Thorstein Veblen's rant à clef

I have been keeping company with Veblen.  He may wince not, but I sure do -- that is, when I'm not laughing out loud at his mordant wit.  His savagely brilliant sarcasm has a bite far worse than its bark.  I would not want to be on the receiving end of such a scathing polemic as he delivers in The Higher Learning in America.*  This has been a fierce, fun read.

Given the new direction I am pursuing for my dissertation, it is especially helpful for me to read Veblen in order to begin to historicize the ideal of the ivory tower  -- the notion of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the community of scholarly inquiry, etc.  That idea is not timeless (none of them are!); it was new to Veblen's time (or so he argued), and he wrote this polemic to contend for it.  Also quite helpful is Veblen's speculation on the place of the American university following the War.  In a remarkable section near the end of his introductory chapter, Veblen suggests that the American university will occupy a "strategic position" with "command" of resources, materiel and personnel in order to defend the way of learning and serve as a "provisional headquarters for the academic community throughout that range of civilized peoples whose goodwill they enjoy" (52-53).  Certainly Veblen is borrowing his metaphor from his times, suggesting that the university will be on a war footing.  Nevertheless, his suggestion of the university as "strategic" points the way, I think, for both William F. Buckley and the Port Huron authors, as well as the cultural combatants of the 1980s and 1990s.  Veblen is staking out the ground of the culture wars right here, in 1918. 

Even in his own time, what Veblen meant by "the higher education learning" -- what he wanted it to mean in the public mind --  was something altogether different than what "the university" had come to signify by the early 20th century in America.  By Veblen's reckoning, the American university combined two different missions within one institutional framework:  undergraduate collegiate instruction and graduate training in scientific research.  "While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars," Veblen writes, "it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management." (100) His notion of what "the layman" understood a university to signify may not be correct -- which is a big problem for Veblen's argument, as I will explain below.  But his perception of where university administrators lavished their energies and attention is, I think, correct enough. 

The reasons that Veblen gives for what he considers to be this inordinate focus on "the perfunctory work of the undergraduate department" boil down to money and market share -- money from donors, a market share in enrollments and in the "immaterial capital" (106) that in turn attracts donors and enrollments in an ever-expansionistic cycle.  "The motive to this inclusion of an undergraduate department in the newer universities," he writes in his introduction "appears commonly to have been a headlong eagerness to show a complete establishment of the conventionally accepted pattern, and to enroll as many students as possible" (24).  He lays out his case in more detail in a chapter on "The Academic Administration," where he gives the reader university presidents and administrators as "captains of erudition," earnest epigones of the captains of industry who form the donor class that founded or funded the new American universities -- Stanford, University of Chicago and the like.  Of course, Veblen was famously fired from both places, among others (and this is not even counting the places at which he was famously not hired), a bit of personal history to which he alludes only obliquely but which gives his text -- and especially his footnotes -- a great deal of vituperative power. 

When Veblen wants to cite a particularly egregious example of some more general tendency he is describing, he takes to his footnotes and regales the reader with the damning details, names redacted.  This practice, which accounts for much of the fun of the book, turns it into what I have called a rant à clef.  One would have to read this text in tandem with scholarly biographies of Veblen and institutional histories of the various major universities in order to know for sure exactly which scandal Veblen invokes in which footnote. 

Here's a representative instance of Veblen's passive-aggressive pique.  In his aforementioned chapter on academic administration, Veblen writes of university professors with no job protection, fireable at a whim by the university president. "They have eaten his bread," Veblen says of the professors, "and it is for them to do his bidding....It is needless to remark on what is a fact of common notoriety, that this rule drawn from the conduct of competitive business is commonly applied without substantial abatement in the conduct of academic affairs" (91).  But this needless remark becomes the occasion of a half-page footnote, in which Veblen describes the administrative backlash against faculty who protested the "underhanded dismissal of a scholar of high standing and long service, who had incurred the displeasure of the president then in charge, by overt criticism of the administration."  In this instance, it seems fairly clear that he is describing the firing of Edward Alsworth Ross from Stanford. 

More generally, for many of Veblen's coolly enraged footnotes, it seems like a fifty-fifty shot:  he's either talking about Stanford or University of Chicago.  However, he does allude to other incidents at other schools, public and private, but much of this telling detail is lost on this reader, at any rate.  I bet Julie Reuben knows exactly which incidents he is referring to; her study of the emergence of the American university from (roughly) the end of Reconstruction to the close of the Progressive era -- The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality -- is the indispensable guide to the history of higher education in this period.  However, as far as I can recall, Reuben does not spend any ink specifically discussing Veblen's ideas and ideals of higher education. 

There is a stubborn idealism behind Veblen's most savage critique, an idealism that dates even his most prescient observations.   To be sure, everywhere Veblen looks, he sees the marketplace encroaching on the academy -- universities run as businesses, education commodified and mass-produced under Tayloristic principles for maximum profitability.  All this in 1918.  In good Pragmatic fashion -- a fashion which Veblen, it seems to me, might not be altogether happy to sport, but which marks him nonetheless as exemplifying the style of his age -- Veblen argues that due attention to the "incursion of business principles into the academic community" (95) might be able to hold back the tide of inimical change.  It might still be possible, in Veblen's view, to do something about "the drift of things."  But, as I said, that's not idealism; that's Pragmatism.

Where Veblen's idealism shows itself is his conviction (but a conviction of believing, or of trying to believe?) that society will always place somevalue on what he calls "idle" knowledge -- by which he means knowledge pursued for its own sake, knowledge that has no market value.  Veblen believed that there was something (almost?) timeless about the human quest for knowledge, something that would ultimately preserve it from total absorption by the market -- he believed there was a broad communal conviction "such as will not enduringly tolerate the sordid effects of pursuing an educational policy that looks mainly to the main chance, and unreservedly makes the means of life its chief end.  By virtue of this long-term idealist drift, any seminary of learning that plays fast and loose in this way with the cultural interests entrusted to its keeping loses caste and falls out of the running" (42).  There's the idealism: that persistent Arnoldian notion of "cultural interests" above the sordid business of "the main chance."  Veblen was able to imagine a world in which the very highest reaches of the ivory tower were out of the market's reach -- which marks him off as a son of his own time, but not a seer of ours.

