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Pathologies of Higher Education
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14558 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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3 / 1988 |
2,837 Words |
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Paul Piccone
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No one disputes that there is a major crisis in education--especially higher education. The Right and the Left not only share this perception, but provide strikingly complementary analyses of the nature of the crisis. Best-selling books such as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Russell Jacoby's The Intellectuals simply address different aspects of the same general phenomenon. While the Right attributes the current disintegration of standards and dilution of the curriculum to the democratizing reforms successfully imposed by the Left, the Left attributes the more general collapse of a public critical culture to the effective integration of radical intellectuals in bureaucratized and increasingly unaccountable universities. Both theories are correct, but they fail to address the problem underlying the symptoms they so eloquently describe. This problem is tied to broader sociohistorical trends and to institutions in advanced industrial societies. What has happened to universities--and, mutatis mutandis, to the intellectuals who have become increasingly associated with them--must be seen in terms of the general social dynamics of the last half century.
This broader context provides a more critical perspective on the current crisis and a better understanding of its deeper social and political implications. Ultimately, the crisis in education cannot be solved merely by means of appropriate educational reforms and, to the extent it is an expression of a much broader social crisis, its outcome hinges mainly on what will happen in society at large and in those other institutions together with which education contributes to social and cultural reproduction. In fact, the crisis in education is not so much a failure of pedagogy, wrong instruction, or budget constraints. Rather, it results primarily from the failure of other institutions previously responsible for socialization and from the consequent overloading of the educational apparatus with social tasks it was never meant to fulfill, cannot presently fulfill, and which no amount of mere educational reforms will ever allow it to fulfill. When higher education was bought out by government subsidies and grants, it was also integrated, too well for its own good, into an administered society that promptly infected it with all its social pathologies.
Before the massive expansion of higher education in the 1960s, which resulted from the growing need for a specialized and at least minimally literate work force to run an increasingly capital-intensive economy, universities were like secular monasteries where the predominant culture was reproduced for the benefit of a relatively small, privileged elite. In that setting, the established modes of production and reproduction of knowledge (along with their attendant archaic traditions like tenure) made some sense. They protected general social commitments to the free flow of ideas from encroachment by parochial interests concerned solely with immediate imperatives. To be sure, the so-called marketplace of ideas did not thrive quite as the idealized academic self-image would have it--especially considering much of the triteness and conformist trivialities these institutions actually produced. However, at least in some Ivy League universities, traditionalism did protect a minimum oppositional culture needed as a control mechanism for institutional well-being.
Intellectuals and Academics
But a truly oppositional culture never fared well within universities. At best, it developed in isolated pockets during
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