The Review

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently introduced the “College for All Act,” which, The Hill reports, “would make community college tuition-free for everyone and four-year public colleges tuition-free and debt-free for students from families making up to $125,000 per year.” Whatever the fate of that bill, the continuing crisis of college debt — much of it held by students who never complete their degrees — is a policy priority for the Biden administration. (From 2009 to 2019, student-loan debt more than doubled, from $720 billion to $1.51 trillion. Our Jacquelyn Elias breaks it down here.)

How did we get here? One answer stems from what the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom calls the “education gospel,” the widespread faith that college will improve one’s economic prospects. All too often, it hampers them instead. What Cottom calls “Lower Ed” “absorbs all manner of vulnerable groups who believe in it.”

In an ambitious new essay for the Review, Chad Wellmon, an intellectual historian of higher education, begins with Cottom’s work and then moves backward, to the early years of the Cold War and the expansion of higher education along the model of what Clark Kerr, the first chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, named the “multiversity.” Wellmon’s goal is to excavate the ideological origins of the education gospel. What combination of policy decisions and imaginative commitments — of faith in the transformative power of college — produced our current impasse? Faith in college, Wellmon suggests, will require some revision if it is not to do more harm than good.

Recommended

• “My interest in anthropology developed slowly. I’ve been aware of and intrigued by social and cultural differences from my childhood. My father was an intellectual Austrian Jew, a correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, who converted to Islam in the 1920s and participated prominently in the religious life and reformist movements of Arab and Indian Muslims. My mother came from an Arabian tribe (Shammar) in Northern Nejd and had no formal schooling.” In Religion and Society, the anthropologist Talal Asad’s “Autobiographical Reflections.”

• “Most of the photographs in Shore’s Steel Town are eerily depopulated, but the stunned expressions of the people he does capture belie their colorful 1970s outfits and mutton-chop sideburns. It’s as if they’d just been told moments before that they have a terrible disease.” At The New York Review of Books, Helen Epstein on Stephen Shore’s photographs of the ‘70s Rust Belt.
  

• At The Baffler, Aaron Timms on how to become a venture-capitalist philosopher, one of “the Valley’s nouveaux Rousseaux. (Rousseau, for those unfamiliar with his work, was a radical 18th-century blogger best remembered for his pro-innovation defense of private property.)”
  

I’m always hoping to hear from you — write to opinion@chronicle.com.

Yours,
Len Gutkin