The Marketplace of Ideas (17 page)

⁵
Enrollment in institutions of higher education, by sex, enrollment status, and type of institution: 1869–1995; Institutions of higher education—colleges and universities, teacher-training institutions, and medical and dental schools, by public-private control: 1869–1995; and Professional and instructional staff at institutions of higher education, by sex and public-private control: 1869–1993,
Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition online,
at http://hsus.cambridge.org.

⁶
On the sociology of professionalism, see Magali Sarfatti Larson,
The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). On the history of professionalism, particularly as it relates to higher education, 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), and Bruce Kimball,
The “True Professional Ideal” in America: A History
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995). I discuss professionalism and literary modernism in
Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 97–132. Some of what follows is adapted from those pages.

⁷
This reform was discussed in chapter one.

⁸
Émile Durkheim,
De la division du travail social
(Paris: F. Alcan, 1893); Herbert Croly,
The Promise of American Life
(New York: Macmillan, 1910); R. H. Tawney,
The Acquisitive Society
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). See also Herbert Spencer,
The Principles of Sociology
(New York: Appleton, 1896), Vol. 3, pp. 179–324.

⁹
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776), ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937), pp. 3–4.

¹⁰
Median total time to degree in the humanities in 2003 was 11.3 years; it was nine years as a registered student. Thomas B. Hoffer and Vincent Welch, Jr., “Time to Degree of U.S. Research Doctorate Recipients,”
InfoBrief; Science Resources Statistics
(National Science Foundation, March 2006) pp. 2–3. The significance of the time to degree is discussed later, in chapter four.

¹¹
Stanley Fish, “Anti-Professionalism,”
Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 214–46.

¹²
Historical studies drawn upon in what follows include Graff,
Professing Literature
, esp. pp. 121–61, 183–208; Wallace Douglas, “Accidental Institution: On the Origin of Modern Language Study,” in Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons, eds.,
Criticism in the University
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985), pp. 35–61; and 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. See also Jonathan Culler, “Literary Criticism and the American University,”
Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 3–40.

¹³
Martin, “Criticism and the Academy,” p. 273.

¹⁴
Graff,
Professing Literature
, p. 283n.

¹⁵
George Saintsbury,
A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day
(Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1900–04), Vol. 3, p. vi.

¹⁶
René Wellek,
A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–66), Vol. 1, pp. vi, 7 (my emphasis).

¹⁷
William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks,
Literary Criticism: A Short History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), Vol. 1, pp. vii, ix–x.

¹⁸
Commonly identified with J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, all professors at Yale. Together with Jacques Derrida, who began teaching regularly at Yale in 1975, they published
Deconstruction and Criticism
(New York: Continuum, 1979), which gave the world the notion (slightly mistaken, since Bloom was never a deconstructionist) of a “school.” See Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, eds.,
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Yale was also a bastion of the New Criticism in the fifties. There is a very good account of the New Critics in Grant Webster,
The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 63–206. On the non-literary aspects of the New Criticism, see Mark Jancovich,
The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

¹⁹
I discuss Eliot’s relation to academic English studies in “T. S. Eliot and Modernity,”
New England Quarterly
, 69 (1996): 554–79.

²⁰
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
The Sacred Wood
(London: Methuen, 1920), pp. 47–59.

²¹
Walter Jackson Bate,
Criticism: The Major Texts
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952).

²²
Thomas Haskell, “Professionalism
versus
Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Émile Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of Professional Communities,” and Eliot Freidson, “Are Professions Necessary?,” in Haskell, ed.,
The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 182, 4–5. See also Walter Metzger, “A Spectre Is Haunting American Scholars: The Spectre of ‘Professionism,’”
Educational Researcher
, vol. 16, no. 6 (1987): 10–19.

²³
Peter M. Blau,
The Organization of Academic Work
(New York: Wiley, 1973), p. 5.

²⁴
Ibid., p. 27. Figures cited by David Damrosch. For speculation on some of the consequences, see Damrosch,
We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 24–47.

²⁵
Ernest Boyer,
Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate
(San Francisco: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990), p. 56.

²⁶
Ibid., p. 12.

²⁷
Harold Rosenberg,
The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience
(New York: Horizon, 1964), esp. pp. 13–20.

²⁸
See the essays in Patricia Meyer Spacks, ed.,
Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

¹
The classic history is Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger,
The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).

²
John Dewey, “Introductory Address to the American Association of University Professors,” January 1, 1915, and “Annual Address of the President to the American Association of University Professors,” December 15, 1915, both in
The Middle Works, 1899–1924
, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–83), Vol. 8, pp. 98–108.

³
I discuss the role of the principle of academic freedom in “The Limits of Academic Freedom,” in Louis Menand, ed.,
The Future of Academic Freedom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 3–20.

⁴
These are references to actual cases, at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, involving Harris Mirkin, in 2002, and at the University of Colorado at Boulder, involving Ward Churchill, in 2005.

⁵
Paul F. Lazersfeld and Wagner Thielens, Jr.,
The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis
(Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958), p. 14.

⁶
Roger Kimball,
Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education
(New York: Harper & Row, 1990). A similar, bestselling account from the same period is Dinesh D’Souza,
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
(New York: The Free Press, 1991).

⁷
David Horowitz and Eli Lehrer, “Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities” (San Francisco: Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 2002). Horowitz sponsors a related Web site, www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.

⁸
Daniel Klein and Andrew Western, “Voter Registration of Berkeley and Stanford Faculty,”
Academic Questions
, 18 (2004–05): 53–65; Klein and Charlotta Stern, “Political Diversity in Six Disciplines,”
Academic Questions
, 18 (2004–05): 40–52; Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,”
The Forum
, vol. 3, no. 1 (2005), article 2; Gary A. Tobin and Aryeh K. Weinberg, “A Profile of American College Faculty: Political Beliefs and Behavior” (San Francisco: Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 2006); and John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick, “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
, 70 (2006): 304–26. The methodologies of these surveys are critiqued in Gross and Simmons, cited in note 9 below.

⁹
Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors” (2007), working paper, at http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~ngross/lounsbery_9-25.pdf. The survey was supported by a grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and was the subject of a conference, “The Politics of the Professors,” at Harvard University in 2007. I was a principal investigator on the grant and involved in the construction of the questionnaire; I was not involved in the administration of the survey or the analysis of the results. The data I draw on are from the working paper and are still subject to review.

¹⁰
Gross and Simmons used a number of measures to confirm the self-reporting: for example, they correlated answers to survey questions about political persuasion and political party with views on specific issues, such as the war in Iraq, abortion, homosexual relations, and so on.

¹¹
The classic study, whose results have been much confirmed, is Philip Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David Apter, ed.,
Ideology and Discontent
(Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–61.

¹²
These and subsequent data are from Gross and Simmons’s working paper. When the numbers do not add up to 100, it is due to rounding.

¹³
Data from 2004. Liberal-Conservative self-identification 1972–2004,
ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior
, at http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab3_1.htm.

¹⁴
Gallup poll cited in Gross and Simmons.

¹⁵
See Robin Wilson, “Conservatives Just Aren’t into Academe, Study Finds,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, 54 (February 22, 2007): A1–A8 (reporting on a paper by Matthew Woessner and Elizabeth Kelly-Woessner, “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates”).