Louis Menand Research Articles

Shaping Minds or Defending Democracy? How Scholars Have Interpreted Major Reports on Higher Education From the 1940s

ABSTRACT In the 3 years prior to Harry Truman’s establishment of the President’s Commission on Higher Education in 1946, the Association of American Colleges (AAC), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and Harvard University all released reports on the relationship of general or liberal education to the political order. This historiographical essay assesses recent scholarship on these major reports of the 1940s by scholars including Jamie Cohen-Cole, Andrew Jewett, Bryan McAllister-Grande, George Marsden, and Louis Menand. The essay examines why intellectual historians have often given more attention to the Harvard “Redbook” than to the Truman report and why they have almost completely ignored the book-length ACLS report (the AAC report was much smaller but also gets little attention). I argue that intellectual historians’ greater attention to the Redbook is largely due to its singular focus on general education (as compared to the more wide-ranging Truman report) and to the greater ease of accessing archival records of the Harvard committee as compared to the Truman Commission. I also assert that some key interpreters have misunderstood the Harvard Redbook and its relationship to the Truman report. Correctly understanding the differences between the two helps us to see that distinct intellectual positions underpinned competing visions for undergraduate education in the United States after World War II.

Louis Menand. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.

Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War arrives with all the signifiers of a landmark. The product of nearly two decades of work by a prominent New Yorker critic and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, its dust jacket includes promises from assembled luminaries that it will be “dazzling,” “astonishing,” “coolly independent,” a “colossal achievement of imagination.” Encompassing 727 pages of text, not inclusive of notes, its chapters wind with smooth confidence across varied terrain: from literary studies (Trilling; Ransom; Derrida; de Man), to popular (the Beatles) and avant-garde (John Cage) music, to social and political theory (Sartre; Riesman; Arendt; Lévi-Strauss; Berlin; Fanon), to cultural criticism (Orwell; Baldwin; Sontag; Baraka; Kael), to the visual arts (Abstract Expressionism; commercial design; Pop Art; Godard). Readers will find a wealth of illuminating narrative details, braided together in an extraordinarily ambitious and finely wrought synthesis of the intellectual life of the age. The book has already achieved a broad audience and will be an essential office companion for lecturers on American cultural and intellectual history for decades to come.

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana Lisa Szefel (bio) Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 2021. 880 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. In 1945, after decades of destruction and deprivation, freedom in Europe seemed to be within grasp. In contrast to the post-World War I retreat into isolationism, the United States, intent on forging a world order grounded in liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity, assumed global leadership. Melvin Leffler’s seminal A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992) set the terms of debate regarding postwar national and international economic, political, and colonial rearrangements. That doorstopper of a book began as the guns fell silent in Germany, a moment the defeated nation dubbed Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”), and representatives of Imperial Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War surveys the same landscape, but from a different angle. The Free World seeks to map out why, in this Pax Americana, paintings and poems, music and movies seemed to actualize liberty. Menand canvasses the shearing forces that caused this faulting and folding in art and ideas as Americans pivoted away from war footing. The Free World does not explore the use of culture as a weapon against Communism abroad, a field expertly mined by Frances Stonor Saunders’ landmark The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1991) and, more recently, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) by Greg Barnhisel. Nor does Menand concern himself with the impact of politics on national identity, a vantage point first sketched by Stephen Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). In the context of superpower rivalry, totalitarian peril, and decolonization, Menand carves out deft insights as they form, strike, renovate, and ricochet—sometimes with a chisel, other times with a scalpel. The Free World ends with a bang rather than concludes, bringing Kennan’s prescription of Soviet containment to its logical conclusion in Operation Rolling Thunder, which rained down three-hundred pounds of bombs for every woman, man, and child in North Vietnam. The engines of American political, intellectual, artistic, and moral authority, developed over the previous two decades, came screeching to a halt, shifting [End Page 408] democracy into reverse. In the wake of this wheelspin, new articulations of freedom gained traction. Menand’s Tolstoyan epic examines a geometry of “vertical cross-sections” and “horizontal through-lines” (p. xiv), which unveils a deep and broad panorama. What results is not War and Peace, but a series of Polaroid snapshots, a device created in 1948 as one of the era’s technological innovations. Menand captures the moments when creators conceived their art: Jean-Paul Sartre jumping into the void; Jackson Pollock tossing a canvass on the floor; Merce Cunningham chucking choreography for chance. Critics charted this new territory, explaining films, explicating texts, criticizing consumerism, unveiling misogyny, and diagnosing racism. A second goal animates the inquiry: the education Menand absorbed from his parents, a more activist and elevated version of the kind of general readers Joan Shelley Rubin illustrated in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992). Considering art and thought in the Cold War might, Menand suggests, render a more complete portrait of his own subjectivity. What launched the notion that ideas matter? Menand argues that it began with George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram,” which laid out in despairing detail the inherently expansionist nature of Communist ideology. With little hope of peaceful coexistence, only a policy of “vigilant containment” offered protection against yet another global conflagration. Among the first to gauge Atomic Age geopolitical threats was George Orwell whose attempt to join a Communist cell became fodder for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell chronicled his battle against fascists during the Spanish Civil War, while the now-canonical Animal Farm (1948) and 1984 (1949) illuminated the despotic impact of Stalinist cant and dissimulation. Eastern bloc consolidation gave ballast to the publishing fortunes of another political prognosticator, Hannah Arendt. Her etiology of...

