The University Revisioned: An Alternative to Corporate Mis-education

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I want to thank John Schaar, Hanna Pitkin, Henry Steck and colleagues in the Government Department, CSU Sacramento, for their close reading of and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Notes Plato, Protagoras, G.Vlastos, ed., Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956, 6–7. E. Farrell, “Public College Tuition Rise is Highest in Three Decades,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 31, 2003. Since the mid-1960s federal spending on research and development fell from 2.15 percent of the GDP to only .8 percent in 2001. Barry Bluestone, “Forget Bush and Gore: Our Economy Needs Another Khrushchev, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 5, 2001, B11. Between 1980 and 2002 the share of state funds devoted to higher education fell from 44% to 32%. Jeffrey Selingo, “The Disappearing State of Public Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 18, 2003, A22. Louis Menand makes this charge in “The Limits of Academic Freedom” in The Future of Academic Freedom, ed., Menand, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. 4, 17–18; as does Thomas Haskell, “Justifying the Rights of Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge,” 73–83, ibid. D. Oblinger, and A-L. Verville, What Business Wants from Higher Education, American Council on Education [ACE] and Oryx Press; Phoenix: Oyrx Press, 1998. The book recommends a curriculum of formal, “portable skills,” “not based on mastering a specific…body of knowledge,” including “teamwork, communications, and flexibility”, 8, 18, 26, 90. Aronowitz, S., The Knowledge Factory, Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Education, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. 62, 97. Tenure rights have already been limited in two states, Texas and Florida. R. Wilson and S., Walsh, “Tears in the Fabric of Tenure,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 10, 2003, A8. John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1927. (Orig. 1852). 138, 113, and 51, 101. Newman referred to the habit as “an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of wisdom, of philosophical reach….” 152. This form of reason is not instrumental but, as Martha Nussbaum explains, “constructs the personality in a very deep way, shaping its motivations as well as it logic.” Cultivating Humanity, A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Cambridge: Harvard University, 1997, 29, 46. David Noble, California Faculty Association, “Future of the University” hearing, Los Angeles, May 9, 2000. The analogy is to the brutal enclosure movement in England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. David Bollier extends this analysis with a chapter on the knowledge commons in Silent Theft, The Private Plunder of our Common Wealth, New York: Routledge, 2003. Instrumental rationality “fosters a narrow sense of responsibility, agency and public values…” Henry Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education,” Harvard Educational Review, 72(4) Winter 2002, 454. Kerr, C., The Uses of the University, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963, 53–55. Aronowitz, 2, 27; Menand, L., “The Marketplace of Ideas,” New York: American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Papers, No. 49, 2001. 2. Between the wars the percentage of high school graduates who went to college rose from 9 percent to 15 percent. L. Jackson Newell, “College and University Governance,” in R. Campbell, et. al., A History of Thought and Practice in Educational Administration, New York: Teachers College, 1987, 154. Kerr, 3–9. Kerr, 28, 87–90. Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and the Community of Scholars, New York: Vintage Books, 1964, 122, 124, 167. Goodman, 109, 139–140. The “service station” reference was originally Abraham Flexner's, from Universities: American, English, German (1930), cited in Hofstadter, R. and W. Smith, American Higher Education, A Documentary History, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961, 907. Goodman, 172, 232,197. Kerr, Uses, 8, 41–42, 57–59, 45, 88, 114, 124. Ibid., 86–87,105. Bruce Kimball, for example, makes this claim in Orators and Philosophers, A History of the Idea of Liberal Education, New York: The College Board, 1995, 156. “The Morrill Act,” in Hofstadter and Smith, 568–587. “The Northwest Ordinance,” Hofstadter and Smith, Jefferson's University of Virginia dispensed with administrative machinery, the taking of attendance and grading; and it included a system of electives. Goodman, 220–221. Jefferson wrote Madison in 1787: “The only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty is to educate and inform the whole mass of the people.” Benjamin Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and Future of America, New York: Ballantine Books, 1992, 224. John Adams and others agreed. Douglass, John A., The California Idea and American Higher Education, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 44, 95, and 22–39 passim. Similar ideas were expressed by U.C. President LeConte and Stanford President Jordan, 63, 98–99. The Morrill Act required that the institutions adopt two relatively new practices “beyond teaching: scientific research and public service.” Douglass, 3. It is also possibly due to this act that, as Nussbaum notes, the idea of liberal education's purpose is “the cultivation of the whole human being…has been taken up most fully in the United States.” 9, 129. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, New York: Signet Classic, 1960, 150–151. