(RE)READING THE HISTORY OF US HIGHER EDUCATION: COMPLEMENTING OUR SURVEY TEXTS By Steven Schlegel A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education – Doctor of Philosophy 2021 ABSTRACT (RE)READING THE HISTORY OF US HIGHER EDUCATION: COMPLEMENTING OUR SURVEY TEXTS By Steven Schlegel In this dissertation I examine four critical monographs on the history of higher education. This type of monograph represents an unacknowledged source of value for the field of higher education studies, which has typically relied on survey level texts that provide coverage and historical background. In contrast, critical monographs offer a narrow, focused account in order to advance a scholarly argument that illuminates our understanding of US higher education in a substantive way. The four monographs in this study are Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College; Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University; Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s The Academic Revolution; and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. Each of these works tells a very different story about the history of US higher education, and as a whole they provide a picture of what history can bring to the study of higher education. Not only do they highlight stories that our survey level texts miss, but they organize and conceptualize history in ways that challenge the dominant narratives we have about US higher education. This study looks at four monographs at a time when higher education studies is focused on the production of journal articles. My analysis directs our attention to long-form scholarship and attempts to use these specific works as models to help scholars understand what a richer understanding of history can bring to the study of higher education. Each work presents a different way to organize a historical narrative and otherwise provides a deeply contextualized argument that connects with and expands our thinking around the topics and problems that most concern higher education scholars. Journal articles—with their limited word counts—preclude the ability to construct this type of argument, and historical works such as survey texts that chronicle a series of events have a long form but lack this type of deeply contextualized argument. Only critical monographs present this type of argument and connect with the research we do in higher education studies. A better understanding of what these monographs do, how they are constructed, and why they are important can help us understand the interconnected, historical nature of contemporary problems. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….... 1 The Historiography of Higher Education..……………….…………………………………...1 Situating My Analysis………………………….……………………………………………. 6 The Tension Between Monograph and Survey Texts…………………………………... 7 Four Monographs……………………………………………………………………… 10 The Use of the Monograph at a Time of Crises……………………………………….. 11 Why These Four Works? …..………………………………………………………………..14 My Approach to Analysis…………………………………………………………………... 17 The Rhetoric of Inquiry ….…......………………………………………………………18 Style in Academic Writing…………………………………………………………….. 20 Historiography…………………………………………………………………………. 22 What Does This Analysis Really Look Like? ………………………………………………25 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………….. 27 CHAPTER 2: BURTON CLARK AND THE DISTINCTIVE COLLEGE...…………………...33 A “Second Story” of our Liberal Arts Colleges……………………………………………. 33 Organizational Belief and the Power of the President……………………………………… 34 The Utopian Vision at Antioch………………………………………………………… 37 The Lonely Venture at Reed…………………………………………………………… 40 Social Esteem at Swarthmore………………………………………………………….. 44 Allegiance and Emotion in the Organizational Saga……………………………………….. 47 Leaving the Survey Behind………………………………………………………………… 50 Organizing History…………………………………………………………………….. 51 Interweaving the Survey……………………………………………………………….. 53 Supplementing the Survey……………………………………………………………... 54 History Plus Sociology……………………………………………………………………... 57 Clark at Work………………………………………………………………………….. 57 Defining the Organizational Saga……………………………………………………... 59 Two Outlooks on Research……………………………………………………………. 64 An Elegant Combination……………………………………………………………...……. 65 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………….. 67 CHAPTER 3: LAURENCE VEYSEY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERISTY..…………………………… 70 A University Structure “too Diverse to Define”.…………………………………………… 70 An Alarming Premonition………………………………………………………………….. 72 Resisting the Upstarts………………………………………………………………….. 73 Accommodating Utility………………………………………………………………... 75 A Sense of Adventure………………………………………………………………….. 76 A Mood that Cannot Last……………………………………………………………… 78 An Appropriate Middle Ground……………………………………………………………. 80 Leaving the Survey Behind………………………………………………………………… 84 Organizing History…………………………………………………………………….. 85 iv Interweaving the Survey……………………………………………………………….. 86 Supplementing the Survey…………………………………………………………….. 87 History Plus Sociology……………………………………………………………………... 89 Veysey at Work………………………………………………………………………... 90 A Loss of Freedom…………………………………………………………………….. 93 Two Interpretations of Research………………………………………………………. 95 An Overlooked Pairing……………………………………………………………………... 96 REFERENCES...………………………………………………………………………………... 98 CHAPTER 4: CHRISTOPHER JENCKS & DAVID RIESMAN AND THE ACADEMIC REVOLUTION…….....…………………………………………….. 101 A Faculty Defined University…………………………………………………………...… 101 An Informal Power………………………………………………………………………... 103 Making the World Safe for Academics…………………………………………..…... 105 The Myth of Faculty Contact…………………………………………………...……. 107 The Academic Revolution, Warts and All……………………………………..…….. 111 Same Forces, Different Circumstances………………………………………………. 114 The Future is in Other Hands……………………………………………………………… 116 Leaving the Survey Behind……………………………………………………………….. 119 Organizing History…………………………………………………………...………. 120 Interweaving the Survey……………………………………………………………… 121 Supplementing the Survey……………………………………………………………. 122 History Plus Sociology…………………………………………………………..………... 125 Jencks and Riesman at Work…………………………………………………………. 126 Repudiation and Validation…………………………………………………………... 127 Two Different Responses…………………………………………………………….. 129 A Lasting Integration…………………………………………………………..………….. 131 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………… 133 CHAPTER 5: GERALD GRAFF AND PROFESSING LITERATURE: AN INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY……..……………... 136 Departmental Organization and Our Short Institutional Memory…………….…………... 136 Yesterday’s Innovation……………………………………………………………………. 138 The Withered Classroom……………………………………………………………... 140 Dilletantes vs. Investigators…………………………………………………………... 143 A Kind of Cycle…………………………………………………………….………… 146 Seeing the University in the Department………………………………………….………. 150 Leaving the Survey Behind……………………………………………………...………... 152 Organizing History………………………………………………………...…………. 152 Interweaving the Survey……………………………………………………………… 154 Supplementing the Survey………………………………………………….………… 156 History Plus Literature…………………………………………………………………….. 158 Graff at Work……………………………………………………………...…………. 160 Institutional Boundaries and Forgotten Conflicts…………………………………….. 162 Two Approaches to Research………………………………………………………… 163 A Different Blend……………………………………………………………...………….. 166 v REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………… 167 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………… 170 Centering Change…………………………………………………………………………. 170 A Scholarly Risk…………………………………………………………...……………… 172 The Monograph in a Social Science World………………………………...……………... 174 Small Stories………………………………………………………………………………. 176 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………...…………………. 181 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………………. 183 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………… 193 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The Historiography of Higher Education It seems uncontroversial to suggest that many scholars link the history of higher education with survey level texts. During the second half of the 20th century, the pre-eminent text on the history of higher education was Frederick Rudolph’s The American College and University (1962). More recently, John Thelin’s A History of American Higher Education (2004/2019) may have taken its place. Thelin’s (2004/2019) work was recently reprinted in its 3rd edition, and as such has largely supplanted Rudolph (1962) as the pre-eminent work on the history of higher education, largely due to Thelin’s (2004/2019) greater attention to non-white, non-male populations, and the extension of the narrative into the late 20th and early 21st century. That said, Roger Geiger’s “The Ten Generations of American Higher Education” (2011) may perhaps be even more widely utilized as it is an article-length survey text and as such is a useful teaching tool.1 All three of the works mentioned above are survey texts. That is, they survey the history of higher education in the US from the founding of Harvard to the present day. Indeed, one of the reasons Thelin’s (2004/2019) survey has been updated twice to bring the text forward and account for contemporary events. Both Rudolph’s (1962) and Thelin’s (2004/2019) texts continue to be widely cited in theoretical, historical, and empirical research; however, at the same time, these works are also teaching texts in higher education programs. They provide 1 When I first began this study the notion that these survey texts were canonical works on the history of higher education was key to my analysis. As my work progressed it became clear that the canon was an important concept that hovers over my own research, but not the central idea I had first assumed. I have elected to include a discussion of the canon as an appendix. Locating this discussion in an appendix allows the reader to think through these concepts in relationship to my larger arguments, without risking the coherence of the narrative I am presenting. 1 content coverage at a time when many of the most prestigious higher education programs do not offer a PhD level course on the history of higher education.2 The Council for the Advancement of Higher Education Programs (CAHEP) offered a session on teaching the history of higher education as part of its pre-conference at The Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) from 2014 through 2019. Such a provision suggests there is a need among new faculty for more structured preparation in teaching the history of higher education. This lack is not limited to coursework. Many of our top journals fail to publish historical articles. The six higher education journals Bray and Major (2011) identify as the most prestigious published only four historical articles between 2016 and 2018 (Graves, 2018; Hevel, 2017; Hevel, 2016; Ris, 2016). This general lack of history in our prestigious journals and curriculum reinforces the position these survey texts occupy in our field and otherwise acts to ensure that survey texts come to stand in for history as a whole. In January 2021 Inside Higher Ed published a blog post that called for more scholars and practitioners to read Thelin’s (2004/2019) history saying that “the most profound cause of middling thinking about the future (or futures) of higher education is too little knowledge about higher education’s past” (Kim, 2021, para. 3). Although Kim offers some critique of Thelin’s work and suggests a number of blind spots, he concludes his discussion by suggesting that the time we collectively spend at higher education conferences might be better spent reading A History of American Higher Education (Thelin, 2004/2019): “there is so much to learn, so much to know, about the history of higher education. The task is daunting. A History of American 2 I identify the most prestigious programs according to the US News and World Report rankings. Using these as guides is not without its own problems, but does offer a useful heuristic for understanding what such programs are doing in terms of course offerings. I also base my analysis off of publicly available information drawn from program websites. I may lack the institutional knowledge to properly account for the housing of these courses, which may be located in unusual places or otherwise be part of several different courses. 2 Higher Education is the best place to start” (Kim, 2021, para. 12). Kim’s take on the value of history to the study of higher education is particularly revealing. He suggests that it is vitally important, but then views historical scholarship through survey texts. My own analysis moves beyond these survey texts to consider four other works within the history of higher education landscape: Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College (1970/1992); Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s The Academic Revolution (1968/2002); Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University (1965); and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1988/2008).3 Although these works lack the status of Rudolph (1962) or Thelin’s (2004/2019) texts, each work can be considered a classic on the history of higher education, and each has demonstrated considerable staying power: By moving past survey texts, I hope to show that expanding our understanding of historical work in higher education represents a significant opportunity for students and scholars. Crucially, each of these works represents what I consider to be interdisciplinary history. That is to say they combine aspects of historical thinking and analysis with work situated in another discipline. For Clark (1970/1992) this is a combination of history and sociology, however other combinations are possible as can be seen in Graff (1988/2008). Stuart Hughes (1964) suggests that all history is inherently interdisciplinary. I would counter that only some historical scholarship is interdisciplinary, but that those works which are interdisciplinary represent an unacknowledged and untapped source of value for the study of higher education. 3 This proposal makes frequent references to four major works on the history of higher education: Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College (1970); Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s The Academic Revolution (1968/2002); Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University (1965); and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1988/2008). Throughout this proposal, I will omit citations when referring to one of these four works by name. I will include citation information when referring to other works by the same author. This is done to streamline the prose and allow readers to more effectively focus on the argument I am advancing by avoiding the distraction of overly frequent citations for the same few works. 3 My analysis is essentially rhetorical. However, it is not my intention to conduct a literature review that comes to terms with the individual arguments these scholars make, although doing so is important. Instead, I focus on how history is used in these works to illuminate questions pertinent to scholars studying higher education. What stories the authors tell. How the history is constructed. And why they have shown staying power within the academy. By directing my analysis towards these questions, I present an argument about how history can be framed and understood in a manner that differs from survey texts, yet still speaks with scholarly authority. Each of the four monographs I am studying is the focus of a single chapter and, within each chapter, my analysis focuses on several common elements that allow me to better illuminate what an alternative to our survey texts might look like and why it is of value. I divide each chapter into four different sections. Each section represents a distinct portion of my analysis and otherwise acts to organize my work. First, what is the narrative trajectory of each work? What scholarly argument does each text advance and what does that argument illuminate? By laying this narrative groundwork, I allow the reader to better understand my analysis and ensure that they are familiar with these texts. Second, what thematic element is at work in each of these monographs and how does that element operate within the framework of the text? Third, how do these works organize history and in what ways do they interact with the dominant historical narrative(s) we have about higher education? Can they supplement or otherwise provide an alternative to our survey texts? And fourth, in what ways do these works act within an interdisciplinary space? How do these authors navigate the requirements placed upon them by two fields? 4 Carefully considering these texts will help us better understand the value of history and thinking historically. Peter Stearns, the former Vice President of the American Historical Association’s teaching division, has suggested that the value of studying history lies in centering the study of change over time (1998). The study of change in higher education binds the four monographs in my study together. Although my analysis is not rooted in the study of change, each monograph offers a unique way to understand change in higher education. Their focused nature means that even though they are not telling a story about higher education as a whole, each work illuminates some small aspect of higher education that enhances our understanding of the totality. Whether that is The Distinctive College centering small liberal arts colleges, The Academic Revolution highlighting the rise of faculty power, or Professing Literature focusing on a single department, the study of change holds the works in my study together and otherwise allows it to be more than four close readings bound together by expediency. Although, I do agree with Stearn’s assessment, history can do more than center the study of change over time. An analysis focused on close readings of these texts will help scholars read historical works more carefully and otherwise enrich our understanding of the historical scholarship on higher education. These works, and this type of close reading, represent a radical alternative to how we think about the history of higher in our own scholarship and how we construct the history of higher education for students in the field. Such an alternative is radical in two ways. First , it distances the field from the emphasis on survey texts and creates space for different, perhaps even competing, narratives within the study of higher education. And second, refocusing on monographs such as the four in my study allows us as scholars to see the complex forces at work within higher education through the microcosm represented within each text. They offer us an opportunity to combine breadth and depth in a manner that has gone unnoticed 5 in the field. It is my belief that these works complement our survey texts in ways that scholars have not adequately considered. By offering a more narrow, focused account of the history of higher education, these works illuminate specific facets of higher education in ways that are more complex than one might otherwise expect. This allows us as scholars to consider a wide variety of historical trends within higher education. Trends that might otherwise go unnoticed if we restrict our focus to survey texts. As I have said above, these four works have all demonstrated enormous staying power in a scholarly environment where many monographs go unread (Walker, Entlich, Green, Hirtle, Rockey, Schnedeker, Stevens, & Tancheya, 2010). Although there are no doubt many monographs that deserve a larger place in the history of higher education, these four offer a particularly expressive and rich platform to approach that history and otherwise push back against the dominance of survey texts. Situating My Analysis Historical survey texts occupy an uneasy place in the field of higher education studies in the United States. They distill an immense amount of history down into a manageable size, often starting with the founding of Harvard almost 400 years ago and continuing through the contemporary era. These texts provide scholars and students–many of whom are trained in the social sciences and lack coursework on the history of higher education–with valuable context that they might otherwise lack. Nonetheless, survey texts are in some ways lacking. In particular, they often lack meaningful engagement with non-white populations and narratives. The recent success of Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy (2013) is seen by scholars as a partial corrective of this phenomenon in its centering of slavery in the history of early American colleges. 6 In addition to a lack of attention on the role of non-white populations, survey texts such as Rudolph (1962) and Thelin (2004/2019) present the history of higher education in a manner that effaces the diverse uses of history and emphasizes the use of history as context. These two texts present a very specific type of historical narrative that places a lot of emphasis on the accumulation of facts, typically presented in chronological order, rather than the construction of a scholarly argument as we might see in a monograph designed to illuminate a single facet of higher education history. Here I am not looking to be critical of our survey texts. As I have said before, they perform a necessary and useful function. However, as a field we can supplement these survey texts with monographs to create a more nuanced account of the history of higher education. The Tension Between Monograph and Survey Texts The Oxford English Dictionary defines a monograph as “any non-serial publication” (OED). Chodorow (1999) defines a scholarly monograph as “a large, specialized work of scholarship that treats a narrow topic in great detail. Size is a critical characteristic because it distinguishes the monograph from the article, which has the same purpose, but is small” (para. 9). If we turn to Williams, Stevenson, Nichols, Watson, and Rowlands in their work The Role and Future of the Monograph (2008) we can find an expanded definition that defines a monograph in the following way: a scholarly work written for a specialized and academic audience (distinguishing it from a textbook, which is designed for a more general and less knowledgeable audience) which “pushes a discipline forward (p. 73). In other words, a textbook is primarily an object written for students in a classroom, while monographs are written for a scholarly community. This is not to say that a monograph cannot be used in the classroom. 7 Indeed, monographs are often used as teaching texts and it should be noted that a survey text is not quite a textbook. Survey texts live somewhere in between these two poles of monograph and textbook. They are typically written for both scholarly communities and for classroom teaching. The OED defines a survey as a work that provides a “comprehensive mental view, or (usually) literary examination, discussion, or description, of something.” The combination of comprehensive with examination and description are key to my understanding of historical survey texts. These are works that first and foremost need to be reasonably comprehensive. All authors have to make choices, and so there will inevitably be things left out, but this element of coverage is key. We can see the need for comprehensive examination in Roger Geiger’s two-part, 950-page history on American higher education (2016; 2019). Although Geiger’s text is singularly large, this need for coverage can just as easily be seen in Rudolph (1962) and Thelin (2004/2019). Missing from these works is any real analysis. Yes, surveys provide some discussion of events, but a detailed analysis is not their focus. They are emphasizing comprehensive coverage because that is what we typically expect of survey texts. If we wanted to focus on a narrow set of material we would turn to a monograph. A monograph typically deals with a narrow set of material in order to advance a specific scholarly argument. It thus changes the focus from covering everything, or at least everything the author can fit into the text, to covering only a limited set of things. Even within monographs there are those that provide a more or less focused argument. Sometimes monographs provide a detailed historical account of events in order of time, we might refer to such monographs as chronicles. Other monographs provide a more detailed analysis or say something more profound 8 about a subject, we might call these monographs critical monographs. Similarly, there is nothing that inherently prevents a survey text from advancing a scholarly argument. David Labaree accomplishes this task in A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017) by restricting his focus in a way that is similar to a more traditional monograph, while also covering a breadth of history reminiscent of a survey text. Labaree’s argument centers on the role market forces played in the diversity of US higher education institutions. He organizes his work around the idea that a lack of central control allowed educational institutions to experiment in a number of ways including the socio-economic status of the students they would serve, the types of degrees they would offer, and the physical plant they would establish for their students. For Labaree this ability to experiment ultimately drove the success of US higher education institutes. In so doing, Labaree covers a breadth of historical time and circumstances that resembles a survey text. However, he selects his historical sources with the purpose of building a specific argument. This frees him from the need to cover everything, as is often the case with more normative survey texts, and allows him to construct a historical narrative that has more in common with the monographs I am considering for this study than it does with the works of Thelin (2004/2019), Geiger (2011), and Rudolph (1962). At this point I wish to be clear that I am not attempting to create a hierarchy with critical monographs perched at the top. I think there is tremendous value in all of these scholarly works. However, it is my belief that higher education studies has placed too much emphasis and relied too heavily on survey texts (and at time chronicles). A focus on these types of works, conveys a message about what history looks like and what it can do. However, a more nuanced picture of history would understand that while there is a place for survey texts and monographs that 9 chronicle, critical monographs offer scholars a unique opportunity to approach the study of higher education in a deeply contextual way. Four Monographs The four monographs that make up my study are what I refer to above as critical monographs. They are trying to advance a bigger argument about higher education using the more restricted focus of a monograph. I look at four works that tell very different stories about the history of higher education: Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College; Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University; Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s The Academic Revolution; and Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. Each of these works suggests that the history of US higher education cannot be comprehensively understood by survey texts alone. For example, Burton Clark (1970/1992) suggests that we need to understand the evolution of small liberal arts colleges (those outside the ivy league) if we want to understand the great diversity among US colleges. In contrast, Jencks and Riesman (1968/2002) suggest that we need to understand the rise of faculty power if we want to better understand the evolution of higher education after World War 2. Gerald Graff presents an argument based in the curriculum and scholarship for an individual department that allows us to think about the evolution of higher education as a whole. Only Veysey (1965) presents a narrative that is similar to that presented in our survey texts, but Veysey suggests a key difference when he directs readers’ attention to how universities came to organize themselves through bureaucracy, which, he argues, is key to understanding the development of US higher education. Focusing on these four works will allow me to highlight how scholars have thought about history and enable me to foreground different ways of conceptualizing the history of US higher education. The Distinctive College and The Emergence of the American University both to tell 10 stories about institutional change and the power of the president. In contrast, The Academic Revolution and Professing Literature tell stories about how faculty power has influenced the structure of higher education. All four works draw on more than just history. It is my belief that by connecting with the history of higher education in this more complicated, interdisciplinary fashion, these works present history in a different way that has enabled them to remain relevant within the academy. However, the point of my research is not to valorize a previous generation of scholars and scholarship. Rather, my research attempts to demonstrate how the four works at the center of this study represent different, productive ways of constructing and conceptualizing the history of US higher education. Through these works, I hope to demonstrate that such a construction of history represents a valuable corrective to our reliance on survey texts. The Use of the Monograph at a Time of Crises It is, however, difficult to escape these works as monographs in an overall scholarly environment that has increasingly come to focus on journal articles. Monographs are simultaneously in an authoritative position as pre-eminent works of scholarship and in a tenuous position as costly, slow moving, paper texts in a digital age. In 2019, Cambridge and Oxford University Presses published a study on the use and future of the monograph (2019). The study collected 5,000 responses from faculty and other academic researchers and utilized both qualitative and quantitative data. Although the Oxford and Cambridge study is larger and more comprehensive than other studies conducted over the last 20 years (Crossick, 2105; Elliot, 2015; Williams, Stevenson, Nichols, Watknis, & Rowlands, 2008; Thompson, 2002), the results are, in many respects, similar. The future of monograph publication is typically viewed as endangered or otherwise threatened given the steady decline in library acquisition budgets and the failure to adequately incorporate a meaningful digital presence for monograph publication. However, 11 monographs are also viewed as a vitally important long-form output that allows scholars to define and demarcate areas of study. In particular, monographs are seen as a part of the research process that “enables researchers to clarify, organize, and structure their thinking and draw connections between related ideas. In HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences), a monograph does more than report on the results of research; it is part of the research ” (Cambridge & Oxford, 2019, p. 4). By allowing scholars more space to draw connections and to otherwise synthesize more complex arguments, monographs advance research in a particular manner. “Monographs are the anchors of a discipline, providing solid islands or waymarkers in an ever-expanding sea of research” (Cambridge & Oxford, 2019, p. 33). One participant in the Cambridge and Oxford study (2019) suggested that the “absence of monographs would have contributed to an even more serious fragmentation of [their] field and a lack of synthesis” (p. 33). In essence, the long form provided by monographs allows scholars to connect different aspects of research within a field in a way that articles do not. Kivistö & Pihlström (2015) suggest that writing a monograph allows an author “to make several related points about a unified subject matter” (p. 3) and to otherwise develop an argument through the use of narrative. In this reading, the use of narrative in a long- form setting is more than simply a large-scale version of a journal article; it is a specific way of approaching and thinking about scholarship. Of course, monographs do not only benefit the scholars writing them. They also benefit readers who are able to draw on long form scholarship. Although an individual scholar may use the writing of a monograph to anchor their own thinking, once a monograph is written and published it provides an anchor to the entire discipline. This anchoring is particularly valuable to 12 students who lack the deep grounding many senior scholars possess. Monographs provide examples of “sustained thought, investigation, and inquiry” (Elliot, 2015, p. 4) to students. This discussion on the monograph comes at a time in scholarly communication when reading rates are generally down; senior scholars are often outsourcing reading and the construction of literature reviews to graduate students (Cooper, 2017; Cooper & Daniel, 2017); and scholars face competing demands on their time from increased teaching loads and publication requirements related to the tenure and review process. More than ever, faculty are practicing what Renear and Palmer (2009) refer to as “strategic reading,” that is, the use of search, scan, and filtering technologies to read only those portions of a given piece of research that are most relevant to the scholar. Baveye (2014) suggests that the technologies themselves are not causing us to read less. Rather, as scholars are driven to publish more and submit ever more applications to external funding agencies, the time available for reading has shrunk, causing faculty to adopt the methods Renear and Palmer (2009) identify. As scholars, we find ourselves in an academic space where we often have less time to read monographs yet find them vitally important to the health of our fields and disciplines. As such, turning our attention to the question of which books matter to our field and why these books have lasted when other seemingly important works have faded away is an important corrective as the field of higher education studies grapples with the challenges around scholarly communication, reading, and an ever increasing list of demands placed upon faculty time. To be clear, my research is not about these three challenges. Rather, it is my belief that at a moment when scholars face these challenges, turning our attention to the place historical monographs occupy within our relatively new field offers us an opportunity to think about the value such works bring and why they have persisted in a scholarly space that tends to privilege peer-reviewed journal articles. 13 Why These Four Works? Given that part of my rationale for including each of these works rests on their persistence within the higher education studies ecosphere, it seems prudent to spend some time talking about each works’ scholarly reputation. Although the authority behind these works comes from their substantial scholarly record, the initial argument for including each work was distinctive, and relied on a combination of citations, (re)publication information, scholarly reviews, and a certain degree of academic guesswork. Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College was first published in 1970. It was most recently updated by Transaction Publishers with additional content (a new introduction) in 1992. At the time of its initial publication, it was reviewed as a work of history by contemporary historians such as Lawrence Veysey (1972) and by contemporary social scientists in both higher education (Heath, 1971) and sociology focused journals (Gaff, 1972). Since its publication, it has been cited approximately 750 times. Shortly after publishing The Distinctive College, Clark published an article (1972) that described the organizational saga (the organizing principle at work within The Distinctive College). This article has been cited 1,200 times. In 2018 alone, these two versions of Clark’s text (1970/1992; 1972) were cited more than 40 times in a diverse array of publications including The Oregon Historical Quarterly (White, 2018), the Journal of Further and Higher Education (Milian & Davidson, 2018), and the Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research (Gonzales, Kanhai, & Hall, 2018). The breadth of different reviews and the varied citations so many years after its initial publication suggests that The Distinctive College (1970/1992) has the necessary status for my study. Furthermore, the manner in which the work is both sociological and historical allows it to act as an ideal model for the type of interdisciplinary history I am focused on. 14 Lawrence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University is somewhat of an exception in my study in that it is not in its second or third edition. In 2021, its original edition (newly printed of course) is available from the University of Chicago Press. Indeed, in 2021 it still has the same preface it did at the time of the author’s death in 2004, which is – in turn – the same preface it had when it was first published in 1965.. This suggests that the work in its original form is still seen as valuable to scholars as the University of Chicago Press sees the need to continue publishing the work, yet at the same time does not feel the need to update it in any way to better account for contemporary research or changing theoretical approaches within higher education studies The lasting value of this work is further highlighted by posthumous retrospectives on Veysey’s work. The History of Education Quarterly dedicated their fall 2005 issue to presenting eight different retrospectives on Veysey and The Emergence of the American University (Loss, 2005). It is my contention that its continued use via scholarly citation (it has been cited 2,300 times, including more than 50 in 2018) and the clear impact it has had on the narrative presented by our survey texts makes it a good choice for my study. Furthermore, The Emergence of the American University presents an altogether different combination of historical and sociological research that demonstrates the diverse possibilities that exist within my conception of interdisciplinary history. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s The Academic Revolution gained distinction almost immediately upon its publication, ironically for something that it did not do, explain the turmoil that engulfed institutes of post-secondary education during the late 1960’s. Instead, The Academic Revolution sought to explain the rise of faculty power within post-secondary education. Today, it remains one of the foremost historical works on the rise of faculty power in the academy. Originally published in 1968–republished in 2002, and then again 2017–The 15 Academic Revolution has been cited almost 2,000 times. This longevity is made all the more remarkable when one considers that the predictive portions of this book, where the authors mapped out the directions in which they thought post-secondary education was headed, turned out to be incorrect. For example, Jencks and Riesman (1968/2002) failed to foresee the oncoming state and federal funding crunch. Nonetheless, in 2018 alone, The Academic Revolution was cited more than 50 times across both scholarly monographs and empirical journal articles. The case for The Academic Revolution is not as obvious as that for The Distinctive College or The Emergence of the American University. It has been cited more frequently than The Distinctive College and has been republished twice, but as I said previously, the predictive portions of the text were in many respects wrong. I have chosen to include The Academic Revolution because it continues to be a relevant historical work on faculty and the ways that faculty power has changed higher education, while also being a powerful example of what is possible when historical analysis is layered on top of a sociological theory. Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature is the most unusual monograph in my study. It is no less prestigious than the three other works, but it has had less of an impact on scholarship in higher education studies. Although it has garnered almost 1,900 citations, a cursory examination shows that many of these citations are from other monographs rather than journal articles discussing higher education. That said, Professing Literature was given a lengthy review in the Journal of Higher Education upon its publication (Robinson, 1988), as well as reviews in the Journal of American History (Tuttleton, 1988) and Contemporary Sociology (Bennet, 1988). The breadth of these reviews shows how easily the work has crossed disciplines. Furthermore, in 2008, a 20th anniversary edition was published by the University of Chicago Press and, in 2018, it was cited more than 20 times. Beyond these reviews and a second printing, Professing 16 Literature also sparked a major discussion among educators during the 1990s about the canon and the need to teach students about the controversies inherent in choosing one canon over another (Cain & Graff, 1994). Even though most of the citations for Professing Literature are not in higher education focused publications, its longevity and the manner in which it straddles the fields of higher education, history, and English literature makes it an ideal interdisciplinary example for this study. My Approach to Analysis The type of analysis I have conducted is essentially rhetorical. In some sense, rhetorical analysis is simply a way of approaching research. It does not represent a methodology in the same way that some authors would suggest case study (Hamilton & Corbett-Whittier, 2013) or ethnography (Green & Bloome, 1997) represent a methodology. Instead, much as Peshkin (1982) suggests case study is a choice of what is to be studied and a way to approach that study, my analysis views the study of rhetoric as a way to think about a particular subject matter (Given, 2008). My analysis draws in part from a tradition referred to as the Rhetoric of Inquiry (Simons, 1990). This tradition views scholarship itself as a subject for research and treats the language used therein as the focus of study. The Rhetoric of Inquiry movement began in the late 1970s, however the foundational work for the movement was presented at the 1984 University of Iowa Humanities Symposium on the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences and published in 1987 as an edited collection. This work, aptly titled The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (Nelson, Megill, & McClosky, 1987) firmly established the notion that the role language and rhetoric plays in scholarly argument is a viable subject for intellectual and scholarly inquiry. This type of work contributed to an understanding “that good scholarship involves much more than hard fact and cold logic and, moreover, that 17 what gets called fact or logic is symbolically mediated if not symbolically (i.e., socially) constructed” (Simons, 1990, p .3). I see the Rhetoric of Inquiry as a helpful tool and a point of departure for analysis of scholarly writing, but it is not everything. Indeed, there is a great deal of scholarly work that operates within a similar scope yet is not connected to the Rhetoric of Inquiry movement. For instance, Clifford Geertz thinks critically about scholarship and language in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988). Geertz examines four foundational texts in anthropology and analyzes the texts themselves and the authors who composed each text, giving each author- work a separate chapter. In so doing, Geertz’s work is both biographical and historical, although it is neither a work of history nor biography. Instead, Works and Lives focuses on the question of “how anthropologists write.” Geertz substantively engages with objections to this type of scholarship, specifically those that assert anthropological scholarship should not be treated as if it were literature. Geertz responds to this criticism with a short analysis of two different anthropological works designed to demonstrate the substantial role language plays in presenting anthropological findings. From this analysis, he concludes that scholarly work in anthropology sits somewhere between two poles; with one pole focused on communicating facts and ideas, and the other pole focused on creating the verbal structure necessary to convince the reader. The Rhetoric of Inquiry The Rhetoric of Inquiry movement draws on several earlier works that consider the role rhetoric played in advancing scholarship, particularly The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962), Metahistory (White, 1973), and The Uses of Argument (Toulmin, 1958). While the Rhetoric of Inquiry movement was influenced by these mid-twentieth century scholars, it can be seen as distinct from earlier schools of rhetorical analysis which Nelson and Megill (1986) 18 refer to as “the logic of inquiry.” For Nelson and Megill (1986), the logic of inquiry “would specify a single (if complex) methodology for all knowledge, demarcating science from nonscience” (p. 30). The key element for understanding the difference between the logic of inquiry and the Rhetoric of Inquiry rests in the use of the word “single,” as if there is an “ideal language” scholars could use in their work (Nelson, Megill, & McCloskey, 1987, p. 13). The logic of inquiry was focused on creating a way to judge all scholarly work as rhetoric using a single system. In contrast, Rhetoric of Inquiry asserts that “every field is defined by its own special devices and patterns of rhetoric–by existence theorems, arguments from invisible hands, and appeals to probabilities or archives–themselves textures of rhetoric” (Nelson et al., 1987, pp. 4-5). However, the notion that each field and discipline has its own unique set of disciplinary devices should not be seen as an assertion that Rhetoric of Inquiry simply expands the number of single objective ideals (i.e., one for each field). This would simply be an expansion of the logic of inquiry. Rather, Rhetoric of Inquiry suggests a multiplicity of avenues and routes for the analysis of scholarship, and works to understand the role language plays across a multiplicity of disciplines and fields. The Rhetoric of Inquiry seeks “to merge the field of study with the practices studied. ‘Rhetoric’ covers at once what is communicated, how it is communicated, what happens when it is communicated, how to communicate better, and what communication is in general” (Nelson et al., 1987, p.16). Scholars working within this mode of analysis came to the realization that it was no longer possible to be a philosopher, historian, or scientist and project a clear or unambiguously neutral picture of your research in what Joseph Gusfield (1976) has referred to as “a style of non-style.” And so, work done within the Rhetoric of Inquiry movement begins with an assumption that all scholarship—be it quantitative or qualitative, written for the sciences or 19 the humanities—is essentially designed to persuade. Rhetoric of Inquiry directs our attention to the role rhetoric, style, language, and organization has played in projecting and establishing knowledge and advocating for a scholarly position. For example, the work of Charles Bazerman (1987) examines the role organization plays in social science research by focusing on the impact the APA style guide has had on empirical research. Bazerman (1987) notes: The assignment of the information to a fixed place in a fixed format lessens the likelihood that researchers will consciously consider the exact significance of such information, whether it and other possible information should be included, and exactly how this information should be placed in the structure of the article. (p.127) Rhetoric of Inquiry thus established an approach to analysis that gave scholars permission to consider the work other scholars were doing and to otherwise think critically about a wide variety of aspects within that scholarship. Style in Academic Writing The Rhetoric of Inquiry makes it clear that we can and should consider style when examining scholarship. Guiding my analysis in this respect is Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing (2012). Sword presents common features of stylish writing and identifies well respected authors’ in different fields to compile a list of common stylish features. This allows her to more meaningfully construct a data set of high-quality academic prose that represents each field she examines. The manner in which she identifies common, but not proscriptive, elements of stylish prose made her work ideal for my study. Two key features of Helen Sword’s (2012) work make it an ideal companion for my study. First, a portion of the data she used to conduct her study is drawn from higher education scholarship. Although Sword’s work is predicated on a variety of disciplines and fields, the fact 20 that she considered scholarship in higher education means that her criticisms and suggestions for scholarship are in many ways directed at and designed with higher education scholarship in mind. Second, Sword constructs her elements of stylish writing based upon key features that may (emphasis mine) be present within each of her works including, but not limited to organizational structure, the presence or lack of jargon, scholarly voice, and the use of carefully crafted sentences. Rather than giving scholars a litany of prescriptive elements to follow, Sword’s common features of stylish writing allows her to assemble a series of common yet diverse elements that writers make use of. These common elements will give my study a series of elements to consider without forcing me to consider specific elements that do not apply to all four monographs. In essence, Sword acknowledges that not all high-quality academic prose is the same, and that what makes one work stylish may differ from what makes another work stylish. In fact, she consciously distances herself from any attempt to peddle a generic, one-size- fits-all approach and instead acknowledges that “readers [should] adopt whatever stylistic strategies best suit their own skin” (p. viii). In spite of its affordances, there is one way in which Sword’s (2012) work is problematic for my study. Specifically, she draws all of her data from, and thereby focuses her study on, journal articles. It is my belief that her focus on journal articles instead of monographs does not present an impediment to my research. Sword suggests that the most important element of stylish writing “is self-determination: the stylish writer’s deeply held belief that academic writing, like academic thought, should not be constrained by the boundaries of convention” (p. 11). And so, in this vein, it seems more than appropriate to apply Sword’s research and her notion that quality prose comes in all shapes and styles to my own study. 21 Historiography My focus on rhetoric in these four works is also a focus on historiography. While historiography can refer to the actual body of literature for a given history—higher education or the gilded age for example—it can also refer more broadly to questions about the study of history as an act (Spalding & Parker, 2007). My research connects with both meanings of historiography. For instance, it connects with the body of literature that makes up the historiography of higher education as it tries to understand the way these four works connect with and differ from our survey texts. However, my research also connects with questions about the act of studying history as it grapples with how these four scholars have constructed their histories and dealt with questions of importance to other historians, such as the portrayal of time. Three major works dealing with questions about the study of history guide my thinking in this regard: Hegel’s Reason in History (1995) 4; Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988); and Appleby, Hunt, & Jacob’s Telling the Truth About History (1994). Including Hegel’s (1995) work allows me to effectively consider the transition from history as an objective study to a subjective activity. This pairs well with Peter Novick’s (1988) work on the ways in which US historians have approached the question of objectivity. The work of Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob (1994) provides a useful counterpoint as they challenge the very notion of a coherent history and advance the idea that history is no longer, and should not be, value free. Hegel’s Reason in History (1995) was one of the first works to consider matters of historiography. However, Hegel conceptualized and understood history in a way that is very different from how many historians think today. The single largest difference stems from the 4 Hegel’s Reason in History was published in 1837. I am citing the particular translation I have used, hence the modern date attached to the citation. 22 manner in which Hegel viewed history as a natural progression of human existence where the nation state became more complete and true. For Hegel, the act of constructing a history was about chronicling the progress humans (he would say man) had made towards this state of complete and true. This created a clear element of directionality in the telling of history. Although Hegel’s focus on the complete and true nation state would not be central for other historians, the notion of history as a chronicle of progress would occupy historians throughout the 19th well into the 20th century (Novick, 1988). Indeed, in some ways we can still see this notion of progress today, as in Geiger’s “Ten Generations” (2011) article, where the dominant narrative is one where US higher education progresses from educating only a wealthy elite to mass and universal higher education. Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988) is organized as a series of alternating time periods when the historical field claimed and then denied the possibility of historical objectivity. This presents an example of an historical work that is not constructed as a linear progression, but rather as a pendulum and, in turn, suggested that my analysis should consider how the monographs in my study have organized themselves and how they portray historical time. This should not be taken to infer that presenting material in a non-linear fashion is inherently superior. As scholars, we should always choose the most appropriate method. Rather, I am suggesting that considering other ways of presenting historical time can open up a narrative in new and interesting ways. Constructing his history as a pendulum allowed Novick to deal with the idea that historians would converge on a single objective truth in a nuanced way. For example, Novick suggests that, in the years after World War 2, historians coalesced around an “amiable but slightly complacent consensus” (p. 320). However, by the 1970’s this consensus had broken down and historians 23 were again (emphasis mine) polarized on the question of objectivity as they became fragmented into ever smaller disciplines and sub-disciplines. Novick (1988) suggests that notions of objectivity could no longer be trusted: “if everyone was lying, if there was no one who could be trusted, why not simply believe whatever one found congenial and convenient?” (p. 417). This attitude should not imply that historians were no longer worried about questions of objectivity, but rather that everyone had accepted that there was no single objective history. A grand narrative, constructed brick-by-brick, was no longer possible and historians had instead turned to their smaller enclaves and sub-disciplines where agreement was more plausible. In essence, historians had shrunk the debate down to a size and scope where they could, perhaps, agree on a single history, not because they were attached to objectivity, but because shrinking it down in this way seemed like the only possible way to continue with their work. Appleby, Hunt, & Jacob’s Telling the Truth About History (1994) further develops Novick’s (1988) narrative related to objectivity. For these three authors, history transitioned from a concept that was neutral, value free, objective, and scientific in the 19th century through a model of historical progress based on models and laws of human development, and arrived at a concept of history that is skeptical about any model of objective knowledge and the narrative of American greatness. The brick-by-brick conceptualization of history is thus no longer tenable, and the notion that historians are “specialized storytellers whose claims to recover the past as it actually happened belong to the smoke screen of scientific pretentions” (Appleby et al., 245). Closely tied to the authors’ thoughts on historical progress is their notion about connecting with the past to illuminate present problems. For some historians, this runs dangerously close to presentism (Hunt, 2002)—interpreting past events through present values—but for these three authors, it is about “mak[ing] connections with the past in order to illuminate the problems of the 24 present and the potential of the future” (Appleby et al., 9). Within this interpretation of historical work, history can and should connect scholars to contemporary problems and the issues that most concern us. However, this must be done in a way that uses and meaningfully engages history without merely interpreting the past using contemporary mores. What Does This Analysis Really Look Like? As I said earlier, the type of analysis I conduct is primarily rhetorical. Although I do wrestle with the individual arguments these scholars advance, my focus is on how these four monographs use history to illuminate the study of higher education. It is my belief that these four works demonstrate the value history brings to higher education studies. They serve as exemplars of interdisciplinary history and otherwise show that expanding the way we understand and interact with historical thought beyond survey texts represents an unrealized opportunity for the field. Each monograph is the focus of a single chapter and within each chapter my analysis focuses on several common elements that allow me to better illuminate what a supplement to our survey texts might look like and why it is of value. I divide each chapter into four different sections. Each section represents a distinct portion of my analysis and otherwise acts to organize my work. First, what is the narrative trajectory of each work? What scholarly argument does each text advance and what does that argument illuminate? By laying this narrative groundwork, I allow the reader to better understand my analysis and ensure that the unfamiliar reader is able to understand my research. Second, what thematic element is at work in each of these monographs and how does that element operate within the framework of the text? Third, in what ways do these works interact with the dominant narrative(s) we have about higher education? How are they organized and can they supplement the stories told in our survey texts? And fourth, 25 in what ways do these works act within an interdisciplinary space? How do the authors navigate the requirements placed upon them by two fields, e.g. history and sociology for Clark (1970/1992) or history and literature for Graff (1988/2008). 26 REFERENCES 27 REFERENCES Appleby, J., Hunt, L., & Jacob, M. (1994). Telling the truth about history. New York, NY: Baveye, P. C. (2014). Learned publishing: Who still has time to read? Learned Norton & Company. Publishing, 27, 1, 48-51. Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. In Neslon, Megill, & McCloskey (eds.) The Rhetoric of Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, (pp. 125-144). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bennet, J. R. (1988, July). Professing literature: An institutional history. [Review of the book Professing literature: An institutional history, by Gerald Graff]. Contemporary Sociology, 17, 4, 526-527. Bray, N. J. & Major, C. H. (2011). 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Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thompson, J. W. (2002). The death of the scholarly monograph in the humanities? Citation patterns in literary scholarship. Libri, 52, 3, 121-136. Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tuttleton, J. W. (1988, March). Professing Literature: An institutional history. [Review of the book Professing Literature: An institutional history, by Gerald Graff]. The Journal of American History, 74, 4, 1344. Veysey, L. R. (1965). The Emergence of the American University. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Walker, K., Entlich, R., Green, G., Hirtle, P., Rockey, S., Schnedeker, D., Stevens, P., & Tancheya, K. (2010). Report of the Collection Development Executive Committee Task Force on Print Collection Usage, Cornell University Library. White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The historical imagination in 19th-century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, M. (2018). The black studies controversy at Reed College, 1968-1970. The Oregon Historical Quarterly, 119, 1, 6-37. Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and Ivy. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. Williams, P., Stevenson, I., Nichols, D., Watknis, A., & Rowlands, I. (2008). The role and future of the monograph in arts and humanities research. Aslib Proceedings, 61, 1, 67-82. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. 32 CHAPTER 2: BURTON CLARK AND THE DISTINCTIVE COLLEGE A “Second Story” of our Liberal Arts Colleges For many students and scholars of higher education, our most prominent and enduring works of history are survey texts that have attempted to reconstruct the entirety of US higher education, from the founding of Harvard until the present. However, there is a second story to be told if we turn our attention away from these survey texts and towards the more narrowly focused historical narratives scholars have constructed. One such work is Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College. Clark provides an alternative to these survey texts and otherwise tells a story that is different in both narrative and construction. Clark focuses on just three prestigious liberal arts colleges that innovated by organizing themselves around what Clark terms an organizational, or institutional saga. Although the organizational saga has been one of the primary ways in which higher education scholars have engaged with this work, The Distinctive College provides an equally rich analysis if one considers the work as history. This is not to say that The Distinctive College should be ignored as a work of social science. Even within my analysis, coming to terms with The Distinctive College as social science is crucial. Instead, it must be understood as both history and sociology. My analysis of The Distinctive College focuses on what these three institutions can tell us about changes in higher education. At first glance these institutions don’t contribute very much to our understanding of higher education, past or present. Liberal arts colleges tend not to play a substantive role when we think about change in higher education, and their individual distinction would seem to separate them even further from our studies about change across higher education. However, as my analysis of Clark’s narrative will make clear, these distinctive 33 institutions really do contribute to our understanding of change in higher education. In particular, Clark directs us to the role university presidents play in initiating change and to the difficulty inherent in sustaining change in an institutional setting where a president has only a limited tenure. In order to give my analysis structure, I will organize my discussion along four broad themes. First, I will look at the story Clark tells about each of these colleges with a particular eye to the role the president plays in establishing an organizational saga. Second, I will consider how the organizational saga comes to take hold at an institution: how does a campus come to define itself in terms of institutional mission and how does that become a saga? Third, I will demonstrate how The Distinctive College represents an alternative and a supplement to our historical survey texts. And fourth, I will grapple with the conflict inherent in Clark’s work as one of both history and sociology. Running throughout my analysis is a fundamental belief that the quality of the writing scholars use matters. As such, I make every attempt to animate my analysis of The Distinctive College with regular and detailed quotations from Clark’s text. Organizational Belief and the Power of the President All scholarly work fundamentally advances an argument of some sort. Before analyzing The Distinctive College in a more nuanced manner, it is necessary to come to grips with the specific scholarly argument Clark is advancing. As a work of history what historical narrative is he telling? As a work of sociology what theory is he developing? Clark’s historical narrative is essentially the story behind the creation of three colleges. Not necessarily their creation as institutions, but rather the development of their institutional culture: for Antioch it is a story of radical change in the face of impending closure; for Reed this is a story of ethos at the time of its founding; and for Swarthmore it is a story of transformation 34 from a low-quality institution into a high-quality one. Clark identifies in each individual narrative a myth or saga that holds the institution together. At Antioch this ethos is a combination of the work-study program and the authority given over to the student body. At Reed this is about the establishment of the college as a space for intellectual pursuits free from athletics and many of the other dominant trends in higher education. At Swarthmore this is about the expansion of the honors college and the gradual removal of the joe-college, pass-man student archetype in favor of students who were academically serious. Clark says this about the organizational saga established at Swarthmore: Whatever the sources and forms of future change and durability, the college in the early sixties was a full-fledged case of an organization that had become a saga. Somewhat quieter in daily tone than Antioch or Reed, somewhat less stimulated by direct and open conflict, this social institution had a strong collective sense of having an eminent, unique history and a noteworthy present character. This feeling added considerable emotional meaning to the lives of many participants. In it, as in the first two colleges, we see the blending of organizational, group, and individual identities that occurs when a college has first sought and then achieved, through several decades of work, a distinctive character and a particular hold on social esteem. (p. 230) For all three colleges Clark’s argument rests on this notion of the organizational saga as it comes to define the institution: what it is, what it cares about, and why it all matters. Not all institutions have a saga, but for Clark those institutions that remain distinctive in the face of the normalizing forces within higher education may very well have an organizational saga that allows them to persevere and remain otherwise different. 35 The Distinctive College was written at a time when Clark Kerr’s multiversity (1963) was gaining traction as a concept and such institutions were coming to dominate the higher education landscape. From a historical perspective The Distinctive College was telling a narrative of how three very different institutions had come to be and remained viable at a time when higher education institutions were trending toward large multi-purpose universities. Although Clark’s sociological argument draws on the same material and utilizes the same historical narrative, the theory he advances is about the organizational saga. Specifically, what subset of factors can create the sense of shared mission necessary to sustain a divergent institution in the face of adversity? Clark provides us with this description of the main features present in the organizational saga: First, believers collect in the faculty and gain the power to protect their cherished ideals and practices. Second, features of the curriculum, determining everyday behavior, reflect and express the saga. Third, a social base of external believers provides resources, including moral support, and interests a certain kind of student in the college. Fourth, the students develop a strong subculture that significantly incorporates the central idea of the college. Fifth, the saga itself–as ideology, self-image, and public image–has forceful momentum (p. 246). Noticeably absent from this description is the president. A forceful individual who as Clark makes clear in the body of his study plays an outsized role in these three colleges. Clark clarifies this several sentences later when he says “a single leader, a college president, can initiate change, but the idea does not go far unless ranking and powerful members of the faculty swing into line and remain committed while the initiator is present and especially after he is gone” (p. 246). Although the long-term viability of an organizational saga rests in the hands of the five features 36 Clark describes above, the president plays an outsized role as an instigator of change. The president is the necessary catalyst for the organizational saga, but after he is gone the presence of these five elements establishes its viability. Up to this point I have said quite a lot about The Distinctive College in general, but very little about it more specifically. What exactly does the creation of institutional culture at these three colleges entail, and why is that story compelling almost five decades later? The somewhat simplistic answer to this question is that good scholarship, well executed with a certain amount of what Helen Sword (2012) calls “style and substance” will often remain relevant far longer than we might first expect. The more complicated answer, which will occupy a great portion of my focus in this chapter, requires that I better ground the reader in Clark’s argument and narrative. Within this grounding I will consider the narrative trajectory of each of these three colleges and Clark’s overall theory about institutional change at these institutions. The Utopian Vision at Antioch Clark begins his analysis with Antioch. He organizes this analysis into three sections we can loosely think of as early, middle, and late periods. He devotes the first half of the text in his early chapter to taking the reader from the founding of Antioch in 1853 up through the early 20th century. At this point, midway through the first chapter, Clark begins his analysis with the entrance of Arthur E. Morgan–first as a trustee, and then shortly thereafter as president–at a time when Antioch was in crises with a rapidly declining enrollment and even worse finances. Morgan initiates a series of changes that eventually come to represent the Antioch way. The main change he implements is a work study program whereby students will spend approximately half their time on campus in class, and the other half of their time off campus engaged in meaningful work experience. Morgan described this process as “the securing of a more rounded 37 development through alternation of study and experience” (p. 22). Morgan’s intention was to revolutionize general education at the collegiate level, and he set about creating this new idea for general education by recruiting new trustees and new faculty who would be sympathetic to his ideals. One of the most important aspects of Morgan’s leadership was not his specific program of work and study–although to be clear without that specific course we would no doubt be having a very different conversation about Antioch–but instead about the drive of the leader to enact their envisioned change. Focusing on Morgan’s time at Antioch, Clark asks the following question: “How is the man of unusual vision and force distinguished? We can look for evidence in consistency of purpose over a long period of time. We can find indications in persistent action: the man who believes his own words works long and hard to fulfill them. We can also see suggestions of this force and vision in disappointment. The gap between the ideas of the utopian leader and the acts that follow is predictably large, for followers exhibit the weaknesses of mortals, compromise the vision, and hence fail the leader (p. 20). The role of the president in establishing an organizational saga is thus one of vision and purpose enacted over time. While specific policies are no doubt an important part of enacting change, at Antioch it is the leader as a visionary utopian that drives the creation of an institutional saga. A sense of purpose drives an individual leader to persist over time despite the predictable gap between the ideals he espouses and the ways in which others enact those ideals. Clark’s pairing of “the utopian leader” as a description of Morgan and “the weakness of mortals” as a description of the other actors at Antioch is telling. Although Utopian does not imbue Morgan with god-like powers for a matched pairing with the “weakness of mortals,” it does present us with an image of the type of leader necessary to initiate an organizational saga. Specifically, the 38 leader must have an ideal in his mind that, while impossible to realize due to the weakness of mortals, he or she relentlessly pursues. The middle period of Clark’s analysis begins with the departure of Morgan as president. For Clark the departure of the strong president who began this process signals a shift in the quality of institutional change. The shift away from the strong founding president allows an idea advanced by a single powerful president to become embodied by the institution. These changes begin to take on the character of an organizational saga as faculty, students, and staff adopt the organization’s ethos. Morgan’s departure allows some aspects of the institution to change. Indeed, even the alternation between work and study changes, but these are changes within the system. They begin from an assumption that the work-study arrangement has value. One noteworthy change is that a great deal of authority comes to be vested in students and student government. This element of student control develops out of the existing laissez faire attitude inherent in having students spend half of their time off campus pursuing work. This results in an extremely permissive set of policies around student conduct, and a powerful student council able to direct a great deal of activity on campus. Similarly, the more extreme aspects of student politics on campus were viewed by the administration as an extension of student general education through the prism of American Democracy and student control. Clark contrasts student government at Antioch with student government at more typical colleges and universities by noting that “because student participation was not imposed from the top, it did not have the fragility of a hothouse plant. The ideals and sentiments of the administration and faculty provided leeway and some impulse, and the students took it from there” (p. 56). A hothouse plant is simultaneously a living organism and an incredibly delicate plant raised in a controlled environment that is unable to survive when exposed to the natural elements. Here Clark is 39 asserting that the tradition of student government at Antioch was anything but delicate, and that while student government could flourish at any college or university, only at Antioch could it be allowed to flourish under its own power without the watchful eye of a ‘gardener’ in the form of the faculty and administration. Yes, faculty and administration provided the initial impulse, but as Clark observes “the students took it from there.” The late period of Clark’s analysis begins in approximately 1945 with the end of World War 2. This final chapter places the work-study arrangement in context of the changes and forces playing out in higher education between 1945 and the mid 1960’s, including the increased emphasis on graduate school, the growing importance of research, and the tendency to employ faculty with PhD’s obtained at research universities. This time period is one of tension for Antioch as many of the forces effecting higher education run counter to the work-study concept in one way or another. Although these forces do push Antioch away from the work-study concept and drive a number of changes that happen after World War 2, the college nonetheless reaffirms their commitment to the work-study ideal in 1961 and explicitly defines the period of off-campus education as a core part of the college’s character. The Lonely Venture at Reed Clark turns his attention to Reed in the second overall section of The Distinctive College. Again, he organizes his analysis into three chapters that can be understood as early, middle, and late. Unlike at Antioch where the first chapter runs quickly through the early history of the institution, the first chapter on Reed looks quite carefully at the founding of the College. The analysis begins in 1910 with a bequest from the Reed family and the hiring of William T. Foster for “the establishment of an institution for higher learning [in Oregon]” (p. 93). Foster saw Reed College as a place of academic rigor free from the extraneous requirements placed on institutions 40 such as Yale and Harvard including participation in intercollegiate athletics and support for fraternities and sororities. Beyond simply freeing Reed from these requirements, Foster also implemented a series of practices that established Reed as a place of academic distinction. First, he was selective in terms of admitting students. No students were admitted conditionally. That is to say, he either accepted students because they were sufficiently qualified, or he did not accept them at all. He had all potential students take an examination, and he then personally interviewed all students to ensure that they were properly motivated. Second, Foster implemented a curriculum that ensured classes were sufficiently challenging. This was done by not publishing grades, and also by requiring all students to complete a junior qualifying exam, a senior thesis, and an oral defense. Taken together these features ensured that Reed college made no room for the gentleman’s C or the pass-man, and otherwise ensured that the college was a place of academic rigor. The refusal to publish grades was seen by many as a key component of the curriculum and an integral part of the saga at Reed. The practice of recording course grades but not reporting them to the student, perhaps a simple and innocent difference in the eyes of outsiders, became weighted with hoary significance. For the faculty not to speak to students in a language of grades, for the college not to issue a report card, for the student not to know his letter grades became a bold and lonely venture to reduce the caring for grades. (p. 130) Two elements of Clark’s language bear further scrutiny here. First, “hoary significance” and second, “bold and lonely venture.” Hoary significance suggests that the practice of not reporting grades is an ancient and time-honored tradition. At the time of Clark’s writing Reed was less than 60 years old. Nonetheless, the practice of not reporting grades was seen and understood as part of ancient tradition, and thus one which was a key component of the institution. Clark then 41 pairs this ancient tradition when the notion that the practice represents “a bold and lonely venture.” Thus, not sharing of grades is both a time-honored ancient tradition and such a break from practice at other institutions that Reed sees itself as a singular bold explorer within higher education. The early section of Clark’s analysis ends with the death of Reed college’s second president, Richard F. Scholz. Scholz was president from 1921-1924. During these three years he reorganized the administration and replaced most of the faculty Foster had hired with faculty who were committed to the ideal of academic rigor and focused on teaching undergraduate students. Perhaps the single largest reform during the Scholz administration was the creation of a coherent sequence of first and second year courses based in the humanities. This sequence of courses would persist in some manner through the 1960’s. The death of Scholz in 1924 signals the transition into the middle period of Clark’s analysis. At this stage the college moved into a model of faculty control based on senior professors exercising outsized authority, an explicit lack of associate professors, and a substantial body of untenured assistant professors. Even this structure was seen as reflecting academic rigor in that it forced faculty to take the necessary steps to become a full professor or to otherwise leave having failed to secure tenure. Faculty control further served to strengthen the sequence of first and second year courses in the humanities, the non-publication of grades, and the more stringent requirements of a junior qualifying exam and senior thesis. For faculty and students, the continued strength of these policies was part of what made Reed an academically serious place and otherwise served to reinforce the notion it was different from other institutions. Faculty control was not limited to curriculum: 42 the influence of faculty in policymaking very considerably exceeded that which obtained in other colleges of average and above-average rank. When compared with the trustee dominance and presidential power usually found in colleges of below-average quality, the structure of authority at Reed was like the other side of the moon. (p. 122) Although Clark tells us that faculty control at Reed exceeded that at other colleges, his pairing of Reed with below-average colleges and his use of the phrase “other side of the moon” is, in fact, what drives this point home. Without this stark contrast the reader would not fully understand just how different faculty control at Reed was from other institutions. Ironically, the high degree of faculty control created an environment of rule-lessness for students in areas outside of academic matters. Control was initially devolved to committees of students and faculty. However, participation on these committees represented a serious time commitment–and thus a turn away from academic rigor–and so few faculty were interested in maintaining order in this way. Over time the entire system became even more removed from faculty control, and this dichotomy came to be seen as the norm at Reed where faculty would exercise an extreme degree of control over the academic portion of the college, and little to no control over the social portion of the college. As was the case at Antioch, 1945 represents a transition into the late period at Reed. In this period Reed faces many of the same forces and challenges as Antioch: professionalization of the faculty, an emphasis on preparing for graduate school, the dominance of research over teaching, and an increased focus on science and professional education. In some ways Reed stayed the same in response to these forces and in other ways it changed. Reed continued to be a serious academic place that emphasized the senior thesis and junior qualifying exam. However, far fewer students were taking degrees in history, the social sciences, and the humanities, and far 43 more students were taking degrees in mathematics and the natural sciences. With the rise of mathematics and the natural sciences came a rise in power of those faculty and a change in focus towards research. Before this change teaching was undoubtedly the focus at Reed. However, by the 1960’s teaching would have to compete with research for faculty time. Although we can see these forces pushing Reed college away from its ideals in some ways, overall Clark presents an image of the college that remains firmly committed to its status as an institution focused on academically serious students. Social Esteem at Swarthmore As was the case with analysis of Antioch and Reed, Clark begins his analysis of Swarthmore with a brief history of the early college. He also spends a considerable portion of the text on the college’s attempt to minimize college football in the early 1900’s. Unusually within the Distinctive College, this early history occupies its own complete chapter. Thus, Clark’s analysis of Swarthmore truly begins in his second chapter with the arrival of Frank Aydelotte as president in 1920. Aydelotte brought with him a specific idea about the role of the honors curriculum and a desire to raise admissions standards. Few colleges in general, and none of these three colleges in particular, seek to lower admissions standards. However, Aydelotte brought to this endeavor an idea that was unusual in 1922: open, competitive scholarships conceived of in the same vein as Rhodes scholarships. These scholarships allowed Aydelotte to attract an improved and more geographically diverse student body than would have otherwise been the case. Aydelotte paired this increase in the quality of the student body with a further decrease in the prominence of college football, and a limiting of the social life on campus, particularly as it concerned fraternities, sororities, and secret societies which he saw as undemocratic in character. It is important to stress that these changes were not truly revolutionary. Rather, all were taking 44 place in small increments over a number of years. They strengthened over time and in 1940 when Aydelotte left Swarthmore the proportion of students recruited from the immediate area had decreased by half, forty percent of all students were graduating in the honors program, and the honors catalog had increased from two pages in 1922 to over fifteen pages. Furthermore, moneymaking football was a thing of the past, having been replaced by participation in intercollegiate sports within the small college leagues, and invitations to join exclusive societies were often refused by a more serious student body who also viewed them as undemocratic. Aydelotte’s departure in 1940 marks Clark’s transition into his final, late period chapter. Despite this slightly earlier transition as compared to Antioch and Reed, the focus remains similar to the other late period chapters. Neither Aydelotte’s departure nor the forces creating multiversities (Kerr, 1963) had a strong effect on Swarthmore. Faculty were supportive and invested in the honors principle. Although the post-war years saw an increase in the number of faculty holding PhDs, this increase did not interfere with teaching students in the small seminars that made up the bulk of the honors program. The focus on preparation for graduate school that was so powerful at Reed after 1945, was not as strongly felt at Swarthmore, and the honors curriculum stayed relatively stable, as did the percentage of students on the honors track. Likewise, intercollegiate sports maintained its place in the extra-curriculum. The dominant trend among students was for serious study be it in the science lab or the humanities seminar—honors or non-honors. The continued ability to attract serious academically inclined students was for Clark strong evidence that the changes initiated by Aydelotte had firmly taken hold at Swarthmore. Swarthmore’s transition from small regional Quaker college to an honors college embodying an organizational saga is altogether smoother and less contentious than anything 45 undergone at Reed or Antioch, and in some ways Clark’s use of language mirrors this. We see neither the “weakness of mortals” at Antioch nor the “bold and lonely venture” at Reed. Instead, the less contentious atmosphere at Swarthmore is mirrored in similarly less contentious text. Clark concludes his discussion of Swarthmore with the same passage that I used to begin my discussion of The Distinctive College: Whatever the sources and forms of future change and durability, the college in the early sixties was a full-fledged case of an organization that had become a saga. Somewhat quieter in daily tone than Antioch or Reed, somewhat less stimulated by direction and open conflict, this social institution had a strong collective sense of having an eminent, unique history and a noteworthy present character. This feeling added considerable emotional meaning to the lives of many participants. In it, as in the first two colleges, we see the blending of organization, group, and individual identities that occurs when a college has first sought and then achieved, through several decades of work, a distinctive character and a particular hold on social esteem. (p. 230) Although Clark’s description of Swarthmore lacks the conflict and powerful metaphors that animate his earlier prose on Antioch and Reed, this passage does not lack for clear tone and interesting language. Swarthmore is presented as an institution with an “eminent, unique history.” Here the use of the word eminent suggests a degree of status that might not otherwise have been applied to Swarthmore. Yes, it was clearly a prestigious institution with an excellent reputation for educating undergraduates, but one must again remember that The Distinctive College was written at a time when Clark Kerr’s notion of the multiversity (1963) was taking hold. Although Swarthmore was undoubtably unique, eminent is a bold, yet somewhat understated, choice of words. 