I love Amanda’s semi-anonymizing habit of referring to her town as “Collegeville”. The town where I teach certainly has that rep, but the town where I teach is 20 miles away from the town where I live. And halfway in between, there’s a small city that houses another college and a huge array of boutiques and restaurants on its two main drags. I love the bookstores, but I could do without all the trustafarians and fauxhemians and Saab-driving yoga moms who make sure you know just how much they recycle and can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to vote republican. I’m pretty dang liberal, but that kind of myopic elitism just bugs the heck out of me. Which is why — despite coveting Amanda’s name for her town — I’ll choose to instead steal from the good Dr. Thompson and refer to the happy municipality where I had sushi tonight as Fat City. And tonight, with the weather gorgeous, the flow of students on the sidewalks swelled to capacity: if there’s patchouli in the air, it must be September in Fat City. We had a really excellent dinner, and I later came back here to finish off Clark Kerr.
Kerr quotes Cardinal Newman’s obsolete vision of a university education that “aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of private life” and that would, as well, ready students “to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility” (3). According to Kerr, however, this superannuated understanding came out of Newman’s experience at Oxford, and constituted the historically English model of the university as liberal education, somewhat elitist in its dedication to providing a well-rounded undergraduate education for men of culture.
Kerr argues that Newman’s vision was replaced by that of Abraham Flexner, in which research replaced teaching as the focus, and universities split into individual departments and added research institutes and research libraries. These were universities on the German model, which found their American expression in Johns Hopkins. And Kerr informs us that “Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’ still has its devotees — chiefly the humanists and the generalists and the undergraduates. Flexner’s ‘Idea of a Modern University’ still has its supporters — chiefly the scientists and the specialists and the graduate students” (6).
But both have been largely supplanted (or, perhaps more appropriately, subsumed) by the uniquely American democratic service-oriented university, which owes so much of its character to the Morrill act of 1862: “The land grant movement brought schools of agriculture and engineering . . . , of home economics and business administration; opened the doors of universities to the children of farmers and workers, as well as of the middle and upper classes; introduced agricultural experiment stations and service bureaus” (12). Furthermore, the American model of the university as Kerr says is becoming increasingly fragmented and pluralistic, with varying constituencies and power bases and missions and allegiances.
And again I see class everywhere I look; in the English model of the production of a ruling class, in the German model of the production of useful knowledge, in the American model with its privileging of utility and democracy. I finished Kerr tonight, and I’ll have some stuff to say tomorrow about how economic and class discourse is always present in his thinking — and I’ll ask whether we can ever get completely away from thinking about the economy. Right now, though, I’m tired and I’m going to bed.
Recent Comments