The Future of American Higher Education

How Today's Public Intellectuals Frame the Debate

Joseph L. DeVitis, Joseph L. DeVitis

• Editore: Stylus Publishing
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642673432
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Istruzione superiore

"This impressive anthology presents the reader with an introduction to a gallery of public intellectuals through the critical eyes of a wide array of contributing writers from various academic fields. Both the latter and the public intellectuals themselves are responding to the state of American higher education. Importantly, most of them (there are a few public intellectuals in the book who cling closer to the status quo) do not separate colleges and universities from the political, economic, and social currents of American society. They attack the realities of growing social inequality, the intractable presence of institutional racism, and the recurrent reliance on the free market as the arbiter of value. Public intellectuals assess the impact of these social factors on the organization and practices of contemporary American higher education. They force the reader to consider serious challenges to the current arrangement of higher learning and, as such, they ask us to assess the efficacy of their respective perspectives. Do they present the reader with insight or idealism, pathways or dead ends? This compendium provides an abundance of ideas for higher education leaders, policy makers, faculty members, trustees and governmental officials as well as social theorists and graduate students interested in higher education careers."— Richard Guarasci, President Emeritus of Wagner CollegeJust as our society is polarized, higher education is no less divided as to its mission and purpose, whether it should be preparing students for employment or for engagement as citizens, whether it should be corporatist and profit-driven or promote intellectual curiosity and independent thinking, and whether it should pursue a neoliberal agenda or promote a liberal education. Whose scholarship, culture and epistemologies should be validated? Should it be a private or a public good? Preserve tenure or erode it? What role should colleges and universities play in addressing economic inequality and systemic racism? The answers to these questions are critical for the future of our society as our universities and colleges are the nurseries of the values and philosophies that shape it.The chapters in this book review the contributions of seventeen public intellectuals who have been at the forefront of these issues and significantly contributed to these debates. Each describes the genesis of each scholar's ideas and presents and critiques his or her core insights and arguments. The seventeen public intellectuals represent a spectrum of opinion, from the conservative to the progressive.At this pivotal moment when much of higher education is in economic crisis, and public trust in it has been eroded, this book offers a robust entry point for considering the options and directions ahead for anyone in a leadership position. The book will also be valuable for higher education courses to stimulate debate about these critical issues and introduce readers to the seminal thinkers in the field. Public Intellectuals Presented
Stanley Aronowitz
Michael Bérubé
Marc Bousquet
Patricia Hill Collins
Lori Patton Davis
William Deresiewicz
Stanley Fish
Marybeth Gasman
Henry Giroux
Sara Goldrick-Rabb
Amy Gutmann
Russell Jacoby
Randall Kennedy
David Kirp
David F. Labaree
Christopher Newfield
Michael Roth

PART ONE

ON LIBERAL EDUCATION

1

SETTING THE STAGE

The Cultural Work of Russell Jacoby

Joseph L. DeVitis and Greg Seals

In The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Russell Jacoby (1987/2000) popularized the term public intellectual to characterize independent scholars and university professors who write broadly and passionately about the urgency to speak out on larger public interests. A huge irony emerges as we set the stage for this chapter. When he published his pioneering polemic in 1987, Jacoby was an independent practitioner. In 2009, he became the Moishe Gonzales folding chair of critical theory at UCLA. Throughout his career Jacoby has long been acknowledged as among the fiercest critics of academic culture. His more recent books attempt to show how identity politics puts limits on individuality and instead fosters groupthink—see On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era (Jacoby, 2020); how cultural illiteracy, political correctness, and commercialization have deflected attention from overriding societal issues—see Dogmatic Wisdom (1995); and how thinkers on the left have seemingly lost their “utopian spirit”—see The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (1999).

Indeed, these factors have led many academicians to obviate their potential role as public intellectuals. That trend has had marked consequences for the academy. The authors will treat each book by Jacoby that relates to higher education in separate pieces. We will first explore Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals. Though he speaks mainly of faculty issues, his biting critique has implications for students and administrators as well; unfortunately, Jacoby himself does not make adequate connections to undergraduates in his writing. This chapter will examine how his thought permits further understanding of certain aspects of higher education while treating some omissions and gaps in it. We will also point out important lessons for the theory and practice of higher learning that Jacoby does not lay out in granular terms. Yet the kernel of Jacoby’s book merits close attention for all those who care deeply about the present and future of America’s colleges and universities.

