Note: This paper was given at the Third Annual Conference on Intellectual Freedom, April 1997, Montana State University-Northern
What I want to do tonight is a familiar critical gambit: Rip aside the veils of misunderstanding, penetrate the mists of misrepresentation, to expose what I think is the truth. Or at least a clearer and more capacious version of it. This is the closest a cultural critic gets to the prophetic mode: "It is written...but I say unto you."
What is written? What is written is that there is a cultural war on between politically correct lefties inside the university and neo-conservative curmudgeons outside the university-curmudgeons who argue that academic freedom is under unprecedented threat from prissy speech codes and politicized professors unconcerned with older standards of objectivity. The lefties, on the other hand, insist that curricula are more diverse and open and vital than ever before.
So what I want to do is this. First, I want to summarize the major issues of the cultural war, as the participants understand them. I want to summarize them quickly, because, to me, they are a bit congealed and familiar. Then I want to set aside this cold porridge and serve up what I hope is a more enticing dish, the main course. And in that, I want to take the conservative criticism seriously. I agree that the academy is in a hell of a mess, but I want to move from that perception in some sharply different directions. Here are two points I want to make.
The first is that the chief threat to academic freedom is not political correctness, but the market-driven managerial influence, the impulse to subject universities to quantitative standards of efficiency and productivity, to turn knowledge into a commodity, and open sites of inquiry into job training centers. That's the first point.
The second point involves the implications of this. The implications, as I see it, are these: the liberal arts tradition, if it is understood as a worldview rather than a collection of courses, poses a radical challenge to the managerial impulse, far more radical than self-proclaimed traditionalists like Bill Bennett and others realize.
This is my theme: I aim to emphasize the radicalism of liberal arts tradition, and the need to tap into that tradition if we want to revitalize our concept of academic freedom. Make it more than a self-protective slogan; make it intellectual freedom, if you want, or just freedom, the theme of this conference.
First, let's look at this neo-conservative assault on the academy. It's been repeated so often that it might almost be called "the official critique." As tuition costs soar, professors suckle at the public teat, writing impenetrable jargon, ignoring students or teaching them lamely, protected by an outmoded tenure system. Students are baffled, wandering, ignorant, and their free speech is silenced by dour custodians of political correctness.
The origins of this sad situation, according to the official critique, can be traced to the same source as every other evil in late twentieth century American culture: the 1960s counterculture. Its assault on standards led, from this view, to grade inflation, a failure of faculty nerve, an academic culture that blends a pervasive moral relativism with goose-stepping ideological conformity. That's the critique. Well, it's tempting to dismiss it, but as Richard Nixon said, in a different context, "That would be wrong."
Consider the reflex response of most left academics to the conservative view. The reflex response is dismissal rooted, I would argue, in a kind of limitless self-satisfaction: "I'm all right, Jack."
Consider their response to Allen Bloom, author of a book that caused quite a stir about ten years ago when it came out, The Closing of the American Mind. Almost to a man and woman, the academic establishment in the humanities closed ranks against Bloom. Like later conservative critiques, The Closing of the American Mind was full of mindless rant against the sixties counterculture, the demonic aspects of rock and roll (which could be discovered, as you know, if you played the right song backwards, slowly.) There was a lot of this sort of thing in Bloom's book. But beneath it, beneath all the fulmination--I actually read this book; I was curious--I discovered that beneath all the conservative tirade there was a note of longing, of pathos, you might almost say a longing for longing. Bloom wanted students to establish an erotic relationship with knowledge.
I always tell the graduate students on the first day they appear in the history department at Rutgers that I want them to establish an erotic relationship with knowledge. It causes those of them who are drifting off to jerk awake quickly. "Erotic? Better wake up for this."
But it's true. I mean erotic in the strict, etymological sense, i.e., avid pursuit. Bloom wanted this. He wanted students to embark on a quest and they weren't doing it. He was upset about that. Bloom's liberal critics, intent on defending their turf, missed his fundamental insight. The fundamental insight was this: there's something missing in American higher education, some defect of spirit.
