The New College Try

Nick Gillespie from the December 1999 issue

Gone for Good: Tales of University Life After the Golden Age. Not coincidentally, few institutions have proven as adaptable, open-ended, and robust as American colleges and universities. Indeed, it's nothing less than astounding that all the colonial colleges--Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Rutgers, and Dartmouth--are still up and running more than 200 years after their foundings.

Of course, those schools barely resemble their former selves. It is precisely that ability to morph into new and varied forms that underlies the continuous pronouncements--from the right and the left, the old and the young, the smart and the stupid--on the "death" of the university, the "decline" of college, and the ongoing "crisis" in higher education. Colleges and universities are always dying, declining, and lurching from one crisis to the next. But they are also always being reborn, getting restored, and resolving problems.

In the early 19th century, administrators wrung their hands over whether to teach modern languages and, even more scandalous, "modern" literature (e.g., Voltaire and other Enlightenment authors); in the late 19th century, they vociferously debated whether students should have the right to pursue elective courses and to study science; in the early 20th century, they fretted over the "Jewish problem" (i.e., too many smart Semites) and whether American literature was worthy of study; during the 1960s and '70s, they debated assigning letter grades, killing foreign language requirements, chucking frats and ROTC and in loco parentis, and going coed. Nowadays, heated, intense, and ugly debates abound over every conceivable topic related to higher ed: corporate and state funding, curriculum, speech codes, academic standards, preferential admissions, campus alcohol policies--you name it. These ongoing battles are best understood as signs of life, however, not death.

Our country's loosely knit system of post-secondary education is a study in decentralized and continued change, a forceful example of Schumpeterian creative destruction, with all sorts of models proliferating and competing, some flourishing and others failing (some colleges even go out of business). In 1800, there were 32 colleges in the country, none of which regularly admitted blacks or women and most of which had religious affiliations. Today, there are more than 3,600 post-secondary institutions, including about 1,500 two-year colleges, 2,200 four-year colleges, and about 450 Ph.D.-granting institutions. The huge growth in schools has been more than equaled by a huge increase both in the sheer number of students and in their variation. In 1900, less than 3 percent of adult Americans aged 25 or older had a bachelor's degree; by 1970, that figure stood at about 10 percent. In 1997, it was about 25 percent. In the past, students were overwhelmingly affluent males. In 1997, according to American Demographics, fully two-thirds of graduating high school seniors--including 70 percent of women, 64 percent of men, 68 percent of whites, and 60 percent of blacks--immediately matriculated at a four-year college.

These are healthy numbers and they reflect a basic health in higher education: More people can go to more schools that are more or less to their liking. That's not to say there are not problems with higher education, or that some trends are not better than others, or that there is no room for criticizing specific policies at specific schools. Rather, it is to underscore that precisely those issues are constantly being raised, debated, and worked through. Contrary to appeals to a fabled Utopian U. and jeremiads predicting certain and imminent doom, higher education in the United States must be considered a huge success, one inextricably bound up in colleges' and universities' willingness to change.

In different ways, Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave, Annette Kolodny's Failing the Future, and Zachary Karabell's What's College For? explore how schools adapt to new circumstances. These books document significant changes that have occurred, suggest possible directions for the future, and add something significant to the ongoing discussion about the future of college and university life. Anyone interested in the evolution of American higher education over the past 50 years will find much of interest here.

Kernan's memoir offers a view of the academy from the top: As an undergraduate, he was educated at Columbia and Williams on the G.I. Bill and, after getting a B.A., he did a stint at Oxford. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Yale and spent his teaching career in New Haven and at Princeton. He is a well-known critic who has written about topics ranging from satire to Shakespeare to print technology. Prior to his retirement in 1990, he occupied a series of high-level administrative posts at both Yale (where he served as provost) and Princeton (where he was dean of the graduate school).

In Plato's Cave reflects on "seismic changes in American higher education since World War II," by which Kernan means primarily the "vast popularization of American higher education...[that] has made it possible for almost any American graduating from high school to attend college." That "democratization," along with technologies such as the Internet that have undermined monopolies on information, has resulted in nothing less than an "epistemological" shift. "Traditional concepts of what we can know and who can know it were questioned at all levels," writes Kernan. "Science set the scene with relativity theory, fractals, and the uncertainty principle, but in the latter half of the century deconstruction--the most descriptive name for a much broader `postmodernist' movement in theory--took uncertainty to its nihilistic extremes in the humanities and social sciences, `demystifying' traditional knowledge, replacing positivism with relativism, substituting interpretation for facts and discrediting objectivity in the name of subjectivity."

