The Marketplace of Ideas (5 page)

In making the move from subject matter to methods, Harvard was being consistent with trends at other institutions. Brown introduced optional Modes of Thought courses in 1969, designed to “place major emphasis on the methods, concepts and value systems required in approaching an understanding of a specific problem, topic, or issue in a particular field of inquiry.” In 1974, the University of Michigan provided, as part of its general education program, an Approaches to Knowledge curriculum that specified four approaches: analytical, empirical, moral, and aesthetic.
³¹
But the post-sixties norm was the distribution system. In 1976, about 7 percent of American liberal arts colleges had core general education programs—defined as programs in which students took the same courses or read the same books. Almost 90 percent of liberal arts colleges had a distribution system, in some of which a distribution of courses was merely recommended.
³²
It was not a climate favorable to prescriptivism.

In the last ten years, though, there has been a swing back toward requirements and the idea of general education. When Harvard revisited its Core program in 2004, a committee of professors recommended switching to distribution requirements, and the faculty rejected the proposal. No one thought that what students needed to know was self-evident, but most professors felt that whatever it was, the college had an obligation to give it to them. Where the process tended to run into difficulties was where general education proposals have always encountered friction—not only with the problem of specialists teaching non-specialists, but with the problem of recasting liberal education with life goals in mind.

6.

Was Eliot’s segregation of liberal arts education from the professional schools a devil’s bargain? By erecting a wall between the liberal arts and the professions, it gave colleges an allergy to the term “vocational.” That word is heard a lot from critics of general education proposals, along with words like “presentist” and “instrumentalist.” There is a little self-deception in the complaints about vocationalism, since there is one vocation, after all, for which a liberal arts education is not only useful but deliberately designed: the vocation of professor. The undergraduate major is essentially a preparation for graduate work in the field, which leads to a professional position. The major is set up in such a way that the students who receive the top marks are the ones who show the greatest likelihood of going on to graduate school and becoming professors themselves. And it seems strange to accuse any educational program of being instrumentalist. Knowledge just
is
instrumental: it puts us into a different relationship with the world. The accusation of presentism is the telling one, though; for it has been in response to present circumstances that the most ambitious general education programs have, historically, been introduced. It’s what is going on in the present that makes colleges need continually to redefine what they do. Are we preparing our students for the world they are about to confront? is the question that colleges ask. If the faculty thinks that a curriculum in which students spend most of four years being trained in an academic specialty is not going to do it, then general education is the answer.

The danger that faces liberal education today is the same as the danger that it faced in Eliot’s day: that it will be marginalized by the proliferation, and the attraction, of non-liberal alternatives. There are data to support this anxiety. Most of the roughly 2,500 four-year colleges in the United States award less than half of their degrees in the liberal arts. Even in the leading research universities, only about half the bachelor’s degrees are awarded in liberal arts fields.
³³
The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in education. Seven percent are awarded in the health professions. Those are not liberal arts fields. There are almost twice as many bachelor’s degrees conferred every year in social work as there are in all foreign languages and literatures combined. Only 4 percent of college graduates major in English. Just 2 percent major in history.
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In fact, the proportion of undergraduate degrees awarded annually in the liberal arts and sciences has been declining for a hundred years, apart from a brief rise between 1955 and 1970, which was a period of rapidly increasing enrollments and national economic growth.
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Except for those fifteen unusual years, the more American higher education has expanded, the more the liberal arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

The instinctive response of liberal educators is to pull up the drawbridge, to preserve college’s separateness at any price. But maybe purity is the disease. What are the liberal arts and sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued disinterestedly—that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical benefit. Disinterestedness doesn’t mean that the professor is equally open to any view. Professors are hired because they have views about their subjects, views that exclude opposing or alternative views. Disinterestedness just means that whatever views a professor does hold, they have been arrived at unconstrained, or as unconstrained as possible, by anything except the requirement of honesty.