The Last Intellectuals’ Relevant Focus: Obsessive Professionalization and Specialization

This section of the chapter spotlights those aspects of The Last Intellectuals that are most relevant to Jacoby’s contentions about present-day higher education in America. Originally published in 1987, the book deals with those public intellectuals whom Jacoby selects from the period of the late 1940s to the 1980s. To cover its whole scope would require a separate chapter in itself. The theme of professionalization and specialization seems most central to our interest in his seminal writing. Jacoby’s chief argument against extreme professionalization is that it “leads to privatization . . . , a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline” and away from cultural and public interest (Jacoby, 1987/2000, p. 147). New faculty members, gearing up for tenure and promotion, spend much of their time beefing up their vitae by publishing very specific work (mostly gleaned from their dissertations), presenting at conferences, networking in various professional associations, and appealing to those upholding the proper paradigm within their academic discipline in a transactional manner:

The lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many mutual relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contribution of others; they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship. (Jacoby, 1987/2000, p. 146)

Such professional activity can undermine critical thinking and creativity, produce endless repetition throughout one’s career, and lead to a deadening attitude rather than mindfulness. For example, it is not unusual for a professor to stay with the subject of her dissertation over the decades. In many cases, that practice might actually help her advancement (she will become known as an “expert” in her narrow specialty with a distinct corpus of work and a coherent scholarly agenda). According to Jacoby, she would also be skirting any meaningfulness to the society writ large. That prospect could well be, in part, why academic knowledge is often seen as so disembodied, so alien to a wider public. Indeed, the more specialized the professor’s topic and language (scholarly jargon can be oppressive), the greater the chances that only a few dozen other specialists might actually read it with any care. Available mainly as technical expertise, its reach to a wider public is highly improbable. (Of course, public intellectuals can also be guilty of arcane communication and illogical use of thought.) But it is a truism that most professors speak principally to their sisters and brethren—and the articles submitted and papers presented can spiral into ever-narrowing webs of specificity and even lesser audience attention.

It is noteworthy that the two intellectual figures perhaps most prominent in his analysis of professionalization and specialization are John Dewey and C. Wright Mills. (They stand out among the heroes in The Last Intellectuals.) Mills’s dissertation was actually devoted to the professionalization of philosophy. His study found that philosophers writing in professional journals spent much more time talking to each other rather than disseminating their ideas in the larger, more public, media (Jacoby, 1987/2000). Mills also saw that substantive philosophy was on a ghostly decline in terms of its relevance to society.

In general, Jacoby contends that independent thought has been in steep decline. He notes that post-Deweyan philosopher Richard Rorty would seek to revivify creative and critical thinking in the 1980s. Rorty peppered his arguments with a blend of pragmatism and literary allusions instead of sterile technical mechanics, as was the general method of analytic philosophers. One of Rorty’s best-known students, Michael Bérubé, is included in the present volume. Bérubé wrote the introduction to Rorty’s Philosophy as Poetry (2016). Yet higher learning has not always been so hospitable to such broadly open thought.

Jacoby (1987/2000) lauds Mills for his public advocacy of “the politics of truth” and for being a “moral conscience of his society” (pp. 117–118). He was a professor, a radical sociologist, and at his heart, a public intellectual. For Mills, that status provided his favored epitaph. He would not join the great majority of his colleagues who neglected their social responsibility by taking a safer, more aloof, professional stance. Likewise, Jacoby (1987/2000) commends Stanley Aronowitz, another theorist who appears in our text, for bringing his background as a union organizer and antipoverty worker to the academic scene—and into the public arena. In another twist of events, Aronowitz eventually became a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His long-standing labor movement roots nourished his scholarship. Along with Dewey and Mills, Noam Chomsky also receives high marks in Jacoby’s universe of public intellectuals. Jacoby refers to him as “the most energetic critic of intellectuals.” Indeed, Chomsky’s anarchist tendencies draw explicit plaudits from Jacoby (2000): “They distrust large institutions, the state, the university, and its functionaries. They are less vulnerable to the corruptions of title and salary because their resistance is moral, almost instinctual” (pp. 96–97).

Some Gaps and Omissions

Despite Jacoby’s piercing critique, he surprisingly fails to consider a number of significant issues that would inevitably seem to flow from his analysis. Though he deals heavily with the place of faculty members in academe, he largely neglects students, except for a few references to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Student Peace Union (SPU) during the stormy years of the 1960s when anti-Vietnam and civil rights protest were at their height. That is to say, the daily life of students, particularly undergraduates, is basically left untouched. (As a general rule, it is still not unusual for this sad circumstance to be played out on many campuses, particularly those labeled as “research” institutions.) One wonders why Jacoby’s emphasis on independence and critical thinking does not provide him grist for the mill in a more direct discussion of liberal education. Ironically, he pays little explicit attention to the latter. It is disappointing that he does not go further because the implications of his thought would be welcome and likely quite enlightening. (Some of his work is applicable to graduate students, but only in terms of how their professors relate to them.)

