He has a chapter on "Liberals" which is really a devastating look at the university system in the US circa 1969 and the many failings of the academy. Like so much else in the book, what was Wills was recording in 1969 has not changed much and his perceptions of trend/movements/ideologies is so spot-on that the book in entirely relevant today. Nothing more so than the chapter on academia. He takes the academy to the woodshed and gives it a sound thrashing. Hell, he takes everything I believe in and have been working on and shows that the liberal project of "freedom" in all its facets is not only hollow, but so self-contradictory that it cannot stand. While Wills may have over-estimated the tranformative nature of 1960s student opposition, he still identifies all the same issues about academia we are discussing today. He even takes a swipe at AFT.
I thought I'd share with you a single paragraph in pages of paragraphs just like it that I thought was particularly good:
Despite the aristocratic code of the university, in which professors address an elite, the academy must yield, in any showdown with the mass electorate, to what Schlesinger calls the discipline of consent. There are two reasons for this, one theoretical (majority rule in the political market) and one practical (the universities' economic support comes from the political community, national, state, and local). Two contradictory feelings grow, therefore, in the academy -- the sense of superior knowledge and the sense of ultimate powerlessness, a combination that makes for resentment. And resentment, according to Scheler and Camus, leads to intellectual asphyxiation, the constant breathing of one's own thoughts in a closed room.As I read this chapter, I couldn't help but agree with Wills. I couldn't but think he was right, that the academy is built upon a fiction and it must be attacked. At the same time, I also couldn't help but realize that these arguments were leading me dangerously close to agreeing with DHo and the like (I'm aware of the DHo-as-student-radical to DHo-as-right-wing-crazy connection, but don't have time to develop it). I kept waiting for the "but, this is the best system we got" or some such saving grace, but it never came. This being the 1960s, "alternatives" were still very much alive and not everyone had settled into comfortable middle-classness (I recognize my resemblance to that remark).
Without going into too much more detail, else I will stray into a book report and I need to re-read this chapter several times, I did want to pose a couple of questions to my friends, especially one in particular. Can we agree that there is something wrong with the academy as it functions today? If so, how do we use the tools at our disposal to make the academy better?
Our union should be such a tool, but it is not. If anything, our union works hard to protect the status quo against attacks from the outside. Maybe this is just another example of the "left" being on the defensive from the far right, so that we have to bunker. But I begin to wonder what we actually win by bunkering. I think we all recognize that there are significant problems with the tenure system in the US, just to pick one example. I don't have time to go into them all...I'm sure you can think of five off the top of your head. But instead of fighting to reform the flawed system, we respond to right-wing critiques of tenure by trying to strengthen and re-expand tenure on the college campus. Moreover, because we are at "war" with the right, we are all supposed to pretend like tenure (and its companion, academic freedom) are unassailable goods and that anyone who critiques them must be either misguided or evil. Worse, we are made to ignore all the inherent contradictions within the academy, which Wills does a great job spotlighting and I am unfairly playing on without explaining. We have stopped improving that which we hold dear, in order to "defend" it from "attack." The right-wing questions and critiques, so we stop questioning and critiquing. Instead of fighting for a future, we are constantly looking back to the past. And that doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere.
4 comments:
Not knowing Wills' critique, it's hard to know how to get at this, but I'll chime in with a couple of things. I think both sides in the culture wars are looking backwards. "Our" side wants to return to a supposed golden age when there were tenure-track jobs a-plenty, etc., etc., and "their" side wants to return to a time when the university was the province of rich, white men pondering universal truths that were only relevant to rich white men.
I guess the question for me becomes why aren't we formulating a vision of what we want the university to be rather than trying to grasp at an ever diminishing number of straws? What sorts of institutions and institutional practices would offer an environment for the unfettered exploration of ideas that would be accessible to anyone who wanted to partake? It's that sort of vision - or "strategic plan," if you will - that I think is missing from the current debates about the academy, which puts us in a strictly reactive mode.
I agree with wobblie, it is difficult to fully comment without the entire critique; however, I can guess that what you were trying to get at derives from what you quoted. If I understand it correctly, Wills is basically saying two things. 1) Professors and students comprise an elite class, meaning that they are somehow "better" than the lowly masses; but 2) they are forced to deal through Schelsinger's "displine of consent" with those same lowly masses.
There are two problems that I find with this criticism. First, thinking about professors as the only public in the university is wrong. Universities and the supposed elite class also include administrators, researchers, and increasingly profit-seeking motives through -- particularly with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act. This means that universities are publicly subsidized R&D labs. To say that universities somehow aren't the "real world" or a world apart seems, to me, fundamentally flawed.
