Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions. The first four columns are here, here, here, and here.
For Thorstein Veblen, Western culture has an inborn tendency to move from barbarism toward civilization, and universities are one of the most important movers in that process. Yet in his 1918 treatise on academe, The Higher Learning in America, Veblen considers the intellectual motor of cultural progress to be at high risk.
Over time, Western society had steadily shifted its attention to value the intellect over other markers of individual accomplishment and societal advance. “Other interests that have once been held in higher esteem,” Veblen wrote, “appear by comparison to have fallen into abeyance—religious devotion, political prestige, fighting capacity, gentility, pecuniary distinction, profuse consumption of goods.” Learning had achieved the highest valuation, especially after the Renaissance had reconnected itself to antiquity. Medieval universities were still largely barbaric, because in their focus on theology, law, and medicine, they ranked the practical over the purely intellectual. Even the abstract speculations of theology are considered utilitarian by Veblen because they had the scholar’s “own salvation” for their motive.
The genuine exercise of the intellect, Veblen believed, should be without purpose. And the universities were the institutions that provide the home for that activity. “Within the university precincts,” he wrote, “any aim or interest other than those of irresponsible science and scholarship—pursuit of matter-of-fact knowledge—are to be rated as interlopers.” This, then, is the role of the university: “In so far as it may fairly be accounted esoteric knowledge, or a ‘higher learning,’ all this enterprise is actuated by an idle curiosity, a disinterested proclivity to gain a knowledge of things and to reduce this knowledge to a comprehensible system.”
In short, universities have no function other than to produce knowledge. Even teaching is not a requirement and only plays a role insofar as it furthers the inquiries of the scholar.
Veblen dismissed vocational training, too, as utterly unacceptable. A university must only prepare its students for a life of research, never for practical pursuits. All vocational preparations for life were the domain of the high school. If a university caved in to the demand for practical education, it betrayed its mission.
Even most state universities failed to satisfy Veblen’s demand for the single-minded pursuit of “idle curiosity.” State institutions, he wrote, “have been founded, commonly, with a professed utilitarian purpose, and have started out with professional training as their chief avowed aim.”
Left to their own devices, true institutions of higher learning will shake off their practical heritage and transform themselves into guardians of a learning that dispenses with all utilitarian considerations. “Yet, in those instances where the passage of time has allowed the readjustment to take place, these quasi-'universities’ ... have in the long run taken on more and more of an academic, non-utilitarian character, and have been gradually falling into line as universities claiming a place among the seminaries of the higher learning.”
But for Veblen, this fragile accomplishment was endangered by developments within the universities. The barbarism of the Middle Ages returned in the guise of the modern businessman.
“The graver issues of academic policy which now tax the discretion of the directive powers, reduce themselves in the main to a question between the claims of science and scholarship on the one hand and those of business principles and pecuniary gain on the other hand.”
For Veblen, business principles and the “idle curiosity” of university education were irreconcilable. Thus one was called to choose between the two: “If the higher learning is incompatible with business shrewdness, business enterprise is, by the same token, incompatible with the spirit of higher learning.”
He saw two main offenders within the walls of academe who were responsible for bringing in the Trojan horse of business acumen: the governing board of the university and the university president.
Unfortunately, the board of trustees is almost always made up of local business leaders who were selected for their willingness to donate, not for their understanding of the nature of scholarship. While their function is primarily to “control the budget of expenditures,” that duty alone suffices to meddle with the genuine task of the university. “Their pecuniary surveillance,” Veblen wrote, “comes in the main to an interference with the academic work, the merits of which these men of affairs on the governing board are in no special degree qualified to judge.”
Most presidents, too, “fall short of the average of their academic staff in scholarly or scientific attainments,” and they compensate for that mediocrity by focusing on skills with market value. Therefore, “it is commonly the quasi-scholarship of the popular raconteur that comes in evidence in these premises.”
Yesterday’s raconteur is today’s spin doctor. University presidents are not leaders in scholarship, but branding experts and marketing directors. As such, they transform an institution of higher learning into a commodity that is subjected to the forces of the open market. Individual departments of a university are forced into “competitive aggrandizement” as they compete for dollars from the central administration, and the university as a whole sells its diplomas in competition with those granted by other universities.
There is no place anymore for true scholarship in such institutions, Veblen concluded. The danger loomed that higher learning would be exiled from universities and relegated to new institutions like think tanks. But that would be deplorable.
In order to prevent that, Veblen turned anarchist: “All that is required is the abolition of the academic executive and of the governing board.”
Things would then happily fall apart, schools and departments would dissociate and be run independently. No scholarships, no central housing office, no student unions, no athletics beyond the intramural. The sweet promise of anarchy begins to look like voluntary barbarism. But with a human face.