____________

Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum of the Conduct of Universities by Business Men [1918]. Introduction by David Riesman (Stanford: Academic Reprints, 1954).  Page numbers for citations from Veblen's text are given in parentheses in the body of this post.

Common Ground for the Culture Wars

Lately I have been keeping company with the post-war intellectuals -- Trilling, Macdonald, Rosenberg, Riesman, Baldwin, Buckley.  Of that last, most formidable fulminator, I had this to say yesterday on Twitter:

Today: reading Buckley, _God and Man at Yale_, wondering exactly how often he rolls over in his grave. Ideas have consequences, dude. #USIH
— LD Burnett (@LDBurnett) August 16, 2012

I spent the rest of the day alternately laughing, rolling my eyes, and -- dare I admit it? -- occasionally nodding in agreement with the old chap.  At the end of the day, I wrote a long-ish two-page precis to map out some future avenues of inquiry for this particular text, which will be making an appearance in my (new and improved!) dissertation. 

So I was very intrigued and gratified to see Kevin Schultz's comment go up earlier today on Andrew's recent blog post on the culture wars and sectarian conflict.  Kevin wrote:

It's funny how a post about the decline of Protestant essentialism (the transformation of David Sehat's Moral Establishment?) has rolled into a debate about the New Left and its role in creating the New Right. But as someone who is writing a book about Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr., one thing I have been struck by is by how much their critiques of Eisenhower's America overlapped. They both hated the mainstream liberalism of the 1950s, and if you look at the early editions of Buckley's National Review and of Mailer and friend's Village Voice (begun within weeks of each other in 1955), their starting sentiments are identical: mid-century liberalism was sapping people of their individualism and their freedoms, it was a sanitary culture where "every child had his own social worker" (that, by the way, is the Village Voice, not the National Review), it was a muted America that had no voice, no expression, nothing interesting to say or do.

Where the two guys went from there is of course the rest of the story (here perhaps Hunter's distinctions help, and also one's Catholicism versus the others Judaism), but it's shocking at how much the starting critiques were the same.

This is an astute observation, and I'm sure that Kevin is on to something. 

For my part, what I find surprising is Kevin's very surprise at the notion that thinkers as seemingly divergent as Mailer and Buckley would share a common sensibility.  That I find Kevin's surprise surprising is, in its turn, evidence of the contrarian nature of (some of) my training by (and, therefore, to a limited extent, as) a historian of sensibilities. (But don't you know that its very contrariety is part of its appeal! If practically everybody is going to zig, then I'm perfectly happy to zag...most of the time.)

But in all seriousness (and what are intellectual historians, anyway, if not Suitably Serious People):  it seems perfectly natural to me that Mailer and Buckley would share a common sensibility.  In fact, having just finished reading Buckley's God and Man at Yale yesterday -- that Ur text of disaffected idealistic undergrads scolding their professors for failing in their moral duty -- I would even up the ante and say that Buckley shared a common sensibility with Tom Hayden and the other authors of the Port Huron Statement.[1]

Buckley's indignation before the inaction and/or alleged conspiratorial silence of the profs sympathetic to his views, along with his insistence that, because the older generation were entrenched in their establishment niceties, it was up to him to sound the alarm -- all this is a sensibility he shares with the authors of the Port Huron Statement.  Indeed, it would not be unreasonable, I think, to argue that Buckley in some sense paved the way for the student activism of the New Left, specifically in identifying the university as the worthy site and center of cultural conflict.  Buckley called higher education "the nerve center of civilization," and he argued that "the guardians...of this sustaining core of civilization...have, in so many cases, abdicated their responsibility to mankind."[2]

With these assertions, at least, Tom Hayden and friends seemed to be in agreement.  In the closing salvo of their manifesto, the SDS affirmed that "the university is located in a permanent position of social influence."[3]  Further, though the authors of the Port Huron Statement no doubt disagreed quite strongly with Buckley that the role of the university is to inculcate and preserve Christian values, they certainly agreed that the university was to be a center and site of moral influence, and that it was badly failing at its task.  "Tragically," they wrote, "the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes.  But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel -- say, a television set -- passing on the stock truths of the day."[4]  Though Buckley wanted those old stock truths protected and preserved, and the SDS wanted those truths challenged, both alike viewed the moral influence of the professoriate as vital to their divergent visions of the good society.

That these young visionaries with practically antithetical visions should alike look to the university as a place in need of and in command of ideological transformation suggests that they are both drawing upon the same underlying sense of the role and reach of (higher) education in public life.  Of course, the call of the SDS to focus on the university might be characterized as a move to counter the New Conservatives' bid for influence there.  However, even for the New Left -- indeed, especially for the New Left -- the university remained the single institution that might still provide a safe haven for ideals and idealists.  To be sure, even in this tenuous, provisional faith in the ivory tower, they differed markedly from Buckley, who looked to the Church as the repository of changeless truth in a changing world and who sought to (re)align the university with its ecclesiastical origins.  But as secular a document as the Port Huron Statement is -- and it is, it seems to me, quite secular by design -- there yet remains the sense that the university, the professoriate, has a sacred trust to keep.

I would venture to say that this sensibility, shared by Buckley and Tom Hayden alike, has not been without its adherents in the decades since.  Further, I would surmise -- though I will defer (for now!) to the judgment of others here -- that it is this shared ideal that, more than anything else, made American university campuses ground zero for many a conflict in the culture wars. I wonder, though, if Buckley's ideas have not finally overcome his ideals.  He wanted the university to champion religion over secularism, and individualism over collectivism, but he based his defense of these ideals on the notion that alumni and parents are "customers" or "consumers" of education, and that it is the job of the university to meet market demand.[5]  That seemingly hyper-individualist idea, such as it is, seems to have carried the day, dislodging humanistic inquiry, along with the search for both meaningful individual existence and enduring or effective social value, from the center of a university education. This result, it seems to me, is something that both Buckley and the signatories of the Port Huron Statement might alike deplore. 

