The American
University at Mid-Century
Up until the 1940s,
American
parents might postpone a son's entrance into the job force with an
idyllic
interlude for disinterested study removed from the tumult of business,
politics, and
industry. I came upon the academic scene just in time to catch a
glimpse of that traditional purpose for higher education. The GI
Bill, an Act of Congress providing any World War II veteran with means
to attend college, inundated the old idea of a university. The
GI Bill not only staved off post-war unemployment in the nation at
large. The pressures and promises of growing enrollments enabled
faculty like Professor Thomas to employ novices like me. My
career rode the wave. I was lucky to get my first job at the
University of Pennsylvania. I was either too sharp, or too dull
to please the department head, but that turned out to be of no
consequence in those
days of swelling enrollments. When I resigned from Pennsylvania
in May, I thought I was leaving teaching for good. I quickly
got two offers for the fall, and continued to receive solicitations
through the summer. Six years after that conversation with Wesley
Thomas on the steps of Old Main, I was running the German program at
the University of Houston. In 1963, I was called back to the
institution which had granted my Ph.D., and became head of a major
German department.
Since my cohort
had come of age during the war
against Germany, it contained very few aspiring
German teachers. When I began to teach,
the
post-World War II "baby boomers" were at the college doors. Tyche had clearly led me into
a
profession
much in need of personnel. Expansion
was transforming a once remote academic world into an
enterprise as vast and comprehensive as the Church in the Middle
Ages. Parents and young people on the one hand, thriving
industrialists and expanding government on the other, were looking
to the universities for research in
areas important to science, government, business, and industry.
We in the humanities enthusiastically argued that language and
literature served these same national goals. Congress was
persuaded to include language study as vital to the national defense,
hence eligible for fellowships and grants. Promise of money and
prestige drew many new graduate students and future faculty members
into higher education, including the humanities.
I had the good fortune of associating
with several wise old fellows who had long served as heads of
departments (something like feudal duchies in the Middle Ages), Bill
Shoemaker of
Spanish and Joseph Smiley in French, also a very gifted historian about
my age, Robert W. Johannsen. Actual administrative duties
were negligible. I conceived it as my task to recruit true
scholars, and to try to demonstrate sincere scholarship myself.
The university had not yet by that time transmogriphied into a
pronounced bureaucracy, but the process had begun. The third
quarter of the twentieth century saw the advent of the "multiversity"
as described by Clark Kerr, president of the many branched University
of California. The rest of the country followed California's
example for several reasons. In the first place, the tidal wave
of
enrollment and faculty hirings had changed the character of teacher and
student alike. Perhaps more basic, an ever larger portion of the
university budget came from industrial grants and subsidies, while at
the same time
increasing dependency on federal funding enhanced conformity between
public and private schools and erased old regional distinctions.
Obviously, relations between state
universities and state
legislatures had changed. At the same time, the legislatures were
themselves were being restructured. During my tenure at the
University
of Houston, the
Supreme
Court required North Carolina (Baker
v. Carr, 1962) to abide by its own constitution in apportioning
its legislature. In subsequent rulings (Wesberry v. Sanders, 1963; Reynolds v. Sims, 1964; and Lucas v. Colorado General Assembly,
1964), the Warren Court, already notorious for expanding the 14th
Amendment's "equal protection" clause even to overruling the voters
themselves (Brown v. Board of
Education, 1954), proceeded with its "one man, one vote" rulings
to require both houses in state legislatures to be chosen by population
(as distinct from the model set by the United States Constitution).
This program had far reaching implications for
state universities. Most of them traced their roughly
hundred-year history back to the Morrill Act of 1862, which had set
aside federal land grants for state universities, a huge boon both to
industrial and agricultural research. A quarter century later,
the Hatch Act had created agricultural extension services. Among
a still predominantly rural populace, this
combination constituted tremendous political strength. It also
reinforced that peculiarly American ideal of the college campus as a
quiet retreat for disinterested learning, "far
from the madding
crowd's ignoble strife." Under "one man, one
vote," such a concept of the
university
now became obsolete. Higher education was politically
dependent on population
centers and their needs.