Chimes of Freedom

In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand tests the proposition that the West’s victory in the Cold War might have been a bigger win on the cultural level than it was on the political and military ones. Nuclear dread does not pervade his narrative, and he handles strategic affairs interstitially. During the Cold War, he suggests, the United States and the Soviet Union exploited the human foibles illuminated by modern literature on a grand scale. Visual art, for its part, elevated and framed American capitalism as a cultural as well as an economic monolith. The US government, including the CIA, sought to weaponise Western culture, but Menand concludes that its unaided power was far greater than any government instrument’s. Art may now be less useful or powerful as a tool of cultural warfare than it was in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Freedom at the Center

Of course it's brilliant. The Free World represents the hugely ambitious culmination of the efforts of a scholar of exceptional talent to explicate mid-century American culture, and to put it within a broad political and social context. With its immense attention to detail, The Free World frequently offers such fresh readings of a wide variety of topics that perhaps only subspecialists can profess to find familiar the evidence and interpretations that Louis Menand provides. It is emblazoned with bold personal opinions that keep the reader interested. At the Center is a very different book. It is a collective effort, and the authors seem to seek to avoid the kind of personalized style that Menand displays. But the effort that Casey Nelson Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick make to tie the disparate threads together distinguish At the Center from Menand's volume, and therefore offer an invaluable contrast. These books are aimed at different categories of reader, provide divergent temporal and geographic frames, and rarely overlap in attentiveness to the same material. Such variations can make for vigorous scholarly arguments about how to pack thought and culture into American historiography.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan

Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

<i>The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War</i> by Louis Menand

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

November 01 2021 The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. Sarah Roth Sarah Roth Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sarah Roth Online Issn: 1531-3298 Print Issn: 1520-3972 © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2021by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cold War Studies (2021) 23 (4): 263–265. https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01053 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Sarah Roth; The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. Journal of Cold War Studies 2021; 23 (4): 263–265. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01053 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsJournal of Cold War Studies Search Advanced Search In September 1960, after the publisher of the magazine Musical America asked the presidential candidates for their views about music, then-Senator John F. Kennedy sent a letter declaring, “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth is also the age of Shakespeare.” Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War serves as an intellectual successor to Kennedy's hypothesis about the relationship between civil society and creativity. Menand's book is not about why culture... © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2021by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts

Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts

The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook ed. by Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook ed. by Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon Melody Herr, Ph.D. Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon (Editors). The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 400 pp. Paperback: $32.50. ISBN 9780226414713 The concept of the research university originated in nineteenth-century Germany and, transplanted to the United States, achieved its modern form in the early twentieth century. This volume gathers key primary sources charting the parallel development of this institution in these two nations from the 1780s through the 1930s. By collecting these documents, many of which are difficult to find or otherwise available only in German, into a single reference book, providing an introduction describing the historical context for each, and placing them in dialogue with one another, the editors have done both scholars and critics of higher education a great service. The volume editors are intellectual historians with a long-standing interest in the university. Paul Reitter, Director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University, who specializes in German-Jewish culture; and Chad Wellmon, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of German and History at the University of Virginia, who recently published a monograph on the invention of the research university (Wellmon, 2015), collaborate regularly. Their websites list several forthcoming co-edited and co-authored publications. Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize winner, recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Professor of English at Harvard University, and staff writer for The New Yorker, is the best-known of the three editors. In The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), he argues that in order to understand the [End Page E-7] modern university and its problems, specifically its resistance to change, one must study its history. The same argument underlies the present volume. By documenting controversies of the past, Menand, Reitter, and Wellmon hope to provide a corrective, long-view perspective on current controversies over the university's purpose and alleged shortcomings. Consequently, they select sources with both historical significance and current relevance. The first half of the volume proceeds roughly in chronological order. Part 1, "German Research Universities," opens with a report on the state of universities in German lands presented to King Frederick Wilhelm II in 1789. Refusing to allow bureaucrats to determine the future of institutions dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schleiermacher, F.W.J. Schelling, and other intellectuals of the day proposed reforms. This section climaxes with Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "On the Internal Structure of the University in Berlin and Its Relationship to Other Organizations" (circa 1809), which the volume editors refer to as the "ur-text of the modern research university" (p. 2). Humboldt's call for the establishment of the University of Berlin concludes Part 1. Part 2, "Americans Abroad and Returning," captures observations of those who studied at or visited German universities. The letters from Göttingen by George Ticknor and George Bancroft, along with reflections by Richard Ely and James M. Hart, give a sense of student life. Although Henry Tappan did not study abroad himself, he toured several European institutions. When he became the first president of the University of Michigan in 1852, he constructed it according to the German model that he so much admired. For Tappan, higher education was a matter of national pride, a demonstration of the practical merits of America's republican form of government. In the essay reproduced here, he declares the educational system created by the despotic Prussian monarchy a "glorious achievement" and challenges his compatriots to prove that "a republic, too, can create and foster the noblest institutions of learning, can patronize the arts and artists, and learning and learned men" (p. 149). Tappan's challenge serves as a segue to Part 3, "American Adaptations," which opens with the Morrill Act of 1862. As the editors rightly point out, the Act was one component of the U.S. Congress's nation-building efforts initiated during the Civil War. Under the Act, states received an allotment of federal land that they could lease or sell in order to generate revenue to establish a college. These land-grant...

Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien

Reviewed by: Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien Richard R. John (bio) Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 john o’brien Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016 268pp. In Literature Incorporated, John O’Brien surveys the rise of the corporation in Britain and early America in the period between 1650 and 1850 from an unfamiliar angle. Most historical writing on the corporation in this period treats it as a legal entity. O’Brien shifts our attention to the realm of cultural artifacts. His goal—as he observes in a gloss of John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), whose writings he explores in his first substantive chapter—is to translate the “unconscious political-economic ideology” of the age into the realm of the conscious “‘idea’” so as to “render it available for critique” (11). Though O’Brien is not unmindful of cultural artifacts that originated in colonial America and the United States, and while he professes to be conversant with recent Anglo-American historical writing on the law, he is primarily concerned with literary texts and cultural icons that originated in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Britain. Admirers of John Seelye, Leo Marx, John Kasson, and Judith A. McGaw, be forewarned. If you are looking for an analysis of the corporation in early American literature, as it is defined by the editors of this journal, Literature Incorporated does not fit the bill. Indeed, the almost exclusive focus on late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Britain makes one wonder if a project that had been originally confined to this topic had been recast at the behest of the editors at a university press to increase its likely readership. Joseph Addison’s tragic drama Cato (1712) and the notorious South Sea Bubble of 1720 receive prominent treatment; John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading empire, as described by Washington Irving in Astoria, and Andrew [End Page 491] Jackson’s veto of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832, as analyzed by generations of historians, do not. Though land speculation fired the imagination of countless Americans while highly speculative ventures to buy and sell the national domain generated a large and often emphatically rhetorical literature, land companies go unmentioned; equally absent is any discussion of the literary response of anyone in Britain or America to canals, railroads, or factories. Specialists in American economic history who are interested in the literary dimension of the economic ideas of John Smith, Benjamin Franklin, or Alexander Hamilton will not find what they are looking for here either. Indeed, the only American figure to receive an extended treatment is Edgar Allan Poe—an unusual choice, given the theme. William Leggett is not in the index, and neither is Herman Melville. Following the lead of the literary critics Marc Shell and Mary Poovey and the economic historian Deidre McCloskey, O’Brien explores the relationship between cultural artifacts and economic phenomena. His primary target is neoclassical economics—with a second, implicit target being the economic history that neoclassicism has inspired. Sympathetic to Louis Menand’s critique of interdisciplinarity as a valorization of the existing disciplines as the only legitimate ways of knowing, he strives for a supradisciplinarity that deploys the methods of the literary critic to expose the metaphorical bedrock on which the discipline of economics has come to rest: “This book sees economics as a way of modeling the world that is more like literature than it is willing to let on” (8). McCloskey’s critique of the mathematization of economics is a particular inspiration: “Literary scholars take economic concepts to be in the first instance imaginative constructs, figures of speech that lend themselves to the same kinds of analysis as all other modes of discourse. That is the goal here” (9). The organization of Literature Incorporated is primarily chronological. Following an introduction that makes the case for the corporation as a literary metaphor, it consists of four substantive chapters that explore, respectively, the ideological significance of John Locke’s late seventeenth-century essays on money; the cultural ramifications of the South Sea Company’s collapse in 1720; the “problem of...