Or am I cutting that cantankerous old Eli too much slack?

__________________
[1]It's quite possible that someone else has already made this argument far more convincingly than I have in this post -- but, for the time being, if it ain't on my reading list, it ain't on my radar screen.  If you know of a scholar who has drawn this particular connection, please pardon my (temporary) ignorance, and please give me a link in the comments.  This would be helpful for my dissertation research.  Added 9:15 PM:  On the more general idea of the university as a guardian and purveyor of moral values, see Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).  

[2] William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom," 50th anniversary edition (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1986), 172-173.\

[3] Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005), 165.

[4] Hayden, 60.

[5]This idea, a major theme of Buckley's work, is highlighted in John Chamberlain's 1951 foreword.  See especially p. lx, where Chamberlain puts the matter in the plainest terms:  "The autonomy of the customer should hold whether he is buying toothpaste, tennis rackets -- or education for his children." 

The Intellectual History of College Coaching and the Penn State Scandal

Today's guest blogger, Brian M. Ingrassia, is the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time College Football (University Press of Kansas, March 2012). He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and currently teaches at Middle Tennessee State University.

What the Intellectual History of College Coaching Can Tell Us about Penn State
By Brian Ingrassia

In recent weeks, Americans listened with horror as graphic tales of sexual abuse emanated from the criminal trial of former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who last Friday was convicted of 45 counts of molesting boys over the course of more than a decade. The scandal and its cover up—which led to the firing of iconic coach Joe Paterno and Penn State president Graham Spanier last fall—have demonstrated the incredible power that departments of athletics hold in many universities. Here, I would like to explore the intellectual history of college coaching (yes, I argue that there is such a thing) in order to gain a fuller understanding of the Penn State fiasco and the place of big-time sports in American colleges.

First, realize that coaching was transformed from an amateur vocation into a profession in the early 1900s. Before this time, players served as coaches, or unpaid graduate advisors like Yale’s Walter Camp worked day jobs while leading their teams to gridiron success. By the 1920s, though, dozens of men—such as Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago, Fielding Yost of Michigan, and John Heisman of Georgia Tech and Penn, among others—devoted their careers to coaching. These men had to make a living from the game. Ultimately, some of them garnered large salaries and even gained professorial rank (as did Stagg and Yost, and later Paterno) at their respective universities.

How did such men justify faculty status and outsized paychecks? In short, they portrayed themselves, in both writings and speeches, as educators skilled at the art of training young men in the ways of discipline and self-control. They were “teaching” football, but they were also—so they claimed—teaching so much more. This argument appeared in numerous popular manuals written by early-1900s coaches. For example, in Principles of Football (1922), John Heisman called the athletic field “the best laboratory known where a young man can get the training, the discipline, [and] the experience” that he would need for a successful post-college life. Such arguments were echoed throughout this genre, as coaches said that they were better able to teach discipline than anyone else—including fathers, ministers, and professors.


These men were writing at a time when American universities were growing larger and more fragmented. Once upon a time, legendary professors like Francis Wayland, Mark Hopkins, and Noah Porter had stressed the teaching of moral, mental, and physical discipline in intimate classrooms and residence halls. But by 1900, expanding universities embraced the modern division of labor and taught knowledge to students in a multitude of new disciplines: history, economics, and psychology, just to name a few. In this pragmatic era, higher education was no longer dedicated to teaching individuals moral virtue. Rather, universities were designed to train members of a population how to make contributions to a complex, highly differentiated society. Athletics seemed to fill the void that opened when the curriculum shifted from moral discipline to academic disciplines. Coaches claimed to assume the important duty of teaching young men proper behavior, ethics, morality, and self-control. The athletic department, at least in theory, became the one department of the modern university dedicated to this task.

By the early 1900s, coaches even regularly asserted that football arenas (note that we are not talking about physical education courses) were essential spaces for teaching discipline. Coaches even posited that college athletics could teach the multitude or the crowd, not just a handful of players. Thousands of fellow students and spectators might learn discipline by watching sports. Coaches like John Heisman and Princeton’s Bill Roper contended that a team could only win on Saturday afternoon if the entire student body observed training rules, thus supporting the team’s efforts throughout the whole week. Fielding Yost, in his 1905 manual Football for Player and Spectator, went even further. He wrote that a football game could inspire spectators to absorb temperate habits and forge “a spirit which reaches out from the athletic field through the campus and into the very recitation room.” The games occurring in the stadium, Michigan’s coach thus asserted, could even improve a college’s academic environment.

As farfetched as such arguments may sound, we need to keep in mind that Yost was not the only (ahem) intellectual to make such claims during the Progressive Era. Josiah Royce said something similar in a turn-of-the-century piece when he stated that properly supervised physical training could “extend its influence to large bodies of boys who, as spectators of games or as schoolmates, are more or less influenced by the athletic spirit.” All those present at expertly conducted games, in other words, could learn ethical lessons useful in modern society.

Can disciplined behavior really be taught to a few men on an athletic field during a commercial spectacle? Do tens of thousands of people really learn how to be better, more disciplined members of society in football stadiums? These are good questions, ones that would be difficult to answer in any historical context. (Not only is it dubious that football teaches players and spectators temperate habits, as Fielding Yost posited in 1905, but there is also no way to measure such an expansive claim.) Nevertheless, similar rhetoric is often utilized today. Great coaches, we are told, are not just great because they win games, recruit star athletes, or reap publicity for their universities. Rather, what makes them great is their dedication to young men—and their identities as “teachers” or mentors, as well as coaches.