Now, few participants in the cultural wars have even hinted what that defect might be. Instead, the right wing has turned almost all its energies to an attack on multiculturalism as simply a form of political correctness, and that attack has provoked the left wing defense of multiculturalism as intellectual openness.
Both sides, I would suggest (like a good liberal academic) are on to something. Conservative charges of anti-intellectualism have some merit. The academy has always sheltered lazy professors who died from the neck up at tenure. It's a familiar pattern. What is new is that anti-intellectualism comes tricked out now in theoretical verbiage, the meat-grinder approach to theory, wherein Gramsci, Foucault, Lacan, whoever, are used as tools to demonstrate some predictable thesis that the author has decided upon in advance. You can find this, pick any scholarly journal in the humanities, flip through and you will find articles, I believe, that illustrate this practice. And at the same time, in the last fifteen years or so, vaguely postmodern leftist sentiment, for lack of a better term, has also justified a kind of pseudo-populist celebration of corporate-sponsored entertainment based on a determination to characterize any judgement of intellectual or aesthetic quality as elitist, except the judgement that this or that particular production is elitist.
Now, what I want to suggest to you is that this refusal of judgement is precisely the opposite of what liberal education is all about. So I'm granting the conservative critics what I just said, the merit in their critique: the existence of anti-intellectualism in the academy proceeding under left, or, liberal auspices.
But, on the other side, there are genuine signs of vitality also emerging from some of the same sources. Postmodern cultural theory, for example, has encouraged the emergence of challenges to positivist orthodoxy in a variety of disciplines, even the so-called hard sciences, let alone the soft ones. The recognition that scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, is embedded in culture, history and power relations is a liberating idea to me, an important idea.
On a more mundane level, in the classroom we also have the exhilarating spectacle, exhilarating to me at least, of multiculturalism actually at work. A few years ago I was asked to sit in on a colleague who was coming up for tenure. It's part of our ritual, to make sure they're showing up for their classes and doing what they're supposed to do. Well, I did that, expecting it to be a fairly routine performance. It was not; it was extraordinary. It was Byzantine history; Byzantine to me in every sense. The historical texts that he was considering that day were those apocryphal texts from the Koran that became known as the Satanic Verses--the ones that put a price on Salman Rushdie's head. This was what he dared to discuss in a class that was full of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, maybe even a Protestant or two--remember, this is New Jersey. And it was debated, that text, passionately. I thought he orchestrated that debate brilliantly. And in the end, no one was killed, no one was even wounded. There was mutual respect, as far as I could tell. There was even some enlightenment, some learning going on. It's interesting how seldom that sort of scene, indeed anything that actually happens in the classroom, gets included in the culture wars debate. We don't talk about these things. This is where education really happens.
It's interesting, too, how both these examples that I've just given--the challenge to positivist orthodoxy and the enactment of multiculturalism in the classroom--how both of these things are, themselves, rooted in the subsoil of the liberal arts tradition. The critique of positivism stemmed from the sociology of knowledge, coming out of Karl Mannheim and others; the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn; the hermeneutic tradition; intellectual enterprises reaching back more than a century. This is not some intellectual fad that somebody just cooked up on the spur of the moment.
And the practice of multiculturalism is also rooted in tradition. It rested, in at least my colleague's case, on a familiar ideal, the ideal of an historian's objectivity. And by that he meant--and I mean--not impartiality, but honesty to the evidence. And that is what he kept saying to keep this discussion on track: "Let's look at the evidence. Let's be honest. Let's look at the text before us. Let's examine it." And what multiculturalism is about, simply, is expanding the kinds of evidence and bringing a variety of perspectives to bear on it. Expanding the kinds of evidence we typically look at in the classroom. Who can object to that? It only enriches the liberal arts tradition. And who can disagree?
