A HALF CENTURY OF HIGHER EDUCATION BREAKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

My "Costs of Correctness" essay from spring, 1991 relied on the work of others who diagnosed the same ills.  Columbia's Richard Hofstadter attempted to work during the madness of the late 1960s, and he might have been mugged by reality.

Hofstadter correctly foresaw that strong forces were building up to turn American higher education away from the search for truth and into an engine of political change. In his view, education was about unfettered inquiry into all sorts of truths. He was right to see danger to that. Many questions are now forbidden because they challenge entrenched “progressive” ideology.

It used to be that ethical professors could keep their personal views separate from their classroom work.  If you have a long memory, dear reader, consider a Paper Chase episode in which the law students got caught up in a protest to save a campus watering hole, and their foil, the imposing Professor Kingsfield, was serving as general counsel for the university in the condemnation case.  But he also chided one of the students about not taking the time to read some case, which the student read, then understood that it offered legal grounds for the historic preservation of the tavern, then muttered, "Kingsfield didn't know what he was doing;" then, after a moment's reflection, the penny dropped, "He did know what he was doing."  Which was equipping students to do the work.  That's work in the real sense, not in the sloganeering version the student affairs types and their enablers in the senior administration invoke.

The problem, though, might be that there's a tension between learning for its own sake, and learning for the sake of individual advancement.  The noisy lefties of the late 1960s and early 1970s were eternally about raising consciousness in vocational disciplines like commerce or engineering ("work, study, get ahead, kill") or affixing a zero-sum stigma on earning grades ("your success ensures somebody else's failure.")  There might also have been reflective faculty who were not happy about public funding for applied research, whether that was splitting atoms in the squash courts, calculating trajectories that might have worked equally well for communications satellites or nuclear warheads,  or even finding the right balance between ameliorating income poverty and encouraging participation in the labor force.  I'm not making any of this up, younger readers.

The individual advancement for students might well have become, increasingly, in those "vocational" degrees, and the retreat of the intellectual types into obscurantism might have deprived several generations of nurses, engineers, therapists, accountants, and dairy scientists of the ability to diagnose ills in the body politic more generally (there's an elaboration on this point in a post to come); while the individual advancement for faculty turned into a quest for sponsored research, whether it's nuclear physics or poverty or what the National Science Foundation called "Research Applied for National Needs" (if an economist said "ran" that probably wasn't a reference to the morning jog) or a juried award from one of the national endowments, all of which became golden fetters on intellectual inquiry.

Thus, although Jay Schalin might credit Professor Hofstadter with correctly identifying what ails higher education, neither the pundit nor the professor correctly identify all the causes of the illness.

He also said that politicization of the academy would be even worse on a practical level (Hofstadter was in agreement with many of the goals of the protesters) since it is “a curiously self-destructive strategy for social change:”

If an attempt is made to politicize completely our primary centers of free argument and inquiry, they will in the end be forced to lose their character and be reduced to centers of vocational training, and nothing more.

As any casual observer of academia today can attest, his warning went unheeded and politicization has become a major force on the American campus. However, he was only partly right about the effects.

Arguably, when part of graduate training becomes learning how to recognize what areas of pure research, or of artistry, are more likely to be funded, and when the best-connected graduate students are those who have learned who to cultivate in the funding agencies, he's only partly right about the causes.  If some degrees lose status as a consequence, that's incidental.

On one hand, much of academia today has indeed been reduced to vocational training, just as Hofstadter predicted. Humanities majors are disappearing from many schools, especially small private colleges that once specialized in the liberal arts and do not have prestigious reputations. The most common majors at such schools now tend to be those geared toward entering a specific profession, such as nursing, accounting, K-12 teaching, computer science, or business management. Even pure science majors other than biology are disappearing at many such schools. The social sciences have not suffered as much enrollment loss because they are often perceived as less-than-rigorous programs favored by those who wish for easy college diplomas to serve as employment credentials.

There are market tests for those credentials: perhaps the return of Carter-style malaise will bring those tests back. But, to reiterate, those nurses, accountants, and the like won't know what they don't know until the reality that knowing some of those things might be helpful smacks them upside the head.

Furthermore, academia’s increasing ties to both the corporate world and the government bureaucracy are perhaps an extension of this vocational emphasis. For the government largely sees academia as a source of economic development and corporations see it as a source of talent and as a means to solve technical problems through research. And universities have been all too eager to sacrifice scholarship and tradition for the largesse offered them to shift priorities in a more corporate direction.

Those influences might work against the fashionable leftism in the common room: all you have to do is read any day's offerings at Inside Higher Ed and find somebody carping about them.  Thus, the argument for faculty stewardship of the university might be more compelling than Mr Schalin thinks.

[Hofstadter] grounded the institutional existence of the university improperly, suggesting that there was universal agreement that “in ultimate reality the members of the faculty are the university.” That assumption contradicts the legal and traditional views that the corporate body of a private academic institution is vested in its board of trustees and that the board is a perpetual body which holds the ultimate authority.

This error had dire implications. For, if the faculty is the university, the basic values of the university—which Hofstadter identified as “freedom, rationality, inquiry, discussion, and its own internal order”—become highly susceptible to ideological change over time as the beliefs of the faculty change. And that is exactly what has happened; freedom, inquiry and discussion are being replaced by rigid codes of political correctness, and rationality is being replaced with pragmatism.

Perhaps the pragmatic stance is in favor of freedom, inquiry, and discussion. Even if it means Professor Kingsfield's students figure out how to save the bar by legal means.