Until November 2011, many Americans thought that Joe Paterno and his coaching staff, including Jerry Sandusky, were true educators dedicated to teaching young men morality and discipline—not to enriching themselves. The excesses of big-time intercollegiate athletics could more easily be overlooked when they were balanced out by feel-good programs like Penn State’s. As it turns out, though, at least one coach in Happy Valley appears to have been abusing his position and doing something perverse and antithetical to the teaching of virtue. In any case, Sandusky’s alleged criminal behavior—and the late Paterno’s apparent complicity in covering it up—indicates that we need to be skeptical of tropes such as that of the wise football teacher who adroitly instills disciplined behavior and good sportsmanship. After all, the questionable notion that famous, powerful, and highly compensated coaches successfully teach young men (and the public) virtuous lessons through spectator sport is one that dates back roughly a century.

Ultimately, understanding the intellectual history of college coaching can help us interrogate the place of athletics in America’s universities, a task that needs critical attention now more than ever.

The Past and Future of Public Higher Education

Today's guest blogger, Nick Strohl, has just completed his second year as a doctoral student in History and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His areas of study include the history of education, American intellectual and cultural history, and higher education history and policy. His current research focus is American higher education during the interwar years.

The Past and Future of Public Higher Education
By Nick Strohl

First of all, I would like to offer my thanks to L.D., and to all of you who manage and contribute to this terrific blog, for the opportunity to write a guest post. I have been a regular reader for about a year, hovering on the margins of the discussion as one might at a lively cocktail party conversation. I do not first and foremost consider myself an intellectual historian—if, at this early stage of my graduate career I consider myself anything—although I have always found intellectual historians to be among the smartest and most interesting folks in the room, and I always learn something new when I spend time with them. This virtual community has not failed to disappoint in that regard.

My topic for this post is public higher education in the United States, its past and just as importantly its future. This is not intended to be another summary of the various ways in which the university is in “crisis,” which, arguably, it has been since Peter Abelard challenged accepted modes of theological discourse in 12th century France.[1] Instead, my goal is to begin a conversation about how intellectual and cultural historians can help in understanding some of the most recent changes in the landscape of American public higher education.

As I will briefly outline below, the halcyon days of public higher education (c. 1945-1970) are over. Many states have demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to fund public higher education at all levels: elite flagships are increasingly expected to make up for declining state appropriations through research dollars and tuition revenue, while community colleges struggle to meet the demand for their services. As a historian, I am interested in what these changes portend for the place of public higher education in American society. To what extent are we seeing a revision of a historic “social contract” between the state and its citizens to provide postsecondary education, as some suggest?[2] And to what extent are public institutions of higher education obligated to perform public service, especially as they come to rely less and less on taxpayer money? Finally, to whom are public institutions of higher education ultimately beholden—students, taxpayers, elected officials, faculty, others?

A long history of this subject—the meaning of public higher education in American society—might begin with a consideration of the Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819 or the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862. The latter example, in particular, first made explicit the duty of publicly-funded institutions to serve a broader public, to pursue useful research, and to be responsive to local needs. By the middle of the twentieth century, this public mission had expanded to include the provision of mass higher education, an ideal embodied most fully by the California Master Plan (1960), but also embraced by many other states, especially in the Midwest and West.[3] By about 1970, public higher education had come to dominate the landscape American higher education, enrolling nearly eighty percent of all American students in postsecondary institutions (up from fifty percent in 1950). As historian of higher education Roger Geiger has explained, “The English language has no word for the opposite of privatization. Yet, that is what occurred from 1945 to 1980 in American higher education (as well as other spheres). American states poured enormous resources into building public systems of higher education: flagship universities were expanded and outfitted for an extensive research role; teachers colleges grew into regional universities; public urban universities multiplied and grew; and a vast array of community colleges was built.”[4]

Today, public institutions still educate a large majority of postsecondary students (about 72 percent), but they do so in ways that, I would contend, represent a growing departure from their historic mission(s). In at least several areas, public institutions and systems—at all levels—are much less “public” than in the past: in their sources of funding, in their governance structures, and in their cost and accessibility to students, among other things. Some of these changes are most striking at the elite institutions, such as UW-Madison or UC-Berkeley, but they filter down to students at all levels, with perhaps the most important consequences for those at the margins of the public system: community college students. As a recent report from the Center for the Future of Higher Education demonstrates, budget cuts and enrollment limitations at the top of the public higher education pyramid have “cascaded” down to those students—often low-income, non-traditional, and first-generation—at the bottom. For the first time since the rise of mass public higher education in the middle of the century, willing and able high school graduates are being turned from the very institution—the community college—that was supposed to be a last bastion of educational opportunity beyond high school.[5]

I do not have enough space to illustrate fully the trends described above, although a few facts might paint a picture. 

*Here at UW-Madison, state appropriations now make up about 15% of the university operating budget, down from about 27% in 1997-1998 and from a majority share of the budget several decades ago. In other states, the share of state support in university budgets can be much lower. At a recent conference on higher education here in Madison, University of Colorado-Boulder political science professor Ken Bickers reported that UC-Boulder now counts state appropriations as an astonishing 4.6% of its overall budget. For most professors and administrators at Boulder, Bickers said, the question of whether to “privatize” the flagship campus is an essentially meaningless one at this point.

*At the elite level of public higher education—the state flagships—reform is decidedly in the direction of privatization—for lack a better term—meaning greater reliance on research dollars, public-private partnerships, patent revenue, private donations and tuition revenue in lieu of state funds.[6] Examples of comprehensive reform plans around the country include Louisiana State’s “Flagship Coalition”, championed by Louisiana business leaders and prominent LSU alumni such as James Carville; UC-Boulder’s “Flagship 2030” plan; and Ohio’s “Enterprise University” plan. Similar plans in Wisconsin and Oregon—the “New Badger Partnership” and the “New Partnership,” respectively—have met been met with greater resistance from the public, other system leaders, and the legislatures in those states. In both Wisconsin and Oregon, the failure to achieve these proposed reforms led to the abrupt departures of UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin (after three years on the job) and UO president Richard Lariviere (after two years). Even more recently, University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan became the victim of a dispute over “philosophical differences” with the UVA Board of Visitors. Sullivan, it appears, was unwilling to implement a program of zero-cost reforms, such as online learning, with the speed and alacrity expected from the Board.