46 Allegiance and Emotion in the Organizational Saga Clark’s purpose in constructing these three narratives of institutional history is not simply to come to terms with that history, nor is it to document the change process that was undertaken. Rather, the purpose of this narrative is to understand how the changes took hold and became a lasting, even defining part of the institutional culture at each of these colleges. Thinking about institutional change in this manner shifts the focus of these narratives and directs the reader’s attention to the later history of each college, not when the change was happening, but when the institution remained steadfast in the face of a new higher education landscape. The institutional saga becomes a way to bind the college together in a way that ensures the survival and preservation of institutional mission in a meaningful fashion. It preserves the Swarthmore, Reed, or Antioch way. Clark does not propose a list of factors present in an organizational saga that a scholar can check off one-by-one. However, a number of such factors make themselves clear, most notably the charismatic leader who has a vision about what the college should or needs to be and the selection of faculty that will sustain this organizational ethos after the president leaves. What Clark does supply readers with is an expansive explanation about the final state of the organizational saga that makes some of these elements explicit: The most important characteristic and consequence of an institutional saga is the capturing of allegiance, the committing of staff to the institution. Emotion is invested to the point where many participants significantly define themselves by the central theme of the organization. . . . Men behave as if they knew a beautiful secret that no one outside the lucky few could ever share. An organizational saga turns an organization into a community, even a cult (p. 235). 47 The first section of Clark’s description presents the broad requirements: the committing of staff to the institution. However, for Clark it is not only about committing to an institution. Instead, the institutional saga represents a “capturing of allegiance” that causes participants to “define themselves by the central theme of the organization.” Clarks draws on a military facing term (capture) to describe the process the distinctive organization goes through to obtain commitment. Such a commitment exceeds what we might otherwise expect: their identity as part of the organization – part of the saga – comes to play an outsized role in their sense of self. Clark then describes the distinctive organization as “a beautiful secret” that only those inside the organization are aware of thereby turning the organization “into a community, even a cult.” The sense of distinctiveness the participants gain by participation in the “beautiful secret” engenders a devotion that might be interpreted as fanatical, hence Clark’s use of the work cult. The above quotation tells us a lot about the response evoked by the organization saga, but not a lot about getting there. We can turn to Clark’s final paragraph in his discussion of Antioch college to better understand the process of getting to an organizational saga. What was later to become the legend was initiated at a time of deep crises by a bold, determined president. Bringing new purpose to an old institution, he struck hard at every component of the campus to shape an appropriate organizational tool . . . soon a strong Antioch group, full of belief that the college had special value, was willing to labor hard in its behalf and was accumulating the power to defend the new character that they continued to develop. A strong sense of community, emerged, along with the marked self-consciousness of a unique social institution and much pride in the accomplishments of several decades of sustained effort. The original innovating purpose had become an embracing and emotional account of what the group had done in past struggles and why, 48 despite its small size, it had a valuable, unique place in the educational world and in the larger society (pp. 87-88). This second quotation gives us the principle elements Clark identifies in the creation of an organizational saga that begins with a determined president with a clear sense of organizational purpose. Clark suggests that this president is responsible for shaping the institution into an “organizational tool.” This metaphor is clearly intended to pair with the following sentence when Clark says that the faculty do the hard labor to institutionalize these changes brought about by the president. The work the faculty does leads to an emerging sense of community that involves the entire campus and otherwise creates the “marked self-consciousness.” In this instance, self- consciousness implies an awareness of self that draws students into the saga. However, the addition of the word “marked” suggests that we should consider this self-awareness with some skepticism as there may be a degree of artifice in the performance of the students. They want to be a part of the saga, and so they come to identify with the “embracing and emotional account.” Nonetheless, when these three elements come into place starting with a determined president, followed up by faculty who do the hard labor of institutionalizing the president’s changes, and concluding with a student body who have selected the college and come to identify with the distinctive qualities it presents, the organizational saga has taken hold and otherwise established the community (or cult) Clark identifies in the previous passage. At Antioch the changes instituted by Morgan solidify under faculty and student control. However, for Clark this does not yet represent an organizational saga. The presence of a saga becomes clear only after World War 2 when the higher education landscape changes and Antioch manages to preserve those elements that make it distinctive: strong faculty and student control, the work-study concept, and the laissez-faire attitude to student conduct on campus. 49 In many ways Clark’s narrative at Reed mirrors the one he presents for Antioch. The changes instituted by Foster and Scholz solidify after Scholz’s death with the rise of faculty control at the college. Again, this does not mark the establishment of an organizational saga, but merely a strengthening of earlier changes. The saga becomes clear after World War 2 when these changes are preserved as Reed maintains its reputation as a serious academic place and continues its practice of requiring junior qualifying exams and a senior thesis for all students. Clark’s narrative at Swarthmore diverges from this pattern of solidification under faculty control in a number of ways. Most notably Aydelotte stays on at Swarthmore for so long that there is no clear opportunity for a new president or new administrative structure to take hold and strengthen his changes. Furthermore, the changes at Swarthmore were less iterative and more evolutionary as Aydelotte gradually increased the institutional focus on the honors program. Nonetheless, the organizational saga becomes clear in Clark’s late period when Aydelotte leaves the college and it maintains the honors program. Leaving the Survey Behind A conventional telling of the history of higher education places a major watershed in the late 19th century coinciding with the creation of research universities (Thelin, 2004/2019; Veysey, 1965), and another major watershed after World War 2, coinciding with the influx of students as a result of the GI Bill and the associated dominance of large public universities (Jencks & Riesman, 1968/2002; Kerr, 1963). Within this conventional telling, the years between these two watersheds (roughly 1900-1940) are ones of expansion in higher education, but the period is not one of major change. Instead, it is characterized by differentiation as student numbers rise and different forms of higher education take shape to meet the needs of new student demographics such as teachers colleges and urban universities (Geiger, 2011). Clark’s narrative 50 runs contrary to this conventional telling in several different ways. First the way he presents his history is different than what we see our more normative histories such as Geiger (2011) and Thelin (2004/2019). Second, he successfully blends the dominant narrative I outline above with the individual stories of these 3 colleges. The combination of a different presentation of history and the intersection with our dominant narrative(s) allows The Distinctive College to act as a powerful supplement to our historical survey texts. Organizing History For Clark the years around 1920 are an important watershed for all three institutions. The transformation of Antioch begins in earnest in 1920 when Arthur E. Morgan becomes the president of the college, and a major, yet incremental change within the character of Swarthmore begins in 1920 with the arrival of Frank Aydelotte. Reed college diverges the most from this periodization in that William Foster was hired and the college was opened in 1910. Nonetheless, the years around 1920 can be understood as pivotal in that this was the time when the character of the college started to become fixed: Foster and almost all of the faculty he attracted left Reed college and were replaced by a new president and new faculty. This periodization suggests that the years around 1920 were not only ones of differentiation for new institutional types, but also as a period of change for small liberal arts colleges. Rather than organizing The Distinctive College as a simple chronology Clark organizes his work as three case studies and deals with each institution separately. Although he starts with the first college to be founded (Antioch), he does not end with the last college to be founded (Reed). Furthermore, the college with the earliest periodization is actually the college with the latest founding (again, Reed). This organization may seem quite natural, particularly to scholars familiar with case study, but organizing an historical work in this fashion is not typical. 51 The way in which The Distinctive College is organized as a case study is closely linked to a specific presentation of historical time. Here, I am concerned not with the order of these three cases and when their narratives begin as I mentioned above, but in the way historical time progresses within the framework laid out by Clark. Each institutional history, and each case is to some extent an institutional history, begins at a different time. Their histories begin in 1853, 1910, and 1869 for Antioch, Reed, and Swarthmore respectively. Despite the diverse physical locations and different founding dates each institutional history converges on 1920 and then separates again. This presents a type of historical time that does not smoothly move from one historical moment to the next, but instead starts from a wide array of historical spaces, converges on a specific moment, and then diverges from that one common point, all while facing a number of common pressures, e.g. the emphasis on faculty research or the professionalization of the curriculum. Although the major watershed for each of these institutions comes around 1920, the historical story Clark tells for each progresses towards the years after World War 2. Not towards the watershed of post-World War 2 expansion that is the focus of our conventional survey- oriented history, but rather towards a point where each of these institutions has the institutional character to maintain itself in the face of that more traditional watershed. Each case study progresses through a period of change comprising the first two chapters and then concludes with a final chapter detailing how these changes in character were maintained and institutionalized. Clark’s narrative is about establishing a saga that can withstand the forces of change buffeting higher education in general so as to maintain institutional character. Thus, from a narrative perspective the story wants and needs to go to this time after 1945 to demonstrate the validity of the organizational saga. 52 Interweaving the Survey Clark skillfully interweaves the dominant or normative historical narrative into the story he tells about each of these three colleges. In many ways, these institutions exist in opposition to the dominant narrative expressed in Geiger (2011), Thelin (2004/2019), or even Rudolph (1963). The narrative presented by these authors is essentially one about the rise of research universities, the importance of college and university athletics, and the expansion of higher education after World War 2 as the multiversity (Kerr, 1963) comes to dominate higher education. Such a narrative would seem to pass these three colleges by. However, for Clark this is not the case. Although all three of these schools operate in a space that is teaching-focused, Clark interweaves the trend towards PhD research into his narrative at both Reed and Swarthmore. At Reed this can be seen through the unique Reed promotion system and the turn Reed takes towards the natural sciences and mathematics. The rise of university sponsored, big-time athletics also passes these three universities by, but Clark nonetheless weaves them into his narrative. This is particularly evident at Swarthmore when Clark focuses on the rivalry between Swarthmore and other major east coast universities. Although the narrative Clark tells about Swarthmore leads away from these rivalries, the way Clark engages with this story allows him to deal with the rise of big-time football in the late 19th century in a way that situates both Swarthmore and money-making football. By interweaving his own narrative with the normative, dominant narrative(s) Clark allows his work to connect more richly and meaningfully with our understanding of higher education history. This ensures that The Distinctive College does not exist in a vacuum or in opposition to the other stories we have about higher education, but instead allows The Distinctive College to connect and illuminate the great variety within US higher education in a 53 more meaningful way. Clark effectively weaves the dominant narratives we have about higher education into stories that, at face value, would seem to oppose those very narratives. Supplementing the Survey Within the study of higher education many of our best known and most cited works are survey texts. These large-scale narratives serve a purpose and I wish to be clear that I am not trying to criticize them. Rather, I am looking to suggest that we can understand works such as The Distinctive College as a supplement and in some cases, perhaps an alternative. Of course, no single, smaller, more targeted narrative can hope to cover the breadth that a survey texts is able to, yet nonetheless The Distinctive College offers an historical narrative that greatly benefits scholars and students. As I have already discussed, Clark responds to and incorporates the dominant narrative(s) told in our survey texts. However, he also presents us, as scholars, with an opportunity to think about some of the other widespread, but perhaps less-dominant trends that can be seen in post- secondary education. Clark deals with these trends not because they are the focus of his work, but because the individual stories he tells intersect with a particular trend. By directing his scholarly focus at these institutions, important less-dominant trends within post-secondary education become visible. These examples may not be the first instance of such a program or feature, but each represents an opportunity to think about the historical origins of practices that are now widespread. An examination of three such trends will help illustrate exactly what I mean. The point here is not to analyze the language or manner in which Clark develops his discussion as I have done earlier, but rather to demonstrate that an historical work organized as this one is, offers a greater breadth of analysis than is typically understood, and thus provides scholars and educators with a larger and more diverse set of analytic and historical tools. 54 In 1935 the trend at Antioch towards student control and enforcement of the honor code led to student rating of the faculty. Although Clark observes that this would “more than once provoke an outburst of resentment from the faculty” the modern reality is that some form of student rating has been going on for approximately fifty years.5 The rating of faculty has, of course, recently obtained a degree of prominence Clark could not have imagined, but the connection from Antioch and student self-governance, through student demands for reform in the 1960’s and 70’s, to the adoption of university wide course surveys, and now even online ratings platforms is a valuable historical trend. The Distinctive College offers us an opportunity to think about the widespread use of student satisfaction surveys, not as a recent phenomenon, but as part of a historical progression stemming from student activism and calls for accountability on the part of students, rather than a bureaucratic element of the annual tenure review process. A second trend we can see stems from the cooperative work program at Antioch whereby students spent half of their time off campus engaging in remunerated work. This arrangement can be understood as an antecedent of the modern internship program. Of course, the students at Antioch were working and being paid unlike so many contemporary internships, but the thrust of the program was the incorporation of work experience with academic learning. This merging of work and academic instruction in the academy is, at least in theory, the driving principle behind modern student internships. Thus, we can understand internships not only as a 21st century response to the need for practical training and job experience, but as part of a larger historical movement that sought to merge academic instruction and practical training. 5 Although it was substantively different in its earliest form, we can understand the initial rise of student rating as a reaction to student protests in the late 1960’s and the demand for curricular relevance. See Academics in Retreat (Fashing and Deutsch, 1971) for a particularly astute account of the student demands for curricular relevance. 55 A third and final trend we can identify is the creation of the highly selective college. To some extent this trend is the central focus of Clark’s research. However, during the course of his narrative we can see this process play out in a specific, concrete manner at all three colleges. Reed handled selectivity by admitting no students on a provisional/conditional basis. At Swarthmore this increase in selectivity may remind readers of contemporary attempts to become more selective: by rejecting more applicants. In 1923 Swarthmore had 800 applicants for only 170 vacancies. Although this 4.7:1 ratio may seem low by today’s standards (Swarthmore currently has a ratio of approximately 10:1), in the 1920’s this was an extremely low acceptance rate and Swarthmore consciously chose not to significantly increase enrollments as many other colleges did during the 1920’s. Instead, as the US college going population rose by over 50% Swarthmore increased enrollments by only 10%. A different element of this selectivity can be seen at Antioch in the form of a nationally recruited student body. In the mid 1920’s Antioch was already recruiting students from across the country, and by the early 1930’s as few as one out of every five students was from Ohio. Clark observes a similar trend at Swarthmore driven by the open scholarships offered by Aydelotte, which attracted more than two hundred candidates from twenty-three states in 1923. Overall applications were not as diverse at Swarthmore as this headline number implies, but one can nonetheless see the same trend towards national recruiting for a highly selective college. Although the contemporary highly selective college may be a response to the proliferation of institutional and programmatic rankings such as those published by US News and World Report, we do not have to understand the phenomenon of selectivity as a strictly recent one. In fact, viewed through The Distinctive College we can see many of the elements we equate with selectivity at work well before the forces that we typically associate selective admissions. 56 History Plus Sociology One of the central challenges with understanding The Distinctive College is coming to term with the fact that it is both a work of sociology and a work of history. Here I wish to think about how Clark navigated the tension between history and sociology and how this process affected his work. Clark himself acknowledges this challenge in the introduction to the 1992 Transaction. Early in this introduction he states that “since organizational character develops over decades, its study requires historical exploration” (p. vii). Later in the introduction Clark talks about the challenges he faced “transmit[ing] to readers the emotion, the passion, that professors, students, administrators, trustees, and alumni invest in an academic enterprise when they are in the grip of an organizational saga” (p. x). The challenge of dealing with this type of language and maintaining critical distance and “cool judgement” (p. x) is a central problem in sociological research. And so, twenty years after initially publishing The Distinctive College we can see Clark struggling with the tension inherent in this work. Clark at Work At first glance, and despite Clark’s introduction, at first glance it would seem that there is no real tension between the requirements of social science and history. The organizational saga continues to be widely used as a concept to study institutional change, and The Distinctive College is still widely cited in both social science and historical contexts. However, the tension between these two poles becomes apparent if one compares the articles Clark produced based on the organizational saga with The Distinctive College as a whole, and then also considers what Clark himself has said about all three. To some extent this tension results from the ambiguity about history’s place within the academy: for some it fits within the social sciences, while for others it fits within the humanities. 57 This ambiguity is not new. During the late 19th century history was very much thought of as a social science (Novick, 1988). At this earlier time historical scholarship was primarily about using history to understand and predict change. However, as the historical field developed its own character during the 20th century it became more strongly associated with the humanities, and in many ways abandoned the attempt to use history to predict or direct change (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, 1994). In many ways elements of this early type of historical work are still present in some sociological research. Similarly, elements of sociological work remain in historical research. The tension exists not because of what Clark chooses to study, but rather because of the inherent ambiguity in considering change over time in a way that requires both sociology and history. Some scholars might suggest that this tension also exists as a result of the disciplinary norms associated with publication and scholarship. Essentially, they might argue that these two fields require scholars to write in two very different ways. To some extent this may be true, but a better way to understand this tension is that the scholars in question perceive it to be true and so they approach the question of writing and language in different ways for each of these fields. This, at least, appears to be true for Clark. In 2008 John Hopkins University Press published a collection of Burton Clark’s essays that were edited by the author and his wife Adele. Clark wrote a short introduction of 1-3 pages for each article. Furthermore, the collection as a whole includes a short introduction, again written by Clark. These introductions provide a valuable insight as to the tension between history and sociology through Clark’s own experiences. Clark identifies a trend in his later career as his work became more interdisciplinary. The colleagues he was working with were more often historians and economists rather than institutional sociologists. “I gained more than I lost as I gradually cut my once-a-year ties to sociology and increased my participation in interdisciplinary 58 national and international associations centered on the study of higher education” (p. xviii). Here, I would like to draw attention to the fact that interdisciplinary largely refers to the major social science oriented higher education journals such as The Journal of Higher Education, Higher Education, and Educational Researcher, which themselves publish a lot of sociological work, and the content of which looks different now than it did 20 or 30 years ago. That said, the locations in which he stopped publishing were ones we could describe as purely sociology focused outlets such as The American Journal of Sociology and Administrative Science Quarterly. Clark sees a stark difference between these two types of journals. We might surmise that the higher education focused journals were more willing to allow for this tension and ambiguity between history and sociology, and thus Clark viewed them as more appealing. All of this leads one to ask the question “so what?” Why does it matter if Clark went from publishing in purely sociology focused journals to publishing in the more generally social science focused higher education journals? Why does it matter that he viewed these types of journals differently? And regardless, where does the tension between history and sociology come in? One way we can understand this tension is through Clark’s use of language. He published 2 articles based on The Distinctive College. Although both articles draw on the entire volume, to a large extent they are primarily constructed from the material of his last chapter, “The Making of an Organizational Saga.” This chapter functions as both a conclusion that ties his narrative together, and as an explication about what an Organizational Saga really is. Defining the Organizational Saga Clark uses the last chapter of The Distinctive College to describe the organizational saga in detail. As I have previously mentioned he also produced journal articles based on the same research. An analysis of the language Clark uses in these two spaces will help us as readers 59 understand why The Distinctive College as a monograph has persisted and also illuminate this tension between sociology and history. Although, I have already focused on a number of passages taken from The Distinctive College, for the purpose of this discussion I would like to take the time to consider, in depth, several passages that bear further scrutiny. The first describes the students at Antioch college and their understanding of student government at Antioch. The adolescent who defined democracy to mean personal freedom above everything else and who then chose to attend Antioch because of its reputation for permissiveness came to see the college as a vehicle of freedom. It was then his sworn duty to increase freedom on campus, to expand the zone of tolerance of student behaviors against the forces of reaction. (p. 77) Clark begins this statement in a strong way when he says, “the adolescent who defined democracy to mean personal freedom.” He does not describe this individual as a student, which we might assume would be the operative word given that Clark is talking about college students, but instead chooses adolescent. Clark then pairs democracy and personal freedom with “came to see the college as a vehicle of freedom.” From this association he extends outwards and draws the seemingly obvious conclusion that “it was then [the adolescent’s] sworn duty to increase freedom.” Clark’s construction of these two sentences offers us an opportunity to see Clark take his research subjects seriously, but also show critical distance from those subjects. He clearly sees these student-adolescents as somewhat pretentious. In the 20th or 21st century a sworn duty is something we might associate with a member of the military or perhaps an elected official, but it is not something we associate with students on a college campus. However, for these students it was their sworn duty “to expand the zone of tolerance . . . against the forces of reaction.” With 60 this final statement Clark gives these student-adolescents a sworn enemy. They aren’t simply crusading for something, freedom, but against something or someone: “the forces of reaction.” Clark provides his readers with a similarly rich and complex description when he introduces his study as one focused on liberal arts colleges: After long development this educational form now exhibits not common style and national standards but a great variety in performance and achievement. Its foremost representatives set a pace in the quality of undergraduate education matched, if at all, only by a few of the best endowed private universities. Its hindmost members offer a narrow religious and cultural fundamentalism and a mean spirit hardly duplicated in the rearguard of the public institutions. (p. 4) Clark’s pairing of foremost and hindmost allows him to elaborate on the notion of “great variety in performance and achievement.” The notion that the foremost liberal arts colleges set the pace in undergraduate education in many ways diverges from accepted wisdom at the time of Clark’s writing. This was, after all, the ascendancy of the multiversity (Kerr, 1963) and asserting that prestigious liberal arts institutions set the pace for higher education is a bold statement that runs counter to the dominant narrative about higher education. However, the power of Clark’s statement truly comes out of his description of the hindmost liberal arts colleges as “offer[ing] a narrow religious and cultural fundamentalism and a mean spirit hardly duplicated in the rearguard of public institutions.” Clark is asserting that even the most inadequate public institutions are superior to the hindmost liberal arts colleges. Clark further defines these hindmost liberal arts colleges as both narrow and mean spirited. In this instance narrow and mean spirited somehow manages to convey no specific details, yet nonetheless conjures a very powerful image. In my own mind it suggests a narrow college which limits the acceptable 61 practices and avenues for students, while also expressing an uncompromising and uncaring attitude towards those same students. Here, it is worth noting that in some respects the colleges present in Clark’s narrative, particularly Reed, enact a similarly uncompromising attitude towards students. Although this may represent a moment when Clark lacks critical distance from his research subjects, I think a better way of understanding the tension in this uncompromising attitude is through the organizational saga. Where a saga is present and a college has successfully enacted a story about what makes it unique and thereby attracted students for that same uniqueness, there is the potential for distinctiveness as Clark envisions it. However, when that story is lacking, when there is no, saga an institution is left with a “mean spirit hardly duplicated in the rearguard of public institutions.” Finely crafted, interesting sentences such as those above are largely absent from Clark’s two sociological articles. Of course, scholars could assert that this type of prose has no place in a social science article and that the language should be more detached and less artful. I would disagree and assert that within the social sciences and all disciplines there is space for well- crafted prose. As Helen Sword (2012) asserts, there is simply a belief that there is no such space. Nonetheless, there remains a qualitative difference between the language Clark uses to describe the organizational saga as a concept in his social science articles and the language he uses in The Distinctive College. This difference persists even when Clark turns to discuss the concept of the organizational saga in his final chapter. What are the conditions for moving effectively toward a unifying and noteworthy emphasis in the organization as a whole? If a group wishes to travel the road to distinctive character, to what organizational features must attention necessarily flow? 62 What is the place of the great leader, and how much does his influence explain organizational distinctiveness? (p. 233) In contrast we see the concept introduced using much different language in Clark’s article in Administrative Science Quarterly. The groups definition of the accomplishment, intrinsically historical but embellished through retelling and rewriting, links stages of organizational development. The participants have added affect, and emotional loading, which places their conception between the coolness of rational purpose and the warmth of sentiment found in religion and magic. An organizational saga presents some rational explanation of how certain means led to certain ends (Clark 1972, p. 178). Although there is a degree of stylishness in Clark’s use of religion and magic, this second introduction to the organizational saga presents the concept using entirely different language: language that seems designed to be clinical and precise, yet somehow manages to be less clear and less precise. A non-specialist might reasonably find this second version clouded by jargon and a careful reader might reasonably ask, what is emotional loading? Clark’s second definition may sound more precise, scientific even, but the prose simply isn’t clear, and the end result is a passage that is eminently forgettable. In contrast the first passage asks three rhetorical questions, all of which prime the reader to learn the answer. And although these questions do not seem to mirror the text in my second example, they are indeed doing just that. Both first sentences ask about the conditions necessary for the organization as a whole. Both second sentences ask about the role of the participants in the saga. Only the third sentence deviates from this pattern. In the first version Clark asks what role the leader plays in the creation of a saga whereas in the second version Clark suggests that the saga itself represents an explanation and leaves out the role of the 63 leader. Viewed as a whole, Clark presents an altogether different view of the Organizational Saga in each of these accounts. It is my belief that the account provided in The Distinctive College and the qualitative difference of the language therein has contributed to the continuing relevance of Clark’s work. Two Outlooks on Research A different way of understanding the difference between The Distinctive College as sociology and history is through reviews in scholarly journals. In the Journal of American History (1972) Laurence Veysey focuses on Clark’s description of high-quality liberal arts colleges and notes how little scholarly work has been written looking at these atypical colleges. Veysey does take note of the sociological impulse that drives Clark, observing that exploring the conditions which permitted such unusual, deviant academic institutions to flourish is the animating force behind the study. Nonetheless, the focus of the review is on the historical account that this study provides and the degree to which it explains how these three institutions came to be. In contrast, when The Distinctive College was reviewed in The Journal of Higher Education (Health, 1971) and Contemporary Sociology (Gaff, 1972) both reviews focus on the prescriptive aspects of institutional transformation and lament that Clark included no failed attempt at transformation so that the organizational saga could be operationalized and used as a framework to direct institutional change. Furthermore, Jerry Gaff in Contemporary Sociology (1972) suggests that the organizational saga lacks predictive power and that it is difficult to know the extent to which a given college has developed an organizational saga or to what degree such a saga is sustaining that college. 64 As readers we can attribute the difference in reviews to something as simple as the outlook of these two fields. Historians would seem to be interested in understanding how three unique colleges came to be and then look to apply this understanding to other colleges, whereas sociologists would seem to be interested in using the organizational saga to drive change. Perhaps we can see in these different reviews a tendency to view the world of research in two different ways. One way sees value in understanding how something came to be, and the other way sees value in understanding how other things can come to be. However, there may be more to these different reviews than my oversimplification suggests, as historical scholarship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries viewed history used in the same way as the sociologists reviewing The Distinctive College. Thus, it is possible to suggest that a contemporary understanding of Burton Clark’s The Distinctive College must accept it as a work of both history and sociology that attempts to do what both types of reviews envision, rather than simply one or the other. Within such an understanding the tension would be both required and also a non-factor because each mode of scholarship would rely upon the other. An Elegant Combination I have structured my argument on Clark and The Distinctive College around four broad themes: the story Clark tells about the establishment of the organizational saga at each of these colleges; the process by which an organizational saga takes hold on a college campus; how The Distinctive College can supplement our survey texts; and how Clark grapples with the challenges inherent in work that is both sociological and historical. By drawing attention to these themes and focusing on Clark’s use of language I am not trying to suggest that The Distinctive College has remained relevant because of Clark’s prose, or the way it straddles both history and sociology, or any of the single features and themes I have highlighted. Rather, it is my contention 65 that Clark’s work is valuable precisely because it manages to do all of these things. The manner in which the various features of Clark’s work come together in The Distinctive College is precisely what has given it such scholarly longevity and makes it worth considering today. Clark brings all of these aspects together to create something that truly is greater than the sum of its parts. However, perhaps the most valuable aspect of The Distinctive College is the counterpoint it provides to the notion that there is a single objective history. By encapsulating both the dominant historical narrative and a number of less-dominant trends, Clark illuminates something that the historical field has known for some time, but that has gone largely unnoticed by the higher education community. There is not a single historical narrative. There is not even a single narrative and other narratives that complicate the first. Rather, there are a multiplicity of narratives that all interact in a complex way. 66 REFERENCES 67 REFERENCES Appleby, J., Hunt, L., & Jacob, M. (1994). Telling the truth about history. New York, NY: Norton & Company. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Quarterly, 17, 178-84. Clark, B. R. (1970/1992). The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore. New Clark, B. R. (1972). The organizational saga in higher education. Administrative Science Clark, B. R., & Clark, A. (Eds.). (2008). On higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Fashing, J. & Deutsch, Se. E. (1971). Academics in retreat. Albuquerque, NM. University of University Press. New Mexico Press. Gaff, J. (1972, January). The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore. [Review of the book The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore, by Burton Clark]. The Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 1, 1, 89-90. Geiger, R. (2011). The ten generations of American higher education in P. Altbach, R. Berdahl, P. Gumport (Eds). American higher education in the 21st century: Social, political, and economic challenges, pp. 37-68. