The election has opened the door to education and expertise, but academics will have to earn respect
Soon after election day, the columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in The New York Times that the “second most remarkable thing” about the election was that “American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.”
What goes on here? Was the historian Richard Hofstadter wrong in his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to detect an irresistible current in our society of “resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it”? Has that current weakened or been sufficiently dammed up to explain the election of a president who is reflective about history and ideas as well as about policy and practice?
Those questions were in the air last month in Seattle at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The association is devoted to promoting liberal education — which it defines as one that develops in students “a strong sense of value, ethics, and civil engagement” — at all levels, from community colleges to research universities. Without discounting the importance of marketable skills, such an education should include the study of literary and historical texts, philosophical questions and scientific concepts, as well as engagement with foreign cultures.
Many people who attended the meeting felt that the spirit of anti-intellectualism emanating from Washington in recent years has hampered, or even stymied, the pursuit of those aims. The inquisitorial tone of former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, with its focus on benchmarks and standardized testing, was frequently cited. But now beleaguered deans and presidents were hoping for better days ahead. What are the chances they are right?
Hofstadter’s book is a good place to start in considering both strategies and prospects. Although not published until 1963, it was conceived in the 1950s, when, even more than today, the term “egghead” was an image of dysfunction and disloyalty. Hofstadter regarded anti-intellectualism as a kind of antibody in the national bloodstream — sometimes dormant, sometimes active — that reacts to “high” culture with an inflammatory response. He traced this attitude to multiple sources: including, in particular, the religious evangelicalism that flares up periodically throughout American history in reaction to the perceived decline of piety and morals and, more generally, public resentment toward those who, claiming expertise and “excellence,” seem to condescend toward unlettered or uncredentialed people as somehow inferior or unworthy of respect.
Lurking in Hofstadter’s book was a cyclical theory of history that attempted to account for why those attitudes wax and wane. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, he wrote, “the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected,” until that respect was swept away by a wave of philistinism. The titular chief of the reactionaries was Dwight D. Eisenhower, but the real ringleaders were “the unpalatable Nixon” and, of course, that avatar of “the vigilante mind,” Joe McCarthy. By the time Hofstadter finished his work, he sensed that the pendulum was swinging back (or forth) again. John F. Kennedy was playing host to Nobel laureates at the White House, and Washington had once more “become hospitable to Harvard professors and ex-Rhodes scholars.” Today there is reason to think we are living through another turn in the cycle. The philistines are out; the Harvard professors (Elena Kagan, Lawrence H. Summers, Cass R. Sunstein, et al.) are back in.
Yet is it really true that intellectuals go in and out of favor entirely for reasons of public irrationality? In fact, Eisenhower had his own brain trust — led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had studied with the French philosopher Henri Bergson and was a fluent reader of Ancient Greek. George W. Bush, too, turned to advisers with strong academic credentials. Paul D. Wolfowitz, his deputy defense secretary, was eminent enough in his University of Chicago days to earn a bit part in one of Saul Bellow’s novels. Leon R. Kass, also of Chicago, advised Bush on issues of ethics and science, and Bush’s second secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, once held the position of provost at Stanford University.
The deeper implication of Hofstadter’s book is not so much that Americans oscillate between periods of antiand pro-intellectualism, but that they tend to harbor simultaneously an “ingrained distrust of eggheads” and “a genuine yearning for enlightenment and culture.”
And why shouldn’t the aspiration be mixed with wariness? After all, it wasn’t long before Harvard professors (McGeorge Bundy) and Rhodes Scholars (Dean Rusk) were ironically renamed “the best and the brightest” in recognition of their sponsorship of the Vietnam War. And everyone knows what happened when the liberal intellectuals of JFK’s and LBJ’s administrations morphed into the neocons of W’s: We got (among other things) another disastrous war.
Rather than telling ourselves a back-and-forth tale of virtue versus vigilantism, academics concerned with the life of the mind generally, and the academic humanities in particular, might be better served by looking inward and asking what we can do to earn public trust. Most Americans, I suspect, are neither antinor pro-intellectual but bring to the question the same pragmatic attitude they bring to everything else: a desire to see results. Those who believe in a broad liberal education for all Americans, based on respect for culture in Matthew Arnold’s sense of “the best which has been thought and said,” need to respond to the public demand for some demonstrable utility in what we teach: literature, history, philosophy, the arts.
