The Vanishing Big Thinker

At least in the realm of rhetoric, 1968 was a year of revolution. It is no wonder, then, that in that year two distinguished scholars, David Riesman and Christopher Jencks, wrote a book about the contemporary university using the term. Don’t be fooled by the title, however. The Academic Revolution focused not on the student uprisings so common in those days, but on two emerging trends that were transforming the contemporary university: the rise of the meritocracy in faculty appointments and student admissions and the solidification of faculty control over what it taught and studied.

Looking back nearly 50 years later and, as it happens, at the beginning of my retirement from an academic career that began the year before the Riesman and Jencks book was published, both of those developments now appear as subsets of an even larger phenomenon: the triumph of the graduate-school model of teaching and research. Even though this change was in its early stages when they wrote, Riesman and Jencks had already begun calculating the costs, pointing to “a rapid decline in teaching loads for productive scholars, an increase in the ratio of graduate to undergraduate students at the institutions where scholars are concentrated, the gradual elimination of unscholarly undergraduates from these institutions, and the parallel elimination of unscholarly faculty.” The more America became a modern and cosmopolitan society, the authors argued, the greater the likelihood that the center of the university would lie with graduate schools and the research they produced.

Since the need for professional expertise in American society has increased drastically in the past half century, all the trends identified by Riesman and Jencks have intensified. Even in four-year colleges that emphasize undergraduate education, new appointments are going to top graduates from a mere handful of prestigious doctoral programs that emphasize research and professional advancement over teaching. The academic job market and tenure expectations focus ever more intently on publications, whether in book or journal form, that tend to stress contributions to scholarship over participation in public discussion. Raising funds through grants will never be as prominent in the humanities and some of the social sciences as it is in the natural and physical sciences, but there is more pressure to do it across the board, reinforcing incentives to focus on research advancements and the graduate programs that emphasize them.

What are the consequences of the increasing graduate-school imperatives for the rest of the university, including its undergraduate programs? To answer that question, I want to focus on my own area of work: humanistic social science. Caught between expectations of greater relevance and demands for greater rigor, humanistic social science, with little or no need for funded research assistants and the analysis of reams of data, is losing its place in the contemporary university.

First, a definition. Humanistic social science has nothing to do with the presence or absence of numbers, charts, and tables; if anything, a focus on empiricism is perfectly in accord with its great thinkers throughout the centuries. Instead, the subject matter under study deals with what might be called the eternal questions faced by human beings and the worlds in which they live, such as wealth and poverty, good and evil, the individual and the collective, religion, power, leadership, war, and peace. Nonhumanistic social science, by contrast, begins with a question posed by a specific body of literature within an academic discipline, including questions of methodology and technique. Its studies might, for example, aim to differentiate between structural factors and individual choice in the explanation of crime waves or to contribute to the debate over whether economic reasoning can help explain popular support for conservative religion.

In addition, the results of humanistic inquiry are usually, but not always, published in book rather than article form and are written by one, sometimes two, but usually not more than three authors, allowing writers to develop a more personal voice. (There are exceptions: Habits of the Heart, the classic study of individualism and social commitment, first published in 1985 and clearly a humanistic work, had five authors.) Nonhumanistic social science borrows its preferred means of publication from the natural sciences: specialized papers by multiple authors published in leading social-science journals or, increasingly, online, and nearly always containing recommendations for further research.

Finally, humanistic social science is meant to influence society. For that reason, it includes technical jargon only when necessary and strives for clarity of presentation; the often-used term “public intellectual” can properly be applied to the humanistically oriented, while nonhumanistic social science is typically read mainly by other experts and generally relies on abstract theorizing and advanced statistical methods. Humanistic social scientists may well have names familiar to the general public even if they are marginal in their disciplines, while the opposite is true for social scientists known for their journal publications.

For an example of humanistic social science, one need look no further than The Academic Revolution itself. Consider first the authors: Neither Riesman nor Jencks possessed a Ph.D., close to unthinkable in today’s academic environment. Trained at Harvard Law School, Riesman was also the very model of a major public intellectual: The Lonely Crowd (1950), which he wrote with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, became a best seller for its study of changes in the American character; Riesman was rewarded with his picture on the cover of Time. When The Academic Revolution was published, Jencks was a resident fellow at the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and an editor of The New Republic. Although adept with numbers, and certainly considered an outstanding academic social scientist, he continues to pursue research concerning major social issues such as poverty, race, and education.

