Are universities good or bad for us?
Why Americans can't make up their minds
Two weeks ago I linked the contemporary obsession with branding to its sinister origins in colonialism, censorship, and state-sanctioned torture. Today’s essay expands that discussion by thinking more broadly about the will of the people regarding public universities. How can it be that higher education in America has come to be seen as both a public good and a public threat?
One explanation lies in the fundamental contradiction between Puritan New England and the Early Republic. We have never resolved that contradiction as a country, but many of our debates about politics and policy can be traced back to it, including our ongoing confusion about what the purpose of a university ought to be.
I’ll state it even more simply for the sake of this thought experiment. The ideology behind branding, as practiced by universities today, has one root in American Puritanism. But public universities flourish under secular democracy. The two value systems cannot be reconciled.
The Puritan brand
There were two kinds of Puritans: the Separatists more commonly known as Pilgrims, who wanted nothing more to do with the Church of England, and the Puritans who started the Massachusetts Bay Colony and hoped to reform the English church from within. But the groups were more similar than they were different. Both communities answered to governors who essentially served life terms: William Bradford for 30 years in Plymouth and John Winthrop for 19 years (until his death) at Massachusetts Bay. Their governments were, in Winthrop’s words, both “civil and ecclesiastical.” The church was the state. Another word for it is theocracy.
Bradford and Winthrop both followed the principles of Calvinism. Puritans believed that human beings were born thoroughly corrupt, that no one could do anything voluntarily to seek grace but instead must be chosen through unconditional election. If you weren’t chosen, tough luck for you. If God decided, by his irresistible grace, to turn the motion of your heart away from evil and toward good, then you would show evidence of this transformation in your life. No one could really know if they’d been chosen, since that wasn’t up to the individual, but the leaders kept saying from the pulpit that Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay had been covenanted by God, and anyone who tried to gainsay the governor faced dire consequences.
A doctrine is not the same as a brand. Many theological schools emphasize mystery. But to my mind, seventeenth-century Puritanism had all of the rigidity of a corporate brand. There was but one doctrine, which was inseparable from the law. The Puritan mission — the brand hierarchy, if you wish — was crystal clear.
Bradford and Winthrop might also be described as CEOs. Massachusetts Bay actually was a corporation. It held a charter from England granting it formal approval to operate in the New World, so long as it adhered to English law and did not trade with other countries (along with other provisions). You didn’t reform a system like this. You either accepted its rules or you left: voluntarily or by way of banishment, as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams discovered. In fact, dissenting was a good way of showing Puritan leadership that you had not been irresistibly transformed by God’s grace, were therefore not among those who had been unconditionally chosen, and deserved to be cast out, since you’d be spending eternity in hell anyway.
Elon Musk is a hyperbolic example, but his recent ultimatum for Twitter employees — to either stay and be “extremely hard core” or to voluntarily leave (presumably before being fired for sloth) — reflects both the unyielding culture of corporate capitalism and the nature of the Puritan state. Musk is just bad at hiding what most obsessive CEOs and corporate-minded university presidents want, which is to burn their brand upon the marketplace and the culture as dominantly as they possibly can. People who believe it is possible to “take back” their country share a similar goal.
This kind of thinking is anathema to a college or university. “University” derives from the Latin universus, which also means “universe” and from the French université for “universality.” Universities are meant to be large, and their unity comes from holding together many different ways of thinking, not melding them all into one. “College” in its purest sense means “body,” which one could take to emphasize a narrow purpose. However, the origins of the word include the Latin collegium, which is still used to describe academic communities. Relationship, not power, is the core value of a college or university. And anyone who has spent any time with PhDs or knows the phrase “herding cats” can appreciate that an academic community is, or ought to be, a loose federation of independent thinkers.
Puritanism falls, but lingers
The Salem Witch Trials in 1692 pushed many Americans away from religious government and toward a secular democracy with its wall of separation between church and state. Even a devout Christian like John Adams had no wish to go back to hanging alleged witches in the public square or banishing Americans for heresy. But Adams did not fundamentally disagree with Jefferson’s characterization of religion as a private matter in Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Compare Jefferson’s language to John Winthrop’s rebuke of Anne Hutchinson when she was dragged into court: “Your conscience you must keep, or it must be kept for you.”
