I feel drawn to much of what David Bromwich had to say in a recent interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education even as I also find myself disagreeing with some of the very same sentiments.
I haven’t been on social media much in the last two weeks, so I’m not sure if this interview drew a response or not. It aligns with the discussion of Emma Camp’s critique of contemporary student culture, so maybe Bromwich’s observations got folded in to that conversation—or were lost in that response. To some extent, my column today is a follow-up on my response last week to Camp’s op-ed.
Let me go to the point in the interview where I experienced the most ambivalence. Throughout the conversation, Bromwich returns multiple times to the idea that the university should be a world apart, dedicated to “getting at the truth by honest means” versus a “popular culture that depends on the fast flow of opinions and isn’t concerned with the conscientious search for truth”.
He quickly qualifies this thought by locating this conception of the university in a specific historical moment, that being the post-World War II American university, which was devoted to “liberty of thought and expression” in an “unembarrassed” way, which he still finds a “persuasive” conception of the university as an institution.
I used to as well; on some mornings and in some moods, I still might. But I’m not at all convinced any longer that it is an accurate representation of the university as it actually was in the United States between 1950 and 2000. Bromwich is an acute enough observer who qualifies much of what he has to say, and so I know some of my objections to this characterization would likely be acknowledged by him. (He notes, quite accurately, that there’s never been a time in most American university classrooms where students routinely engaged in vigorous disagreement with one another.)
Is Bromwich’s preferred ideal really the American university of the 1950s and 1960s, for example? An era when many public universities in the South were mobilized by legislatures to defend segregation, an era when many universities both public and private attempted to limit or block the hiring of faculty on the left, particularly Marxists? An era when many faculty in the humanities and social sciences—mostly white, mostly male—showed enormous intellectual disdain for feminism, for new fields of study dedicated to race, to non-Western societies, etc.? In my own discipline, social history had become a methodological orthodoxy by the late 1970s, but it faced strong opposition when it first started to emerge in the academy in the 1950s and 1960s—an era when powerful men in academic departments were often free to hire and exclude incoming scholars as they saw fit, and did so often with an eye to reproducing their own preferences and keeping other views outside the pale.
If I think about the American public sphere from 1950 to the mid-1970s, if there was anywhere where the pursuit of free thought and expression combined with conscientious concern for the truth, it wasn’t necessarily within the university—it was in a wider print culture, coming significantly from social critics and journalists who were at best adjacent to the university and more often located entirely outside of it.
So if there really was a moment that the university matches what Bromwich finds a “persuasive” conception of its distinctive purpose and character, it was perhaps the late 1970s through to the mid-1990s, at best a two-decade period where the fight to make the university open to a wider liberty of thought and expression, as opposed to the really quite intellectually narrow politesse of debate and thought of the white male American academy of the 1950s and 1960s. The American academy after 2000 has to some extent been trapped in a perpetually recurrent nostalgia for that very limited moment that both erases its intense specificity and overlooks the accelerating casualization of academic labor that began in the mid-1970s.
When I took my tenure-track position at Swarthmore in 1994, the generation of white male scholars who had maintained a censorious, disapproving attitude towards new methods, new topics of study, new theories, and above all, new people drawn from a much wider social world and a wider set of institutions, had just retired. It did feel as if the intellectual room we were newly inhabited was more expansive and the conversations were vigorous—especially, as Bromwich’s own book noted, in relationship to an increasingly conservative public culture. That made it easy to forget the strong discontinuities between the university of that moment and the previous three decades, and to envision that the university had always been thus and that its character as such was strongly established. It also made it easy for the remaining academic intellectuals who felt they had experienced that openness earlier on—typically in a small handful of elite universities that tended to mistake themselves for the while of academia, much as they still do—to give themselves credit for the way things felt in the 1980s and 1990s and to quietly forget all the times they tried to block appointments, peer review some types of scholarship into oblivion, and de-legitimate work they disliked not through “open debate” but through institutional structures that offered avenues for action that never had to be accountable or visible.
If we didn’t build from the 1980s and early 1990s, the major reason is not that we became censorious or that we switched to a new conception of the university, it is that most of the jobs disappeared or were retained under conditions that were so precarious that the patient pursuit of truth through free and open expression became an extravagant luxury open to only a few.
The other part of my ambivalence has to do with Bromwich’s view that the contemporary university has moved from the idealized vision that he exalts to wanting to be good, e.g., to attempting to model within its walls a vision of what a good society should be like. I also have a bunch of qualifiers to apply to that view but I do understand and appreciate what he means by it. The problem is that I’m not sure why he thinks that’s bad. He seems to think it’s folly to “erode the distinctions” between the academy and society, that the academy has to retain a sense of distinctive purpose that requires specific professional training and devotion to discipline. And yet if the era that he pines for ever really existed at all, it often was defended specifically as a model for the open society, for liberal democracy, and also as a producer of truths and ideas that were meant to shape the society. The postwar university he believes in, if it was ever at all real, was not an austere monastery distant from the rest of the world where the devoted sought truth apart from everyone else. It was deeply integrated into political power, into the economy, and into public culture, and faculty were at no time shy throughout that period about regarding their way of working and doing business as a good sociopolitical model for their students and peers to consider and adopt. When Orest Ranum climbed in the window at Columbia to urge student activists in 1968 to stand down because they might provoke a massive shift to the right within the faculty, he was there in part because he thought the modes of blandly liberal deliberative action favored by faculty were a model that students should adopt in their own lives both within and beyond academic study.
Indeed, the conception of the university as the incubator of good character among an elite is an older and deeper one than the “free and truthful” university that Bromwich admires. And it is in its way just as much about maintaining a distinction between the university and the world as the conception Bromwich admires more.
I’m prepared to think there are indeed problems with trying to make the university a more ideal community than the world around it. If nothing else, because we may end up (perhaps already have ended up) showing that even when there’s strong social alignment, strong agreement on deliberative norms, and strong shared culture, it’s nearly impossible to get people to agree on concrete actions or to engage in collective action. There are some no-brainer things that faculty, students and most administrative leadership at almost all types of institutions should be able to easily align behind: investing collectively in building open access platforms and university presses that would put for-profit publishers of scholarship out of business for good, reversing four decades of labor casualization, undoing the steady drift towards managerialism. But we don’t and generally it seems we can’t. If it’s this hard for us to even slightly glimpse the better worlds that are possible, then it feels as if nothing at all is possible anywhere. That’s discouraging for us, but also for anyone who might look to us to provide a guiding light.
But I really don’t understand why exactly it’s wrong to try—or what the difference really is between a university that pursues truth and liberty and a university that tries to make a more moral, mutually supportive, and secure world within its confines. Those seem perfectly compatible to me. If Bromwich is trying to say that the pursuit of truth through free inquiry is always necessarily agonistic, adversarial, and atomistic—and that we can make no promises about whether that leaves the world or the university a better place to work, live or be human—then that seems like a vision that is very much in need to explanation and defense, because it’s a peculiar and unappealing conception on the face of it. Perhaps that really is the sort of thing that should be off in a bleakly isolated monastery then, where it need not trouble the rest of us.
Image credit: "Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library" by Lauren Manning is marked with CC BY 2.0.