior civil relations, should always be regarded as paramount in importance with respect to the culture of man in society. He who has been thus freely developed should then attach himself to the State: and the State should test and compare itself, as it were, in him.”112
This is a high standard for what we might ask of graduates, and it is certainly a
higher standard than the purported civic and economic goals that Americans came
to attach to university study. However, we should remember that Humboldt was
also the author of The Limits of State Action, and was thus beginning to work out
what certain institutions would look like outside the heavy hand of tradition or
inherited power. The university marked an emergent possibility in this regard,
wherein the mutual ennoblement of character and society could be achieved
through an enlargement of the sphere of freedom for individuals. And as Fritz
Ringer underscores, culture was the key: “Humboldt believed that the university
aspects of culture and rational inquiry come when 18th century reformers imagine a more ambitious break from the weight of tradition. 112 Cited in Maarten Simons, “The ‘Renaissance of the University’ in the European Knowledge Society: An Exploration of Principled and Governmental Approaches,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26, no. 5 (1997), 439.
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could win back for Prussia in the field of cultural power and intellectual greatness
what it had lost in the field of political influence.”113
V. The Crisis of German Universities
The efforts of 18th century reformers open themselves up to two competing
interpretations. The first is to read their efforts strategically — as stemming the
tides of a general movement in German society (e.g. away from universities and
towards Royal Academies and other institutions serving existing elites, or towards
the English/French variants of the Enlightenment). This is to capture the radicality
of Kant and his followers in proffering a new locus of authority in the autonomous
subject or the critical function of the Philosophical Faculty. The second
interpretation is to read these reformers as consolidating the gains of a progressive
movement signaled by the Enlightenment. On this reading they are filling out the
nascent features of an emerging social order and the essential place of the university
therein.
Both interpretations — whether the reformers were acting strategically or
seizing upon the currents of change — turn on how you understand the historical
situation into which these figures were intervening. Whilst it cannot be denied that
the implications of their thought have been far-‐reaching and impactful even in
contemporary debates about universities, and hence transcend any firm historical
determinism, reading their legacy against the history of the “long 19th century” is
nonetheless instructive. As the philosopher Theodor Litt commented on the
educational reform movement of the early 1800s, “[it] could hardly have made its 113 Ringer, 43.
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appearance at a more unfavorable moment than when the social world began one of
its most powerful transformations.”114 Why such a transformation was unfavorable,
but nevertheless did not detract from the power of these reformers, is the concern
of the following section.
Two very important changes in German society are essential for
understanding the crisis of the German universities. The first is the emergence of
Germany into a modern nation state (unification occurring in 1871), bringing with it
parallel developments in economics (rapid industrialization and urbanization) and
politics (participation in the colonial scramble alongside other European powers,
and strengthening of the state apparatus during Bismarck’s program of
rationalization). The second is the emergence of academics into a powerful class in
German society, which in many ways was a function of the rapid expansion of the
university system throughout the 19th century. Drawing on Max Weber’s study of
Chinese elites, Fritz Ringer calls this emergent class “the German Mandarins,” and
locates their class power in prestige associated with educational achievement rather
than capital accumulation. The power of academics thus developed in conjunction
with the growing power of the State and the economy, leading to what philosophers
like Litt saw as an inevitable confrontation.
Following the founding of the University of Berlin there was a small
expansion in the number of students attending university, but this plateaued
114 Cited in Sibert, 47.
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between 1830-‐1860 with total enrollments settling between 12,000-‐13,000.115
However, a large spike occurred in 1870, with enrollments growing to 34,000 by
1900 and 61,000 by 1914. These trends can be explained in part by a rapid growth
in the population that occurred during the middle part of the 19th century, expanded
governmental and economic sectors to employ university graduates (hence making
university study more attractive), and increased state support for universities. Such
trends also changed the character of the student body, with the expanded and more
heterogeneous middle class now dominating universities.116 These increased
enrollments, coupled with the demographic changes in the student base,
successively chipped away at the harder line commitments to the ideals that drove
early university reformers. “Not Bildung for its sake alone,” writes McClelland, “a
value attached for the traditional educated middle class — but also the attainment
of university credentials for social status became a value for the commercial
bourgeoisie.”117
Many of these trends were presided over by Friedrich Althoff, whose policies
were indicative of new forces being brought to bear on the organizing ideals of the
university. Althoff was the director of university affairs for the Culture Ministry 115 McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 239. 116 McClelland describes the changes thusly: “A relatively stagnant, predominately Protestant, all-‐male body of graduates of the classical Gymnasium drawn mostly from the professional and civil service elite had been transformed into a heterogeneous mass. The old core of the university students remained intact, but it was strongly augmented in number by non-‐Protestants, sons of the commercial classes and even the petite bourgeoisie, more foreigners, and a few woman.” McClelland, 251. 117 Ibid., 253.
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during this period (he retained his post from 1882-‐1907). He grew technical
institutions (Technische Hochscheuluen), allowed them to grant doctoral degrees,
made inroads into faculty politics to influence faculty appointments, and increased
funding to the universities. In addition to these intentional policies academics also
were wrapped up in changed social and economic conditions, for example in
developing new research programs in foreign languages and cultures (a
consequence of imperial pursuits) or in developing economic and statistical models
that both helped in comprehending the complexities of the new industrial economy
and created a group of experts who were enlisted in its service. In accordance with
Althoff’s vision, these changes added up to a shift in conventional wisdom that now
conceived of universities as institutions of the State.118
Now such a shift in and of itself would certainly be dizzying to any society,
but would not necessarily blossom into a full-‐blown crisis. What made the case
different in Germany was the constitution of the academic class, forged in the wake
of the strong normative ideals set by Kant, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Fichte.
Fritz Ringer calls this group the “German Mandarins,” referring to “a social or
cultural elite which owes its status primarily to educational qualifications, rather
than hereditary rights or wealth.”119 For this group Berlin set something of an ideal-‐
type for universities, and thus the kinds of changes that occurred in the latter part of
the 19th century were often met with derision. Even Max Weber, by no means a
118 Ibid., 291-‐295. 119 Ringer, 5.
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radical defender of academic privilege, would frame his critique of government or
industry oriented research as a “weakening of [academics’] moral authority.”120
Ringer breaks the Mandarins into two camps, “orthodox” and “modernist”
(the latter sometimes referred to as “accomodationist”). Common features of the
orthodox camp include a condemnation of mass culture, skepticism towards
democracy, doctrinaire belief in the intellectual and cultural superiority of the
educated class, and general criticisms of industrial society. Modernists on the other
hand tried to develop a new set of resources and dispositions that acknowledged the
inevitability of certain changes in the political, cultural, and economic landscape of
the time. This did not mean a wholesale abandonment of the mandarin tradition,
but rather would “enable the mandarins and their values to retain a certain
influence in the twentieth century”121 by bringing features of modern society into
their research and teaching practice. In its most pointed form the debate between
the two sides concerned the extent to which the ideals of the university could (or
should) absorb the social upheavals of the time. As Ringer notes, there was little
questioning of the assumptions of the mandarin ideology itself. 122 Rather, the
question concerned the level to which mandarin ideology could retain its relevance
in society — with the orthodox camp citing the moral, cultural, and intellectual
prestige garnered through a principled commitment to Wissenschaft and Bildung;
120 McClelland, 269. 121 Ringer, 130. 122 Ringer, 134. A good example of this is a resistance towards Marxism or other revolutionary programs. What the modernist Mandarins wanted was reform.
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the modernists citing the need to use this tradition to steer the new economic and
political reality facing academics in a period in which the scale and complexity of the
university had grown along with that of the nation-‐state and the economy.
The drama that played out in the run up to WWI (and continued up until
WWII) thus unfolded on several fronts — in strong reactions to the encroachments
(real and perceived) of Althoff in faculty politics, in wading through problems of
scale (e.g. increased student-‐faculty ratios) that came with the expansion of the
university system, in deciding how vigorously to intervene in political affairs, and in
reinterpreting the ideals of early reformers in radically changed circumstances. An
emblematic “crisis” of this period was the so-‐called “great debate,” which unfolded
between 1919-‐1921. The debate concerned two competing interpretations of
Wissenschaft as the raison d’être of mandarins. In “Science (Wissenschaft) as a
Vocation”123 (1919) Max Weber laid out the modernist interpretation, in which
modern forms of inquiry found their sense in a long history of what he called “the
process of intellectualization,” through which magical interpretations were
displaced by sustained acts of human intelligence. In Greece this process was
defined by the search for pure Ideas, in the Renaissance the focus turned towards
understanding art and nature, and in the early modern period philosophers isolated
laws in attempts to map out the causal nexus which illustrated God’s true nature.
Just as these ages displaced many efforts of previous eras, so too was there no
guarantee that modern, scientific, highly technical and specialized efforts would 123 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” Ed. & Tr. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129-‐156.
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generate definitive answers to questions. Rather, Wissenschaft as the vocation of the
scholar marked a commitment to posing questions well, using the best tools for
understanding at one’s disposal, and to aid in the enlargement of understanding for
students and society.124 “To teach his students to recognize inconvenient
facts…facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions”125 is how Weber
succinctly describes the pedagogical vocation of the scholar. A steady and humble
research program though the various specializations of professors marks their
scientific vocation.
A group of “orthodox” mandarins saw this as a betrayal of scholarly
standards — especially of the striving for unity that emerged out of German
Idealism. Nowhere in Weber’s speech was the type of cultural ennoblement that
they saw as flowing from their authority as upholders of the great tradition of
Bildung and Wissenschaft. Moreover, in Weber’s positions and in his sociological
inquiries they saw deference, or resignation in the face of lamentable modern forces
like democracy or socialism in matters political, and utilitarianism in matters
economic.126 The orthodox position could certainly be described as elitist, but it
must be kept in mind that academics established themselves as prominent and
influential members of society through a principled commitment to these ideals.
124 Ringer, 356. He sums up the three functions left to scholars by Weber as “the facing of ‘facts,’ the weighing of consequences, and the assessment of internal consistency in the setting of objectives.” 125 Weber, 151. 126 See Ringer, 357-‐360 for the most violent reactions to Weber.
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The strong reactions to Weber were to some extent to be expected. In his
speech he drew a firm line between counsel based on scientific inquiry, which was
meant to be value-‐neutral, and that based on the authority of the professor, which
was specifically meant to intervene on the plane of values. Weber makes mention of
the latter position at several points in his speech, and in the most virulent responses
to his proposals (not to mention the historical sequence which follows) we can
observe that it was indeed a serious trend in universities. For example,
pamphleteers directly responding to Weber’s speech saw him as tacitly embracing
the fragmentation and spiritual debasement of modern industrial life and a
chastened post-‐WWI state. These pamphleteers took the opposite position,
embracing the heroic vision of the scholar as he who strived for totality. This
conservative interpretation of Wissenschaft thus called on the scholar to hew closer
to older justifications for scholarship, which were, to quote Arthur Salz, a professor
of sociology and economics, “[to have] the guidance of life as a goal, intuition as the
method, and universality of scope.”127
Now it should be mentioned that a decidedly ungenerous reading of Weber
fueled these attacks, which is to a large extent the phenomenon that I am
investigating (the failure of legitimation claims resulting from the contestation of
terms and ideals in periods of rapid social and economic change). In the initial part
of his address Weber addresses one salient external constraint on scholarship that
is rarely mentioned, which is the influence of chance. What he meant was that a
great deal of chance is involved in hiring decisions, in who attracts students, who 127 Cited in Ringer, 362.
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garners their praise, and whether a talent for teaching and research coincide in
promising scholars. Normally these factors needn’t be mentioned, but Weber saw a
pressing danger in their denial at that historical juncture, because students were
imbuing professors with a kind of spiritual authority, which many professors were
using as an occasion to speak on matters of “value and culture” beyond what their
expertise and position authorized.
Thus Weber’s intent was to diminish the heroic conception of the scholar
(which he saw eventuating into the “demagogue”) and return scholarship to the
more moderate ambitions described above. “In the lecture-‐rooms of the university
no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity,”128 is how he describes the
acceptable limits of academic authority. Not engaging present conditions with this
integrity, lapsing into “academic prophecy,” “will create only fanatical sects but
never a genuine community.” However, in the vacuum left by a weakened set of
political and economic leaders in the waning years of WWI and into Weimar, such a
position was seen by many as an abdication of scholarly duty. Thus in this debate
we can clearly see Wissenschaft straining under competing interpretations that were
generated out of academics trying to wrestle with large changes in the culture, the
economy, and the function of the nation-‐state.
It was the orthodox position that prevailed in this particular crisis, leading to
a heightening of turmoil right up to 1933 and the ascent of National Socialists to
power. As Ringer notes, theories of cultural decadence (Spengler’s Decline of the
West being published between 1918-‐1923) circulated amongst many scholars who 128 Weber, 156.
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saw their role as bearing witness to the various forms of decline and loss that
marked the modern period and providing the ideals capable of motivating a
“spiritual renewal.”129 Paradoxically these ideals came from the past, with a
renewed emphasis on “wholeness,” on “synthesis,” and other legacies of the
Romantics and German Idealists who once dominated the academic community. But
the novelty was that these were now being attached to relatively recent phenomena,
such as a powerful nation-‐state and the development of industry. This led to the
“semantic disease” of calling every movement against this search for unity a “crisis
in learning,” and an oscillation between various sources of cultural fracture —
technology, democracy, materialism, positivism.130 As Ringer concludes, and as
history sadly attests to, “common sense in politics was discredited, along with the
merely practical knowledge of positivist learning. Where could an argument against
unreason have begun?”131 Put another way, once the position of the orthodox
mandarins congealed into a hardened ideology that ran counter to the general
direction of society, universities began to indulge deeply emotional arguments that
are better classified as wish fulfillment than scholarship. Or, to put matters yet
another way in the language of this thesis, once the crisis claim began to circulate
with ease a narrative frame was placed around university affairs in which certain
questions and positions were authorized, others delegitimized, and the closure of a
gap between reality and some absent ideal was the call of most reformers. 129 Ringer, 385. 130 Ibid., 402. 131 Ibid., 438.
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VI. Conclusion
The kind of conflict between the orthodox and modernist mandarins is one
that we will have occasion to revisit in different contexts. However, the point of the
preceding account is to provide the first example of how the discourse of “a crisis of
the university” tracks significant changes in the political and economic structure of a
society. This discourse becomes particularly charged when these changes follow a
period in which very strong normative ideals about universities were developed and
deployed with a great deal of success. In the next two chapters I will introduce two
more cases which bear a strong family resemblance to Germany in the long 19th
century, and indeed we will see many of these same ideals brought into play.
To summarize briefly, the German case demonstrates one potential way of
interpreting the crisis of the university. In this case ideals that were developed in
one context, beginning with Kant and then gaining force in the University of Berlin,
took on a completely different set of meanings in another. The conservative and
ultimately far-‐right interpretations of the academic tradition can be seen largely as a
consequence of universities failing to work though serious social and economic
changes, to say nothing of the growth in scope and complexity of the university
itself. Thus justifications for academic work moved beyond that of establishing a
self-‐regulating institution guided by Reason (Kant) or helping to advance the
German nation by producing well-‐rounded republican subjects (von Humboldt).
Rather, the academic tradition was radically reinterpreted to be constitutive of a
very narrow form of nationalism, which recalls the kinds of crisis that we saw in the
Young Hegelians, where critique calls out a crisis in order to shed the old world and
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usher in the new. In this particular case it was terms coming from the old world or
Romanticism, Idealism, and the German Enlightenment that were being used to
conjure up the new in which a strong nation-‐state and industrial economy were the
primary loci of power (weakened in the concrete situation of Weimar, reinvigorated
in the future imagined by orthodox Mandarins). The “semantic disease” that Ringer
notes amongst conservatives is a compelling illustration of how these changes were
absorbed and understood in the university.
Thus one of the important lessons to be drawn from the German context is to
investigate the adequacy of applying tradition to contemporary challenges. What
should be noted in this case is that the tradition opened itself to many competing
interpretations and the discourse about how to adjudicate between them was
subject to systematic distortion when one side dominated the debate. But this
should not cover up the fact that the period was one of great contestation and
negotiation, and as with any historical inquiry appreciating the possibilities inhering
in these periods of uncertainty can serve as a spur to look differently at the present.
However, this is not to say that the march of history renders these ideals
unavailable to the present moment. In the final chapter I will retrieve Kant’s notion
of critique, internal the function of the Philosophical Faculty, as an attractive notion
that is worth revisiting in light of the contemporary situation. Moreover, I will argue
that preserving the critical function of the university should take precedence over
the subsequent turn to Bildung and culture which was to become an equally
important aspect of the self-‐understanding of universities after Berlin (and as these
ideals merged with English conceptions of liberal learning in the development of
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American universities). However, before deriving more insights on the German case
I would like to introduce one more example that brings us closer geographically and
temporally to the locus of the current “crisis of the university.”
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Chapter 3: The Golden Age of American Higher
Education, Its Progressive and European Inheritance,
and the Student Protests
”The link between our postwar democracy and the traditional university — a link that seems almost attractive — is coming to an end.”132
Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (1970)
Introduction In the 1890’s the muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker mused, “Was
there a world outside of America?” His response, indicative of a certain nativist
streak in the American psyche, “If there was, I knew next to nothing about it.”133 For
many boosters of the American higher education system, “the finest in the world,”
this attitude shades any telling of how our colleges and universities took on their
distinctive character in the world scene. Whilst denominational colleges like
Harvard and Yale may have borrowed from the Oxbridge model, they eventually
shed their religious and classist roots to reflect the essentially democratic character
of America.134 Moreover, under the stewardship of heroic university presidents
132 Jürgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). 133 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1. 134 For example, Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869-‐1909, is still praised on the university’s website for shedding requirements like attending chapel and learning ancient Greek and introducing what he called “a spontaneous diversity of choice” in undergraduate education. Eliot’s introduction of the elective system, inspired to a large degree by Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia, came to
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such as Charles William Eliot at Harvard, William Rainey Harper at the University of
Chicago, and Andrew Dickson White at Cornell University, American higher
education went beyond Humboldt’s idealized balance between teaching and
research to such a degree that they attracted the finest professors and students from
around the world and produced discoveries that altered the course of human
history. Whatever the influences that drove these reforms, the achievements were
distinctly American.
But to what degree is this triumphalist story true, especially in the
development of American universities and colleges that were late arrivals on the
higher education scene when compared to their European counterparts in Paris,
Bologna, Salamanca, or even Berlin? Even if there were influences from Europe, was
America able to develop a strong, unified vision of what they expected from their
institutions of higher education, much as the Germans took great pains to
distinguish themselves from the English and the French? The answer to these
questions can be taken up with reference to two periods: the development of
colleges and universities before WWII (especially around the turn of the 20th
century) and the period of expansion in the years immediately following the war. As
Daniel T. Rogers argues in Atlantic Crossings, the “years between the 1870s and the
Second World War were…a moment when American politics was peculiarly open to
define what many saw as both the democratic and well-‐rounded character of the American undergraduate curriculum. However, what is often not noted is that Eliot was opening up the curriculum to the kinds of advanced research programs that we saw in the previous chapter in reference to the development of the German research university. More will be made on this later in the chapter in reference to Harvard’s own report on “general education.”
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foreign models and imported ideas.”135 In the first part of this chapter I will briefly
review the relationship between these European influences and the emerging
features of an American system that is decidedly marked by a progressive
orientation borrowed from Europe, especially as these manifested in the
development of the nascent social sciences. This compressed history will, in part,
make the leap from the German to the American crises less abrupt than it might first
appear and show how certain ideals about the modern university exist on a
continuum and are available for re-‐investigation at certain moments of “crisis.” As
we will see, both the Wissenschaft and Bildung aspects of German universities found
enthusiastic boosters in the United States, the former in the burgeoning social
sciences and the latter in the push for general education.
The first part of my narrative also aims to demystify the belief that anything
like coherent and distinctly American vision of higher education emerged during
this early period. This could not be the case because of the uneven and oft-‐times
competing influences of the Wissenschaft and Bildung traditions, complications
brought about by the co-‐development of industrial capitalism and the building of a
democratic cultural infrastructure, and a minimal role for the federal government.136
135 Ibid., 4. 136 This runs counter to the German experience, in which the cultural understanding of academic work preceded economic and political modernization. This allowed for a more unified ideal of the university to emerge in Germany, one which then drew on support from the expanded state, but eventually fell into a sense of crisis when abiding cultural concerns could not be squared with novel sectors of power in German society.
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In the figure of Clark Kerr we will see how this internal inconsistency was taken to
be an asset that Americans should embrace in the post-‐war period.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII the fortunes of Europe and the United
States diverged tremendously, with Europeans beginning the difficult task of
rebuilding and the Americans assuming a position of global dominance. Such a shift
was reflected in American universities, and it is during this period that we see a
staggering growth in the scale of higher education as well as a distinctly American
vision coming into sharp focus. In the second part of this chapter I will examine two
strands in this development. The first deals with the installation of universities at
the center of American life by binding the interests of the state, the economy, and
civil society together in an institution that is marked by its productivity (primarily
in the natural and social sciences, as well as assuming a training and accreditation
function for various professions). I will examine Vanaveer Bush’s Science — The
Endless Frontier (1945), the University of California Master Plan (1960), and Clark
Kerr’s The Uses of the University (1963) as key texts in providing the ideals which
were to guide one important trajectory in the expansion of American higher
education.
The second strand looks at the “general education” movement in higher
education, which called on universities to serve broad civic and democratic ends in
the building of a mass democracy. In the work of Robert Maynard Hutchins at the
University of Chicago and James Bryant Conant at Harvard, we can see a growing
concern with higher education being able to have an effective role in shaping the
character of citizens and the values of society. In many ways these university
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presidents were interpreting the Bildung tradition in radically different
circumstances than their Romantic and Idealist German predecessors, namely in the
heart of an immigrant society, powerful nation-‐state, and industrial, capitalist
economy. I will turn to General Education in a Free Society (1945) and Robert
Maynard Hutchins’ The University of Utopia (1953) to spell out the state-‐economy-‐
university-‐culture constellation envisioned by the general education movement.
The notable feature of the model that emerged from these two aspects of
post-‐war expansion was the lack of any singular, unifying ideal (or, to put it slightly
differently, the simultaneous presence of multiple ideals). Rather, the focus was on
establishing the university as a central American institution and using it to pursue
certain political, economic, scientific, and social ends. Pursuant to my broader
argument, this “Golden Age” of American higher education occurred at a period in
which universities were by and large able to square what Clyde Barrow calls “the
contradictory imperatives that emerged from attempts to reconcile the rise of
corporate capitalism with the claims of political democracy.”137 Thus I will also look
at the particular state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation that allowed many,
such as the University of California President Clark Kerr, to heap so much praise on
the post-‐war American higher education model.
The concluding section of the chapter picks up the theme of crisis and the
changes in the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation that it signals.
Though by no means limited to the American case, the student protests of the 1960s 137 Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-‐1928 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 7.
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and the subsequent culture wars that followed marked a sequence that undermined
models like the California Master Plan or the project of general education and
initiated a new set of expectations for our colleges and universities. The major issue
that students, administrators, and academics were grappling with was the
centrality, scale, and complexity that the university had come to assume, and
whether this left room for universities to retain a distinctive identity of their own.
Again, sticking close to the California example (though weaving in accounts from
other locales as well), I will examine John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin’s The Berkeley
Rebellion and Beyond138 to see how this complexity was negotiated at the time and
what it meant for the university’s status as an institution of central importance in
post-‐war American life.
