The Marketplace of Ideas (6 page)

There are several reasons why more women and non-white Americans, not to mention more non-Americans, began entering higher education in greater proportions after 1970, but one of them is simply structural. After 1970, there were fewer white American males for colleges to choose from. In order to maintain enrollments and selectivity, colleges simply had to enlarge the pool from which they accepted new students. The system had overexpanded during the Golden Age. In 1950, there were 2.6 million college students; in 1970, there were 8 million. Too many state-subsidized slots had been created—in 1950, 50 percent of college students attended a public institution; in 1970, 73 percent did—and the result was a much higher level of competition for new students.
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There had been talk before 1975 about the educational desirability of co-educational and mixed-race student bodies, but at many schools, economic necessity is what made it happen. That is a reason why after 1970, virtually every non-military all-male college in the United States went co-ed. It was not the women’s movement that did it. Or, more precisely, the same need for a stronger labor force pool that enabled the movement for equal rights for women finally to have some success applied to higher education as well.
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The intellectual changes in many of the academic disciplines, and particularly in the humanities, have the same etiology. This does not mean that changes in the humanities disciplines were triggered by changes in demographics, although this has often been asserted. It means that the factors that contributed to the new demographic makeup of higher education are the same as those that contributed to the present condition of the humanities disciplines. The two phenomena are both fallout from the Golden Age.

3.

The strategic rationale for the postwar expansion in American higher education was technological and geopolitical—we needed better hardware than the Communists—but the social policy rationale was meritocratic. Postwar educational leaders, including James Conant and George Zook, were concerned about broadening the range of educational opportunity for all Americans,
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and, as we have seen, the National Defense Education Act was quite explicit on this point. If the nation seeks to maximize its talent pool in the name of greater national security or greater economic productivity or both, it will not wish to limit entrants to that pool on the basis of considerations extraneous to aptitude, such as gender, family income, and skin color. Postwar liberals like Conant also believed that inherited privilege leads to class resentments, and that class resentments lead to conditions in which illiberal political movements can grow.

The meritocratic philosophy was accompanied by two other postwar developments. One was a belief in the importance of general education in undergraduate teaching; the other was the dominance of a scientific model in academic research. In practice, most colleges paid lip service to general education in American universities after the war; relatively few created independent general education curricula.
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But such curricula were not necessary for the idea to have an effect, since general education did receive a great deal of lip service. Most educators subscribed to the belief that the major works of the Western tradition are accessible to all students in more or less the same way; that those works constitute a more or less coherent body of thought (or, at least, a coherent debate); and that they can serve as a kind of benign cultural ideology in a pluralist nation whose citizens are generally wary of anything overtly ideological.

The other critical Golden Age development, the adoption of a self-consciously scientific model of research, also reflected the anti-ideological temper of postwar American thought, a temper epitomized in the phrase, first used in the conferences of the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom and later given wider circulation by the sociologist Daniel Bell, “the end of ideology.”
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To some extent the antipathy to ideology was a response to global political history between 1914 and 1945. But to some extent, as the historian Thomas Bender has suggested, it was a response to all that federal money that began pouring into universities after the war. Scholars eschewed political implications in their research because they wished not to offend their granting agencies.
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The idea that academics, particularly in the social sciences, could provide the state with neutral research results on which pragmatic public policies could be based was an animating idea in the 1950s university. In the sciences, it helped establish what the Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons called the ethos of “cognitive rationality.”
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In the study of political history, it led to the “consensus approach,” an attempt to avoid distracting ideological debate when writing and teaching history. In sociology, it produced what Robert Merton, the Columbia sociologist, called “theories of the middle range,” which emphasized the formulation of limited hypotheses subject to empirical verification.
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Behaviorism and rational choice theory became dominant paradigms in psychology and political science. In literature, even when the temperament was anti-positivistic, as in the case of the New Criticism and structuralism, the methods were scientistic.
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Boundaries were respected and methodologies were codified. Discipline reigned in the disciplines. Scholars in the fifties who looked back on their prewar educations tended to be appalled by what they now regarded as a lack of analytic rigor and focus.
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Because public money was being pumped into the system at the high end—into the large research universities—the effect of the Golden Age was to make the research professor the type of the professor generally. This is a phenomenon that the sociologists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman tracked in their study of what they called “the academic revolution”—the emergence of higher education as a central source of social authority.
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For the first time in the history of American higher education, research, rather than teaching or service, defined the model for the professor—not only in the doctoral institutions, but all the way down the institutional ladder. This strengthened the grip of the disciplines on scholarly and pedagogical practice. Professors identified with their disciplines, which constitute a national “community,” first and with their institutions second. Federal research grants increased by a factor of four between 1960 and 1990, but faculty teaching hours decreased by half, from nine hours a week to four and a half.
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Few professors would have said that their jobs became easier because they were teaching less; the demand for research simply was much greater. This is how it was that the system of higher education became more uniform even as it expanded between 1945 and 1975. The Cold War homogenized the academic profession.

