The Marketplace of Ideas (15 page)

¹⁶
Quoted in Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller,
Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University
, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 44. On the Redbook and the fate of its general education program at Harvard, see ibid., pp. 42–46, and Phyllis Keller,
Getting at the Core: Curricular Reform at Harvard
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 10–18.

¹⁷
See Cross, at http://www.columbia.edu/core/oasis/history0.php.

¹⁸
Higher Education for Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947).

¹⁹
Quoted in Hershberg,
James B. Conant
, p. 520.

²⁰
General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 102.

²¹
The alternative rationale is that the great books are timeless and should be taught for their own sake. This was the view of Robert Hutchins, who, with the help of Mortimer Adler, formerly at Columbia, instituted the famous great books program at the University of Chicago. See John W. Boyer, “A Twentieth-Century Cosmos: The New Plan and the Origins of General Education at Chicago,”
University of Chicago Record
, 41 (January 18, 2007): 4–24. All general education programs are informed by a mix of these rationales—the material is important in its own right, but it is also important because it has been important. The Chicago program was an extreme expression of the former theory—see Robert M. Hutchins,
The Higher Learning in America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936). A recent incarnation of this split can be found in two books that rose to prominence simultaneously in 1987: Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind
and E. D. Hirsch’s
Cultural Literacy
. Bloom, a Chicagoan, echoed Hutchins’s claim for the timeless pedagogical relevance of the canonical works of Western philosophy. Hirsch, an English professor at the University of Virginia, argued for teaching the terms and phrases that every would-be educated person ought to know because every educated person does know them. Bloom wanted students to be cultured; Hirsch merely wanted them to be literate.

²²
In his autobiography, Conant says that he later decided that “a unified, coherent culture” is impossible in a democratic country and that “a pluralistic ideology must be the basis of a democracy.” James B. Conant,
My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 366.

²³
Keller,
Getting to the Core
, pp. 17–19.

²⁴
On Eliot’s reforms and their national importance, see Hugh Hawkins,
Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). See also, on Eliot’s presidency, Henry James,
Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869–1909
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), vol. 1, esp. pp. 184–301, and Samuel Eliot Morison,
Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 323–64.

²⁵
Hawkins,
Between Harvard and America
, pp. 92–93.

²⁶
In 1940, it was one out of every 6.5. See Burton J. Bledstein,
The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 278. Today, half of all Americans have some experience of college; 25 percent earn college degrees (associate’s or bachelor’s).

²⁷
Quoted in Hawkins,
Between Harvard and America
, p. 105.

²⁸
Veysey,
The Emergence of the American University
, pp. 248–59.

²⁹
The history of the creation of Harvard’s Core curriculum is in Keller’s
Getting to the Core
.

³⁰
Quoted in Carnochan,
Battleground
, pp. 97–98.

³¹
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
Missions of the College Curriculum: A Contemporary Review with Suggestions
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), pp. 171–72.

³²
Levine,
Handbook
, pp. 10–14.

³³
About a third of four-year colleges in the United States have curricula that concentrate on liberal arts and sciences or that balance liberal arts and pre-professional coursework—see “Undergraduate Instructional Program: Distribution of institutions and enrollments by classification category,” Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Several years ago, in light of the increasingly mixed nature of undergraduate curricula in American colleges, the Carnegie Foundation dropped “liberal arts and sciences” as a stand-alone designation from its classificatory scheme. Most Americans who attend college do not have a liberal arts education.

³⁴
Bachelor’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by discipline division,
Digest of Education Statistics
.

³⁵
Joan Gilbert, “The Liberal Arts College: Is It Really an Endangered Species?,”
Change
, 27 (September–October 1995): 36. Gilbert detected a swing upward in the percentage of liberal arts degrees in the eighties, but an analysis of degrees awarded since 1972 suggests that, both proportionately and in absolute numbers, the underlying trend is downwards.

¹
The humanities are one of (usually) three liberal arts divisions; they are defined differently at different institutions, and there are many possible subfields within a humanities division. Harvard has more than twenty degree programs in the humanities. A principal difference among institutions is whether history is counted as a humanities discipline (as it is at Yale) or a social science (as it is at Harvard). Changes in the study and teaching of history were very much part of the public debate over the condition of the humanities, less so in the internal debates. Philosophy largely escaped attention, both internally and externally.

²
See, among others, George Levine et al.,
Speaking for the Humanities
(New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1989); Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, eds.,
Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities
(New York: Routledge, 1995); Martha Nussbaum,
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Sander Gilman,
The Fortunes of the Humanities: Thoughts for After the Year 2000
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Marjorie Garber,
A Manifesto for Literary Studies
(Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2003). See, in addition, the mission statements of the many college and university Humanities Centers that have been founded since the 1970s. A national Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes was established in 1988.

³
Alvin Kernan, ed.,
What’s Happened to the Humanities?
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

⁴
The title of a conference held at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1999.

⁵
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,”
The Sacred Wood
(London: Methuen, 1920), p. 100. In literature, the term “objective correlative” refers to an “exact equivalence” between a plot situation, or an image, and the emotion that the writer intends to evoke.

⁶
Roger L. Geiger, “The Ten Generations of American Higher Education,” in Philip G. Altbach, Robert O. Berdahl, and Patricia J. Gumport, eds.,
American Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 61.

⁷
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), Vol. 1, pp. 382, 387; Walter P. Metzger, “The Academic Profession in the United States,” in Burton R. Clark, ed.,
The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 124.

⁸
Geiger, “Ten Generations,” p. 62.

⁹
The birth rate in 1939 was 18.8 per 1,000 of population; in 1949, it was 24.5, almost a third again as high.

¹⁰
U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development,
Science—The Endless Frontier
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). See Roger L. Geiger,
Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 157–97, and Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond,
The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 26–50.

¹¹
Gary S. Becker,
Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education
(New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1964), and Theodore William Schultz,
The Economic Value of Education
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

¹²
Quoted in Elizabeth A. Duffy and Idana Goldberg,
Crafting a Class: College Admissions and Financial Aid, 1955–1994
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 170.

¹³
Ibid., p. 4.

¹⁴
College enrollment of recent high school graduates: 1960 to 1994, U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Statistical Abstract of the United States
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), p. 180.

¹⁵
Duffy and Goldberg,
Crafting a Class
, p. 22. See also Marvin Lazerson, “The Disappointments of Success: Higher Education After World War II,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
, 559 (1998): 72.

¹⁶
Joan Gilbert, “The Liberal Arts College: Is It Really an Endangered Species?,”
Change
, 27 (September–October 1995): 36–43.

¹⁷
Bachelor’s degrees earned by field: 1960 to 2006,
Digest of Education Statistics
. The figure for humanities degrees does not include history. If subjects such as religious vocation, area studies, general studies, and visual and performing arts are included, then the humanities account for 17 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. See bachelor’s and master’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by field of study and state or jurisdiction: 2005–06,
Digest of Education Statistics
.

¹⁸
“Today” means 2005, the latest year for which these breakdowns are available. The percentages of white students in undergraduate and graduate enrollments are the same. Total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions, by attendance status, sex of student, and control of institution: Selected years, 1947 through 2005,
Digest of Education Statistics
.

¹⁹
Total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions, by race/ethnicity, sex, attendance status, and level of student: Selected years, 1976 through 2005,
Digest of Education Statistics
.