*Perhaps the most “felt” change in public higher education today is its cost to students and their families. If declining state support has meant one thing at all levels of public higher education—whether at flagships or at community colleges—it is that students must pay more of the share of the cost of attendance. As rising tuition and costs have far outpaced growth in family incomes and various forms of grant-based financial aid, more students and families have had to rely on loans. A recent report by Demos, a public policy research and advocacy organization based in New York, offers an excellent overview of the deleterious effect of higher education cuts for the American middle class. Among its findings, the report explains that “states have reached a turning point in their relationship to public higher education, and the policy choices of the next few years will determine the extent to which public institutions of higher education continue to function as a bridge to the middle class for young adults, especially for those from low- and moderate-income backgrounds.”[7]

Taken together, the above trends suggest a much narrower conception of the mission of public higher education than has historically been the case, at least since the mid-twentieth century: research is increasingly valued for its potential to reach the marketplace; students are expected to pay for the cost of their own education beyond high school, even if that requires that they take on significant debt; and institutions, especially elite flagships, demand to govern themselves with less state oversight, including the freedom to set their own tuition levels. Of course, private universities have long enjoyed many of these freedoms now sought by these public universities; and private universities themselves provide some measure of public service in their teaching and research. But the aggressiveness with which public universities have moved in the direction of private models is something new, and, in my view, represents a revision of the historic mission of public higher education without an open discussion about what is in fact taking place.

This, I think, is where historians, and especially intellectual and cultural historians, can provide a service. In my view, we need to better understand not just the structural changes in American higher education in the last fifty years, but also the broader intellectual and cultural changes that have accompanied them. Why should taxpayers share some, if not all, of the cost of higher education for all? To what extent should public universities be controlled by democratically-elected state legislatures, instead of being free to run their own affairs? And to what extent should taxpayers provide support for those students who cannot afford the cost of postsecondary education? These are questions that, to some extent, can be answered by economists and political scientists.8 But they are also questions whose answers are embedded in culture and politics.

My own two cents, based on the work of Christopher Newfield (Unmaking the Public University, 2008) and Andrew Hartman (“Occupy Wall Street: A New Culture War”) is that a better understanding of the place of the public higher education in American society will come with a better understanding of the meaning of the “culture wars” of the last several decades. As both Newfield and Hartman explain, the “culture wars” paradigm has tended to obscure the connection between economic and cultural issues, which are more often than not one-and-the-same. Thus, the demand that students pay for their cost of their college education—whether through loans, scholarships, parental support, work, or some combination of all of these—resonates with political discourse about personal responsibility; the desire of public flagships to operate with greater autonomy makes sense in a world where the corporate model is the gold standard; and the idea that the government should get out of the business of funding higher education aligns with the view that less government intrusion leads to more efficient market outcomes.

My question for the readers of this blog, therefore, is how one might begin to historicize the changes in public higher education since the middle of the twentieth century. Are these changes part of broader intellectual and cultural changes in the postwar era? What other frameworks might one use to understand the place of higher education, public or private, in American society today? I am interested to hear how others might begin to assess some of the trends described above, as well as how and whether these changes have been felt on the ground.

____________
[1]For an insightful assessment of the most recent spate of books on the shortcomings of American higher education, readers should see Anthony Grafton’s reviews in the New York Review of Books, particularly the one brought to the attention of this blog last fall by Andrew Hartman.

[2] See, for example, John Aubrey Douglass, The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford, 2007).

[3]See John Aubrey Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford, 2000): 1-18.

[4]Roger L. Geiger, “Postmortem for the Current Era: Change in American Higher Education, 1980-2010,” Working Paper No. 3, (State College, PA: Center for the Study of Higher Education, Pennsylvania State University, July 2010), 3. The enrollment statistics cited above also come from this source.

[5]I am in debt to UW-Madison professor Sara Goldrick-Rab and her blog, “The Education Optimists,” for pointing me in the direction of some of the most recent reports and data on the issues discussed in this post. See http://eduoptimists.blogspot.com/ for more.

[6]Higher education researchers Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the development of these trends in the last three decades of the twentieth century in their book, Academic Capitalism: Markets, the State, and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

[7]The Great Cost Shift: How Higher Education Cuts Undermine the Future Middle Class (2012), 3.

[8]For a historical analysis of the connection between educational attainment and long-term economic growth, see the work of economists’ Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz in The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

On the Origins of the Anti-Elitist Critique of Higher Ed

A couple weeks ago, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum called President Barack Obama a "snob" for proposing policies that would make college affordable for more Americans. Santorum argued that colleges were "indoctrination mills" in which right-thinking young Americans were turned into godless liberals.

The sociologist Neil Gross had a useful piece in the New York Times yesterday refuting Santorum's claims about American higher education.  Citing actual sociological studies, Gross shows that, although university faculty are certainly more liberal and less pious than other Americans, attending college does not in fact turn students into liberals, agnostics, or atheists [h/t to Tim Lacy for initially calling this piece to my attention over on the S-USIH Facebook page]. This of course should be no surprise to those of us who teach in higher ed.

But, at least for readers of this blog, the more interesting aspect of Gross's op-ed may have been the intellectual history of conservative attacks on higher ed with which he concluded.*



Explaining the nature of these conservative attacks on higher ed, writes Gross,

...requires some historical perspective. Conservatives have been criticizing academia for many decades. Yet only once the McCarthy era passed did this criticism begin to be cast primarily in anti-elitist tones: charges of Communist subversion gave way to charges of liberal elitism in the writings of William F. Buckley Jr. and others. The idea that professors are snobs looking down their noses at ordinary Americans, trying to push the country in directions it does not wish to go, soon became an established conservative trope, taking its place alongside criticism of the liberal press and the liberal judiciary.  

The main reason for this development is that attacking liberal professors as elitists serves a vital purpose. It helps position the conservative movement as a populist enterprise by identifying a predatory elite to which conservatism stands opposed — an otherwise difficult task for a movement strongly backed by holders of economic power.