It now seems obvious that the dispensation put into place in the first two decades of the Cold War was just waiting for the tiniest spark to blow sky-high. And the spark, when it came, wasn’t so tiny. The war in Vietnam exposed almost every weakness in the system that Conant and his generation of educational leaders had constructed, from the dangers inherent in the university’s financial dependence on the state to the way its social role was figured in national security policy to the degree of factitiousness in the value-neutral standard of research in fields outside the natural sciences. (The war did also lead to skepticism about the neutrality of academic science, though this criticism was political as well as philosophical.)

Then, after 1970, as new populations began to arrive in numbers in American universities, the meritocratic rationale was exploded as well. For it turned out that cultural differences were not only not so easy to bracket as men like Conant had imagined; those differences suddenly began to seem a lot more interesting than the similarities. The trend was made irreversible by Justice Lewis Powell’s decision in
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
, handed down in 1978.
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That case was brought by a white man, Allan Bakke, who had twice been rejected for admission to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, even though his scores were higher than those of non-white applicants who did receive offers of admission. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the California State Supreme Court, and ruled, by a 5–4 vote, that Bakke had been denied his rights under the Equal Protection clause. But, by the back door, it also gave the consideration of race in admissions constitutional sanction.

Justice Powell’s decision, quoting from the
amici curiae
brief filed jointly for Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that college admissions offices have always given preference to various types of candidates whose grades and standardized test scores may be below the average. They have done so because they have other institutional needs besides putting scholars in the classrooms. They have football teams to field, orchestras and marching bands to staff, student organizations to be led, alumni to be kept in a giving mood, and feeder schools to be kept in a feeding mood. They have a gender balance to preserve. They can’t have ten times as many poets as physicists, or thirty students from Exeter and none from the local high school. Racial diversity, Powell concluded, is just another institutional need. What the
Bakke
decision basically said to universities was: Stop talking about quotas and about redressing the effects of past discrimination and start talking about the educational benefits of mixed-race student bodies, and you’ll be on the safe side of the law. It preserved the practice by changing the rationale.

Powell’s opinion changed the language of college admissions. He blew a hole in meritocratic theory, because he stated what might have been obvious to anyone looking for it from the beginning, which is that college admissions, even and especially at places like Harvard, have never been purely meritocratic. Colleges have always taken non-standardized and non-standardizable attributes into account when selecting students, from musical prodigies to football stars, alumni legacies, and the offspring of local bigwigs. If a college admitted only students who got top scores on the SATs, it would have a very boring class. “Diversity” is the very word that Powell used in the
Bakke
opinion, and there are probably few college Web sites in the United States today in which the word “diversity,” or one of its cognates, does not appear.

The term plainly connotes racial diversity. College admissions officers sometimes use the phrase “three in a tree.” It is a reference to the now-standard admissions brochure photograph of three college students on or around a tree—each identifiably a member of a different racial group. But “diversity” also means a variety of interests and abilities. Colleges no longer search for (in admissions office shorthand) BWRKs—bright well-rounded kids. They search for what they call “well-lopsided” applicants. They no longer want well-rounded students; they want a well-rounded class.
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4.

As the homogeneity of the student body broke down after 1975, and the homogeneity of the faculty broke down along with it, the humanities disciplines underwent a series of transformations. These shifts became visible at the level of the undergraduate curriculum in an emphasis on multiculturalism (meaning exposure to specifically ethnic perspectives and traditions) and values (attention to the ethical implications of knowledge); in a renewed interest in service (manifested in the emergence of internship and off-campus social service programs) and the idea of community; in “education for citizenship” and in a revival of a conception of teaching, associated with the philosopher John Dewey, as a collaborative process of learning and inquiry. The landmark study identifying this shift is
Scholarship Reconsidered
, by Ernest Boyer, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which was published in 1990.
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This transformation in the undergraduate curriculum was clearly a reaction against the model created by the Golden Age and the academic revolution: the model of disinterested research and the great books or “Western Civ” curriculum. The vocabulary of “disinterestedness,” “objectivity,” “reason,” and “knowledge,” and talk about things like “the scientific method,” “the canon,” and “the fact/value distinction” began to be superseded, particularly in the humanities, by attention to “interpretations” (rather than “facts”), “perspective” (rather than “objectivity”), and “understanding” (rather than “reason” or “analysis”). An emphasis on universalism and “greatness” was replaced by an emphasis on diversity and difference; the scientistic norms that once prevailed in many of the “soft” disciplines began to be viewed with skepticism (though a very
rigorous
skepticism); context and contingency were continually appealed to; attention to “objects” gave way to attention to “representations.” The area in which these transformations were most emphatic was literature, especially English and French, the fields in which much of the theorizing took place. The influence of that theorizing spread across the humanities disciplines and, during the seventies and eighties, extended into history departments, anthropology departments, and even law schools.