historical perspectives on the crisis of the university

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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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).

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.).

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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

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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.

66

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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historical perspectives on the crisis of the university

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