Almost any liberal arts field can be made non-liberal by turning it in the direction of some practical skill with which it is already associated. English departments can become writing programs, even publishing programs; pure mathematics can become applied mathematics, even engineering; sociology shades into social work; biology shades into medicine; political science and social theory lead to law and political administration; and so on. But conversely, and more importantly, any practical field can be made liberal simply by teaching it historically or theoretically. Many economics departments refuse to offer courses in accounting, despite student demand for them. It is felt that accounting is not a liberal art. Maybe not, but one must always remember the immortal dictum: Garbage is garbage, but the
history
of garbage is scholarship. Accounting is a trade, but the
history
of accounting is a subject of disinterested inquiry—a liberal art. And the accountant who knows something about the history of accounting will be a better accountant. That knowledge pays off in the marketplace. Similarly, future lawyers benefit from learning about the philosophical aspects of the law, just as literature majors learn more about poetry by writing poems.

This gives a clue to the value-added potential of liberal education. Historical and theoretical knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge that liberal education disseminates, is knowledge that exposes the contingency of present arrangements. It unearths the a prioris buried in present assumptions; it shows students the man behind the curtain; it provides a glimpse of what is outside the box. It encourages students to think for themselves. Liberal educators know this, but sometimes they make the wrong inference. They think that showing the man behind the curtain subverts the spectacle. But merely revealing the contingency and constructedness of present arrangements does not end the spectacle, and subversiveness is not the point. The spectacle goes on. The goal of teaching students to think for themselves is not an empty sense of self-satisfaction. The goal is to enable students, after they leave college, to make more enlightened contributions to the common good.

It’s sometimes claimed that learning any scholarly field well develops general mental faculties, which may then be applied to problems and issues encountered in life after college. But problems and issues in the academic world are not always analogous to problems and issues in the non-academic world; resolving problems and issues in the non-academic world usually requires taking into account frictions of a kind deliberately bracketed in the academy. And the vast majority of college graduates today will seek work well outside the academic band of the occupational spectrum. Even at Harvard, where students are supposed to be trained at the cutting edges of the academic disciplines, less than 10 percent of graduates pursue a PhD. More than 50 percent pursue careers in law, medicine, and business. What relevant knowledge and skills does college provide these students with? That is the question a general education needs to answer.

In the system that Eliot helped to bring into being, professional education is the monopoly of the professional schools. Only lawyers get to teach the law to future lawyers. In most liberal arts colleges, students cannot take a course on the law (apart from the occasional legal history course). Many students in liberal arts colleges never take a class in business, or even in economics. Most take no classes in architecture, education, or engineering, unless they are in a special, and usually segregated, program. Few students who do not intend to become specialists take courses in subjects touching on health or technology. These are matters that everyone has to deal with in life, and knowing something about them is important to being able to participate effectively in the political process. But college graduates typically have no more sophisticated an understanding of them than people who have attended only high school do. The divorce between liberalism and professionalism as educational missions rests on a superstition: that the practical is the enemy of the true. This is nonsense. Disinterestedness is perfectly consistent with practical ambition, and practical ambitions are perfectly consistent with disinterestedness. If anyone should understand that, it’s a college professor.

1.

ABOUT TWENTY YEARS
ago, the humanities acquired a rationale problem.
¹
In sociological terms, they suffered an institutional legitimacy crisis. A public perception arose that study and teaching in fields such as literature and art history had gotten off track. The problem was not that humanists were unable to provide rationales for their work; many did.
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The problem was that even humanists felt that those rationales were not completely persuasive to outsiders—to the public, to university administrators, and even to colleagues in other academic disciplines. To some extent, the difficulty was understandable. Disciplines are rarely called upon to justify themselves. No one says, I don’t understand a tenth of what physics professors are talking about. Why should we spend all this money on physics departments? The inaccessibility of physics is built into the rationale for physics departments; that is, we need physics departments precisely because special training is necessary to teach and do research in physics. And to most non-physicists, the value of doing physics goes without saying. People feel, out of ignorance or not, that there is a good return on investment in physics departments. In the 1980s, people began wondering what the return on investment was in the humanities.

