Empire of Illusion (18 page)

“The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic,” wrote William Deresiewicz in
The American Scholar.
Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale, writes that

Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic prowess. It can be used to further the exploitation of the working class by corporations and the mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to fight these forces. But if you determine worth by wealth, as these institutions do, then examining and reforming social and political systems is inherently devalued. The unstated ethic of these elite institutions is to make as much money as you can to sustain the elitist system. College presidents, many of whom earn salaries that rival those of corporate executives, must often devote their energies to fund-raising rather than to education. They shower honorary degrees and trusteeships on hedge-fund managers and Wall Street titans whose lives are often examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed.

The slavish honoring of the rich by elite schools, despite the lofty rhetoric about public service, is clear to the students. The object is to make money. These institutions have an insatiable appetite for donations and constant fund-raising campaigns to boost multibillion-dollar
endowments. This constant need can be met only by producing rich alumni. But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.

Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer. The student becomes adept, as Richard Hoggart wrote, at

The products of these institutions, as Hoggart noted, have “difficulty in choosing a direction in a world where there is no longer a
master to please, a toffee-apple at the end of each stage, a certificate, a place in the upper half of the assessable world.”
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The very qualities and intellectual inquiries that sustain an open society are often crushed by elite institutions. The elite school, as Saul writes,

One winter night I was returning books to Firestone Library at Princeton University. I glanced at the book the student behind the main desk was reading. It was
How to Win at College
by Cal Newport. The flap cover promised that it was “the only guide to getting ahead once you've gotten in—proven strategies for making the most of your college years, based on winning secrets from the country's most successful students.”

“What does it take to be a standout student?” the flap read.

“Proving that success has little to do with being a genius workaholic, and everything to do with playing the game,” it went on. “
How to Win at College
is the must-have guide for making the most of these four important years—and getting an edge on life after graduation.”
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First-year students arrive on elite campuses and begin to network their way into the exclusive eating clubs, fraternities, sororities, or secret societies, test into the elite academic programs and lobby for competitive summer internships. They put in punishing hours, come to office hours to make sure they grasp what their professors want, and challenge all grades under 4.0 in an effort to maintain a high average. They learn to placate and please authority, never to challenge it. By the time they graduate, they are superbly conditioned for the drudgery of moving large sums of money around electronically or negotiating huge corporate contracts.

“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can't be measured by a letter or a number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

“Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul,” he went on. “These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don't think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus.”
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This soul-crushing experience of education is not new within elite academic institutions, as William Hazlitt noted at the beginning of the nineteenth century:

The educational landscape, however, has deteriorated since Hazlitt. There has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian. The Modern Language Association's end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature, and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-2009 from the previous year, the biggest decline in thirty-four years. The humanities' share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the mid- to late '60s, according to the Humanities Indicators Prototype, a new database recently released by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Only 8 percent of college graduates, or about 110,000 students, now receive degrees in the humanities. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English have declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent of the whole, as have degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), and social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise to teach students how to accumulate wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduating population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.
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Frank Donoghue, the author of
The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
, writes that liberal arts education has been systemically dismantled for decades. Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite. They do not know how to interrogate or examine an economic
system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates directly into the arms of corporate entities.

Matthew Arnold's
Culture and Anarchy
, written in 1869, was once considered a canonical work on the lofty goals of education. Arnold argued that a broad knowledge of culture, “the best that has been thought and said,” would provide standards to resist the errors and corruptions of contemporary life. This belief held sway, at least in the outward manifestations of higher education, for perhaps a century. But Arnold's eloquent defense of knowledge for its own sake, as a way to ask the broad moral and social questions, has been shredded and destroyed. Most universities have become high-priced occupational training centers. Students seek tangible vocational credentials. At the few institutions where the liberal arts survive, as Donoghue writes, prestige is the paramount commodity.
U.S. News & World Report
has, since its annual America's Best Colleges issue debuted in 1983, ranked schools that, through their selectiveness, also offer a route into the world of the elite. These schools may still teach the liberal arts, but those arts are marketed as another way to propel students into the vocational specialties offered by graduate schools or into lucrative jobs.

The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewrit ing” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful.”
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The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth-century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes, “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry
for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.”
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And as small, liberal arts schools have folded—at least 200 since 1990—they have been replaced with corporate, for-profit universities. There are now some forty-five colleges and universities listed on the NYSE or the NASDAQ. The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit school with some 300,000 students, proudly calls itself on its Web site: “Your corporate university.” Ronald Taylor, the chief operator and co-founder of DeVry, the second-largest for-profit, higher-education provider, bluntly stated his organization's goals: “The colos sally simple notion that drives DeVry's business is that if you ask employers what they want and then provide what they want, the people you supply to them will be hired.”
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The only mission undertaken by for-profit universities, and increasingly non-profit universities, is job training. And as universities become glorified vocational schools for the corporations, they adopt values and operating techniques of the corporations they serve. It may be more cost-effective to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts and whittle down or shutter departments like French or history that do not feed vocational aspirations, but it decimates the possibility of a broad education that permits students to question the assumptions of a decaying culture, reach out beyond our borders, and chart new alternatives and directions.