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Heath, D. (1971, January). The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore. [Review of the book The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore, by Burton Clark]. The Journal of Higher Education, 42, 2, 157-159. Jencks, C., and Riesman, D. (1968/2002). The academic revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Kerr, C. (1963). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Novick, P. (1988). That noble dream: The ‘objectivity question’ and the American historical profession. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press. Rudolph, (1962). The American college & university. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Sword, H. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Thelin, J. R. (2004/2019). A history of American higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 68 Veysey, L. R. (1965). The emergence of the American university. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Veysey, L. R. (1971, March). The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore. [Review of the book The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore, by Burton Clark]. The Journal of American History, 57, 4, 953-954. 69 CHAPTER 3: LAURENCE VEYSEY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY A University Structure “too Diverse to Define” Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University (1965) tells some of the same story as our survey texts. Indeed, in some respects the work of Veysey (1965), Rudolph (1962), Kerr (1963), and Thelin (2004/2019) all consider the creation of research universities during the late 19th century the central watershed for the history of US higher education. However, Veysey highlights unique features and organizes his work in a fundamentally different way. Furthermore, Veysey provides a story that both supplements, and provides an alternative to, our survey texts. A closer look at Veysey’s text will allow us to better understand how The Emergence of the American University offers such an alternative. As we have already seen in The Distinctive College, supplementing or countering the narrative in our survey texts is not unique to any single author. Some monographs only counter and others only supplement or reinforce. However, many of the best monographs on the history of higher education manage to do all three. Their construction allows them to weave the elements of their story together and present a diverse portrait of higher education in a manner that has gone unnoticed. Veysey divides his narrative into two halves. In the first half he focuses on four competing visions scholars and college presidents had for higher education. He identifies these visions as ‘discipline and piety’, ‘utility’, ‘research’, and ‘liberal culture’. Veysey thinks of this portion of his narrative as intellectual history and focuses his analysis on these four educational philosophies. In the second half of his narrative Veysey sets aside intellectual history and instead focuses on university organization and bureaucracy grounded in sociological research. A 70 conventional understanding of The Emergence of the American University sees these two halves as somewhat jarring and disjointed. Indeed, many contemporary reviews criticized it for just this reason (Cordasco, 1966; Rudolph, 1966). However, it is my belief that a closer, more careful, altogether slower reading can help us as scholars better understand what this work offers and why it has persisted. My own analysis of The Emergence of the American University focuses on what Veysey can tell us about changes in higher education. Although the story he tells is primarily focused on people and events that occur in the 19th century, it is my belief that this work illuminates aspects of contemporary higher education that are more typically associated with 21st century forces. In particular, Veysey’s decision of his monograph into two halves allows him to show how very different forces acted to drive change in a rather singular direction, towards the creation of what we now call research universities. As was the case for my discussion of The Distinctive College, I will organize my analysis of The Emergence of the American University along four broad themes. First, I will look at the story Veysey tells about educational philosophies. Second, I will consider how these four philosophies come together to tell a story about university bureaucracy. Third, I will demonstrate how The Emergence of the American University supplements our historical survey texts. And fourth, I will grapple with the conflict inherent in Clark’s work as one of both history and sociology. As was the case in my previous analysis, I make every attempt to animate my discussion with regular and detailed quotations from Veysey’s text. A closer and more detailed understanding of Veysey’s language helps us as readers better interrogate the work and otherwise question the assumptions we have made about it. 71 An Alarming Premonition Although I have presented an outline of Veysey’s narrative and talked quite generally about the four academic philosophies, I have said very little about that narrative more specifically. What do each of these educational philosophies sound like? What role did their advocates see for higher education? And why has Veysey’s narrative remained relevant to scholars more than 50 years after it was published, and more than 100 years after the events in question took place? The first half of Veysey’s narrative focuses on the four competing visions for the purpose of US higher education and the individual scholars who advanced these positions. The narrative principally obtains its forward momentum from a discussion of college presidents. In the late 19th century college and university presidents had the most visible platform from which to advocate for and put new ideas into practice. Different presidents come to be associated with different philosophies and so James McCosh (Princeton) is strongly associated with discipline and piety; Charles W. Elliot (Harvard) with utility; Daniel Coit Gilman (Johns Hopkins) with research; and Woodrow Wilson (Princeton) with liberal culture. By 1910 each philosophy would come to have at least some claim on the purpose of the university, but in 1865 utility, research, and liberal culture were only ideas about education which “the mid-nineteenth-century academic custodian had had only an alarming premonition” (p. 2). By describing these philosophies as an alarming premonition Veysey makes it clear just how radical each of these new concepts truly was. And while the 20th century will essentially “swallow up the followers of the more particular educational philosophies” (p. 12) the scholars and presidents advocating for each position saw these different philosophies as wildly opposing 72 alternatives for what a university would become. Veysey describes the urge to create a university along one of these lines during the 19th century: Before 1865 the dream of an American university standing on par with those of Europe had been a vague but increasingly insistent urge. Again, in the twentieth century, rhetoric about the university (with some notable exceptions) was to lean toward hazy generalities. Only for one generation, while the university was actually coming into existence, did clearer, more articulate lines of debate find widespread expression. (p. 12) For Veysey the years at the end of the 19th century represent the only time when there was a widespread debate about the purpose of the university. Before these years other ideas did not exist, and after these years all four philosophies become just another part of university rhetoric. Only in the years between 1865 and 1910 is there a lively debate about the purpose of a university. Focusing on these years allows Veysey to show their early genesis and to explore how these philosophies change as they become part of college and university culture. Resisting the Upstarts For Veysey ‘discipline and piety’ represents a continuation of the aims most commonly associated with early and mid 19th century higher education, specifically mental discipline (the idea that the mind is a muscle and it needs strenuous activity to develop). Within this philosophy the highest duty of education was to discipline the mental and moral faculties. The diffusion of culture, science, and foreign languages were all seen as subordinate. For some proponents of mental discipline the expansion of the college curriculum was an accommodation that placed too much emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge. Veysey’s discussion of mental discipline focuses on the presidents of prestigious private colleges. These are the institutions that advocate for mental discipline, but they also succumb to 73 the pressure for reform stemming from utility, research, and liberal culture. Although mental discipline loses the educational debate, the rhetoric behind this philosophy remains important for the development of higher education. Veysey notes that “each of the upstart viewpoints would contain noticeable elements of continuity with mid-nineteenth century academic thinking.” Understanding the views and pronouncements made in favor of mental discipline allows Veysey to more clearly establish an evolution of university structures and ideas, and understanding the thinking that would label these other philosophies as upstarts demonstrates how advocates of discipline and piety negotiated the change from college to university. Veysey illustrates this change by focusing on the reactions Noah Porter and James McCosh made to the various calls for reform represented by utility and research. However, the narrative of discipline and piety is essentially one of managed decline. Although the rhetoric of mental discipline would permeate the other three educational philosophies, it does not emerge victorious. Defenders of mental discipline were simultaneously too compromising and not compromising enough: “their verbal stubbornness marked them as ‘old fogies’ and intensified the contempt they received in progressive circles. At the same time, their failure to adopt a thoroughly ruthless policy in practice had something to do with the way their carefully prescribed curriculums collapsed” (p. 50). By calling them old fogies Veysey emphasizes these individuals as stuck in their ways and reactionary. It is easy to envision the scorn and contempt reformers would direct towards the old fogies. Veysey then contrasts this with the idea that they failed to adopt a ruthless policy. They failed to stridently defend their practices and instead compromised. The old fogies are thus presented as lacking in two ways. At a unique moment when scholars and presidents were able to advance their ideals within the American college and 74 university, these individuals failed to advance theirs contributing to the collapse of both their ideals and their curriculum. Accommodating Utility Veysey uses Charles Elliot at Harvard and Andrew White at Cornell to provide readers with two models of utility. It is possible to see these two presidents as similar: both support some version of the elective system; both viewed higher education through the lens of democracy; and both believed that the college student should be treated as an adult. However, as presidents they viewed each other as rivals, and each advanced their philosophy in print and on campus. Elliot grounded his use of the elective system in a laissez-faire version of free choice that viewed the elective system as preparation for adulthood. For him the strength and value of the elective system was that it allowed individuals to identify and select the correct and moral option in a setting that prepared students to take their place in a democracy. In contrast, White saw Cornell as an institution educating students for public service where any student could get instruction in any field. Although he accommodated the elective system, he also put limits on it, creating a group system of courses that maintained a degree of coherence within the system. Veysey uses White and Elloit to help readers understand other utility minded presidents such as James B. Angell at Michigan and Charles R. Van Hise at Wisconsin. Each enacts a version of utility slightly different from Elliot or White. However, Veysey weaves the themes of electives, democracy, and adulthood through this wider array of institutions, always returning to the models set by Cornell and Harvard. By 1900 utility in general, and the elective system in particular, could plausibly make a case to have triumphed. Columbia had abolished Greek and Latin as entrance requirements and even conservative Yale instituted free electives for the final three years of their undergraduate degree. Veysey describes this change saying, “the initial 75 academic revolution, if such it was, constituted far more of a voluntary accommodation than it did an armed invasion from below” (pp. 60-61). By adding “if such it was” to “academic revolution” Veysey makes clear that although this was a radical change in how higher education was viewed, it does not represent a forceful change, but rather a process of change by accretion. A steady stream of colleges would adopt aspects of utility over time, with no singular change representing a monumental leap, as each little accommodation took institutions down the path towards utility. However, Veysey makes clear that utility was not the only educational philosophy that could claim victory. Research could just as plausibly claim to have triumphed over the educational landscape. A Sense of Adventure Veysey’s treatment of research is in some ways organized in a different manner. Rather than beginning with university presidents, Veysey reverses this and introduces the university presidents later in the chapter. This allows him to demonstrate how faculty and early researchers influenced Daniel Coit Gilman (Johns Hopkins) and G. Stanley Hall (Clark). Veysey shows how research shifted from an enlightenment pursuit for wealthy gentleman to the purview of trained scholars in a specific discipline. The German research university provided the catalysts for this change. Specifically, it provided an avenue for the earliest scholars to train and afforded those scholars a degree of legitimacy that they could not otherwise have obtained. These scholars then come to interpret and define the German university in a rather selective way as they advance the idea of “scientific research” (p. 127). To the believer scientific research represented a way of life. Veysey quotes an early description of Johns Hopkins to drive this point home saying that the first Hopkins fellows did not see their appointments as merely the first step of an academic career, but rather “a rare and peculiar opportunity for study and research, eagerly seized by men who had 76 been hungering and thirsting for such a possibility” (p. 149). Rare and peculiar refers to the manner in which this type of position was new to the academic landscape. However, the second half of this sentence is truly revolutionary. Veysey opens by suggesting that these men seized this opportunity. It wasn’t simply given to them, rather they had to take it for themselves through their own hard work. However, even this imagery is not forceful enough as Veysey adds “eagerly” to suggest just how desperate these individuals were for this type of opportunity, and then concludes with “hungering and thirsting for such a possibility” to further emphasize the sense of need these scholars felt. Having established the position of research after 1860 Veysey introduces Clark and Gilman into his narrative. Veysey uses these two presidents to demonstrate how the notion of scientific research takes root. Veysey sees Gilman as a necessary, yet also ancillary figure at Johns Hopkins: “without Gilman’s encouragement, the orientation of Johns Hopkins towards research would have been impossible. Yet no statements of purpose uttered by a university president had less to do with the actual nature of the institution he superintended than did those of Daniel Coit Gilman” (p. 161). At first glance it would seem that Gilman was ineffectual as a president, yet the opposite is true. Rather than stemming from the direction of the president himself, the intense research-focused atmosphere at Johns Hopkins resulted because Gilman created a space where the forces of scientific research could coalesce. Gilman brought an air of respectability to what was a very new and unusual venture, and otherwise “gave the early Johns Hopkins just the protective façade it needed” (p. 164). There were, of course, other institutions where graduate education and scientific research were important including Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago, however none were as dominated by the ideals of scientific research. For these other institutions the ideals of scientific research were 77 only one of many competing claims: as Veysey observes, “precisely because Harvard and the others could offer this kind of financial security, the story of the creation and expansion of their graduate schools is spiced with comparatively little sense of adventure” (p. 171). There was no great risk or leap into the great unknown for these other institutions. Their financial wealth made them more secure and lessened the need and pressure to reform. With the exception of the elective system at Harvard these other institutions were more apt to reform and adapt to the requirements of the new educational philosophies than to pioneer something new. A Mood that Cannot Last Veysey presents a complicated picture of liberal culture. He suggests that some elements of liberal culture can be viewed as an updated version of discipline and piety reworked for a modern university that substituted a new humanistic perspective for the overt focus on piety. Advocates for liberal culture were firmly against the mental discipline philosophy of education. They no longer saw the mind as a muscle that needed to be exercised with strenuous activity. However, they still saw education playing a moral role and liberal culture was seen as an antidote to the specialization associated with research. Science represented a certain narrow type of thinking and liberal education represented a substantive, well-rounded acquaintance with the standards of culture. The tension between depth and breadth of study is familiar to everyone in the academy. However, as Veysey observes, the reforms associated with liberal culture between 1865 and 1910 were not successful. It is only later in the 20th century that reforms associated with liberal culture take hold. Veysey uses President Wilson at Princeton as an administrative example of liberal culture. And indeed, Princeton can be thought of as an institution dedicated to liberal culture delivered through a common background in the humanities. Wilson’s main achievement for 78 liberal culture during his time at Princeton was the establishment of the preceptorial system of small group instruction. This system essentially placed faculty in dormitories alongside students in an attempt to create a cohesive college environment. Although we can see Wilson and Princeton as an example of liberal culture at the institutional level, it provides no clear and successful example of the philosophy. Before and after Wilson Princeton is dedicated to the provision of a proscribed curriculum for all undergraduates. In this respect, perhaps Princeton is the ideal example of liberal culture. It failed to drive meaningful change at the institutional level, and even a president committed to the philosophy at an institution that was similarly aligned was unable to substantively direct his institution towards the philosophy. An alternative and more successful example of liberal culture is the philosophy department at Harvard. This example is one of the few moments in Veysey’s text where he is not focused on presidents. For Veysey the philosophy faculty at Harvard represents a singular moment “the result [of which] was a collective mood of exhilaration” (p. 233). However, as he immediately clarifies “like the atmosphere at the early Johns Hopkins, this mood could not last. But it was another earthly moment during which all the academic potentialities seemed to be realized” (p. 233). The philosophy department at Harvard proved to be short-lived, representing only an “earthly moment” when all the “academic potentialities” were apparent. Furthermore, the model provided by Harvard was not something that other colleges and universities could emulate. When liberal culture did succeed as a philosophy it did so on an individual level and many of the other examples Veysey provides are of singular professors such as Alexander Mieklejohn at Brown or John Erskine at Amherst. Veysey observes that advocates for liberal culture were generally underrepresented at most colleges and generally made up only a small 79 minority of academic professors and administrators: “as a goal for the heads of institutions, liberal culture could not survive at the center of the academic map” (p. 233). Even at Princeton arguments over research and graduate education would prove to be the undoing of president Wilson. Instead, if liberal culture was to survive it would have to persist in small pockets consisting of just a few faculty sufficiently removed from the rest of the faculty to escape notice. An Appropriate Middle Ground It is easy to get wrapped up in Veysey’s description of these four educational philosophies and the various presidents and scholars who advanced them. However, the real value of Veysey’s narrative becomes apparent when one sees these philosophies come together during the second half of The Emergence of the American University. Veysey describes this second half as structural functional analysis. What this second half really does is help us understand how these widely diverging philosophies came to co-exist within the structure of the modern university. Where the focus of the first half was a debate about the purpose of the university, the second half is about the management of these four purposes. The magic of Veysey’s work is not in the way he lays out these philosophies during the first half of this monograph. Rather, it is in the way he combines the two halves and effortlessly draws on the philosophies discussed in the first half to illuminate the second half. In so doing Veysey enables readers to appreciate the incredible turn of events that allowed these seemingly incompatible ideals to coexist and create a university structure so full of contradictions that failure would seem to be the most likely outcome. Of course, as we all know, failure was not the outcome and American higher education would eventually become the envy of the developed world. Taking a closer look at the second half of The Emergence of The American University can help us better understand how these philosophies congeal into a coherent whole. 80 Veysey observes that the manner in which these disparate elements came together was not unique to a single institution, but instead part of a trend whereby universities came to match one another. Thus, Johns Hopkins, Clark, and Princeton all come to resemble one another. Veysey identifies five common elements of this new system: “increasing presidential authority, bureaucratic procedures of many sorts, the new functions of the deanship, the appearance of the academic department with its recognized chairman, and the creation of a calculated scale of faculty rank” (p. 268). We can understand bureaucratic procedures and the calculated scale of faculty rank as a response to tensions over diverse educational philosophies. By standardizing practices and creating requirements for promotion faculty would be protected from a president or colleague who espoused a different viewpoint. Alternatively, as faculty departments became larger and more numerous the president came to wield more and more power as the bureaucrat responsible for maintaining some semblance of order. Bureaucratic procedures came about to give structure to this authority. Deans and department chairs essentially acted as intermediaries between presidents and departments, at times representing the president and at times representing their department. Both intellectually and in terms of its structure, the American university was becoming too diverse easily to define—or to control. The adherence of academic leaders to varying philosophies, the emergence of crystallized departments of learning, and the presence of larger number of students all contributed to this result. . . . No longer did any over-all intellectual formula exist to counter (or to cloak) such fragmentation; neither the Christian religion in any of its varieties, nor positive science, nor humane culture proved self-evidently capable of making sense out of the entire range of knowledge and opinion. (p. 311) 81 Veysey identifies bureaucracy and presidential leadership as the force that allows these diverse elements to hold together. Significantly he is not asserting that they form a coherent whole. Rather he suggests that standardized practices were substituted for any sort of agreement on purpose saying “bureaucratic norms offered an appropriate middle ground for this kind of internally diverse, semi-compulsory institution: a means which nearly everybody could accept as the fairest for securing a reasonably efficient flow of activity” (p. 316). Although the bureaucratic structure Veysey outlines allowed the university to congeal together, it fails to address the question of why it stayed together. Veysey answers this by observing that the majority of participants remained unaware of what their colleagues were doing: tacitly obeying the need to fail to communicate, each academic group normally refrained from too rude or brutal an unmasking of the rest. And in this manner, without major economic incentives and without a genuine sharing of ideals, men labored together in what became a diverse but fundamentally stable institution. The university throve, as it were, on ignorance. (p. 337) The three previous quotes are best understood together. The first establishes the difficulty inherent in keeping the modern university together and suggests that Veysey’s four philosophies were unable to hide this disunity, much less actually organize it into a coherent whole. The second establishes bureaucratic norms as the viable mechanism to give this diverse body of individuals and purposes structure. And the third establishes the mechanism that allows the second to work. It was not that bureaucracy innately enabled the university to function. Rather, it was the degree of distance and the general failure to communicate between individuals, departments, and colleges. Each unit agreed to remain generally ignorant of what the other units were doing, or to otherwise ask hard questions about the validity of their scholarship and the 82 costs they were incurring. In exchange, the whole system worked reasonably well and everyone was allowed to get on with whatever business they felt was most important. Veysey handles the interaction between the academic philosophies in an explicit fashion when he suggests that a blending between them was most noticeable among administrators, particularly as the university came to represent all of the academic philosophies simultaneously. David Starr Jordan provides an example of this blending in a speech he gives as early as 1888 where he provides six different rationales for a college education: (1) contact with the great minds of the past; (2) the study of nature; (3) beneficial social influences emanating from the students and faculty; (4) the virtue of hard work; (5) the financial worth of the college degree (though he was also careful to decry this as a motive); and (6) the general ‘idealism’ of the campus. (p. 343) We see a continuation of discipline and piety in 3 and 4; utility in 5; research in 2; and culture in 1. David Starr Jordan is consciously trying to represent all possible purposes to all possible people. Veysey provides readers with a detailed portrait of this blending through a lengthy analysis of William Rainey Harper at the University of Chicago. Veysey contrasts the public face of Chicago as a Baptist institution (discipline and piety) with Harper’s focus on graduate education (research) and his desire for a partially prescribed curriculum (culture) saying: Apart from its ‘Baptist Side,’ the University of Chicago had the more usual problem of balancing the requirements of public service, research, and culture. In these terms Chicago never clearly ‘stood for’ anything in the sense that Cornell had stood for democracy and Johns Hopkins had stood for research. Especially when addressing a state university audience, Harper could glory in the democratic ethos (p. 375). 83 When Veysey suggests that Chicago never really stood for anything he is in many ways running counter to our understanding of the university. Chicago is one of the founding members of the Association for American Universities. These institutions were selected on the basis of their commitment to research and graduate education. And so, when Veysey says “never” he makes it clear that this ambiguity of purpose was present from the start. It was not an accident. Leaving the Survey Behind To some extent Veysey’s work has become a conventional part of the history of higher education. Both Veysey and our survey texts place a major watershed in the late 19th century coinciding with the creation of research universities. However, Veysey’s narrative differs from that presented in our survey texts in important ways. For Thelin (2004/2019) the late 19th century is best characterized by two phenomena. First, a diversifying of higher education through the creation of normal schools, women’s colleges, co-education, and land-grant colleges. And second, a growth by accretion: “if there was a prototype American ‘university’ between 1860 and 1890, it was created through a process of expansion and annexation by a college so as to create a configuration of colleges” (Thelin, 2204/2019, p.103). Thelin sees this as a process whereby existing colleges tack on related, but separate units such as scientific schools and women’s colleges. Veysey’s narrative arrives at a similar end point (1910) and focuses on many of the same institutions (modern research universities), but when examined closely the story he has to tell is really quite different. In the conventional telling the institutional subjects (research universities) are the narrative telos of the story. However, for Veysey the story about research universities is simply a means to grapple with the larger problem of how universities came to organize themselves and the bureaucratic structures that arose to help manage them. His focus on 84 bureaucratic structures allows The Emergence of the American University to supplement our survey texts in a way that is different from the other works in this study. Organizing History Veysey’s periodization has in many ways become the standard periodization used in our survey texts. Although Thelin (2004/2019) makes a considerable attempt to expand his narrative with the inclusion of other institutions and other actors, the historical telos remains roughly the same: forces converge around the late 19th and early 20th century to establish larger, more diverse universities. And while Thelin does suggest that wealthy research universities are not all encompassing, he utilizes the same periodization presented by Veysey and simply expands the number of institutions deemed worthy of note. Thelin (2004/2019) is not the only survey text to rely on this periodization. We see something broadly similar in Rudolph’s The American College and University (1962). What makes Veysey’s work different is how he utilizes this standard periodization to produce a very different interpretation. Veysey organizes his history thematically, with each chapter focused on a different theme that progresses along the same timeline. This allows him to show how different forces converge around a particular historical moment. By constructing the first half of his monograph thematically Veysey demonstrates how the competing philosophies for higher education were brought together not by a victory of one over another, but rather by the dominant force of university bureaucracy between 1890 and 1910. Although individual presidents and institutions are the focus of different chapters, these individuals and organizations tend to play a role in other chapters as well. For example, Charles Elliot is a focal point for Veysey’s discussion of utility, but he also plays a role in the discussion of both research and liberal culture. 85 By drawing the material in these first four thematic chapters together in the second half of his monograph Veysey further demonstrates the complex way that these forces converge. The historical moment represented by the rise of bureaucracy operates in two ways. In one way the four philosophies are all moving towards this moment. We can see this as a sort of convergence. In a second way bureaucracy is drawing the four philosophies inwards. We can think of this as a magnetic force drawing these four philosophies in. University bureaucracy allows these forces to co-exist, but without these four competing philosophies the university bureaucracy Veysey describes would not have been necessary. The historical momentum of bureaucracy needs these four philosophies much as the four philosophies need bureaucracy. They are, in a manner of speaking, symbiotic. Interweaving the Survey Although Veysey’s narrative has become part of the narrative presented in our survey texts, he also presents readers with several sections that tie into our survey texts in other ways. In particular, his sections “The Mind of the Undergraduate” and “The Gulf Between Students and Faculty” focus on student attitudes to faculty conceptions of education. These two sections provide a particularly rich discussion of students and student life at the end of the 19th century. And while students are not a central focus in Veysey’s work, they allow him to interweave student ideas about education within his narrative and to illustrate the ways in which these four philosophies interacted with radically different student ideas about the purpose of higher education. These two sections allow Veysey to connect with other major themes that our present in our survey texts. Thelin (2004/2019) observes that between 1890 and 1910 American’s became fascinated with undergraduate life and student culture. This encompassed college songs, 86 clothing, and perhaps most importantly, intercollegiate athletics, which reached an apex of both violence and influence on campus in the years before 1910. However, the fascination Thelin observes goes well beyond these few specific things encompassing popular novels and newspaper articles that primarily focused on the antics of undergraduate students. These elements of popular culture ran in opposition to all four academic philosophies. By including these two sections in his monograph Veysey creates a space for other campus actors in a work that would otherwise be focused almost exclusively on college presidents and faculty. Supplementing the Survey Veysey’s argument can also supplement the story that gets told in our survey texts. Of course, no single monograph – not even one as substantial as Veysey’s – could cover as much ground as a survey, but the seemingly narrow focus these works have allows them to expand in important, unnoticed ways. A central theme in Veysey’s work is the bureaucratic growth of universities, particularly around the president. However, the growth of organizational bureaucracy is not limited to the presidency. Indeed, the department, more than any other single feature, has allowed the modern university to hold together despite all its inconsistencies. It has allowed widely diverse disciplines and fields to coexist and has proven remarkably adept at accommodating the growth of new fields. For example, student protests in the early 1970’s over the lack of diversity and the lack of curricular relevance on campuses were not generally well received by university presidents. However, when universities eventually met student demands with the creation of African American and Gender studies programs, these new units were fairly easily drawn into the university through the department system. Money and space notwithstanding, universities 87 have been able to accommodate new types of knowledge by simply creating a new department to house that knowledge. The departmental structure has proven wildly adaptable within student services as well. Many of the student-centered departments and services universities offer in the 21st century provide functions Elliot and Gilman would have considered completely foreign. Nonetheless, the expansion of these services seems tailor made for a departmental organization as adding a new service has again been limited by the realities of funding and space. Although Veysey’s narrative would seem to say little if anything about the rise of student services, the rise of the department structure and the tacit agreement for one department not to look too closely at what another department was doing has, in fact, played a tremendously important role in the rise of student services. Veysey’s four philosophies can be understood as precursors to the academic triad of teaching, research, and service. The academic triad is often thought of as a product of the 20th century, particularly the years after World War 2. However, Veysey makes it clear that the origins of these components were far earlier: liberal culture would eventually become teaching; research would of course stay research, and utility would eventually become service. Understanding that these requirements are not modern concepts, but in fact quite old can powerfully impact our understanding of these forces today. Furthermore, we can see other extensions of these philosophies throughout higher education. For example, community colleges have in many ways become responsible for the type of education some utility minded reformers envisioned with their focus on trade skills and community workforce education. And while this takes us away from the story of modern universities, it allows us to see that Veysey’s narrative 88 contributes to an understanding of higher education that is not limited to prestigious research universities. A third and final trend we can see in Veysey’s narrative is the dominance of research on tenure and hiring. We often think of this dominance as an outgrowth of postwar funding for science research (Kerr, 1963), academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), or even neoliberalism (Olsen & Peters, 2007). However, Veysey makes it clear that demonstrating successful research was already a major requirement for promotion by the early 1900’s (tenure would not come along until much later). Veysey demonstrates how hiring changed over the course of his narrative. In 1860 a man’s faith was often the determining factor in selecting a new faculty member for a college. By 1880 colleges often focused on a faculty member’s status as a gentleman, perhaps coupled with his politics as the defining characteristic for new hires. However, by the early years of the 20th century both of these factors were being replaced by a focus on a candidate’s scholarship. The right denominational faith or the proper social standing were no longer the primary selection criteria for new faculty. Viewed through The Emergence of the American University contemporary complaints about the dominance of research are not symptoms of recent phenomenon, but essentially baked into the system at the moment of its creation. Although each philosophy would come to exert pressure on higher education, research would be the distinguishing feature for any scholar who wanted to advance their career. History Plus Sociology The division between the two halves of The Emergence of the American University presents readers with a significant challenge. The first half focuses on Veysey’s four academic philosophies and is conceptualized as a work of intellectual history. The second half focuses on the structure of the new university, in particular the rise of bureaucracy, and is conceptualized as 89 organizational sociology. The unevenness between the two halves proved jarring for scholars reviewing this work at the time of its publication who felt that this structure made the work more difficult to comprehend. However, it is my argument that understanding The Emergence of the American University as two separate, ill-fitting halves is mistaken. Instead, we can see it as a monograph that takes two seemingly disparate modes of scholarship and combines them into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Or as John Thelin observed in a 1987 retrospective, “the truly distinctive contribution of The Emergence of the American University is less in the history of ideas and more in making institutional history part of the study of organizational behavior” (1987, p. 519). By merging these two forms of scholarship Veysey produced a powerful, long lasting work that illuminates higher education in a truly profound way. However, he also produced something that is difficult to grapple with and difficult to understand. Veysey at Work More so than the other works in this study there really does seem to be a tension between history and sociology in The Emergence of the American University. Not only does Veysey acknowledge this tension in his introduction, but he organizes his work around it as he separates these two distinct modes of scholarship into their own respective halves. Nonetheless, this tension has not appreciably dampened the utility of the work. It continues to be cited and continues to be relevant to such a degree that Julie Reuben has suggested publishing on the time period Veysey analyzes has remained underdeveloped: “why write when Veysey has already said anything that could be possibly said?” (2005, p. 413). Even as late as 2015 The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article which described The Emergence of the American University as “arguably the greatest book ever written about the American University” (Carey, 90 2015). The fact that the Chronicle published a lengthy article on Veysey and The Emergence of the American University is telling. Furthermore, Carey (2015) informs us that this tension is real when he describes the monograph as divided into two halves and says that the “first, most well- known, covering the period from the end of the Civil War to 1890, is an intellectual history of a battle among three ideas vying for the soul of academe” (para. 20). Carey makes it clear that other scholars have indeed accepted Veysey’s division. However, the most important piece of Carey’s statement is “first, most well-known” followed by “ideas vying for the soul of academe.” These two pieces of text inform us about contemporary interpretations of Veysey that revolve around Veysey’s analysis of academic philosophies and confirm that this is the dominant interpretation when he says that the first half of Veysey’s monograph is better known than the second half. In 1981, fifteen years after The Emergence of the American University was first published, The American Journal of Education afforded Veysey the opportunity to review his own work under the idea of “Re-Views.” For this re-view he responds to comments and criticisms about his argument, particularly to the way he organized his text thematically according to educational philosophy and how he emphasized university presidents and minimized the voices of faculty in the sciences. Strikingly there is no real discussion about any tension between history and organizational sociology. For Veysey this was a settled matter. However, if we take a slight detour, we can see Veysey working through this tension in a 1969 article entitled “Toward a New Direction in Education History: Prospect and Retrospect.” The article is conceived as a respond to historian Bernard Bailyn’s (1960) call to rethink how scholars see education: 91 as the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations; when one is prepared to see great variations in the role of formal institutions of instruction, to see schools and universities fade into relative insignificance next to other social agencies; when one sees education in its elaborate, intricate involvement with the rest of society, and notes its shifting functions, meanings, and purposes. . . . For these soft ambiguous moments where the words we use and the institutions we know are notably present but are still enmeshed in older meanings and different purposes – these are the moments of true origination. They reveal in purest form essential features which subsequent events complicate and modify but never completely transform. (p. 14) I have taken the time to quote Bailyn at length in a way that Veysey does not because most modern readers will be unfamiliar with Bailyn’s work and unaware of how and why Veysey sees his work as answering Bailyn’s call. The Emergence of the American University looks at the shifting functions and meanings of higher education and how these various functions and meanings became enmeshed within an organizational structure that was not designed for any single purpose. Furthermore, Veysey sees his work as interdisciplinary saying: historians are often asked to take a stand on the issue of their relation to ‘the social sciences.’ If, however, one looks at the exciting work that has been done in historical scholarship during the past fifteen years, one soon discovers that the illuminating ideas have nearly all comes from sociology, social psychology, and anthropology. (Veysey, 1969, p. 345) He suggests that historians doing this kind of work must understand how people behave in social groups and then “try to relate this knowledge to a study of changes and continuities in social patterns” (Veysey, 1969, p. 346). Thus, Veysey remains concerned with the study of change and 92 continuity over time, but with an awareness that these elements exist within a framework of ideas about education that are embedded within individuals and society in a complex way. A Loss of Freedom In many ways the sociological turn Veysey takes in the second half of his work is focused on what we now refer to as institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Although there was no such term at the time of Veysey’s writing and his data is far more historical than what we typically consider when looking at these forces in higher education, the comparison remains a strong one. For Veysey, many of the bureaucratic changes highlighted during the second half of The Emergence of the American University were spontaneous. To a degree the spontaneous nature he attributes to these changes is true. However, in other ways the changes and forces Veysey describes fit very well within the framework of institutional isomorphism. It is my contention that Veysey simply lacked the lexicon and thus struggled to identify a series of sociological forces for which he had no name, opting instead to say “the nineties, as we have seen, found local progress geared more and more to the emulation of one’s academic neighbors . . . Thus, while rivalry brought unparalleled fructification, it also engendered timidity” (p. 330). Veysey illustrates this timidity in the next paragraph saying, “as American universities become more intensely competitive – in the nineties and after – they became more standardized, less original, less fluid” (p. 330). Veysey is describing a system whereby institutions copy their more prestigious rivals, or at least their more visible rivals, in an attempt to maintain the relative status of their institution. For example, Harvard under president Elliot only commits to graduate education after Johns Hopkins is created. Veysey even goes so far as to say “Harvard graduate school came into being more from a motive of institutional up-to-dateness than from any deep- 93 seated enthusiasm for investigation on Elliot’s part. Faculty members were to complain, even into the eighties, that Elliot was indifferent towards their researches” (p. 96). Veysey identifies a central problem for Hopkins when he observes that “when the newness of research as an experience wore off into routine, the Hopkins emerged into the daylight as a small institution in financial trouble, plagued by competition from wealthier imitators” (164-65). The notion that Johns Hopkins’ troubles only became apparent when it emerged into the daylight suggests that it was never as successful as its competitors thought. Its rivals were imitating it because they did not want to be left behind, not because there was a true advantage to be garnered from research. If anything, the major advantages to be gained from adopting a focus on research were prestige oriented, which again leads us back to institutional isomorphism and the role the bureaucratic university played in holding all of these elements together. During the nineties in a very real sense the American academic establishment lost its freedom. To succeed in building a major university, one now had to conform to the standard structural pattern in all basic respects – no matter how one might trumpet one’s few peculiar embellishments. A competitive market for money, students, faculty, and prestige dictated the avoidance of pronounced eccentricities. Henceforth initiative had to display itself within the lines laid down by the given system. . . . Imagine an American university lacking a president, department chairmen, athletic stadium, transcripts of students’ grades, formal registration procedures, or a department of geology. Institutional development could seldom any longer be willful. Only on the peripheries of expectation, where standards had not yet clearly formed themselves, could it be experimental. All contenders for high institutional honor had to follow the prescribed mode. . . . The proof 94 lay in the fate of the four important institutions which still naively dared, in the nineties, to be somewhat different: John Hopkins, Clark, Yale, and Princeton. (340) With the exception of a university president the elements Veysey lays out are all things which colleges lacked in the 1860’s. He then further clarifies that a university seeking “high institutional honor” could not development willfully along the lines imagined by a president with a vision, but instead had to develop along the prescribed lines. The “peripheries of expectation” still allowed some degree of flexibility. Small colleges could experiment. Likewise, colleges that were not at the forefront of “institutional honor” could deviate from these norms, but for the types of institutions Veysey is focused on only the most minor deviations would prove acceptable: Hopkins, Clark, Yale, and Princeton would all come to resemble the University of Chicago and one another. Princeton might be a bit more selective with how it recruits students, and Johns Hopkins would retain a reputation for graduate research, but all would end up offering undergraduate education, accepting the elective system, emphasizing the prestige associated with graduate education, and require faculty to conduct research. And so, Veysey is offering us a very succinct explanation of isomorphism in the university, with just enough of his language to bring this history to life. Thus Hopkins, Clark, Yale, and Princeton “naively dared” to be different and all eventually came to avoid “pronounced eccentricities.” Two Interpretations of Research Reviews of The Emergence of the American University described the division between the two halves of Veysey’s work as jarring. However, if one looks more deeply at the content of their reviews this division and any problems it might present become less worrisome. Historians such as Frederick Rudolph (1966) tend to focus on the first half of Veysey’s monograph as intellectual history, and sociologists such as Joseph Ben-David (1966) tend to focus on the 95 second half of Veysey’s monograph as structural analysis. The sociologists do attempt to tie Veysey’s work to contemporary concerns (what historians would call presentism), and Rudolph’s (1966) analysis is a bit sharper, but the sharpness of Rudolph’s analysis may say more about him as a scholar than it does about an historical outlook, and neither is strong enough create what Frank Cordasco identifies as “the Veysey fissure” between these two halves of the work (1966). Perhaps the only real difference in reviews along this cleavage is the wish of the sociologist Joseph Ben-David (1966) for a wider sample of institutions including technical institutes, small colleges, and professional schools. For Ben-David these inclusions would have clarified the sociological conclusions Veysey was trying to make and otherwise increased the validity of his findings. However, even Ben-David admits that this is a minor point, saying “nevertheless, this is an important book, one of the very best examples of sociologically meaningful institutional history” (1996, p. 306). I bring up these reviews because the notion that The Emergence of the American University is jarring has persisted in modern accounts (Carey, 2015). However, the substance of these early reviews and my own analysis shows that this understanding is incorrect. The two halves of Veysey’s work are indeed different. He is drawing on different material and trying to advance a different kind of scholarly argument, but rather than representing a disjointed and uncomfortable merging of two modes of scholarship, Veysey very successfully combines the two to create a narrative and analysis that offers something unique and valuable. An Overlooked Pairing I have structured my argument on Veysey and The Emergence of the American University around four broad themes: the story Veysey tells about the development of 96 educational philosophies; the role bureaucracy played in bringing these philosophies together in the university; how The Emergence of the American University can supplement our survey texts; and how Veysey navigates the challenges inherent in creating a work that is both history and sociology. I am not suggesting that Veysey’s work has remained relevant because of any single element of my analysis, nor I am saying that the quality of the prose drives its continued use in teaching or scholarship. Rather, the way Veysey combines all of these features drives its continued use as a scholarly text. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this text is the way in which it appears to contain two ill-fitting halves. Although each half could stand on its own as a separate story, Veysey weaves them together to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. By using many of the same institutions as our survey texts he complicates our understanding about the uses and outcomes of historical scholarship and subverts our understanding of historical narratives. By using many of the same watersheds Veysey provides an example of how the same events and forces can be used to tell more than one story. Thus, we see that there are multiple narratives that could be told utilizing the same material. History is not a single static thing. Indeed, it is not even multiple static things, but instead a variable thing that challenges us as scholars to come to terms with what a historical narrative implies. 97 REFERENCES 98 REFERENCES Bailyn, B. (1960). Education in the forming of American society. New York, NYL Norton & Company. Ben-David, J. (1966, November). The emergence of the American university [Review of the book The emergence of the American university, by Laurence Veysey]. American Journal of Sociology, 72, 3, 305-306. Carey, K. (2015, October 29). Meet the man who wrote the greatest book about American higher ed. The Chronicle Review. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com Cordasco, F. (1966, Spring). The emergence of the American university [Review of the book The emergence of the American university, by Laurence Veysey]. History of Education Quarterly, 6, 1, 73-75. Dimagio, P. & Powell, W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 2, 147- 160. Kerr, C. (1963). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loss, P. (Ed.). (2005). Retrospective: Laurence R. Veysey’s The emergence of the American university. [Special section]. Journal of American History, 45, 3, 405-460. Olsen, M. & Peters, M. A. (2007). Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism. Journal of Education Policy, 20, 313-345. Reuben, J. (2005). Writing when everything has been said: The history of American higher education following Laurence Veysey’s classic. History of Education Quarterly, 45, 3, 412-419. Rudolph, (1962). The American college & university. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Rudolph, F. (1966, December). The emergence of the American university [Review of the book The emergence of the American university, by Laurence Veysey]. The Journal of American History, 53, 3, 616-617. Slaughter, S. & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thelin, J. R. (1987). The emergence of the American university. [Review of the book The Press. 99 emergence of the American university, by Laurence Veysey]. History of Education Quarterly, 27, 4, 517-523. Thelin, J. R. (2004/2019). A history of American higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Veysey, L. R. (1965). The emergence of the American university. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Veysey, L. R. (1969). Toward a new direction in education history: Prospect and retrospect. History of Education Quarterly, 9, 3, 343-359. Veysey, L. R. (1981, November). The emergence of the American university [Review of the book The emergence of the American university, by Laurence Veysey]. American Journal of Education, 90, 1, 103-106. 100 CHAPTER 4: CHRISTOPHER JENCKS & DAVID RIESMAN AND THE ACADEMIC REVOLUTION A Faculty Defined University Our survey texts often emphasize the large structural changes that have occurred in US higher education such as the creation of modern research universities and the expansion of US higher education after World War II. These stories are most often told through college and university presidents. However, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s The Academic Revolution (1968/2002) tells an altogether different story that eschews presidential power. These authors focus on the rise of faculty power and organize their work thematically with particular attention paid to different sectors of US higher education. Focusing on faculty power presents a story that is both at odds with our survey texts and coincides with what our surveys say. A more in-depth examination of Jencks and Riesman’s argument will better illuminate how this monograph runs counter to our survey texts and simultaneously reinforces their narrative. The more narrow, focused position this monograph provides paradoxically allows it to present a more expansive picture of higher education that is able to give voice to institutional types that do not typically play a significant role in a survey of US higher education. For Jencks and Riesman, “the academic revolution” refers to the growth in faculty power on college and university campuses, particularly in terms of faculty’s ability to set standards for undergraduate and graduate student admission and graduation, as well as for faculty promotion and tenure. 6 In the first half of The Academic Revolution, Jencks and Riesman focus on four 6 I use the phrase “The Academic Revolution” as a work and as a concept. When I refer to it as a work, it will always be capitalized and italicized. When it is a concept, it will always be in lower case and not italicized. 101 structural principles that are central to their analysis. In the second half of the monograph, they consider six institutional types, and use the four structural principles to guide their analysis. Their chapters blend historical analysis based in the existing literature (neither author is an historian and they did no archival work for this monograph) with social science research to better contextualize the rise in faculty power and what it means for the diverse purposes of US higher education. By combining a narrative about faculty power with individual chapters dealing with diverse institutional types and different structural principles, Jencks and Riesman are able to present a convincing story about how diverse institutional sectors have come to resemble one another despite differences that would otherwise keep them apart. It is my belief that such a combination allows the authors to better contextualize the drivers of change and to more effectively identify the forces of continuity. I structure my analysis according to four broad themes. First, I examine the story Jencks and Riesman tell about the rise of faculty power. A key part of this analysis is focused on how various structural principles and institutional types came to be affected by faculty power and the academic revolution. Second, I consider how the organization of this monograph around structural principles and institutional types tells a radically different story about the history of US higher education. Third, I show how The Academic Revolution functions as an alternative to survey texts and consider how it can supplement more traditional historical narratives in the field. Fourth, I consider the tension of this work as both historical and sociological. As was the case in my analysis of both The Distinctive College and The Emergence of the American University, my work relies on the belief that the quality of the authors’ prose matters; as such, I 102 make use of regular detailed quotes from Jencks and Riesman’s text to allow readers to more closely interrogate their argument. An Informal Power Jencks and Riesman begin their monograph with a chapter called “The Academic Revolution in Perspective.” In this chapter, they attempt to clarify their theory on the development of US colleges in regard to the academic revolution. Following this introduction, the authors identify four structural principles affecting higher education. These structural principles are then used to direct an analysis of six institutional types, each of which is affected by the forces of the academic revolution. Each stated principle and institutional type gets its own chapter for a total of ten chapters. The structural principles are dealt with in the chapters: “The War between Generations,” “Social Stratification and Mass Higher Education,” “Nationalism versus Localism,” and “Class Interests and the ‘Public-Private’ Controversy.” Institutional types are dealt with in the chapters: “The Professional Schools;”7 Feminism, Masculinism, and Coeducation;”8 “Protestant Denominations and Their Colleges;” “Catholics and Their Colleges;” “Negroes and Their Colleges;” and “The Anti-University.” 9 Jencks and Riesman then close their monograph with a unique feature among the works in this study: a chapter that explicitly looks 7 The chapter on professional schools is unusual in that it is not an institutional type, but instead a way to think about graduate education at teachers’ colleges, professional schools, PhD programs in the Arts and Sciences, and Medical schools. This chapter can primarily be understood as an extension of their opening chapter “The Academic Revolution in Prespective.” Within this chapter, the section “Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences” is both the largest single section and the rhetorical telos of the chapter. 8 Although the title of this chapter implies it should be thought of as a structural principle, in reality, the chapter is about gender specific colleges and coeducation. 9 The authors use the term “Negro colleges.” Jencks addresses this in the introduction to the 2000 transaction edition when he acknowledges that while “negro” was the preferred term when they were writing the text, if they had waited even a few years, the preferred term would be “black colleges.” In the interest of fairness and inclusion, I use the term “HBCUs” (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), as is current accepted practice in higher education studies. However, when quoting material from the text, I retain the original terminology. 103 forward and contains policy recommendations. The authors describe the organization of the book as follows: It begins with a general theory about the development of American society and American college, then moves on to discuss different species of colleges and their relationships to the various special interest groups that founded them. Not only does it try to describe the past and future of these relationships – it also tries to evaluate them. (p. xix) For each of these chapters, Jencks and Riesman rely on the idea of the academic revolution. The authors focus on how it has come to define university purposes. They show that although the ideals of the academic revolution are not the only purposes of the university, they have come to dominate a wide array of college and university processes. The Academic Revolution was written at a time when Clark Kerr’s concept of a multiversity (1963) was gaining widespread acceptance. The Academic Revolution was also written in the wake of both Frederick Rudolph’s The American College and University (1962) and Lawrence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University (1965). Although the authors recognize a debt to Veysey’s combination of structural functional analysis and history— and they also acknowledge the multiversity as a unifying concept for a significant portion of higher education—Jencks and Riesman advance a very different theory. Specifically, they focus on faculty and faculty education as the primary driver of change in higher education. In the introduction to the 2002 transaction edition, Jencks clarifies their argument, saying “administrators still exercised formal control over their institutions, but their choices were now constrained by their belief that success would be measured by the ability to attract a distinguished faculty” (p. ix-x). In other words, although faculty were not formally driving change through administrative power, faculty prestige was a university priority, even for that did 104 not prioritize research. The idea that the academic revolution impacted all institutions regardless of prestige is crucial to understanding the authors’ later focus on institutional types. By considering how less prestigious institutional types were affected by the academic revolution, we can more easily come to terms with the widespread nature of its effects. Although I have said much about The Academic Revolution in general and briefly discussed it as a theory, I have yet to dive into specifics. What exactly does the academic revolution imply? How does it interact with the structural principles identified by the authors? What is the significance of grounding an analysis in these diverse institutional types? And why is it still relevant more than 50 years later? To answer these questions, I situate my discussion in Jencks and Riesman’s narrative so readers can gain a better understanding of what they were trying to achieve. My organization of this chapter differs from what I have done previously in that I do not attempt to reconstruct Jencks and Riesman’s narrative, but instead use only a limited selection of their chapters to illustrate how the academic revolution intersects with US higher education. Making the World Safe for Academics Jencks and Riesman begin their analysis by focusing on the academic revolution as a theory. More than simply a catchy title at a time when revolution and student protests were in the news, the academic revolution offers a framework for making sense of the rise in faculty power on college and university campuses. To be clear, faculty power is not administrative power. Faculty have not gained authority over budgets, tuition, or funding allocations. Instead, the academic revolution describes an altogether different type of informal power. This power takes two forms. First, faculty have gained control over the standards students and other faculty are held to; and second, faculty priorities have, in many ways, become 105 administrative priorities. Although faculty have always had some control over classroom standards, the control associated with the academic revolution differs in that faculty are able to exercise control over the standards for admission, as well as the requirements and organization of the curriculum. They also exercise control over the standards fellow faculty members are held to: the requirements for entree into the profession (a PhD); the promotion and tenure process (publication); and the qualifications required for senior administrative positions (generally a PhD and having previously held a position as faculty). The authors illustrate the dominance of the academic revolution in their statement: “the top management, while nominally acting in the interests of the board, actually represents the interests of ‘middle management’ (i.e., the faculty), both to the board and to the world. . . . Most university presidents see their primary responsibility as ‘making the world safe for academicians’” (p. 17). The phrase “making the world safe” emphasizes the role of administration in shielding faculty from a variety of concerns. Not only do they represent faculty interests to the outside world, but they also ensure the outside world does not encroach on faculty. For Jencks and Riesman, these elements of faculty power are an extension of prestigious graduate schools. These graduate schools educate the majority of PhD holders and socialize them to value research and to view matters related to curriculum and admissions through a departmental lens. Less prestigious colleges hire these graduates to staff their programs and the new hires bring their socialization with them. As a result, less prestigious colleges come to value the same things as prestigious colleges, including research, graduate education, curriculum that prepares undergraduates for advanced work in a specific discipline, and the hiring of more faculty with PhDs. This created a system whereby colleges add graduate programs, de-emphasize undergraduate education and, over time, look similar to the prestigious universities that educated 106 the PhD faculty. However, Jencks and Riesman make it clear that this cycle is not driven by competition. Rather, the changes a typical president would pursue are defined by the faculty: more productive scholars, more endowed chairs, a larger faculty, a lower student-faculty ratio, and a greater emphasis on graduate programs. It is perhaps a mark of the success of the academic revolution that the elements used to determine the quality and ranking of an institution are those the faculty themselves have prioritized. This understanding of the processes at work within the academic revolution drive Jencks and Riesman’s analysis in the remainder of the text. The Myth of Faculty Contact The structural principles Jencks and Riesman identify do not drive the academic revolution, nor does the academic revolution drive the structural principles. Rather, the academic revolution colors how colleges and universities respond to each principle: generational strife, social stratification, localism, and class interests all exist as independent forces in American life. However, the academic revolution guides and directs how colleges and universities approach these forces. To illustrate this, I focus on two chapters: “The War Between Generations” and “Nationalism versus Localism.” Jencks and Riesman open their chapter “The War Between Generations” by conceptualizing the conflict between students and faculty as central to the activities of a college. One way to determine the central purposes of an institution is to ask whether a given function could be eliminated without changing its name. An institution that does not facilitate social mobility, that has no connection with any occupational subculture, and that does nothing to perpetuate localism, sectarianism, sex polarities, or ethnic separatism can still be called a college. But an institution that does not bring together people called 107 teachers with other people called students is not called a college but something else. (p. 28) By suggesting that the relationship between teachers and students is the central defining feature of a college, the authors place the desires of the younger generation (students) into conflict with the desires of older generations (faculty). Contemporary scholars have followed suit and made this intergenerational conflict a central aspect of their studies.10 Jencks and Riesman also address the myth that this conflict is a modern aspect of higher education brought about by the demands of research and publication, saying: Among the many myths that afflict contemporary thinking about American colleges, none is more persistent than the one that maintains that in the good old days, when colleges were small, faculty and students had intimate personal contacts on a day-to-day basis. . . . Whatever its origins, the myth does not square with the facts. . . . The students were continually struggling with the faculty, whom they almost all regarded as the enemy. The faculty reciprocated in kind, devoting itself mainly to the enforcement of academic and social rules, often of the most trivial sort. (p. 35) Jencks and Riesman begin this statement with an image of the myth of “the good old days” and use the term “afflict” to suggest that this thinking, this myth, represents an element of disease in our beliefs about US colleges and universities. The authors then pair this with “struggling” against the faculty, who are thus identified as the enemy. Crucially, this conflict is not a matter of a disagreement over coursework or sexual mores, but instead something more foundational that amounts to a struggle the authors describe as “guerilla resistance” on the part of students (p. 36). 10 My Freshmen Year (Nathan, 2006) and Academically Adrift (Arum & Roska, 2011) both deal with this conflict, although neither acknowledges it in the same way Jencks and Riesman do. 108 Such a reading of generational conflict is a core component of how the authors view higher education. Jencks and Riesman observe that faculty have distanced themselves from undergraduate education. They teach fewer lower division courses and emphasize graduate education. Furthermore, when they do interact with undergraduate students, they tend to focus on the most capable and otherwise urge a more selective admissions process. The authors emphasize that this neglect is mutual—while faculty complain about how few students come to office hours, students complain about the lack of contact with professors and tell horror stories about absent mentors and advisors. A better way to characterize Jencks and Riesman’s description may as benign neglect. There was a time when “open warfare” and “guerilla resistance” were accurate descriptions of the war between the generations, however, the academic revolution has changed how the conflict between students and faculty is viewed and approached, but not altered the fundamental existence of the conflict. A second structural force Jencks and Riesman outline is the relationship between nationalism and localism.11 For the authors, colleges have historically been local affairs as the primary impetus for founding a college was geographic. The earliest US colleges were organized on a state basis at a rate not exceeding one per state. As the country expanded west, the geographic element became both more important and smaller in scope. Colleges became more intensely regional and were founded at a rate far above one per state. Although these colleges were typically organized on a denominational basis, the true appeal was one of localism and the 11 Here, it is important to recognize that nationalism was being used as a counterpoint to localism. Thus, it did not refer to the militarized nation state as is often the case when the term is used to describe 19th and 20th century nationalism. For Jencks and Riesman, nationalism represented a focus on national level forces and a response to needs based on an all-encompasing understanding of the US population, whereas localism represented a response to local level needs. 109 desire to put a given town “on the map.” The denominational appeal for the founding of new colleges almost entirely disappeared in the 20th century, while the regional appeal continued to grow along with the demand for higher education. Jencks and Riesman contrast the family focused local pressures with the academic revolution centered national forces. In so doing, the authors grapple with a series of contradictions as colleges balance both local and national requirements. In some ways, institutions remain primarily local to this day. For example, comprehensive colleges are largely commuter institutions that cater to a population that is primarily local. However, faculty at comprehensive colleges typically advocate for new departments, new graduate programs, and the hiring of more distinguished faculty, rather than for a focus on the local elements of a university’s mission. Jencks and Riesman describe this contradiction saying, “localism may define who will be admitted . . . but academic professionalism then takes over and defines who will be educated” (p. 197). Within this paradigm, it becomes possible to view the structural principle at work here as localism for most undergraduate students and nationalism for graduate students (as well as the most capable undergraduate students). Those who are considered “capable” are educated according to national standards defined by academic disciplines, while those deemed “less capable” get the benign neglect Jencks and Riesman observe in “The War between Generations.” When the academic revolution combines with nationalism, colleges are encouraged to become more national in outlook and recruitment as they seek to acquire more prestigious faculty and more capable students. However, the forces of localism push colleges in the opposite direction as they accept underprepared local students: “the paradoxical result is likely to be that while the majority of individual institutions will become more national, the system as a whole 110 will not. Instead, nationalization and localism will both spread in tandem, just as they have for the past two generations” (p. 196). Here, Jencks and Riesman emphasize that this tandem growth is not voluntary: college and university faculty will almost always prefer the national. The authors assert that this growth of the local need not be a negative and cite Berea college as an example of an institution that takes its commitment to the local seriously. However, they conclude that Berea is singularly unique as a four-year institution that takes its local mission seriously by choice, rather than because it lacks other options. Instead, the majority of institutions that take the local seriously do so because they are unable to emphasize the national. The Academic Revolution, Warts and All Jencks and Riesman focus on four institutional types that deviate or are otherwise uniquely stressed by the academic revolution: gendered colleges, religious colleges, historically black colleges, and anti-university colleges. The authors’ treatment of HBCU’s is problematic and will be the focus of my analysis in a separate section. Jencks and Riesman separate their analysis of religious colleges into a chapter on protestant colleges and a chapter on catholic colleges. By doing so, they are not suggesting that the defining quality for either is their ecumenical stance. Rather, they treat them separately because their historical circumstances have placed them at different points along the academic revolution. Although many institutions have remained nominally protestant, the daily work of teaching and scholarship at most of these institutions has been given over to lay faculty who are a product of the academic revolution. This is not a recent change. Instead, the authors suggest that this process began at protestant colleges in tandem with the professionalization of the faculty and the creation of research universities at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast, Jencks and Riesman observe that Catholic colleges 111 only recently began to professionalize their faculty, and they were struggling to balance the requirements of the academic revolution and their ecumenical stance. For the authors, there is nothing that inherently prevents an institution from being both academically respectable and catholic. However, they do note that the administrative reality of faculty appointments suggests otherwise, as academic professionals want to choose their colleagues on the basis of their professional accomplishments. “If a Catholic institution takes the same position, however, what is left of the Church’s pastoral commitments” (p. 400). Although the authors would like to see some such a compromise happen, they are doubtful that catholic colleges will be able to enact such a policy . As the quote makes clear, the demands of the academic revolution make working out such a compromise unlikely. Historically, the majority of protestant and catholic colleges have been and continue to be regional. In other words, they attract students from the surrounding area and, as such, are not institutions that recruit nationally. The geographic boundaries that define these institutions may have expanded, but the regional character of these institutions has not changed. The central question underpinning Jencks and Riesman’s analysis is whether the adjectives “Catholic” or “Protestant” have any real meaning when the norms and expectations of being a college are established by graduate programs at prestigious national universities. Most Protestant colleges met the demands of the academic revolution by minimizing their Protestantism and aligning instead with professionalized faculty. The authors conclude their discussion of catholic colleges saying: the question is now whether the logic of the situation will allow them to remain “Catholic” in any recognizable sense. Will they embrace the academic revolution, warts and all, as many nominally Protestant college have done? Or will they hold back, 112 continuing to look to the Church as well as the leading secular universities for ideals and leadership. (p. 399) Here, the authors create a telling juxtaposition when they pair embrace with holding back. This suggests a voluntary yet inevitable aspect of the academic revolution: these institutions can embrace the academic revolution as one embraces change, or they can hold back and resist it. However, “holding back” is all they can do to resist, much as one holds back the tide. The academic revolution will not disappear. They best they can do is resist it for a time. Jencks and Riesman identify two different anti-universities: community colleges and colleges committed to the general education movement. These institutions are not a type or sector in the same way as religious or gendered colleges. Rather, the authors group them together because they act in opposition to the academic revolution. Community colleges emphasize aspects of higher education such as workforce development and adult education that meet local needs. They are able to resist the academic revolution primarily because local circumstances dictate that they should. 12 In contrast, colleges involved in the general education movement consciously and purposefully resist the academic revolution. For Jencks and Riesman, the dissident programs in the general education movement were largely failures. They represented an important counterpoint to the dominance of the departmental silo, but the more a program resisted the academic revolution, the less likely it was to survive: A department may, for example, have a man it would like to keep on but has no money to pay. The general education program, the experimental college, or whatever it may be, has a budget line but does not want the department’s man. It has another candidate of its own 12 Community colleges are perhaps the single institutional type that has undergone the biggest change since The Academic Revolution was first published. Although community colleges still balance a variety of competing goals and purposes, many are beginning to display changes we might associate with the academic revolution, such as hiring faculty with PhDs and offering more prestigious four-year degrees. 