This skepticism produced some defensiveness on the part of humanities professors, and it also led to a fair amount of self-examination. Self-examination is usually a good thing, but it can become obsessive, and the focus of humanities professors on questions like “What’s happened to the humanities?”
³
and “Have the humanistic disciplines collapsed?”
⁴
did become a little obsessive. There are fewer students majoring in humanities fields than was once the case, but undergraduates continue to take courses in literature, art, music, and philosophy; despite an uncertain job market, people continue to apply to doctoral programs in those fields; and a great deal of scholarship continues to get published. The humanities disciplines may go through a period of reorganization, but they aren’t likely to become extinct.

There was something slightly disproportionate about the reaction of humanists to questions about the value of the humanities. In literary terms, their response lacked an objective correlative.
⁵
In psychiatric terms, it was neurotic. There was anxiety that behind the problem of public justification was another problem, which was that professors in the humanities could not seem to produce a consensus around a paradigm for humanistic studies. It was not that humanists were quarreling with one another: that would only have meant that there were competing paradigms in the humanities fields, which is a sign of life. What was worrisome was that even in the absence of a quarrel, there was no clear agreement on a definition of what humanists do. Which raises the question, Does there need to be a definition? What is the history of the humanities disciplines that made the lack of a paradigm seem something like a crisis?

2.

The history of higher education in the United States since the Second World War can be divided into two periods. The first period, from 1945 to 1975, was a time of expansion. The composition of the higher education system remained more or less the same—in some respects, the system became more uniform—but the size of the system increased dramatically. This is the period known in the literature on American education as the Golden Age. The second period, from 1975 to the present, has not been honored with a special name. It is an equally dramatic time, though, a period not of expansion but of diversification. Since 1975, the size of the system has grown at a much more modest pace, but the composition of the system—who is being taught, who does the teaching, and what they teach—has been transformed. It was a decade or so into the second phase, the period of diversification, that questions about the value of the humanities started being asked. But we cannot understand the second phase unless we understand the first.

In the Golden Age, between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent and the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.
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Those are unprecedented and almost certainly unrepeatable figures. The rate of growth was nearly fantastic. In the sixties alone, undergraduate enrollments more than doubled, from 3.5 million to just under 8 million; the number of doctorates awarded every year tripled; and more faculty were hired than had been hired in the entire 325 years of American higher education prior to 1960.
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At the height of the expansion, between 1965 and 1972, new community college campuses were opening in the United States at the rate of one every week.
⁸

Three factors account for this expansion. The first was the baby boom; the second was the relatively high domestic economic growth rate after 1948; and the third was the Cold War. What is sometimes forgotten about the baby boom is that it was a period of record high birth rates that followed a period of record low birth rates, the years of the Depression and the Second World War.
⁹
When Americans began, after 1945, reproducing at a rate that would exceed 4 million births a year, it was a sharp spike on the chart. The system had grown accustomed to abnormally small cohorts. A lot of slots had to be manufactured very quickly.

The role played by the Cold War in the expansion of higher education is well known. The American university had been drawn into the business of government-related scientific research during the Second World War by men like James Conant, president of Harvard, and Vannevar Bush. Bush, former vice president and dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the director of the government Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war. At the time of the First World War, scientific research for military purposes had been carried out by military personnel, so-called soldier-scientists. It was Bush’s idea to contract this work out to research universities, scientific institutes, and independent private laboratories instead. In 1945, he organized the publication of a report,
Science—The Endless Frontier
, which became the standard argument for government subvention of basic science in peacetime, and which launched the collaboration between American universities and the national government. Bush is the godfather of the system known as contract overhead—the practice of billing granting agencies for indirect costs, an idea that allowed universities to spread the wealth across all of its activities. This was the start of the gravy train that produced the Golden Age.
¹⁰

Then, in 1957, came Sputnik. Although it had the size and lethal potential of a beach ball, Sputnik stirred up a panic in the United States. (It wasn’t the satellite that caused the panic, of course; it was the missile used to launch it.) Among the responses was the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The act put the federal government, for the first time, in the business of subsidizing higher education directly, rather than through contracts for specific research. Before 1958, public support for higher education had been administered at the state level (which is one reason why there are state universities in the United States but no national university). After the passage of the National Defense Education Act, the main spigots from which government largesse flowed moved from the Department of Defense (which continued to be a major source of funding) to civilian agencies, notably the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. The act singled out two areas in particular as targets of public investment: science and foreign languages, thus pumping up two distinct areas of the academic system.