Ultimately I will claim that the students were unable to square these
questions of complexity with a distinctive set of norms and ideals that could secure
an autonomous trajectory for the university in what Schaar and Wolin describe as
“the technological society.” Following the work of Christopher Newfield, I argue
that this failure, in many ways reflective of supervening forces on the level of the
state and the economy, primed a counter-‐movement in which universities were able
to retain neither their progressive inheritance nor their interpretations of the
Wissenschaft and Bildung traditions. The result of this was to diminish the public
status of the university and the critical function that Kant installed at the heart of its
culture. This will bring us more or less up to the present crisis, which will be the
138 John Schaar & Sheldon Wolin, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond (New York: New York Review Books, 1970).
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concern of the following chapter. Even though this chapter focuses almost
exclusively on the American system it sets the stage for a more global discussion in
the following chapters, for the basic reason that the American model was to become
so influential worldwide — a process referred to by many scholars as the
“Americanization” of higher education.
I. Transatlantic Influences on the American University System
As we saw in chapter 1, Andrew Delbanco begins College: What it Was, Is, and
Should Be with an epigraph from W.E.B. Dubois. Dubois was one of a number of
young intellectuals and reformers to make their way to the German universities for
post-‐graduate study in the latter decades of the 19th century. While at the
University of Berlin Dubois studied with many of the most esteemed scholars in
their relative fields, including Gustav Schmoller (economics), Wilhelm Dilthey
(philosophy), Heinrich von Treitschke (history), and Hermann von Helmholtz (the
natural sciences). As Daniel Rodgers notes, Dubois was not alone in being
impressed by the German university system and the highly interventionist state
policies of the Bismarkian era that funded higher education and allowed
intellectuals to be woven into public life. Dubois remarked in 1890 that the German
state has “gone from political to social unity — from the idea of the State as the great
military guardian of the physical boundaries, to the idea of the State as the guardian
and leader of the social and industrial interests of people.”139 The “Great Debate” of
1919-‐1921 attested to the attempts of academics to marshall their social standing in
an attempt to incorporate themselves into this steering purpose. At the time this 139 Cited in Rodgers, 88.
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raised important questions about the relationship between pure and practically
oriented research and teaching,140 but it also showed a rapprochement between the
university and the other three components that I have been considering. At the
moment of Dubois’ remarks the troubling possibility that this would lead to a state
of crisis would have been a very marginal concern for the academic class,141 hence
the allure of the German model.
What was so revealing to American students at the time of this emerging
transatlantic educational network was the stark contrast with institutions back
home. In the United States the leading lights of the American higher educational
scene were still under the sway of the denominational college. This distinguished
them from their continental European counterparts in that research and knowledge
production were less of a focus than the “philosophical commitment to the
comprehensive logic of knowledge, spiraling up to the college president’s own
capstone course in moral philosophy.”142 Practically this led “scholars” into a
position where they relied on simplified textbooks and received wisdom instead of
developing a comprehensive disciplinary method of research, especially in areas of
emerging complexity like political economy and sociology. For the simple reasons
140 Ibid., 89. Visiting Americans were very impressed by the renown in which German scholars were held, for example in attracting large crowds to public lectures. This was to a far greater degree than was to be found in America. 141 A similar remark could be made about the “Golden Era” of American higher education” which I will examine later in the chapter. Here again the harmonization of the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation was temporary and began to fray when certain pressures were brought upon it. 142 Ibid., 81.
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of a common language and strong cultural ties this reliance on received knowledge
showed up, in the social sciences, most clearly in a general acceptance of British
“laissez-‐faire” economic and political dogma.
Moreover, the comprehensiveness of the state-‐funded German system bore
little resemblance to the American situation. Whilst there were good “state’s rights”
reasons for rejecting a national university system in the United States, there were
also practical impediments to such a project. Instead of developing a national
university system the government grew its higher education sector by granting land,
plentiful after westward expansion, to states to set up their own systems. Missouri
was the first to do so in the newly opened western lands, founding their flagship
state university in 1821, but not actually opening its doors until 1839. By granting
land instead of providing capital investments the federal government made such
delays inevitable, as universities scrambled for a mixture of public and private
funds. Thus from this period of expansion to the Second World War higher
education was intimately tied to the economic fortunes of its constituents, either by
increasing the tax base or by soliciting donations from wealthy donors. The result of
such an arrangement was an eclectic mix of priorities and curricula,143 and certainly
nothing like the unity of purpose that prevailed amongst those in German
universities.
As was seen in the previous chapter, exposure to the German university
system would pose a significant challenge to this for two reasons: the first being a
143 For a comprehensive list of funding sources, broken down by profession, company, and regional difference see Barrow, 30-‐61.
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structured commitment to knowledge production for the ends of cultural
ennoblement (Wissenschaft and Bildung), and the second being an often-‐times
structural revulsion to the intellectual and political orientation of the British, which
in this case referred to the proximity of private (utilitarian) economic interests to
universities and the prevalence of laissez-‐faire economic dogma amongst professors
of economics and politics. We could even add a third reason, which became more
pronounced during this period of heavy transatlantic movement, which was the
openness and inexpensiveness of German universities relative to their American
and English counterparts.144 Thus while the leading American denominational
colleges followed the models of Oxford and Cambridge, with their heavy fees,
limited enrollments, religious origins, and primary interest in training the country’s
political and economic elites, the German system reached a much wider public,
training professionals across the vast state bureaucracy as well as the ascending
bourgeoisie. Again, as was seen in the previous chapter, the integration of this wide
public into a unified and culturally imbued, state backed university system couldn’t
fail go unnoticed by American’s aboard.145
144 This refers primarily to the older, elite colleges and universities located in the northeast. But even newly established state colleges and universities were criticized for being too exclusive and elitist by farmers and other Populist-‐oriented groups. See Scott Gelber, The University and the People: Envisioning Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 83-‐100. 145 To take the most obvious example, Bismarck’s vast social insurance policy had no equivalent in the United States. But visiting scholars also mentioned being impressed by things like public transportation and street lights, all of which spoke to a more robust public culture. See Rodgers, 83-‐95.
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The most direct influence that these students had upon their return to the
United States came in the way they reinterpreted their role as scholars. As opposed
to retaining the link to professing, harkening back to the preacher of denominational
colleges and the liberal, humanist philosophy of college presidents, they lobbied for
the features of German universities to be brought to their institutions: “the lecture,
seminar, research paper, monograph, scholarly journal, graduate education, and the
Ph.D. degree.”146 Organizationally this initiated the move away from the trivium and
quadrivium and towards the disciplinary structure and set of professional schools
that remain to this day as an organizing principle. Moreover, the foundation of
organizations such as the American Economic Association, a scholarly association
meant to work with state and economic officials in an advisory role, was derived
from similar German models. While there were differences in their political stances
(most Americans abroad were deeply uncomfortable with the “emperor worship”
that many German academics held towards the Bismarkian state and looked for
more local applications of their knowledge), the general thrust of all this movement
was to inject scholarly activity (especially in political economy) with a more
progressive orientation and a stronger commitment to novel forms of research.
Thus the model of the German research university was crucial during the 19th
and early 20th century, when the American higher education sector was rapidly
expanding. However, there were also key differences that emerged during this
period and features of a distinctively American model were beginning to take shape,
though only in nascent form. A prime example of this divergence can be seen in the 146 Rodgers, 97.
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period when Populism flourished at the administrative level in several state
universities (1880s-‐1910s). As Rodgers notes, “in Germany, the state and its
universities were older than industrial capitalism, and their authority predated
it.”147 The development of the German university system drew heavily on the
rationale of cultural ennoblement and the practical need to train the growing
number of state civil servants. This led to a widespread feeling of elitism vis a vis
practical economic concerns and was one source of that system’s crisis, as the
effects of industrial capitalism became more and more unavoidable in the daily
experience of students and citizens, yet still remained beneath the pail for comment
from the German Mandarins.
In America there was a similar tension between a reflexive academic elitism
inherited from European and denominational influences and the need to integrate
popular features of economic life into the course of study and research. However, in
the United States these universities grew up alongside industrial capitalism and
didn’t have the recourse to strong ideals like Bildung and Wissenschaft upon which
their German counterparts based their authority. As the American higher education
system expanded, especially with the many land grant colleges that were created in
the two Morill Acts (1862 and 1890), the desire for universities to intervene in
matters of practical economic life grew. Moreover, the very growth of many
universities was tied to the expansion of industrial capitalism in the post-‐
Reconstruction era, as attested to by the make-‐up of many boards of trustees at the
147 Ibid., 104.
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time.148 The challenge posed by Populists concerned the influence that these private
entities should have on university governance and faculty politics. The worry of the
Populists was that in the absence of a strong ideal, universities would function in
support of capitalists as opposed to helping farmers, laborers, and others who
wanted universities to further democratic ends, for example favoring access to the
elitism of professors who considered themselves experts.
The Populist reformers of this period were on the one hand pressuring
universities to develop scholarly practices on the German model, but on the other
were attempting to avoid the elitism of the Kulturstadt and apply their knowledge to
issues of public planning that benefitted farmers and laborers. Richard T. Ely is a
good example of the type of reformer active during this period. In 1877 Ely made
his way to Germany to study philosophy, but eventually took up the study of
political economy, attending the seminars of leading economists such as Johannes
Conrad.149 What Ely and his cohort picked up in Germany was a new approach to
scholarship, one which privileged knowledge production and comment on social
issues (this being the privilege of the Mandarin class). Upon his return to the United
States Ely would write influential textbooks that challenged the uncritical
acceptance of British laissez-‐faire models and applied novel methods of economic
analysis to American social issues such as labor unions, inequality, government 148 See Barrow, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 47, 50, 52, 53, and 57 for a breakdown of Trustees by profession for different regions of the United States. 149 Conrad was a professor of economics at Halle and influential in developing, along with Gustav Schmoller, economics as a discipline that commented on public policy, which we see in the research interests and public advocacy of Ely and others who were influenced by German university study.
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intervention, and collective ownership.150 Additionally, Ely was a founding member
of the American Economic Association, which had the express intent of applying
economic scholarship to social issues and influence policy. In short, Ely and his
generation of scholars were developing what we would come to know as the
modern social sciences. Because of the non-‐unified nature of American universities,
this put academics in an ambiguous relationship to the state, private economic
interests, and cultural institutions.
Ely, who was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and later head of the
Political Economy department at Johns Hopkins, would serve as a model for
subsequent generations of progressive scholars. Beyond the politics of these
scholars, university presidents such as Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins and
Andrew Dickson White of Cornell “saw this social science as a modern expression of
the ethical core of higher education.”151 This was not to say that such a core set of
values was accepted by all and served as that missing unifying ideal that American
universities had been working without. Edward Bemis, Ely’s student, was dismissed
from the University of Chicago for his views on the collective ownership of utilities.
Episodes like this forced universities to confront standards of academic freedom
and tolerance of different viewpoints. According to Scott Gelber, Populists were
often the most aggressive in defending the notion of academic freedom, which they
defined as “the right to express partisan ideas rather than the duty to remain 150 Ely’s influential books include The Labor Movement in America (1886), Monopolies and Trusts (1900), Property and Contract in Relation to the Distribution of Wealth (1914), and Land Economics (1940). 151 Gelber, 131.
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politically neutral.”152 On the definition of people like Bemis and Ely, this meant
using one’s knowledge, research methods, and authority to confront the realities of
industrial capitalism and other issues of social and economic planning in the
interests of furthering democracy.
The Populist movement marked an essential element of this early period of
expansion, and dealt primarily with public institutions in the agricultural south and
west. Unlike more financially secure universities in the northeast, it drew attention
to the corporate and industrial base of higher education and who constituted boards
and administrative positions. Moreover, it put political questions about the material
consequences of higher education into play, especially as related to the social
obligations of faculty and administrators. As Clyde Barrow remarks in Universities
and the Capitalist State, “The new state constructed during this period began
essentially with the Populist uprising and ended with its consolidation in the New
Deal, a period we often call ‘the age of reform.’”153 The task this imposed upon the
intellectual class came from “the contradictory imperatives that emerged from
attempts to reconcile the rise of corporate capitalism with the claims of political
democracy.”154
The reason that I have chosen to mention the period of Populism in the “age
of reform,” instead of the traditional “heroic” narrative wherein university
presidents provide an eloquent and striking new language for American higher 152 Ibid., 141. 153 Barrow, 7. 154 Ibid.
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education, is twofold. First, the contentious nature of populist oriented movements
showed very clearly how Barrow’s twin imperatives were difficult to square without
the firm integration of political and economic interests in university life — which
was exactly what happened in Germany’s case, eventually with any pretenses to
democracy succumbing in the process. If America was going to avoid this kind of
crisis they would have to follow a different path. This was indeed the case, as the
lessons that American academics learned from their German counterparts took on a
different expression in the United States, where there was a different state-‐
economy-‐university-‐culture constellation.
The second reason I have chosen to focus on this movement is that the
“Golden Age” of American higher education, which followed WWII, was a rare
instance where the fulfillment of these often-‐contradictory imperatives was actually
achieved. This was indeed the period in which we can confidently say that a
distinctly American ideal of higher education reached maturity. In the following
section I will first examine the Vannevar Bush’s Science — The Endless Frontier and
the California Master Plan to show what this achievement consisted of on the level of
big science and extensive state planning. This brings to fruition the development of
the social sciences and the idea that universities could do things with different
forms of knowledge production. I will then examine the general education
movement to demonstrate the ways that a democratic ethos was also installed in the
norms and values of academic work. The development and undoing of these
achievements will prime a discussion of how universities, perhaps as powerful as
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they had ever been in their history, subsequently entered a period in which they
were taken by many to be in a state of crisis.
II. Post-‐War Expansion 1: Big Science and the Growth of the Middle Class
The story of “The Golden Age” of American higher education is well known in
its broad outlines. After WWII the United States emerged in a position of global
dominance, and through measures like the GI Bill, increased funding for research
from the Defense Department and other governmental agencies, and the absorption
of displaced European intellectuals, universities were flooded with an abundance of
students, capital, and talent. Such abundance spread throughout society, as
university graduates took up positions in corporate hierarchies, in government
posts, or in the military, and grew a broad middle class the likes of which had not
been seen in a country marked only 30 years earlier by Dickensian levels of
inequality. Through an agreement between capital and labor, often referred to as
“the social compact,” the material and technological benefits of American economic
expansion raised the general standard of living and facilitated opportunities for
citizens to move up the socio-‐economic ladder. Such a system required a great deal
of planning and was undeniably bureaucratic in nature, but it afforded citizens a
sense of stability and provided a coherent narrative for achievement. The historian
of higher education Jeffrey Williams calls the model of higher education that
emerged during this period “the welfare state university.”155
155 “The features of mass attendance, of federal and foundation funding, of technological development, and of faculty provenance directly articulate with the welfare state; and, in turn, they define our horizon of expectation of the university.”
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The first decisive step in this direction can be seen in Vannevar Bush’s
“report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research,” entitled
Science — The Endless Frontier. Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific
Research and Development (OSRD) was concerned with consolidating the major
advances in science and technology that occurred under the auspices of wartime
research. He posed four basic questions to a distinguished committee of political,
scientific, and industrial leaders: 1) How can, within the limits of national security,
the “contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific
knowledge” be made known to as wide a group as possible for as wide a set of
beneficial applications as possible? 2) How can research against disease be
productively organized? 3) What is the role of federal involvement for spurring
research activities by public and private organizations? and 4) How can top
scientific talent be identified and cultivated, much as it was done during the war
effort?156
The report that Bush and his committee finally presented would have lasting
effects on the course of science, but also for the university, many of which we will
see later in this chapter. What Science — The Endless Frontier proposed was a
mechanism through which basic (as opposed to applied) scientific research would
Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Post-‐Welfare State University.” American Literary History, 18, no. 1 (2006), 194-‐5. 156 Vannevar Bush, Science – The Endless Frontier (North Strafford: Ayer Company Publishers, 1998), 1.
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be outsourced to the universities157 and funded through granting agencies that were
federally financed, but independent in terms of how funds were allocated (initially
the National Research Foundation, now the National Science Foundation and
National Institute of Health). Bush felt universities were “uniquely qualified” to
carry out this work because “they are charged with the responsibility of conserving
the knowledge accumulated by the past, imparting that knowledge to students, and
contributing new knowledge of all kinds.”158 Moreover, Bush was a firm believer in
what some call a “downstream model” of research, where the goal was to build the
fund of basic knowledge as opposed to pursuing predetermining research ends.
This required a strong commitment to academic freedom and autonomy in setting
research agendas. As he writes, in universities “scientists may work in an
atmosphere which is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention,
prejudice, or commercial necessity. At their best they provide the scientific worker
with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of
personal intellectual freedom.”159
There are three major consequences of this model that are worth
highlighting. The first is that it replaced a disaggregated funding structure (from the
industrial and philanthropic sectors, e.g. by the Melons, Carnegies, and Rockefellers)
157 This marks a key difference with other countries, e.g. France, where most large-‐scale research is conducted within the state-‐managed Centres Nationales de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). 158 Bush, 19. 159 Ibid. Note the resonance with Von Humboldt’s desire for students to work in “freedom and solitude.”
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with federal tax dollars, the scale of which no other funding source could match.160
This began the process of wedding the university to the federal government, which
would be a theme brought up later by the student protestors. The second
consequence was that, by funding projects that were large-‐scale and long-‐term,161
the transition was made from small to big science, with many large research labs
built in the post-‐war period. These large-‐scale research programs again reunited
research and teaching by placing graduate students in the lab with professors doing
advanced research. The third consequence was that academic freedom was placed
at the center of federal higher education policy, with both the granting agencies and
the scientists operating on a peer-‐review system independent of governmental or
industry aims. The idea that inquiry could be freely guided by the interests of the
researcher him or herself, and nonetheless be useful and worthy of public
investment, became a cherished norm among academics.
The California Master Plan (hereafter CMP) arrives after Science — The
Endless Frontier has already changed the landscape of higher education, being
commissioned in 1959 and formally submitted in 1960. However, in the CMP we
see the further development and formal codification of what the post-‐war welfare
state university saw as its proper sphere of concern. The first of these was a
concern with efficiency. In the preface to the CMP the committee names “rapidly
160 Moreover, federal tax dollars were being used to invest in human capital as well as the general good of society (e.g. advances in medical knowledge). This change in focus is what led historians like Jeffrey J. Williams to describe this model as the “welfare state university.” 161 Bush, 33.
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mounting enrollments” and a “growing concern that wasteful duplication between
the state colleges and University of California might cost the taxpayers millions of
dollars.”162 The rise in enrollments was resolved by guaranteeing admission to the
University of California system to high school students graduating in the top eighth
of their class,163 admission to the California State system to those in the top third,
and providing opportunities in the Junior and Community College systems for all
other students. The University of California system was charged with the sole
responsibility of granting PhDs, and the CMP recommended that “periodic studies be
made of the relation of supply to demand, particularly in fields where there seem
likely to be shortages…for the purpose of determining what steps the University
should take to meet its responsibilities in these professional fields.”164 The
allocation of resources for tasks such as research, professional training, and
pedagogy were easier to determine once this differential structure was put in place.
Beyond just eliminating waste, the second concern of the CMP was the
steering and staffing of those professions which were becoming so important to the
service economy of the 1950s.165 This placed an incentive on making university
162 California Master Plan, xi. Full text available at www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/MasterPlan1960.pdf. (Last accessed May 2, 2014.) 163 To accommodate these students new universities were opened in Santa Cruz and San Diego. 164 CMP, 11. 165 An example of this can be seen in the committee’s recommendations to expand the ranks of the faculty required to staff the UC system. “Greatly increased salaries and expanded fringe benefits, such as health and group life insurance, leaves, and
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study as attractive as possible to the students of California. One aspect of this was
an attempt to increase the overall quality of California’s institutions of higher
education. The Junior and Community College segment “provide[d] a wide variety
of other post-‐high-‐school educational services required by mid-‐twentieth century
society.”166 This allowed the state and University of California schools to be
“exacting [in contrast to public higher educational institutions in most other states]
because the junior colleges relieve them of the burden of doing remedial work. Both
have a heavy obligation to the state to restrict the privilege of entering and
remaining to those who are well above average in the college-‐age group.”167
However, the other key aspect was to remove barriers to access. Hence one of the
most radical recommendations of the committee was on the topic of student fees:
“The two governing boards reaffirm the long established principle that state
colleges and the University of California shall be tuition free to all residents of the
travel funds to attend professional meetings, housing, parking and moving expenses, be provided for faculty members in order to make college and university teaching attractive as compared with business and industry.” CMP, 12. Notice that the University has firmly embraced it role as the institution positioned to adequately train the professions and impose initial standards of competency. Thus it is asking for increased investment to match the expansion of these professions in the broader economy. Contrast this with recent challenges to the exclusivity of graduate schools of education to handle teacher certification from organizations like Teach for America. Such a shift demonstrates the stark difference in logic pertaining to the University’s status as a public institution involved in provisioning the public with certain services. 166 Ibid., 65. 167 Ibid., 66.
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state.”168
On the level of coordination, defined mission, and relationship to broader
society this marks a stark difference with the early 20th century. Universities were
now placed at the center of long term social planning, bringing to fruition the
progressive and interventionist orientation that scholars picked up during their
experience in Germany. However, unlike their German counterparts the
development of talent was not framed in terms of cultural ennoblement, but rather
what sociologists would come to call “human capital,” understood here as
developing the differential talents of a population. The vast expansion of higher
education that necessitated the CMP made sure that this included vocational,
professional, and scholarly talents (the latter to both staff this newly expanded
system as well as produce noteworthy works and discoveries, bringing prestige to
American higher education in adherence to Cold War politics). Returning to the
Clyde Barrow’s problematic of squaring the imperatives of democracy and capital,
we can note that expanded state support resembled that of the Bismarkian state
towards Germany’s universities. However, unlike Germany there was not a strong
cultural aspect of nationalism that came with this, thus accommodations to industry
and even state interests were not seriously challenged to the extent that they were
in the German crisis. This expectation of increased involvement (financially)
coupled with increased autonomy for universities themselves goes back to Science
—The Endless Frontier.
168 Ibid., 14.
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In 1958 Clark Kerr assumed the position of President of the University of
California system, and thus oversaw the implementation of many of the CMP
recommendations. In 1963 he delivered a set of lectures at Harvard, which were
eventually published in a short book entitled The Uses of the University. As Kerr
states in the preface, “Universities in America are at a hinge of history: while
connected with their past, they are swinging in another direction…the university
today finds itself in a quite novel position in society.”169 Kerr coins the term
“multiversity” to describe the aggregate of functions, services, inheritances, and
goals that the modern American university was now in a position to pursue.
Whereas Science — the Endless Frontier and the CMP merely enumerated the
general framework of this system, Kerr considered the implications of this new kind
of university, which, as he notes, fused British ideals of liberal learning for
undergraduates, German conceptions of scholarship and professional training for
graduate students and faculty, and homegrown democratic traditions emerging
from populist movements in the agricultural south and west.170 This mixture of
traditions is one reason that he chose the term “multiversity,” which he admits is
“an inconsistent institution.”
169 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th Edition, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001], xi. 170 Kerr notes that the organization of Johns Hopkins along the German model of professional education and novel scholarship was surprisingly compatible with the growth of land grant colleges. “The one was Prussian, the other American; one elitist, the other democratic; one academically pure, the other sullied by contact with the soil and the machine…But they both served an industrializing nation and they both did it through research and the training of technical competence.” Kerr, 11-‐2.