"The burgers that done the deed": Hazardous food un Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice'

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009), recently adapted into film by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014), depicts “countercultural California [as] a lost continent of freedom and play, swallowed up by the faceless forces of co-optation and repression”, to use the words of Louis Menand in The New Yorker (2009). While tracking the meandering investigations of Larry “Doc” Sportello, a doped-up private detective, Pynchon composes an elegy for the dwindling late-1960s hippy utopia about to disappear in the wake of a general transformation of the US into an increasingly corporatized, surveyed, and normalised space. This essay explores the role of hazardous and unhealthy food in characterising the anarchic utopia of late-1960s Californian counterculture. Like its often explosive or toxic food, this counterculture suffers from a tendency to deteriorate due to the essential instability of its components, which is, in fact, the very definition of “inherent vice”. Yet, such references, though perhaps unappetising, contribute to an affirmative, if eulogistic portrayal of such a culture. In a contemporary context of increasing food and health regulation, often targeted at traditional and unusual forms of food, this essay aims to discuss the main, and frequently vivid, references to food and drink in Pynchon’s novel as signifiers of a larger tendency to escape restrictive social norms, as well as health inspections.

The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue, and: Liberal Arts at the Brink by Victor E. Ferrall, Jr, and: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand, and: The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American

The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue, and: Liberal Arts at the Brink by Victor E. Ferrall, Jr, and: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand, and: The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand (review)

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand (review)

Superfluous southerners: cultural conservatism and the South, 1920-1990

In Superfluous Southerners, J. Langdale III tells the story of traditionalist conservatism and its boundaries in twentieth-century America. Because this time period encompasses both the rise of the modern conservative movement and the demise of southern regional distinctiveness, it affords an ideal setting both for observing the potentiality of American conservatism and for understanding the fate of the traditionalist man of letters. Langdale uses the intellectual and literary histories of John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate the three principal contributors to the Agrarian manifesto I ll Take My Stand and of their three most remarkable intellectual descendants Cleanth Brooks, Richard Weaver, and Melvin Bradford to explore these issues. Langdale begins his study with some observations on the nature of American exceptionalism and the intrinsic barriers which it presents to the traditionalist conservative imagination. While works like Louis Menand s The Metaphysical Club have traced the origins of modern pragmatic liberalism during the late nineteenth century, the nature of conservative thought in postbellum America remains less completely understood. Accordingly, Langdale considers the origins of the New Humanism movement at the turn of the twentieth century, then turning to the manner in which midwesterners Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer Moore stirred the imagination of the southern Agrarians during the 1920s. After the publication of I ll Take My Stand in 1930, Agrarianism splintered into three distinct modes of traditionalist conservatism: John Crowe Ransom sought refuge in literary criticism, Donald Davidson in sectionalism, and Allen Tate in an image of the religious-wayfarer as a custodian of language. Langdale traces the expansion of these modes of traditionalism by succeeding generations of southerners. Following World War II, Cleanth Brooks further refined the tradition of literary criticism, while Richard Weaver elaborated the tradition of sectionalism. However, both Brooks and Weaver distinctively furthered Tate s notion that the integrity of language remained the fundamental concern of traditionalist conservatism. Langdale concludes his study with a consideration of neoconservative opposition to M.E. Bradford s proposed 1980 nomination as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and its significance for the southern man of letters in what was becoming postmodern and postsouthern America. Though the post World War II ascendance of neoconservatism drastically altered American intellectual history, the descendants of traditionalism remained largely superfluous to this purportedly conservative revival which had far more in common with pragmatic liberalism than with normative conservatism.