Gross is entirely correct about the populist (or pseudo-populist) function of the anti-elitist right-wing critique of higher education, but I believe he's wrong that this explains its timing.**

After all, the populist critique of elites had long been put to conservative ends. For example, the generation of white Southern politicians that included Pitchfork Ben Tillman had used such appeals to reconstitute white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.

And especially after FDR--a member of the cultural, social, and economic elite if there ever was one--became the leader of, and symbol for, a reconstituted American liberalism in the 1930s, conservatives frequently framed their criticisms of the New Deal in anti-elitist terms.  To many on the right, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a "country squire in the White House," as ex-New Dealer-turned-libertarian-conservative John T. Flynn titled his 1940 screed against the President.

But if conservative deployment of populist rhetoric was nothing new in the McCarthy period, what was new were the demographics of higher education.  In 1940, only 6 per cent of U.S. men and 4 per cent of U.S. women had completed four years of college.  Over the course of the next two decades, boosted at first by the GI Bill and post-war prosperity, those numbers began to increase. By 1960, 10 per cent of American men and 6 per cent of American women had completed four years of college. And starting in the 1960s, these numbers exploded.  By 1980, 21 per cent of US men and 14 per cent of US women had completed four years of college.***

In short, what was really new in the McCarthy era wasn't the value of populist rhetoric for the right, but rather the changing political importance of higher education in America.  It was precisely when higher education slowly began becoming available to people not in a tiny elite, that charges of elitism and snobbery in the academy began to become popular.  And at least at first, I suspect these politics were most potentially effective in their ability to exploit generational divides between an older, largely not college educated middle class and younger Americans much more likely to have attended college.

_______________________________________________

* I realize that I am stepping into the professional territory of my USIH co-blogger Andrew Hartman here. I trust he will improve upon any points I make in comments!

** I do question his notion that anti-elitist attacks on academia from the right were a wholly new thing in the McCarthy era. To begin with, charges of Communist subversion leveled against the academy had, themselves, an anti-elitist aspect to them.

*** Source:  Thomas D. Snyder (ed.), "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait" (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1993) (.pdf here)

Grafton: Why are universities failing?

Historian Anthony Grafton's New York Review of Books essay--a review of several books about higher education--paints a grim picture of students mortgaging their futures for something likely to fail them. Thoughts?

Tim's Light Reading (12/2/2010)

[Updated: 9:05 am, 12/2]

1 (of 5). Piss Christ Redux: Ignorance of History as Anti-Intellectualism

Some of our Culture Wars history appears to be repeating itself---though in a weird, reverse chronological order. In a move reminiscent of debates over Serrano's 1989 Piss Christ, protests by Bill Donohue of The Catholic League, with support from new House Speaker John Boehner, caused part of an exhibit to be pulled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery a few days ago.

The purportedly offensive art, constructed in 1987 by David Wojnarowicz (right, since deceased) and titled Fire in the Belly (video link requires age verification), involves---among other graphic images---a scene where ants crawl over a crucifix. Fire in the Belly was part of an ongoing exhibit titled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Donohue designated the video "hate speech" (although I'm unclear whether he found all or just parts objectionable). Here's the press release where the Gallery explains its action.

At what point in the arts does censorship become anti-intellectualism? What's the relationship? It seems clear to me that anti-intellectualism is necessary but not sufficient for censorship. As such, other factors can be involved (social norms, moral outrage, etc.). Even so, in this case I'm inclined to think it's a very important, if not primary, necessary condition. I assert this in line with commentary given two days ago by Blake Gopnik in Washington Post. Gopnik summarized the historically-uninformed nature of Donohue's opposition:

The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

In my view, this kind of historical ignorance is simply another form of anti-intellectualism (i.e the unreasonable strain). The rest of Gopnik's commentary is pretty interesting, historically speaking, as well.

2. The Recent History of Publishing in the Academy

Scott McLemee at InsideHigherEd considers changes in the quality and quantity of academic scholarship over the past forty or so years. He opens by referencing a recent fall 2010 issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), but jukes to a consider the 2010 book, The State of Scholarly Publishing: Challenges and Opportunities (edited by Albert N. Greco). The book contains an essay William W. Savage, Jr. that constitutes the heart and soul of McLemee's piece. Here's the quote around which McLemee built his article:

In a passage that may seem literally incredible to younger scholars today, [Savage, Jr.] cites a piece of advice by one professor in the early 1970s – an epoch when “faculty who worried about publishing too much, thereby alienating colleagues and damaging their own careers” still wandered the earth. To be safe, this scholar suggested publishing “an article a year and a book every five years.” That would be enough to satisfy the administration, “but not so much as to threaten [your] colleagues unduly.”

Contrast that with the agenda laid out here (which considers publishing and teaching together).

3. Zombies in the Academy

Continuing a theme I started here last year, I offer this CFP for a book project (unrelated to my post) that seeks to "take up the momentum provided by the resurgence of interest in zombie culture to examine the relevance of the zombie trope to discussions of scholarly practice itself. We propose to canvas a range of critical accounts of the contemporary university as an atavistic culture of the undead." I am very much tempted to send a proposal. It sounds like fun, yes? The proposal due date is Dec. 15, 2010.

Btw-1: Here's a blog hosted by the Zombies in the Academy folks.
Btw-2: Yes, this is a real CFP. Andrew Whelan, a sociologist, does indeed exist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.]

4. Chinese Logic

Since learning of Mortimer Adler's (faulty? simplistic? sensible?) arguments, in Truth in Religion (1992), for the irreconcilability of Eastern and Western philosophy (primarily in chapters two and three), I have been passively interested in the history of logic. This recent blog post by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (right) at New APPS indulges my latent questions about this subject. In the post Novaes lays out questions and issues she plans to study on "the roots of deduction" during a five-year project. The central question seems to be "why the axiomatic-deductive method emerged in ancient Greece but not in ancient China"?