Second, from what I tell based on your description, Wills thinks that the entire institution of the university is based on the liberal ideal of "freedom" and an egalitarian society. But, part of the reason that the protests of the 1960s were so strong (besides drafting students to send off to a senseless and baseless war) was that the professoriate was so entrenched in traditionally conservative ideals of conserving and training the foundations of western thought. With the civil rights movement, women's liberation movement and the anti-war movement, it was becoming obvious that the entrenched conservation of old white man knowledge was actually at odds with the experience of those traditionally excluded from the academy. In other words, it was the conservatives who were forced into the "discipline of consent" of the disenfranchised masses.
To me, these problems point out two things that might come to the same conclusion as wobblie, albeit much
more indirectly and less elegantly than his account. The conservatives look at the 60s as some kind of paradise lost - a day when the rich, white men conserved their own knowledge for themselves. Listening to conservatives now, they think that "conserving" that old knowledge will return them to that glorious time in their narrated history. They forget that, despite claiming the mantra of popular (i.e. non-elite) opinion and common sense today that it was that popular opinion to which they succumbed forty years ago.
At the same time, liberals are under siege and look at the campus rebellions as the glory days of redemption. But, I think that the larger problem is that the popular opinion that brought about the changes of the 1960s are no longer the problems we face today. The kind of oppression that was prevalent throughout the country and was excluded from the academy in the 1960s is no longer present in the same way today. Rather than fire hoses and police dogs, the kind of oppression faced today is "benign neglect" -- a classically liberal policy (I know that there are other examples, but this is the most obvious to me currently). I think that there is a grain of truth in the conservative criticism; a good deal of research does not respond to the kinds of things that a good deal of the population finds relevant (a point, Dave, you have made before).
I agree with wobblie that the problem is that there is no strategic plan to move forward - nothing to rock a new agenda that can define the role of the university in society. But, I would go further. I would say that it is a problem in general and is why our politics are stuck. We have all, in a sense, become culture warriors defining our politics by the side we feel is the true heir to the politics of the 1960s. Should we move back to the "glory" days of the 1950s by pretending that severe gender and racial oppression didn't exist (or, worse, justifying it). The alternative is to try and continue the revolution by protesting the war with the 20 other lefty activists in Eugene, Ann Arbor, Tacoma Park or other hippie bastions.
Although I answered neither of your questions (but hope to do so in the future), but I think that this gets at the larger issues involved in the debate you brought up here. To the extent that we separate the university from the "real world," we keep digging further in our bunker.
Quick thought before I get ready for work:
One of Will's points is that college (circa 1969, but I think it holds today) really is (still) for the elite. A university education is little more than a "rounding" or "finishing" experience for the vast majority of undergrads. They get a little knowledge here, a little knowledge there, but nothing that prepares them for the working world. Our universities are not focused on preparing people for the working world, careers, professions.
In fact, the academy does not claim that as the goal. Instead, we (if I may) claim different goals. Wills swipe at AFT in his referencing the slogan "Educating for Democracy." We often speak of an educated citizenry making educated political choices. And here we walk dangerously close to our right-wing friends. Wills, writing about the student protests of the 1960s, was attacking the Liberal academy from the Left, while the modern-day critics attack it from the right. Either way, if the goal of the academy is to educate citizens for democracy, the academy is clearly advancing a political agenda.
As Mike points out, the academy has changed since 1969. The mission today seems less about educating people about the virtues of democracy/freedom and more about freedom/tolerance, but it's really the same game. The hypocrisy that Wills wrote about and the students were protesting is that the the academy is really not a place that practices a whole lot of freedom and tolerance of ideas that challenge the value of freedom and tolerance. (I'm leaving aside the whole question of secular humanism and the indoctrination therein for another time).
Another idea I think is relevant here is the notion that college is really just a 4-year "time out" from society because we have no idea what to do with these kids age 18-23. We don't want or need them in the workforce. They have no place in society. So we ship them off to college to "educate" them.
In these ways, the university experience is not terribly different than it was in the early 1900s. It is a place for young people to go to get some experience and rounding so that they may be better workers/people when they are needed.
More on the failure of the "marketplace of ideas" later?
A related point I just thought of...maybe the corpretization of the academy is a symptom of the fact that there is no real reason for 90% of the people who attend college to do so. If you are running what amounts to a baby-sitting factory, doesn't it make sense to hire the cheapest baby-sitters possible? Our university administrators have made it clear, we're not there to actually educate people. And, really, what would be the point? Is there any reason that someone needs to know the five causes of the Civil War? As long as were "teaching" something nobody really "needs" to know, why not have an adjunct or graduate student do it?
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