Certainly not William James, who penned one of the most capacious definitions of the liberal arts tradition and the humanities that I've ever seen, in an essay called-a classic, genteel title-"The Social Value of the College-Bred" (1907). That sounds very traditional, very stuffy, right? This is my point; we find radicalism in strange places. This is part of what James had to say:
You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalog, history a list of dates, and natural science a heet of formulas and weights and measures. The sifting of human creations, nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities! Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time. We acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection [on the part of men]; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" may signify in general. Our critical sensitivities grow both more acute and less fanatical.... What the colleges [--teaching humanities by examples which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant--] should at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent,--this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what we know as wisdom. (1)
A couple of points I want to stress about James and his view of the humanities. The first thing is that he is not talking about creating what we now call intellectuals, even though he uses the term in his essay. Here is how he uses it:
We college-bred folk, he says, "...ought to have our own class consciousness. 'Les Intellectuels!' What prouder club name could there be than this one, used ironically," he says, "by the party of 'redblood,' the party of every stupid prejudice and passion, during the anti-Dreyfus craze (in France), to satirize the men who still retain some critical taste and judgement!" (2)
These are not "intellectuals," these are educated people.
The second point: James is not just a threatened humanist in a world of science and technology and machines. This is not a backward-looking vision: "We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas, into the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject,"--and here you can think of multiculturalism, you can think of management theory, you can think of fashion design--"let in every modern subject, sure that any subject will prove humanistic if its setting be kept only wide enough" (3).
So keep this quote in mind as I talk, because when I refer to the liberal arts tradition, I am not so much referring to specific subjects as to a habit of thought, a frame of mind.
The liberal arts tradition: a phrase from a college catalog--the humanities--the pursuit of wisdom through free inquiry, the effort to cultivate discriminating sympathy to combine a capacity for appreciation of the critical spirit. This is what makes teaching a subversive activity and the university a shelter for intellectual freedom--the free play of ideas, the dedication to follow the truth wherever it may lead. You've heard it all before, right? Platitudes, maybe. That's the problem with language; it gets tired sometimes. But those platitudes, I think, refer to a worthy, a fragile ideal. And it's an ideal that's rarely been more in danger than it is right now, more in danger than it has been in recent years.
Why is that? That's the question that is almost never asked, I believe, by either side in the culture wars. I want to suggest an historically informed answer, one that traces our current plight past the 1960s to the turn of the century, when American universities began to embrace the Prussian ideal of productive scholarship. The production model required that completion of the task of production be certified by certain letters, certain documents that could be produced on demand.
By the early 20th century, we had Prussian productivism on the one hand, and on the other, what did we have? We had American vocationalism and anti-intellectualism--the distrust of ideas, the love of the practical, the demand for cash value on the barrelhead now, no waiting.
What happens when Prussian productivism and American vocationalism meet and marry? At the turn of the century, they produced the spawn of the modern American university. Not bad place, a good place, in a lot of ways, but a place that, from the early twentieth century, begins to nurture contradictory missions. On the one hand, to continue to preserve a place for the free play of ideas. On the other, to service the needs of the more powerful groups and institutions in society. Prussian productivism, American vocationalism--the modern American university.
And from about that time you can trace the growth of what William James called "the Ph.D. octopus" (4). He meant the proliferation of degrees and credentials required for admission to the professional and managerial class. The growth, among other things, of graduate business schools characterized from the outset by a robust anti-intellectualism. Yet as James knew, they did not have to be anti-intellectual. They did not have to be models of that frame of mind. When it was suggested to the dean of a Midwestern graduate business school that he offer a course on the problems of trade unionism, he was told, "We don't want our students to pay any attention to anything that might raise questions about management or business policy in their minds" (5). Profiles in courage.
It didn't have to be this way. James knew that. But given a certain orientation, the business school did, in fact, turn in that anti-intellectual direction.
The early twentieth century also witnessed the growth of what became known as the human sciences, the policy sciences, (not to mention the hard sciences), all of them serving increasingly as handmaidens of state and corporate power, as sources of data for the sorting and categorizing institutions that channeled human resources into productive purposes. In fact, the very term "human resources," like "human capital," as you know, is an outgrowth of this human science orientation, this sweeping utilitarianism. But it is a utilitarianism without any larger aims or purpose. It's a utilitarianism where process alone seems to count.