Some professors, especially, perhaps, those at elite institutions, respond to that demand simply by rejecting its validity. That has been the position of humanist educators from Cardinal Newman (“Liberal knowledge ... refuses to be informed ... by any end.” “Knowledge is capable of being its own end.”) to Stanley Fish (“Higher education, properly understood” is “characterized by a determined inutility.”) There is a certain prideful purity in such a view, but if educators hope for renewed public trust in the value of liberal as opposed to practical or vocational education, we have to come to terms with the utility question one way or another.
I heard essentially two answers at the conference in Seattle: First, that the nation needs liberally educated people if it is to compete in the global economy — people, that is, with a certain versatility, creativity, and, ideally, some knowledge of foreign cultures. Second, that if citizens are to participate responsibly in a democratic society, they require some knowledge of history and a capacity for critical thinking.
I find the second answer more persuasive than the first. It is not clear that a nation cannot compete in the global marketplace by means of a small educated elite overseeing a diligent and competent work force that has received technical training rather than a broad humanistic education. (China has been doing so successfully up to now.) But it is beyond doubt that if we are to have a society where the distributive justice we claim to prize is really to count for something, we need an educated citizenry in the sense that the founders envisioned: informed citizens able to think about ethical questions.
There is a third answer too. Liberal education — education, that is, that includes an engagement with what we call the humanities — deepens and enriches individual experience. That fact came home poignantly to me not long ago when an elderly alumnus of my own university, responding to my arguments on behalf of our required curriculum of great books, music, and art (the Columbia Core Curriculum), said to me, “What you say about preparation for modern life and citizenship and all that is fine, but you miss the main point.” With some trepidation I asked what he meant. “What the core really taught me,” he replied, “is how to enjoy life.”
As President Obama begins to put his personal stamp on public debate, I think we can be hopeful that respect for the qualities that liberal education aims to foster — moral and aesthetic sensitivity — will rise. We can also be hopeful that academe, especially as an engine of opportunity and a site of scientific research, will find a friendlier partner in government. The provisional “stimulus package” includes modest increases in federal support for low-income students and a good deal of money for “shovel ready” construction projects on our campuses.
But if true liberal education is to flourish in our colleges and universities — education, that is, in history, literature, philosophy, and the arts as well as in science — we might start by pulling back from defensiveness toward putative “anti-intellectuals” outside the ivy gates, and ask whether those of us inside have lived up to our own professed values.
Can we say, with Hofstadter, that “of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged,” it is intellectuals who have “shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below [them] in the social scale”? Academics certainly talk a lot about social justice, but how credible are we when, for instance, our wealthiest and most prestigious universities admit such a minuscule percentage of students (often fewer than 10 percent) from low-income families?
Among the purposes of liberal education is the inculcation of self-questioning and self-doubt, qualities that many academics have lately — and rightly — found lacking in our political and managerial elite. But can we honestly say that we have held ourselves to the same standard? After decades of jargon-ridden theorizing in the academic humanities, how sure can we be that President Eisenhower (as quoted by Hofstadter) was entirely wrong when he defined an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows”?
Surely, one of the secrets of President Obama’s rhetorical power is his ability to draw on our national history for inspiration even as he acknowledges, with vividness and fervor, the tragedies and travesties of the past. He thereby offers young people a tradition to which they can lay claim without embarrassment but also without uncritical reverence. That balance between the curatorial and the critical has always been essential if humanistic education is to have power and meaning for the young. Yet in recent decades the academic humanities have been overwhelmingly ironic and iconoclastic, and thereby failed to sustain the balance — one reason, I suspect, why we have lost respect in universities and in society at large, although I believe we are beginning to wake up to the problem, especially as young scholars succeed the baby-boom generation exhausted by the culture wars.
In short, if we look to ourselves, we will be in a stronger position to secure the public faith we crave. The ultimate goal of humanistic study, after all, has always been self-knowledge.
Andrew Delbanco is a professor of humanities and director of American studies at Columbia University and a member of the board of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. His book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be will be published by Princeton University Press in 2010.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 23, Page B8