The University Provost whom I knew, the final
arbiter for the university budget both on campus and before the
legislature, was the scholar-administrator Lyle Lanier, a crony both of
the New Critics in his native Tennessee and of legislators in
Illinois. This authentic researcher and author served as credible
mediator between academic and political mentalities. The same was
true of his successor Herbert Carter, who had built Illinois'
distinguished chemistry department. Such men, and I think there
were many of them across the nation, would have found much of their
effectiveness lost on the numerous "campuses" of the new
multiversity. Its demographically located centers were
coordinated by boards of higher education, which were connected to the
legislatures through a Byzantine labyrinth of committees and
administrators. Appointment, retention, and advancement of "human
resources" now had to conform with procedures which necessarily
excluded the personal, arbitrary judgment revered and practiced by the
old scholar-administrators.
In 1959-60, just before I
returned to
Illinois, an event on that campus accelerated the national trend toward
normalization of university governance. On a Homecoming week end,
an assistant professor of biology, Leo Koch, published in the campus
newspaper his view that premarital sex could be salutary for
undergraduates. University President David
Dodds Henry, either genuinely alarmed at
the application of
biological expertise to student life, or in order to reassure the
public that his university still conformed to the principle in loco
parentis, dismissed the
young
man. The American Association of University
Professors contended that Professor Koch had been denied due process,
and blacklisted the University of Illinois until the faculty
senate should adopt bylaws detailing procedures for faculty retention
and dismissal. The case had national implications. The day
when a university administrator dared apply individual judgment in
personnel matters was passing.
Rules and procedures for retaining and advancing the
teeming new work
force had become imperative. The most obvious criterion
for the all important scientific and technical fields was publication
of research. Absent exercise of individual
department heads' judgment, faculty
careers were to be determined by quantifiable measures, the number and
length of publications, the venue in which they were printed, and the
frequency of their citation, eventually also by machine-graded student
evaluations, participation on committees, etc. My friend, the
head of the English Department, devised his own carefully gradated
point system. As in the management of other large organizations,
everyone right up to the chief operating officer was concerned with his
own "career," a word newly popular among teachers. As in all
organizations, advancement meant delegating responsibility, so that the
operator rose ever
farther
above the operation itself.
In the scientific and technical fields,
universities naturally
reflected needs and desires in the nation at large. In his inaugural address at
Rockefeller
University (1990), the new President David Baltimore observed,
"Biomedical science
has
become big business in America, attended by keen competition for funds
and ideas; managers and politics intrude . . . biomedical science today
attracts armies of patent lawyers, corporate funders, auditors,
personnel managers, Congressional investigators, and peer review
panels." Baltimore's words were true for most institutions of
higher education.
Baltimore himself was a man of learning, even dedication, but most
university
executives were selected for other qualities.
Their job was to manage
multibillion dollar businesses with a focus on engineering and other
technical fields, including business
administration itself, and above all to promote an attractive life
style for the
eighteen to thirty-year-olds aspiring to enter those fields. What I had
imagined as the core of the university, the old
rhetorical learning, lay at a forgotten periphery.
At
the end of the century, the
university still retained the
patina of a transcendent ideal.
"Mission" statements regularly accompanied appeals for public
support. But now more than ever before, the American public was convinced that their
children's
welfare and happiness depended on university acceptance. Parents'
willingness to pay
rapidly rising costs, students' readiness to encumber their
future with debt, were a measure of Americans' profound faith in the
university. Unprecedented indebtedness of graduates in all fields, most prominently law and
medicine, compelled new members of
these professions to focus as never before on
billable
hours and numbers of clients treated. The enhanced stature and
prestige of university
personnel heightened their awareness of their own careers, and
commensurate salary demands.
All these practical considerations displaced the old ephemeral goals of
"higher
learning" in the minds both of teachers and students. Like any
other enterprise involving large sums of
money, the university became a magnet for outside interests with
shrewdly calculated methods and goals. The first obvious
collaboration between financial institutions and university policy
makers occurred in
the vast new enterprise of student lending.