Notes From The Lower Education: The Looters and the Looting

by Samuel Hux (February 2016)

Take the GOSU with which I am most familiar, having spent most of my professional life there, the City University of New York, a much more typical place than its racial-, ethnic-, and age-diversity, and its absence of dormitory life, would suggest. For more than forty years in at least four “chancellor’s reports” CUNY has been promised-or-threatened-with a radical restructuring. A collection of semi-autonomous units spread over the five boroughs of New York City—supposedly liberal arts colleges, community colleges, technical and professional institutes, a graduate school, a law school—CUNY is in effect a university system, competing in size with many state university systems (as it once competed for academic esteem with such systems), and it may indeed need restructuring .  .  . but what kind? Noting that there are overlapping offerings at College A, College B, College C, and so on, the periodic chancellor’s reports have proposed that College C might down-size or phase out Discipline X and perhaps College B Discipline Y, since X and Y are stronger at College A, and that C and B might strengthen Discipline Z which could then be eliminated at College A. Ignore these very generalized representations of details and hear the music: a presumably liberal arts college might not have, for instance, a History major, indeed might not have a History discipline. Or Anthropology, Astronomy, Geology, Foreign Language (Spanish excepted) or Philosophy: all judged by one report a few decades ago to be “non-essential.” But it might have an ISM (Information Systems Management) major. What’s the rationale? Don’t look for an intellectual one. Rather—and this is what the reports are really all about, and, incidentally, the reason to think that four-plus decades of persistence will pay off—look to see how, as we say in CUNY, students “vote with their feet.” In other words.  .  .  .

Grant me a brief digression, as I urge upon you a brief recollection. For all the manifest deficiencies of higher education in the past (say before the late ‘60s or early ‘70s) colleges did say to their students something like this: “The world (its history, its culture, its scientific structure) is very large, and you are very small. Your job here is through the acquisition of knowledge to grow toward the world’s size. This college is here to help you do that, for frankly you are at this moment too lacking in knowledge to know how small you are and how much in need you are of decreasing the discrepancy between your size and the world’s.” Now colleges are saying: “The world is very large, and you are probably as large as you need to be. The college is here to help you cut the world down to your size by allowing you to ignore most of the world. You, in the freshness of your ignorance decide what’s important to learn, and we will adjust the college to that. So—vote with your feet.”

Most vocational majors have four things in common. First, they take immediate aim at the job-entry level instead of long-term aim at the life of a cultivated citizen. Second, they tend to effect fairly well-defined career limits: chances are, for instance, that the graduate with a B.S. in Business Administration is going to have a career working for or under someone who majored in Economics or History or some such. Third, they are enormously popular with students, who are immediate-goal-oriented enough to take the first point but are ignorant of the second. Fourth, they are most of them bloated with required credits: while a liberal arts major will require ten or twelve courses, the vocational major may require twice that many (claiming the national association in the field demands it), effectively cutting all the more into the liberal education that’s supposed to distinguish college or university from professional school.

So, again, there’s a difference between students choosing majors and students having their “votes” define the nature of the university itself, an institution that predates them and will, if only in modified form, postdate them. Of all the secular institutions of civil society the traditional university was the surest embodiment of Edmund Burke’s ideal of a conversation “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Make it merely conversant with the living, or rather a structure of immediate preferences of the living, and it becomes a mere training institute providing instruction in one job-or-profession or another. Actually Burke did not say (although he implied) “conversation”: he said “partnership.” But I have slipped in the former term for the sake of another allusion.

For the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott education is apprenticeship in the “Great Conversation” that is the world’s culture. If students, most of whom are not aware that the conversation exists, are allowed, through voting with their feet, to define the university, then indeed the conversation will not exist, at least not in its traditional home. Only the stupid could say good riddance. And only the naïve would think that there are no stupid people in responsible positions in the university.

Indeed, “you hadn’t seen nothin’ then!” For Oakeshott’s remarks speak more eloquently to our problems than they did to his own. They do so not because of the thousands of “non-traditional” students—although I shall return to that point—but because those “men of power” with the “intention of transforming the universities” are no longer “outside”: they are inside.  Some are faculty members, some of whom would, as a colleague of mine says we should, remove all humanistic and scientific “obstacles” (that is to say, traditional standards) from the students’ swift entry into the job market, cheap degree in hand. Some are a new class of administrator, you might say a technician of administration: not the retired minister, the former dean of the law school, or the philosopher with a talent for administration and a compelling sense of duty—none of those characters of popular memory.