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However, the more important reason for calling the American model the
“multiversity” was to signal the multiple communities that made up the university.
Kerr lists undergraduates, graduate students, humanists, social scientists, natural
scientists, nonacademic personnel, administrators, and professional schools. In
many instances these communities are speaking at cross purposes, especially when
they are dealing with those other members that make up the multiversity’s “fuzzy
edge” — alumni, farmers, businessmen, or legislators. Thus, as is evident in the
CMP, the university is in the strongest sense an extremely complex institution that
needs to be efficiently managed. In Kerr’s words, “It is more of a mechanism — a
series of processes producing a series of results — a mechanism held together by
administrative rules and powered by money.”171 In the CMP we see several desired
results put forth, such as producing a generation of graduates who receive an
education that at a minimum prepares them for the complexities of modern society,
harnessing the top talent to staff key professions in California and the nation,
producing scientific innovations of practical use and for the sake of prestige, or
pursuing democratic ends by removing barriers of entry to students who would like
to pursue some form of tertiary education. In the hands of the right administrators,
these are non-‐exclusive ends.
As Kerr makes clear the multiversity is justified in leaving behind the quest
for any single set of unifying ideas and must remain adaptive. Perhaps with the dire
consequences of German universities’ inability to achieve “consistency with the
171 Ibid, 15.
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surrounding society”172 on his mind, Kerr lauds the American multiversity’s ability
to remain “consistently productive.” He notes how “adaptive it can be to the new
opportunities to creativity; how responsive to money; how eagerly it can play a new
and useful role; how fast it can change while pretending that nothing has happened
at all; how fast it can neglect some of its ancient virtues.”173 The multiversity is by
no means problem free, and indeed a chapter of Uses of the University concerns
issues like the potential of undue influence coming from the federal government and
other funding sources, a split between what C.P. Snow called “the Two Cultures” of
science and the humanities, and an increase in research at the cost of a decrease in
teaching.174 However, as with the CMP, Kerr imagines that such problems can be
managed as they arrive and the multiple uses of the university can remain open to
the multiple constituencies and ends that such an institution was now in a position
to serve.
Adaptive, useful, efficient, and productive, the post-‐war American university
had become a mass institution that could rightfully claim a role in fostering
prosperity, growing the basic fund of scientific knowledge, and efficiently investing
in the talents of the population. Moreover, it was able to do so without a single,
coherent “idea” of the university along the lines of Humboldt or Cardinal Newman.
We can recall Jeffrey Williams’ description mentioned earlier in the chapter, “The
features of mass attendance, of federal and foundation funding, of technological 172 Ibid., 33. 173 Ibid., 34. 174 Ibid., 35-‐63.
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development, and of faculty provenance directly articulate with the welfare state;
and, in turn, they define our horizon of expectation of the university.” Thus, as was
the case with the German example, one powerful explanation for the crisis that was
to occur in the American system is a failure of this horizon of expectation to keep
pace with changes in the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation. However,
before turning to how universities were implicated in this change, we must consider
the second major feature of the expansion of post-‐war American higher education
— the project of general education.
III. Post-‐War Expansion 2: General Education and Mass Democracy
The American university has always been something of a hybrid model,
drawing on influences from Great Britain, continental Europe, and extra-‐educational
religious and economic organizations. But as we have just seen, this did not stop
Americans from eventually claiming an identity and set of ideals of their own, shown
for example in Kerr’s formulation of the “multiversity.” Following upon the growth
of big science and attendant advances in technology, power, and complexity in
American society, the multiversity foregrounded the productive potential of a
certain model of higher education — one which remained in step with more general
changes occurring in American life.
The program of General Education, the subject of a Harvard study following
WWII,175 was also meant to track the changing face of American society and its
175 The study was actually commissioned in 1943, but the report was not issued until 1945. However, the forward-‐looking nature of the report places it firmly in a post-‐war imaginary.
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implications for education at all levels. General Education in a Free Society176, also
referred to as the Harvard Red Book, was the outcome of a committee formed at
Harvard to study the future of curricular priorities at that school — however, as
James Conant Bryant writes in the introduction, the study expanded to “a view of
the total American education scene” in the post-‐war era.177 There are three primary
changes that the committee believed necessitated a response from educational
institutions: the “staggering explosion in knowledge” produced by specialized
research, the growth in educational institutions with universal free and compulsory
secondary education expanding the ranks of universities (albeit not to the extent we
would see in the decades after WWII), and “the ever growing complexity of society
itself.”178
There was also a trend in education that James Conant Bryant noticed which
he felt bore special attention, namely the tendency to meet these changes in society
with more instrumental, vocational approaches to learning. He writes, "The heart of
the problem of a general education is the continuance of the liberal and humane
tradition. Neither the mere acquisition of information nor the development of
special skills and talents can give the broad basis of understanding which is
essential if our civilization is to be preserved.”179 As has already been seen, this kind
of approach to general education would have been familiar to followers of Cardinal 176 General Education in a Free Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). 177 Ibid., v. 178 Ibid., 5. 179 Ibid., vii.
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Newman or certain interpretation of the Bildung tradition.180 However, Bryant
remarks that “what is new in this century in the United States is their [i.e. goals
attached to liberal education] application to a system of universal education.”181
Thus the major issue that frames General Education in a Free Society is the
movement from an initial unity, e.g. in the training of the “Christian citizen”182 in
early northeastern denominational colleges, to a state of complexity through the
kinds of social changes mentioned above, to a newly secured sense of unity that
leverages the education system against the threat of personal and social
fragmentation. As the committee puts it, the need is to secure the “relationship
between specialistic training on the one hand, aiming at any one of a thousand
different destinies, and education in a common heritage and toward a common
citizenship on the other?”183 By specialistic training they mean both narrow forms
of vocational or applied education, but also the kind of specialization that we see in
advanced research conducted in the various departments of universities. In a
strange irony it was Harvard itself that helped hasten this process, when Charles 180 In fact, there was already a perfectly good word for what he has in mind, namely liberal education. However, the committee says that what separates general education from liberal education is scale. General education attempts to distribute a humanistic education for wholeness to a far larger population than liberal education, which then (e.g. in England and northeastern colleges) and today (e.g. in small, prestigious, and quite expensive “liberal arts schools”) tended to be restricted to an educational elite. General Education in a Free Society, 52. 181 Ibid., ix. Later in the report the committee specifies what these values are: “effective thinking, communication, the making of relevant judgments, and the discrimination of values.” Ibid., 73. 182 Ibid., 43. 183 Ibid., 5.
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William Eliot opened up the curriculum to the kinds of advanced, specialized
research programs pursued in European universities and introduced an elective
system where students could choose narrower, more specialized courses of study.
One effect of this broadening of choice was to raise the question of whether a
common method could unite all these disciplines and thus aid in the integrative,
civic function that the committee calls for.
For the purposes of this section I will focus only on a few remarks the
committee makes pertaining to higher education, and more particularly to the role
of general education therein. They note that while educational institutions at
different levels are undeniably integrated and mutually influencing, what separates
the college or university from the high school is their proximity to “the body of
modern knowledge.”184 By this they mean not only the scientific pursuits that
people like Vannevar Bush were interested in, but also branches of the humanities
and human sciences that preserve a continuity between present and past by tending
to works in literature, theology, history, the arts, or other parts of what they call our
common “heritage.” In a mode similar to Edmund Burke’s treatment of the French
Revolution, the Red Book paints an evolutionary picture of “civilization” in which
political forms like democracy or laudable aspects of civil society, national culture,
and intellectual activity accrue slowly over time through the collective activity of
Western thinkers, statesmen, religious leaders, etc.
In the post-‐war period this evolutionary picture of society was straining
against the vision that was in large part articulated by Bush, which embraces the 184 Ibid., 36.
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liberatory potential of science. The rise in specialization and vocational training
flows from this enthusiasm and, in the eyes of the committee, has the concomitant
effects of diminishing the role of once central topics like religion, ethics, philosophy,
or disciplines that trade in judgments of value verses those of facts or practical
application. Thus the first major recommendation of the committee was to retain
those aspects of the curriculum that introduce students to the heritage of “Western
man,” assuming both that the continuity between past and present makes these
works valuable despite the revolutionary arrival of modern science, and that, like
other advocates of liberal learning, contending with these great works has the
capacity to foster self-‐improvement in modes of thinking and traits of character.
A second recommendation that can be gleaned from the report is that these
goods we should expect from general education are ultimately tied to broad civic
purposes, to unite “the good man and the citizen,”185 to borrow the title of one
subsection in the chapter outlining the theory of general education. What
democracy requires is a commitment to both “heritage” and change, which in a
rough and ready way corresponds to general and specialized education.186 The
committee notes that no democracy can be wholly committed to change and
novelty, and the subtending ethos, ideas, and vocabulary that can be held in
common and sustain a democratic political community require an education that
spans different eras and branches of knowledge. Thus, again, the insistence on
wholeness in the individual citizen is scaled up to wholeness in polity. 185 Ibid., 73. 186 Ibid., 93.
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There are many other recommendations made in General Education in a Free
Society, but they remain on a fairly abstract plain, as can be intimated from the
foregoing discussion. To put it somewhat reductively, the committee’s report has a
polemical point, which is to note some possible inadequacies of committing wholly
to big science and professional training in the universities. If Bush was interested in
growing the fund of knowledge through basic research, the Harvard committee was
interested in sustaining the basic fund of wisdom that has accumulated over the
course of Western civilization. The important contribution of the committee was
not to frame these concerns only as inherent educational goods, but also to attach
them to democratic life which, in America, was operating on a scale hitherto
unmatched.
At one point in the report the committee writes that “general education must
accordingly be conceived less as a specific set of books to be read…than as a concern
for certain goals of knowledge and outlook.”187 This may seem hopelessly vague, but
in the figure of Robert Maynard Hutchins we see how this general ethos, which we
might name as one aspect of the American interpretation of the Bildung tradition,
found a very concrete institutional correlate in American colleges and universities.
In fact it is hard to get more concrete than Hutchins, who, along with the
philosopher Mortimer Adler and contra the above quotation, produced a 54-‐volume
set of 443 “great works” from the western philosophical, artistic, literary, and
scientific tradition. At Hutchins’ University of Chicago, as well as my home
institution of Columbia, this took on the form of “Great Books” or “Core Curriculum” 187 Ibid., 80.
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programs, which retained a mandatory set of texts at the heart of the undergraduate
curriculum to supply the common fund of knowledge, wisdom, and dispositions for
which the Red Book advocates.
In The University of Utopia188 Hutchins lays out the rationale for insisting on
this broadly humanistic core at heart of university study, and like the Red Book it
departs from a set of changes occurring in mid-‐century America and the options
they entailed. For Hutchins the four “peculiar dangers” of the moment were
industrialization, specialization, philosophical diversity, and social and political
conformity.189 These are very similar to the Red Book, for example in his insistence
that we must “education everybody so that the country may have the scientific and
industrial strength it requires and at the same time educate everybody so that the
country will know how to use its scientific and industrial power wisely.”190 He also
marks the university as a space in contradistinction to industry or other applied
areas of knowledge. For Hutchins the ideal university “rests on the assumption that
there should be somewhere in the state an organization the purpose of which is to
think most profoundly about the most important intellectual issues.”191 He goes on
to characterize the university as “a community that thinks,” but it is thinking of the
kind engendered by liberal studies (perhaps in contrast to the planning that Kerr
188 Robert Maynard Hutchins, The University of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 189 Ibid., 1. 190 Ibid., 2. 191 Ibid., 41.
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names). Indeed, Hutchins echoes the call for general education (which, recall, was
liberal education scaled up for a country committed to universal, compulsory
secondary education), stating very bluntly that a major premise of his book is that
“every man and every free citizen needs liberal education.”192
Recall that Andrew Dickson White and Daniel Coit Gilman claimed that the
modern social sciences, decidedly progressive in their orientation, were the “ethical
core” of the new American university. By the middle of the 20th century this was
challenged by the ascendency of the hard sciences, which were making a play on the
soul of the university by linking specialized research with the growth in power,
prosperity, and quality of life that were beginning to take shape in America’s
industrial democracy. Though recognizably conservative by today’s standards,
these midcentury arguments for general, humanistic education were nonetheless
very timely in dealing with questions of priority, purpose and investments
(financial, political, and intellectual) in a vastly scaled up institution. At the time
there remained a question of whether the direction of big science, general
education, or massive planning and coordination on the level of the CMP were
inherently progressive or conservative, which we can see in the fact that all frame
their potential successes in broad, civic terms. But as we have also seen in figures
like Delbanco and Kronman (a liberal and a conservative), the kinds of concerns that
were stated in the push for general education still retain a hold on our
contemporary imaginary and thus are a second integral feature of the post-‐war
development of the American university. 192 Ibid., 35.
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IV. The Crisis of the American University System193
There are two major reasons that the university entered a period of crisis in
the 1960s, one attributable to the successes of the post-‐war multiversity and the
other attributable to its failures. Each has its own signal phenomenon, the first
being the culture wars that dragged on into the 1990s and the latter being the
student protests of the 1960s. I will begin with the students, as they most directly
challenged the understanding that Kerr laid out as the new model of the American
university.
In fact, Clark Kerr is uniquely placed to introduce this discussion because he
was president of the University of California system when the Free Speech
Movement took place in 1964-‐5. Led by students such as Mario Savio and Jack
Weinberg, the movement challenged what had been an enduring issue on American
campuses since the Populist era — namely the suppression of radical political
opinions and activity. The difference between the Populists and the students of the
1960s, which made the latter movement far more widespread and impactful, was
the presence of the federal government in university life (and of course, in the lives
of youth in general via the draft and military conflict in Vietnam). In The Uses of the
University Kerr believed that the influx of federal money and legislation concerning 193 I am taking it for granted that the reader is sufficiently aware of the student movement in its broad features. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the full range of its causes or concentrate on the variety of forces at play during this time. For a short, helpful introduction to different student movements across the globe, captured from the ground, see Stephen Spender, The Year of the Young Rebels (New York: Random House, 1969). However, an interpretation of the Columbia and Berkeley protests will be provided later in this chapter with reference to Robert Paul Wolff’s Ideal of the University and John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin’s The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond.
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higher education would not infringe on the diverse communities within the
multiversity from pursuing their own self-‐appointed ends, with some obvious
concessions needed to allow for peaceful cohabitation on campus. The post-‐war
period and successful implementation of Vannevar Bush’s model of taking a hands
off approach to scholarship would have bolstered this belief. However, with novel
political developments like the Red Scare and the Vietnam War the explosion of
political activities on campus, which led to schisms amongst communities who once
were able to peacefully interact, was in a way to be expected.
Kerr had the chance to revisit the student protests in 1972 when he wrote a
postscript to the 2nd edition of Uses of the University. In it he states,
“The two great new forces of the 1960’s were the federal government and the protesting students. The federal government emphasized science and research, equality of opportunity, impartiality of treatment among the races, and the innovative role of the federal agency. Much of what has happened to the campus, both good and evil, can be laid at the door of the federal government.”194
The total rejection of mass society, present in certain wings of the student
movement, was thus in large part a rejection of the proximity of the federal
government, which through the university was also heavily integrated in the
economic and social aspects of students’ present condition and their futures. The
anti-‐Vietnam and civil rights groups made up the core of the student movement, and
their call for an attentiveness to politics were in large measure critiques of what
Kerr claims that the federal government brought to campuses. If they had brought
these, they arrived in either an incomplete or disingenuous form according to the 194 Kerr, 99.
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students. The protests put pressure on the post-‐war social compact’s promise to
build a more tolerant, prosperous, and peaceful society. Vietnam and the Civil
Rights movement, amongst many other challenges to the power structure,
questioned whether social democracy could in fact be reconciled with the post-‐war
form of capitalist modernization — one that was now yoked to imperialism abroad
and suppression of certain parts of the population at home.
The students also challenged the new form of unity sought in programs of
general education, seen most explicitly in the longest student strike in American
history at San Francisco State that eventuated in the founding of an ethnic studies
department.195 In all of these cases of fracture that have been mentioned we see the
uniting feature of students, faculty, and administrators attempting to understand
and articulate the kinds of implications and values that came with the university
assuming such a powerful role in society, and moreover having come to assume this
position in such a short period of time. Many of these values fell under what John
Schaar and Sheldon Wolin call “the technological society,” which in the case of
universities refers a policy where they “have been deliberately organized and
subsidized to manufacture technical knowledge.”196 And moreover, as the authors
remarked at the time, “the connections between the campus on the one side and the
economy, government, and society on the other have grown so close that the
195 See Joshua Bloom & Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 269-‐308. 196 Schaar and Wolin, 9. We can think here of Kerr’s remarks that the multiversity “is more of a mechanism — a series of processes producing a series of results — a mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money.”
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boundaries between them are hard to distinguish.”197 In the 1960s this brought
about a “crisis both of values and power…Having become the richest and most
powerful nation in history, we can begin to see our poverty and weakness.”198
Pursuant to my broader interest in the crisis claim, we can see how this paradoxical
situation of undeniable power and undeniable weakness could place many
cherished ideals about the university — big science, efficient coordination,
broadened access, and the perusal and civic goods attached to general education —
in a state of contestation and uncertainty.
Kerr is relatively silent on the merits of the student protests on this broader
scale of social critique. However, he does agree with Schaar and Wolin in seeing
them as diagnostic of a change that was at that time occurring at the level of the
multiversity itself. For example, the students’ call for greater “relevance” in their
studies or more commitment to undergraduate education was a reaction against the
inherent conservatism of the faculty, who tended towards specialization and
research.199 But as calls for “relevance” reveal, the “heritage” offered by general
197 Ibid. 198 Ibid., 10-‐11. 199 “The ‘improvement of undergraduate instruction’ is now a lively and even abrasive subject on many campuses. The need to create ‘a more unified intellectual world’ that looks at society broadly, rather than through the eyes of the narrow specialist, has now become the insistent demand of students for relevance. The need to ‘solve the whole range of governmental problems within the university’ is now recognized as the battle over governance. ‘How to preserve a margin for excellence’ in an increasingly egalitarian society has become a most intense issue. It takes the form not only of the lesser verses the greater research institutions seeking funds and preferment – the state college against the university – but also, within the elite institutions, of demands by some students and faculty members for open
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education was not an attractive option for students now attentive to the complex
and interconnected issues of justice that cut across the many channels of the
multiversity.200
In Ideal of the University Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at
Columbia, provides a similar account of the perplexing situation that students were
bringing to national attention. Whereas the student movement was indicative of a
broader social critique for Kerr (because there was no coherent ideal of the
university to challenge directly), Wolff thinks that unrest on campus has to be read
against some sort of “ideal type” about what a university should be. He presents
four such ideal types: “The University as Sanctuary of Scholarship; The University as
a Training Camp for the Professions; The University as a Social Service Station; and
The University as an Assembly Line for Establishment Man.”201 The models are
drawn from the “history of the university,” “its present character,” “a projection of
present trends,” and “a radical critique of the university.”202 These different ideals
are roughly analogous to Kerr’s multiple communities, though Wolff singles out the
admissions, no course requirements, no grades.” Robert Paul Wolff, Ideal of the University (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 100. 200 Schaar and Wolin relay an insight that many drew from the protests of the late 1960s, which is that “we simply do not know the form of the highest general culture appropriate to contemporary, largely post-‐industrial society.” Schaar and Wolin, 111. This was a genuine point of perplexity, which as we will see later in the chapter was able to be closed by conservatives in the culture wars and leveraged as a way to remove many questions of justice and value that were raised during the student protests. 201 Wolff, 3. 202 Ibid.
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conflict between models 1 and 2 (undergraduate vs. graduate and professional
education) as the main source of discontent. However, his main point is that the
mere aggregation of these communities providing various forms of “social services”
(as Wolff puts it) is insufficient without an “internal political organization” that
grants the university some autonomy. “When an affair like the Columbia uprising
occurs,” he writes, “faculty and students are appalled to discover how many of the
activities of the university take place absolutely at the discretion of the president or
chancellor, without even the semblance of control by members of the university.”203
If Bush’s commitment to the autonomy of universities and researchers was being
upheld vis a vis the federal government, there was still a centralization of decision-‐
making authority at the administrative level.
Here we see two different readings of the student protests, though both bring
to light a failure of the post-‐war university. For Kerr the students are reacting
against the federal government’s inability to make good on the claims for democracy
and widespread prosperity that were initially attached to its increased involvement
in university life.204 For Wolff, whatever the benefits of increased support from the
federal government and other granting agencies, the university cannot be influenced
beyond the point where an internal sense of steering and purpose is lost. Harkening
back to Kant, Wolff believed ultimately that “if [the multiversity] is an instrument of 203 Ibid., 35. 204 We can see a similar conclusion in Kristin Ross’ assessment of May ’68. Following Maurice Blanchot, she states that students “acted in such a way as to put into question the conception of the social (the social as functional) on which the state based its authority to govern.” Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 25.
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national purpose, then it cannot be a critic of national purpose, for an instrument is
a means not an evaluator of ends.”205 However, as Schaar and Wolin write, “the
crisis [of the 1960s] demonstrated that socially useful functions, no matter how
competently performed, are no substitute for moral authority.”206 By framing the
crisis in terms of a reckoning with the rapid increase in scale and complexity of the
university, and insisting that extant ideals of the university are insufficient to cope
with this (whether scientific productivity, general education in a common heritage,
or functionality), the student protests marked a genuine turning point in the history
of the American university.
There is certainly more to be said about the student protests, a theme
already touched on briefly in chapter one, when protests accompanied another
perceived “crisis” of the university. But here it is sufficient to note that one way to
read the 1960s was as a rejection of the rapprochement of economic, social,
political, and educational ends that made the university such a central institution in
post-‐war American society. Its successes were undeniable in the advancement of
science, in the general raising of human welfare, and in the construction of America
as a superpower, but its failures also became visible in the abdication of any critical
function, whether it be to critique the features of mass society, of the imperial and
military underside of global economic and political dominance, or the failure to
spread prosperity and empowerment to minority groups, women, or labor as the
economy began to move away from its agricultural and industrial base and as 205 Wolff, 41. 206 Schaar and Wolin, 22.
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cultural belonging began to be reframed in ways much broader than the “heritage”
of western civilization. Such were the failures that marked the end of the “Golden
Age” of American higher education.
However, strangely enough, an equally compelling story can be told of how
the university was drawn into a crisis by virtue of its successes. In Unmaking the
Public University207 Christopher Newfield looks at the disruption of the student
protests in the longue durée of the post-‐war period to the culture wars of the 1980s
and 1990s.208 For him the period is marked by two sequences: the first being the
role of universities in constructing a broad and relatively inclusive middle class
through increased public investment, and the second being the undoing of this
achievement by the power structure that such a middle class threatened. It is worth
exploring Newfield’s argument in some detail because in many ways it inspired the
understanding of “crisis” elaborated in this dissertation.
Newfield lays out three major principles that we can extract from the CMP
and from the general direction of public higher education in the post-‐war period.209
The first is “a broad social egalitarianism,” by which he means goods like education
should not be denied to any group. The CMP addressed this by removing the barrier
of cost and protesting students developed it by pointing to cultural and legal 207 Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-‐Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 208 A similar story, though focusing more on the development of capitalism than on universities, is told in Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 1-‐15. 209 Private higher education was certainly influenced by these principles, especially the first two. Questions of funding priorities were always going to be different.
