The Marketplace of Ideas (16 page)

²⁰
Louis Menand, “Everyone Else’s Higher Education,”
New York Times Magazine
, April 20, 1997, p. 48. The statistic was calculated from tables in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, Almanac Issue, 1996.

²¹
Martin J. Finkelstein, Robert K. Seal, and Jack H. Schuster,
The New Academic Generation: A Profession in Transformation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 26–32.

²²
Part-Time, Adjunct, and Temporary Faculty: The New Majority?: Report of the Sloan Conference on Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty
([New York]: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1998), p. 5.

²³
Doctor’s degrees conferred by institutions of higher education, by racial/ethnic group and sex of student: 1976–77 to 1996–97,
Digest of Education Statistics
.

²⁴
The “culture wars” encompassed more than higher education. A main target of criticism, starting in 1989, was the funding practices of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. See Richard Bolton, ed.,
Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts
(New York: New Press, 1992).

²⁵
Lazerson, “The Disappointments of Success,” p. 66.

²⁶
The argument about economic necessity is the conclusion of Duffy and Goldberg’s
Crafting a Class
, a study of admissions policy at sixteen Ohio and Massachusetts liberal arts colleges. On the women’s movement and the rise of the information economy, see Francis Fukuyama,
The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order
(New York: The Free Press, 1999).

²⁷
See
General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), and
Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1948).

²⁸
As we saw in chapter one.

²⁹
Daniel Bell,
The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
(New York: The Free Press, 1962). The phrase is also associated with the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset.

³⁰
Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945–1995,” in Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds.,
American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 17–54. In the early Cold War period, of course, the tendency to avoid the political was also a response to the threat of McCarthyite intrusions into the academic process. See Ellen W. Shrecker,
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

³¹
Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt,
The American University
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 47, and Geiger,
Research and Relevant Knowledge
, pp. 331–32.

³²
Robert K. Merton,
Social Theory and Social Structure
, rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1968), pp. 39–72. The first edition of Merton’s book was published in 1949.

³³
See Wallace Martin, “Criticism and the Academy,” in A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
Vol. 7:
Modernism and the New Criticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 269–321.

³⁴
See the essays in Bender and Schorske, eds.,
American Academic Culture in Transformation
, esp. Carl E. Schorske, “The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences, 1940–1960,” pp. 309–29.

³⁵
On the trend “from localism to nationalism,” see Christopher Jencks and David Riesman,
The Academic Revolution
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 155–98.

³⁶
Clark Kerr,
The Uses of the University
, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 83, 142.

³⁷
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
, 438 U.S. 265.

³⁸
A good journalistic account of contemporary admissions practices (at Wesleyan) is Jacques Steinberg,
The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College
(New York: Viking, 2002). See also, for a look at one of the methods some elite colleges use to achieve a diverse class, Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks, and Richard Zeckhauser,
The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

³⁹
Ernest L. Boyer,
Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate
(San Francisco: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990). See also Bruce Kimball,
The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition
(New York: College Entrance Examinations Board, 1995), a study largely confirming Boyer’s conclusions.

⁴⁰
Thomas Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962; 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Paul de Man,
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Hayden White,
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973); Richard Rorty,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Stanley Fish,
Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

⁴¹
I. A. Richards,
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929); William Empson,
Seven Types of Ambiguity
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1930).

⁴²
Talcott Parsons,
The Social System
(Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951). Parsons, who founded the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard, intended the three disciplines to complement and interact with one another.

⁴³
Edward Said,
Orientalism
(New York: Pantheon, 1978); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Fredric Jameson,
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). And see the essays in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed.,
“Race,” Writing, and Difference
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). The list is somewhat arbitrary, but it indicates roughly the timing and shape of this moment in the history of literary studies. A detailed account can be found in Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
Vol. 9:
Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical, and Psychological Perspectives
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

⁴⁴
Gerald Graff,
Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). See also Francis Oakley,
Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 160–64. Oakley has an interdisciplinary dialogue in mind; Graff’s is essentially intradisciplinary.

⁴⁵
Ethan Bronner, “Study of Sex Experiencing 2d Revolution,”
New York Times
, December 28, 1997.

⁴⁶
Some of the problems with interdisciplinarity are discussed in chapter three.

⁴⁷
Francis Oakley, “Ignorant Armies and Nighttime Clashes: Changes in the Humanities Classroom, 1970–1995,” in Kernan, ed.,
What’s Happened to the Humanities?
, pp. 63–83.

⁴⁸
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/major.html. Material from college Web sites is always subject to change, of course. It might seem as though Trinity’s description is only a Socratic definition of philosophy as open-ended inquiry, and perfectly traditional. I was told by a member of the Trinity department, though, that it was, in fact, designed to avoid the suggestion that philosophy is an autonomous discipline.

⁴⁹
http://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/philosophy/major/.

⁵⁰
http://www.amherst.edu/~english/; http://www.wellesley.edu/English/.

⁵¹
Humanities professors coined a number of clever phrases for the “crisis of legitimation.” My favorite is the title of an MLA paper by David H. Richter: “Once I Built a Railroad, Now It’s Done. Buddy, Can You Paradigm?”

¹
A point made, and more than once, by Stanley Fish: see Fish, “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do,”
There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 213–42, and
Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 71–92.

²
Walter 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. 136. See also Andrew Abbott,
Chaos of Disciplines
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 122–23: “The departmental structure of the American university has remained largely unchanged since its creation between 1890 and 1910. Biology, it is true, has fractured in most universities into a number of departments.…In the humanities and social science, the departmental map has shown only marginal changes in the last sixty or eighty years. Linguistics, comparative literature, and a few other small fields are the only and occasional newcomers.”

³
There are national scholarly and scientific organizations, such as the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which was founded in 1919 and which provides a common organizational home for humanities and related social science disciplines. But most professors do not gather regularly in these venues, and their purpose is not to transcend disciplinarity.

⁴
On the evolution of specific disciplines, see Gerald Graff,
Professing Literature: An Institutional History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Thomas L. Haskell,
The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Bruce Kuklick,
The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); and Bruce Mazlish,
A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).