Higher Education Has Always Been a Mess

Starting in the mid-20th century, academe became idolized, in good times, as embodying everything right about America, and demonized, in bad times, as embodying everything wrong. It’s neither, and both — a crazy, amorphous amalgam of interests and histories that couldn’t have been planned and won’t become extinct.

It was ragtag and subpar until World War II, then enjoyed a 30-year golden age. Afterward, it remained the world leader but has subsided into noisy fractiousness over credentialism and culture, politics and price. As we grope our way forward, calm, rational discussion and a little perspective might help. But a search for solutions in American academe’s linear, illustrious history surely won’t — because that past of sustained grandeur and gravitas never existed.

Frank Rhodes, a former president of Cornell, in 2001 described the university as “the most significant creation of the second millennium.” Wow. That’s not how we thought of it when I was growing up.

In 1940s Hoboken, N.J., a child of East European immigrants who did not read or write English, I got my exposure to American higher education through the movies, where I took my Yiddish-speaking grandmother three times a week. Our favorites were Marx Brothers pictures, including Horsefeathers (1932). The first image of the American college president I saw was Groucho as President Quincy Adams Wagstaff, leader of Huxley College, who hires two professionals — Chico and Harpo — to help win the big football game against Darwin College. There was also a mature, attractive “campus widow” hanging around the team and leading Zeppo into dangerous waters. College sounded great.

For most Americans around this time, college life meant football, fraternities, and pompous or absentminded professors played by comedic character actors like Edward Everett Horton, in academic regalia. The (all-white) student body had as little as possible to do with intellectual life. Even as a war was raging in Europe, college was depicted as a harmless, football-obsessed, bucolic campus filled with students who didn’t know much when they arrived and were looking forward to four years of fun and games.

Certainly high-school preparation did not lead the public to expect much. When the United States entered World War II, in December 1941, the Columbia historian Allan Nevins surveyed 7,000 first-year students at 36 of the best colleges and universities in the country: Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, Penn, Penn State, the University of North Carolina, Washington University (St. Louis), and Yeshiva were among them. A third could not find St. Louis on a map. A third could not locate the Mississippi River. Half identified William James as the brother of Jesse James. Thousands could not name the American presidents during the Civil War or World War I. And more than half identified Walt Whitman as an American bandleader, having confused him with Paul Whiteman.

Three hundred years of experience in higher education had prepared the American public for low expectations. Denominationalism dominated the small number of students who attended 17th-century colleges: Harvard was for Congregationalists, Yale for Calvinists. Such distinctions were often a matter of life and death. Quakers were being hanged on Boston Common. Persecuted Baptists fled Boston for Providence, where they founded their own college. Evangelical Presbyterians established Princeton. And the Anglicans had William & Mary. The few students who attended any college were taught by poorly trained teachers who could not maintain order. After Thomas Jefferson created the religiously liberal University of Virginia, in 1819, faculty members slept with loaded pistols under their pillows for fear of riotous students.

For the first 60 years of the 19th century, the United States was peppered with dozens of church-founded Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, and other denominational colleges throughout the East and Midwest, mostly for the purpose of training ministers. Georgetown, Holy Cross, and Boston College took care of the Irish Catholics who poured in after the 1840s. Memoirs and diaries speak of mediocre professors and generally useless curricula. If one was serious about education, there was only one place to go: Europe.

Two events changed the picture: the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890; and the rise of philanthropic industrialists who wanted German-style research universities and were ready to put their own money to the effort. Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Hopkins, Stanford, Duke, Carnegie, Mellon, and dozens of others embraced the German research degree, the Ph.D., and fused undergraduate education onto the German research model.

But America’s leap forward never got its research enterprise higher than second place. Germany’s enormous advantage and industrial-academic collaboration placed it on the pinnacle of accomplishment, not just in science but in all aspects of the systematic pursuit of knowledge: what the Germans called Wissenschaft. Germany, “das Land der Denker und Dichter,” the nation of thinkers and poets, was supreme, and if there were any doubts about its capacity to lead, when the Nobel Prizes first appeared, in 1901, the science awards looked like a wholly owned German subsidiary.