5. An Excellent Quote on the Internet, Reading, and Indexing

For the December 2006 edition of Prose Studies, Paul Tankard of the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand), wrote the following about 'indexes'---in the context of writing about lists as both literary devices and as signs of certain truths (bolds mine):

In saving the reader the trouble of actually reading, of experiencing in real time the full discursive being of a text, indexes contribute to the "death of the author." We see this in that huge electronic index which threatens to consume all text, the Internet, where sounds, images, and "grabs" or "bites" of text circulate independently of any author, where searching the indexes is not restricted by the covers of individual books, and where texts flow in and out of each other. However, this is not a new thing. Alphabetically organized anthologies...have always been popular --- although perhaps like printed indexes, they are not so much meant to undermine reading as re-reading. (p. 351)

And yes, I am acutely aware of the irony of my quoting this text in this format. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (12/2/2010)

[Updated: 9:05 am, 12/2]

1 (of 5). Piss Christ Redux: Ignorance of History as Anti-Intellectualism

Some of our Culture Wars history appears to be repeating itself---though in a weird, reverse chronological order. In a move reminiscent of debates over Serrano's 1989 Piss Christ, protests by Bill Donohue of The Catholic League, with support from new House Speaker John Boehner, caused part of an exhibit to be pulled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery a few days ago.

The purportedly offensive art, constructed in 1987 by David Wojnarowicz (right, since deceased) and titled Fire in the Belly (video link requires age verification), involves---among other graphic images---a scene where ants crawl over a crucifix. Fire in the Belly was part of an ongoing exhibit titled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Donohue designated the video "hate speech" (although I'm unclear whether he found all or just parts objectionable). Here's the press release where the Gallery explains its action.

At what point in the arts does censorship become anti-intellectualism? What's the relationship? It seems clear to me that anti-intellectualism is necessary but not sufficient for censorship. As such, other factors can be involved (social norms, moral outrage, etc.). Even so, in this case I'm inclined to think it's a very important, if not primary, necessary condition. I assert this in line with commentary given two days ago by Blake Gopnik in Washington Post. Gopnik summarized the historically-uninformed nature of Donohue's opposition:

The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

In my view, this kind of historical ignorance is simply another form of anti-intellectualism (i.e the unreasonable strain). The rest of Gopnik's commentary is pretty interesting, historically speaking, as well.

2. The Recent History of Publishing in the Academy

Scott McLemee at InsideHigherEd considers changes in the quality and quantity of academic scholarship over the past forty or so years. He opens by referencing a recent fall 2010 issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), but jukes to a consider the 2010 book, The State of Scholarly Publishing: Challenges and Opportunities (edited by Albert N. Greco). The book contains an essay William W. Savage, Jr. that constitutes the heart and soul of McLemee's piece. Here's the quote around which McLemee built his article:

In a passage that may seem literally incredible to younger scholars today, [Savage, Jr.] cites a piece of advice by one professor in the early 1970s – an epoch when “faculty who worried about publishing too much, thereby alienating colleagues and damaging their own careers” still wandered the earth. To be safe, this scholar suggested publishing “an article a year and a book every five years.” That would be enough to satisfy the administration, “but not so much as to threaten [your] colleagues unduly.”

Contrast that with the agenda laid out here (which considers publishing and teaching together).

3. Zombies in the Academy

Continuing a theme I started here last year, I offer this CFP for a book project (unrelated to my post) that seeks to "take up the momentum provided by the resurgence of interest in zombie culture to examine the relevance of the zombie trope to discussions of scholarly practice itself. We propose to canvas a range of critical accounts of the contemporary university as an atavistic culture of the undead." I am very much tempted to send a proposal. It sounds like fun, yes? The proposal due date is Dec. 15, 2010.

Btw-1: Here's a blog hosted by the Zombies in the Academy folks.
Btw-2: Yes, this is a real CFP. Andrew Whelan, a sociologist, does indeed exist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.]

4. Chinese Logic

Since learning of Mortimer Adler's (faulty? simplistic? sensible?) arguments, in Truth in Religion (1992), for the irreconcilability of Eastern and Western philosophy (primarily in chapters two and three), I have been passively interested in the history of logic. This recent blog post by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (right) at New APPS indulges my latent questions about this subject. In the post Novaes lays out questions and issues she plans to study on "the roots of deduction" during a five-year project. The central question seems to be "why the axiomatic-deductive method emerged in ancient Greece but not in ancient China"?

5. An Excellent Quote on the Internet, Reading, and Indexing

For the December 2006 edition of Prose Studies, Paul Tankard of the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand), wrote the following about 'indexes'---in the context of writing about lists as both literary devices and as signs of certain truths (bolds mine):

In saving the reader the trouble of actually reading, of experiencing in real time the full discursive being of a text, indexes contribute to the "death of the author." We see this in that huge electronic index which threatens to consume all text, the Internet, where sounds, images, and "grabs" or "bites" of text circulate independently of any author, where searching the indexes is not restricted by the covers of individual books, and where texts flow in and out of each other. However, this is not a new thing. Alphabetically organized anthologies...have always been popular --- although perhaps like printed indexes, they are not so much meant to undermine reading as re-reading. (p. 351)

And yes, I am acutely aware of the irony of my quoting this text in this format. - TL

Political Anti-Intellectualism And The Liberal Arts: Historical Considerations

Since anti-intellectualism has often been most effective in politics (e.g. with victims such as Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, Eugene McCarthy in the 60s, and even Bill Clinton in the 90s), I'm not surprised to see a present-day application via the "professor" label.

With regard to the article, I'm not sure I agree---initially at least---with Charles Ogletree's assertion that today's manifestation in relation to President Barack Obama is a "thinly veiled" kind of racism (article's phrase, Jack Stripling is the author). The problem I have with that line of thinking is that it's nowhere in the recent history of anti-intellectualism---as a broad social phenomenon at least. All of the late twentieth-century political figures that were objects of anti-intellectualism were white. Indeed, if there's any historical racism associated with political anti-intellectualism it's in the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was never derided precisely for his mental prowess. To carry Ogletree's argument a bit further, it seems to me that if any "uppity" association occurs to racists in relation to Obama, it will be because of his newfound aggressiveness (i.e. bully pulpit), not his mental ability. The "professor" appellation is likely just straightforward anti-intellectualism on the part of some opposition that may be racists.