Religion and the Public University

It seems almost commonplace now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to bemoan the crisis facing public higher education in America. (1) Funding at the federal and state levels - sometimes in decline, sometimes on the rise - feels more tenuous than ever. (2) To entice new students, colleges and universities have been creating and revamping majors, expanding study-abroad programs and internship options, and opening new recreational and research facilities, all while increasing tuition at rates well above inflation. (3) And we have recently been witness to a disturbing set of public shamings as schools disclose a of statistical inflation in pursuit of higher rankings in U.S. News and World Report (Perez-Pena and Slotnik 2012). The 2008 fiscal crisis and the fraught relationship between Congress and the White House have only added urgency to this already agitated discussion. Many reasons can explain the anxiety about the future of public higher education. This paper addresses one cause that is often unmentioned. It is my worry that millions of Americans who regard religion as central to their lives may have become disenchanted with and disenfranchised by public higher education. For one example among many, Liberty University in Virginia, founded by the Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell in 1971, has doubled its student body twice since 2007 alone. It now educates more than 60,000 students each semester - far more than even some of the largest public universities (Anderson 2013). Religious Americans who attend or send their children to parochial schools of higher education do not see their moral or political views reflected in or valued by public academia, which is often seen as dominated by left-of-center voices. (4) I believe that this sense of disenfranchisement leads religious Americans to send more and more of their children to private denominationally-affiliated colleges and seminaries instead of public universities. (5) This essay is organized into two major parts. To provide an overview of the crisis facing American higher education, I begin by discussing two representative texts, The University in Ruins by Bill Readings and The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. These books describe different sets of problems and propose divergent (though complementary) kinds of solutions. The essay then takes up a vision of the university presented in the 1790s by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and compares his view with recent writings by the contemporary social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I conclude by using these texts to suggest how public higher education could better accommodate religious Americans. Bill Readings and the University of Economics Two books on public education, one by the late literary scholar Bill Readings and the other by the cultural historian Louis Menand, present broad critiques of the contemporary public university. In a way, these two authors create a tension with each other. For Readings, the university functions primarily as a filter for creating and credentialing capitalist workers; for Menand, the university is structurally anachronistic and detached from the demands of contemporary life. A look at these two books provides an outline of the dominant discourses of alarm. It also suggests the reasons that words like morality, God, nation, and truth (common tropes for religious Americans) tend to be excluded from the debate about the condition and future of public higher education. Readings' primary contention is that, by the final decade of the twentieth century, the university had been transformed from an institution conveying what he calls culture to an institution promoting something he calls excellence. By culture, Readings means a sort of nation-state ethos, a narrative played on the accomplishments - including the history and the literature and art - of the political and geographical entity in which a university was founded and had matured. …

Race to the Top: Knowledge Production and Disciplinary Formation in the Long Eighteenth Century