The Academic Revolution, moreover, was not published by a university press: Doubleday brought it out. It is long and at times dense, but it was not written for other scholars so much as for policy makers. The footnotes are easily accessible at the bottom on the page, not references at the end then associated with the scientific style of publication. And they were worth reading, even for a nonspecialist. One, for example, informs the reader that “in Greek, a ‘diploma’ was literally a doubled-over piece of paper and hence a letter of recommendation. A ‘diplomat’ was one who carried a diploma.” The book was reviewed in both Science and The New York Review of Books, as if to call attention to its status as a work of both serious social science and humanistic inquiry.

One can only imagine what would happen to The Academic Revolution if it were published today. Although Riesman visited most of the institutions analyzed — Jencks was more responsible for the organization and writing, along with analysis of the data — now a team of graduate students, probably financed by a major foundation, would fan out around the country to write up reports of specific institutions; in the process, a substantial number of doctoral dissertations would be produced. Since it is unlikely that a commercial publisher today would be interested in a manuscript totaling 580 closely-printed pages, a university press would take it on. That means the manuscript would be subject to peer review, in all probability leading to the elimination of the personal reflections of the authors, as well as the removal of provocative arguments that were not fully proven, such as their contention that at colleges associated with the radical right, as Pepperdine University then was, anti-Communism played the same role that traditional Protestant doctrine once did at other Christian colleges.

Today, the manuscript would lead off by placing the research of the authors in the context of other literature in the sociology of education. There would be roughly one chart or table per page (The Academic Revolution contains one chart and seven tables, all of them confined to one chapter.) Science might still review it, but probably not publications with wider readerships. A national debate might take place over the book, but as much about its methodology as its contents. And the academic revolution would continue unabated.

My discipline is political science, which for some decades has been split between more-humanistic scholars who study political philosophy and those who rely on concepts and methods from more-scientific fields, analyzing topics like voting behavior. It is well known that the scientific approach in the field has become increasingly dominant, as witnessed by the fascination with rational-choice theory and the use of models from other fields, including economics, psychology, and even, in both faddish and adventuresome ways, evolutionary biology and neuroscience.

What is not so familiar is the way forms of professionalization similar to the natural sciences have entered the most humanistic part of the discipline, the study of political philosophy. To be sure, there are still first-rate humanists who do political theory, such as Michael Walzer, Alan Ryan, and the late Jean Bethke Elshtain. But a better picture of the state of the field can be gleaned by examining what is taking place among those humanistic political scientists most committed to relying upon the wisdom of the ancients and the great books produced by thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau: political scientists who work in the Straussian tradition.

I want to spend some time on the Straussians, not out of any hostility, but because they offer an extreme example of how far the graduate-school model of research has extended into the least likely corners. It is not that Straussians are adopting methods from the natural sciences. Far from it. It is that, by writing in ways that are increasingly specialized, self-referential, and designed to be read primarily by other specialists, they are far more in accord with the conditions of contemporary academic life than the rebels against it they once were.

Leo Strauss was a brilliant German Jewish philosopher and political theorist who attracted a large following after he came to the United States in 1937. Conservative in his politics, Strauss particularly admired the wisdom of the ancient world and taught that the modern study of politics wrongly claims that reason occupies a stronger and more durable turf than revelation. Given his skepticism toward modernity, Strauss was a critic, rather than a defender, of the humanistic movement known as the Enlightenment. But that was only because he saw a more glorious era of learning in classical Greece.

In many ways, Straussianism has remained one of the few bright lights in our discipline, reminding us that political life is one of the most vital forms of human life. With impeccable care, Straussians read and analyze the great books of the Western tradition. They do so in at least two and often three languages. They are not averse to writing, and are even eager do so, about creative geniuses such as Shakespeare and Lincoln and, in so doing, they expand the range of what political philosophy covers. Many are known as outstanding teachers at both the graduate and undergraduate level. As with the friendship between the philosopher Allan Bloom and the novelist Saul Bellow, who was close to the Straussian circle at the University of Chicago, they have brought together some of the greatest creative minds of our era.