113 whom the department thinks demonstrably weaker, at least on the scholarly side. The department therefore concludes that the general educationists are without judgement and uses the next available opportunity to curtail their power to saddle the university with what seem semi-competent faculty. A cynic might also note that the result of such maneuvers is usually to increase the number of slots the department can fill. (p. 499) With this quote, Jencks and Riesman highlight the downfall of the general education movement: it sought to promote faculty the department and the academic revolution deemed inferior. Put another way, the general education movement refused to promote the renowned scholar with a spotty teaching record that the department wanted around but off their payroll. Same Forces, Different Circumstances Any examination of The Academic Revolution must grapple with Jencks and Riesman’s extremely problematic chapter on HBCU’s. Furthermore, this task is made all the more challenging by the fact that an early version of this chapter was published in the Harvard Educational Review in 1967. After this early publication, the article took on a life of its own as it was reviewed in Time Magazine, Newsweek, and The New York Times. These reviews in turn prompted a number of critical responses published in academic presses. Marybeth Gasman (2006) has done an excellent job tracking these responses. I do not wish to cover the ground she already has covered, but I do think it is important to situate the chapter and its responses in the context of my larger argument about this monograph. The outline of this chapter follows much the same outline as the other chapters in The Academic Revolution with the exception that the authors spend the first 10 pages discussing the social status of African Americans. They acknowledge slavery, the failure of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and segregation. Although the discussion is very much a relic of the 1960s – and there are 114 omissions we might consider glaring today—their appraisal of the social status of African Americans is, in general, not a problem. The authors then provide a brief historical sketch of HBCUs. This historical sketch is also reasonable, if somewhat dated. It would be helpful if it included more details about a segment of higher education many scholars were—and still are— unfamiliar with, but the sketch at least orients readers to the remainder of the analysis. However, the analysis itself is unkind to say the least and, in one oft-quoted passage, the authors labeled HBCUs as “academic disaster areas” (p. 433). Taken as a whole, the criticisms leveled at this chapter can be grouped into three broad categories. First, the author’s characterization was impressionistic and they otherwise failed to adequately investigate these institutions. As a result, they drew faulty conclusions about HBCU’s. Second, although some of the concerns the authors raise about HBCUs are valid and had been highlighted before (see McGrath, 1965), Jencks and Riesman’s analysis lacked sufficient context and did not adequately account for the specific challenges faced by HBCUs. They also ignored the failings of many predominantly white institutions. And third, Jencks and Riesman’s analysis almost exclusively focused on HBCU’s problems and ignored their successes. All of these critiques are fair. Indeed, Jencks and Riesman did not spend enough time on these campuses and they did not do enough in their text to make it clear that these negative statements are true of the other institutional types under analysis. However, when viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that The Academic Revolution is skeptical about the education provided by many of the institutional types they consider. Jencks and Riesman conclude their chapter with a point that is particularly pertinent to my analysis. While the statement should not be taken to absolve the authors, it provides us with a 115 different way of understanding this chapter and the arguments made in The Academic Revolution: These colleges have very little to tempt a talented professor, whatever his color. Except for such leaders as Texas Southern, the public Negro colleges are among the least favored institutions in the least favored states in the nation. The public Negro colleges, moreover, suffer in many instances from having been until recently de facto teachers colleges, with all that that implies not only for academic prestige but for the character of the faculty against whom a newcomer has to struggle if he wants to innovate. (p. 472) For Jencks and Riesman HBCUs face a particular challenge relative to the academic revolution. As long as expectations for prestige and performance are based on metrics like number of faculty holding a PhD, the number and size of graduate programs, or the research productivity of faculty, HBCUs will continue to be disadvantaged. Highly trained faculty who are themselves swept up in the academic revolution will not want to teach at an underfunded HBCU any more than they would want to teach at an underfunded catholic college. Thus, although HBCUs face a number of challenges specific to their circumstances, they are no less impacted by the academic revolution than the other institutions Jencks and Riesman discuss. The Future is in Other Hands The Academic Revolution does not construct a typical narrative like The Distinctive College or The Emergence of the American University. Nonetheless, Jencks and Riesman tell two stories. The first focuses on the academic revolution: how it came about and how it has impacted and interacted with different aspects of the US higher education landscape. The second focuses on the great diversity of US higher education institutions and the wide variety of purposes these sectors and institutional types meet. This is not explicit to the degree it is in The 116 Distinctive College where the story about three colleges is used to identify and illuminate the institutional saga. Instead, as Jencks and Riesman discuss the academic revolution, a second story gets told. By organizing their analysis according to sociological concepts and institutional types, they advance the argument that the academic revolution intersects with a wide variety of institutions and purposes. In so doing, the authors acknowledge the diversity of US higher education and assert that understanding it requires us to grapple with a wide variety of factors. The more notable higher education institutions have increasingly come to resemble one another thanks to the academic revolution. However, those institutions that have resisted or been unable to conform to the academic revolution tell an altogether different story. Each chapter in The Academic Revolution deals with a different element of this diversity. Thus, Jencks and Riesman frame their chapter “The War Between the Generations” as a conflict between scholars’ desires and the sizeable mass of undergraduate students—i.e., between the academic revolution and the need for credentials. While this conflict can be viewed as one between young students and older faculty, it is also a story about what we expect from institutes of higher education, especially in regard to faculty research, student life, undergraduate education, and credentialing. “The War Between the Generations” places any tension between the diverse purposes of higher education within the same institution. In contrast, “Nationalism versus Localism” places this tension between institutional types. The forces of nationalism are best understood in reference to large research universities and PhD faculty. For Jencks and Riesman, these individuals and institutions see themselves as national actors. The institutions think of their place within a national framework, recruit students from a national pool of applicants, and emphasize graduate education. PhD faculty focus on graduate education which, in turn, is a national 117 endeavor that allows the best universities to recruit the best students from a national pool of applicants. Although this national outlook represents a dominant ideological component of higher education, the authors suggest that local forces act to shape higher education in altogether different ways and direct other institutional types to emphasize the provision of affordable higher education to students from given geographic regions, even if the forces of the academic revolution press individual institutions away from meeting these local needs. The primary institutions Jencks and Riesman identify with meeting these local needs are the non-selective, non-prestigious religious institutions, women’s colleges, and HBCU’s.13 The authors’ analysis is unkind to these institutions. They view such colleges as underfunded and lacking in scholars who are suitably trained. In their estimation such schools charge too much for the education they provide (at least the private ones) and many of their students are only tangentially interested in getting an education. However, a reading that sees these institutions within a higher education ecosystem that requires the local and the national presents a different conclusion. The authors may see institutions as individually lacking, but they recognize that there is a role for local institutions that are somewhat removed from the norms associated with national graduate schools. Such a reading differs from the more conventional analysis I provided earlier. This should not suggest that either reading is wrong, but rather that Jencks and Riesman have attempted to graft the ideas and norms associated with the academic revolution onto the complexities of US higher education. Their analysis of different institutional types concludes with a prediction that divergent institutions will come to more closely resemble national graduate schools as the academic revolution trickles down to less prestigious institutions. They are 13 In many ways, this local need is now filled by state-funded comprehensive universities. However, during the mid 1960s, these institutions were far smaller and far less prevalent. It is also important to note that state comprehensive colleges were often founded in opposition to local HBCUs in places where segregation was the norm. 118 skeptical and dismissive of these institutions in a number of ways, but are clear in acknowledging that these institutions will persist in large part due to local phenomenon: There are many students who are equally uncertain of their identity and strengths, and some of these will also make a religious commitment to escape being “only a number” at a big public institution. Thus, the Protestant college will survive as a distinctive phenomenon, even though the shape of the future is in other hands. Indeed, it is precisely the fact that the future is in other hands that gives the Protestant colleges their appeal to those who are looking for an alternative. (p. 333) Although the academic revolution has been a dominant force in higher education, the authors suggest that marginalized institutions will persist because the diverse purposes of higher education have created space, if only in part, for institutions that are able to resist the academic revolution. Leaving the Survey Behind As a work of history, The Academic Revolution covers a significant span of time. It begins in the 19th century and reaches its apex in the 1960s. However, its analysis primarily focuses on the years after World War II, when higher education expanded and PhD faculty became a dominant norm on college and university campuses. A conventional telling of the history of higher education during the postwar years would focus on expanded access to higher education and the overall increase in the number of young people enrolling in postsecondary education. This narrative would with Clark Kerr’s (1963) multiversity. Although the multiversity and the postwar expansion of higher education are both important elements in Jencks and Riesman’s narrative, neither of these more traditional historical watersheds provide the momentum necessary to account for changes in faculty power, nor do they enable the authors to 119 account for the diverse institutional types that occupy a great portion of the analysis. Instead, Jencks and Riesman combine their own analysis on the academic revolution with an overall reading of higher education that takes these two watersheds as a given, but asserts that they do not explain the higher education landscape as fully as the academic revolution. Organizing History Jencks and Riesman propose an alternative watershed for US higher education centered around the creation of a mass consumer culture. Although they place the start of this consumer culture at the beginning of the 20th century, they note that it reaches its apex after World War II. In this reading, mass consumer culture and national sales distributions drove the demand for the “company man.” The company man needed a graduate education that suited a national employment model. As such, the expansion of graduate education came about in response to the rise of a national consumer culture and the associated growth of national corporations. This alternate watershed suggests higher education scholars have been too limited in their understanding and analysis of the national-level changes that have impacted higher education. In other words, there has been too much focus on events that have obvious implications, such as the GI bill, and too little attention on contextual events in US history. The Academic Revolution is the third book in my study and the third book not to be organized chronologically. In some ways, the organization of The Academic Revolution resembles the organization of The Emergence of the American University in that both construct a set of chapters focused on different elements of US higher education with subsequent chapter proceeding in a roughly chronological fashion. However, Jencks and Riesman take this chapter- element principle and amplify it. This minimizes the coherence of their narrative and instead conceptualizes each chapter as a vignette held together by theory. 120 The easiest way to understand these chapters is to think of them as presenting the same narrative over and over again. The details change, but the telos of that narrative basically stays the same. It always ends with “the academic revolution.” I am not suggesting that this makes the narrative inherently better or worse. Rather, I am saying that this makes it different than the other works in this study and, most importantly, very different from our survey texts. Indeed, this is a radically different way to organize history—a way that is primarily focused on patterns and thinking about how diverse things come to be similar over time. Interweaving the Survey Although the dominant narrative about US higher education runs in the background of Jencks and Riesman’s argument, this narrative is not the focus of their analysis. Nonetheless, the authors interweave this narrative about the rise of research universities and the growth of the multiversity into the Academic Revolution. The rise of research universities and the dominance of large multiversities is evident in Jencks and Riesman’s discussion about these institutions as engines of growth. In this discussion, they observe that large institutions “become one of the amenities with which the state or town seeks to establish its national reputation as a ‘progressive,’ ‘forward-looking’ place appealing to outsiders. To serve this purpose a college must play to an adult rather than a juvenile audience, and it must play according to whatever rules seem nationally relevant” (p. 187). This quote indicates that thinking about universities revolves around economic development and competition for scarce resources and talent. By serving as another amenity these large national institutions allow cities and states to attract business and secure federal dollars that would otherwise be out of reach. This understanding contextualizes the dominance of large multi- purpose institutions in a way that is not at first obvious. Within Jencks and Riesman’s argument 121 these institutions are primarily drivers of PhD faculty enacting the academic revolution. However, the university as amenity idea places these institutions into an economic context that extends beyond the bounds of graduate education and research grants. These institutions become an important local feature for regional economic development. Jencks and Riesman further emphasize the dominance of research universities in their discussion of catholic colleges when they rather dryly observe “that the rich grow richer even faster than the poor do” (p. 403). They immediately follow this statement with the observation that, “if one looks, for example, at the scholarly ratings of the universities over the years, one discovers very few new faces” (p. 403). Taken together, these two quotes illuminate just how entrenched the top universities are within the hierarchy of US higher education. There has been some change on the margins and, if we consider the Carnegie Classification of high research activity, the list of top research universities has grown bigger and gotten longer. However, if we turn to an explicit ranking mechanism, such as that compiled by the US News and World Report, we find very few institutions that were not already prestigious in the 1970s, and even fewer institutions that were founded after 1890. Although Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago play a smaller role in Jencks and Riesman’s monograph than they do in our survey texts, The Academic Revolution allows us to understand a new facet of their influence as providers of the PhD faculty who are themselves aligned with the academic revolution. Supplementing the Survey Although the story Jencks and Riesman tell utilizes many of the same ideas as the story told in our survey texts, their monograph is organized to facilitate examinations of other trends in higher education in a way that is more interconnected than is possible in a survey text. The first trend we can see illuminated by The Academic Revolution is the propensity for colleges to add 122 programs and course offerings that mirror those at more prestigious institutions. The 21st century has seen a steady stream of two-year institutions looking to offer something close to a four-year degree and four-year institutions adding “prestigious” graduate programs. Although Jencks and Riesman do not frame their analysis in these terms, their discussion of religious colleges makes this element of increased prestige explicit: “like most second and third rank colleges, their eyes are on the first rank institutions and not on their students’ problems. They assume that if only they could do what Bryn Mawr or Randolph Macon or Manhattanville does, they would be more effective” (p. 309). Crucially, this is not about competing with Bryn Mawr or Manhattanville; rather it is about emulating these first rank institutions under the assumption that being more like them will help students at second and third rate institutions. A second trend we can see is the growth in remedial coursework. Remedial coursework is often assumed to be a recent phenomenon. However, the authors conclude their discussion of HBCUs by acknowledging that 1960’s era primary and secondary schools were already not preparing students for college work. They suggest that as college going expanded the burden of educating underprepared students would fall on state commuter colleges (now often called comprehensive universities). The authors also suggest that properly addressing the needs of these students would require an enormous amount of resources be directed to a variety of underfunded institutions. Higher education has, of course, expanded to include these underprepared students and we have mustered the resources to address their needs, albeit poorly. Jencks and Riesman failed to anticipate the overall rise in the cost of higher education and the degree to which we would place the burden for this cost directly on the neediest students. Put simply, we have mustered resources for these remedial courses by charging students to take them. The failure to anticipate this change should not distract us from the fundamental assertion the authors make 123 about the challenges of remedial education on college campuses and the historical nature of the problem. A third trend Jencks and Riesman illustrate is the struggle to (re)define what counts as scholarly output. We might typically associate this trend with Ernest Boyer’s 1990 publication, Scholarship Reconsidered. Although, Boyer (1990) is not the only advocate of such a change, he is perhaps the best known. Jencks and Riesman’s discussion of Anti-University colleges makes it clear that this discussion was already underway at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, where Hutchins’ general education program was trying to position faculty work, such as syllabi, as scholarly output and to otherwise promote faculty based on teaching ability. Viewed in this light, Boyer’s argument is only one in a long series of such arguments. Crucially, The Academic Revolution asserts that the dominance of research and publication has been directed by faculty, not administration and the failure of dissident general education programs makes this clear. A fourth and final trend Jencks and Riesman highlight is the growth of comprehensive, or commuter colleges. Although our survey texts do not give meaningful voice to these institutions, Martin Trow’s “Reflection on the Transition from Mass to Universal Higher Education” (1970) has brought them into our narrative. Jencks and Riesman provide context to this expansion when they talk about the regional nature of catholic colleges and HBCUs. In the 21st century, the largest commuter colleges are large state institutions offering undergraduate and graduate education. The academic revolution allows us to see this growth at comprehensive colleges as an intersection between localism and universal higher education. 124 History Plus Sociology All of the works in this study are interdisciplinary in that they draw on more than just history. However, of the three books that draw on sociology (Professing Literature draws on literature), The Academic Revolution is most strongly identified with sociology, chiefly because Jencks and Riesman made a number of predictions about higher education: predictions that proved to be incorrect but are somehow astoundingly relevant 50 years later. In particular, the authors failed to anticipate the late 20th century funding crunch and thus failed to envision a higher education ecosystem where state and federal funds were not increasing. However, as the 21st century has progressed, many of the trends identified by Jencks and Riesman have only intensified. The authors acknowledge that, sociologically speaking, their work is superficial. There are simply too many institutions to truly study every single one. Similarly, they admit their treatment of students paints them with too broad a brush, saying “the turnover is enormous and yesterday’s impressions are often out of date” (p. xix). Jencks and Riesman are no less honest about the deficiencies of their historical research, admitting that they are not historians and have done no archival research. Indeed, they base a great portion of their historical account on survey texts such as Rudolph’s The American College and University (1962), and other more specialized works such as Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University. The authors defend their choices saying, “responsible scholarship must invent methods and data appropriate to the important problems of the day” (p. xxii). In so doing, they acknowledge the tension between sociology and history. Although their sociological analysis requires an account of the historical forces at work, spending time on history means less time for sociological analysis and vice versa. Assembling a coherent whole required Jencks and Riesman to shortchange both analyses. 125 Jencks and Riesman at Work The principle way in which Jencks and Riesman navigate the tension between these two modes of scholarship is through their organization, both in the way the monograph as a whole is organized and through the organization of each individual chapter. At first glance, this organization mirrors what we’ve seen in Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University. Veysey describes the first half of his work as history and the second half as structural functional analysis. It appears as if Jencks and Riesman have simply reversed this organization and placed the sociological facing chapters first. However, a more careful reading shows that this is not the case. The material is not divided in the same way. Instead, within each chapter, Jencks and Riesman sketch a brief historical narrative and scaffold sociological analysis on top of that narrative. For example, in their chapter “The War between the Generations,” they begin with an examination of how the age distribution of students has changed over time. They then use this narrative to approach student subcultures on campus—and the adult backlash against these subcultures— through a discussion of safe (i.e., conservative or non-radical) schools. This form, beginning with an historical sketch that is followed by analysis rooted in sociology is then repeated in the following chapters. Although the format I have sketched above makes logical sense, it is not often the norm. Even within the books in my study—which are in many ways uniquely organized—we more usually see history and sociology occupying separate sections. Meaningfully integrating these modes of scholarship is difficult and, as such, does not typically happen. One might ask: how and why are Jencks and Riesman able to integrate the two? What is unique about them and their approach? Throughout their careers, both scholars held prestigious positions at research universities. However, neither held a PhD, and thus neither was committed to the methodological 126 boundaries we typically associate with the disciplinary structure of US higher education. Riesman had a JD, but was known as a sociologist, and Jencks had an M.Ed from Harvard and spent approximately one year at the London School of Economics pursuing a PhD in sociology. Together, these two scholars do not display the disciplinary focus we would otherwise expect from well-known scholars. This ultimately created the space for them to organize The Academic Revolution in a manner that considers history as a necessary component of sociological discussion, and sociological analysis as a necessary component of historical discussion. Jencks and Riesman make this explicit when they discuss Stuart Hughes’ History as Art and as Science (1964). For Hughes, history is inherently interdisciplinary, requiring scholars to draw on a range of other fields including anthropology, economics, psychology, literature, or even topography. However, the university restricts their ability to do this when it shoehorns students into departments and requires them to learn about the specialty of each faculty member in their department. In this way, other elements that might benefit the historian are left behind, as they do not fit in the department of history any more than history fits in a department of sociology. Jencks and Riesman’s distance from these departmental silos created space and allowed them to approach the intersection of these two disciplines in a way that is novel, even within the bounds of my study. Repudiation and Validation An alternate way to approach the tension between history and sociology is by considering what the two authors have retrospectively said about this monograph. David Riesman turns his attention to The Academic Revolution in the preface to On Higher Education (1980). Here, Riesman repudiated a central part of The Academic Revolution’s thesis saying that, in hindsight, faculty dominance was not the central watershed for understanding US higher education. Instead, 127 he agrees with Veysey’s conclusion that the primary watershed occurred between 1890 and 1910, when universities were coalescing into their modern structure formed around the department. In contrast, 20 years later in the introduction to the 2002 transaction edition of The Academic Revolution, Christopher Jencks defends their choice saying: looking back, this account of America’s educational history still seems to me convincing. But while I think my co-author, David Riesman, and I had a plausible story about the past, I also think we overestimated the extent to which past trends would continue in the future. . . . While the academic profession continues to dominate America’s leading research universities, its grip on teaching institutions is being challenged in ways we did not anticipate. (p. xi) The two authors fundamentally disagree on whether or not their thesis is correct. It may simply be that they came to view things differently. However, for me a more compelling explanation would account for the role of time. In 1980, university funding had been cut and students were beginning to see themselves as consumers of higher education. These changes suggest that faculty dominance was only temporary. However, in 2002 the forces Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie identify in Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (1999) had only reinforced the academic revolution. Now, almost 20 years after Jencks published his defense on the transaction edition, faculty research dominates university hiring and tenure practices in almost all sectors of higher education. This primacy of research is exactly what the academic revolution would have predicted, and so it makes sense that Riesman would distance himself from the academic revolution in 1980 only for Jencks to assert that the argument was accurate in 2002. 128 At this point, you may be asking “why does this matter?” or “what does this change have to do with the tension between history and sociology?” The answer would be that what we expect of sociological and historical research is different. We expect history to contextualize change over time and to otherwise help us understand how we arrived at a particular moment. If we are a little less rigid, we may be interested in having history help us understand other similar moments in time. In contrast, we expect sociology to provide some sort of guide as we move forward. Not, perhaps, a foretelling of the future, but guidance as we make decisions. Both Jencks and Riesman primarily viewed themselves as social scientists not historians, so an important element of their reaction is not based around the question “is the explanation cogent and insightful?” Instead, their disparate responses stem from the question “does this explanation match new data?” Two Different Responses A final way we can approach the tension between history and sociology is through a 1988 Retrospective published in The Review of Higher Education by John Thelin, John Casteen, and Jane Bailey. The retrospective looks back on The Academic Revolution 20 years after it was published and attempts to (re)assess the work in light of new scholarship and changes to the higher education landscape. For John Casteen, this means focusing on how critical components of The Academic Revolution have proven incorrect. He cites the failure of graduate education to be truly meritocratic, the lack of students from historically disadvantaged groups, and the emergence of the highly selective public “ivies” as major errors on the part of Jencks and Riesman. For Casteen, these problems deserve the majority of his attention. The strengths of The Academic Revolution merit only a final paragraph in which Casteen suggests that the monograph is at its best when it deals with higher education as a mass phenomenon, particularly within 129 Jencks’ data analysis, which Casteen sees as “establish[ing] the standard for academic analysis of higher education (1988, p. 7).” Casteen continues, saying that “the chapter on ‘Social Stratification and Mass Higher Education’. . . persuades in part because it conveys objectivity and scholarly competence” (1988, p. 7). The data analysis thus acts as a precursor to more “rigorous” research in higher education studies and thereby makes a positive contribution, while the rest of the work is seemingly lacking. John Thelin and Jane Bailey provide readers with a different perspective. They open their retrospective by noting that “forecasting is a risky business. . . . We wince, for example, to find in the concluding chapter of The Academic Revolution that the authors dismiss fears about the financial future of higher education” (1988, p. 7-8). However, the bulk of Thelin and Bailey’s response is focused on “the shelf-life of the book’s interpretations” (1988, p. 8). They assert that, although it is important to acknowledge its deficiencies, what truly matters is if the interpretations presented in The Academic Revolution remain relevant. Thelin and Bailey then identify two themes where The Academic Revolution remains particularly relevant. First, Jencks and Riesman challenge the idea of “the good old days” in higher education. Faculty and students were never in close contact, and colleges and universities functioned as a cultural sorting system throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Second, Jencks and Riesman emphasize the idea that faculty values have trickled down from research universities. Thelin and Bailey stress that students were never enthralled by academic values, saying “as the scholarly faculty ascended, they had to coexist with a largely pragmatic, non-intellectual student body” (1988, p. 11). Jencks and Riesman thus clarify that the academic and disciplinary focus that seems so dominant on college and university campuses is in fact driven by faculty and the small percentage of 130 undergraduate students that pursue advanced graduate study, while the majority of undergraduates have been left to fend for themselves. A Lasting Integration I have structured my argument on Jencks and Riesman’s The Academic Revolution around four broad themes: the story the authors tell about the rise of faculty power; the great diversity of US higher education and the wide variety of purposes they meet; how The Academic Revolution can supplement our survey texts; and how Jencks and Riesman negotiate the challenges inherent in truly integrating historical and sociological research. No single element of my analysis is the sole reason this monograph remains relevant. Supplementing our survey texts is not the only value higher education scholars can get out of this work. Furthermore, my emphasis on the tension between these two modes of scholarship should not suggest that this pairing is the only reason the argument the authors make remains persuasive. Jencks and Riesman’s use of language is perhaps not as artful as what we have seen in Clark or Veysey, but what Jencks and Riesman lack in imagery, they make up for in rhetorical punch. It is hard to image another author responding to the notion that testing is unfair to disadvantaged populations by saying “life is unfair to the poor. Tests merely measure the results” (p. 125). The Academic Revolution uses this rhetorical punch to orient their text differently than the other monographs in this study. Jencks and Riesman’s individual descriptions often stick in the mind. We rightly take the authors to task for their description and treatment of HBCUs, but it is hard to argue with the rhetorical power inherent in a phrase such as “academic disaster areas.” These images give the various chapters individual weight and allows them to both stand alone and to be part of a whole. This presents a type of historical scholarship that asks us think about how and why diverse organizations respond differently (or similarly) to the same events and 131 stimuli. Rather than constructing a more typical narrative, this type of history directs our thinking in specific directions and helps us better understand problems higher education faces in the 21st century. 132 REFERENCES 133 Arum, R., & Roska, J. Academically adrift: Limited learning on college campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Boyer, E. L. (1990) Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of teaching. Gasman, M. (2006). Salvaging “academic disaster areas”: The black college response to Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s 1967 Harvard Educational Review article. The Journal of Higher Education, 77, 2, 317-352. Hughes, H. S. (1964). History as art and as science: Twin vistas on the past. New York, NY: Jencks, C., & Riesman, D. (1967). The American negro college. Harvard Educational Review, Harper & Row. 37, 2, 3-60. Doubleday. Jencks, C., and Riesman, D. (1968/2002). The academic revolution. Garden City, NY: Kerr, C. (1963). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGrath, E. J. (1965). The predominantly negro colleges and universities in transition. New York, NY: Institute of Higher Education, Teachers College Columbia University. Nathan, R. (2005). My freshman year: What a professor learned by becoming a student. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Riesman, D. (1980). On higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rudolph, (1962). The American college & university. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Slaughter, S. & Leslies, L. (1999). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thelin, J. R., Casteen, J. T., & Bailey, J. M. (1988). After the Academic Revolution: A retrospective forum. The Review of Higher Education, 12, 1, 1-16. Trow, M. (1970). Reflections on the transition from mass to universal higher education. Daedalus, 99, 1, 1-42. REFERENCES 134 Veysey, L. R. (1965). The emergence of the American university. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 135 CHAPTER 5: GERALD GRAFF AND PROFESSING LITERATURE: AN INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY Departmental Organization and Our Short Institutional Memory Many students and scholars of higher education may be unfamiliar with Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Graff is a literary studies scholar and his monograph discusses the development of English literature as a field. It is thus understandable that his monograph is not well known in higher education studies.14 However, if we take a step back and look at the larger story Graff tells about higher education we can see an original and insightful analysis that applies even to those scholars who are unfamiliar with literary studies. Graff presents us with a narrative that both supplements the story told by our survey texts and powerfully diverges from that same story. A closer look at Graff’s text will allow us to better understand the limits of survey texts on the history of higher education and what exactly monographs such as Graff’s offer to readers. Here I wish to emphasize that monographs do not inherently present an alternative to survey texts. Instead, the best monographs manage to supplement, counter, and reinforce the narratives our survey texts present. At times they supplement or reinforce, at other times they counter, but their construction allows them to present a much more diverse portrait of higher education than we have traditionally acknowledged. 14 Graff uses the terms “literary studies,” “English department,” and “literature department” in his text: “English department” is typically used to reference the core classes taken by all students in a college or university, such as English 101. “Literature department” is typically used to describe programs at the graduate level and “literary studies” is used to describe the wider field of literary scholars. I primarily use the phrase “literary studies” when referring to the field and “English department” when referring to the organizational unit on a campus. 136 My analysis of Professing Literature focuses specifically on what Graff’s history can tell us about changes in higher education as a whole. I argue that the value of this text lies in its exploration of a single department to tell a story about higher education that gives voice to individuals who would not normally figure into a survey text on the history of US higher education. A text such as this one allows us to explore topics our survey texts are often missing. A careful reading of Professing Literature can show how understanding changes in literary studies enables us to draw wider conclusions about changes in the academy. Using a study about a single field and department, in this case literary studies and the English department, provides scholars with a novel way to approach the study of change in higher education. Whereas Clark situates change in Presidential power and Veysey situates it in isomorphic forces of competition, Graff suggests an altogether different focus. Crucially literary studies and the English department combine elements of inter university organization, with elements of intra university organization. Although departments are chiefly thought of as an internal feature of university organization, connecting the departmental structure of English with the field structure of literary studies demonstrates how these two connected organizations drive change. My analysis is structured according to four broad themes. First, I look at the story Graff tells about English departments and literary studies with an eye toward how English departments and literary scholarship have changed over time. Second, I consider how this story about a single department is embedded in a much broader story about the academy as a whole. In particular, I seek to understand what this story says about the organization of colleges and universities and how it illuminates important changes in the kinds of work faculty do. Third, I demonstrate how Professing Literature represents an alternative and a supplement to our historical survey texts. And fourth, I grapple with the conflict inherent in Graff’s work as a history of an academic field 137 that speaks to scholars in literary studies and as a history of the academy more generally. As has been the case in my previous three chapters, my analysis is undergirded by a fundamental belief that the quality of scholars’ writing matters. As such, I make every attempt to animate my analysis of Professing Literature with regular and detailed quotations from Graff’s text. The type of close reading this analysis represents can help us grapple with Graff’s argument and assess his conclusions. Yesterday’s Innovation All scholarship advances an argument and Professing Literature is no different. Coming to terms with the scholarly argument Graff is advancing is crucially important if we are to understand this monograph as more than a history of an academic field. Therefore, the first part of my analysis in this chapter is geared towards identifying the specific narrative Graff advances about literary studies and what that narrative tells about higher education. We must also differentiate between Graff’s narrative and the polemic he wishes to advance. Graff’s polemic is that literary scholars should teach students about the conflict and controversy that has occurred around the establishment of a literary canon. In contrast, his narrative is essentially a story about the teaching and study of literature and poetry in the academy. Professing Literature can be divided into three sections: 1) classical curriculum in the 19th century; 2) early formations in the new universities; and 3) the changing nature of legitimate scholarship in the 20th century. These sections are not given equal treatment in the monograph, as the last section encompasses more than half of Graff’s text. Many scholars interested in literary studies may find the first two sections to be little more than introductory background before the weightier analysis contained in the final section. However, this division can also help scholars of higher education understand the scope and trajectory of Graff’s argument. 