I came to one of the flagship colleges of The City University as a young socialist eager to teach in “the university of the proletariat,” as I romantically perceived it. In the subsequent decades in one of the new (officially) liberal arts colleges of a much bigger CUNY I have become someone who’s comfortable speaking the language of Edmund Burke, and who takes the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset as his guide through the American university—not his Mission of the University, but a work in which higher education is barely mentioned.

The Revolt of the Masses (1930) is an oft-misunderstood book, for as with most books its title rather than it is read. La rebellion de las masas is not the rise of the working class. Las masas are no social class at all, but a human type. “Mass-man” is fortunate in that he lives in a period when except for the very poorest all enjoy a “rise in the historical level” where “average existence.  .  .  moves on a higher altitude” than in the past. That is, life offers a greater possibility of one’s earthly desires being fulfilled than in previous periods. One has “formidable appetites and powerful means of every kind for satisfying them”: economic, physical, civil, technical. But one is mass-man if along with “the free expansion of his vital desires” he has a “radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence”: the history that preceded him and the civilization that provides his ease.

Oakeshott’s “looters” (both students and administrators) who “appropriate to themselves the organization, the shell of the institution, and convert it to their own purposes” are, no surprise, mass-men. As it is often difficult to imagine a particular adult ever having been young, it is even more difficult to imagine the new class of academic bureaucrats ever having been, except in the most formal sense, students. Another healthy quotation from Oakeshott, his 1975 essay “A Place of Learning” (also in The Voice of Liberal Learning):

And now, since the overwhelming majority of the American university’s population are not faculty or bureaucrats but students, comes the most difficult part of this argument: How to talk about students realistically, avoiding the protective temptations of sentimentality.

My classes have been for some time typically about a third foreign (mostly Asian, Latin American and Caribbean, and Muslim middle-eastern), more than half American Blacks and U.S.-born Hispanics, a smattering of people who look like me. A few of them—no national, racial, ethnic, or sexual pattern—are exceptional students, occasionally extraordinary. Some—again no pattern—are duller than butter, too dull even to be mass-men, beneficiaries of Open Admissions, and eventually they disappear. It is the majority that’s problematical. Some of that majority, while they didn’t enjoy that childhood schooling that prepares one for “the invitation of liberal learning in a university,” are just innocent and bewildered enough to wonder what’s going on and therefore are without the ready-made meretricious ideas and opinions of mass-man. Some others are unreadable, and I hesitate to generalize. And some would excite central casting if anyone ever figured out how to make a film of The Revolt of the Masses. And for those there is a pattern, although not demographic. They tend to be the “extracurricular” enthusiasts, the elected and unelected “student leaders”: the presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of the student government, the officers and many members of the Hispanic Caucus, the Women’s Coalition, the Whatnot and the Notwhat, the inevitable student reps on the Presidential Search Committee, the thug with the foghorn at the periodic protest campus-lockout.

Someone might object that this does not sound like a typical GOSU, but that someone would give stronger weight to ethnicity and race than I do. Furthermore, since the “minorities” are the vast majority at my college, and since no one benefitted from Affirmative Action quotas but rather perhaps from CUNY’s Open Admissions policy, we’re free of that neurotic atmosphere of colleges where minority students insist on more Affirmative Action yet resent being thought beneficiaries of it. Consequently, the minorities here are as comfortable in their setting as the traditional majority at other colleges. 

But not necessarily appreciative of that fact. The mass-student, like the exceptional, the bewildered, and the unreadable, is fortunate that he enjoys in college a “rise in the historical level” where his “average existence.  .  .  moves on a higher altitude” than did students in the past. There are all sorts of financial aid programs which have nothing to do with academic promise or academic prowess, as well as a few which do reward promise. Student opinion is solicited on questions of governance, personnel (mandatory student evaluations of instructors—where an undergrad can judge whether his professor has “a good command of his subject,” which might be quantum mechanics or Kantian metaphysics!), and curriculum (dreadful mistake, but there it is, absurd residue of the ‘60s-‘70s). If a student “has problems” there is free counseling available. If a student fails a course, then, depending upon the specific course, the F might be expunged from the transcript. If a student feels a need for peer support within his or her racial, ethnic, or sexual group, or feels the urge to express himself or herself through membership in an organization committed to the celebration of his or her bio-cultural heritage, then he or she will find such an organization, officially sanctioned, suitable for him or her, unless he or she is the only man or woman on campus of his or her background, but in any case he or she can know that there’s a Campus Climate Committee policing against any possibly uncharitable words or hints of attitude toward the racial, ethnic, or sexual group to which he or she belongs. And if he or she is at the moment uncertain which sexual persuasion she or he really should belong to—God often mistaken in His or Her assignments—the college will surely in time come up with a program to aid her or him (or “them”?).