In 1962, Leo Strauss wrote the epilogue to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, edited by Herbert J. Storing. Appearing even before the behavioral revolution in political science took full flight, Strauss’s essay criticized many of the themes that have dominated the study of politics in my lifetime, and his thoughts certainly bear rereading today. The claim of the new political science to be a science presupposes a universalist agenda, Strauss argued, one that applies to all people in all times. But it fails on that front: It does not recognize how much of what it studies — voting, for example — is far from universal, but a product of one specific political form, modern liberal democracy.

Worse: “While the new political science becomes ever less able to see democracy or to hold a mirror to democracy, it ever more reflects the most dangerous proclivities of democracy.” By that, Strauss meant the process of massification, the tendency of collective forces such as the state to subsume the individual. “By teaching the equality of all values, by denying that there are things which are intrinsically high and others which are intrinsically low as well as by denying that there is an essential difference between men and brutes it unwittingly contributes to the victory of the gutter.” Political science, Strauss underscored, existed long before democracy, and its greatest practitioners, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Machiavelli, were far more universal, and in that sense truer to the scientific spirit, than his contemporaries.

Political scientists do not speak that way today, Straussians included. Strauss himself, according to a bibliography assembled by Heinrich Meier, wrote 25 books and booklets and 160 articles, reviews, and letters, not including anthologies and other publications issued posthumously. Of the articles only two, one on Machiavelli and the other on Locke, along with a reply to the political theorists John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin, appeared in the American Political Science Review, the major outlet for significant research in the field; the remainder were published in such learned journals as the Journal of the History of Ideas, The Review of Metaphysics, and Social Research.

Strauss wrote in a highly Germanic style, yet that did not confine him to the world of academic publishing: The Free Press; Basic Books; and Holt, Rinehart and Winston were among his commercial presses. It is clear from the subjects he tackled that he was not writing primarily for other political scientists; his work was just as relevant to scholars in philosophy, history, Jewish studies. Whatever one thinks of his political views, he was indisputably one of the great humanists of the 20th century: He believed that a political science that did not concern itself with human purpose or the human capacity for good and evil was not worthy of the name.

Many of the scholars directly influenced by Strauss continued to discuss large public questions and, in so doing, could be called “public intellectuals.” The Storing volume, for example, contained a chapter by Walter Berns, who died last year at the age of 95. Angered by the occupation of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University by black students in 1969, Berns left Ithaca, first for the University of Toronto and then Georgetown University and the American Enterprise Institute. He wrote books on capital punishment, the U.S. Constitution, and the Electoral College, served on the National Council of the Humanities, and won the National Humanities Medal in 2005. His friend Allan Bloom gained even broader renown. Bloom was brilliant, learned, and fun to read, and his portraits of Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche were instant classics. His The Closing of the American Mind (1987) became one of the more surprising best sellers of the past few decades. Articles were written about his apartment, his clothing, and his sexual preferences.

Straussians are often divided into East Coasters, who focus primarily on Greek and Early Modern European philosophers, and West Coasters, who specialize more in American political thought and practice. Among the latter in Straussianism’s second generation, Harry V. Jaffa, who died the same day as Berns, was the author of a book on Lincoln and Douglas, Crisis of the House Divided (1959), that is still considered indispensable. However divided the second generation of Straussians may have been, both coasts were united by not only writing great books, but also by making substantial contributions to American letters.

I do not deny the existence of a number of learned contemporary Straussians who write important and impressive works on a number of subjects. But none of them, including, I fear to say, Harvard University’s Harvey Mansfield, a scholar I very much admire, have the broad public reach of Berns, Bloom, or Jaffa. In fact, the only living Straussian who continues to write major books on large subjects that attract a substantial number of readers outside academe is a non-American: Pierre Manent of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, who has written on liberalism and, in recent years, the future of Europe.

Facing the same dilemmas of other humanistic disciplines in responding to the academic revolution, Straussian political theory has accommodated itself to the way the modern research university conducts its business. Just about every publication by a contemporary Straussian has appeared in either a book published by a university press, a book published by a company such as Rowman & Littlefield that appeals to a specific audience, or an academic journal, including an impressive number in the American Political Science Review. (By my count, the last four issues of the APSR contain five articles written by Straussians.)