This opposition between the "old academic order" and the new is overdrawn. Since their founding about 100 years ago, literature departments have been hotbeds of disputes over critical methodology and canons; contemporary debates in most other disciplines similarly differ in degree, not in kind. Nor is postmodernism's emphasis on the limits of knowledge nihilistic, either in theory or in practice. In many ways, postmodernism's recognition of knowledge as provisional and partial participates fully in Enlightenment ideals of self-critique and scrutiny; similarly, it's rare to hear a postmodernist actually assert that all choices are equal. But Kernan is certainly correct that the willingness to "question all authority" has grown over time and that this tendency is linked with greater access by a wider variety of people to the university. Even at elite schools, the reaction to being granted entry quickly moves from docile gratitude to confident demand, with a changed institution the inevitable result.

Such changes can happen more or less quickly and more or less rationally. On the irrational side, Kernan recounts how in the spring of 1970 Yale's campus was filled with mania over the upcoming trial of Bobby Seale for the murder of a fellow Black Panther. Though the university had no connection to the case, a number of prominent activists, including Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, urged Yale students to violent "revolutionary action," and the school quickly became embroiled in the trial's larger racial dynamics. Yale's black faculty members, whom Kernan suggests were rightly less interested in Bobby Seale's fate than in their own, took advantage of the charged situation to present the administration with a list of demands for "some very practical things: more tenure slots for black faculty and more money for African-American projects."

If implied violence is hardly a preferred method for effecting change at a university, neither is it particularly common. More typical is the process by which Kernan and some colleagues created a new, "relevant" course to revive flagging interest in literary studies. "Even skeptics [of new critical methodologies] like myself understood...that the old regime of Romantic literature had become in many ways a museum, filled with great works but removed from its human context to a world of hushed reverence, separate from normal human activity," he writes. "If literature was to be saved from oblivion, [we needed to provide] a more open, less idealized context for literary study that located the canonical works, Oedipus Rex and The Aeneid, King Lear and Madame Bovary, in the middle not of perfect art but of a continuing, ever present human activity of making up stories that give meaning to events and sort out the perplexities of human life."

That desire to reach indifferent students led to a popular interdisciplinary course team-taught by scholars in English, German, French, and other languages, and course materials that juxtaposed previously unthinkable combinations: "Tarzan of the Apes with Conrad's Mr. Kurtz; Superman with Achilles; advertisement with sonnets." Traditionalists cringed at such fare (and still do), but the course proved hugely successful. "The students took to the idea, and it was all very lively," reports Kernan, who adds that the course became the basis for the major in comparative literature, "where it has continued to flourish."

Kernan is himself a traditionalist, but he understands that change is inevitable. Reflecting on the shift in the second half of the 20th century toward "a new kind of democratic university," he writes, "Though my heart is with the old academic order in which I was trained, my argument is not that this radical change is, as many of my contemporaries believe, an educational catastrophe. The new democratic universities will in time make necessary compromises and settle into their own institutional forms to educate people to their own ends."

Annette Kolodny's Failing the Future describes in detail some of those compromises and new institutional forms. Kolodny is a high-profile feminist critic of American literature, best known for the influential 1984 study, The Land Before Her. From 1988 to 1993, she was dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a position that made her responsible for an annual budget of about $18 million, 200 full-time faculty, and 22,000 graduate and undergraduate students (she is now a professor at Arizona). Though her focus is on the public research university, the major issues she discusses--budget constraints, tenure reform, curricular change, and the like--have wider relevance.

A conventional academic leftist, Kolodny of course hails the democratization of the university. But even as she celebrates increased access to higher education, she is resolute that it's all imperiled by the usual suspects--"vicious corporate downsizing for the sake of short-term profits, a fraying social safety net, and widening inequalities in income distribution"--all of which "have turned the nation sour and cynical." Similarly, she clings to the hope--not fully done in by decades of 70-percent-plus personal income tax brackets--that "a truly progressive tax system" will finally bring about "social justice." Reality in the form of low unemployment, heightened standards of living for virtually all Americans, increased spending on higher education, and, perhaps most relevant of all, the huge and continuing enrollment in colleges just can't cut through such canards.