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barriers that prevented minorities, women, and other groups from receiving the full
benefits of a college or university education. Similarly, arguments for general
education broached this topic by scaling up the goods of liberal education to the
level of national education policy. The second principle was “a new kind of
meritocracy,” which refers to the harnessing of talent for those sectors where
knowledge creation and application was to become most valuable. The third
principle was that “educational needs should dictate budgets and not the other way
around.” Related to the first principle, this further solidifies a post-‐war
understanding that education is a public good with multiple benefits to society, and
thus is worthy of commensurate public investment.
These principles conspired to bring into being a broad “middle class,” which
Newfield uses as shorthand for “college educated.” He writes, “The public
university was the institution where blue-‐ and white-‐collar workers and managers,
citizens of every racial background were being invited into a unified majority.”210
Crucially, as the preceding history demonstrates, this unification brought along with
it a broadly progressive orientation, and this disturbed “conservative elites.”
Newfield’s basic argument is that the social, political, economic, and educational
gains achieved (even if only partially) in the rise of the post-‐war public university —
“full social inclusion, general development, cultural equality, and majoritarian
economics”211 — were deliberately targeted by these elites. However, their method
was counter-‐intuitive, as such goods produced by the university could not be 210 Newfield, 4. 211 Ibid., 13.
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challenged head on. Instead the conservative elites, whom Newfield calls “culture
warriors,” proceeded to undermine the authority of those within the university by
attacking the foundations upon which student protesters staked their criticisms. As
the nation underwent a significant economic downturn hastened by
deindustrialization and a loss of confidence following the defeat in Vietnam, culture
warriors were able to reframe the ways in which the university was meant to
contribute to society, claiming that economic efficiency was not compatible with the
goods just mentioned at broad public cost. An extended and deliberate campaign
was launched by think tanks and other organization attacking ethnic studies
programs, policies to engender better race relations, lesbian and gay studies, and a
diminution in “great books” programs. Though unstated in these specific attacks,
Newfield argues that “conservatives defined race-‐conscious [which we can take in
the broader sense of socially-‐conscious and progressive] social policies as
incompatible with market forces, democracy, political order, affirmative action, and
economic efficiency.”212
For Newfield the crisis of the university, which in his view is the “crisis of the
mass middle class,” has three aspects — cultural, economic, and political.213 The
cultural crisis concerns “the eclipsing of qualitative knowledge about culture and
human relations”214 by productive, quantitative knowledge. Similar to C.P. Snow’s
account of the “two cultures” problem, “the humanities,” Newfield claims, “were 212 Ibid., 12. 213 For a helpful table see Newfield, 23. 214 Ibid., 24.
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often cast as the source of nonknowledge or even a kind of antiknowledge, one that
led to social division and economic costs.”215 Whether the target was post-‐modern
philosophical discourse, ethnic studies, or literary criticism, culture warriors made
the case that academics propagated a form of obscurantism whose use was not
readily apparent to wide swaths of society, and thus could not justify the kind of
public investments that we saw in the post-‐war period, as it was not building the
basic fund of knowledge, developing human capital, nor fostering a collective sense
of social belonging by contributing to the heritage of western civilization.
The political crisis concerned the gradual undoing of what the university, in
conjunction with the civil rights movement, had tirelessly attempted to build —
namely a “multiracial mass democracy.” Newfield cites the reorganization of the
Republican party after Goldwater’s 1964 defeat as the key factor in this crisis. As
evidenced by the challenges to affirmative action launched by conservative think
tanks, the delinking of multiracial democracy from university study remained an
enduring feature of the culture wars. Finally, the economic crisis refers simply to
the “decline of American economic preeminence on which its golden-‐age affluence
hinged.”216 As the country’s economic fortunes declined for the majority of middle
and working class Americans, “economic and management discourse overwhelmed
discussion of broader social and cultural matters.”217 In universities this overturned
the majoritarian focus of models like the CMP and led to the competition for scarcer 215 Ibid., 25. 216 Ibid., 24. 217 Ibid.
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resources amongst the various communities within the university, with a growing
intolerance for non-‐economic rationales. Newfield sums up the confluence of these
three crises in the following way: “The university-‐focused culture wars blocked
genuine solutions to the first two challenges of multiracial democratic politics and
majoritarian economics by undermining the requisite cultural capabilities on which
these solutions hinged.”218
There are several aspects to the process that are worth noting here. The first,
in contrast to a standard reading of the student protests, is that the progressive
achievements of the post-‐war university were notable more for their achievements
than their failures. The second is that “culture warriors” were able to substantially
reframe the terms in which we were meant to understand universities during a
period in which the relationship between the state and the economy was
undergoing a drastic transformation, with market calculations significantly
replacing the logic of broad public investment, such as was once seen in the CMP.
Thus, for example, there were many ways to meet the charge that humanities
programs were more cost-‐prohibitive than investing in STEM disciplines,219 but the
pressure applied by culture warriors made such defenses difficult to make, due to
first, a general skepticism towards humanities scholars speaking in economic terms,
and second, dissension amongst these scholars when an economic language was
adopted. Furthermore, the lack of a unifying ideal that Kerr praised became a
problem for those hoping to challenge culture warriors, especially for scholars in the 218 Ibid., 26. 219 See Newfield, 150-‐2, 160-‐5, 180-‐9, and 208-‐19.
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humanities who were not accustomed to meeting charges of market inefficiencies;
this, going back at least to Kant, never being a central aspect of their self-‐
understanding or practices.220
To summarize, Newfield’s account of the student movement, and the crisis
that it signaled, was less indicative of internal fractures within the university than a
broader shift in American society. In the students’ claims for radical democracy, or
the fulfillment of egalitarian promises suggested by the whole sequence that begins
in the Age of Reform and matures in the post-‐war era, a vision of society was
powerfully expressed. Crucially, this vision was tied to universities and was highly
critical of the current power structure. What the subsequent culture wars
demonstrated was that a powerful ideological countermovement could be launched
against this vision by attacking the authority of the university itself. The crucial
victory of the culture warriors occurred when they could again decouple the twin
imperatives that Clyde Barrow named for American scholars — to further the
interests of capitalism and political democracy. In a period when post-‐war
abundance could no longer float the broad public investitures of models like the
Bush’s generous federal grant schemes or the CMP, undue weight could be given to
the former of these imperatives and the function and nature of the university could
be rearticulated in public debates. Eventually this meant that universities would
only retain their centrality in society if they were understood as institution
furthering economic growth. 220 We can even recall the Mandarins here, who accrued social standing and power not on account of their economic achievements, but rather on prestige which was attached to their educational attainment.
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V. Conclusion
The story that I have told about the development of a uniquely American
model of higher education, and its subsequent period of crisis, is admittedly at best
highly selective and at worst overly reductive. However, the general features can be
summarized in the following way. At the turn of the century a group of scholars and
progressive administrators imported ideals learned during their period of study in
Germany. These included the features we now associate with modern research
universities — the lecture, seminar, research paper, monograph, scholarly journal,
graduate education, and the Ph.D. degree. However, having nothing like the backing
of the Bismarkian state or the commitments to building a strong national culture,
the American model developed in a different direction that called for increased
access and increased relevance to local concerns. The Populist Era of education
showed how American scholars (especially social scientists) began to understand
their work as both spurring economic and social development as well as promoting
democratic ends.
In the post-‐war period the US was powerful enough to pursue these two
imperatives in an integrated way, making the university a central institution in
society, but also bringing together the federal government, private interests, and
educational leaders into a very close relationship. The striking feature of this model
was its adaptability and functionality, owing to a large extent to the fact that the
university lacked any singular, defining ideal. Students eventually challenged this
proximity when educational ends (framed mostly in terms of promoting democracy
and pure science) ran counter to political and economic ends (framed mostly in
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terms of promoting imperialism and capitalism). Similarly, following Newfield’s
longer sweep of history, those in the conservative power structure challenged this
proximity, arguing the case in the opposite direction, namely that if universities
deserve public investment it is not for democratic reasons but rather for economic
ones. In either case, the university was contested, and many notions were imputed
to its status as a crucial institution in American life. Absent any strong unifying ideal
itself, this contestation could be seen as reflecting a change within the university-‐
culture-‐economy-‐state constellation during a period of sweeping social and
economic transition. These changes were registered in a powerful way by the
student protestors, who, as Schaar and Wolin argue, were attempting to reckon with
the rapid increase in scale and complexity of American universities. However, as
Newfield demonstrates, how the crisis was defined and pursued was, ultimately, a
matter of politics, and absent a strong unifying ideal (similarly, it should be noted, to
the Communiqué from an Absent Future) the students struggled to preserve the
critical spirit they attempted to reanimate at the heart of campus life.
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Chapter 4: The Current Crisis of the University Revisited
”The prolixity of the government’s correspondence and orders is a sign of inertia…The demon of writing is waging
war against us; we are unable to govern.”221 -‐ Saint Just
Introduction As we saw in the previous two chapters, the modern university has, at
different points in time, dreamed of a form of legitimation that would place it on a
solid footing both within the academic community and in society at large. For Kant
it was Reason that organized the university within and made it useful without,
thought not in crude instrumental terms. For Humboldt and other reformers
associated with Berlin it was Bildung and Wissenschaft — Culture and Science —
that successfully defined the university to such an extent that academics were able
to accrue a considerable measure of social power. For Clark Kerr and the architects
of post-‐war U.S. higher education policy it was efficiency and productivity, or the
promise of fostering widespread social belonging through mass initiation into a
common heritage, that licensed unprecedented levels of public investiture into
universities. Part of the broader “management revolution,” these leaders saw the
virtue of jettisoning any unifying ideal and grew the university into a mass
institution, underwriting both big science and the growth of a broad and inclusive
middle class. However, as the conclusion of the preceding chapter demonstrated,
the shedding of normative ideals was harder to achieve than first imagined. In fact,
the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s saw the direct confrontation between a set of 221 Cited in Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2012).
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normative principles (e.g. of the critical role of universities, or of their adherence to
a certain conception of justice or tradition of liberal education) and a purely
managerial, economized approach to higher education. This followed a critical shift
in the history of the post-‐war American university that began with the student
protests, during which the growing realization that universities were central
institutions of American social, political, and economic life led to serious questions
of what this should entail.
One thing to note about these various forms of legitimation is that they are
both prefigurative of a certain kind of state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture
constellation (in their early periods) and then reactive once this constellation has
been called into question (in their period of crisis). As we saw in the Introduction,
universities have again entered a period in which the crisis claim circulates freely,
but historical proximity makes any neat assessments of what forms of legitimization
are being called into question difficult to articulate. Hence it may be helpful to
introduce a few vignettes that express current concerns and work backwards to find
the ideals that are being contested. Slightly different from the more summary
judgments that were the subject of chapter one, in this chapter I will focus on
managerialism, the precarity of the humanities within the new regime of priorities
in many systems of higher education, and the university in the knowledge society as
indicative of the present crisis and illustrative of a shift occurring once more in the
state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation. One uniting factor, which I’ll return
to later in the chapter, is how these three phenomena attempt to render the crisis in
such a way that universities are not appealing to forms of justification that are
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politically contentious (at least not in the way they were in Germany in the early
20th century or in the United Sates in the 1960s). This will become important when
changes in the nature of the state and economy, and the consequences of these on
universities, are discussed.
Vignette 1: Administrative Bloat, or the Problem of Managerialism
Academics are quick to dismiss criticisms coming from the business sector,
but a 2012 article from Bloomberg Businessweek provided faculty members with a
platform upon which to air their grievances. The article, entitled “The Troubling
Dean-‐to-‐Professor Ratio,”222 begins with J. Paul Robinson, chair of the Purdue faculty
senate, pointing to a row of administrative offices. “I have no idea what these
people do,” Robinson tells John Hechinger, the reporter. Hechinger proceeds to
specify what Robinson in complaining about — 1 provost, 6 vice and associate vice
provosts, 16 deans, and 11 vice presidents. Highly paid and highly varied in their
functions (from “chief diversity officer” to “marketing officer”), the growth in
administration relative to faculty has spiked in recent decades.223 What frustrates
222 John Hechinger, “The Troubling Dean-‐to-‐Professor Ratio,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 21, 2012. 223 At Purdue the increase in administrators was 54% over the past decade, eight times the rate of the growth in tenure and tenure-‐track positions. According to the US Department of Education the national average was a 60 % jump in administrative positions form 1993-‐2007, ten times the rate of tenure and tenure track faculty positions. Or to take an example from the University of California, “between 1998 and 2009, while student enrollments increased 33 percent and ladder-‐rank faculty increased 25 percent, the ranks of senior managers rose by 125 percent. By the end of the period, [the University of California System] had 1 senior administrator per 1.1 faculty members.” Coleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James Vernon, “Humanists and the Public University,” Representations, 116 (2011), 5.
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professors like Robinson is that this growth, called “administrative bloat,” has
tracked the skyrocketing of tuition and the declining levels of state and federal
funding for public universities. Put in the ironic position of arguing from principles
of efficiency (ostensibly the province of administrators), Robinson ruefully asks:
“We’re here to deliver a high-‐quality education at as low a price as possible. Why is
it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost
unlimited budget for administrators?”
The rejoinder from administrators was summed up by Purdue’s then acting
president, Timothy Sands. “This is a $2.2 billion operation — you’ve got to have
some people involved in administering it, managing it, running it, leading it. We’re
about as lean as we can afford to be.” The exchange between Robinson and Sands
neatly expresses changes that have occurred during the past three decades in higher
education. The era of grand, heavily subsidized state planning, such as was seen in
the CMP, is over. What we have now is a set of tasks that have been mainly shifted
onto the institutions themselves (getting budgets in order, managing large scale and
varied “research operations,” expanding what Stefan Muthesius calls “student
personnel services”224) and onto the students in the form of tuition increases.
Moreover, this occurs in a context in which the scale of higher education has
exploded (reflected in the $2.2 billion operating budget). However, this does not
necessarily mean increased freedom for faculty. The general direction of operations
can still be managed, as has been the case since Science — The Endless Frontier,
224 See Stefan Muthesius, The Post-‐War University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 20-‐24.
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through granting agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH),
National Institute of Health (NIH), or National Science Foundation (NSF), but these
now compete with powerful non-‐governmental agencies like the Ford and Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundations. If faculty can find funding, for example in public-‐private
partnerships though “knowledge transfer” opened up by the 1980 Bayh-‐Dole act, or
by teaming up with foundations, or even by attracting enough students to keep
enrollments high, then that is what administrators will encourage them to do.
Moreover, at each step of the way these decisions are subject to review by an ever-‐
growing band of vice presidents, presidents, provosts, vice provosts, and other
managers concerned with guiding the course of academic work.
Vignette 2: The Erosion of the Humanities
One key feature of the current crisis is the difficulty that those in the
humanities have had in justifying the value of their work to this growing band of
administrators and to the general public. Aaron Kuntz and John Petrovic225 provide
an example from my own specialized academic discipline of “philosophy of
education” — and as good representatives of specialization the authors can resort to
torturous linguistic tics to make a straightforward point.226 They were interested in
understanding how the language and “cognitive frames” that faculty members 225 Aaron Kuntz and John Petrovic, “The Politics of Survival in Foundations of Education: Borderlands, Frames, and Strategies.” Educational Studies, 48, no. 1, (2006), 7-‐43. I mention the style only in reference to Louis Menand’s earlier discussion of a “crisis of confidence” amongst humanities scholars, which shows up in needlessly technical language. 226 I have chosen an example from a school of education, but the question of communicating the value of humanities work is meant to apply more broadly. Many of these reflections should resonate with the material covered in chapter one.
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marshaled to describe their work reinscribed Educational Foundations faculty in the
“larger contemporary discourses” that I’ve been describing and revealed their place
within these. Through a series of interviews (mostly with members of regional
philosophy of education societies) Kuntz and Petrovic identified “a general belief
that many non-‐Foundations faculty members do not see Foundations as important,
and/or are not clear on what it is the Foundations faculty do.”227 This was to a large
extent reflective of a general trend where the ends of Education faculty work are set
by external agencies not in line with standards of valuation traditionally applied to
humanistic work (e.g. following NCATE certification credentials that privilege
“teaching methods,” metrics for evaluating research output taken from the hard
sciences, or trying to meet the targets of NCLB, which downplay humanistic
approaches for more quantifiable learning objectives that can be measured).
However, the more important point here is that such a context led many faculty to
fear that Foundations programs and positions would be folded into (and seriously
compromised by) other departments in schools of Education. In light of this
Foundations faculty developed a set of strategies, which the authors categorize as
“communication, visibility, and practicability.”
Communication concerned “engagement with the formal mechanisms
through which boundaries are continuously (re)worked,”228 and interviewees
focused primarily on finding better and more effective ways to communicate the
nature and value of their work to the proper audiences (teachers, fellow faculty, 227 Ibid., 181. 228 Ibid., 183.
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administrators, and interested political groups). These strategies varied, but the
authors found commonality in “the need to smuggle [Foundations work] into the
institutional structures and curricular space within which marginalized knowledge
practices might be partially protected.”229 However, the interviewees acknowledged
that such a strategy “affected the very discourses in which they find meaning”230 and
expressed anxieties over ceding academic autonomy.
Visibility concerned “making Foundations materially and discursively present
in the local context,”231 for example by serving on committees, making sure
Foundations requirements were retained in the curriculum, and participating in
work that brings faculty into closer contact with populations like school teachers.
Such strategies aim to “reassert professional authority” where Foundations faculty
feel this is being undermined. Practicality, which is that which “is suited for actual
use or useful activities…[seeks] to apply the institutional structure, a particular
discourse of effectiveness, [to Foundations work] in a way that mirrors the
foundation for the claims and activities that define and protect other knowledge
practices in teacher education.”232 The strategies of both Visibility and Practicality
operate “within a discourse of boundaries that promote the professional authority
229 Ibid., 185. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid., 186-‐7
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of other studies in ways that may lead to an appropriation of the purposes of
Foundations.”233
Long gone is the self-‐confidence of the Mandarins or Hutchins, or even the
clear critical function that Kant set for the Philosophical Faculty. Kuntz and Petrovic
conclude that “faculty participants offered analyses that established an inside and
outside, negotiated material and discursive boundaries…[their work] consists in
maintaining some container walls and transgressing others.”234 The authors worry
that this work often has the effect of furthering the conditions wherein faculty
members develop a “general sense of despair”235 by easily allowing their work to be
reinscribed within a general neoliberal frame. However, my purpose in introducing
this example is to provide a partial snapshot of the kinds of changes and challenges
that philosophers of education and others in the humanities are likely to fix their
sights upon. Feeling pressures from administrators to be more productive, from
funding sources to be more empirical in their research like their colleagues in the
hard and social sciences, and the general public to be more relevant, the humanities
in the university today find themselves in a very uncertain position. How
humanities work came to be a scandal in schools of Education and universities in
general will be explored later in this chapter.236
233 Ibid., 187. 234 Ibid., 190. 235 Ibid., 193. 236 We have already seen this theme of the humanities in peril or crisis brought up several times. What makes this current treatment slightly different is reading the
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Vignette 3: Knowledge and the University
I had the privilege of recently participating in a seminar called The New
University? The course was an interesting mix of students from Columbia’s
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) and the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). In addition to weekly discussions of
readings, GSAPP students had a studio component in which they generated designs
for Columbia’s northward expansion into their Manhattanville campus.237 While
principles of campus design were discussed, including whether or not there was a
distinct American tradition of campus planning that could be drawn upon for these
new designs, the general logic of expansion was never called into question.
Jonathan Cole, author of The Great American University238 and one of the seminar
leaders, recalled a perpetual challenge that he faced during his tenure as provost of
Columbia: “the problem was never a lack of money, but always a lack of space.”
When asked what necessitated (or legitimated) this constant expansion Cole
state of the humanities in light of managerialism and the changed set of priorities in universities that I will describe later in the chapter. 237 Manhattanville is a 17-‐acre site that stretches roughly from 125th st. to 134th st. in Manhattan, bordered by Broadway to the east and the Hudson River to the west. As Columbia’s website describes it, “Columbia’s comprehensive plan…moves away from past ad-‐hoc growth of University buildings. Gradually over the next quarter-‐century, this carefully considered, transparent, and predictable plan will create a new kind of urban academic environment that will be woven into the fabric of the surrounding community.” Moreover, the campus will have be decidedly research focused, housing large centers such as the Mind-‐Brian Behavior Institute. See http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/. (Last accessed May 2, 2014.) 238 Jonathan Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, its Indispensable National Role, Why it Must be Protected (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).
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answered unequivocally, “the research function of the university and the production
of new knowledge.” This general belief is echoed in the plans for Manhattanville,
which will house many research laboratories and centers, but is not slated to
include any of the undergraduate teaching functions of Columbia College, which will
remain tucked away in the southeast corner of the Morningside Heights campus.
Cole’s answer and the Manhattanville project are admittedly concerned with
only one segment of the higher education sector – namely the research function at
large public and private research universities. However, the remark is telling in that
it reveals the general logic that governs much of our thinking about universities
today. Take, for example, the concluding presidential remarks from the 2000 Lisbon
European Council, a meeting of EU politicians and educational leaders tasked with
normalizing and reforming higher education across Europe for the first decade of
the 21st century. Citing policies like the establishment of the European Research
Area and the Bologna Process, through which researchers and students can move
with more ease across national boundaries among EU member states, the president
imagined Europe heading in the direction of becoming “the most competitive and
dynamic knowledge based economy in the world, capable of sustained growth with
more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.”239
In these remarks we can see that “knowledge” is here invoked in a slightly
broader sense than in the original context of Wissenschaft, or the fruits that are born
of organized research. Knowledge now is something that is generated by increasing 239 Cited in Gert Biesta, “Towards the Knowledge Democracy? Knowledge Production and the Civic Role of the University,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26 (2007), 468.
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the opportunities for interaction, which ranges from the different research
programs and expertise’s of researchers (Cole’s rationale for expansion) to
differences in cultural backgrounds and potential aptitude for different jobs (the
Lisbon Council’s hope for “social cohesion” and economic growth). Knowledge thus
imposes an obligation on the university to shed it’s cloistered past and engage the
conditions of fluidity and movement that characterize the modern world. Why this
has not been a smooth process, and how universities have either failed to meet or
challenged this obligation, will be the third lens through which to understand the
modern crisis of the university.
I. Managerialism
One way to approach the problem of administrative bloat, or the imposition
of a decision-‐making structure that takes governing control away from the faculty, is
to look for broader changes that have occurred in the economy. “Managerialism”
has emerged in a number of fields as a term meant to capture the packages of
reforms that have swept through many social institutions in the past 40 years. As
David Lea notes, “marketization, privatization, performance measurement or
performativity indexing and accountability are interrelated concepts broadly
associated with the term managerialism.”240 These models are premised on a belief
that the kinds of managerial structures one finds in the private sector should be
embraced by public institutions (or even in private universities, which historically
imagined themselves operating in light of different imperatives) in order to render
240 David Lea, “The Managerial University and the Decline of Modern Thought,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43, no. 8 (2009), 816.