America still can’t decide whether it wants to be governed by Enlightenment principles such as equality, derived from John Locke’s notion that everyone is born with natural rights, or by the theocratic imperatives that drove Winthrop’s leadership. When American government drifts too close to the original City on the Hill, icy memories of Salem blow through the republic. But because Americans prefer mythology and amnesia to history, we have to keep learning this the hard way.
These pendulum swings in American politics have always affected colleges and universities, but never has higher education become so clearly identified with a single political camp. Ironically, this polarity shows that both sides have reverted to the binary thinking that defines Puritanism. Banning books from public libraries is consistent with the Puritan practice of banishing dissenters. And everyone knows that when Ron DeSantis and others champion the Stop Woke Act, they are not really advocating for separating private beliefs from public policy despite what they might claim. But neither is Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is an endowed chair at Boston University more commonly known for his bestselling book How to Be an Antiracist, which advances the argument that one is either an enabler (consciously or not) of racist ideas, or one is actively engaged in anti-racism. There is nothing in between. To my knowledge, Kendi has never retracted his proposal to create a permanent Department of Anti-Racism to “investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and [to] monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.” Flip that around, and you have a fair description of how public school teachers in Iowa and Florida already feel. In fact, some of what I’ve written here about the Puritans might be illegal to teach in Florida, especially if I went on to examine how the Puritans used the Bible as a metaphor: for themselves as the ancient Israelites, and for indigenous people as the Ammonites, Hittites, and Canaanites, who could be massacred without regret.
Activists at both political extremes claim that they simply want freedom, justice, and equality. But all the other side can hear is the voice of John Winthrop: Your conscience you must keep, or it must be kept for you.
American universities flourish under secular democracy
The decline of Puritanism paralleled the explosion of higher education in America. If America had become a New Jerusalem in the way that Winthrop hoped, there would have been many fewer universities and nothing quite like the public institutions that have functioned for generations as cultural centers and beacons of opportunity.
Just three U.S. colleges and universities were founded before 1700. Many of today’s elite institutions were added in the 1700s, and the first two public universities emerged after American independence had been won. The University of Georgia was chartered in 1785, just two years after the Treaty of Paris, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened in 1795. And the 1800s saw an even larger spike in new colleges and universities.
Correlation, as any scholar knows, is not causation. I do not mean to imply that the Salem Witch Trials had any direct influence on the emergence of institutions of higher learning. Much of this is too complex to reduce to a single narrative. However, William Bradford himself lamented that as the American colonies began to grow, they began to disperse, and that the notion of a tightly knit community bound to the same narrow purpose became impossible to sustain. Economic prosperity, westward expansion, and new ideas about human rights all provided fertile soil for universities, especially after American independence had been won.
Most of us understand by now that much of this prosperity came from slavery and from the exploitation of women. Westward expansion during the 1700s and 1800s wrote the bloodiest chapters in the Native American Holocaust. And Enlightenment ideas about human rights mainly benefited white men during the early republic. Hypocrisy, thy name is America.
However, I am one of a fading cohort that believes the best defense against hypocrisy is reason and that the early republic built into its definition the values necessary for its gradual reformation. The early republic was the near-perfect antithesis of Massachusetts Bay or Plymouth. Barack Obama said this all better than I can in his classic speech “A More Perfect Union.” In the spirit of that speech, I can say that I admire Thomas Jefferson’s idea for the University of Virginia as “a public university designed to advance human knowledge, educate leaders and cultivate an informed citizenry” even as I recognize how much of a throbbing hypocrite Jefferson was.
The Revolutionary War required a very different kind of unity from the kind Winthrop and Bradford promoted. Thirteen colonies with different interests, who were suspicious and sometimes outright disdainful of one another, held together a fragile union. Why? Because, as Benjamin Franklin is rumored to have said while signing the Declaration of Independence, they would all hang separately if they did not hang together. Which also describes the kind of loose federation at the etymological root of university.
The will of the people
This circuitous thought experiment was initially triggered by an op-ed about public universities titled “What the People Want,” which offers a false narrative of unity regarding higher education and implies an even more disingenuous relationship between corporate branding and democracy.