Straussians sponsor and attend a very large number of conferences and symposia, but the fact that most of the participants are themselves Straussians contributes a hermetic quality to the discussion. In their departments, Straussians tend to hire scholars much like themselves, in the process making sure that their graduate students wind up teaching other graduate students. The questions they address, such as the nature of political ambition or the relationship between poetry and politics, are ones that Straussians have been talking about for years; in fact, an unusually large number of recent books by Straussians are about Leo Strauss. Like other contemporary academics, they publish frequently, teach outstanding graduate students, and play significant roles in university governance. They are as successful and talented as anyone — and that is precisely the problem. They are no longer men and women who keep alive traditions of scholarship that do not quite fit the way contemporary universities conduct their business.

Left-wing critics of the Straussians point to their nefarious influence on neoconservatives in Washington, but I agree with Catherine H. Zuckert and Michael P. Zuckert, who have written that “in the tendency to see a Straussian under every bed in Washington, there is at work an optical illusion of sorts.” My criticism, rather, is that Straussians in American academic life are not Straussian enough. There is, in Strauss, an anguished cry against the formalism of contemporary academic life. In contemporary academic Straussianism, that has been lost. Much of the modern world, in its view, is corrupt, but not the way it produces and distributes knowledge.

Because the aspirations of academic social-science departments are so determined to model themselves on forms of graduate-school inquiry, I wonder whether either Riesman or Jencks could find appointments today. Even in their own time, the academic careers of both of these men overlapped more with professional schools than with liberal-arts disciplines. Jencks would go on to assume a professorship at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard, not with the departments of government or sociology. (He is not listed as a faculty member on the websites of either the government or sociology departments.) Riesman held a university professorship at Harvard, but most of his scholarship after The Lonely Crowd involved questions relevant to the Graduate School of Education, where such distinguished humanists as his co-author Glazer held a position, and where the psychologist Howard Gardner now teaches.

Similar patterns for humanistically oriented social-science intellectuals continue. The late Philip Selznick, the great sociologist of organizations who once wrote a book called A Humanist Science, found a home first in the sociology department at the University of California at Berkeley, but then moved to the law school. Todd Gitlin, a prolific and politically engaged sociologist, essayist, and commentator, is at Columbia University’s journalism school. Amitai Etzioni, a former president of the American Sociological Association, has an institute at George Washington University all to himself.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, another well-known sociologist, teaches at the Harvard Business School, and the communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson at Penn’s Annenberg School. The radical sociologist Alvin Gouldner taught at Washington University in St. Louis, which eliminated its sociology department (in part, one thinks, because of Alvin Gouldner). Walzer has spent the major part of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., not a university at all. I was thrilled to teach at a modern research university, albeit a “special interest” one, as Jencks and Riesman called those associated with a religious tradition or a specific mission. (I hope Catholic universities will continue to hire public intellectuals. I believe Boston College has undertaken to do so.)

Of all the political philosophers who have taught in the modern university, the one who has had the greatest influence on me was the late Latvian-born and Oxford-bred Isaiah Berlin. One theme ran throughout Berlin’s prodigious efforts to make sense of other thinkers, and thus of the world. We should, he wrote, be wary of all those who say that there is only one goal worth reaching and only one proper method to reach it. “Value pluralism,” as his approach has been called, judges a society as liberal, in the best sense of that term, if it appreciates not only that there are many values, but also that such values can be incommensurate.

Berlin’s model for the best society should also be our model for the best university. It would value scholarship, of course. But it would also value many different kinds of scholarship, some narrow and specialized, others broad and of compelling interest to the public, just as it would give weight to teaching and serving one’s country.

The modern research university has unfortunately become increasingly susceptible to value monism, the belief that there is only one right way to advance, only one correct form of knowledge. The graduate school takeover, I hasten to add, is not the reason for my retirement: I simply felt that I had reached the age when it was proper to pass the responsibilities on to others. I just hope that whatever form the university of tomorrow takes, it leaves a place for those social scientists who resist the trend toward greater disciplinary professionalization. The liberal arts should be liberal enough to make a place for many kinds of teaching and learning.

Alan Wolfe recently retired as a professor and director of the Boisi Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life at Boston College. Among his books are The Future of Liberalism (Knopf, 2009) and, most recently, At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews (Beacon Press, 2014).