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such institutions more efficient, effective, and productive. To this end, governments
and supranational organization (the World Bank, the EU) have initiated changes in
the organizational make-‐up of universities worldwide through policy
recommendations, restructured funding agreements, and performance targets.241 In
practical terms, such changes have resulted in a rapid increase in administrative
staff relative to faculty, new measures for evaluating and gauging performance of
university workers (in many instances altering the character of such work), and a
decrease in public funding for higher education.242
There are several significant effects of this shift. Lea notes how this process
calls into question the internal goods of university work by imposing new schemas
of evaluation. He believes that managerialism initiates “the reduction of matter and
even social behaviors to measurable units,”243 which makes a good deal of university
work (e.g. humanities teaching and learning, which are notoriously difficult to
measure) an object of suspicion. In a similar vein, David Preston244 claims that
managerialism evidences a post-‐enlightenment legitimation crisis, where the
operations of capitalist management provide the amoral response to the breakdown
of older forms of authority — or, following the preceding chapter, a faith in long-‐
term investment and planning by federal and state governments, seen in post-‐WWII
241 Ibid. 242 See Newfield, 159-‐73, for a comprehensive account of this in the United States. 243 Lea, 9. 244 David Preston “Managerialism and the Post-‐Enlightenment Crisis of the British University,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 33, no. 2 (2001), 344-‐363.
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funding schemes and the CMP. As with Lea, this condition depletes the university of
whatever resources it has to resist forces of marketization and the managerial
structures it brings in tow.
Other thinkers have followed the template of The Spirit of the New
Capitalism,245 tracking how the language of managerial culture has congealed into a
set of more concrete institutional arrangements. In the British and Australasian
context many of these analyses focus on New Public Management (NPM), a
governing regime in which “higher education is conceived as a managed economy in
which competitive markets and market simulacra are nested in a framework of
external supervision by governments or, depending on the sphere of operation,
institutional managers.”246 According to Grahame Locke and Chris Lorenz, one of
the unintended consequences of such a shift is the eclipse of, “universal —
educational and scientific — goals,” in universities by “ordinary ‘private’ market or
commercial logic.”247 Furthermore, as a group of British philosophers of education
have written,248 the managerialism of corporate entities and the entrepreneurial
245 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The Spirit of the New Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2007), 57-‐101. 246 Simon Marginson, “Academic Creativity Under New Public Management,” Educational Theory, 58, no. 3 (2008), 270. See also Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). Power’s conception of the “audit society” presages many of the developments documented in more recent treatments of managerial culture in universities. 247 Graham Lock and Chris Lorenz, “Revisiting the University Front,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26 (2007), 408. 248 Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish, Education in an age of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2001).
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spirit of flexible and highly competitive workplaces have taken hold of how
administrators and policy makers view the ends of education in general (e.g. the
publishing of U.K. league tables which rank school performance so as to provide
parents with the information needed to make “a more informed choice” about their
child’s education; or in the United States we can look to various school voucher
programs).
Such a shift is particularly pronounced in universities when read against
Humboldt’s linkage of teaching and research in pursuit of universal knowledge,
Hutchins or Eliot’s conception of general education, or any of the ideals backing the
expansion of the higher education sector for the public good that were deeply
formative in the foundation of the modern university system, as was seen in the
previous chapter. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, much of the thrust of
managerialism is to conceive of the crisis as a very particular answer to the “what
went wrong?” question that Janet Roitman argues is behind many crisis
designations. Here the answer is that prior forms of academic organization were
inefficient, and in times where the state is no longer flooding universities with
financial and human capital (as occurred in the post-‐WWII period), then more
efficient and enlightened organizational and management principles are called for.
This is meant to sidestep a political discussion, though as we saw earlier in William
Bowen’s assessment of how the cost disease factors into funding decisions about
universities, a political discussion of priorities is exactly what is called for in
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discussions of managerialism.249
Now, many of these critical assessments of the way universities are
organized and governed are premised on a confrontation with some sort of
normative ideal about the university, for example of its proper vocation of seeking
“universal knowledge.” Indeed, an early version of this form of critique was seen in
Wolff’s Ideal of the University in the previous chapter. The difference between the
1960s and the present moment is that such critiques are engaging a different set of
background conditions that can broadly be understood under the banner of
“neoliberalism.” In Wolff’s case the problem was that universities were becoming
efficient agents of government (especially military) policy and economic interests
without reflecting on the ends to which such policies were leading. In the wake of
the neoliberal project this kind of critique is more difficult to make because both the
state and the interests of the economy have been radically reorganized.
In a special issue of Representations, an interdisciplinary humanities journal
from the University of California, Coleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James
Vernon give a good accounting of what this neoliberal project does to the university.
The title of the special issue was, “The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public
University,” and in many respects the various invited contributions were
responding to the following list of symptoms from the neoliberal public university:
“replacement of public funding with tuition; explosion of administrative activities, personnel, and costs; privileging of the ‘practical’ over the ‘liberal’ arts on grounds of higher career salaries; franchising of degrees overseas, or in global colonies (hubs or partners); casualization of academic labor and the
249 Cf. page 51 of this dissertation.
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erosion of tenure; creation of ‘market-‐driven’ inequities in faculty salaries and reduction of service-‐based pension packages.”250
Such a list should reinforce the fact that there is nothing amoral or neutral
about managerialism, but rather that it is but one feature of a broad
reorganization of universities away from internal forms of regulation and
towards economic ends (this being the neoliberal rearticulation of the “public
good”). Recalling the “Communiqué From an Absent Future,” the crisis of the
university emerges from a critical interrogation of these economic ends, the long-‐
term viability of the state form they presuppose, and the university’s role in
producing and sustaining these.
II. The Crisis of the Humanities
In his 1959 Rede Lecture, the British literary critic C.P. Snow famously
lamented what he called “the two cultures…literary intellectuals at one pole — at
the other scientists, and as most representative, the physical scientists [today we
might swap in neuroscientists]. Between the two a gulf of mutual
incomprehension.”251 Writing just one year earlier in America, Hannah Arendt
penned the following words explaining the motivations behind The Human
Condition, a difficult to classify phenomenology of political life. Departing from
symbolic importance of launching a satellite into space in 1957, which signaled the
ascent of science to a point where the limits of man or the Earth are no longer firm,
250 Coleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James Vernon, “Humanists and the Public University,” Representations, 116 (2011), 2. 251 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.
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she writes, “what I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to
think what we are doing.”252 The worry in both cases is that the age of big science
which emerged out of WWII lacked the kind of moral constraints that the
humanities could impose, and conversely that a failure of humanists to deal with
evolutions in the basic fund of knowledge could lead to an irresponsibility in literary
culture as well.253
One way to underscore the enduring relevance of Snow’s distinction is to
look at the ways the sciences and the humanities have been folded into the current
institutional structure of the university. As mentioned above, Lea laments “the reign
of quantity” in the valuation of academic work. When quantification is the name of
the game, it is not difficult to imagine an inequality emerging between the hard and
social sciences, and then a further inequality between these and the humanities if all
are held to a common measure. If we look at certain metrics for valuing academic
work, then we can begin to see clearly why this is the case. Nick Burbules and Paul
Smeyers detail one such metric, the Impact Factor, which is meant to evaluate the
252 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5. 253 “I remember being cross-‐examined by a scientist of distinction. ‘Why do most writers take on social opinions which would have been thought distinctly démodé at the time of the Plantaganets? Wasn’t that true of most of the famous 20th century writers? Yeats, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, nine out of ten of those who have dominated literary sensibility in our time — weren’t they not only politically silly, but politically wicked? Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?’” Snow, 7.
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quality of research output.254 An academic’s impact factor is the result of a complex
formula that tracks citations of articles and books in a weighted index of academic
publications. What concerns Burbules and Smeyers are the fundamental
inadequacies of such measures (e.g. possibilities to “game the system” through
mutual citations, an inability to differentiate between negative and positive
citations, or emerging preferences for certain types of writing)255 and their growing
influence in the employment practice of universities and publishing practices of
academic journals. Moreover, citations of fundamental methodological or
conceptual advances in our scientific understanding, which ideally would apply to
scientific literature, do not find an easy correlate in the humanities or some of the
social sciences.
We can look to An Verburgh, Jan Elen, & Sari Lindblom-‐Ylänne256 to deepen
the worries raised by Burbules & Smeyers. They examine whether these metrics
measuring the quality of research have had a markedly beneficial effect on the other
side of academic work — teaching. The authors note that the move to mass higher
education and policy formations driven by perceived changes in the status of
knowledge have significant effects on the ways faculty are asked to balance
teaching, research, and other functions (e.g. serving various publics outside the 254 Nicholas Burbules and Paul Smeyers, “How to Improve Your Impact Factor: Questioning the Quantification of Academic Quality,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45, no. 1 (2011), 1-‐17. 255 Ibid., 12. 256 An Verburgh, Jan Elen, and Sari Lindbloom-‐Ylänne, “Investigating the myth of the relationship between teaching and research in higher education: A review of empirical research,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26 (2007), 449-‐465.
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university). This changed context has been central to calls for reforms in both the
study of and policy towards the relationship between teaching and research.
“However,” the authors argue, “consistent empirical evidence on a positive mutual
relationship between teaching and research appears more difficult to retrieve” than
the touted benefits of reform policies. Thus, while they note, “studies point out that
teaching and research are not antagonistic and that faculty believe in the value of
the relation,”257 they conclude that increased efforts to isolate a positive correlation
between these two activities have been unable to capture common, shared beliefs
amongst humanities instructors in particular. What troubles the authors most is
that the burden of many of these studies is on optimizing the research end
(measured quantitatively), to the determinant of a nuanced examination of “student
learning or the way research is integrated into teaching.”258 As noted above, this can
have the unintended consequence of influencing the self-‐conception of humanities
professors.259
257 Ibid., 452. 258 Ibid. 259 Probably the most concrete example of this comes in various forms of academic self-‐assessment. Phil Cohen highlights the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), wherein one schedules out research goals with a set of measurable targets. The major worry expressed about such self-‐assessment schemes is that they foreclose on the possibility of innovative thought, which Cohen argues is central to the work undertaken in universities. Phil Cohen, “A Place to Think? Some Reflections on the Idea of the University in the Age of the ‘Knowledge Economy,” New Formations, 53 (2004), 12-‐27. Simon Marginson makes the same point in light of NPM’s encroachment on the “radical-‐creative imagination.” For a more recent assessment of these policy changes in the U.K. see Suzy Harris, The University in Translation: the Internationalization of Higher Education (London: Continuum, 2011).
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Now if such metrics harbor these problems, then we can see how the hard
sciences or disciplines more amenable to quantification along other lines
(significantly, their ability to generate revenue or place students in lucrative
careers) are put in a privileged position. For example, the capital investments
necessary for constructing a laboratory or setting up a center for long-‐term, grant
funded research projects can be measured with some confidence by looking at the
quantity and quality of knowledge produced, the ability to emerge into a self-‐
sufficient cost structure, or even to generate new sources of income for the
university through developing patents or engaging in technology transfer to the
private sector. Or, to take the example from the beginning of this chapter, if the
study of certain domains — e.g. education — can be linked to the needs of specific
constituents — teachers, students, policy makers —, then again, a language to assess
academic work in terms of meeting or falling short of targets is easier to imagine.
The relative ease with which these assessment schemes can be constructed puts
those in the humanities that don’t have a specific set of outcomes in mind in a
difficult position. And on the other side it enables managers to set a clear range of
administrative tasks to coordinate research efforts, again privileging the amoral
machinations of capitalist management over substantive reflections on the nature
and value of research itself.
The reference to Snow should demonstrate that these tensions are certainly
not unique to our present moment, where the reign of science has led to a particular
form of instrumental reason. But unlike the post WWII period the funding structure
is not in place to absolve individual departments and disciplines from formulating
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comprehensive policy objectives to justify their own work. Thus, on the one hand,
there is the reduction of academic work to a slim number of quantifiable models,
which skews support towards particular areas of the university (the sciences,
professional programs) and away from others.260 The report from Petrovic and
Kuntz is an example of how this leads to specialization, an awkward and needlessly
technical prose style, and professional anxiety amongst humanities professors. But
on the other hand, as the previous section argued, this model is no longer even
based on the intrinsic goods of scientific research (which is one coherent reading of
what made the post-‐WWII university great), but rather on the neoliberal model that
“promotes a consumerist view of education that signifies it as a private investment
instead of a public good.”261 As evidenced by the closure of various humanities
programs (philosophy at SUNY-‐Albany and Middlesex in the UK, classics at McGill),
the long-‐term nature of humanistic academic work, once so central to our
conception of what a university is, is by no means a settled issue.262
260 One can also look at the decline in federal funding of the humanities, for example in a 40 % reduction in the National Endowment for the Humanities budget from 1972-‐1996, the period leading to the conditions current scholars are now struggling against. John D’Arms, “Funding Trends in the Academic Humanities, 1970-‐1995: Reflections on the Stability of the System,” in What Happened to the Humanities, Ed. Alvin Kernan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 32-‐62. 261 Coleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James Vernon, “Humanists and the Public University,” Representations, 116 (2011), 1. 262 Tood Edwin Jones raised this issue in a 2011 article for the Boston Review entitled “Budgetary Hemlock.” Jones, then head of the philosophy department at the University of Nevada-‐Las Vegas, described the reaction of a friend when they learned that the administration had decided to close the department: “You can’t have a university without a philosophy department!” Given the Kantian legacy still present in many conceptions of the university, this is a perfectly sensible reaction.
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III. The University and the Knowledge Society
The word knowledge has already cropped up several times in the previous
two sections. Indeed, if Reason defined Kant’s university, Culture and Science that of
Humboldt, Knowledge is the first word on everyone’s lips today. An ever-‐expanding
body of literature on modern universities has tried to conceptualize current trends
in light of what many have called “the knowledge society” (or alternatively, the
“knowledge economy”).263 In order to ground the discussion I’ll take three examples
from the “philosophy of education” field to demonstrate the topics that are often
taken up by researchers when discussing the role and nature of knowledge in
humanistic work. I will deal with them at some length as representative samples.
Gert Biesta has examined how policy debates in “the knowledge society” are
related to the two primary roles that we have already seen universities asked to
fulfill — an economic role and a civic role.264 He writes that in recent thought
“knowledge has become an economic force in its own right” and any reform of
higher education policy must emphasize the desired knowledge practices that will
benefit both students and nations in a competitive, networked global economy. But in light of the issues discussed in this chapter, particularly with changes in the nature of knowledge and in the kinds of universities that are likely to attract financial support from the state and popular support from society, the sense of this statement is not so straightforward. Todd Edwin Jones, “Budgetary Hemlock,” Boston Review, April 5, 2011. 263 For a comparative analysis of these trends across different nations, see the collection edited by Craig Calhoun and Diana Rhoten, Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 264 Gert Biesta, “Towards the Knowledge Democracy? Knowledge Production and the Civic Role of the University,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26 (2007), 467-‐479.
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Given that knowledge production has become central to the university’s mission,
this economic shift has brought universities a renewed amount of attention from
policy makers and economists (Biesta gives the example of recent EU legislation
such as the Bologna Process or the development of the European Research Area).
However, tensions in the EU have also signaled a renewed interest in the
university’s integrative, civic mission. The mixing of these two missions can be seen
in the previously mentioned statement from the 2000 Lisbon European Council, in
which universities were invoked in a “deliberate strategy to make Europe the most
competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world, capable of sustained
growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.”265
Biesta concedes that universities no longer have a monopoly on knowledge
production (e.g. research is pursued in privately funded laboratories or think tanks),
but he argues that they still occupy a privileged space by virtue of granting degrees
that confer “scientific status” to bodies of knowledge and knowledge practices.
Instead of using this position to assert the superiority of scientific truth to everyday
understanding (what Biesta calls the “technology-‐argument”), universities can
instead initiate vital reflections on “the production of scientific knowledge and the
role of science in society.”266 In a knowledge society this gives universities the
ability to recognize “the major asymmetry in modern society…between scientific
and other forms of knowledge” in such a way that resists the hegemonic forces of
scientific-‐technological explanation (which Biesta sees as collapsing the knowledge 265 Cited in Biesta, 468. 266 Ibid., 478.
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society into the knowledge economy). If scientific knowledge can be shown to be a
situated knowledge amongst a diversity of knowledge practices, then universities
will be able to pursue a reflective and democratic function in modern society, whist
more or less retaining their traditional disciplinary structure. However, this still
presupposes that peer review or other features of academic culture will handle this
function in a way that is different from either the state or private institutions (the
previous two sections of this chapter should at least raise the possibility that this is
a problematic assumption). In a sense we can see Biesta attempting to reinstall
Kant’s critical function of the humanities at the heart of the knowledge society. Or
to turn to the American example, he wants universities to indulge both its
productive and integrative, humanistic capacities.
Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons are concerned with how this renewed
interest in universities initiates not a new opportunity, but rather a problematic
reimagining of the their role in the knowledge society.267 Their path into this topic is
an examination of the elevated importance of “learning” in the extant “grammar of
schooling,” with a particular eye towards how universities are implicated in
furthering a particular configuration of “both government and self-‐government” of
subjects. They ask the question, “who are we as people for whom learning is of
major importance, who refer to learning as a way to constantly position and
267 Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, “The Governmentalization of Learning and the Assemblage of a Learning Apparatus,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 58, no. 4 (2008), 391-‐415.
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reposition ourselves?”268 The question is spurred by the growing importance in
policy documents of the connection drawn between learning processes and the
generation of competencies in a wide range of behaviors. This is premised on
knowledge being treated as something emergent as opposed to relatively stable,
which requires adaptability instead of mastery.
They track this question in four directions that seem essential to
understanding the preeminence of “learning” in the knowledge society: “the
necessity of learning in the knowledge economy, the importance of learning to
guarantee freedom in a changing society, the educational expertise concerning
learning and instruction, and the importance of the employability of learning
results.”269 The kind of subjectivity that this investigation sketches is one in which
learning is an ongoing, value-‐added process, an object of “self-‐management” and
“self-‐expertise,” and measurable and capable of refinement through the
demonstration of certain competencies.
Masschelein and Simons express skepticism as to “whether the experience of
learning indeed results in the freedom and collective well-‐being that is promised”270
by reformers and governments. However, the upshot of their study is to give proper
attention to the vocabulary that becomes prevalent in a knowledge society, for
example noting how the “learning” differs from “schooling,” or how calling a sector
“higher education” has different practical effects than discussing “universities and 268Ibid., 392. 269 Ibid., 396. 270 Ibid., 393.
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colleges,” which carry with them a history and a tradition. Like Biesta they are wary
of ways in which this vocabulary collapses the potential benefits of the knowledge
society (with liberatory promises of increased freedom and cooperation on par with
Enlightenment discourse) into the flattened out aims of the knowledge economy.271
The article ends with the important critical insight that any substantive university
reforms must be attentive to the emancipatory and stultifying potentials inhering in
the very language through which they are articulated and received.
To round out this picture Maarten Simons places university reform in the
knowledge society in a “broader socio-‐historical context.”272 He introduces a
distinction between two milieus that vie for preeminence in setting the agenda for
the university and defining its public role: the personal (“with the persona of the
academic or critical intellectual”) and the governmental (“with the persona of the
state official or governmental expert”). Drawing on the development of the modern
research university in 19th century Germany, Simons reminds us that university
organization has always involved a mixture of these two milieus. For example, he
cites Wilhelm Von Humboldt’s elaboration of the pedagogical idea of Bildung:
“Whence I conclude, that the freest development of human nature, directed as little as possible to ulterior civil relations, should
271 It should be noted that statements such as this cannot be taken as a comprehensive assessment of the university. The research function of the university certainly has many attendant dangers of inappropriate relationships with economic forces, but Masschelein and Simons’ comments on learning are more difficult to attach to things like cutting edge bio-‐medical research that occurs at universities. 272 Maarten Simons, “The ‘Renaissance of the University’ in the European Knowledge Society: An Exploration of Principled and Governmental Approaches,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26 (2007), 433-‐447.
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always be regarded as paramount in importance with respect to the culture of man in society. He who has been thus freely developed should then attach himself to the State: and the State should test and compare itself, as it were, in him.”273
The Humboldtian ideal has however suffered a subsequent breakdown and
reformers often have a difficult time trying to reconcile these two milieus. Simons
uses the conception of the “public” character of universities, following the work of
Simon Marginson, as an example of this. From the “governmental gaze, the notion
‘public’ refers to the source of these institutions’ funding, and/or the ‘nature of the
output of goods,’ who benefits and how the goods are distributed.”274 As articulated
in various policy directives like those coming from the Lisbon European Council and
the Bologna Process, “public” derives its substantive content from the methods
deemed most suitable for developing “the most competitive and dynamic
knowledge-‐based economy in the world.” But from the gaze of critical intellectuals,
“the notion ‘public’… refers not merely to the nature of outputs and issues of
funding, but to the public character of for instance the sphere inside the university
and its (critical) relation to a larger public sphere beyond the university.”275 Here
the substantive content of “public” is set by exemplary procedures for maintaining a
healthy and robust public sphere, or by modeling a way to legitimately adjudicate
between competing knowledge claims.
273 Cited in Simons, 439. 274 Ibid., 440. 275 Ibid.
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Simons is quite emphatic that it is the governmental milieu that is
determining the modes in which the contemporary university is made visible as an
object of reform in the knowledge society. The consequences of this are similar to
those noted above in his work with Jan Masschelein. As he puts it here, “it seems as
if the decline of the role of the critical intellectual, its intellectual culture and moral
authority or social prestige goes hand in hand with the growing importance and
almost omnipotence of the administrative, managerial intellectual and educational
expert.”276 As with the previous two examples, the major worry here is that the
conditions of the knowledge society collapse into the needs of the knowledge
economy when brought into the realm of university reform.
The foregoing examples are meant to underscore a potential danger inhering
in our enthusiasm towards “knowledge” as the word that can lead universities out
of our present confusion. For Biesta the danger lies in knowledge exacerbating an
imbalance between normal claims of competency and those of “experts.” Ideally the
university would be in an advantageous position to address this potential problem,
but the present environment is not encouraging. If we recall Newfield’s reading of
the culture wars, then we can appreciate the limitations or compromises that
academics are likely to face in democratizing our understanding of diverse
knowledge practices.277 This worry is underscored by Mascehllein and Simons (and
276 Ibid., 445. 277 Newfield showed how experts can be drawn into a battle that they didn’t ask for, for example with very well organized think thanks, which has occurred since the early days of the culture wars. The expertise of the faculty lies not in public relations, but in the standards that are set by their discipline. This can lead to a
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Simons), first calling into question the kinds of subjects that a university organized
around knowledge is supposed to produce, and second questioning where authority
ultimately rests in valuing and directing the production of different forms of
knowledge. In short, like the multiversity, knowledge also opens up a space for
diverse and often conflicting understandings of mission and purpose to emerge
within the university and in the broader public understanding.
IV. Characterizing the Current Crisis
It is possible to note certain convergences in the above topics, all of which
will help in characterizing the current crisis in the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture
constellation that I have been examining. First, there is the persistent concern over
the increase and comprehensiveness of market-‐based reasoning, terminology, and
practices. As Kuntz and Petrovic note, this has acute effects on how humanities
scholars conceive of their own work and place within the university structure.
Steven Burwood sums up the general picture for a large number of humanities
scholars: “Academic anxiety emanates from the fact that the vision of education
these terms [i.e. of managerialism, New Public Management, or outsized expectations
for “knowledge creation”] embody is one most academics find deeply uncongenial
and at odds with what they take themselves to be doing.”278
confusion of the bases of their own expertise, and lead to problems similar to those of the Mandarins. 278 Steven Burwood, “Universities Without Embarrassment,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 20, no. 3 (2003), 299.