This was also the period, after Sputnik, when economists such as Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz introduced the concept of human capital,
¹¹
which, by figuring educated citizens as a strategic resource, offered another national security rationale for government investment in higher education. In the words of the enabling legislation for the National Defense Education Act itself: “The security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women…. We must increase our efforts to identify and educate more of the talent of our Nation. This requires programs that will give assurance that no students of ability will be denied an opportunity for higher education because of financial need.”
¹²
This was one of the triggers for the accelerated expansion of the 1960s.

The baby boom was another. The National Defense Education Act was passed just before the effects of the higher birth rate kicked in. Between 1955 and 1970, the number of eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States grew from 15 million to 25 million.
¹³
The expansion received a late and unintentional boost from the military draft, which provided a deferment for college students until 1970. The result was that by 1968, more than 63 percent of male high school graduates were going on to college, a higher proportion than do today.
¹⁴
This is the period when all those community college campuses were springing up. They were, among other things, government-subsidized draft havens.

Then, around 1975, the Golden Age came to a halt. The student deferment was abolished and the Vietnam War ended; the college-age population leveled off; the country went into a recession; and the economic value of a college degree began to fall. In the seventies, the income differential between college graduates and high school graduates dropped from 61 percent to 48 percent.
¹⁵
The percentage of people going on to college therefore began to drop as well, and a system that had more than quintupled in size in the span of a single generation suddenly found itself with empty dormitory beds and a huge tenured faculty. This was the beginning of the long-term job crisis for American PhDs, and it was also the beginning of serious economic pressures on the liberal arts college.

Pressure on the liberal arts college translates into pressure on the humanities disciplines, because research in the humanities is essentially a by-product of the production of college teachers. The system produces professors; professors produce research. When the demand for college teachers drops, the resources available for research drop as well. From 1955 to 1970, the proportion of liberal arts degrees among all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually had risen for the first time since 1900; after 1970, it began going down again.
¹⁶
Today, a third of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States are in the liberal arts, and less than 10 percent are in the humanities.
¹⁷

American higher education did grow after 1975, but much more slowly, at a rate averaging about 1 percent a year. And it changed, but in a different way: it diversified. In 1947, 71 percent of college students in America were men; today, a minority of college students—42 percent—are men.
¹⁸
As late as 1965, 94 percent of college students were classified as white; today, the figure for non-Hispanic whites is 66 percent.
¹⁹
Much of this diversification happened after the Golden Age, and a single statistic makes the point. In the decade between 1984 and 1994, the total enrollment in American colleges and universities increased by 2 million, but not one of those 2 million new students was a white American-born male. They were all non-whites, women, and foreign students. The number of white American men in American higher education actually declined between 1984 and 1994.
²⁰

Faculty demographics changed in the same way, a reflection not so much of changes in hiring practices as of demographic changes in the group that went to graduate school after 1975. In 1998, American faculty who had been hired before 1985 were 28 percent female and about 11 percent non-white or Hispanic. Full-time faculty hired after 1985—that is, for the most part, faculty who entered graduate school after the Golden Age—were 40 percent female and 18 percent non-white.
²¹
These figures apply only to full-time professors; they do not include part-time faculty, who by 1998 constituted 40 percent of the teaching force in American higher education, and who were more likely than full-time faculty to be female.
²²
In 1997, 45,394 doctoral degrees were conferred in the United States; 40 percent of the recipients were women (in the arts and humanities, just under 50 percent were women), and only 63 percent were classified as white American citizens. The other 37 percent were non-white Americans and foreign students.
²³
The demographic mix in higher education, including both students and faculty, changed dramatically in the span of twenty years. And this change just happens to have coincided with the period, beginning around 1987, when higher education came under intense public criticism for radicalism and elitism—the period of the “culture wars.”
²⁴