Our recent Chronicle Review essay — “The University Run Amok!” — elicited a number of responses, ranging from those that welcomed our effort to shed light on the historical connections between American universities and the democratic project to those that took issue with elements of our argument. We would like to consider two of the most substantive ones: Cathy N. Davidson’s “Is Higher Ed Omnivorous or Sucked Dry?” and Alan Jacobs’s “The Clientele, the Public, the Person.”
We agree with Davidson that universities have come under extraordinary political pressure over the past few decades. We think, however, that the framework she invokes does not adequately account for the complex development of American universities. Nor does it offer a helpful way of envisioning a future. Davidson suggests our argument exemplifies a genre of politically conservative criticism that blames universities for trying to do too much, resulting in administrative bloat, skyrocketing tuition, and irresponsible stewardship of public resources — all as a ruse to justify slashing public support of higher education. Rather than “accusing” universities of doing too much, she suggests, we ought to recognize that they are “victims” of problems not of their own making. Exogenous reformist demands — that universities should be run more like businesses, that they should be more financially self-sufficient, that they should focus on work-force training — have pushed them off course and fomented the current crisis.
The capitalist spirit of American universities has long been tempered by their historical self-conception as servants of a democratic public.
Our contention is that American universities are fundamentally modern social institutions. More than a century ago, William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago and the inspiration for Thorstein Veblen’s “captain of erudition,” said that for some the ideal university would best be realized if the “spiritual could be more definitely distinguished from the material.” But, like any institution, the university had material and structural needs and, if it were to be well organized and flourish, deserved to “take its place side by side with the world’s other great business concerns.” And, beginning already in the late 19th century, that is exactly what leading American universities did. They did not simply suffer the bureaucratizing, capitalist, and rationalizing forces of Western rationality; they helped advance and develop them. After visiting several American colleges and universities on his tour of the United States in 1904, the sociologist Max Weber returned to Germany and enthusiastically reported to his colleagues that American universities were “industrial enterprises” led by academic titans (presidents) and driven by a capitalist and ruthlessly competitive spirit.
But the capitalist spirit of American universities has also long been tempered by their historical self-conception as servants of a democratic public. This definitive tension has been greatly exacerbated by the gutting of American public institutions more broadly. Many of the reformist discourses Davidson cites, we would contend, are symptomatic of the general withdrawal of public investment in favor of private, market-based approaches. Universities have not been alone in dealing with the consequences of these enormous changes, nor have they been especially resistant to further adopting the language of markets and the habits and technologies of the private sector. To borrow Davidson’s terminology, we would argue that we all — universities and the various and fragile publics of which they are a part — are simultaneously victims and perpetrators in this state of affairs.
Alan Jacobs’s response to our essay highlights this increasing conflation of universities’ public and private commitments. Jacobs argues that we have it backwards: Universities are not motivated by democratic principles, but instead invoke them as a legitimizing veil for self-serving interests — in particular, ever-greater prestige and competition for students. Universities, he argues, “make occasional face-saving and conscience-salving gestures in the direction of the public good, but the reality is this: Universities, and especially top-tier universities, compete with one another for a shrinking pool of customers.” The university doesn’t serve the public; it serves a clientele. Likewise, democracy isn’t the American university’s muse; it’s its beard.
Jacobs’s description of the university is readily recognizable. But it is the result of a particular disposition. Through the lens of his frank realism and institutional skepticism, he understandably thinks private interests decisively shape institutional behavior and dismisses earnest assertions of democratic purpose as bad-faith arguments. He is not wrong. We too are oftentimes similarly disposed.
But we also see a formative, idealistic power in the university’s democratic self-understanding that has consistently shaped its role in American public life for over a century. By describing (and endorsing) the American university’s distinctly democratic purpose, we are highlighting its normative force. We are suggesting neither that universities are essentially democratic nor that they have historically been so. They have certainly not always realized their democratic ends. But they have understood themselves or been compelled to account for themselves in democratic terms. And this allowed for historically unprecedented goods — and challenges.
Since at least the passage of the Morrill Act, the university’s investment in the democratic project has both motivated and justified the competitive pursuit of limited resources: from land grants to state funding, federal financial aid, research funding, philanthropy, and beyond. In recent decades, as the pace of public disinvestment has accelerated and brought with it heightened political and financial pressures, the competition of universities for these resources has only been exacerbated, as they are forced to turn away from the predominantly public sources on which they used to rely.
In so doing, they have increasingly adopted the practices, technologies, and professional expertise of late capitalism. The “industrial enterprises” Weber described have become, like so many other social institutions, something entirely different from what they were a century ago; they have assumed the language and organizational structures of “markets,” of “efficiency,” of “customer service.”
In many places, these activities and idioms are gaining such purchase that they threaten to exert a decisive influence on what universities most basically do, to the exclusion of core academic considerations. Consider, for example, the adoption of corporate “best practices,” the turn to a highly risk-averse “culture of compliance,” the expanding role of legal counsel in institutional decision-making, the implementation of one-size-fits-all business systems, and the heedless pursuit of U.S. News rankings. Much of this has been undertaken without fully considering the relationship of these enterprises to the academic mission. Too frequently, the question of how and whether they make the university a better university — by advancing teaching and research — is never seriously considered. Often, the reverse is true.
Jacobs’s view is that this ship has already sailed — the university has been fully and irrevocably colonized by private interests. He may be right. But we contend that what we need most desperately now is an alternative vision of the university in order to save and reinvent those goods and practices most unique to it. We need a normative ideal of what the university ought to do. The democratic model offers just such an ideal. We need to refashion it for a present in which it’s desperately needed.
Adam Daniel is senior associate dean for administration and planning at the University of Virginia, where Chad Wellmon is a professor of German language and literature.