The liberal arts began, in this atmosphere, to seem softer than the hard-nosed managerial disciplines, with their problem-solving ethos and their convincing simulation of a scientific spirit. World War II and the Cold War hastened the triumph of a managerial outlook. Nationalism became an ideological rationale for the subordination of traditional liberal arts to the needs of the state.
I well remember growing up in the fifties. My parents took Reader's Digest, like good middle-class Americans were meant to do. I remember the titles on the cover of Reader's Digest from the middle of the 1950s: "Why Johnny Can't Read and Ivan Can." Scary. It was always presented that way, reading and language as weapons in the Cold War. As most historians probably explained to you in introductory history classes or elsewhere, and as maybe lots of you know anyway, this all intensified after October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the successful Sputnik satellite. It generated enormous hysteria about the state of American education at all levels. And there was some justification for this.
Go back and look at the history of American education in the 1940s and '50s. We had traveled pretty far down the road to "life adjustment," as Richard Hofstadter called it. That is, the perversion, or the expression, of John Dewey's theories about what education should be about; education that should groom children for entering into the real world rather than connect them to the dry and lifeless artifacts of the past. In the hands of Dewey's less thoughtful disciples, this became the rationale for driver training as an addition to high school academic curriculum, social problems at the soda fountain, etc. Groupthink and life adjustment invaded American pedagogical theory in the 1950s.
But what happened in the late fifties and on into the early sixties is that the reaction to the Cold War, to the concern in the wake of Sputnik, and to President Kennedy's insistence that the United States would be the first to put a man on the moon, all of this together led to the tremendous institutional convergence, the national security state combining with corporate behemoths to promote a really impoverished and utilitarian conception of the university. It was the university as a kind of knowledge factory, which was precisely the phrase Clark Carr used in 1959 to describe his university, the University of California at Berkeley.
Nineteen fifty-nine, you will note, was on the eve of that fateful decade, the 1960s. Maybe it was no accident that some of the most raucous and best-documented student protests of that era occurred at Carr's own university. Mario Savio led the free speech movement into national prominence in 1964. There was a lot of anti-intellectual nonsense in this emerging counterculture. Some of us have first-hand memories of that nonsense.
Yet there is more to this story. A lot of the anti-intellectualism was, in fact, a side show, and the main event, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the broader counterculture they spawned, demonstrated the radical strength of the liberal arts tradition. They showed the uses of that tradition as a resource for resistance to illegitimate power. Even the slogans of the free speech movement invited a recognition that there was some kind of connection between a foreign policy dictated by technocratic imperatives and an educational policy dedicated to batch processing students.
"I am a human being. Do not bend, fold, or mutilate," worn on protest buttons, was a quote from the instructions on the IBM cards that students used to register for courses back in those days of primitive computers. "I am a human being. Do not bend, fold, or mutilate."
This was not just happening at Berkeley. Contemporary critics of the academy have joined in a kind of general national cultural ritual of the last twenty years--trashing the sixties, reducing a complex cultural movement to the self-indulgent groping of over-privileged kids at elite universities. Let me suggest a different perspective, even if I have to risk the confessional mode to do it.
I went to a conservative southern university. I joined Naval ROTC. I never went near an SDS meeting. And yet I was profoundly affected by the anti-war counterculture. What I remember most about my college education in the late 1960s was that, for me at least, it was a great time to study, and probably also to teach, the humanities. Enrollments were soaring in philosophy, literature, and history. I was about to say that fraternity boys were battering down the doors to get into classes on Nietzsche, but I decided that would be hyperbolic. Maybe it wasn't quite that dramatic.
The fact was this, I believe. The shadow of the Viet Nam War affected us profoundly. The war really did make us think hard about things; it really did make students, including myself, confront some urgent ethical dilemmas. It made us ask ultimate questions about meaning and purpose in our lives. Sometimes we asked those questions sophomorically. And why not? We were sophomores at the time. We challenged sometimes, I think, the implicit denial of meaning and purpose that was imbedded in the managerial impulse that guided our policymakers. As we thought about these things, we read canonical authors-writers our professors had assured us were major--Melville, Faulkner, Shakespeare. And what did these authors do for us? They helped us understand what we were up against, the proud man's contumely, the insolence of office. They helped us challenge that pride, that insolence; they gave us the language of resistance.
