Democratic Intellectual Resources

A month or so ago, I finished Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard, 2008). At the center of Newfield’s argument is a pair of assumptions. First, in the U.S. context, public universities have made available intellectual and cultural resources for negotiating the American democracy (see for instance pp. 6-11, 47, 125, 126, 273-275). This basic premise likely finds broad acceptance (though I can imagine some think tanks muttering about elitist university sorts and a lack of common sense). The second assumptions is less plain (and likely would cause Bill O’Reilly to go apoplectic): “The culture wars discredited the cultural conditions of the political and economic ascent of . . . college-educated, middle-class workers. The culture-war strategy was a kind of intellectual neutron bomb, eroding the social and cultural foundations of a growing, politically powerful, economically entitled, and racially diversifying middle class, while leaving its technical capacities intact” (p. 6). The book is a selective (Newfield knows the California context best) social and intellectual history that rereads the culture wars of the early 1990’s and traces rise of supply-side economic and cultural analysis and policy that argues relentlessly that cultural and economic explanations of phenomena are neither mutually exclusive nor hierarchical in explanatory power.

What I am left mulling over, though, is how to embed this narrow history in broader economic and cultural histories. Newfield mentions John Kenneth Galbraith several times but seems uninterested in James Galbraith’s ongoing work on inequality. He pauses now and again on the ecological implications of the supply-side orientation of the culture warriors but never quite jumps into a consideration of the way that ecology informs and perhaps underlies both economic and cultural arguments. I finished the book thinking that early in the 20th century (prior to the period that concerns Newfield), the university took over the role once played by land. In the American context, the “availability” of land supported the myth of providential development but also required elaborate rationales for violating basic values (respect for property, respect of persons and a concomitant abhorrence of slavery, respect for nature, participation in community life, among others). As the public universities began to draw growing numbers of students between the world wars but especially after World War II, research and the development of an entire society stood in for the chance to go west and start over. At a university, “anyone” could take up a profession and find her way into the middle class (or become one of the lawyers and surgeons in her pedigree). Again, the myth of American growth had to cover over the denial of access to college to various Americans and to the radically different experiences available along lines that seemed to imply a class system. But the means were there for boundless growth.

Historians of U.S. higher education (Newfield included) celebrate the period between 1945 and about 1972 as a time of growing equality, a time that suggested a potential for a multi-racial society with a majority middle class. They also either explain or cover over a redirection of this trajectory. The university seems, since the 1970’s, to have begun producing inequality and self-interest in various stripes. Relatively few link this redirection to a toxic media environment, an energy crisis, leveraged redevelopment of properties, and public investment in a military industrial complex that would soon have to hope for enemies in order to justify its budget. The American myth of growth had by 1980 exhausted its ecosystem, could not continue to produce at current levels without doing serious cultural, economic, and ecological damage, but the myth insists on growth, more this generation than last.

I started a B.A. in 1981 at a regional Midwestern university that seemed still to consciously aim at gathering together the (largely white) children of Wisconsin and provide them opportunity to go where their interests and efforts took them (the economy willing). While I was at school, though, my campus voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in its history, for a candidate who had declared that government (one that in my state still supported a collegiate experience for the top 75% of a high school class) was a problem. My classmates voted for Reagan at a point when the culture warriors were still working out their white papers (Friedman’s important stuff was already in circulation but just finding significant application to policy). We (I was not at that time knocking on doors for the Green Party) voted for Reagan for cultural and economic reasons but not those, I think, that Newfield considers. My classmates jammed TV lounges to see episodes of General Hospital and loved MTV (I myself cannot be blamed for these 1980’s legacies). In the year I graduated, Dire Straits released “Money for Nothing.” The culture warriors clearly did sit in smoke filled rooms and think through political and economic and cultural strategies (Newfield’s argument is compelling for me), but they too were products of cultural and economic forces themselves and they found willing audiences for their arguments. They simply declared, You can have your MTV (and vacation in Hawaii) but only if you make sure to protect your interests. We obliged and went on a shopping binge of biblical proportions with little regards for energy, water, food, and real estate policy that was on any measure short-term and on most measures insane. Divorced from any interest in thinking about habitat and community in ecological, truly democratic terms, we followed the easiest credit.

I like Newfield’s remedies (develop public universities that 1) aim at racial equality (of opportunity and outcome); 2) aim at a synthesis of access and quality; 3) redefine development as not primarily economic; 4) increase public funding; 5) publish research describing societies as something other than markets). I finished his conclusion wondering how he might find an audience for these remedies beyond the readers of Harvard Press books on higher education. The elitism of the culture warriors seems largely to define his analysis. The university will produce the knowledge needed. Networked societies are not without need for such universities (and indeed, there are reasons to believe that universities will continue to provide intellectual resources and leadership), but the intellectual resources that will matter will, I suspect, come more and more rarely out of English departments. Wendell Berry has long produced such resources well away from the university (and there are 20 and 30 somethings doing close to subsistence farming on his advice). James Gustave Speth managed a book like Bridge at the Edge of the World only be stepping outside of the discourse of the university. It is figures like Naomi Klein and projects like Witness.org or the Human Rights Video project that will recycle ideals about global human rights into resources.

I am glad to have read Newfield’s book. I wonder if he is prepared to have English departments embrace access and develop cultural and intellectual resources.