Published Winter 2005
 
Ideas of the University
(on Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 [Durham, NC, 2003])
Seemingly since the day of its publication in 1996, the book which people in literary and cultural studies typically cite when they want to discuss the university as an institution is Bill Readings's The University in Ruins. It would be all to the good, if Christopher Newfield's Ivy and Industry were to replace it in this role, and yet, as I will show, the two books have one fundamental similarity. Part of the popularity of Ruins stems from its altogether satisfying skewering of university administrators' empty rhetoric of "excellence." But beyond that, Readings's book clearly filled some sort of deep-seated need within the profession, which I take to be both confirming our apocalyptic sense of our own fate while at the same time flattering our self-image as the last believers in the true mission of the university. The university for him is defined by the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, which he sees as fitting nicely with the needs of developing nation states. He regards globalization and the decline of the nation state as determining the character of an emerging "postcultural" university. The basic argument is that the university rose because of the increasing value of the cultural capital it could confer, and that it has declined with the value of that capital. This argument makes somewhat more sense if one is talking about the European university, because European nations have traditionally identified themselves with their distinctive cultures. In the U.S., cultural nationalism didn't become a powerful force within the university until World War II and the Cold War gave the state an immediate need to promote Americanism at home and abroad. The role of culture here was mainly the promotion of class affiliation, and, while it certainly can be argued that that role has been diminished, it is hard to make the case that it no longer exists.
The main problem with Readings, however, is not any one these debatable claims, but the larger method, in which the character of the university is understood to be determined by an Idea of the university. The ruin of the university is adduced from the replacement of the enlightenment idea of culture with the postmodern idea of "excellence." Newfield's story differs from Readings in that it is not one of the decline or corruption of a pure form, but rather of the coexistence of competing conceptions and forces. And, Newfield does a much better job of grounding his discussion in the history of social, economic, and institutional formations. For example, he notes that the university and the business corporation share the same legal history, both having been authorized by the Dartmouth College vs. Woodward decision of 1819 which defined Dartmouth College as a private entity in the face of a challenge by the New Hampshire legislature. Not only this common point of emergence, but a continued relationship thereafter makes the corporation and university twins. Indeed, one might be inclined to say that the university is the good twin, and the corporation the evil one, except that Newfield's take on both is more complicated than that. Unlike some commentators, he doesn't regard the university as a mere tool of business, recognizing that it is dependent on money made by business, but not itself engaged in the production of surplus value. This has given colleges and universities a degree of independence, but business has had a continuing influence as seen in their dependence on a business structure, and more recently, on commercial research. Newfield sees these as compromises that have eroded or strained what he believes to be the university's liberatory mission. Moreover, Newfield even sees the humanist ideal of freedom finding its way into management theory and thus into the business corporation itself.
But what is a bit troubling here is the failure to offer a critique of corporate power or the capitalism in which it has grown apace. Newfield clearly has a sense that the university represents some kind of opposition to business, but it's not entirely clear what kind. In the final chapter, we finally get the sense that a class analysis lies behind the institutional one the book foregrounds, but even there we don't learn how the university might function oppositionally in class conflict. Taking off from the Ehrenreichs' analysis of the independence of the professional-managerial class (PMC), Newfield holds "that the central historical function of the university has been to make these future managers," and he asserts that it, "more than any other institution, ...systematically links a student's success with her adaptation to the sensibility and behavior of professional and managerial life" (218). He then tells us that one could write two narratives about how the PMC has fared in the twentieth century. One corresponds to a widely shared story that PMC has lost independence. In this version it is claimed that while the PMC remains ideologically dissociated from the working class, its members divide between being a part of the bourgeoisie and being managed employees—that is, economically part of the working class. This narrative of rise and fall would have made Ivy and Industry more compelling had it actually structured the book as a whole. But it is to Newfield's credit that he avoided this device, since he doesn't see this narrative as telling the whole story. His "second draft" would show that "the university constantly pushed the middle class out of its subordinate role" (223). While I think Newfield succeeds in showing that the university provided an ideological alternative to this subordinate role, his book also strongly suggests that it did not succeed in pushing the middle class out of it.