There might have been an opportunity for an American race to the top, but our immigration policy changed abruptly in the first decades of the 20th century and cut off the intellectual flow that might have fed the U.S. research enterprise. The American undergraduate opportunity had been an enormous attraction for the immigrants still fleeing oppression and poverty at the end of the 19th century. Academically hungry Jews and Italians by the 1910s accounted for more than 30 percent of the entering classes at the most prestigious colleges and universities. But, after Italian-born anarchists were arrested in 1920 in a fatal payroll heist in Massachusetts, the doors of Ellis Island began closing. By the time Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, in 1927, restrictive immigration laws had slammed the doors shut.

At the same time, our most prestigious private colleges instituted quotas on applicants of Eastern and Southern European origins. Acceptances among this group — mostly academically hungry Jews and Italians — dropped to the single digits, and the meritocracy was over. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton began filling their classes from a half-dozen select prep schools, whose football players were in particular demand in the 1920s and 1930s. America’s place as a perpetual No. 2 was guaranteed. Even after Germany’s catastrophic loss in World War I, its universities were soon again leading the world. Americans just didn’t seem very interested in higher education. That’s why, in the depths of the Depression, I and millions of others turned to the Marx Brothers and Notre Dame football as academic avatars.

It took Hitler to make American academe great.

No one could have anticipated the destruction of first the German, then the European, higher-education tradition from 1933 to 1945. The Nazi racialization of science — the idea of “Jewish physics” versus “Aryan physics” — and the wholesale firing of German academics who were not free of Jewish blood, including those married to Jews, destroyed the world’s leading research enterprise in less than a generation. The United States found enough wisdom to open our doors just a crack, to admit a few exiled German, Italian, and Hungarian scientists. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter (actually written by Leo Szilard) to President Franklin Roosevelt suggesting the construction of an atomic bomb, a project to be guided by Enrico Fermi. Such imported technical bright lights became the face of the new American faculty.

By 1945 the abrupt miracle of American higher education had happened. Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, sent President Truman a report, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” which put the federal government in the business of funding research through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. That, along with the GI Bill of Rights, which poured more than two million additional students into the higher-education system, helped knock down college quotas and also got more immigrant scientists into our academic institutions. By the early 1950s, American scientists were dominating the Nobels, many giving their acceptance speeches in heavily accented English.

Without even knowing it, we had entered academe’s golden age, including the bold experiment of universal higher education — providing a place in some kind of college or university for every American.

Money poured in, research and teaching faculty were in short supply, and everyone attending an academic convention had five job offers, whether from the exploding California colleges and universities under Clark Kerr, or the newly created SUNY and CUNY systems in New York, or hundreds of other institutions, small and large, in between. It was a wild sellers’ market. Tenure took hold not because of Senator McCarthy’s threats to free speech, but because it was the only way to keep your faculty from leaving for other jobs. Current teaching applicants will be stupefied to learn that in 1966, after two years as an assistant professor at Tufts, without a single major publication, I was approached by a wonderful dean who placed his hands on my head and said, in effect, Poof, you have tenure! There was no peer review, no formal review of any kind.

The golden age didn’t last long — a mere 30 years — but by the time it ended, in the mid-1970s, the United States had become the world leader in higher education, a position it now seems unable to relinquish, despite mayhem on campus, chaos in governance, confusion in public opinion, and the abuse we heap upon ourselves.

The public’s mood swing took a while. As late as 1978, the Hollywood template for our view of college was Animal House: John Belushi had replaced Groucho Marx, but campus life still seemed relatively harmless. But by the late 1980s, prevailing gloom was the norm. Profs were coddled, blowing off their students except to politically indoctrinate them. Scholars invested their energies in self-centered career advancement or corporate- or defense-linked profit-seeking tech research. Meanwhile, critics sneered, students were drowning in a broth of relativism with mushy lumps of dissolved canon, graduating with no solid knowledge, principles, or plans.

