Louis Menand—Luke to those who know him—has all the credentials of a public intellectual. A professor with a chair in English and American literature at Harvard University, he is also a staff writer for The New Yorker. He’s taught at Princeton University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and he’s been an associate editor of The New Republic and a contributing editor at The New York Review of Books. He is author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning crossover The Metaphysical Club, and now he’s written a book on a most public controversy: why higher education is so hard to change.
Yet in an interview, he vehemently denies the label—and part of the reason can be found in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton). As a humanist focusing on the liberal arts, Menand asks four questions: Why is it so hard to create a general-education curriculum? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? Why has “interdisciplinarity” been seen—and ultimately failed—as a magic wand? Why do professors share the same politics?
Behind those puzzles (“pickles,” Menand calls them) is an uneasy sense that the transformation of higher education since 1945 has strained the system, and that the liberal arts, in particular, are being marginalized.
“We want to reform higher education,” Menand says, stressing his academic identification. “But nobody knows how to make that happen.” At the same time, he goes on, critics (especially the journalists with whom he associates) too often succumb to what he calls “a willful obtuseness” about what academics do. His book is written for both camps.
Menand has long been interested in higher education. It was a concern of the late-19th-century pragmatists he wrote about in The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). Before that, he produced a paper for the American Council of Learned Societies that he would later turn into the chapter in his new book on the humanities; he has lectured on higher education and, in The New York Times, called for doing away with the dissertation and making Ph.D. programs shorter. He has also been involved in Harvard’s recent change in its general-education curriculum.
Why have most reforms in general education been so difficult to make? The two traditional styles—distribution requirements versus a core curriculum—developed in the first half of the 20th century as a way to teach undergraduates not just academic knowledge, but also what they needed to know as citizens. But as higher education expanded and was professionalized, Menand writes, the liberal arts became allergic to having a mission or anything that seemed vocational imposed on them. “There’s been an instinctive response to pull up the drawbridge,” he says.
“That makes it difficult for students to see the practical issues behind the philosophical ones.” It also makes designing courses to help them difficult. Another problem, as Menand knows from Harvard’s experience, is that “everyone wants the funds that come with a seat at the table.”
And the humanities? “The temperature has gone down a bit” since the 1990s, when debates about the humanities’ value were heated, Menand thinks. Still, “humanists have spent a lot of time and anxiety to produce a definition of their work. In the end, no one has come up with one.” That’s not all bad. “Exploring the limits of any form of knowledge is a form of knowledge in itself.”
While he’s concerned about the worsening job market for humanists and declining enrollments in many humanities courses (Harvard’s included), he calls some of today’s angst “neurotic.” Perhaps there is no single definition of the humanities, nor the need for one. Eclecticism itself can provide legitimacy.
Enter the craze for “interdisciplinarity,” what Menand calls “a mask for deeper concerns about our effectiveness.” Academics tend to see interdisciplinary work as “a magic wand” to make the disciplines seem more valuable. In reality, he says, most interdisciplinary work simply brings together teams from different disciplines—which just ratifies disciplinary silos.
As to whether professors share the same politics, it is true, Menand says; studies show most professors are left of center, which puts them out of step with many Americans. “I don’t think professors should just reflect the public culture,” he emphasizes. “That’s not what we’re about. To the extent the liberal arts have a self-definition, it lies in disinterestedness.”
Still, he worries that academic socialization leads to “a lack of oxygenation” that deters new thinking in the disciplines. The culprits, he suggests, may be the increased time it takes to get a degree and the dismal job market. The obstacles to getting a job are so great that entering students tend to self-select. They’re the ones who “already talk the talk,” Menand writes.
Not only does that undercut intellectual diversity, it’s also unfair to students, he says. “We’re not bad people. We don’t want to torture students. But we should be embarrassed at making them put in so much time for such few jobs.”
And the solutions? Menand shies away from pronouncements (the conclusion to The Marketplace of Ideas is a scant two pages). When asked directly, he says that he likes Harvard’s response to the general-education problem: a series of courses that relate academic knowledge to real-life issues like global warming. He’d support bringing the humanities into more undergraduate majors throughout the arts and sciences, to provide a historical and theoretical framework for disciplines. He still thinks the time to a Ph.D. needs to be shortened, despite the fact that his original proposal was largely ignored. But with what seems a characteristic diffidence, his bottom line is: “We need younger people with new ideas telling us we’re full of crap.”
“I’m just not a polemicist,” he says “I’m not a public intellectual. I don’t have an agenda.”
“That attitude fits with Luke’s view of the liberal arts, and with his own teaching style,” says Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, who took a freshman composition course with Menand at Columbia University. “I went to several classes, and he called me in and said, ‘You’d be better served by an independent study.’ Years later he joked that he had worried I’d be a pain in the ass if I stayed in class,” Williams goes on. “But what he was doing was giving me room to explore.”
Menand’s own education let him do just that. Growing up around large research universities—with a mother who was a historian and a father a political scientist—he opted for the liberal arts at Pomona College, where, according to his own account, he spent a lot of time reading and writing poetry. Unsure what would come next, he enrolled in law school for a year, then applied to both Columbia’s English department and its journalism school.
“He had a clear way of talking about ideas, that would start with an anecdote but end up with a larger purpose,” remembers David Yaffe, an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University who went to CUNY as a graduate student to study with Menand. “But he always let us talk—and you know how graduate students like to talk!”
“I think it’s that Luke doesn’t want to limit himself intellectually,” Yaffe says.
Indeed, Menand’s approach is often historical, putting issues in context, but he doesn’t call himself a New Historicist, a hot designation in literary circles. He’s one of the few critics of his generation who hasn’t dabbled in literary theory—he doesn’t seem opposed to it, it’s just not him. Like such critics as Edmund Wilson, about whom he’s written, he likes to range through ideas. For a person with a very public persona, he seems shy. He answers questions directly but quickly stops. He doesn’t go on—about himself or his point.
There’s little question that Menand doesn’t come up very often when people talk about public intellectuals. Look at the top 100 public intellectuals in a poll by Foreign Policy: He doesn’t make the list.
Menand himself says he doesn’t see a big difference between his scholarly and journalistic work. “I don’t think about having two hats,” he says. “I just write the way I write.”