Ideological in the last sentence is meant to convey two distinct meanings. On the one hand, the university provided a system of beliefs that are particular to the PMC. In this sense, the university provided necessary support for the PMC's sense of its own independence. On the other hand, it can be argued that those beliefs are illusory, in that they deny or mask much of the struth about capitalism. Given Newfield's argument, what stands out here is individualism and the particular idea of freedom that the university propounded and the middle class embraced. That the university harbored critics of individualism, such as John Dewey, is undeniable, but that these institutions as institutions embraced such critique cannot be demonstrated. And herein lies an instance of an unfortunate weakness in Newfield's scholarship. Like the literary critic that he was trained to be, he has a predilection to take representativeness of great authors and works for granted. Too often, a single quotation is taken to be sufficient evidence for a claim about the university or humanism or something similarly large and diverse. Moreover, there is a very heavy reliance on secondary sources. While the use of such sources is not illegitimate, since Newfield isn't representing himself as a historian, these sources sometimes get him into trouble. For example, he accepts Gerald Graff's notion that literary studies during the first decades of the twentieth century was "dominated by two parties: 'investigators,' who helped to develop research departments, and 'generalists,' who resisted specialization" (107). That's true if one is looking, as Graff was, for the history of conflict in the profession. If one looks at what members of the profession published and who controlled the Modern Language Association, however, one must come to the conclusion that the 'investigators' were dominant, and the generalists much subordinate. As this suggests, the book fails to take sufficient account of academic disciplines as novel and distinctive social formations. Perhaps as a result, Newfield tends to play down the degree to which the discipline of literary study in its early years identified itself as a positive science. It is telling that the word "philology" doesn't appear in the index. Newfield makes the mistake of looking only at professors' statements about their work rather than the work itself, and it leads him to overrate the role of the ideology of "humanism" in the disciplines that come to be called the "humanities."
Newfield wants to partially rehabilitate humanism after its having been vilified by Althusser, Foucault, and many of their English-speaking adherents. This desire has some merit, and Newfield is right to describe their antihumanism as "humanist" (45). But the role that humanism will have in Ivy and Industry is very similar to the role culture plays in The University in Ruins. Humanism, and the "freedom" it propounds serve as the basis for Newfield's claim of an oppositional position for the university. He traces humanism's "radical freedom" to Wilhelm von Humboldt and the nineteenth-century discourse of emancipation. While he asserts that Humboldt founded the first research university around 1807, Newfield fails to show that the German's humanist defense of that enterprise was an influence on the late nineteenth-century development of the American research university. Indeed one of his attempts to show such influence leads one to question its existence. As an example of the importance of "freedom" to the new research university, Newfield quotes Harvard president Charles W. Eliot on the elective curriculum he instituted there: "'If election by the individual...works well in practice, it is of course to be preferred to any method of selection by an authority outside himself, since freemen are best trained by the practice of freedom with responsibility'" (50). But the freedom allowed by the elective curriculum, which was designed to enable disciplinary specialization by undergraduates, is not at all the same freedom promoted by advocates of liberal humanism. It is much closer to the freedom claimed by entrepreneurs for themselves to conduct unfettered commerce and for their employees to sell their labor without the interference of trade unions. The point is that there are many freedoms, and that the word "freedom" is not sufficient to denote genuine opposition. Moreover, it seems equally idealist to attribute the university's cultural function to the liberal humanist idea of freedom as to attribute it to Reason or Culture.
Given these complaints, why do I assert that Ivy and Industry is so much preferable to The University in Ruins? Newfield's book gives us a much more complex and convincing account of the place of the university in American society. The university's role has never been primarily the promotion of culture—or even reason—but rather, as Newfield shows, the production of knowledge and of knowledge workers. As such, it both served the dominant order and remained apart from it. Ivy and Industry captures this conflicted role and explains how it has been played out in discourses about the university. In recognizing the university's position has been subordinate but not servile, Newfield suggests why the institution remains worth defending. The university has provided a partial but real alternative to the market, and Newfield gives us some hope that it will continue to do so.
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