American Academic Culture in Transformation

Fifty Years, Four Disciplines

Thomas Bender, Carl E. Schorske, Thomas Bender, Carl E. Schorske

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691227832
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

In the half century since World War II, American academic culture has changed profoundly. Until now, those changes have not been charted, nor have their implications for current discussions of the academy been appraised. In this book, however, eminent academic figures who have helped to produce many of the changes of the last fifty years explore how four disciplines in the social sciences and humanities--political science, economics, philosophy, and literary studies--have been transformed.
Edited by the distinguished historians Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, the book places academic developments in their intellectual and socio-political contexts. Scholarly innovators of different generations offer insiders' views of the course of change in their own fields, revealing the internal dynamics of disciplinary change. Historians examine the external context for these changes--including the Cold War, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism. They also compare the very different paths the disciplines have followed within the academy and the consequent alterations in their relations to the larger public.
Initiated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the study was first published in Daedalus in its 1997 winter issue. The contributors are M. H. Abrams, William Barber, Thomas Bender, Catherine Gallagher, Charles Lindblom, Robert Solow, David Kreps, Hilary Putnam, José David Saldívar, Alexander Nehamas, Rogers Smith, Carl Schorske, Ira Katznelson, and David Hollinger.

PART I

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Thomas Bender*

Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995

BY MOST MEASURES, the half century following World War II has been the “golden age” of the American university.¹ The period was haunted by the bomb, McCarthyism undermined academic freedom, and the Cold War distorted intellectual agendas. Other qualifiers could be named. Yet one cannot but be impressed. The American research university simultaneously adapted and actively furthered a dramatic expansion and significant diversification of its student body and faculty while its research and graduate training capacity was greatly strengthened. It was a remarkable transformation, with both quantity and quality rising. Recognizing new constituencies and opportunities for expansion, universities sought and gained both private and public support. On the government side alone, there was a massive reallocation of resources; between 1950 and 1970 governmental expenditures for higher education rose from $2.2 billion to $23.4 billion, and to $31 billion in 1991.²

There was a pattern of leveling up: by 1970 or so, research and training was no longer dominated by a select few institutions— Chicago and the Ivies. Distinction was as likely to be found in major public institutions (Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Madison) as private ones, though recent developments, since about 1985, threaten to reestablish this divide as major private institutions have gained resources relative to public ones.³ All areas of the country became home to major research institutions, and the number of institutions with stature as major research and graduate training campuses increased from about twenty to more than 125 in the half century.⁴ But if there has been some leveling at the top among the institutions examined in this inquiry, considerable differentiation still marks the 3,600 institutions of higher education in the United States, where a half million faculty teach. Over the past half century this decentralized system has become nationalized even while remaining differentiated, making difference feel more hierarchical now than in 1940 when institutions, including Harvard, Berkeley, and Princeton, were more local, even parochial in outlook.⁵

Before World War I, many of the most ambitious and talented American scientists and scholars had sought advanced training abroad. During the interwar years, however, the American university became self-sufficient, and the academic leaders of the postwar era were mostly American trained, though in some fields they were significantly influenced by the émigré scientists and scholars who fled European fascism.⁶

The American research establishment had taken form during the interwar years, and postwar developments would build upon these foundations. Two characteristics in particular would have struck visitors from major research centers in Europe. First, there was (and is) the American combination of advanced research and undergraduate teaching in a single institution. Second, visitors would be surprised by the number and diversity of decentralized institutions, each organized more by local opportunity than by national policy. Partly from these two circumstances, there was more space and more opportunity in the American system for innovation and for the incorporation of new disciplines and fields. The fact that change could occur faster and with less bureaucratic conflict in the loosely organized American system would become an advantage in the years of growth after the war.

Before the war, national academic systems were rather insular, but the postwar years witnessed the development of an international scholarly community, sustained in part by exchange programs supported by the United States government (e.g., Fulbright scholarships) and major foundations. In the natural sciences, where resources were so important, the United States came to dominate this internationalized research environment, but there was an important international role for the United States in the social sciences, especially in sociology (briefly) and economics (continuing). More recently, the end of the Cold War has promoted a new level of international visibility for American academic experts, and in a broader context the advent of global academic communication has been both advanced and dominated by American research and scholarship.

The quantity and quality of American research cannot be measured with any precision, but some crude indicators are available. For example, 80 percent of all citations in electronic retrieval systems are in English.⁷ And the awarding of Nobel Prizes indicates an increasing recognition of American research: before 1946, one in seven Nobel Prizes went to Americans, while between 1946 and 1975 Americans received one in two.⁸ Notwithstanding the attention given to a few French ideas recently imported into the United States, American research universities are massive exporters of research and importers of graduate students, mostly in science but also more generally. With no intention of trivializing the matter, one can say that only American scholarship, research, and advanced training have the international stature and appeal of American movies, popular music, software, and basketball.