In addition, for all his focus on the cultural and sociopolitical aspects of American life, Jacoby leaves the economic realm in a flattened state. He does not delve into some obviously crucial factors that influenced higher education as he was writing his book. Neither economic growth nor constriction is given much daylight in his treatise. Commercialization, status-seeking, consumerism, credentialing, and the neoliberal movement had begun to rear their heads during the Reagan years. Jacoby (1987/2000) does mention how the launching of Sputnik in 1957 provided colleges and universities monetary allotments that permitted expansions in their student bodies, hiring practices, and physical plants.

Yet he does not note that higher education was becoming more privatized by the midto late 1980s. Given his suspicion of privatization as an intellectual and practical matter, it is curious that he fails to allude to how it started to affect colleges and universities, especially in the public sector. Shrinking budgets were already pushing state institutions to tighten their priorities. Neoliberal policies were giving clear signals that public campuses could soon be seen as “state-aided” or even “state-located” instead of state-supported. Nor does Jacoby show how increasing commercialization, consumerism, and marketing were influencing colleges, particularly those not known as “elite,” into displays of glitzy overkill by branding their institutions in often inauthentic ways—for example, via glamorous viewbooks. It seemed that every college wanted to appear “distinctive,” when only a thin minority actually were.

And, once again, Jacoby had largely forgotten undergraduates. With a nudge from their parents, students were coaxed to play the game of status-seeking and credentialing. College became imperative to the ethos of success. Job aspirations were making the life of the mind a tertiary concern, and liberal education was becoming prone to vocational interventions. These are all considerations that lurk between the lines of Jacoby’s writing, but they are never brought to light—except in the case of faculty members. Not surprisingly, his focus on status-seeking is most germane to how professors can climb the ladder of their supposed success—and Jacoby (1987/2000) does make an interesting point: “In plain English, . . . studies suggest that where one went to school and whom one knows, not what one does, are critical. Not quality of work but social relations permeate academic success” (p. 145).

Though he does not treat everyday accounts of how administrators work, Jacoby takes a stand on several cases of blatant executive overreach: McCarthyism of the 1950s and the academic “lynching” of Henry Giroux (another prominent intellectual covered in this text) at Boston University in the early 1980s. As Jacoby reminds us, American universities set the stage for the weeding out of countless leftist professors. Indeed, he lays the academy’s silencing methods at the altar of professionalization, which he claims “served as a refuge” that “entailed a privatization that eviscerates academic freedom.” In Giroux’s case, his authoritarian president, John Silber, appointed Nathan Glazer, a neoconservative sociologist at Harvard, to an ad hoc committee that reviewed Giroux’s dossier—for a tenured position in Boston University’s School of Education, not in its College of Arts and Sciences! Personal and ideological animosity by Silber and Glazer played the major role in discharging a young assistant professor with a potent academic record—but one which was both “critical” and “dissenting” from the more conventional mindsets of both his henchmen (Jacoby, 1987/2000, pp. 136–137).

Finally, Jacoby pays scant attention to public intellectuals from underrepresented groups in the first edition of The Last Intellectuals. In the introduction to the second edition, he mentions Henry Louis Gates, Gerald Early, Adolph Reed, Jr., Randall Kennedy, and Cornel West, but gives them only a glancing nod. In passing, Jacoby both compliments and jabs at them:

These are smart, hard-hitting and often graceful writers who weigh into public problems of race, sports, politics, law, and culture. They have been both acclaimed as successors to the New York intellectuals and criticized as publicity hounds who ignore earlier black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Dubois and C. R. James. In no way did my book anticipate their appearance. Yet it seems to me that the new black intellectuals demonstrate that a literate, hungry, public still exists. What is lacking is the will and ability to address it. (Jacoby, 1987/2000, pp. xix–xx)

Finally, Jacoby allows relatively lean space to women as public intellectuals. Although he cites a number of them, he provides substantial coverage to only June Jacobs, acclaimed author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961) and Mary McCarthy, prominent novelist who wrote The Group (New American Library, 1963) who was also an antiwar activist. Intellectuals with other racial, ethnic, and gender identities are hard to find in Jacoby’s seminal work. Many years later, Jacoby (2020) would focus on the issue of diversity, as this chapter will discuss.

Dogmatic Wisdom—Relevant Focus: Illiberality in Academy and Society

In Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America, Jacoby (Doubleday, 1995) spins a tale of decline, a modernist lament. America is losing its love of education. Education is losing its sense of self. And selves are becoming concretized and shattered as mounting pressures from an intensely illiberal orientation to social life fragment and fracture civil society into a loose but contentious consumerist confederacy of cultural groups and lifestyle choices. Often these groups are narrowly conceived, sometimes doxastically authoritarian, and seldom constitutive of distinct structures of work, living, and beliefs. Although Jacoby never explicitly suggests a way out of the dire straits he describes, he does suggest criteria of adequacy for development of a general response to issues presented to education and society by social facts found at the root of the evil of illiberalism.

A society becomes illiberal when it becomes difficult to find activities considered valuable in themselves. Intrinsically valued activities become harder to ...