There is no “we, the people” now, at least not regarding universities. According to a 2020 poll by the Survey Center on American Life, 38% of Republicans believe that professors act in the public interest, whereas 74% of Democrats say they have confidence in American faculty. Much of this divide appears to be attributable to culture wars. Some say that political tribalism stems less from identity politics on the left than from white Republicans’ intolerance to America’s growing diversity. Others lay blame for increased polarization at the feet of liberal academics. Bob Leonard wrote last week in Deep Midwest that “performative academic ambiguity and disdain for a popular audience” contribute to the public’s distrust of universities. Two weeks ago, in a comment on my branding essay, Carol Roh Spaulding, observed: “One's race or sexual identity becomes a brand, so to speak, under Capitalism. Like a brand, one's cultural identity must be articulated, defended against competitors, and, most importantly, continuously produced.” The 1619 Project might illustrate the point: for some, it represents the heart of why higher education is a public good, yet the very same project was deemed such a threat that it was banned in Florida schools.
Now and then you’ll hear an argument for peacemaking, with the quaint notion that “open inquiry and free expression” can coexist among openly hostile factions. Other pollsters claim that affordability and economic mobility might be America’s “hidden common ground” on higher education. But the same studies show a near impasse on the civic benefit of a college degree. As long as anything like the traditional liberal arts is taught, cultural divisions will bedevil any policy, like debt forgiveness or state subsidy, that tries to target affordability and access in higher education. If writers like Stephen Marché and Barbara Walter are correct, and civic rancor is so deep that a civil war is inevitable, then internal divisions and external pressures will continue to erode many colleges and universities.
It’s no mystery why college leaders see branding as a way to navigate these troubled waters. Simplify the institutional goals. Be really good at fewer things that can be easily marketed, like robotics. Market those brand products during football games. Make sure your football team doesn’t suck (see the “Flutie effect”). Divest from disciplines that inflame cultural divides, and shore up your endowments with budget winners like business, entrepreneurship, and STEM. But this mindset turns the university into something more like the Massachusetts Bay Company than like the Continental Congress.
We live once again in colonies. Our thinking is more like Winthrop’s than it is like Jefferson’s. We mingle freely with those who do not share our beliefs or backgrounds, but we may not even see them as our compatriots because our civic life is no longer our real life. In this environment, the notion of a university as a federation of independent minds or as a collegium defined by relationship seems difficult to maintain, if not outright quixotic. America is reversing the dispersal that William Bradford lamented. Instead of moving out into greater freedom and the tolerance that comes with it, we have voluntarily walked back through the fortress gates, locking ourselves behind those protective walls, peering at one another through the spikes in our palisades.
This, as near as I can tell, is how higher education in America can be seen simultaneously as a public good and as a public threat.
As you say, the development of American higher education has room for many narratives, and the one featuring Puritanism is an interesting one for the ways in which competing values remain incompatible. But I wonder if there is not another basic contradition in what colleges and universities are asked to do in America: on the one hand we want educated people to know the history and culture of all the disciplines (broadly defined) so that what is best can be passed on to the next generation; but on the other hand, we want graduates who are able to question and critique that store of received knowledge so that we might produce new knowledge and come to new understandings of how we have arrived where we are and where we ought to go. One vector is self-congratulatory, the other critical. But we don't like to be wrong, and we certainly don't like to be told what to do even if it's the right thing.
Despite the outrageously escalating costs of higher education, we have managed to educate many, many people who in previous decades might not have gone to college. New voices have produced new narratives and new texts that rightly challenge the received order. I'm thinking now of The 1619 Project and the reactionary response to that text and to Hannah-Jones herself. I don't know how long American universities can be underfunded and still sustain the vital role of producing new knowledge, but it seems that legislatures are unwilling or unable to take a long view. And the unfortunate result is that potentially new voices will be left unheard and unheaded. We're in a sorry state, but it's not a new one.
I'm reminded of an old essay by W. H. Auden which he wrote as a preface to Henry James's, The American Scene, because it seems to capture the prevailing attitude in America these days and may help to explain why we're screwed. He approaches his subject by comparing European assumptions with American ones, and in this binary Auden says that the European supposition is "that virtue is prior to liberty; i.e., what matters most is that people should think and act rightly; of course it is preferable that they should do so consciously of their own free will, but if they cannot or will not, they must be made to, the majority by the spiritual pressure of education and tradition, the minority by physical coercion, for liberty to act wrongly is not liberty but license. The antagonistic presupposition, which is not peculiar to America...but for which this country has come, symbolically, to stand, is that liberty is prior to virute, i.e., liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virute and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one."
These days it seems that we want the impossible: a "world-class" education that merely confirms our own prejudices. And that is not an education at all.
Good or bad is hard to say, but I don't think the current version of the university suits who we want to be in the future.