"Poetry makes nothing happen," W.H. Auden said, famously. Well, he was wrong. Poetry made something happen. Tradition proved it had a radical edge.
Now, that edge is, I think, considerably duller, worn away, in part, by the big lies of Bill Bennett and other traditionalists. Humanities enrollments are down. Who wants to study a collection of stodgy, unchanging masterpieces preserved in amber? Who wants to study dead white males who do nothing but shore up the status quo, who teach us we're living not only in the greatest country in the world, but the greatest country in the history of the world?
This is not what the liberal arts tradition does, in my opinion. And for anyone who bothers to investigate the subject, the humanities tradition is now broader, more capacious, more vital because it does include non-white, non-male and non-Western texts. That's all to the good. But on most campuses, consumer demand is somewhere else. What happened?
Here is my own version. After Viet Nam, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the link between national security and the knowledge factory loosened a little. The private sector, as it's called, and its needs came to the fore. In documents like A Nation at Risk, which was published in the early '80s, the university was charged with failure. And what was the failure? The university had failed to produce and failed to prepare the labor force of the twenty-first century. By the middle and later 1980s, the market had acquired the stature accorded to God in medieval theology; the Primum Mobile, the First Cause, the Unmoved Mover, the standard to which everything else had to be referred. And universities gradually fell into line with that resurgent managerial impulse.
We have evidence of this all around us. Some of the most egregious involves cybermania, the virtual classroom, the techno-fix. It's a familiar idea. Out of this fascination some good has come, some good will come. No doubt about it. But I predict there will be a great deal of waste, unnecessary waste. And I remember, at every university I have visited, or nearly every one, I have seen enormous closed-circuit TV sets looming over lecture halls, gathering dust, never used, relics of an earlier period of techno-philia.
There's no point in my getting into the pros and cons of computers in the classroom, the uses of Internet databases, and the like; there are many obvious applications that will help all of us. But what I suggest we attend to here, in thinking about this implementation of technological fixes, is that we cannot substitute technology for the human interchange that goes on in the classroom. Any use of technology that undermines that face-to-face contact is potentially destructive and impoverishing to education.
Another development in recent years may be more sinister. Again, this is not news; this is not a dramatic revelation. We are looking at an era, the last fifteen years or so, where universities are being asked to behave, and are indeed behaving, more and more like corporations. Downsizing is only part of it: so is relying on part-time and temporary employees who don't use up those expensive benefits, so is the conception of the faculty as employees and administrators as bosses. Something is happening. Think how quaint the idea of a sabbatical is. A sabbatical. What's that? We don't have sabbaticals any more at my university; we have research leaves--research leaves that are based on scholarly productivity, I might add. A good Prussian ideal.
The third development I want to mention just briefly: the market-driven curriculum. This, in some ways, is the most ominous development of all. And by the way, this is not a simple model of the market that I'm proposing here. Any economist knows that you have various kinds of market pressures. There are those that are more in the nature of monopolistic pressures, such as the pressure exercised by the Educational Testing Service on high school curricula through "Advanced Placement" courses. Students are expected to conform to a curriculum that is basically being laid down by this academic-industrial complex in Princeton. And the teachers are forced to conform to it as well. It's extraordinary and insidious.
The other kind of market pressure surfaced the other day. It surfaces all the time, but I just noticed it the other day in a report from Framingham State College in Massachusetts. Some of you may have heard this. Framingham State College has abolished chemistry and philosophy. They're not on the premises anymore; those departments have been eliminated to make room for other departments with burgeoning enrollments. The reason for this--the president of Framingham State is very straightforward--is consumer demand. Consumer demand. Who can argue with that? This is America, where democracy is consumption, consumption is democracy.