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Second, it is easy to imagine all of these changes independent of any strong
state influence.279 Take as an example the proliferation of extension campuses and
“global studies” programs. Many flagship institutions such as Yale, NYU, and even
Columbia (e.g. the Studio X studios being bought up by GSAPP280) have established a
presence overseas, either in partnerships with existing universities or through the
construction of new campuses. As NYU President John Sexton has put it, the new,
globalized age will be a “knowledge century” and its leaders will not be national
university systems, but rather “idea capitals.” “Globalization,” he writes, “is not
leveling the playing field, it is redrawing it. The future will reside in the idea capitals,
those places that attract a disproportionate percentage of the world’s intellectual
capacity.”281
The cultural anthropologist Tom Looser has questioned the logic underlying
these claims in his broader work on Special Economic Zones (SEZs).282 For Looser
279 It is true that New Public Management or the Research Excellent Framework are national policies, but they are in the service of ideals that have no specific national reference (i.e. making universities and academics more efficient and productive). This is markedly different from looking to universities to build a national culture, pursue local political projects, or elaborate and curate national literary, artistic, and scientific achievements. 280 Studio X is the slightly sinisterly named program where GSAPP has purchased studio spaces in the downtown areas of what they deem “transitional cities.” These currently include Mumbai, Beijing, Amman, and Rio de Janeiro, with plans to expand into Johannesburg, Moscow, and Istanbul. 281 Cited in Tom Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,’” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 1 (2012), 102. 282 Looser writes, “There are many variants of SEZs (tax-‐free zones, free-‐trade zones, free ports, etc.), but the general idea is that these are exceptional areas allowing for
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the new global campus, engineered to produce “world citizens,” is the perfect foil for
a more pervasive neoliberal project that has ideologically and materially diminished
the power of states or the idea of a “national community” in favor of the exigencies
of global capital. He writes, “in its most basic and generic form, neoliberalism
implies freedom from responsibility; especially, it implies freedom from
responsibility to any kind of alterity, in favor of responsibility only to one’s self.
Logically, carried out as a principle, the result would be a kind of pure self-‐identity,
free of relation to others.”283
Global campuses conform to this project in several ways. First, the question
of alterity is removed by exempting campuses from the local culture (language,
religious traditions, regional literature, etc.) in favor of a globalized vision of culture.
Sexton refers to Saadiyat Island, the site of NYU Abu Dhabi, as a “zone of pure
culture,” including branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim to bolster the study of
subjects like “world history” and “world literature.” Second, most of these
campuses are new constructions or built on reclaimed land, thus initiating a process
of building that is “of indifferent relation to any specific history (other than their
own, newly formed).”284 Third, the sites of these global campuses are not accidental,
as places like Abu Dhabi and Singapore are able to grant universities exemption
from local tax laws or legal restrictions. For example, though the construction of
less regulation of capital, often without taxation, and at times allowing for some suspension of local laws.” Looser, 100. 283 Ibid., 99. 284 Ibid., 107.
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Saadiyat Island was highly dependent on the exploitation of migrant labor (which
government authorities were finally forced to redress), NYU was adamant that the
academic conditions of the campus would remain consistent with policies of
academic freedom set by the AAUP, respect the equal treatment of genders, and
provide services (including shopping and entertainment) equivalent to what a
student might access on the home campus in New York City.
In Looser’s focus on these global campuses we can get a clearer picture on
how things like the emphasis on “knowledge production” and our new “globalized
context” can have quite significant effects in redefining the nature of the university.
For example, he writes that in these programs “there is a gap, or indifference,
between the subject (of citizenship, or culture) and its predicate (the framework of
the state, or more generally the area, to which we belong).”285 The goal of preparing
or producing a certain type of republican subject (Humboldt), or “gentleman”
(Newman), or graduate educated to meet the complexities of modern life and
science (CMP or general education programs) becomes less comprehensible than
producing a pliant, open-‐ended, “world citizen” that can remain responsive to the
movements of global capital. Now Looser is adamant that this does not call for a
reflexive resurgence in nationalism, a point to which I am in full agreement. He
writes, “by these terms, indifference is not only the defining condition of a neoliberal
sociality but also a real, historical condition of uncertainty and potentiality — both
an opening into new possible social forms, and an ideal site for social debate and
285 Ibid., 114.
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critique.”286 The point is rather, recalling “crisis’” etymological link to a point of
decision, that the diminished role of the state is something that must be thoughtfully
engaged.
A third point of convergence in the above treatments of the contemporary
“crisis of the university” is the eclecticism with which administrators navigate the
contemporary field of higher education and scholars conceive of it as an object of
analysis. By this I mean a few things. First, changes in the material conditions of
academic work and study have necessitated a variety of responses. As Lynn Hunt
noted almost two decades ago,287 increased enrollments, from 2 million in the post-‐
war years to 15 million by 1994 (estimates now place the figure near 20 million,
depending on how you define a university), have introduced a new level of scale and
complexity. The rise of complex bureaucracies and the offloading of extra-‐academic
functions to colleges themselves (reflected in “administrative bloat”) and students
(reflected in increased tuition and indebtedness), with the concomitant decline in
public investitures, is one response to these changed conditions. The expansion into
global markets can also be understood in these terms. In either case there is a
structural challenge to some aspect of the university’s viability that is being
redressed.
Moreover, an eclecticism is reflected in the sheer range of topics that can be
subsumed under any “crisis of the university” claim. There are the functional 286 Ibid. 287 Lynn Hunt, “Democratization and Decline? The Consequences of Democratic Change in the Humanities,” in What Happened to the Humanities, Ed. Alvin Kernan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 17-‐31.
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challenges just noted, but there are also concerns about the viability of broader
social, political, and economic forms and ideals. We can look to the twinning of
worries over democracy and economic sustainability in the analyses of Biesta and
Simmons & Masschelein, the communiqué issued by students at UC—Santa Cruz, or
in the policy initiatives of the European Union towards higher education. In any of
these cases a broader set of preoccupations are folded into treatments of the
university and generate a great diversity in points of emphasis.288 While this is
wholly consistent with the basic contention of this dissertation (that “crises” of the
university are not internal to the institution but dialectically related to changes in
state forms, economic forces, and social/cultural trends), the sheer variety of topics
should give us confidence in grouping the contemporary situation with prior
“crises” that historical distance allows us to characterize as a period of sweeping
change.
In a summary, perhaps slightly reductive schematic form, I can characterize
these changes in the following manner: whereas the post-‐war period was
characterized by strong, state-‐interventionist policies, the current political
environment is one that holds a reduced role for the state — either on the level of
investitures or in the ability to steer curricula and policies towards civic, cultural, or
288 This dissertation does attempt to catalogue a number of these points of emphasis, but any attempt at comprehensiveness would proliferate into an unmanageable size for any meaningful treatment. To name just a few others: student debt, the status of academic labor, the perhaps inadequate maturation process provided by the undergraduate experience, the inequalities that obtain between different branches of knowledge, the inability to square access and quality when universities become mass institutions, or the need to integrate technology into all aspects of university life.
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other non-‐economic goals.289 Moreover, in the transition from a service to a
knowledge economy the economic benefits of tertiary education become detached
from any particular national context. One of the forces driving the massive
expansion of U.S. higher education following WWII was to train professionals to staff
key sectors of the emerging service economy (white collar workers), but also to
educate citizens to be able to cope with the growing complexity of political,
economic, and social realities (seen in Eliot and Hutchins’ advocacy for general
education). In the current environment these broader goals are shifted onto the
individual learner, and what we see is learning as an ongoing, flexible process not
bound by the specificity of local or national exigencies. In the context of rising costs
and student indebtedness, this further economizes our understanding of tertiary
education as a hedge against future earning potential (which, scaled up, can also be
understood as setting the rationale for which programs university administrators
choose to support). And finally, the current crisis is unfolding against a general
trend of accountability, where universities are called upon to give an account of
their activities or render some aspects of academic work visible in particular ways. 289 Take Affirmative Action as an example. The policy, while subject to significant and ongoing legal contestation (most recently in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, decided in 2014), was a way for universities to address social inequalities rooted in a history of formal and informal discrimination. The goals were broadly civic, using university admissions as a tool to foster a more inclusive, fair, and representative democracy. In the current climate countries such as the United States and Great Britain are marked by historical levels of economic inequality. This has led many to call for a similar, interventionist policy from universities (and backed by the courts) to expand affirmative action to include economic status as a factor in admissions decisions. However, as the preceding discussion should indicate, this would mean an almost unfathomable challenge to our basic framing of most aspects of university policy and structure along market-‐based ideologies.
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This, as the preceding account demonstrates, radically changes the interface
between universities and other forces within society.
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Chapter 5: Contesting the Public Nature of the
University
Introduction Though highly selective in focus, I hope that the preceding chapters have
accomplished a few things. First, the particular story that I have told about the
development of the modern university positions me to switch from an analytic into
a more prescriptive mode. By showing that crisis signals a point of significant
renegotiation and contestation of once cherished ideals I can now offer an account
of the university that I think is worthy of upholding in this moment of uncertainty.
Second, the account that I’ve provided has situated these ideals in a historical
context, from Kant’s critical vocation for the humanities to Vannevar Bush and Clark
Kerr’s vision of big science and the well functioning multiversity. Hence my use of
these ideals will be attentive to their potential and limitations in what for many
cases will be a very different set of historical conditions. And third, the scope of my
inquiry should now be seen to extend beyond the university itself, but rather to the
political and cultural fields of which universities are a constitutive element. Indeed,
it is this wider constellation that allows us to interpret the “university in crisis”
claim.
My argument in this chapter will proceed in three steps. First I will introduce
four approaches to this topic, one which I think is unhelpful for contending with the
“crisis” claim, two which I think are methodologically valuable up to a certain point,
and one that I find the most instructive methodologically and substantively for
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making normative claims about the university today. I will then pick up a theme
that was introduced but undeveloped earlier in the thesis — namely the public
nature of the university. Making use of the historical account presented in the
preceding chapters, I will argue that the crisis claim, whatever its initial intent, has
the capacity to foreground the public nature of the university and rearticulate what
that might mean in different contexts. What this entails is privileging the critical
over the liberal-‐humanist or scientific vocations of universities in order to secure a
defensible position in the current state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation.
In fact the critical vocation of the university allows it to make certain claims, on its
own terms, on these other components that would otherwise be ceded. In the
concluding section of the chapter I will argue that four elements — a
reconsideration of the nation-‐state, a discussion of politics, an attentiveness to the
effects of the crisis claim, and a return to the crisis/critique cognate — must be
present in advocating for the university’s public status in our contemporary “crisis”
period.
I. Liberal/Humanist Apologies
If the university is a highly complex institution that cannot be spoken of
univocally, and if concentrating on one aspect of it by definition will exclude a host
of other eminently worthy points of concern, then why would it be a problem to
speak in a relatively abstract, aspirational mode? If, for example, you think the
moral issue has gone wanting in departments of economics, professional schools, or
in the undergraduate curriculum, then why not put forth as a regulative ideal the
kind of concerns that Anthony Kronman or other proponents of liberal learning
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think are so worthy of our consideration? It would be up to those in their specific
disciplinary or professional position (student, administrator, employee, parent, etc.)
to determine how this is actualized, but having a regulative ideal would impose
some consistency on whatever policy is being pursued.
Indeed, we have already explored an approach like this in some detail
in Andrew Delbanco’s College — What it Was, Is, and Should Be. Recall that
for Delabanco a well rounded course of study led by professors dedicated to
their teaching function has the effect of, 1) inculcating civic virtues that
facilitate healthy democratic discourse in a pluralist society and 2)
developing the capacity to “enjoy life,” which we can understand as a variant
of the Bildung focus on the holistic development of character. A similar point
has been made by Martha Nussbaum, most recently in Not For Profit: Why
Democracy Needs the Humanities.290 Nussbaum has the general target of “a
world-‐wide crisis in education,”291 which she attributes to an obsession with
growth, an exclusive focus on applied and technical training, and the
intrusion of the profit motive into educational policy — “education for profit”
in her terms. The more proximate version of the crisis for the purposes of
this dissertation (i.e. at the university level) was the spate of closures of
humanities departments that were occurring at the time of her writing — the
highly regarded philosophy department of Middlesex in the UK or calls to
290 Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 291 Ibid., 2.
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close language programs at SUNY Albany were two high profile instances.
She sums up the priorities of education for profit thusly:
The goal of the nation should be economic growth. Never mind about distribution and social equality, never mind about the preconditions of stable democracy, never mind about the quality of race and gender relations, never mind about the improvement of other aspects of a human being’s quality of life that are not well linked to economic growth.292
Along with Delbanco she believes that these priorities are disastrous on both the
individual and collective level. To contrast with this model she advocates an
“education for democracy,” which focuses heavily on the humanities, the benefits of
which are two-‐fold. First off, departing from Rousseau’s conception of childhood,
she argues that engaging the humanities helps us overcome a natural selfishness
and develop a sense of empathy.293 Second, they prepare global citizens by
promoting “the ability to assess historical evidence, to use and think critically about
economic principles, to assess accounts of social justice, to speak a foreign language,
to appreciate the complexities of major world religions.”294 These, Nussbaum
argues, are necessary for democracies to flourish in our globalized world and we
ignore them at our peril.
The argument is not unfamiliar and not without an intuitive appeal. In fact
Nussbaum should be praised for using her public visibility to insist on the enduring
value of the humanities. However, when we place her argument into the state-‐
292 Ibid., 14. 293 Ibid., 34. 294 Ibid., 93.
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economy-‐university-‐culture constellation that I have been tracking problems
immediately arise. For example, the UK policies that we saw in the previous chapter
(cutting humanities programs, measuring academic work in terms of impact,
introducing competition into higher education) come under heavy criticism in Not
for Profit. By contrast Nussbaum praises the American liberal arts model as
preserves of the kind of “education for democracy” that we need. What this
comparison leaves out is any nuanced reading of the conditions in which these two
different forms of higher education are occurring. In the UK the problems besetting
universities are one very visible aspect of the longer neoliberal project of gutting the
welfare state and installing a managerial ethos at the level of the state.295 In the U.S.
liberal arts colleges are heavily underwritten by philanthropy (which Nussbuam
praises) and tuition dollars, which either make them a privilege of the wealthier
classes or are underwritten by student debt. And moreover, if Nussbuam adds the
wrinkle that humanities education is for global citizenship, how are these kinds of
differences between nations or even between parts of one nation’s higher education
system accounted for?296 This is to raise the worry expressed in the previous
295 A similar story, I have argued in chapter three, can be seen in state university systems like the University of California. 296 Now, one could rightly contend that I too have insufficiently attended to issues like the differences between national university systems. However, my general reflections on the relationship between universities and the state, or the challenges in squaring the imperatives of democracy and industrial capitalism in the early 20th century, allow for further specification in a comparative analysis of national university systems or tiers within one country’s higher education sector. Nussbaum’s approach, as my critique suggests, is unhelpful when asking further questions about the role of the state, which will become clearer when I compare her to Bill Readings, Jonathan Cole, and Christopher Newfield later in this section.
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chapter by Tom Looser that “global studies” programs may foster an overly thin set
of civic virtues.
These questions are meant to put pressure on the civic side of these civic-‐
humanist (and primarily liberal) defenses of universities and the centrality of the
humanities within. If the civic side falters then all we are left with is a highly
individualistic form of educational flourishing that is perfectly amendable to the
neoliberal model enacted in the UK and in many parts of the US higher education
sector (education in the humanities, and the values inherent to it that Nussbaum
names, would be one possible choice amongst other courses of study, or a value-‐
added aspect to a professionally oriented curriculum). The kinds of questions that
Nussbaum’s work leads us to ask on this topic in particular, I would argue, lack a
sufficient amount of political sophistication by not seriously engaging the history of
the university as an institution itself, but also in its relationship to the state, the
economy, and social forces.297
297 However, Nussbaum’s book is not about the history of the university so she should not be faulted too much for this omission. Her argument for “education for humanity” in a globalized context is an attempt to rework the civic and moral obligations individuals and nations have towards others in a highly interconnected world. The issue I am raising here is that the history of the university has been, historically, tied to the nation-‐state, even when it came to defenses of liberal learning by Eliot or Hutchins. Thus a call for a more globalized approach would have to work through this history if the university were to retain a coherent self-‐identity that incorporated aspects of its history such as the civic-‐humanist function of higher education. Nussbaum does discuss at length the state of universities in India, where she has done educational work along with the economist Amartya Sen. She worries, reasonably, that the liberal arts are being crowded out of the curriculum by more technological and economically oriented courses of study. However, pursuant to my line of argument, reckoning with issues of general education there would have to deal with a scale very different from that which
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A similar approach can be seen in Stephanie Mackler's Learning for Meaning’s
Sake: Toward the Hermeneutic University.298 For Mackler the problem facing the
university in the early 21st century has two aspects: its “lack of unifying purpose”
and “the widespread cultural struggle with meaninglessness and an over-‐reliance on
banal interpretive explanations.”299 These are exceptionally reasonable concerns
which we’ve seen shared by many thinkers throughout the history of the modern
university. Moreover, Mackler stages her argument in distinction to the “positivist
modern university, which was founded on the quest to produce and disseminate
knowledge.”300 In response to this she writes, “I suggest that we give meaning to the
university precisely by defining it as a place devoted to meaning itself…I call this
new approach to higher education hermeneutic insofar as hermeneutic refers to
studies in understanding, interpreting, or making meaning.”301 Again, this is an
extremely reasonable and attractive ideal that I along with many others included in
this dissertation would wholeheartedly endorse. As Mackler points out, in a culture
saturated with information, one point that can and should be worth emphasizing is
concerned Hutchins of the Harvard Red Book, which is why I think calls for a focus on liberal learning are unlikely to get the hearing they did in mid-‐century America. 298 Stephanie Mackler, Learning for Meaning’s Sake: Towards the Hermeneutic University (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009). 299 Ibid., xviii. 300 Ibid., xxi. 301 Ibid., xx-‐xxi. The distinction being referenced here, but made explicit elsewhere in the book, is between knowledge and meaning. As we saw in the previous chapter, a preoccupation with knowledge can have the kind of effects that Mackler is so concerned with — a loss of depth, a sense of drift, a general disorientation, etc.
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that higher education has modeled and sustained a depth of engagement with ideas,
texts, and the social and natural world that the “crisis” designation may be an
occasion to revisit.
Yet in Mackler we see some of the same problems that we saw in Nussbaum.
Mackler has a slightly different focus, not concentrating on the civic benefits of
studying the humanities, but rather remaining on the Bildung side and participating
in what we might call “the liberal idea of the university” tradition. However, as with
Nussbaum we see a set of oppositions — education for profit vs. education for
democracy, the positivist university vs. the hermeneutic university — that are
intuitively appealing and don’t yield a very expansive set questions that could shed
light on the contemporary crisis of the university. Mackler writes, “To make
meaning is to thoughtfully use language to explain the purpose, significance, reason,
or underlying aims of what occurs in the realm of human affairs. Put another way,
meaning-‐making represents our attempt to create and sustain a conceptual world
through our careful use of language.”302 She later goes on to discuss Hannah
Arendt’s idea of “natality,” which Mackler describes as a “disposition to attend to
questions of meaning.”303 These are both important additions to reformers who, for
example, would have us focus exclusively on civic virtue, or as we saw in the
previous chapter those who would like to hold universities accountable to certain
forms of utility. But this begs several questions: Why is the university the privileged
place for creating and sustaining a conceptual world? What, aside from an anti-‐ 302 Ibid., 22. 303 Ibid., 25.
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positivist orientation,304 are the mechanisms for the university to do this? Does the
way that Mackler frames meaning making, as attending to the existentially
important questions of purpose in everyday life, or how Nussbaum frames the
humanities’ role in allowing us to overcome infantile selfishness, make this ideal a
highly individualistic one?
In short we can make recourse to well worn understandings of ideology and
interpolation to ask how these beliefs – in the intrinsic value of learning, in the need
to supplement knowledge production with meaning production, in the broad civic
benefits of studying the humanities – are materially and discursively called forth in
the current state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation. As Mackler notes, her
book “does not offer a curriculum or policy statement, [but hopes] to provide new
ways in which to conceive of higher education that will influence pedagogy and
policy.”305 This is a laudatory impulse insofar as the reformist idiom has been given
over to the managerial and economized discourses that were described in the
previous chapter. However, an over-‐reliance on metaphor or an unwillingness to
route your ideas through specific institutional, historical, material, or ideological
304 Mackler is highly critical of the prior standard bearer of anti-‐positivism, namely the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which she traces through to the hermeneutics of suspicion and deconstructive impulse of contemporary theorists – all three of which she confusingly labels as positivist themselves. Her concern is that these approaches merely teach us how to read and interpret texts in a way that simply unmasks a hidden truth. To this she opposes a “hermeneutics of retrieval,” where we read in order to reflect on everyday questions of importance and how we can ascribe higher meaning to our lives. (See Mackler, 11-‐13.) It should be clear at this point that I feel this is an ungenerous if not misleading account of critical theory. 305 Ibid., xxi.
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correlates strikes me delimiting the force of the argument — i.e. only appealing to
those who are already persuaded of your position. Throughout Learning for
Meanings Sake and Not for Profit there is an absent account of the reasons for the
contemporary crisis of meaning and fragmentation306 or the democratic deficit that
an education for profit produces, which makes a discussion about the possibilities
for higher education — those ideals that are placed on the table by the “crisis”
designation — limited or similarly restricted to an abstract plane.307
II. The University in Ruins and The Great American University – A Middle
Ground
The criticisms that I have made of the civic-‐humanist approach would seem
to hold for the literary critic Bill Readings, who wrote The University in Ruins308
shortly before his untimely passing in a plane accident in 1994. Readings appeals to
306 Mackler actually does give an account of the crisis, which is a combination of what Max Weber described as “disenchantment” and a reliance on hollowed out “banal” language that Hannah Arendt argued is incapable of speaking to issue of meaning, value, and purpose. Mackler, 3. My argument is that these need further specification in order to be applied to the current context of higher education and the claim that it is in a state of crisis. 307 Bill Readings states this mindset well. For defenders of liberal learning like Nussbaum and Mackler, “all that is required to set things right is clearer (true) communication: the truth will set us free.” Readings, 183. Like Readings I think this faith in true communication betrays an insufficient historical and political consciousness, which I am arguing is necessary for contending with the “crisis” claim. This I why I find the work of Schaar and Wolin so instructive about the student protests of the 1960s, as they routed a similar set of questions through a reckoning with the “technological society,” in which universities had come to play such a central role. 308 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
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an architectural type, the ruin,309 to argue that the university has outlived the
purpose that gave rise to its material and organizational form. Inhabiting the ruin
requires a different kind of academic community, “a community of dissensus that
presupposes nothing in common, would not be dedicated either to the project of a
full self-‐understanding (autonomy) or to a communicational consensus as to the
nature of its unity.”310 The goal is rather “to make [the community’s] heteronomy,
its differences, more complex.”311 While perhaps not as intuitive as Mackler and
Nussbaum’s full throated defenses of liberal learning, Readings’ argument is still a
familiar one to many in the academy who have been trained to oppose reductive
interpretive schemes, yet it too can be seen to suffer from a lack of specificity and
remains in a fairly abstract, theoretical register.