Returning to Stripling's article, I do appreciate the thinking in this passage related to David S. Brown: It’s no surprise that the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter wrote about has resonance among some Americans today, says Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College. Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents are inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs -- not to intellectual growth, Brown says. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

When I first read the InsideHigherEd article I thought that, with more people than ever in college and even more than ever in graduate school, this line of political strategy can't be effective, long term, beyond a limited cohort of our citizenry. But I hadn't directly linked today's anti-intellectualism, as Brown did, to the ongoing vocationalism (read: devaluing of the liberal arts) that's occurred in higher education---beginning after World War II but increasingly evident in the last 10-15 years. - TL

Political Anti-Intellectualism And The Liberal Arts: Historical Considerations

Since anti-intellectualism has often been most effective in politics (e.g. with victims such as Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, Eugene McCarthy in the 60s, and even Bill Clinton in the 90s), I'm not surprised to see a present-day application via the "professor" label.

With regard to the article, I'm not sure I agree---initially at least---with Charles Ogletree's assertion that today's manifestation in relation to President Barack Obama is a "thinly veiled" kind of racism (article's phrase, Jack Stripling is the author). The problem I have with that line of thinking is that it's nowhere in the recent history of anti-intellectualism---as a broad social phenomenon at least. All of the late twentieth-century political figures that were objects of anti-intellectualism were white. Indeed, if there's any historical racism associated with political anti-intellectualism it's in the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was never derided precisely for his mental prowess. To carry Ogletree's argument a bit further, it seems to me that if any "uppity" association occurs to racists in relation to Obama, it will be because of his newfound aggressiveness (i.e. bully pulpit), not his mental ability. The "professor" appellation is likely just straightforward anti-intellectualism on the part of some opposition that may be racists.

Returning to Stripling's article, I do appreciate the thinking in this passage related to David S. Brown: It’s no surprise that the anti-intellectualism that Hofstadter wrote about has resonance among some Americans today, says Brown, a historian at Elizabethtown College. Higher education programs are increasingly moving toward the pre-professional variety, and students and parents are inclined to press colleges about how their programs will lead to jobs -- not to intellectual growth, Brown says. In that context, the stereotypical liberal arts professor is ever more marginalized.

When I first read the InsideHigherEd article I thought that, with more people than ever in college and even more than ever in graduate school, this line of political strategy can't be effective, long term, beyond a limited cohort of our citizenry. But I hadn't directly linked today's anti-intellectualism, as Brown did, to the ongoing vocationalism (read: devaluing of the liberal arts) that's occurred in higher education---beginning after World War II but increasingly evident in the last 10-15 years. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].

Tim's Light Reading (11/2/09)

1.a. The History of the Idea of Political Correctness: With a hat tip to John Quiggin at Crooked Timber, this old NYT story and the Wikipedia entry for political correctness got me thinking about how a history of the idea in the United States would look. It would seem that no history of the Culture Wars could be written without some accounting of the roots of p.c. But would it begin with the linguistic turn, as Quiggin briefly asserts? Or is it a Left political phenomenon, as some conservative thinkers assert, and the Wikipedia and NYT articles support? And while I've brought up Wikipedia, the early historical sample given there in relation to the U.S. (Chisholm versus Georgia, 1793) seems to confuse political theory with language usage. But maybe this is just a case of more context being needed with quote?

1.b. Related Aside: Philosophy of the History of Ideas: Is it just me, or can you turn anything into a form of intellectual history by giving the topic Platonic-like form/idea status and then claim to talk about its history? If so, then historians of ideas are going to run into the same critical problem Aristotle had with Plato: How many forms are there? And if *everything* has a form (which it appears even Plato did not assert), then isn't it more useful to talk about the specifics of the real object in front of you rather than the idea? But I suppose that kind of materialism is an anti-historical line of thought. I mean, if everything is unique, then there is no history. But this goes against our common sense. Even if the number of forms is not infinite, the pool of them is large enough that there is plenty of material with which to work. Perhaps it's necessary to being a historian that we believe there's an underlying-but-similar essence about which we can discuss change. The issue then becomes a well-worn one: how much change? In any case, it appears that a certain amount of Platonism, combined with the possibility of change, buttresses our attraction to the history of ideas.

2. The Creation of a Neoliberal Audit Culture in Higher Education: Decasia's Eli Thorkelson meditates on how Margaret Spellings' ill-fated effort to control/dictate/reform higher education accountability has led to a voluntary regimen of outcomes assessment over the past few years. To quote the post, this has created a new "neoliberal audit culture" in higher education (the phrase might be from Morten Levin or Cornell University's Davydd Greenwood).

3. Jennifer Burns' Competition: After Jennifer Burns received excellent exposure for her new book on The Daily Show (#6 here), another biography of Ayn Rand is now on the market: Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Here is a review. I like the present-past connections made in Kirsch's review. And Kirsch does mention Burns' effort. Amazon shows the release of Burns' book as Oct. 19 and Weller's as Oct. 27. Our days in the sun do not last long, do they? [BTW: Here is an excellent combined review of Burns' and Heller's books.]

4. Saul Alinsky and Jacques Maritain: About a month ago I learned that Alinsky and the moderate-to-liberal Catholic Thomistic philosopher Maritain maintained correspondence for almost 30 years, from 1945 until Alinsky's death in 1972. This was sort of a "worlds colliding" moment for me. And there's a book about it, no less: Bernard E. Doering's The Philosopher and the Provocateur. I suppose this is a reiteration of a lesson I've learned many times over: Never the let the *reputation* of person's philosophical commitments and social views (whether Left or Right) dictate your assumptions about her/his connections with the rest of the world.