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Historical Perspectives on the Crisis of the University Michael Schapira

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Historical Perspectives on the Crisis of the University Michael Schapira Historical Perspectives on the Crisis of the University Michael Schapira Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Michael Schapira All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Historical Perspectives on the Crisis of the University Michael Schapira The beginning of the 21th century has not been a particularly stable period for the university, at least if you trust the steady stream of books, articles, jeremiads and statements from public officials lamenting its fallen status and calling for bold reforms. Such a state of affairs has allowed critics and reformers alike to axiomatically evoke the “crisis” of the university, but this begs several questions: Are universities in a genuine state of crisis? If so, what are the root causes of this situation and what are its salient features? Are there historical antecedents that shed light on our present moment? In this dissertation I investigate the “crisis of the university” theme by revisiting two prior crises – the worldwide student movements of 1960s and the crisis of German universities in the opening decades of the 20th century. In both cases I argue that the “crisis of the university” is derivative of a broader shift in the nature of the economy and the nation-state, wherein once-popular justifications for the university are called into question, particularly when the scale and complexity of universities have rapidly increased. Returning to the present “crisis,” I argue that current debates should focus on rehabilitating “public” nature of the university, which has undergone significant degradation in effects of neoliberalism on the nation-state, the “knowledge economy,” and the nature of academic work itself. Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 I. The End of the University 1 II. Which Crisis 4 III. What’s in a Word 10 IV. Outline of the Argument 18 Chapter One: The Lay of the Land 25 Introduction 25 I. Crisis on Campus 26 II. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be 30 III. Communiqué from and Absent Future 35 IV. The Lay of the Land 40 V. Summary 52 Chapter Two: The Birth of the Modern University and the German Crisis 55 Introduction 55 I. Kant vs. the Censors 57 II. Legitimate vs. Illegitimate Conflicts 62 III. Berlin — The University of Culture 66 IV. Bildung, Wissenschaft, and the Republican Subject 69 Bildung 69 Wissenschaft 73 The Republican Subject 76 V. The Crisis of the German Universities 79 VI. Conclusion 89 Chapter Three: The Golden Age of American Higher Education, Its Progressive Inheritance, and the Student Protests 92 Introduction 92 I. Transatlantic Influences on the American University System 98 II. Post-War Expansion 1: Big Science and the Growth of the Middle Class 108 III. Post-War Expansion 2: General Education and Mass Democracy 118 i IV. The Crisis of the American University System 126 V. Conclusion 139 Chapter Four: The Current Crisis of the University Revisited 141 Introduction 141 Vignette 1: Administrative Bloat, or the Problem of Managerialism 143 Vignette 2: The Erosion of the Humanities 145 Vignette 3: Knowledge and the University 149 I. Managerialism 151 II. The Crisis of the Humanities 156 III. The University and the Knowledge Society 162 IV. Characterizing the Current Crisis 169 Chapter Five: Contesting the Public Nature of the University 177 Introduction 177 I. Liberal/Humanist Apologies 178 II. The University in Ruins and the Great American University 186 III. Unmaking the Public University 194 IV. The Public Nature of the University — Confronting Ideas in Their Time 197 V. Conclusion 212 The Nation-State 212 Politics 215 The Effect of the Crisis Claim 216 Returning to the Crisis/Critique Cognate 218 Bibliography 224 ii Acknowledgements There is a moment in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where Marco Polo, after having regaled Kublai Khan with tales of strange and fantastic cities from his travels until the dawning of the new day, claims that “Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.” Khan replies, unconvinced, that “’There is still one of which you never speak…Venice.’ Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?...Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’” This exchange approximates my relationship to Teachers College, a constant spur for thinking about the crisis of the university and the imperiled state of the humanities. However, despite the difficult conditions under which this dissertation was written, I would like to express sincere gratitude to the following people. Dissertation Sponsor: Dr. Megan Laverty Dissertation Committee: Drs. Megan Laverty, Robbie McClintock, Kevin McDonough, Eduardo Duarte, and David Hansen. Academic Community: Special recognition is due to the following members of the Philosophy and Education community: My cohort: Ruaridh MacLeod, Beto Cavallari, Holly Brewster, Matthew Hayden, Brian Veprek, Ori Livneh; Classmates: Alex Hunley, Yoshi Nakazawa, Timothy Ignaffo, Daniel Hendrickson, and Sean Woosley; Teachers: Robbie McClintock, whose influence bears the strongest imprint on this dissertation, his late colleague and collaborator Frank Moretti, George Bond, Lambros Comitas, and the Anthropology department at Teachers College, Eduardo Duarte, Jessica Hochman, Tyson Lewis, and Daniel Friedrich. Family: Parents, Carol and Jeffrey Schapira Sister, Leslie Schapira iii Introduction ”No one laughs from the heart in his university, W. says. He's noticed that.”1 Lars Iyer, Exodus (2013) I. The End of the University? “Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” So began a 2009 op- ed in the New York Times by Mark Taylor, chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Taylor’s op-ed, entitled “End the University as We Know It,”2 set out to establish a parallel between the devastating social consequences that flowed from manufacturing’s late acceptance of its decline in our current, globalized knowledge economy, and the way in which an outmoded contemporary higher education system is structurally set up to fail both its students and the economic and civic goals of the United States. Doubling down on investments in the current model of higher education, on the both the individual and collective level, would amount to as much folly as building dozens of new factories in Detroit because 1) graduate programs “produce a product for which there is no market” (referencing, for instance, the glut of PhDs facing the trend of declining non-contingent faculty positions), 2) departments “develop skills for which there is a diminishing demand” (a reference to the kind of hyper-specialization you find in largely unread, prohibitively expensive academic journals), and 3) rising costs are likely to eat up 1 Lars Iyer, Exodus (New York: Melville House, 2013). 2 Mark Taylor, “End the University as we Know it,” New York Times, April 26, 2009. 1 investments anyhow and saddle students with crushing debt burdens (student loan debts overtook private credit card debt in 20103). “If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century,” Taylor warns, it must be “competitively restructured” to be more “agile, adaptive, and imaginative,” three traits which one would never ascribe to U.S. manufacturing at the turn of this century. Such concerns have not abated since Taylor’s controversial op-ed appeared, as evidenced by a recent, far more measured book by Andrew Delbanco, another Columbia humanities professor (Department of American Studies). In College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be,4 Delbanco sets out a bold vision for higher education that recuperates the best aspects of its past, but this cannot proceed before contributing to Taylor’s sources of disquiet: “globalization; economic instability; the ongoing revolution of information technology; the increasingly evident inadequacy of K-12 education; the elongation of adolescence; the breakdown of faculty tenure as an academic norm; and perhaps most important, the collapse of consensus of what students should know.”5 Functional challenges aside, this reinforces Taylor’s suspicion, captured in Delbanco’s decidedly normative book title, that there are few truths in the field of higher education that we can take as self evident. 3 For a comparison of private credit card debt and student loan debt see William Bowen, Higher Education in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 21. 4 Andrew Delbanco, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 5 Ibid., 4-5. 2 It is one thing for two tenured professors to look back at the changing nature of their profession and broader trends in education over the past 30 years, but quite another to feel the weight of these changes condensed into the contemporary student experience. In the fall of 2009 a series of student protests broke out in London, Chile, New York, California, and many other locales around the globe, calling attention to the short-term disinvestment in higher education and the long- term consequences of the issues that Delbanco and Taylor bring to our attention. While the specifics of these protests differed in response to local exigencies, a good accounting of their overall focus came from a group of students occupying an administration building at the University of California – Santa Cruz. In a document entitled “Communiqué from an Absent Future,”6 the students enumerated the ways in which universities have entered a period of bankruptcy and drift. “No one knows what the university is for anymore,” they wrote. “We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.” Taken together, these three perspectives speak powerfully to the situation in which we find ourselves today: one in which the university can be aXiomatically defined as being in a state of crisis, but where crisis can come to signify any number of topics from a diffuse and growing set of problems.
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