However, I believe that The University in Ruins is a far more helpful book for
my purposes and, along with Jonathan Cole’s The Great American University, puts us
in a better position to appreciate the contemporary “university in crisis” claim. One
reason for this is that Readings’ fairly abstract conclusions are based on a subtle
historical argument about the development of the modern research university (an
account that attempts to ground and assign causal forces to the condition of
309 It can be argued that a ruin sits at the center of Columbia University, my home institution. Low Library was once a functional library and bears inscriptions of the four faculties (Medicine, Law, Theology, Philosophy) at the corners of its central rotunda. This was to be the material form of the integration of knowledge that the modern university symbolized. Today Low Library no longer operates a functional library and instead houses many of Columbia’s various administrative offices. 310 Ibid., 190. 311 Ibid.
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meaninglessness and disunity in a more systematic way than Mackler and
Nussbaum). He argues, thinking about the figures and historical period that were
discussed in chapter two, that “the University and the state as we know them are
essentially modern institutions, and that the emergence of the concept of culture
should be understood as a particular way of dealing with tensions between these
two institutions of modernity.”312 From this tension came the concern first with
Fichte and Kant’s attempt to “inculcate the exercise of critical judgment” throughout
the university community and the rational civil servants they produced, and then
with generating and preserving a sense of national culture, which Readings locates
first in the Germans but then in the development of literary studies in Britain in the
19th and early 20th centuries. The decline of the nation-‐state as the central arbiter of
culture or political influence is thus the signal event that casts the university in a
new mold and ruins the previous structure. Readings calls this delinking of
university work from the nation-‐state and national culture “dereferentialization,”
where references to culture are replaced by the neutral and ever pliable
“excellence.” Much of this we’ve seen born out in the near two decades since the
publication of The University in Ruins, for example in the forms of managerialism and
measures of academic productivity that were discussed in the previous chapter.
What does Readings mean by national culture, and how does this function in
relation to the nation-‐state as a political unit? As we have already seen, the
foundation of the University of Berlin was premised on fusing Wissenschaft and 312 Ibid., 6. Recall as well that for Koselleck “crisis” is the “supreme concept of modernity,” which should remind us how the four component parts that I have been tracking have become so intertwined.
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Bildung, which Readings describes as speaking to “the unity of all knowledges that
are the object of study” and the “process of development, of the cultivation of
character.”313 The turn towards classical cultures by these early Romantic and Neo-‐
humanist scholars was a search for this unity as a foundation for national character,
and much of this was done with an emphasis on philosophical inquiry.314 However,
in the latter years of the 19th and early 20th century culture moved “from philosophy
to literary studies as the major discipline entrusted by the nation-‐state with the task
of reflecting cultural identity.”315 Here the key figures are champions of liberal
learning like Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold, and the focus on unity moves
from a scientific to a theological and literary mode. As Readings puts it,
“if literature is the language of national culture, the written proof of a spiritual activity beyond the mechanical operations of material life, then the liberal education in intellectual culture, through the study of national literature, will produce the cultivated gentleman whose knowledge has no mechanical or direct utility, merely a
spiritual link to the vitality of his national language as literature.”316
It is this sense of culture that gives rise to discussions over the foundation and
preservation of a cannon and grounds some readings of the culture wars of the
1970s-‐1990s. Culture functions in opposition to industry or what Readings call 313 Ibid., 64. 314 It is worth repeating a quote from Humboldt introduced in chapter four: “Whence I conclude, that the freest development of human nature, directed as little as possible to ulterior civil relations, should always be regarded as paramount in importance with respect to the culture of man in society. He who has been thus freely developed should then attach himself to the State: and the State should test and compare itself, as it were, in him.” 315 Ibid., 70. 316 Ibid., 77-‐8.
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“society” and holds out an idea of national unity that can be retrieved in moments of
crisis or drift. Thus for Alan Bloom or Anthony Kronman threats to the cannon are
actually threats to a sense of national unity, which is why not only challenges from
new disciplines (Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, African-‐American Studies) were
met with such disdain, but also why methodological currents within literary studies
(deconstruction, new criticism) were seen as damaging to the nation. As we will see
later in reference to Christopher Newfield’s reading of the culture wars, this
conservative reaction is consistent with a more neutral interpretation that notes the
decline of the nation-‐state as a primary political unit or container of a coherent
cultural narrative. Many left-‐wing critics would also note the abandonment of a
search for unity, once the province of literary studies (or the humanities more
generally), but would not posit this as a spiritual malaise, but rather a function of
global capitalism now superseding and eroding the sovereignty of the nation-‐state
as a discrete political unit that could guarantee a sense of identity or belonging.
Readings’ identification of “excellence” as replacing a commitment to culture signals
this process of dereferentialization and coheres with either the conservative or
liberal critique.
I have included The University in Ruin as a step in the right direction because
the historical account contends with shifts in the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture
constellation and asks how these speak to changes in our understanding of higher
education and its material form. Readings is ultimately a literary critic though, so is
partial to changes closer to his home discipline and, as we saw above, often retreats
to a level of abstraction that may leave readers unsatisfied. In Jonathan Cole’s The
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Great American University317 we get another account that also puts the nation-‐state
at the center of the university’s modern history, but takes a more wide-‐ranging
approach that integrates the knowledge function of the university. For Cole the
decisive turn towards greatness occurs during the mid-‐century following Vannevar
Bush’s push towards federally backed, big science. We read about Bush’s influence
in chapter three, how “paradoxically he had to both bring the government in [to
universities] and leave it out,”318 and how this initially led to a period of great
expansion and productivity and then brought with it the problems signaled by the
student protests.319
This basic advance in the way the sciences were funded had ancillary effects
on the culture of the university and its role in society, but before turning to these it
is important to mention the concrete benefits that big science has had on our
standard of living. Cole devotes a third of his book to demonstrating how a
commitment to basic research, autonomously pursued by researchers in
universities with a sizable investment from federal tax dollars, has shaped
317 Jonathan Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, its Indispensable National Role, Why it Must be Protected (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). 318 Cole, 95. 319 Cole notes a similar, more recent version of this story. During the Clinton administration the federal government again flooded universities with money for biomedical research, which was rapidly advancing with technological innovations. This again brought the government and researchers into closer proximity, but universities were given great freedom in how they pursued biomedical research. Yet during the Bush administration this reversed, and the proximity of government to scientific research again became problematic, as the budgets of the NIH and NSF were cut and priority was given to certain types of research over overs. Cole, 106-‐8.
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contemporary life. Discoveries made in university labs include refrigeration, a basic
fund of knowledge about genes that has had numerous medical applications, the
nicotine patch, and dialysis machines.320 The social and behavioral sciences have
produced complex economic models like congestion pricing and explanations for
social mobility, accounts for behavior like bounded rationality, and sophisticated
interpretations of national myths like the American Dream.321 Beyond this we can
point to massive leaps in our understanding of the natural world, from the earth
sciences to the most cutting edge branches of theoretical physics.322
Aside from taking the time to present the numerous achievements of
university research in their full breadth, this is perhaps a banal observation. But
Cole is adamant that it was not just the linear advance of technology and research
methodologies that led to this explosion in knowledge post-‐WWII. Rather the
system that Bush set in place spoke to a particular state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture
constellation that, in Cole’s eyes, brought the American university to global
preeminence and is worth defending under countervailing pressures. What are the
features of this “Great American university?” Cole provides a list of overlapping
“core values” that shaped the “norms, attitudes, and behavior of those in the
academy.” These are: Universalism (i.e. the ability to appeal to impersonal criteria),
Organized Skepticism, Creation of New Knowledge, Free and Open Communication of 320 193-‐244, Passim. 321 299, 342, Passim. 322 This list is large and growing, which is why Cole set up a website to highlight noteworthy discoveries that have come from universities. See http://university-‐discoveries.com. (Last accessed May 2, 2014.)
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Ideas, Disinteredness, Free Inquiry and Academic Freedom, International Communities
[of inquiry], the Peer Review System, Working for the “Common” Good, Governance by
Authority, Intellectual Progeny, and finally The Vitality of the Community.323
These are perhaps an overly general set of values, but given Cole’s estimation
of Vannevar Bush we can draw some concrete conclusions. First, as Cole writes,
“Erosion of consensus on the core values of the university could easily lead to
structural changes that could undermine the quality of these institutions as well as
the pace of advances in the many different disciplines we depend on for our nation’s
well-‐being.”324 As we have seen in the previous chapter there are direct challenges
to the status of several of these values as holding a core import to the university.325
But more importantly Cole has a specific version of the university in mind — one
which is richly supported, relatively autonomous, driven by goods inherent to the
quest for knowledge, and committed to a set of core values. Moreover this vision of
the university was underwritten by a form of national culture — premised not on
literature but on the idea that massive public investment in the talent of a
population would produce a wide set of social goods — that reaped widespread
social benefits. Cole is not only nostalgic for this “golden era” of American higher
education, but, as with William Bowen, foregrounding a set of political priorities
that are worthy of defending when certain core values are unsettled or deemed in a
state of “crisis.” 323 Ibid., 60-‐8. 324 Ibid., 69. 325 Cole himself catalogues threats to these values in part III of his book.
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I have classed these two studies a middle ground because as much as I think
there is a lot to take from their methodologies — namely their attention to the
university in its historical development, especially as it relates to the nation-‐state —
I find their conclusions wanting. By calling the university a ruin and marking it as a
site for “dissensus” Readings retreats to a level of theoretic abstraction that I
believe, at this historical juncture, is unhelpful. Moreover, his focus downplays the
knowledge function of the university and tends to apply mainly to departments of
literature, cultural studies, or others in the humanities. Cole provides a necessary
corrective to this, but I think he is insufficiently attentive to the radical changes that
have occurred at the level of the nation-‐state. Cole may be correct that the model
which gave rise to the great American university is imperiled, but unlike Marc
Bousquet and others we have encountered in chapter one, he is less willing to see
this as part of a larger ideological project that affects the four components that I
have been tracking throughout the dissertation. Pace Nussbaum, national
educational priorities may reflect the very kinds of democratic subjects that states
currently need.
III. Unmaking the Public University – Fusing the Theoretical and the Material
Christopher Newfield is a literary critic, a scholar of American literature like
Andrew Delbanco, but he also brings an appreciation of the university’s history to
his approach and has the patience to look through budgets. I have already provided
an overview of Newfield’s argument in Unmaking the Public University,326 but it is
worth restating here what I have drawn from his approach in light of the 326 Pages 134-‐139 in this dissertation.
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aforementioned ways of treating the “crisis of the university.” The first is his
reading of the development and “unmaking” of the public university system in
California and across the United States. For Newfield both processes are
expressions of a set of political priorities, the first an extension of the progressive
inheritance of American universities during a period of post-‐war affluence, the latter
a conservative reaction to a broadening of the power structure that universities
played a crucial role in facilitating. As we saw in chapter three with reference to
Wolin and Schaar, the student protests of the 1960s marked an important
transitional period in understanding the direction of this longer historical arc.
Second, there is a concrete material basis to his argument. “For better or
worse,” he writes, “the university has become increasingly responsible for imagining
progress for the whole of society…if it is to succeed, it will need a renewed financial
base and a new confidence in its public mission.”327 Throughout the dissertation we
have seen what Mark Depaepe and Paul Smeyers have called the
“educationalization” of social and political problems,328 where this kind of
responsibility is placed on the university. By placing the plight of the public
university in full view Newfield is drawing our attention to problematic status of
“public” as a political concept, which is to say a point where there is a serious
negotiation between the state, economic forces, and aspects of the culture. And
moreover, he is noting that there is an irreducible financial dimension to the 327 Newfield, 275. 328 Mark Depaepe and Paul Smeyers, “Introduction – Pushing Social Responsibilities: The Educationalization of Social Problems,” Educational Research, 3 (2008), 1-‐11.
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problem, which in the public discourse binds these elements together without
necessarily naming the status of the “public” as a point of investigation itself.
We can make recourse again to Janet Roitman’s discussion of the narrative
effects of crisis to see why Newfield’s approach is so useful for rehabilitating the
public nature of the university, and for understanding the modern “crisis of the
university” more generally. For Roitman “crisis” is not a first order empirical
observation, for example determining whether the various problems that were
discussed in chapters one or four reach the threshold of a crisis. Rather crisis
imposes a narrative frame around events by making the second order claim about
ethical, political, or even aesthetic values329 that are involved in our judgments
about contemporary or historical situations. As she points out in the context of the
2007-‐8 global financial crisis, when we accede to the crisis claim, as it circulated
freely through the media and official governing discourse, we posit a gap between
our current knowledge or practices and an ideal state. Thus we ask, “what went
wrong?” in our valuation of homes or invention of complex financial instruments,
claiming that even the financial experts didn’t understand the economic logic behind
those factors that led to the crisis. We do not ask about the conditions that led to
such schemes of valuation (e.g. counting debits as credits), allowing a whole set of
economic and political choices that underwrote these practices to drift into the
background.
329 Delbanco’s quote from a proud alumni, “Columbia taught me how to enjoy life,” is probably best understood as an aesthetic judgment about a well-‐rounded education.
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To return to the “crisis of the university” and its public status, Newfield states
that an assent to the crisis claim that does not broaden out to a more general
political and cultural field (the “40-‐year Assault on the Middle Class” of the book’s
subtitle) is going to lead to a similarly delimited set of questions — what went
wrong to allow budgets and tuition to spiral so far out of control, what depreciated
the role of learning in the student experience, or why have universities remained
out of touch with social and economic changes, particularly those associated with
the growth of technology? These questions are fine and worthy of investigation, but
for Newfield (and Roitman) they are not best served if we assume the narrative
frame of normalcy/error, or what went wrong to slow the inexorable progress of
institutions of higher education. Rather the “crisis” designation should be an
occasion to excavate the ideals and conditions under which these events could
unfold, which for Newfield is the intrusion of broader political and ideological
projects in the functioning of universities. Moreover, as I have attempted to do here,
his analysis is served by a historical accounting and bolstered by an interrogation of
a concrete set of political priorities, particularly those imposed by changes within
the nature of the state (the gutting of public institutions by the neoliberal project)
and the economy (with the knowledge economy lending to a conception of
education that is a highly individualistic, value-‐added process, as was described by
Simons and Masschelein in the previous chapter).
IV. The Public Nature of the University -‐ Confronting Ideas in their Time
To make the pivot to the public nature of the university, that political issue
that I want to claim should be put in play by contemporary crisis narratives, we can
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turn to Craig Calhoun, a prominent commentator on the status of the public research
university. In “The University and the Public Good,”330 he states that there are at
least four powerful questions that might drive an inquiry into the public character of
the university: “1) Where does its money come from? 2) Who governs? 3) Who
benefits? and 4) How is knowledge produced and circulated?” Debates tend to get
hung up on the first two and the fourth question, which can be addressed by
pointing to the budgets of state university systems, or the tension between faculty
self-‐governance and managerialism (whether from within the bureaucracy itself or
from the state), or by appealing to technological innovations like MOOCs and open-‐
source publishing. The third however is a little trickier, and if anything should
contest the tidiness of debates over budgets, governance, and technology.
Leaving aside questions 1, 2 and 4 for the moment, the question of who
benefits from universities has been staged by thinkers in each of the three historical
periods under consideration. In this section I will retrieve aspects of my historical
account to prime a consideration of how the public nature of universities can be
conceived today. I would argue that how the question of public benefit is
approached is ultimately the most revealing about the state-‐economy-‐university-‐
culture constellation and the limitations and possibilities that it contains during
periods when “crisis” claims are garnering wide acceptance.
Recall that Kant begins The Conflict of the Faculties by appealing to “an
enlightened government, which is releasing the human spirit from its chains and
330 Craig Calhoun, “The University and the Public Good.” Thesis Eleven, 47, no. 2, (2011), 174-‐197.
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deserves all the more willing obedience because of the freedom it allows.”331 The
progressive unfolding of reason, institutionally protected by a university governed
by the Philosophical Faculty, benefited the state by producing critical, but obedient
republican subjects capable of exercising their civic function and ensuring that wise
consul was being provided by those in charge of training scientists, researchers,
doctors, the clergy, or legal professionals. This seems like an excessively broad
answer to the question of who benefits from the university, but turning to Kant’s
What is Enlightenment? will help clarify the public he has in mind here and how it
was elaborated by the subsequent reforms of those associated with the University of
Berlin.
Kant famously defines Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from self-‐
imposed immaturity,” which is to say various forms of dependence on the authority
of others and not one’s own reason. “If I have a book to serve as my understanding,
a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so
on, I need not exert myself at all.”332 As the prior quotation from The Conflict of the
Faculties indicates, Kant is interested in Enlightenment on the collective level, which
he describes as “the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.” However, this is
not an unconditional freedom, but rather restricted to “the use that anyone as a
331 Immanuel Kant (Tr. Mary Gregor), The Conflict of the Faculties, (New York: Abaris, 1979), 9. 332 Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Ed. Tr. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 41.
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scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world,”333 and not for example the
soldier or civil servant who must carry out orders from their superiors for the social
good. We saw a similar distinction in chapter two, where I cited Kant's belief that
“the higher faculties must, therefore, take great care not to enter into a misalliance
with the lower faculty, but must keep it at a respectful distance, so that the dignity of
their statutes will not be damaged by the free play of reason.”334 Governing
authorities, on the other hand, cannot limit the activity of the Philosophical Faculty
“without acting against [their] own proper and essential purpose,”335 because the
free discussion of the ends of policies or issues of public concern ultimately moves
the locus of control to the process of rational inquiry and discussion itself and not to
those who derive influence from inherited authority.336 Wise governance, according
to Kant, needs the spirit of the Philosophical Faculty.
Here we have a better indication of who benefits from the university. The
public that Kant is imagining is not literally a community of scholars, but rather is
modeled on the type of scholarly activity the he described in the relation of the
higher to the lower faculties in the university. We can recall that the benefits of
granting the Philosophical Faculty a degree of freedom were the clarification of
333 Ibid. 334 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 35. 335 Ibid., 45. 336 There is a basic consideration of social reproduction here, as “one age cannot bind itself, and thus conspire, to place a succeeding one in a condition whereby it would be impossible for the later age to expand its knowledge…to rid itself of errors, and generally to increase its enlightenment.” Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 43-‐4.
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prejudices that the higher faculties could not account for themselves, a form of
debate that can be conducted amongst scholars without being beholden to
immediate practical application (e.g. Kant’s defense of his writings on religion), and
the unification of the various branches of knowledge through a commitment to
rational inquiry. The benefit of this is ultimately the Enlightened state, which can
more confidently and consistently enact sound policies and rely on their citizens to
fulfill their civic duty by discussing the wisdom of such policies (in free public
debate).
Fichte was the most explicit in picking up Kant’s Enlightenment enthusiasm
for a philosophical project that aimed for unification amongst the various branches
of knowledge and the progressive movement away from reliance on past prejudices
and dogmatism.337 But as conditions changed, and nationalism and national culture
become more pressing concerns (i.e. as the German Enlightenment started to
position itself dogmatically against what it took to be French and English variants)
the notion of the public benefit shifted to emphasize aspects of culture. As Jürgen
Habermas writes of Humboldt and Schleiermacher, “both thinkers were convinced
that, if only scientific work were turned over to the dynamics of the research
337 Habermas nicely captures this sentiment, writing that “the university was to owe its inner connection to the life world and the totalizing power of idealism. The reformers attributed to philosophy a unifying power with respect to (as we would say today) cultural tradition, to socialization, and to social integration.” Jürgen Habermas, “The Idea of the University — Learning Process,” New German Critique, 41 (1987), 10.
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process,338 the universities would serve as focal points for moral culture, and indeed
for the spiritual life of the nation generally.”339 Who benefits here is the German
nation, which can look to its universities as sources of inspiration and ensurers of a
spirit of national culture. This is slightly different than Kant’s commitment to the
progressive unfolding of reason, and through the 19th century it was this answer to
who benefits that widely obtained, leading to both consistent state support (which,
as we saw, both impressed and troubled visiting American scholars) and an
expansion of the Mandarin’s social influence.
However, during the same period we began to see the undoing of this
consensus, as the autonomous sciences pursued specialized lines of inquiry whose
complexity eluded the kind of unity imagined by early reformers, the modern
industrial economy required new specialized forms of professional training, and the
goods of higher education began to be consolidated amongst the Bildungsburger, the
Mandarins, and other privileged classes. As Habermas writes, “In the sheltered
inwardness enjoyed by these Mandarins, the neo-‐humanist ideal was deformed into
the intellectually elitist, apolitical, conformist self-‐conception of an internally
autonomous institution that remained far removed from practice while intensively
conducting research.”340
338 Here he is referencing the fusion of Bildung and Wissenschaft, pursued in “solitude and freedom,” the fuller articulation of which we saw in chapter two. 339 Habermas, “The Idea of the University — Learning Process,” 9. 340 Ibid. 13.
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The “crisis of learning” that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century
showed just how mismatched these answers to who benefited from universities
were with political, economic, and social realities. Put another way, no longer were
these benefits seen as long-‐term, broadly distributed, or able to be framed in terms
of enlightenment, unity, and wholeness.341 Modernists like Weber were attempting
to return to Calhoun’s question in light of these changed circumstances, arguing that
“academic prophecy [i.e. the attempt to conjure up a vision of wholeness in a
condition of growing complexity] will create only fanatical sects but never a genuine
community.”342 He advocated things like “the plain duty of academic integrity” or
the task of the teacher to “teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts…facts
that are inconvenient of their party opinion.”343 In such calls you see Weber
attempting to renovate some basis for the self-‐understanding of academics and
students that could contend with present realities. Unfortunately, such calls were
met with a more intransigent sect within the Mandarin class, with devastating
effects on universities and society.
To summarize, my account of the German crisis provides us with a set of
resources that can be helpful for answering Calhoun’s third question. In particular I
am attracted to the kind of social benefit that is imagined to come with granting the
341 Ringer writes of the “unconscious mental habit” of Mandarins to appeal to wholeness during the Weimar period, for example casting their pedagogy and research in terms of “‘whole’ insights for morally profitable experiences, rather than ‘merely’ analytical techniques.” Ringer, 394. 342 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 155. 343 Ibid., 151.
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university a good deal of autonomy with the expectation that it maintains what
Habermas calls a spirit of “corporate consciousness” or what Cole called the
prevailing “norms, attitudes, and behavior of those in the academy .” The benefits
were widespread in their conception (the protection of an Enlightened state or
culturally ennobled nation, the development of both science and the character of
students who pass through the university, the commitment to a spirit of rational
inquiry and criticism), but this did not prevent specific ideals from emerging as
guiding lights for the university. For Kant and his successors the nature of this
corporate consciousness found different articulations — Reason, Bildung and
Wissenschaft, plain intellectual integrity — but in each case there was a
responsibility that the university took upon itself for being afforded a degree of
freedom, and how that responsibility was interpreted became a major theme during
the period when universities were said to be in crisis.