There are two assumptions in this Framingham State example that I want to question. The first is that students are sovereign consumers. It's absurd. Students are no more sovereign than any other consumer in an oligopolistic economy. In fact, as most of us have observed at one time or another, students tend to be passive, inert--bumping aimlessly from one requirement to another, fearful and confused about the future, anything but avid consumers.
The second assumption is that the faculty has nothing of their own to offer--no independent authority or disciplinary tradition. They are merely employees in a bureaucratic service economy, according to the mantra, training the labor force of the twenty-first century.
This is what we're up against in the fight to preserve and revivify academic freedom. Not a handful of old elitists, as left academics charge, but an army of young and middle-aged managers. And both sides in the culture wars ignore them.
Meanwhile, as Willy Loman said, "The woods are burning." The woods are burning. That's what I thought when I heard the example from Framingham State. We are debating whether to add another course in African-American studies. This is not a trivial issue and I'm not suggesting it is. But we are expending all this energy and focus on a narrow sub-discipline, and meanwhile whole departments are being eliminated! Whole disciplines! With long and rich intellectual traditions! What the hell is going on here? What is going on? I think we have to ask ourselves.
The woods are burning. I don't mean to suggest that we pull the wagons in a circle. Academics, I think, all of us--and I should add that I'm lecturing myself as much as anyone else here--need to examine their own sacred cows critically and not just ritually defend them. And this includes the sacred cow of tenure. I'm for it, by the way. I'm a product and beneficiary of it; I ought to be for it. But I think we need to think about how the original rationale for tenure has been undermined by a managerial impulse. Tenure, as most of us know, was meant to protect professors with unpopular ideas. To protect them from troglodyte legislators and pea-brained administrators. But, if we are not engaged in sustaining, criticizing, and debating intellectual traditions, if we are merely providing vocational training on consumer demand, the original rationale for tenure becomes problematic and we have to either formulate a new one or find some honest way to exhume the old one. Ultimately, this crisis, and it is a crisis, is not about job security, any more than it is about how many classes are online or which departments get the biggest bucks. It's about the attitudes we take to our most important audience, a non-academic audience. We professors are constantly berating ourselves and being berated for withdrawing into this insular world of scholarship, for not connecting with the real world. The real world is right there in front of us in the classroom; it is students--students who have no intention, 99 percent of them, of entering the academy themselves. They are a non-academic audience; they are a public.
What do we take to them? What attitude? What should we take to them? Here again, bear in mind that I'm lecturing to myself as much as to anyone else here.
We might think about the issue this way, as the Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry suggested, when he made the distinction between field crops and tree crops. Then he talked about that in connection with education, and I'm going to quote him:
An index of the health of a rural community--and, of course, of the urban community, its blood kin--might be found in the relative acreages of field crops and tree crops. By tree crops, I mean not just those orchard trees of comparatively early bearing and short life, but also the fruit and nut and timber trees that bear late and live long. It is characteristic of an unsettled and anxious farm population,a population that feels itself, because of economic threat or the degradation of cultural values, to be ephemeral, that it farms almost exclusively with field crops within economic and biological cycles that are complete in one year. This has been the dominant pattern of American agriculture. Stable, settled populations, assured both of an economic sufficiency in return for their work and of the cultural value of their work, tend to have methods and attitudes of much longer range. Though they have generally also farmed with field crops, established farm populations have always been planters of trees....Good teaching is an investment in the minds of the young, as obscure in result, as remote from immediate proof, as planting a chestnut seedling. But we have come to prefer ends that are entirely foreseeable, even though that requires us to shorten our vision. Education is coming to be, not a long term investment in young minds and the life of the community, but a short term investment in the ecomony. We want to be able to tell how many dollars an education is worth and how soon it will begin to pay. (6)
Now this may be possible for field crops, but not for tree crops. And students are a kind of tree crop. In a managerial age of techno-fixes and five-year plans, this approach to teaching will always ( I hope) remain necessary, honorable and regenerative. This is what we need to remember if we want academic freedom to remain a living tradition, and not just a dream some of us had.