Yet the public has taken little notice of this success; indeed, in a spirit of disappointment Americans may even be initiating its dismantling. Within academe, moreover, there is a pervasive sense of unease, and the origins of this self-doubt precede the current financial crisis of higher education. In fact, there is a certain paradox in the success of academe. Its recognized achievements (disciplinary excellence in the context of dramatic expansion) have not strengthened academic culture as a whole. It has even produced conflicts about its mission, particularly its civic role, and there has been a weakening of the informal compact between the university and society.

Academe is also a victim of larger transformations in American society. The incorporation of higher learning into the center of American established institutions, including the government, has enhanced the university, but it has also made it vulnerable to a larger disaffection with those institutions. Universities have also been focal points (and sometimes at the leading edge) for increasingly controversial efforts to overcome racial and sexual injustices. The most compelling aspirations of the universities—whether one speaks of advanced scholarship or progressive social interventions—have prompted more criticism than congratulation.

What follows is a brief and necessarily selective elaboration of the phases and contexts of change in American academic culture. It highlights some of the more important social, intellectual, and political trends that have intersected and affected the trajectory of academe’s ascent and apparent loss of standing.

MAKING THE GOLDEN AGE

The period following World War II was one of two great moments of academic reform in the United States—the other coming after the Civil War, when the sixty-seven land grant colleges were created and the modern American research university was established. In the half century following the founding of The Johns Hopkins University in 1876, educational leaders augmented a substantial university system in the United States. But it still fell short of the highest ambitions of the research community, a point underscored in Abraham Flexner’s scathing report of 1930 on the universities of the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.⁹ Twenty years later a major appraisal of the state of American scholarship praised progress but saw most of it as very recent. Prewar social science and humanities research, it seemed in 1953, was too often marked and marred by “fact-finding,” “over-specialization,” and “trivial investigations.”¹⁰ Moreover, the style of academic life had begun to change since the war. A genteel profession became more diverse and worldly. Postwar academics were less gentlemanly and more professionally ambitious, fired by aspirations to upward mobility.

There was a strong sense that the postwar era would demand more from universities, both as teaching and as research institutions. Harvard commissioned a study of its curriculum, producing, in 1945, General Education in a Free Society, otherwise known as the famous “Red Book.” Two years later the President’s Commission on Higher Education presented its multivolume report, Higher Education for a Democracy (1947). Both envisioned an expansion of education: more students and wider responsibilities for the future direction of society. The Red Book made a case for studying science and the texts of the European humanist tradition, associating them with freedom and democracy. This argument, framed against the backdrop of fascism and communism, preserved a role for history and the historical disciplines in a blueprint for a higher education oriented to contemporary concerns. The President’s Commission pointedly criticized economic and racial barriers to equal education, and the language was strong enough on the issue of racial injustice to prompt several commissioners, including the scientist Arthur H. Compton and historian Douglas S. Freeman, to note their dissent. The report was attentive to the diversity of the American people, and it urged reforms that would make higher education responsive to their various needs and interests but at the same time committed to a curriculum sufficiently unified to nourish a common culture and citizenship. The report explained that “liberal education,” the lineage of which was distinctly aristocratic, must be converted into its democratic counterpart, “general education,” which is “directly relevant to the demands of contemporary society.”¹¹

The next half century would witness the predicted expansion of access to higher education, but it is not clear that university faculty expected to make much accommodation to these changes, nor does it appear that any special needs or aspirations of these new students were considered by the faculty and administration. The faculty of elite institutions provided the vision for the Golden Age of the postwar university, and its priorities reflected their interests.¹² Between 1940 and 1990, federal funds for higher education increased by a factor of twenty-five, enrollment by ten, and average teaching loads were reduced by half.¹³

The nationalization of higher education tended to establish a single standard for excellence—the model of the major research university. Ernest Boyer complained that just when American higher education opened itself to a larger and more diverse student body, “the culture of the professoriate was becoming more hierarchical and restrictive.”¹⁴ This process seems also to have advanced a growing commitment to (and internalization ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Stephen Graubard
• Acknowledgments
• Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske
• Part I: Historical Context
• Part II: Trajectories of Intra-Disciplinary Change: Pant Perspectives
• Part III: Inter-Disciplinary Comparisons: Historical Perspectives