In the development of the American university system in the early parts of
the 20th century, especially as the German model was integrated into state
university systems, the question of who benefits was again powerfully posed. As we
saw in chapter three, the major forms this question took were ones of access vs.
elitism and disinterested scholarly research vs. practical, local applications of
knowledge produced in the hard and social sciences. With Hutchins and the
Harvard Red Book we witnessed a new front opened up in these debates, with the
centrality of the humanities foregrounding a broader civic function that was
envisioned for higher education. This raised the question of who benefitted from
universities to a national level by asking questions of the kind of society that
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America could become, given the nature of how it had already changed (e.g. as a
developed industrial capitalist economy or as a nation of immigrants). Most
answers were routed through some variant what Clyde Barrow described as “the
contradictory imperatives that emerged from attempts to reconcile the rise of
corporate capitalism with the claims of political democracy.”344
Recall that the Harvard Red Book departed from three sweeping changes
occurring in the mid-‐20th century: the “staggering explosion in knowledge”
produced by specialized research, the growth in educational institutions with
universal free and compulsory secondary education, and “the ever growing
complexity of society itself.”345 This led the committee to pose the following
question: “What then is the right relationship between specialistic training on the
one hand, aiming at any one of a thousand different destinies, and education in a
common heritage and toward a common citizenship on the other?”346 The vision
that emerges from General Education in a Free Society and Science — The Endless
Frontier is one that appreciates the unique place of the university in relation to “the
body of modern knowledge,”347 the catalyst for the “thousand different destinies”
that awaited graduates, but one that carried the Bildung tradition forward by also
emphasizing “preparation for life in the broad sense of completeness as a human
344 Ibid. 345 General Education in a Free Society, 5. 346 Ibid. 347 Ibid., 36.
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being, rather than in the narrower sense of competence in a particular lot.”348 Again,
the freedom accorded to scientists, social scientists, and humanists carried with it a
responsibility, namely to contribute to these broad civic goals alongside their
narrower scholarly pursuits.
As was the case in Germany, this required a massive amount of state support
with benefits that were broad and not immediately discernible — the “downstream”
benefits that Bush expected from funding basic as opposed to applied research. The
CMP provides a clear example of how these public benefits could be conceived at the
level of a state university system. Unlike Kant and his 19th century successors there
is no strict corporate ideal inherent to the university, but rather a vision of mass
democracy for which leaders like Hutchins/Bryant, Bush, and Kerr found correlates
in the emerging shape of the American university — in the teaching, research, and
administrative functions respectively. These are goods, features of what Jeffrey
Williams called “the welfare state university,” that still cut an attractive figure for
contemporary commentators on higher education.
However, the student movements of the 1960s showed how the “ever
growing complexity of society itself,” and the complexity of the multiversity in
particular, could not be so easily contained by the public-‐spiritedness expressed by
the above thinkers. In a sense they attempted to show that rationalization, the
building of mass society, was not the same as Kant’s public use of reason, which
carried with it a critical reflection on the values and long-‐term ends of the
university’s position in post-‐war America. Nor was the condition of universities 348 Ibid., 4.
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able to fulfill the civic-‐humanist aspirations of Hutchins and Bryant. The two major
targets of the students’ critiques were the failures of democratization (represented
in the Free Speech Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and arms of the
civil rights and women's liberation movements) and the values of the new state-‐
economy-‐university-‐culture constellation (represented in anti-‐war movements like
the Third World Liberation Front and New Left leaders like Herbert Marcuse). As
John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin wrote at the time, “the connections between the
campus on the one side and economy, government, and society on the other have
grown so close that the boundaries between them are hard to distinguish.”349 This is
why the student protests were thematized by Reagan, Nixon, and other conservative
figures as a crisis that reached far beyond the campus walls.
The irony of the student protests is that, as Christopher Newfield
persuasively argues, they follow a period during which the public benefit of
universities was pushing into new areas, growing a broad and inclusive middle class
and raising the general standard of living for many Americans. Yet the aftermath of
the protests, initially a time during which the question of who benefits underwent
intense contestation, was the consolidation of a conception of universities
producing goods along more private, less politicized lines. The “culture wars” of the
80s, 90s, and 2000s neutralized those forms of scholarship that were directly
confrontational to the power structure, and through declining state investments and
novel ways for universities to raise money (e.g. the Bahye-‐Dole Act that allowed
universities to profit from patents produced by researchers) a more economized 349 Schaar and Wolin, 9.
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approach to education came into effect. In chapter three I argued that such changes
track a shift from an industrial to a service economy and a move away from the
expansive system of state investments that flourished in the post-‐war period.
To summarize once more, my account of the post-‐war expansion of the
American university and its subsequent crisis marked by the student protests
recapitulates some aspects of the German example and provides some novel ideas
about the public nature of the university. As with the German case, a model was set
up in which a broad and generous system of state support was provided to
universities, but immediate, short-‐term benefits were not to be expected. Rather,
the public goods produced by universities were taken to be widely distributed.
Whereas in Germany this was initially expressed in terms of enlightenment, cultural
ennoblement, and the autonomous development of fields of inquiry, in the United
States it took the form first of a civic-‐humanist commitment to democracy and later
of producing a technologically sophisticated and productive middle class society. I
again want to underscore the attractiveness and demonstrated achievements of this
type of broad public support, where universities were entrusted to hold themselves
to a set of standards, Habermas’ “corporate consciousness,” and through the
autonomous work of faculty as researchers and teachers many social benefits were
accrued.
However, the novel aspect of the American example is the productiveness of
the multiversity and the imperative, articulated forcefully by the student movement,
to take the complexity of the institution seriously. Neither Hutchins/Bryant’s belief
in the civic-‐humanist ideals of general education, Bush’s trust in science’s ability to
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push past the frontiers of knowledge in a politically disinterested manner, nor
Kerr’s functionality of the multiversity were alone able to provide a sufficient self-‐
understanding for those within the university nor a compelling account of its public
mission for those without once the “university in crisis” designation started to
circulate. Moreover, the knowledge function positioned the university differently in
society. Whereas Humboldt and Schleiermacher imagined that “universities would
serve as focal points for moral culture, and indeed for the spiritual life of the nation
generally,” the American university was better placed to produce new knowledge
and disseminate essential skills and information on a mass scale (as we saw, for
example, in the tiered structure of the CMP). This placed the Bildung tradition, or
the nature of the civic-‐humanist function more generally, in an ambiguous situation.
My reading of the student protests suggests that it was this ambiguity that was at
play and contested at a moment when the values attached to the knowledge
function were seen as problematic — particularly as these values were expressed on
the level of the state, the economy, and in social mores.
In returning to the German and American examples of the “crisis the
university” we can see that the status of educational ideals change as they undergo a
set of historical and geographical displacements. This may seem like a facile
remark, but the subtext of my argument is that contemporary renderings of the
crisis and the questions and responses they generate are not sufficiently attentive to
these changes, particularly as they link up with transformations at the level of the
state and the economy. In chapter four we saw the proliferation of New Public
Management, arguments for the global university, and the disciplining of knowledge
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production through different schemas of valuation. These have caused a great deal
of discomfort and discord within the university for reasons that I share and hope to
have conveyed, but they also reveal something important about the ways in which
the public good is conceived today, when the power of the state is so thoroughly
reduced and the boundaries of communities is harder to locate.
With the foregoing discussion in mind we can turn once more to the present
“crisis.” If we can extract a lesson from my reconstructed narrative it is that
universities must engage their historical moment in a thoughtful manner, especially
when their role in the state-‐economy-‐university-‐culture constellation is being
contested and the effects of scale and complexity are being raised. What I find so
compelling about Germany in the early 20th century and the U.S. student protests is
that they reveal two moments when universities were seen as absolutely central to
society, either for moral and technical guidance in the service of a nation growing in
power and status or for constructing what Schaar and Wolin called “the
technological society.” In the former instance orthodox Mandarins interpreted the
centrality of universities in a positive light, making their quest for wholeness
amenable to a damaging form of nationalism in a way that didn’t take either the
scale of higher education or the complexity of society seriously. With the student
movements it was unclear whether the centrality of universities to economic and
national goals was a good thing, or whether the space of critique or imagining
alternative social and political arrangements, for many a good that we should expect
from the disinterested study that occurs at universities, had been swallowed up by
the scale and complexity of the multiversity.
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What is interesting about our present moment is that “the knowledge
society,” some would argue, both does and does not need to see universities as a
central institution. On the one hand universities are still privileged for their
production of knowledge, ability to conduct big science, and provide graduates
advanced training in many different fields.350 We saw this, for example, in the
Lisbon council’s vision of universities making Europe “the most competitive and
dynamic knowledge economy in the world, capable of sustained growth with more
and better jobs and greater social cohesion.” Yet on the other hand it is less clear
that we look to universities to raise issues of culture or push political questions of a
broad and sweeping manner in the way that the two prior crises did.351 The
complexity and scale of higher education has grown once more and questions of
value have become drowned out by questions of management and coordination —
seen perhaps most clearly in the enthusiasm for MOOCS and their potential to
streamline the teaching function. This line of thinking leaves the civic-‐humanist side
of the university’s tradition without a clear audience, or makes an individualistic
conception of education that is measured in terms of market successes more
comprehensible.
However, there is another absolutely essential lesson that we can draw from
my preceding account, which is that the question of public benefit has not found an 350 Though this is by no means assured, if you look to the kinds of research conducted by private companies like Google and online educational models of organizations like Code Academy. 351 Here I am referring to Newfield’s account of the culture wars, in which highly organized think tanks systematically attacked the legitimating claims for universities to be involved in these kinds of activities. See Newfield, 51-‐67, 239-‐264.
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attractive or inspiring answer when approached in any short term, narrow calculus.
The challenge that faces us today is that the crisis designation often hastens our
thinking, thus we press to resolve the question of whether universities are still an
institution of central importance, and if so what form they should take. There is
nothing wrong with asking questions of the following nature about the university:
What activities is it appropriate for them to be engaged in? Which political and
social developments bear commentary and engagement and which should be
avoided so as the preserve the disinteredness of academic work and the associated
goods of academic freedom? Are there ideals from the history of the university that
can inspire a corporate consciousness appropriate to the present moment? From
Kant onwards these kinds of questions are built in to the very raison d’être of the
university, but what I have been arguing is that how we approach these questions is
absolutely essential. We need to lengthen the time-‐frame of our thinking,
habituating ourselves to thinking outside of either the normalcy/error calculus or
problem/solution binary that crisis often promotes.
V. Conclusion
What would this mean for answering the question of who benefits from the
university today? By way of conclusion I will suggest four elements that I think are
necessary for an answer that leverages the “crisis” claim as a moment to open
certain questions about the public nature of the university, as opposed to producing
a delimited set of options and considerations.
The Nation-‐State
The status of the nation-‐state needs to be taken seriously when discussing
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the “crisis of the university.” As I have tried to signal in the previous chapters, the
historical accountings that I think are most valuable are ones that see the
development of the modern university alongside that of the nation-‐state. Moreover,
following the work of Tom Looser, to be overly hasty in our assumption that the
political unit of the nation-‐state is diminished to the point where we must adopt a
globalized frame has the danger of aligning universities with the logic of global
capitalism. Recall that the key moment in both the German and the U.S. university
systems was the leveraging of state support to raise the university to a level where
national ends could be achieved through it. In Germany this broke the system of
being paid directly for instruction and freed up academics to be more autonomous
in their research pursuits. In the U.S. the use of federal and state tax dollars to fund
basic research at universities introduced a scale of support that could not be
matched by private interests. In both cases the involvement of the state, in financial
support as well as seeing the universities as institutions positioned to help achieve
national ends, allowed for the development of world renowned schools.
Furthermore, it allowed for a distinctive corporate consciousness to emerge
amongst academics who broadly agreed on a set of values and responsibilities
attached to their work, values which were not derived from appeals to the direct
external interests of the state or the economy.
The situation has now changed, partly, as Newfield and others have shown,
as a result of an ideologically driven project that diminished the levels of state
funding, partly as a result of the supervening economic forces. In most nations
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(China being a notable exception)352 there is little appetite for increased public
expenditure on higher education, and the scale that the state could bring to fund
research and other university operations is no longer out of the reach of private
entitles like Google or the larger foundations that influence national policy. But this
does not mean that calls for renewed levels of public support are quixotic. Rather,
as former university leaders like Jonathan Cole and William Bowen have argued,
funding higher education more generously reflects a set of priorities that many
would find laudable.353 Recall Bowen’s observation that teaching, like the arts,
cannot be treated like other sectors of public investment, where productivity and
efficiency gains can lower investment costs. Those who invoke crisis and attach it to
spiraling costs may have a worthy point about keeping higher education within
reach for people of modest means, but it should not blind us to the fact that expense
is built into the educational process and there are values beyond return on
investment that are expressed in this type of broad public support. These are values
that the frame of the nation-‐state can contain better than global capitalism, or at a
minimum there are few strong examples that should give universities confidence
that they can retain cherished aspects of their tradition in a purely globalized
352 China is currently attempting to build an equivalent to the Ivy Leagues, called the C9, which receives a disproportionate amount of state investment relative to other parts of the Chinese higher education sector. 353 This is different than what Readings referred to, where universities managed a cannon to instill a sense of national culture. The values here are more political, as seen for example in Christopher Newfield’s Remaking the University project, which gathers essays and analysis that aim to shift policy considerations back to the logic of public investment that led to the post-‐war expansion of American universities. http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/. (Last accessed May 2, 2014.)
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context.
Politics
This leads naturally to the second point, which is that the political nature of
the crisis claim must be taken seriously. One striking feature of the German and U.S.
“crises” is that what people had to say about universities, whether the orthodox or
modernist Mandarins, or protesting students and their foes in the administration,
linked up neatly with broader considerations of politics, economics, and culture.
This was seen most clearly in Schaar and Wolin’s account of the student protests at
the University of California — Berkeley, where free speech, civil rights, and anti-‐
imperialism protests in the university bore directly on the way the university and
state, economic, and cultural pursuits were mutually reinforcing. But it can also be
seen in the intransigence of the orthodox Mandarins, who in refusing to engage the
political climate in which they undertook their work gave themselves over to a
process wherein their work was politicized nevertheless, in this case in the service
of a grotesque version of nationalism.
The call to take politics seriously is not a call for a more direct form of
political intervention on the part of academics, or again to take an example from
demands of ethnic studies programs in the 1960s, to measure all academic work in
terms of relevance to pressing issues of the day. It is rather, following Newfield, to
appreciate the fact that universities are enmeshed in a broader political field, where
disciplinary disputes in the humanities extend outward to a consideration of how
discussions of justice, culture, achievement, and belonging are staged and who is
authorized to participate. The accomplishment of culture warriors, to undermine
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the gains that universities had made in broadening the American power structure, is
a good example of the fact that how university work is conceived, discussed, and
justified has sweeping political implications beyond campus walls. Thus defenses of
“education for democracy” over “education for profit” reduce the imperative to
understand how universities operate in this wider political field and leads to a more
limited set of answers to the question of what universities are and should be.
In short the crisis designation should make us not only appreciate that values
are at play, but also should raise a set of political considerations because the
situation we are in reveals a whole pattern of decisions that have already been made
and values that we have been committed to, perhaps without fully appreciating the
consequences. What I have been arguing is that “crisis” often marks a moment
when such values have been contested in an attenuated sense and thus the moment
should not be dismissed lightly. There are models that we can draw from the
university’s past, but the serious thinking and discussion comes in how we imagine
the full constellation of how the university functions in relation to the state, the
economy, and society.
The Effect of the Crisis Claim
In the introduction I recounted the many senses that have been attached to
crisis, beginning with Koselleck’s historical accounting of the term from its Greek
origins into European national languages, and then examining how the term has
come to be used today. This range of meanings included: judgments of health and
sickness; questions about the final status of good and evil or right and wrong;
considerations for and against critical decisions; issues of recurrence verses epochal
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change, or normal disruptions verses states of emergency; the ability for our
institutions to provide the kinds of goods upon which societies have come to
depend; or positing a failure, or gap between reality and ideals that needs to be
closed. There is a temptation to collapse these different senses into one another, for
example when the global financial crisis of 2007-‐8 is treated alternatively as a
matter of life and death for the financial system (necessitating large bailouts), a
revelation of the gap between our current scheme of valuation and normal market
forces, and a legitimation crisis concerning the ability of governing authorities to
regulate the economic realm. The situation is similar in universities, where leaders
like John Sexton of NYU are attempting to usher universities into a “new axial age” of
globalized education networks, conservative critics like Arum, Roksa, and Kronman
positing a gap between the ideals of liberal education and the degraded form of
learning found of campuses today, or Hacker & Dreifus’ are offering an alarmist
accounting of the ills plaguing higher education.
From this diverse set of uses we can learn that it is important to thematize in
what sense crisis is being employed, so as not to confuse these different senses and
the discrete set of issues that they call forth. As the foregoing account has
demonstrated, there are effects that issue from these different senses of crisis,
especially as universities navigate changes in the nature of the economy (the
knowledge economy), the state, and the effect of technology on culture. However,
doing this requires the kind of slow, reflective thinking that Roitman and others
have called for, wherein we interrogate what it means to accede to the crisis claim in
the first place. Such an approach can provoke productive discussions about working
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within constraints (where the dominant ideals are starting to be overstretched by
conditions) and isolating possibilities that may inhere in the present moment.
Returning to the Crisis/Critique Cognate
The question of who benefits from universities is not a literal one, or needn’t
be answered by naming a specific set of parties (which Clark Kerr did, for example,
in Uses of the University).354 If we broaden our thinking, think downstream as Bush
imagined, then what we are really naming is the public when we answer this
question. So, for example, we can locate in academic work a kind of critical practice,
one that Kant established in the Philosophical Faculty and in the enlightened use of
reason, that universities may still be best positioned to uphold. The ability to reflect
on long-‐term ends and values, to question anything as Derrida and his cohorts in
GREPH would say (to which I will return in a moment), is something we can locate
in a distinct form of corporate consciousness in the university, which follows a
different set of motives from a) formal politics, b) the media or communication
networks, or c) an orientation towards different measures of productivity or short
term, applied research and teaching programs. Yet the benefits of this type of
critical consciousness is not a private good that is passed along to students (e.g. in
teaching critical thinking skills), or limited to the work of academics, but rather
names a value that societies have accorded themselves since the inception of the
modern university.
An example of what I have in mind can be drawn from Jacques Derrida and
his involvement in the 1980s in a group called GREPH (Le Groupe de Recherche sur 354 See p. 116 of this dissertation.
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l'Enseignement Philosophique), which contested a set of reforms introduced in 1973
by the French education minister René Haby.355 Active throughout the 1970s and
1980s, GREPH produced a series of documents (and founded a new institution, the
College International de Philosophie), which argued for a sustained commitment to
philosophy’s critical function as a central pillar to the education system as well as
the practice and teaching of humanities subjects themselves.
A key text for Derrida and other GREPH members is Kant’s Conflict of the
Faculties, from which they take two key lessons. The first is that Kant’s critical
function of the humanities, coupled with his definition of Enlightenment that calls
for scholars to speak unreservedly on all matters using their own rational capacities,
names an “unconditional” space of resistance to forms of instrumental rationality.
Derrida writes that “this principle of unconditionality presents itself, originally and
above all, in the Humanities. It has an originary, and privileged place of
presentation, of manifestation, of safekeeping in the Humanities.”356 Put another
way, the Humanities, as conceived by Kant and Derrida, help us locate a principle
from which a model of free, open, and rational (i.e. beholden to a search for the truth
and not extrinsic ends) discourse that is set off from other parts of society and other
parts of the university. Even if this kind of unconditionality is not in fact tenable,
355 The so called “Report Haby” introduced concrete measures such as a reduction in the amount of philosophy teaching positions nationally and marked what GREPH saw as a “de facto destruction of the teaching of philosophy” in favor of the sciences and vocational training. See Jan Plug, “Translator’s Foreword,” in Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University, Ed., Tr. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), x. 356 Jacques Derrida, “The University without Condition,” Without Alibi, Ed., Tr. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 207.
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Derrida argues that “the idea of this space of the academic type has to be
symbolically protected by a kind of absolute immunity, as if its interior were
inviolable.”357
The second lesson that Derrida draws from Kant is that the critical function
of the humanities requires both a sense of trust and a sense of responsibility. These
two requirements are joined in the link between the vocation of the professor and
the act of professing. He writes that “the discourse of profession is always, in one
way or another, a free profession of faith; in its pledge of responsibility, it exceeds
pure techno-‐scientific knowledge.”358 He continues, “to profess consists always of a
performative speech act, even if the knowledge, the object, the content of what one
professes, of what one teaches or practices, remains on the order of the theoretical
or the constative.”359 What we expect of universities, drawing we in the widest
sense of “we the public” who see the modern university as a central institution in
our political, economic, and cultural lives, is that university work holds a critical
reserve that extends beyond the more applied, technical, or ideological knowledge
practices. We saw this in Max Weber’s conception of the vocation of the scholar,
who is committed to “plain intellectual integrity” and pursuing research knowing
that one’s findings are likely to be displaced down the road.
357 Ibid., 220. 358 Ibid., 215. 359 Ibid.
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To get a better understanding of these two lessons we can look at the
example of censorship. In chapter two we saw how Kant’s writings on religion fell
afoul of Woellner and the Prussian authorities. However, Derrida notes that such
forms of “royal censorship” no longer obtain today in liberal democratic societies.
Rather, “the unacceptability of a discourse, the noncertificaiton of a research project,
the illegitimacy of a course offering are declared by evaluative actions: studying
such evaluations is, it seems to me, one of the tasks most indispensable to the
exercise of academic responsibility, most urgent for the maintenance of its
dignity.”360 Being able to identify and stage a discourse about these evaluations, of
which we’ve encountered throughout the preceding chapters (e.g. in New Public
Management, Impact Factor, employability of graduates), is here explicitly named as
a responsibility professed by those in the university.
The aforementioned focus on presentation in the Humanities here, on
questions of unofficial, diffuse forms of censorship, can be understood as preserving
what Kant called for in the distinction between the public and private use of reason.
Recall that the private use of reason restricts the permissibility of critique, but in
such a way that allows the process of enlightenment to proceed.361 The issue that
Derrida is drawing our attention to in framing the essence of philosophy as the right
to question anything is precisely this issue of where we draw the distinction 360 Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” Eyes of the University, Ed., Tr. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 144-‐145. 361 The definition of the private use of reason is “that which a person may make in a civic post or office that has been entrusted to him.” “What is Enlightenment,” 43. The obedience demanded of those occupying such posts is for the public good, something akin to Rousseau’s voluntary alienation in The Social Contract.
222
between the public and private use of reason. As conceptions of learning become
ever more economized and individualized, as graduate school becomes ever more
concerned with the formal mechanisms of professionalization, as professors are
beholden to metrics that measure their work in terms of impact and applied value,
as the culture wars and the broader neoliberal project have reshaped our
understanding of public goods, things have been rendered private that should
remain public. The university has the institutional resources to rehabilitate the
public use of reason, because, as the account that I have given demonstrates, it
departs from a different set of motivations and justifications from other parts of
society.
Why does insisting on the critical function of the humanities provide the best
form of corporate consciousness in a period when the university is taken to be in
“crisis?” And how does this amount to naming a public? It is because those sectors
of society that support the discussion and reflection on long-‐term ends should be
preserved, especially when these practices have been so marginalized by the
neoliberal project and are so easily abandoned in times of great uncertainty. Whilst
it is fine to also insist on developing citizens who can lead lives of purpose and
meaning, the civic-‐humanist argument is likely to fall on deaf ears if it is not
institutionally protected, even if only “symbolically,” by the principle that Derrida
and Kant advocate — namely the right to question anything. As with the two prior
“crises,” this principle can facilitate a necessary dialogue that renegotiates cherished
ideals during periods of great change in the state-‐economy-‐culture-‐university
constellation, as opposed to seeking closure by acceding to crisis narratives that
223
approaches the university in terms of a sociology of error. This may not have the
appeal of a reform package or the elegance of a call to return to timeless educational
ideals, but as I hope to have demonstrated, it models the best of the university’s past
and preserves the kind of conversations we need in these times of “crisis.”
224
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