I receive an on-line magazine, Academe, that is put out by the "American Association of University Professors." It often has good little pieces in it; if you're interested in higher ed, you should e-subscribe, or whatever it is they allow you to do. This latest issue came earlier this week, and it has a few pieces I thought were good to look at together--to do a brief check on the institutions of American Higher ed, past and present and future.
Normally Academe doesn't talk about institutions, but about the people inside the institutions that constitute "the academy." I take their attention to the institutions, in this issue, to be a sign that they like a lot of us are now realizing that institutions are in need of direct attention and care. We have all become more institution-minded in the past few years, even if we do not name it in those terms; and for good reason. Reasons, in fact.
One piece is a book review of two recent works on "Land-Grant Universities." These are the classic "big state U" schools, paradigmatically in the Midwest--Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, and beyond. Initially designed to aid in the agricultural purposes of those regions, they developed along with the states into industrial and technological and even humanistic institutions. Because of them, Americans enjoyed a period in the early twentieth century of being the best educated nation in the world. (That is not true anymore, by the way.) Along with liberal arts colleges, the land-grant university is the kind of classic American innovation in higher education. The piece is worth reading, both for the back-story it gives on these institutions, as well as on the challenging expectations as regards their future, especially as they compete for students and faculty increasingly on a global scale, and have to do so while facing significant public dis-investment from their states and the federal government.
A second piece is about the New School for Social Research, a University in New York City that began as a refuge for Columbia University professors fired by their twisted president, the tyrant and monster Nicholas Murray Butler, for not toeing the political pro-war line in 1917. The university is very famous and has been for a long time, most especially as the central host of the "University in Exile" of European scholars fleeing Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s. Sadly, as the piece notes, the "University in Exile" has been re-started in the past ten years or so, for scholars from around the world, including Eastern Europe, fleeing authoritarian governments.
Both pieces are worth your while--one for a major structural feature of American Higher Ed, the other for a single, idiosyncratic, quixotic principality of the academic republic of letters.
Why do I care about institutions, and why do I think you should too? I think that my attention to them is not due only to what I have learned over the past ten years as a scholar, but also a process of maturation in my life--my movement, not over the past ten but maybe the past twenty years?, into full-fledged middle age.
When I was younger, I assumed the institutions in which I found myself were permanent fixtures of the cosmos, metaphysical realities that I could rely on, and did not need to help curate. Existentially, civically, professionally, the task before me seemed to be to find a place in those institutions, to fit in. Perhaps they would need to change for that to happen, but they would be able to endure those changes.
Once I had achieved some of those things, I found that in fact the achievement opened up a new horizon of responsibilities, responsibilities and duties to help cultivate and sustain the institutions in which I was now a fully paid-up member, institutions which, like Soylent Green, turned out to be nothing more than people.
Speaking more explicitly of the academy in particular now: The people not only welcomed me (more or less) into their company, they were happy to share the labor with me. And the labor was larger than I expected it to be--not only in terms of quantity of work, but also quality. There are no metaphysical standards whereby a field, for instance, determines what counts as "excellent work". That is determined by the people in the field, and is always contentious. People's judgments are different, and cannot always be brought into harmony. A culture is as much an ongoing argument as it is a consensus.
(I am a realist about quality and standards, by the way--in other words, I think there really are better and worse works. I don't think that, just because people say something is good, it is good; but we have no other public criteria whereby to guide decisions in the short term, so "lost" or "forgotten" good work will, I believe, only be recovered later when standards, held by people again, shift to allow such good work to appear as good, while the flashier stuff that perhaps captured peoples' attention when that work was first published declines to its own true level of value. But I am going way off-topic here.)
More than that, however--more than the setting and application of standards and norms, whether they be norms of political acceptability, cultural suitability, scholarly excellence--there is the "difficult and slow boring of very hard boards" that Max Weber called the central experience of politics: the experience of labor, of effort, of work that may not seem to be vital but actually is vital, the staffing of committees and overseeing of processes and mentoring of younger members and honoring of older ones. The work of caring for an institution like the academy may mean more than teaching and writing. It may mean working far away from the vocation you first found in the academy. Many deans and administrators are genuinely sacrificing something they want to do, for something they care about more. This is also true of families, of political institutions, and the like as well. All of us are not able to do just what we think we want to do most of all, right now. Maybe facing up to that, however well we do it, is part of what it means to be an adult.
All of this may seem platitudinous to you. You would not be wrong. I think it was G.E. Moore who said "philosophy is the art of combating absurdities with platitudes." And anyway, platitudes are platitudes for a reason. They speak to truths that many people judge to be so durable that they are almost obvious. But we have seen ourselves forget these truths from time to time, so we say them out loud to remind ourselves of them as well. Middle-aged people forget stuff more often anyway, so they may be more sensitive to this. Which may be why, in my experience, people in middle-age are more fond of platitudes than younger or older people. Older people have seen so much that they've given up, as it were; younger people feel resentful of being reminded of things they have freshly learned at all. Maybe one good definition of middle age, to borrow (sort of) from Moore, is that it is that class of people who are "absurdities with platitudes." I certainly feel absurd enough. Maybe you do too, my middle-aged friend. But that doesn't excuse us from caring about institutions.
By the way: in posts like this, I recognize I am leaning on my recollections, my experience, maybe my authority, in making these claims. It is eminently reasonable to challenge the messenger along with, or beside, the message. I know I am just an N of one. I recognize my experience can be nothing more than my idiosyncratic experience. I fully acknowledge my particular susceptibility to the many blindness of which I have been shown, time and time again, to be prone. But the wager of me writing this to you is that something about my experience may resonate with yours--if not already, soon; if not soon, then sometime. (This is what essays are for, I think, and maybe blog posts are twenty-first century essays.) I think the lessons here are generalizable across much of human experience in late modernity. I feel more confident still that they are generalizable across experience in the academy--even as the academy is engaged in some convulsive changes.
We need to understand these institutions, at least better than we do, and attend to their flourishing directly; if the past years have taught us anything, it is that assuming an independent durability and stability to such institutions, and permitting ourselves a general indifference and spectatorial irresponsibility towards them, is a crucial step towards disaster.