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University, 1957, 317; and The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press, l959, 187, and 185–189. California's Department of Education tried in 1939 to wrest a liberal arts role for itself by drawing distinctions from the U.C. system. Douglass, 159; 139, 155–56. President Michele Myers of Sarah Lawrence College emphasized this political role more recently when she wrote that education, more than “learning job skills,” is the “bedrock of democracy … [Its] purpose is to make people free—to give them the grounding … to participate as intelligent members of a free society.” “It's a College, Not a Brand Name … ” Sacramento Bee, April 4, 2001. See Haskell's illuminating discussion of the disciplines as new “communities of the competent.” 44 and passim. Frederic Howe in David P. Thelen, The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1972. Though utilitarian, one scholar concludes that “the training students received” as a result of LaFollette's and Von Hise's Idea “pointed them less toward professionalism than toward cooperation” with the community in solving social problems. The “excursion method” taught them a “truly scientific humbleness…”, 123. See also Lincoln Steffens, “Sending a State to College,” The American Magazine, Feb. 1909 (349–364). Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America, 1918, in Lerner, ed., The Portable Veblen, New York: Viking Portable, 1948. 508, 510—11. See also Flexner, 920. Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928, Madison, University of Wisconsin, 1990, Ch. 2. On the changing make-up of the boards see also Richard Hofstadter and Metzger, Walter P., The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, New York: Columbia University, 1955, 352. Barrow, Ch. 2. On the shaping of political science, see Peter Seybold, “The Ford Foundation and the Triumph of Behavioralism in American Political Science,” in Arnove, R. I., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism, New York: Macmillan, 1980. 269; and David Horowitz, “Billion Dollar Brains: How Wealth Puts Knowledge in it Pocket,” Ramparts Magazine, 7 (May, 1969): 36—44. Barrow, 66, 64–75 passim, 119; and Aronowitz, 15. Goodman, 126, 123. See also Flexner, 907, 915. On the hidden politics of scientific management, see J. Lustig, Corporate Liberalism, The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890–1920, Berkeley, CA: U.C. Press, 1982, ch. 6. Haskell, 47. Concerning early academic freedom defenses of professors (including the conservative William Graham Sumner) see Hofstadter and Metzger, Ch. 9 ff., and 335—338; and Barrow, Ch. 7. AAUP, “1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” AAUP offprint, 2. Menand suggests academic freedom might also be a product of American Pragmatism, but this is doubtful given that its counsel of adjustment gave little grounding for a principled struggle against long odds. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001. 411–417, 313–314. Certainly Dewey's detachment during the critical Pullman strike and abstract 1902 essay on academic freedom give little cause hope about this genealogy. (“Academic Freedom,” Educational Review, XXIII, New Jersey 1902; reprinted in The American Concept of Academic Freedom Information, Walter P. Metzger, ed., New York: Arno Press, 1977.) It was Arthur Lovejoy, a traditional philosopher and Dewey's co-founder of the AAUP who resigned his position at Stanford in solidarity with an unjustly fired colleague. AAUP, “Declaration of Principles….” 3. Haskell, 46, 54. Haskell, 66 (italics in orig.). Jefferson stated in reference to the University of Virginia, that “We are not afraid to follow truth where it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as freedom is left to combat it.” Hofstadter and Metzger, 239. Haskell notes that any claim to authority on the part of faculty members is “as delegates of a community of inquiry” who have submitted to this mutual criticism, 55. This analysis follows Barrow's insightful formulations, 8–10. Carlin Romano, The Nation, June 12, 2000, 53. Newman, 177. Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols.” War and the Intellectuals, Collected Essays of Randolph Bourne, ed. C. Resek, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964, 60. There were exceptions to this, however; University of California professors, for example, refused in 1949–50 to sign the loyalty oath though they were fired for it by the Board of Regents (most subsequently regaining their positions through court order). The professor was economist Stanley Sheinbaum as explained in his “University on the Make,” Ramparts Magazine, 6, Apr. 1966. Also see Nussbaum, 9. Jaroslav Pelikan proposes that the university rests on “four legs:” the advancement of knowledge through research, transmission of knowledge through teaching, preservation of knowledge in libraries and scholarly collections, with universities as “the custodians of the common memory,” and diffusion of knowledge through publishing. The Idea of the University: A Reexamination, New Haven: Yale University, 1992, 16–17, 112. But neither “advancement” nor “transmission” necessarily entail education in the sense of educing, cultivating, students’ minds and potentials. D. Goines, The Free Speech Movement, Coming of Age in the Sixties, Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1993, 361. Newell, 155, 158, citing John Corson, The Governance of Colleges and Universities, 1960. Newfield, Christopher, “Recapturing Academic Business,” 48 Social Text 15, Summer, 1997, 59–61. Nietzsche, F., The Use and Abuse of History, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949, 33. Kerr, 69, and 2, 5, 94, and 122. Kerr, 124. The counsel was not, however, of total promiscuity, the requisite service being due only “leadership groups in society”—i.e. agribusiness not farmworkers, the Department of Defense not the anti-war movement. Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt note fifteen overlapping usages of the phrase, “corporate university.” Academic Keywords, A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education, New York: Routledge, 1999, 89. David F. Noble reported in 1997 that UCLA, U.C. Berkeley, and the University of Colorado had all struck deals along these lines. Essay included in Noble, Digital Diploma Mills, The Automation of American Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. Emil Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, New York: Glencoe Free Press, 1964, 372. Eyal and Washburn, 42. The U.C. deal was between UCB's Plant Biology department and the multinational life-sciences company Novartis, and lapsed after five years. Press and Washburn, 39–42, G. Blumenstyk, “A Vilified Corporate Partnership Produces Little Change,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001. pp. A24-A27. By 1988 Harvard already had sixty-nine such corporate relationships, Stanford forty, and MIT thirty-five. Aronowitz, 44. “The views and needs of business are at the heart of nearly all of [these] long-range higher-education plans.” Schmidt, P, “States Set a Course for Higher-Education Systems: Master Plans Aim to Insure Cohesive Response to…Changes,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 20, 2000. A7-A8, J. Basinger, “College Presidents Urged to Nurture Relationships with Businesses,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, A27. R. Birnbaum, Management Fads in Higher Education, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000, 27, 140, 154. Birnbaum adds the brilliant insight into this rationality: “Systems of this kind are considered rational as long as they are internally consistent, even if their elements are not consistent with external reality, and even if they do not lead to the desired outcomes.” (emph. in original), 28. Gary Rhoades, Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. Newfield, 44, 48. The Association of Governing Boards “Statement on Institutional Governance,” Nov. 8, 1998, and American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) statement from the same period reassert governing boards’ plenary power over American universities and the idea that shared governance is a concession from them. Leatherman, C., “Shared Governance Under Siege: Is It Time to Revive or Get Rid of It?”, Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 20, 1998. On the attempt to degrade faculty status, Cary Nelson, “The War Against the Faculty,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 1999. Press and Washburn, 46. Haskell notes the similarity between the epistemology of the university and Charles Peirce's “fallible realism”, 68–70. And Nussbaum recognizes the “narrative imagination…in the liberal arts” to be part of a “curriculum for citizenship,” 97 and Ch. 3 passim. “Lawmakers increasingly view higher education as a private good that should be supported more by students and donors, rather than as a public good that deserves state support.” Selingo, “Disappearing State of Higher Education,” (n. 2 supra); and Selingo, “What Americans Think About Higher Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 3, 2003., A13. “The commoditization of the research enterprise has transformed research knowledge into intellectual capital and intellectual property.” Birnbaum, 91. Virginia Postrel, “When Knowledge was Spread Around, So Was Prosperity,” (review of Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena,) New York Times, Dec. 5, 2002, C2., Bollier provides an excellent analysis and overview of the commons and gift economy. Jonas Salk, Albert Sabine and Benjamin Franklin among others all refused to patent their inventions, the latter stating that he had “benefited from others’ inventions and was glad to return the favor.” “Hot Type” column noting Edmund Morgan's book on Benjamin Franklin, Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 13, 2002, A18. Barry Munitz, a protégé ironically of Kerr's, who rather than welcoming debate like Kerr urged “leverage and constraint mechanisms [on campuses]…to effect change and improve client orientation in response to consumer and patron expectations.” “Managing Transformation in an Age of Social Triage,” in Re-inventing the University, Managing and Financing Institutions of Higher Education, S. Johnson and L. Rush, eds., New York: Wiley and Sons, l995, Ch. 3. Newman, ix. Goodman noted that, “the teacher teaches a child and not a subject matter”, 177. Newman, xv–xvi, 134–138, 101, 113. Seneca wrote that, “the only kind of education that really deserves the name liberalis…is one that makes its pupils free, able to take charge of their own thought and to conduct a critical examination of their society's norms and traditions.” Nussbaum, 30. Two U.C. faculty members noted at the time of the Free Speech Movement that the protestors were also defending “the principles of a liberal education which their elders had mislaid somewhere among the many other functions of the multiversity.” John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond, New York: Vintage Books, 1970, p. 22. The classic seven arts were grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Kimball, 2, 59, 175. Aquinas already felt these were insufficient. Kimball, 66. Colonial America also knew seven arts: classical languages, literature, rhetoric, geometry, mathematics, and natural and moral philosophy. Newell, 152. Newman, 102, 105–06. Pelikan, 149. The other phrases are from public testimony at the California Faculty Association's “Future of the University” hearings, San Jose and Los Angeles, California, Spring, 2000. Sara Hebel, “Poll Shows Value Americans Place on a College Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2000. According to a Chronicle survey, 85 percent of the public believes that preparing students to be responsible citizens is very important or important. Jeff Selingo, “What Americans Think….”, May 2, 2003. Also see Sara Hebel, “Public Colleges Emphasize Research but the Public Wants a Focus on Students,” Ibid. A14. “The history of liberal education is the story of a debate between orators and philosophers.” Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 2. Werner Jaeger developed this thesis earlier, Paidea, Vol. III. New York, Oxford University, 1944. The latter quotes are from Jaeger 64, 102. Isocrates resembled Thucydides in seeing politics as subject to the laws of tragedy. Jaeger, 101, 108, 129. Isocrates and his followers charged Plato with developing a “mental gymnastics” that could not “advis[e] anything about what should be done at the present,” and encouraging a “withdrawal from the active political life,” that they saw alone as giving a person's life worth. Jaeger, 71, 148; Kimball, 34, 37, 238; Mirhady, D. and Y. L. Too, Isocrates I, Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2000. 15; “Against the Sophists,” 63; and “Antidosis,” 221, 213, 233, 253. Jaeger, 143–144. The word logos was critical for both branches of the tradition because it simultaneously denoted higher order and speech. Cicero, De Oratore, Kimball, 36. Seneca, Cicero's contemporary also excluded any study “which results in money-making” from liberal studies. Guterman, N., ed., The Anchor Book of Latin Quotations, New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1966, 251. Jaeger, 46–47. See also Murhady and Too, 204. Kimball also saw Isocrates as “the father of liberal education” and humanistic culture. On the humanists’ communal idea of freedom, Kimball, 115, 122. The university should be “our delivery not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own….” Lord Acton, in Pelikan, 131. See also Nussbaum, 100. Kimball, 214. Newman, 145. Jaspers, K., The Idea of the University, Boston, Beacon Hill Press, 1959, 62. Menand, L., “Re-imagining Liberal Education,” in Robert Orrill, ed., Education and Democracy: Re-Imagining Liberal Learning in America, New York: The College Board, 1997, 2. Mills, Power Elite, 318. Newman, 145, 147–48. Rabban, D., “Academic Freedom: Individual or Institutional?” Academe, Nov.–Dec. 2001, 16–20. AAUP, 1915 “Declaration.” Aronowitz, 65. And he notes accordingly, “The decline of academic life represents, in part, the degree to which the faculty has surrendered autonomy.” 164. See also Haskell, 46, 54. These attempted defenses began as early as the 1830s (e.g., Hofstadter and Metzger, 268). On academic freedom as distinguished from First Amendment rights, see Haskell, Hofstadter and Metzger, and Donna R. Euben, “Academic Freedom of Individual Professors and Higher Education Institutions, AAUP, Mar., 2002. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor, New York: Abaris Books, 1979 (orig., 1798), 27–29. Newman, 177. Alexander Astin writes that “we are inclined to forget that the autonomy that we seek…may be the most powerful tool we have for reshaping liberal education in the interests of promoting democracy and citizenship.” “Liberal Education and Democracy: The Case for Pragmatism,” in Orrill, 222. Pelikan argues that even Cardinal Newman was not opposed to goals like these, believing rather that narrow “utilitarianism is a threat to utility,” —i.e., the university's larger contributions. Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination 34, and Chs. 4, 8. Oblinger and Verville, 18, 82. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 4th ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1995, 182, 192–193. Giroux, 441. P. Gay, Schnitzler's Century, The Making of the Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2002, 21–22. Peirce also saw the search for truth as being undertaken by communities of inquiry rather than by isolated individuals, and truths therefore established by collective reason and inter-subjective standards of proof. Peirce, C.S., “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in P. Weiner, Values in a Universe of Chance, Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1958, 133; Lustig, 161, 167, 263. Barber writes similarly that “What distinguishes truth…is not conformity to society's historical traditions or the standards of independent reason or the dictates of some learned canon, but conformity to communicative processes…that occur only in free communities….” 223. The Renaissance humanists’ appeal to Greek and Roman tradition, the roots of the recent idea of “neutrality,” was a straightforward part of their larger politics. Nussbaum, 103. Toni Morrison, “How Can Values Be Taught in This University,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring, 2001, 278. Roger W. Bowen, “The New Battle Between Political and Academic Cultures,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, B14. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 187. Testimony at “Future of the University” hearing, California Faculty Association, California State University Sacramento, Nov. 16, 2000. Barber, 14. A quarter of the nation's faculty had joined unions by late 2001, and some of the unions were attempting to become, more than wages-and-hours organizations, “agents of a new educational imagination.” Aronowitz, 101. Academic citizenship is a theme of Richard Moser's, AAUP National Field Representative. Personal correspondence. Wells, H.G., The Outline of History, 1920, 706–707.