Robin Valenza's Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680-1820 (Cambridge, 2009) is extraordinarily timely - indeed, one could almost call it untimely, in the Nietzschean sense of throwing our own moment into uncomfortable relief. With pressure mounting to make the humanistic disciplines ever more accountable to a general public, especially the (often reluctantly) tax-paying public that still at least nominally supports state institutions - and with many of those same institutions reducing or even eliminating their Humanities offerings (see: University at Albany) - the hour may be growing late indeed. Some, like Martha Nussbaum and Cary Nelson, are continuing diligently to make the case for the ongoing general relevance of a Humanities education; others, like Stanley Fish, have long ago retreated into a narrow professionalism. Valenza, however, is less interested in either defending or justifying the Humanities (at least not overtly) than in using a comparativist, historicist approach to shed light on the long-durational trends of disciplinary division and sedimentation that have contributed to our current impasse. Valenza's book thus joins two other recent, high-profile, historicallyminded studies - Louis Menand's Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University and Mary Poovey's Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain - in attempting to trace a genealogy of our contemporary disciplinary crisis.1 Whereas Menand undertakes a generalist study that primarily focuses on recent institutional history, and Poovey concentrates specifically on how the of economics successfully split itself off from literary writing in general, Valenza undertakes the even more ambitious challenge of charting the history of the general separation of humanistic from scientific disciplines. While this leaves her less able (or willing) to issue the kind of specific diagnoses and recommendations that cap the other two studies, it means that Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines is able to cover more ground and paint a broader picture of the changing intellectual landscape of eighteenth-century Britain.Valenza's first chapter, The Economies of Knowledge, capably clears the ground for her project as well as establishes its primary debts and goals. More than a decade ago, in Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830, Clifford Siskin argued that for the Romantic discipline of literature to evolve out of belles lettres, its scope had to be narrowed so that its intellectual investments could be deepened.2 One of Valenza's first tasks, however, is to demonstrate that this Foucauldian paradigm did not mean that all disciplines were equally affected; instead, as she points out, When managed well, popularization and specialization could thus be complementary phenomena, two sides of the same coin (4). What mattered - at least in Britain (one wonders whether the picture Valenza paints looks the same in other national literatures) - was how the thorny process of intellectual specialization was handled by its practitioners in a given field and, perhaps more importantly, how such specialization was represented to the public at large. To track these developments, Valenza proposes to focus on three emergent disciplines: physics, philosophy, and poetry. (Again, one wonders what her study would have looked like had she chosen other fields - say, chemistry or mathematics; Valenza hints intriguingly that several such alternative chapters were contemplated, and spends a page discussing why chapters on biology and chemistry were abandoned.)Eighteenth-century Britons themselves were not unaware of the importance of their moment for the modernization of processes of knowledge production. Moreover, thanks to the historical and economic theories of the Scottish Enlightenment, they were also well aware of the primary engine of such modernization, material as well as intellectual: the division of labor. …

Review: The Old Curiosity Shop and the New Faculty Majority

Reviewed are The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand and No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom by Cary Nelson.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (review)

Reviewed by: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University Jeffrey R. Di Leo Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, 174 pp. "Knowledge is our most important business" (13), writes Louis Menand in the opening line of The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. "Knowledge is a form of capital that is always unevenly distributed," he continues, "and people who have more knowledge, or greater access to knowledge, enjoy advantages over people who have less" (13). Despite this provocative opening line and the book jacket's claim that "The Marketplace of Ideas is certain to spark a long-overdue debate about the condition of American higher education," little space is given to exploring how the humanities can innovate and thrive under the pressures of the marketplace in an increasingly corporatized university system. The Marketplace of Ideas traces some interesting historical origins for the insularity of humanities departments and the conflicts inherent in perpetuating constricting professional circles, but the author's more provocative proposals for how professors might revitalize the contributions of the humanities are sadly relegated to afterthoughts. Menand's book remains a tepid entry into the burgeoning discourse concerning the fate of the humanities following the rise of the corporate university. Though the marketplace is explicitly mentioned in the title, there is relatively little in Menand's book about the "business" of knowledge or the effects of corporatization on the university (for a succinct review of the historical development of the American university system in accordance with corporate logic and values, turn instead to Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities [2008]). The repercussions of shifts in the economy of academia, such as the unemployment and underemployment of academics, rising student debt, the erosion of academic freedom, and the assault on tenure, are left untouched. Given that Menand's book was published following the financial meltdown of 2008, it is disappointing that it gives little consideration to the ways in which the global financial crisis has affected the humanities in higher education. Perhaps Menand's argument seems lacking in vision only in comparison to other recent publications on the topic. 2010 has proven to be a bountiful year for strong and provocative books on the condition of higher education. Andrew Hacker and [End Page 249] Claudia Dreifus's controversial book Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It (2010), contends that our colleges and universities spend far less on student teaching than they should. Mark Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities (2010) has raised eyebrows with its argument that the university as we know it is outdated and broken, and requires nothing short of radical restructuring. Among Taylor's many suggestions for change are salary increases for productive faculty and decreases for unproductive ones (213); creation of a National Teaching Academy to support teaching excellence around the country (190); and adding a fourth division for schools of arts and science called "Emerging Zones" in addition to the more traditional tripartite division of the natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities (145). His most controversial claim though is to do away with tenure: "The only way for American higher education to remain competitive," writes Taylor, "is to abolish tenure and impose mandatory retirement at the age of seventy" (204). Other effective studies on higher education published this year include Cary Nelson's No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010), and Ellen Schrecker's The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (2010). These books call for a wider discussion of the ways in which the corporatization of higher education erodes academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure. Compared to the strong studies noted above, Menand's book is strong on history, but lacks bite. While beautifully written and well researched (Menand is a staff writer for The New Yorker and won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history...