But the mass-student (he or she) while enjoying on campus “the free expansion of his [or her!] vital desires” in so far as they’re vaguely appropriate on academic soil, has a “radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence.” (Or hers!  O.K., enough of that.) He thinks this is the way it’s always been at Good Ol’ State U., has no idea university life was once much more Spartan, feels it is his due, like air and water—and what have you done for me lately?

He may have no idea—but on the other hand he’s full of ideas and opinions. And “he decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete.  .  .  [as] he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture.” The ideas may differ depending upon the campus, but in my familiar haunts they are politically correct, racially progressive to aggressive, and rarely “gender silent.” He knows Columbus was a mistake. (You’d be surprised how many Hispanics are theoretically sorry to have been born.) She knows traditional modern English grammar is sexist and a conspiracy to insult half of personkind. (Because like most people she is ignorant of Anglo-Saxon where “he” was h­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­e and “she” was heo, making the evolution of gender-neutral “he” quite natural.) The Greeks lifted their culture from Africa and hence western civilization is a theft of a birthright. (And yet—schizophrenically—as Jesse Jackson chanted, “Ho ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”) He’s not at all sure that minorities were not targeted for AIDS. He doesn’t necessarily buy the nonsense of the famous Professor Jeffries at City College (CCNY)—melanin, sun people, ice people—but he’ll defend to the whatever the man’s right to bold speech, hears in it a profounder music than mere reason, and thereby having dispensed with the content tells you that perhaps you’re too impatient with the man’s style. He is never, absolutely never, himself a racist—“Don’t lay that shit on me”—because only a member of a majority in a nation can be a racist. If you ask if that means no white in Africa can be a racist, and if you don’t accede to his answer about not-confusing-the-issue or that’s-different-altogether, you’re liable to be told you’re guilty of “linear thinking” or some such (I forget what).

In any case, he has not “prepare[d] himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it [and] is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion.” Nonetheless, when pushed to the wall in argument, he asserts with unrecognized banality that “It’s a matter of opinion, and my opinion’s as good as yours,” which doesn’t imply for him the reverse. (At other GOSUs, and at the more elevated levels too I suspect, a different set of manufactured ideas and opinions prevail, more mainline acceptable: that’s all.) The single feature that separates mass-student from Ortega’s conception of mass-man is that although he has the assurance to proclaim and impose his opinions wherever he will, he has no idea that he is commonplace.

An apparently good question: Why even dream of submitting this student to a rich immersion in the “Great Conversation,” into the tradition Jesse Jackson has such contempt for, why bother submitting him to more than the minimum liberal arts at all? Why resist the trend to election by feet? There are two reasons.

First:  A certain amount of remediation has become recognized as necessary in the university—that’s what all Composition courses are, not only those designated “remedial”—but more remediation is needed than is generally recognized, although a different kind of remediation. Since most students did not receive that tough paradisiacal education Oakeshott recalled with such fondness (and during which one picked up writing along the way as a mysterious cultural acquisition), the university is the last chance for even a patchwork approximation. Cultural remediation, if you will. But this answer may seem to beg the question that a patchwork is even possible with this student, mass-student. Why not just service him with some how-to courses and let it go?

It is well to remember the beginnings of universities in the western world. Although university has come to suggest both the universe and the universality of learning—as it should—such was not its original meaning. As Charles Homer Haskins noted in his classic The Rise of the Universities (1923) the university was universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque, a corporation or guild of masters and students. The medieval University of Bologna was at first a universitas societas of students, with professors at their beck and call. Students could, for instance, fine a professor “If he failed to secure an audience of five for a regular lecture.” (Were the absent voting with their feet?) In time the professors formed a guild of masters and eventually stability overtook the original Student-Centered U. The universities of northern Europe and Britain followed the pattern of master and student with the master master—and the rest is history.

Until perhaps now. I am afraid the university, GOSU at the very least, is about to return—through the agency of the Student-Centered University Management and albeit ignorantly—to its roots.  .  .  and suffer, as Oakeshott put it, “a destructive metamorphosis from which recovery will be impossible.”

No, let me correct that. I think it has already happened. I don’t think the GOSU can recover from that destructive metamorphosis. I don’t think it is reformable. 

 

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Samuel Hux is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.

 

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