Past Imperfect

By Christopher P. Loss

Brecht Vandenbroucke for The Chronicle

A year after I landed my first tenure-track position, in 2007, the recession struck and the bottom fell out of higher education. Ever since, it’s become part of the conventional wisdom that the sector is undergoing a great disruption, that the bubble is about to burst, that the end of college, as we’ve known it, is near.

Like many faculty members, I’ve found myself worrying about the future of our profession and whether the once great American university can survive all the maladies that have stricken it: funding cuts, rising costs, student debt, administrative bloat, the twilight of tenure, the list goes on. I’ve also found myself pining for the good old days and wondering: Is higher education doomed? Or are we in the midst of one of the great transformations in its history?

Doubters have been predicting the end of college ever since there was college, and then turning their skepticism into calls for its reconstruction. Every generation on the lookout for evidence of precipitous educational decline has had no problem finding it. Back when Harvard (founded in 1636) and the College of William & Mary (1693) were the only colleges in British North America, a faction of disgruntled Harvard refugees, alarmed by their alma mater’s flagging Puritanism, founded a school in New Haven to uphold the faith. The same schismatic cycle that resulted in Yale (1701) was likewise responsible for the six colonial colleges that followed.

Thomas Jefferson, a devout deist, would have none of it. During the Revolution, he grew disillusioned with the colonial colleges, especially his alma mater, William & Mary, which he now considered a monarchical relic corrupted by “priestcraft” and tyranny. The new nation, he believed, needed new schools, born of liberty, to educate republican citizens. As governor of Virginia and later as president, he pressed, unsuccessfully, for a national university and helped establish West Point (1802). His lasting monument to arts and letters was his design for the University of Virginia (1819). It embodied his Enlightenment belief in secularism and freedom, right down to his plan to make the library, housed in the Rotunda, rather than a chapel (there wasn’t one), the spiritual center of his “academical village.”

The limitations of the old-time denominational college and its classical curriculum did not become apparent until after the Civil War, when, in the span of 25 years, the rise of research universities radically transformed the order of learning in the United States. A small band of education reformers led the charge with the financial backing of Gilded Age tycoons who viewed universities as fitting tributes to themselves. Whether it was spun from an existing college, as at Harvard, under Charles W. Eliot, or cut from whole cloth, as at Cornell (1865), under Andrew Dickson White, and at Johns Hopkins (1876), under Daniel Coit Gilman, university building turned out to be a patchwork affair.

These president-reformers regarded the German university and its dedication to pure research as the ideal type. But that ideal was rarely, if ever, achieved on this side of the Atlantic. The longstanding tradition of undergraduate instruction combined with the uniquely American demand for useful knowledge, codified in the land-grant-colleges provisions of the Morrill Act of 1862, to say nothing of benefactor preferences for practical education, imbued the American university model with a diverse mission that included research, teaching, and public service. Notwithstanding the lingering ivory-tower fantasies of the university as a place to explore truth for truth’s sake, the real aim of the institution turned out to be somewhat more down to earth. The businessman-turned-university-founder Ezra Cornell, on the occasion of the opening of his namesake institution, said it best: “I would found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study.”

As demand for access to higher learning climbed in the early 20th century, these divergent aims — original inquiry and mass education — created a rift between professors and students that left both parties mourning the loss of personal relationships that they now recalled as a virtue of the long-gone denominational college. Poorly paid faculty members, who earned the same as skilled industrial workers, bemoaned the decadence and apathy of the typical undergraduate and the precious time that teaching took away from scholarly work. Students had their own litany of discontents: Classes were too big and the faculty too aloof. “It was quite possible to attend a class three hours a week for a year [in the early 1890s],” recollected one student, “and not have even the remotest conception of the personality of the man behind the desk.”

Faculty members and students did see eye to eye in their mutual disdain of administrators. For students, administrators were little more than well-dressed professors sent to enforce all the parietal rules (dress codes, curfews, fraternization policies) that Greek-lettered “college men” loved to break; for faculty members, administrators were traitors in the ranks, bureaucratic functionaries hired to do the bidding of the president and the deep-pocketed “captains of industry” who really called the shots, as the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen memorably put it.

Veblen’s onetime employer, Stanford University (1885), which dismissed him in 1909 after a string of scandalous affairs with “girl students,” served as fodder for his withering critique, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918). Founded as a memorial to their son by the Southern Pacific railroad magnate Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, the university had earned its cutthroat, corporate reputation. The Stanfords took a keen interest in hiring — and firing — faculty members, particularly Mrs. Stanford, the sole trustee of the institution for 12 years after her husband died, in 1893. She had no appetite for disobedience or faculty politicking when those politics crossed her own laissez-faire views. So when, in the combustible political season of 1900, an outspoken sociologist named Edward A. Ross publicly announced his support for unionized labor and municipally owned utilities, Mrs. Stanford, smelling “socialism” in the air, had him ousted. From a long-range perspective, the Ross case encouraged faculty unionization in support of academic freedom, but at the time it was just another reminder of the drudgery of professorial work.

For most of today’s professors, a hundred years ago is ancient history. When slashed budgets and political meddling stir up anxieties about the future of higher education, we take refuge in memories of the more recent past. These memories have been seared in the academic imagination, repackaged and handed down from departed colleagues old enough to recall how the GI Bill “democratized” higher education and “the Bomb” ended World War II, and how the flush years that followed led to the greatest expansion in access to higher education the world had ever seen. Fuzzy reminiscences recall a “golden age” when tenure-track faculty jobs were plentiful; socially engaged undergraduates filled classrooms; the steady flow of public support for research and student aid kept everyone happy; the liberal arts were valued and teaching still mattered; merit meant something; and college athletics was really an amateur affair. Those were the days. Right?

The luster fades, however, when you look beyond the remarkable growth in public funding, enrollments, and tenured faculty lines that we still marvel at today. On closer inspection — when you consider the institutionalized white-male privilege of the GI Bill; or the routine breaches of academic freedom in the name of national security; or the dubious morality of military research; or the violent tendencies of the student antiwar movement; or the baldfaced racism, misogyny, and homophobia that pervaded campuses; or that the entire enterprise was propped up by a colossal warfare state — the so-called golden age doesn’t look so golden.

Where does this leave us? For starters, it compels us to reflect on the ways we are better off now than we were then. Before you throw your hands up in protest, consider that there are more high-quality two-and four-year colleges and universities, with uniformly stronger and more productive faculty, in closer proximity to more students, than ever before; that technological advances are creating exciting possibilities for individualized and mass instruction the world over; that student, faculty, and administrative ranks are growing more diverse; and that students have more choices for intellectual and personal expression, for selecting majors and joining clubs and disclosing one’s identity, than at any time in the history of American higher education.

Does this mean that higher education is on the cusp of a transformative epoch? Could a real golden age be coming? Nobody knows. But I do know that we’ll never solve our own problems if we fail to grasp the larger historical patterns of continuity and change that connect higher education’s past to its present. Until that happens, we’ll forget that faculty work has always been challenging, that student indifference is not new, that business and government are necessary partners, that teaching and research have always existed in tension — that, in short, the university’s imperfections are what drive us to make it better.

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