Three books from among dozens make the point: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy (1987); Charles Sykes’ Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education in America (1988); and Page Smith’s Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (1990).

William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, who led the National Endowment for the Humanities between 1981 and 1993, also harped on the ostensible academic and social failures of American colleges. Nothing could be done to reform the behemoth. The only bright future imaginable would be one free from the mediocrity of American higher education. In a 1997 interview in Forbes, the management consultant Peter Drucker gave his verdict: “Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive.”

Amplifying our fantasies and quagmires was the billion-dollar beast of college athletics, having nothing to do with higher education and skewing the picture for more than a century. But it wouldn’t, and won’t, go away, for the simple reason that the American public — out of wish fulfillment, nostalgia, a Vegas-fueled gambling obsession, and distraction — likes it.

The critics harked back to a former greatness, a time when even our K-12 system was admirable and our colleges and universities led the world with pride. Never mind that such a past was imaginary. To paraphrase Will Rogers, “Schools ain’t what they used to be and probably never was.” American memory has always been suspect and triumphalist. People seemed to have forgotten that it took the Third Reich to move an anti-intellectual America into the forefront of higher education.

Though the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole remaining world power, the sad song of “American education in decline” was followed by a chorus of “Which other nations will lead the future?” The European Union and Japan were the two strongest candidates for academic leadership as the 20th century came to an end.

Now, well into the new century, those competitors look troubled at best, and we are bombarded again with criticism of the ills inflicted on the nation by higher education. Outrageous student debt, poor teaching, vast and ineffective remediation, overpaid presidents, athletics scandals, irrelevant curricula, unfair admissions, cheating — the list goes on. And always with a nostalgic plea for a return to a time when we could hold our heads high, when American higher education was the envy of the world. America as a whole is falling behind because of higher education’s systemic failures.

That’s the myth. The reality is that, mostly by accident and occasionally by design, we have created a system of remarkable diversity and choice, made up of 4,000 to 6,000 institutions — depending on whether you include the 1,300 Bible colleges that accredit themselves — an astonishing mixture of private, public, two-year, four-year, college, university, church-affiliated, faith-based, nonprofit, for-profit, on-campus, no-campus, online, urban, and rural, and ranging from institutions with fewer than 100 students to others with more than 80,000 and growing. We obsess more about seeking change and solutions, and write more about every aspect of research, teaching, and administration of this colossal enterprise, than does any other nation, even while a stream of books predict severe academic disruption, if not Armageddon.

There will be disruption; there always has been. Over the past three centuries, hundreds of colleges have disappeared. When the Land Grant colleges were created, teachers complained that more than 80 percent of their students needed remedial work. At the turn of the 19th century, faculty members at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale bitterly denounced students’ poor literacy and writing skills.

Yet, in a brief spurt of extraordinary growth after World War II, American higher education shot to the top, where, despite ourselves, we will remain. No other nation could possibly replicate — or want to replicate — this breathtaking, occasionally dysfunctional, sometimes wasteful, and often ungovernable collection of disparate institutions. But it is that anarchy that has become the greatest attraction for the finest minds in the world. Despite our nativism, we remain a nation of immigrants. Of the researchers who have won Nobels while working in America, roughly a third were foreign-born. And the overwhelming number of Chinese-born Ph.D. candidates here are seeking green cards.

What do they see in our messy, pathologically self-critical, and at times self-destructive higher-education system? Maybe that it’s also, by accident and opportunity, unique, inimitable, and unlikely to be surpassed, even as it staggers and mysteriously evolves into the murky future.

Sol Gittleman is a former senior vice president and provost of Tufts University, where he is now a university professor.