138 The first section on the role of literature in the classical curriculum is by far the most student-centered portion of Graff’s analysis. The second section addresses the tensions in early literature departments between the new breed of PhD scholars in Philology15 and the generalists who promoted literature as a form of acculturation. The third section documents a divide in 20th century literature departments between the old guard and the new. The first such conflict in this section is between scholars and critics, and the second is between scholars/critics and theorists. For Graff, this conflict is a recurring phenomenon resulting from the construction of departments and disciplines in accordance with the field-coverage model. He describes this process as follows: “in an institution with a short memory, evidently, yesterday’s revolutionary innovation is today’s humanistic tradition. . . . Though the terms by which the profession has defined treason against humanism never change, the activities that the terms refer to change every generation” (p. 249). Here, when he asserts that yesterday’s revolution is today’s tradition, Graff suggests institutions, departments, and fields have a kind of working memory, but that this memory is limited. As such, he asserts that literary studies is engaged in a perennially reoccurring fight in which the terms used to define treason are constant, but the activities those terms describe continually change. Graff elaborates by describing how each new revolutionary innovation is incorporated into the department field-coverage model: “instead of being used to bring the different ideologies and methods of the literature department and the university into fruitful relation and opposition, literary theory becomes yet another special field” (p. 250). Here, Graff directs us as readers to consider what the evolution of English departments can tell us about the evolution of the university and how the university has expanded by turning each revolutionary impulse into an accepted field. He suggests specifically that whenever conflict threatened to 15 Philology is the historical study of literature that emphasizes names, dates, incidents, and events as they relate to the author and the work. It is considered separate from literary history. 139 break out, the disagreement was hidden by adding another unit to a university structure that remains otherwise unchanged. This lessens the pressure for revolutionary change: innovators are appeased becoming insiders with their own positions and programs, and the university gets to congratulate itself for its intellectual diversity without asking anyone to significantly alter their behavior. Up to this point, I have said a fair bit about Professing Literature in general and given readers an outline of how I read Graff’s structural argument. However, I have said very little about the monograph more specifically. For instance, what does the recurring fight between scholars and humanists have to do with the university at large and why is the story of literary studies valuable to individuals not immersed in the study of literature? Answering these questions requires me to ground my discussion in an analysis of Graff’s argument and narrative. Within this grounding, I consider each of the monograph’s three sections as well as Graff’s theory that the field-coverage model obscures conflict and prevents meaningful interaction across specialties. Taken as a whole, Professing Literature allows Graff to illustrate how the field coverage model—and the conflict it obscures—have directed organizational change in specific ways. The Withered Classroom The teaching of English literature was not part of the classical college. As such, the earliest section of Professing Literature represents a time pre-literary studies. However, this does not mean literature was not present in classical colleges—rather, that it took different forms and was present in different places. Graff asserts that instruction around literature was situated chiefly within the teaching of Greek and Latin. These subjects occupied approximately half of a student’s time and were supposed to “inspire the student with the nobility of his cultural 140 heritage” (p. 28). However, in practice, courses in Greek and Latin focused on the rote memorization of grammar and etymology. Greek and Latin literary classics were used, but the focus of these classes was not on aesthetic considerations. Graff quotes late 19th century graduate Fred Lewis Patee, who noted that the typical student studying the Iliad or the Aenead “had no suspicion that they were great literature, works of supreme art and beauty” (p. 29). Although these works were selected for use in classrooms because they were exemplars of high art and literature, their use in the classroom was entirely divorced from this status as art objects. When English literature was taught as a distinct course, it most often duplicated the teaching methods used in Greek and Latin focusing on etymology and grammar. One exception to this was what Graff describes as an impressionistic approach exemplified by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow referenced individual texts and authors as if they were old friends. During free discussions of the texts, Longfellow drew from an extensive wellspring of personal reminiscences recalling the church where Dante was baptized and other tangentially related details. However, instructors like Longfellow were rare and their teaching positions tenuous at best. The space between the two extremes of impressionism and etymology was filled with the study of rhetoric, oratory, and elocution. Such courses typically used textbooks containing selections from important English authors. In some cases, this middle road resembled the rote grind of Greek and Latin grammar. Yet, when these texts were supplemented by declamations, students were brought into close proximity with classic works of literature that bridged the gap between technical analysis and impressionism. Despite the presence of courses on rhetoric, oratory, and elocution, the largest source of literary education came not from the college classroom, but from the clubs and societies that supported oratorical culture. These clubs and societies sponsored public lectures on topics as 141 diverse as Chaucer, the abolition of slavery, the continuation of slavery, and the foundation of divinity in the natural world. They also served to situate the student body within the contemporary issues of their time and connected the classical curriculum with issues of relevance to students: No institution better offset the aridity of the college classroom than the cluster of literary societies, debating clubs, student literary publications, and public lectures and lyceums that impinged on college life. . . . Literary education did not yet depend wholly on the classroom, as it would for most students after the turn of the century, when literary societies lost their centrality to fraternities, sororities, and athletics. (p. 44) Here, Graff presents us with two important ideas. First, is the idea that the college classroom was arid. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “arid” as “dry, without moisture, parched, withered.” The word “withered” in particular provides a glimpse of the reality of student learning in the classroom. However, the OED provides an additional definition: “barren.” Taken together, these two meanings, withered and barren, describe student learning in the college classroom as lacking in every possible way. Second, Graff presents us with the idea that student learning and literary culture flourished in the clubs and social organizations that formed to fill the gaps in the college curriculum. By the late 19th century, oratorical culture was fading. The reputation and fame that had previously been accorded to the literary man were largely transferred to the fraternity man who coached the college football team. While colleges would eventually come to fill the need for literary education, at this moment, when literary study was seen as a function of grammar, rhetoric, elocution, and etymology, the focus of what we now call student life was altogether academic in nature. Although our survey texts identify both these early examples of student life and the transition from literary culture to fraternities and football, Graff 142 contextualizes our understanding through the English department as student life from the academic to the non-academic. Furthermore, Graff provides us with an opposing change when he presents an image of the college classroom as it transitions from the non-academic to the academic that is otherwise left out of our survey texts. Dilletantes vs. Investigators Graff calls his second section detailing the formation of early literature departments “The Early Professional Era: 1875-1915.” This section tracks the same period that Veysey (1965) identifies with the creation of research universities. However, Graff’s analysis shines when he turns from generalities to particularities, saying of the new university: by comparison with the old college’s rigidity, the new professionalism was willing to give a wide berth to unorthodox opinion provided it did not tread too openly on accepted principles. The scholar’s business was the search for impersonal truth, and the formulation of values and ideals was theoretically left to others. (p. 61) This division between the scholars searching for impersonal truth and others who formulated values and ideals is key for Graff because literature departments became a space where these two ideals coexisted. Graff situates this phenomenon as follows: what ‘professional expertise’ meant and how it related to its lay clientele were reasonably obvious as long as one remained in the spheres of marketing, engineering, or management. But what did it mean for those working on Middle English poems and homilies? It was one thing to professionalize the health industry, another to professionalize the culture industry. (p. 64) Taken together, these quotes introduce the central theme of early literature departments: impersonal scholarship on the one hand and the formulation of values and culture on the other. In 143 such configurations, faculty pursuing impersonal scholarship controlled most of the levers of power as the standards of research and scholarship became the standards of the university. Nonetheless, faculty interested in values and culture remained doggedly persistent. The status of faculty in the new university rested on the scientific and authoritative nature of their research. For scholars in literature, this meant philology. The scientific rigor of the philologists allowed them to supplant Greek and Latin as a tool to promote mental discipline and secure their place in the institutional hierarchy. If mental discipline required courses on languages to be difficult, philology ensured the use of English instead of Greek and Latin. Although the requirements for research and legitimacy were philological, the university also needed faculty to teach undergraduate students, only a small percentage of whom would pursue scientific research, and so philological faculty were called on to teach literature. Graff uses this disjuncture to illustrate something many scholars already know but that nonetheless bears repeating: “what the professor of literature is trained to do, has little relation to what he or she teaches” (p. 79). The incongruence between these poles of teaching and research created space for a group of faculty Graff calls “The Generalist Opposition” (p. 81). The generalists defined themselves in opposition to scientific researchers and, while Graff does not assert this difference was absolute, he does note, “in practice very few individuals and fewer departments managed to integrate the two” (p. 81). The generalists aimed to adapt the ideals of liberal culture that had formerly been associated with rhetoric and oratory to the modern university. And although the generalists were often dismissed as superficial or impressionistic, they were, in turn, able to depict researchers as “maimed men whose lives had been forgotten in the perverse development of mere intellect” (p. 87). Graff points out that, although there was some substance to the generalists’ critique of 144 scientific research, they failed to offer viable alternatives: “generalist manifestos were frequently no more than vapid attacks on the analytical approach to literature as such, incanting words like ‘literature’ in a talismanic fashion, as if the power of literature were, in and of itself, sufficient to overcome any institutional problem” (p. 88). In this quote, Graff demonstrates that, to the generalists, research scholars were mistaken: their pursuit of “mere intellect” had left them maimed and incomplete. In contrast, Graff describes the generalists as “incanting words like ‘literature’ in a talismanic fashion.” This ascribes a degree of religious fervor to the generalists, while also suggesting they did not adequately consider the implications of their position. When Graff describes them as “incanting words” he suggests that they are holding “literature” aloft to direct their argument but doing so in a way that does not critically examine any implications. Instead, they accept the idea that “literature” holds a preferred position as a matter of faith. The generalists failed to come to terms with the requirements of university advancement: the graduate degrees, the publications, and the scientific prestige. However, researchers’ failure to make literature meaningful to students created a space for the generalists to survive a war they had otherwise lost. Graff leaves us with this final description of the divide between these two sides: “dilettantes versus investigators: the one all interesting but untrue generalizations, the other all true but sterile particularities, and evidently nothing in between” (p. 95). By describing the generalists as “dilletantes” Graff emphasizes their status as amateurs and gives voice to the investigators’ objection that the generalists were not committed to the advancement of scholarly knowledge. In contrast, by describing the investigators’ work as “sterile particularities” Graff emphasizes the generalists’ view that the investigators’ research was lifeless and barren. Each adopted a position that would seem to brook no compromise. It is difficult to come to terms with 145 opponents you label as “dilettantes” and equally difficult to compromise with an opponent whose research you view as only “sterile particularities.” A Kind of Cycle As Graff’s narrative moves farther into the 20th century, the advocates for research (originally the philologists) and liberal culture (originally the generalists) change, but their arguments stay the same. Literary historians eventually supplanted the philologists and came to dominate the formal levers of power in English departments. Similarly, by 1915 the cause of liberal culture was no longer identified with the generalists, but was instead advanced by the literary critics. The critics advanced the idea that literature needed to be understood as an aesthetic work and that students should understand “the generic idea of the book as a work of literature, the proportion and symmetry of the organic parts, and the constructive plan by which artistic unity is attained” (p. 126). Although the critics often disagreed with one another, they remained united against research scholars. World War I advanced the critics’ cause in important ways. The anti-German atmosphere meant that scholarly traces of “Germanity” were purged and literature came to be a vehicle for teaching the idea that the Allies were morally superior. Courses were rebranded and centered around “War Issues.” One of these courses eventually became the General Honors course at Columbia. In response, the research scholars asserted that, while criticism had a place, it could only be attempted after the scholarly groundwork had been laid. This effectively ensured criticism would have no real place in the education of serious students. It would instead remain the preserve of lower level undergraduate courses for students who were not looking to pursue graduate study. Nonetheless, by the early 1940s, many of the most prominent critics had moved into academic jobs. Even though they were still viewed with a great deal of suspicion by their 146 more senior colleagues who saw them as “amateur intruders” (p. 153). These two words tell us a great deal about how senior faculty viewed the critics. They were first amateurs, unskilled, and lacking in the methods and rigor which characterized real scholarship. And second, they were intruders; unwelcome interlopers in a scholarly environment for which they were not properly fit. From these departmental positions, the critics advanced the idea of a unified curriculum designed to combat the fragmented nature of knowledge. The defining feature of this curriculum was the “text itself,” chosen from among the greatest works of literature: “if only literature itself could be allowed to work its potential magic, all would be well” (p. 171). Here, Graff makes it clear the critics were making the same argument as the generalists had before them. It was repackaged through the artifice of criticism but remained largely unchanged. After World War II, scholars and critics began to make conciliatory gestures towards one another’s work. Together they asserted that critics could focus on literary works while the scholars dealt with background information. Although these two activities differed, both were seen as legitimate aspects of literary scholarship, and a sound literary education required both. This should not, however, suggest that these two groups were truly coming together. There was no great synthesis. Rather, individual departments left individual scholars to their own devices. And as Veysey suggests in The Emergence of the American University, scholars refrained from looking too closely at the work of others, and everyone was thus able to work together in an amicable fashion. Graff describes what happened in the aftermath of this reconciliation as “Rags, to Riches, to Routine” (p. 226). Previously, criticism had been an undesirable newcomer in the field. However, newly accepted critics came to teach graduate courses and publish in their own specialized journals. Shortly thereafter, the field was exhausted, plagued by “ossification and 147 mechanical imitation” (p. 226). As such, what had once been novel and new all too quickly became a controlling routine as scholars adapted to producing criticism. This element of routine created a space in which the critics were attacked by the deconstructionists and theorists who asserted that the critics had become irrelevant, much as the critics asserted literary historians were irrelevant. To the deconstructionists, the critics had failed to justify the types of analyses they were doing. Graff describes this process saying, “in a kind of cycle, routinization generates theoretical awareness, whose terms and concepts are themselves routinized, generating further theoretical awareness in turn” (p. 242). However, for Graff this was not a problem intrinsic to literature or literary scholarship. Instead, he saw it as function of university organization and the arrangement of scholars within departments. He adds, “the routinization of critical discourses is a function of institutional arrangements that do not require these discourses to confront one another” (p. 243). By organizing departments to cover different time periods and areas within a discipline, diverse scholars and diverse courses were kept apart from one another. For literary studies, this allowed philology, literary history, and literary criticism to become routinized and kept each from talking to the others. This problem is not unique to literary studies. To name just one other example, in music departments theorists, historians, and instrumentalists are kept similarly distant. In part this distance can be viewed as a natural result and function of faculty autonomy. Each faculty member is accorded professional space and allowed to do their own work under the assumption that they know what they are doing. However, the field coverage model presumes that no two people do the same thing in the department and thus even a department with two music historians or two philologists would separate them by time period, thereby minimizing the chance of meaningful interaction. For Graff, the defining problem with this model is that instead of asking “what interesting thing 148 might happen if we hired a particular scholar” we ask, “what course do we need covered and who can teach it.” Perhaps we do need that course covered, and perhaps the field-coverage model is inevitable, but Professing Literature directs us to consider that what was initially a necessity (having the basic spread of courses taught) has become the controlling force in departmental organization. Graff closes Professing Literature with an extended analysis of the most recent conflict over literary theory. He does so with an eye toward the previous conflicts he had already discussed: “today, defenders of theory tend to equate the New Criticism itself with unreflective empiricism, but in its time the movement stood for theoretical reflection against the primitive accumulation of data” (p. 247). The history Graff lays out shows that the argument which took place between scholars, critics, and theorists was not new, but rather a continuously updated version of previous arguments. Each generation characterized the previous one as resistant to change and accused them of blindly clinging to the good old days. Graff emphasizes this dichotomy when he positions “theoretical reflection against the primitive accumulation of data.” His use of the word “primitive” identifies the old guard as resistant to change, antique, and even prehistoric. Thus, when the critics come to occupy a controlling role in the department, they essentially become the next batch of traditionalists—the most recent in a long line of scholars who would be shunted off to the side, yet still maintain a place in the academy. By centering the repeated nature of this conflict, Graff suggests that new revolutionary forms of scholarship are neither repressed nor allowed to fully supplant old modes of scholarship. Rather, each new mode is accepted and relegated to its own corner of the department’s field-coverage model. 149 Seeing the University in the Department Although Graff’s narrative is essentially about a somewhat arcane conflict in literary studies, he also tells a story about universities writ large: how they have come to organize themselves into departments; how these departments have come to structure themselves internally; and how different modes of scholarship have come to dominate the academy only to be quickly jettisoned as outdated and reactionary. Thinking about Graff’s narrative in this manner shifts the focus from specific arguments about minutiae of literary studies and instead uses literary studies and the English department as a way to approach the study of change within the university. Thus far, I have tried to limit my analysis of scholarship in literary studies. I myself am not well versed in it and I think the way Graff has oriented Professing Literature towards literary specialists has limited the reach of his work. However, the broad transitions I have outlined from philology to literary history and from critic to deconstructionist and theorist can help us better conceptualize how other fields have progressed. For example, the philologists were not simply interested in philology by chance. Instead, their work was a reflection of the historical moment and the need to appear scientific during the early history of the American university. The turn to deconstructionism and theory is similarly not unique to literary studies; rather, it represents a widespread movement during the 20th century in fields as diverse as music (Taruskin, 2005), history (Munslow, 1997), and law (Hunt, 1986). Graff describes both the generalists and the critics as faculty who were interested in something larger than the narrowly defined discipline. Each drew from a wider field of vision than their more traditional colleagues and so, in some sense, each exceeded the accepted bounds of literary studies. Over time, the academy created a space for the critics and their research. 150 When this was accomplished, their work no longer transgressed and instead encompassed its own new subfield. Viewed in this way, the conflict Graff outlines tells us about the scholarly process involved in creating new departments. Specifically, this is the natural result of existing departments and fields growing to encompass new intellectual territory as methods and theories bring existing ones into question. However, rather than supplanting old methods, these new methods and theories are given their own space and become new departments. The newcomer may not be welcomed, but they are tolerated and granted legitimacy as one of a wide variety of accepted scholarly activities. Professing Literature also illustrates how scholarship changes within fields. When Graff first introduces literary critics, they were the descendants of the generalists. However, he shows that as time progressed these new academics were given positions in existing departments. Gradually, they won converts from among newly admitted graduate students until the critics had themselves become an older generation, viewed as outdated and reactionary by the newest generation of scholars. This process is not unique to literary studies. If anything, it should be familiar to scholars throughout the university no matter the discipline or field. Departments that teach both undergraduate and graduate students face conflicts similar to that observed between the generalists and the scholars. Who should the department focus on educating, undergraduates or graduates? Departments have managed this question by fudging it, much as scholars in literary studies fudged it: literary scholars asserted that departments were committed to undergraduate education and put out convincing material about this commitment. At the same time, undergraduate courses remained less prestigious than graduate courses and the levers of power were left in the hands of faculty who focused on graduate education (Berlinerbau, 2017; Courant & Turner, 2017). 151 And so, while Professing Literature appears to be telling a story particular to literary studies, the reality is that this monograph has a much wider focus than is initially apparent. Graff does not simply construct a narrative about the place of literature in our colleges and universities. Instead, the example of literature allows him to explore changes in US higher education, and thereby creates a compelling subtext within his monograph. The primary narrative speaks to literary scholars about their own discipline while the subtext speaks to the wider academy and invites us to consider how the changes outlined in this singular field are mirrored elsewhere. Leaving the Survey Behind It should be no surprise that Professing Literature diverges from the story told by our survey texts. After all, Graff focuses on a specific academic unit that is far too small to factor into a survey. However, in some ways the narrative Graff presents mirrors the focus in our survey texts because those texts most often focus on the most prestigious research universities. These institutions have driven change at the university level since the late 19th century and Graff’s focus on research output and scholarship directs our attention to the role research universities have played—and continue to play—in educating faculty and dictating the trajectory of future scholars. As has been the case in my previous chapters, the point of these examples is not to analyze Graff’s language, but to suggest that this type of monograph offers a greater depth of analysis than is typically acknowledged and that it otherwise provides readers with a more diverse set of narratives to draw upon. Organizing History Of the four monographs in my study, Professing Literature is organized the most conventionally. Each section is primarily chronological, as are many of the internal chapters. A chronological structure allows Graff to more easily track developments within literary studies 152 and to otherwise show change over time. More specifically, it allows him to show how modes of research that were once considered unscholarly or revolutionary came to be accepted as dominant modes of research. This structure provides an important counterpoint within my study. It emphasizes that the alternate organizational schemas used by Clark (1970/1992), Veysey (1965) and Jencks and Riesman (1968/2002) are not intrinsically better by virtue of being different, but rather that their differing construction better fits the authors’ individual goals and needs. Graff presents us with three watersheds. The first coincides with a traditional watershed for higher education—the transition from the old classical college to the new university. Graff’s timing of this watershed is situated in the same period as Veysey’s (1965) and Thelin’s (2004/2019); however, the specific features of the watershed are different. Put another way, the background is the same, but the context is different. By centering this one discipline, Graff locates a watershed with the same root causes as our conventional narratives (i.e., the creation of research universities) that nonetheless has very different particulars. For Veysey (1965), these particulars are primarily about competition and the need for institutions like Harvard and the University of Chicago to be seen at the forefront of higher education. However, for Graff these particularities are about the need to be seen as scholarly, authoritative, and rigorous. Graff’s second and third watersheds are centered on times that are not typically thought of as periods of great change in higher education. His second watershed occurs after World War I when the philologists came into conflict with the newly empowered critics. World War I is not often thought of as a time of great change for colleges and universities. Rather, it is more often thought of as a period of consolidation and transition. The bulk of state normal schools became teachers colleges during the period, the number of junior colleges continued to expand, and elite 153 colleges and universities cemented their position (Geiger, 2011; Trow, 1970). However, Graff shows that this was a period of change and conflict for literary scholars. Graff’s third and final watershed is in the late 1960s, which was a period of great conflict in higher education that is typically seen as producing little actual change. Although we see 1960’s era protests in our survey texts, including those against segregation (Students for a Democratic Society), the Vietnam War (Kent State), and curricular relevance (Berkley), these protests do not traditionally lead to a watershed moment for higher education. However, Graff sees these protests as vitally important for literary scholars because the principles associated with different movements become salient for scholars and direct their focus toward new topics and methods. Rather than simply representing a moment of protest and social consciousness among students, these years mark an expansion in the types of scholarship that were granted legitimacy in the academy. Interweaving the Survey Professing Literature intersects with our dominant, normative narrative about the history of higher education in a way I have not considered in my previous chapters. Specifically, Graff identifies some of the same watersheds as our survey texts but draws radically different conclusions about these events. In particular, he offers a different take on the effects of World War I, World War II, and the postwar expansion of higher education. Thus, rather than illustrating traditionally recognized historical watersheds, Graff recontextualizes these traditional events by approaching them through the faculty. As I briefly outlined above, a conventional telling of World War I places it in a framework of expanding higher education. In this way, World War I acts an endpoint for a period of standardization in which colleges and universities came to share a number of common features and otherwise marks the beginning of a period of steady growth. As such, this moment 154 acts as a convenient waypoint, and anchors a narrative of steady enrollment increases. However, Graff uses World War I to signal a change in the tenor of acceptable scholarship. The need for patriotic education and courses on war issues provided an opening for the humanists as “history, politics, economics, and literature were taught with a view to inculcating the moral superiority of the allies” (p. 129). Graff argues that World War I marks a change in the viability of humanism in the academy. The generalists and the critics did not come to control the levers of power, but the hold of research scholars was loosened. Graff’s narrative also runs counter to a conventional telling of World War II. Our more normative story emphasizes the growth of higher education through the GI Bill and federal support for research in the sciences after the success of the Manhattan Project. However, Professing Literature shows the immediate postwar years as a time when scholarship became less political. The prewar belief that literature could play a social and moral role in the academy was replaced with the notion that literature had no politics. This change mirrors similar ones in fields as diverse as political science (Farr, 1988), music (Taruskin, 2005), and psychology (Lefford 1946). This reading of World War II does not suggest that the federal government did not play a part in the expansion of higher education; nor does it contradict the role of the federal government in the funding of science. Rather, it suggests fields and disciplines not closely aligned with government funding distanced themselves from political and social concerns during the immediate postwar years. Professing Literature also presents a different interpretation of the expansion of higher education during the 1950s and 1960s. For literary studies, the important feature of this expansion was how postwar affluence and expansion muted the arguments between scholars and critics: “progress called for setting old hostilities aside and mobilizing the resources of 155 scholarship and criticism” (p. 208). Graff notes that the creation of new programs and the expansion of existing ones allowed faculty to set aside their conflicts. When new positions were plentiful, the opposing point of view no longer represented an existential threat. This does not suggest that the expanding enrollment of higher education was unimportant. Rather, this expansion was significant because a larger pie allowed departments to more effectively fudge things. There was thus no need to decide what to teach or for whom when the university was able to accommodate everyone. In short, expansion hid fundamental disagreements about the purpose of literature and higher education more broadly. Supplementing the Survey Professing Literature can also supplement the narrative presented in our survey texts. Graff’s focus on a single department allows him to highlight important trends and features of higher education that would otherwise go unnoticed. And while no monograph can hope to cover as much scholarly ground as a survey text, the targeted nature of Professing Literature gives it the ability to offer a unique historical narrative that can greatly expand our understanding of the history of higher education. Although the initial momentum of Graff’s analysis comes from the rise of research universities, it diverges from this narrative and highlights several less-dominant trends that come about as a result of his more restricted subject matter. Below, I examine three such trends to illustrate how focusing on a specific discipline can open paths to other narratives. Teaching is an integral part of higher education that nonetheless gets ignored and left out of our histories. Indeed, it is perhaps the quintessential activity on college and university campuses. It may not be the one that gets the most attention from faculty or plays the largest role in setting higher education policy, but teaching has been viewed as a core activity in the context of higher education for more than 70 years (Bok, 2006; Gasset, 1944; Lang 2016; Rudolph, 156 1977). Professing Literature directs us to think about how the methods and practices of teaching have changed, and how techniques once considered innovative (e.g., lectures), have come to be seen as outmoded. Elements of teaching and learning are largely missing from dominant narratives on the history of 20th century higher education. Our survey texts present teaching and learning as historical phenomena that are largely disconnected from contemporary higher education. This presentation implies history can tell us something about teaching in the colonial and denominational colleges of the 19th century, but is silent on contemporary issues. In contrast, Graff’s analysis clearly connects the history of teaching and learning to contemporary arguments about curriculum and teaching methods. Individual fields do not factor into our dominant narratives of higher education but, as Graff’s analysis makes clear, scholarly allegiance sits with individual fields and disciplines, not with institutions. 16 While administrators and undergraduate students tend to identify with their institution (and university athletics), graduate students and faculty specifically orient themselves to their discipline. By centering faculty and literary studies, Graff draws attention to the role academic disciplines play in college and university organization. This, in turn, forces us to reconsider the dominant role institutions and presidents play in our survey texts. Our survey texts often position the expansion of higher education in terms of institutions and students. This positioning makes a certain amount of sense because without students, there would be no institutions and without new institutions, where would students go? However, Graff suggests we can also view this growth through departments. The first way they have grown is by adding new faculty to existing departments. Although such an observation might seem obvious, the process by which it happened is not. These departments have not grown by adding a second 16 Tony Becher provides an in-depth analysis of this allegiance in Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (1989). 157 medievalist or by otherwise duplicating something that was already “covered.” Rather, departments have grown by expanding the scope of accepted research and then hiring faculty to fill the new space. Second, colleges and universities have grown by adding new departments. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this addition was primarily a function of catching up, as colleges and universities sought to match existing knowledge. However, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this process stemmed from the expansion of knowledge and research. We can see this in literary studies through the creation of creative writing departments and in music through the separation of composition, performance, and musicology. In other words, when a given subgroup within a department became large enough, the university broke the subgroup off and formed a new department. Separating creative writing from literary studies allowed creative writing to expand internally. A department of literary studies would conclude that they already had creative writing covered by a single faculty member. Therefore, separating creative writing from literary studies allowed creative writing to grow in a way that otherwise would not have been possible. The expansion and fragmentation of knowledge enabled universities to hire more faculty and thereby accept more students. And while the expansion of higher education is a key component of the narrative in our survey texts, showing how this expansion was driven by, and benefited, departments and disciplines dramatically changes how we approach the study of change in higher education In this reading the growth of higher education is paradoxically attached to the fragmentation of higher education. In order for the whole to become larger, the pieces all became smaller. History Plus Literature Professing Literature is unique in that it does not combine historical and sociological research. However, this difference is not unique to the types of historical works I want to draw 158 our attention to. For instance, a historical study might draw on sociology, economics, literature and literary criticism, psychoanalysis, or even philosophy. Graff’s subject dictates that he draw on history and the history of literary studies. At first, this may not seem to represent a different mode of scholarship. After all, isn’t history a critical part of “the history of literary studies?” My answer would be that history and the history of literary studies are just as far apart as history and economics or history and psychoanalysis. Not because the history of literary studies is not close to history, but because grappling with the history of literary studies requires a specialized knowledge and vocabulary that only a specialist in literary studies would have. Much as the history of science is a unique field populated by scientists who have the required insider knowledge, the historical material Graff deals with requires unique insider knowledge. More so than any other work in this study Professing Literature challenges readers who are not well versed in both subject areas. As such, it is important to consider how Graff navigated the tension between literary studies and history: One of the challenges for me in writing Professing Literature: An Institutional History was to keep the argument from overwhelming the history. I wanted my story of the emergence of professional academic literary study in America to be useful to readers who might disagree with my polemic on how the institution went wrong and how to set it right. And I wanted a book that would have a shelf-life after the controversies that shaped its writing had subsided. (p. vii) Here, Graff merges an argument about teaching in a specific discipline with a larger argument about the structure of colleges and universities along the field-coverage model. He thus demonstrates an acute awareness that his argument about the former can and, at times, does overwhelm the historical argument he tries to make. 159 Graff at Work For Graff, Professing Literature exists as part of a much larger discussion about the organization and conceptualization of college and university curriculum. He wants his colleagues in literary studies to bring the discussion that occurred about the canon in journal articles and faculty meetings into the classroom. Rather than presenting the canon (emphasis mine) to students as a settled matter, he wishes to include graduate and undergraduate students in this conversation. Graff asserts that arguing about what belongs in the canon is an integral part of teaching. In fact, this idea of teaching the history of disciplinary conflict occupies Graff’s subsequent monograph, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992). He further continued this debate in a 1994 edited collection aptly titled Teaching the conflicts: Gerald Graff, curricular reform, and the culture wars (Cain). Beyond the Culture Wars (Graff, 1992) focuses on teaching the history of disciplinary conflict more concretely and attempts to provide a path forward in the classroom. In contrast, Teaching the Conflict (Cain, 1994) places Graff’s proposals in the realm of scholarly debate as faculty consider the merits of the idea. As Graff and his colleagues work through this idea, the element of college and university history—and the role it has played in the organization of departments and the construction of curriculum—is minimized. Although Teaching the Conflict is primarily about Graff’s polemic (teaching the conflict), the scholars grappling with this concept, prove Graff’s point that departmental organization effaces difference. We see Graff return to larger structural arguments in 2003 with Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. In this text, he addresses Professing Literature’s heavy focus on literary studies saying, “because my examples of conflicts to be taught were often the debates over the canon and politics in literary studies, some readers have assumed that 160 teaching the conflicts for me focuses only on those debates, whereas teaching the conflicts can be done in any discipline or subject area” (Graff, 2003, p. 12). We can see Graff clarify this distinction when he emphasizes larger structural elements that cut across disciplines. Admittedly, most of his examples involve courses on literature, but he attempts to minimize any notion that his examples are limited to his own field. We can see this in a passage on the academic discourse he inelegantly terms “Arguespeak”: To be sure, the Arguespeak of literary studies, philosophy, or history is very different from the Arguespeak of mathematics or chemistry, which is different in turn from the Arguespeak of the social sciences, economics, or computer science. There exist underlying commonalities, however, that are obscured by the divisions between the humanities and sciences and the subdivisions between the humanities and sciences and the subdivisions of these fields. Indeed, in obscuring the commonalities across the disciplines, these divisions obscure disciplinary differences as well. (Graff, 2003, p. 22) Although Graff’s examples come from the discipline he is most familiar with, they are intended to illustrate larger elements in higher education that are common across fields. The above quote also clarifies what may be a central problem for the study of teaching and learning. Specifically, examples that are not “in my discipline” are all too often viewed as “not relevant to my discipline,” when in fact many of the problems scholars face transcend department and discipline. At this moment, a reader might be asking themselves: so what? Why does this distinction matter? Or is there really even a distinction? My answer would be that there is a real distinction and that grappling with this distinction in Professing Literature can help us better understand why all four of the monographs in my study have remained relevant to this day. The crucial 161 difference for Graff in Professing Literature is not whether he is writing for historians or sociologists as Burton Clark does in The Distinctive College. Rather, the crucial difference is whether Graff writes for a specialized audience of literary scholars, or a general scholarly audience (e.g., faculty and administration) in the wider university. Notably, Professing Literature attempts to speak to both audiences at once. At times, this makes the monograph difficult for the non-specialist to read, as many scholars may not know who Rene Wellek was or understand what Critical Explication represents. However, the need to be seen as rigorous and professional, which Critical Explication addressed, speaks across departments, fields, and disciplines. Professing Literature may, at times, be difficult for non-specialists to comprehend, but it illustrates the idea that speaking to multiple audiences is an integral part of the continued relevance of scholarship and that the two audiences in question do not have to be historians and sociologists. Institutional Boundaries and Forgotten Conflicts Graff concludes Professing Literature by explicitly connecting his own material to wider college and university structures. Literary studies remains Graff’s stepping-off point, but he connects his analysis much more broadly than was the case before. For instance, he opens his final chapter by saying that, “a university is a curious accretion of historical conflicts that it has systematically forgotten” (p. 257). His use of the word “accretion” emphasizes that university growth has not been intentional, but instead a function of adding layers over time. He then follows this with “systematically forgotten.” His use of the term “systematically” suggests a degree of organization and intentionality that is lacking from “accretion.” However, in this case, the word is used ironically when paired with “forgotten.” The only thing the university is capable of doing in a systematic, organized fashion is to forget what steps it took to get there. Graff 162 follows up with a long section that more concretely describes the divisions and conflicts he’s alluding to: Each of its divisions reflects a history of ideological conflicts that is just as important as what is taught within the divisions yet is prevented from being foregrounded by the divisions themselves. The boundaries that mark literary study off from creative writing, composition, rhetoric, communications, linguistics and film, or those that divide art history from studio practice, or history from philosophy, literature, and sociology, each bespeak a history of conflict that was critical to creating and defining these disciplines yet has never become a central part of their context of study. The same is true of the very division between the sciences and the humanities, which has been formative for both yet have never been an obligatory context for either. (pp. 257-258) In this passage Graff asserts that the history of conflict between these fields is crucial to understanding the history of the university. Each division has a history. There is a reason rhetoric and communication are different fields and housed in different departments, much as there are reasons art history and studio practice are separate. Graff asserts that a central component of university history is this separation: by understanding the individual circumstances of these divisions, we can better understand how the university came to be organized, and why certain divisions exist between fields while other divisions exist among existing fields—i.e., why some modes of research became their own department and others simply became a specialty within an existing department. Two Approaches to Research A different way to understand Professing Literature as a work of literary studies and history is to consider the separation between Graff’s polemic about teaching the controversy and 163 the institutional history he presents. First and foremost, we can see this distinction in Graff’s title. The first half says: “Professing Literature” and it addresses the teaching and research of literature. The second half says: “An Institutional History” and it addresses the history of the department and its organization. However, unlike more traditional titles where the colon signals a fictitious division or perhaps a few catchy words on one side of the colon and a few descriptive words on the other, the two halves of this title really do identify different elements of the monograph. This division becomes more apparent when you consider scholarly reviews. Alan Golding (1989) and Kermit Vanderbilt (1988) reviewed Professing Literature in the journals Modern Philology and American Literature, respectively. Both focused on the text as a history of academic literary studies in the United States. In essence, these reviews focus on the first half of Graff’s title (Professing Literature) as the reviewers see changes in literary scholarship and the place of literature in the curriculum as the most important elements of this work. In contrast, reviews by David Novity in Philosophy and Literature (1988) and Lee Andrew Elioseff in Educational Studies (1989) take an institutional view and focus on the second half of Graff’s title (An Institutional History). Elioseff (1989) connects the changes happening in literary studies with broader trends in higher education, such as the rise of the elective system and the separation of subfields into separate fields like speech and journalism. His review is typical of those supplied by scholars outside of literary studies. However, Novity’s (1988) review is singularly enlightening. Novity begins by noting that Professing Literature is both “a very radical critique both of the place of literature in the university system, and of that system itself. This is a book that shakes the ground on which every academic stands” (Novity, 1988, p. 118). In Novity’s reading Graff and Professing Literature invite scholars to think about how their 164 own fields are constructed and the effect said construction has had on their own work. The field- coverage principle is by no means unique to literary studies, and by drawing attention to the history that formed the field, Graff exposes structural elements of college and university organization that have largely gone unnoticed or otherwise been taken for granted. Novity brings this analysis to his own discipline of philosophy, observing that philosophers frequently critique the latest scholarly fashions in other fields and disciplines but have otherwise failed to direct this lens toward their own discipline and its structures. In other words, they have taken their own canon for granted and not understood that “its shape and place within the modern university is a function not just of its merits, but of many social forces which need to be recounted and explained” (Novity, 1988, p. 126). And so, for Novity, Graff’s monograph does two things. First, it invites us as scholars to think about a wide variety of disciplines in this manner; and second, it makes such an activity “academically respectable” (Novity, 1988, p. 128). As readers, we can interpret different types of reviews as a function of discipline. Philosophers are often accused of navel gazing and we might expect literary scholars to be more interested in the minutiae of literary studies. However, Graff’s combination of history and literature offers us an opportunity to move beyond these disciplinary divisions and consider what a work drawing from more than one discipline asks of and offers to its readers. When we view Professing Literature as a history of literary studies, the monograph lands flat for many non- specialists. Yet, when we think of literary studies as way to approach the history of the university (i.e., as an analysis of its structures and the decisions that have driven change), Professing Literature opens up and changes into something that expands our thinking about the organization of universities and the structure of their departments. 165 A Different Blend I have structed my argument on Graff and Professing Literature around four broad themes: the story Graff tells about the development of literary studies and the English department; the manner in which a single department can illuminate the development of the academy; how Professing Literature can supplement our survey texts; and how Graff grapples with the challenges inherent in constructing a work that is both history and literary history. My focus on these themes and Graff’s use of language is not intended to suggest that Professing Literature has remained relevant because of any single factor. Rather, it is my belief that the manner in which these diverse features come together in Professing Literature has allowed it to persist and remain relevant. By bringing these elements together, Graff creates something greater than what he could have achieved with only a single feature. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Professing Literature is the counterpoint it provides to our standard watersheds. More specifically, the other monographs in my study have tended to emphasize different watersheds, but Graff emphasizes many of the same watersheds as our survey texts, yet he draws radically different conclusions. This shows how the same major forces can drive change in more than one direction. Different stories and narratives do not require different watersheds. Instead, they often share the same watersheds, but diverge when local circumstances meet major forces of change. 166 REFERENCES 167 REFERENCES Arid (n.d.). In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www-oed-com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/10700?redirectedFrom=arid#eid Becher, T. (1989). Tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Berlinerbau, J. (2017). Campus confidential: How college works, or doesn’t, for professors, parents, and students. New York, NY: Melville house. Bok, D. C. (2006). Our underachieving colleges: A candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cain, W. E. (ed.) (1994). Teaching the conflicts: Gerald Graff, curricular reform, and the culture wars. New York, NY Garland Publishing. Clark, B. R. (1970/1992). The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Courant, P. N. & Turner, S. (2017). Faculty deployment in research universities. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Papers. Retrieved from https://www.nber.org/papers Elioseff, L. A. (1989, spring). Professing literature: An institutional history [review of the book Professing literature: An institutional history, by Gerald Graff]. Educational Studies, 21, 1, 88-93. Farr, J. (1988). The history of political science. American Journal of Political Science, 32, 4, 1175-1195. Gasset, J. O. (1944). Mission of the university. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Geiger, R. (2011). The ten generations of American higher education in P. Altbach, R. Berdahl, P. Gumport (Eds). American higher education in the 21st century: Social, political, and economic challenges, (pp. 37-68). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Golding, A. (1989, May) Professing literature: An institutional history [review of the book Professing literature: An institutional history, by Gerald Graff]. Modern Philology, 86, 4, 411-416. Graff, G. (1988/2008). Professing literature: An institutional history. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 168 Graff, G. (1992) Beyond the culture wars: How teaching the conflicts can revitalize American education. New York, NY: Norton & Company. Graff, G. (2003). Clueless in academe: How schooling obscures the life of the mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hunt, A. (1986). The theory of critical legal studies. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 6, 1, 1-45. Jencks, C., and Riesman, D. (1968/2002). The academic revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Lefford, A. (1946). The influence of emotional subject matter on logical reasoning. The Journal of General Psychology, 34, 2, 127-151. Munslow, A. (1997) Deconstructing history. New York, NY: Routledge. Novity, D. (1989). Professing literature: An institutional history [review of the book Professing literature: An institutional history, by Gerald Graff]. Philosophy and Literature, 12, 1, 118-128. Rudolph, F. (1977). Curriculum: A history of the American undergraduate course of study since 1636. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Taruskin, R. (2005). The Oxford history of western music volume 6: The late twentieth century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Thelin, J. R. (2004/2019). A history of American higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Trow, M. (1970). Reflections on the transition from mass to universal higher education. Hopkins University Press. Daedalus, 99, 1, 1-42. Vanderbilt, K. (1988, March). Professing literature: An institutional history [review of the book Professing literature: An institutional history, by Gerald Graff]. American Literature, 60, 1, 108-109. Veysey, L. R. (1965). The emergence of the American university. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 169 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION Centering Change Although this dissertation is not exclusively about the study of change in higher education, the four critical monographs analyzed in the previous chapters offer different ways of understanding how and why higher education has changed. Crucially for higher education studies, these works do more than provide the type of historical background we associate with survey texts. Their individual arguments are indeed based on historical circumstances, but each author contextualizes historical change in a way that adds to our understanding of contemporary higher education. As such, these works help students and scholars comprehend the richness and the messiness of higher education in a way that does much more than chronicle events ‘as they happened’ (Appleby et al., 1994). Burton Clark (1970/1992) emphasizes the role of college and university presidents as institution builders and as essential components for creating institutional sagas. For Clark, college and university presidents initiate change, but the culture that builds up around the saga allows that change to persevere through adversity after the president has left the institution. Clark describes this process as “capturing allegiance” (p. 234) in a way that causes participants in the organization to think of the institution as a “beautiful secret” (p. 234). Although not every institution has a saga, and indeed identifying a saga seems to be a slightly circular endeavor, Clark’s work illustrates one way institutions have enacted change and distinguished themselves from each another. Laurence Veysey also focuses on university presidents. However, for Veysey their role is altogether different. Veysey sees presidents at early research universities as the figures who 170 organized and enabled university bureaucracy to bring order to the institutional chaos. Bureaucracy, in this way, provided structure to institutions that were otherwise “too diverse easily to define—or to control” (p. 311) . Veysey notes that early presidents accumulated the necessary power to enacted change, but the strictures put in place by bureaucracy are what have allowed universities to expand and fulfill the wide variety of goals and purposes that we now associate with the multiversity. In contrast to Veysey and Clark’s focus on top down change coordinated by presidents, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman (1968/2002) focus on institutional change directed from the middle, by faculty. For Jencks and Riesman, such change has resulted in less prestigious institutions looking more like prestigious PhD granting institutions. However, this is not a function of competition as shown in The Emergency of the American University, but is rather a function of faculty training that begins with scholars being educated at prestigious PhD granting institutions. They are then hired by less prestigious institutions where these new faculty look to hire similar faculty with similar training and similar scholarship outputs. This process enabled college and university faculty to gain a substantial amount of influence over university policies and goals. Yet, it is not a formal power; instead it is an informal power, whereby faculty priorities become institutional priorities. As Jencks and Riesman indicate, approaching institutional change through faculty hiring and promotion tells a radically different story than ones centered on college and university presidents. Gerald Graff (1988/2008) provides a different explanation about change in higher education using literary studies to focus his analysis on changes in scholarship and departmental growth. He uses this analysis to direct our attention to how such changes impact higher education more widely. In particular, Graff considers how the arrangement of scholars into fields 171 has driven institutional change in particular directions. This picture of faculty led change suggests that “a university is a curious accretion of historical conflicts that it has systematically forgotten” (p. 157). In other words, the creation of new departments and fields has played a major role in the growth of higher education institutions, but the university structures put in place to manage departments and faculty hides this process of growth by obscuring the disagreements and intellectual rifts that necessitated the addition of new departments in the first place. A Scholarly Risk When I selected the four works summarized above I did so with an eye towards their scholarly reputation. This included their initial reception and reviews, as well as their continued use in scholarly publications. Beyond these more empirical criteria, I also based my selection on a personal sense that these works would reward the type of close reading I have done. While It was immediately clear that these works are examples of interdisciplinary histories, it was not clear if they would reward close readings or supplement and interweave with our survey texts as I have demonstrated in my analysis. It was not clear that they were, in fact, critical monographs. This type of research grounded in close readings of monographs represented a significant risk in a field that is dominated by the social sciences, and it offered a real chance of failure that would have left my research metaphorically stranded. Nonetheless the results of this study demonstrate that this avenue of research was a valuable one and that critical monographs do really represent a source of unrealized value for the study of higher education. There are, no doubt, other monographs I could have chosen. For instance, I could have analyzed more recent works like Cooper and Marx’s Media U: How the Need to Win Audiences has Shaped Higher Education (2018), which offers a blend of media studies and the history of US higher education as the authors argue that the foundational goal for higher education has 172 been to cultivate audiences. Steven J. Diner’s Universities and Their Cities: Urban Higher Education in American (2017) similarly blends the history of US higher education with critical thought on the growth of US cities to tell a story about the development of higher education that runs counter to the pastoral, idyllic, and residential aspects of early US colleges. Christopher Newfields’s The Great Mistake: How we Wrecked Public Universities and How we can Fix Them (2016) also combines a history of late 20th and early 21st century higher education with a detailed analysis of college and university funding. This analysis specifically considers the problems facing higher education as a series of cyclical, self-reinforcing phenomenon. Alternatively, Hutcheson’s A People’s History of American Higher Education (2020) offers a radically different take on the construction of survey texts. Hutcheson organizes his work thematically, eschewing the chronological sequencing of more traditional survey texts and instead focuses on elements and populations that have typically been excluded from mainstream narratives about the history of US higher education. Finally, David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (2017) combines the focused nature of a monograph with the breadth of a survey text as he interrogates the role of systemic diversity in the growth of US higher education. These five 21st century monographs present an equally diverse picture of history as the works I selected for this dissertation. They, too, may also reward the type of close reading I have engaged in, but their status as exemplars and critical monographs is harder to determine. These recent monographs may indeed present the types of arguments and analysis that will remain relevant into the future. However, because they are new, because we have not observed them remaining relevant within a changing higher education environment, they cannot as effectively serve as models. 173 In contrast, the monographs at the center of my study have shown that their arguments and analyses remain relevant years after they were first written. The higher education landscape is both quantitatively and qualitatively different, yet these works still speak to us. This reinforces the notion that history has real value to the study of higher education. I contend that the way these works have been constructed and the way they span disciplines is key to their persistence and continued relevance as this has enabled them to connect with higher education scholarship in a more diverse way than is at first apparent from the principle narrative presented by each of these works. The Monograph in a Social Science World This study comes at a time when monographs are in many ways threatened. Library budgets for new purchases have been cut to balance out the ever rising costs of must-have journals; fewer students and faculty are using libraries’ physical space (even before the COVID pandemic); and the close reading often required to understand a monograph no longer suits the fast-paced nature of the tenure-review and grant writing environment university scholars operate within today. Higher education studies in particular has focused on the production of certain types of knowledge that preclude the type of analysis I do here and the construction of social science journal articles almost invites skimming (Bazerman, 1987). In contrast, critical monographs require deep reading and reward the repeated engagement Italo Calvino (1999) associates with classic works. Despite the peculiar hold these four monographs have over us, it is clear that monographs in general are on the back foot. This makes coming to terms with their value, and thinking about why they are important, even more necessary for the study of higher education. 174 It is worth noting that the four monographs in this study all continue to be used and cited in a number of different contexts. Even as higher education studies has conceptualized history as a function of survey texts, these works have played a part. This is evident in their continued citation, scholarly retrospectives, and second edition printings. However, prior to this study, the value such monographs bring to research on higher education had not been adequately explored. I argue that these specific monographs serve as models for what a more nuanced reading of history can bring to the study of higher education. This should not be taken as a blanket defense of all older works, nor of all historical monographs. Rather, these four critical monographs are exemplars of a particular kind of history, interdisciplinary in nature, that requires the long form of a monograph to present and contextualize an argument. Journal articles—with their limited word counts—preclude the ability to construct this type of argument, and historical works such as survey texts that chronicle a series of events have a long form but lack the type of deeply contextualized argument characteristic of the monographs in my study. The purposeful construction of these monographs plays an important part in presenting their deeply contextualized arguments. Indeed, it is the diverse ways in which they are organized and constructed that allows them to connect with and expand our thinking around the topics and problems that most concern us, whether that is admissions selectivity (Clark), the dominance of research on tenure and promotion (Veysey), the pursuit of institutional prestige (Jencks and Riesman), or the tension between teaching and research (Graff). However, rather than selectively addressing these concerns, works like these grapple with many of the same problems. For instance, selectivity in admissions is not only an element of Clark’s work—Jencks and Riesman discuss selectivity in undergraduate admissions, and Graff grapples with the tension inherent in educating graduate students at the expense of undergraduates. Indeed, all of the problems I 175 identify above span multiple monographs. All four works deal in some fashion with the dominance of research on promotion and tenure, the pursuit of prestige; and the tension between teaching and research. Such overlap is not a coincidence. The way critical monographs such as these are constructed enables—perhaps even requires—them to grapple with the major problems facing higher education. Small Stories As we see in in Ebony and Ivy (Wilder, 2013) and even A History of American Higher Education (Thelin, 2004/2019), historical scholarship that chronicles a series of events can be vitally important to the study of higher education. However, both chronicles and survey texts tend to be constructed in a way that limits the diverse ways history can be constructed and conceptualized. In contrast, the four critical monographs at the center of this study organize history in different ways and emphasize different periodizations and watersheds. They demonstrate that history is not a single fixed thing, but something altogether more fluid. The narratives presented in these works converge and diverge. At times they share watersheds and at other times a watershed presented by one author contradicts that of another. For example, the end of World War 2 was a watershed in both The Academic Revolution and Professing Literature; however, they draw radically different conclusions about its effects on higher education. Alternatively, The Emergence of the American University see the years after 1900 as a period of consolidation, but The Distinctive College suggests that these years were ones of great change for small liberal arts colleges. Rather than discounting the history that is presented, these seeming contradictions affirm the fluid nature of history and provide more nuanced picture of US higher education. 176 In spite of their differences, there are commonalities across all of these monographs and between then and our survey texts. The Distinctive College provides us with three separate narratives of small, liberal arts colleges that run counter to dominant narratives about the growth of large, multi-purpose research universities. On one hand, we might expect such radically different institutions to have radically different narratives. On the other hand, we can see that this is not always the case when Clark highlights the trend towards PhD research at Reed and Swarthmore. Similarly, Professing Literature provides us with a story about the growth of a single field. At first glance, nothing could be farther away from large multi-purpose universities, yet we see Graff interweave many of the same watershed events into his text to radically different ends. In particular, Graff specifically suggests that the postwar narrative of expansion built around the GI Bill and the middle class entering higher education—or the expansion of federal funding for scientific research—are not the only ways to understand the years after World War 2. For Graff the aftermath of World War 2 signals a change in the outlook and tenor of faculty research as humanities faculty came to view scholarship as apolitical in response to the forces of Nazism. Yet the story we more typically told about higher education leaves Nazism behind once World War 2 is over. By organizing their narratives in different ways that are not primarily chronological, these texts present a picture of history that does not proceed in a clearly chronological fashion. For example, Veysey organizes his earliest chapters according to different philosophies for purpose of higher education. Jencks and Riesman amplify this schema in The Academic Revolution when they organize their work according to thematic elements and then view each of these elements through their unifying theme of faculty power (the academic revolution). Burton Clark does not even organize The Distinctive College into a single narrative. Instead he presents 177 three stories about different liberal arts colleges, and then uses their stories to advance an idea about how lasting institutional change is affected. Only Professing Literature is organized in a way that can be understand as chronological. For Graff, this organization is about showing change over time. More than any other work in this study, Professing Literature adds a distinct temporal element to the analysis as Graff delineates the transition from one mode of scholarship to the next. However, rather than chronicling a series of events, he is showing how a very specific set of ideas changed over time; thus, organizing his history in this way is a necessity for his argument. The diverse portrayals and constructions of history in these four critical monographs provide a counterpoint to the presentation of history in our survey texts. Not only do these works present multiple narratives, but they also use similar events to tell different stories. Sometimes this is achieved by putting disparate pieces together in a novel way as we see in The Emergence of the American University. Other times, it is achieved by using the same forces and watersheds to draw radically different conclusions, as in Professing Literature. In still others, the use of multiple narratives or similar events helps us consider how organizations end up in the same place despite different local circumstances, as in The Academic Revolution. In sum, these works equip readers with a variety of different ways to organize and conceptualize historical material, and in the process demonstrates that history can tell many different stories in many different ways. Overall, the four monographs in this study help us understand change in higher education through a much smaller lens. To paraphrase William Blake, they allow us to see the world of higher education in an individual grain of sand, as each text tells a different story about a small portion of US higher education and, in so doing, helps students and scholars understand how and 178 why US higher education looks the way it does. Although these works do not, at first, appear to be telling stories about the entirety of US higher education, each contributes to our understanding therein. The language of a “small story” that illuminates a larger story is not language that I have used in my analysis. Instead, I opted to use “supplement” and “interweave.” However, all three terms are getting at similar ideas about survey texts. “Supplement” and “interweave” speak to specific instances wherein these monographs intersect with our survey texts or otherwise tell stories that do not fit into such texts. In contrast, using the language of a “small story” to illuminate a larger story emphasizes how the totality of these monographs are simultaneously much smaller than a survey text in scope and focus and yet, because of the connections made through “supplement” and “interweave,” they illuminate a larger, more nuanced story about higher education. As I have stated elsewhere, I am not suggesting that these alternate modes of construction are innately superior, nor am I saying that diverging from our conventional narratives automatically elevates a specific work. Indeed, Professing Literature is organized in a broadly chronological fashion, and The Emergence of the American University tells a story similar to that told in survey texts. However, when taken together, these four monographs provide readers with a multifaceted picture of the diverse ways history can be constructed and make it clear that there are a wide variety of historical narratives about the history of US higher education. Such diverse presentations of history do more than simply assert that there is history beyond survey texts. Specifically, the type of multifaceted history I have highlighted in this dissertation directly connects with the work we do in higher education studies and allows us to think about our problems historically and in a more interconnected manner. This is because the research problems we face today are not only contemporary, but also historical. They exist within a web 179 of interconnected changes to the higher education landscape. Better understanding and utilizing history can radically reshape how we approach and understand problems as well as the conclusions we draw in addressing them. 180 REFERENCES 181 REFERENCES Appleby, J., Hunt, L., & Jacob, M. (1994). Telling the truth about history. New York, NY: Norton & Company. Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA publication manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. In Neslon, Megill, & McCloskey (eds.) The rhetoric of human sciences: Language and argument in scholarship and public affairs, (pp. 125-144). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Calvino, I (1999). Why read the classics. London, UK: Random House. Clark, B. R. (1970/1992). The distinctive college: Antioch, Reed, & Swarthmore. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Cooper, M. G. & Marx, J. (2018). Media U: How the need to win audiences has shaped higher education. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Diner, S. J. (2017). Universities and their cities: Urban higher education in American. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Graff, G. (1988/2008). Professing literature: An institutional history. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Hutcheson, P. (2020). A people’s history of higher education. New York, NY: Jencks, C., and Riesman, D. (1968/2002). The academic revolution. Garden City, NY: Routledge. Doubleday. Labaree, D. (2017). A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Newfield, C. (2016). The great mistake: How we wrecked public universities and how we can fix them. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press Thelin, J. R. (2004/2019). A history of American higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Veysey, L. R. (1965). The emergence of the American university. Chicago, IL: University of Hopkins University Press. Chicago Press. Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony & ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. 182 APPENDIX 183 The Value and Meaning of Canonical Works Proposing any work as canonical is fraught with issues of representation, authenticity, and privilege. As scholars, we might have a serious discussion about the types of works that should be included in a canon; if the canon should serve scholars and scholarship or students and teaching; or if we should even have a canon. Taking the time to consider what the terms “canon” and “canonical” mean can provide a useful heuristic as we think through these questions. One of the reasons it is difficult to talk about canonical works is because it is unclear what a canon is and who it represents. Merriam-Webster defines a canon as “an authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture.” Within a disciplinary context, a canon is perhaps better defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which supplies two definitions, both of which are helpful for our understanding here. The OED defines a literary canon as “a body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of especially Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics (now frequently in the canon).” The OED supplies us with a second definition focused on a more generalized field or discipline: “a body of works, etc., considered to be established as the most important or significant in a particular field.” Each of these definitions provides us as readers with valuable insight into what it means to consider a work canonical. The definition provided by Merriam-Webster is important for two reasons. First, it is the only definition the dictionary provides that is relevant to a discussion of canonical works in an academic field. There is no definition similar to those provided by the OED. The lack of a definition focused on disciplinary structures in a public dictionary like Miriam-Webster is telling in that it suggests the centering of religious doctrine is firmly enshrined in the popular 184 imagination. The term “canon” is thus tied to scripture and, in some ways, indisputable. This is not to say that scripture cannot and is not disputed. Rather, it is to say that associating the term “canon” with scripture implies it is incontrovertible. Specifically, if a canon is indisputable—if it is incontrovertible—there cannot be other canons, nor can there be multiple competing canons, and as scholars we cannot critically discuss the canon. The two definitions provided by the OED contradict this notion and drive my own understanding of what it means to think about canonical works. When a canon represents a body of literary works, or just a body of work within a particular field, there is space for differing or alternative canons. Rather than being indisputable as suggested by the Merriam-Webster definition, a canon instead includes works that are considered to be particularly important or significant to a field or discipline; but, of course, determining what is “important” and “significant” is a matter of conjecture, power, and privilege within that field or discipline. The Merriam-Webster definition positions a canon as cutting off scholarly debate. This may, in turn, drive some of our scholarly objections to having canons. Yes, a canon does tend to privilege older works and, in turn, tends to be less diverse, but a more important aspect of such scholarly dismissal may stem from the manner in which the Merriam-Webster definition suggests that these canonical works are the only important ones and that there can be no other works or canons. In contrast, the OED definitions create space for a debate about the role of canonical works in a field and implicitly acknowledge that there can be more than one canon because the works that one scholar holds to be of the highest quality or the most enduring value can be very different from the works that another scholars holds. Yes, these works may still be older and less diverse, but by reorienting our definition, we allow for alternative canons that are conceptualized or organized in different ways. This definition allows us as scholars to propose 185 alternative works within existing canons. If the canon is no longer incontrovertible, if it is instead a subjective construct based on the works that provide enduring value to a field, it is possible to suggest removing and adding works to a particular canon. A canon can thus become a flexible construct that helps scholars in a field think about what works provide the most value, to whom they provide that value, for what purposes, and why they have persisted. Coming to some agreement about what the word “canon” means does not signal the end of a scholarly conversation around the idea of a canon. Instead, it signals the beginning. For some scholars, the inclusion of one work over another is problematic. For other scholars, the notion that there can be a canon is even more problematic. For many scholars in higher education, the privileging of dead white men is more problematic still. However, the presence of a canon, or at least the discussion that surrounds scholarly thinking on a canon, can be seen as one sign that a field or discipline is coming of age. In order to consider any work canonical, a field needs to have progressed far enough to have ancestors and foundational texts. By definition, new fields would seem unable to have a conversation about canonical works. As such, it seems plausible to suggest that higher education has arrived at a point in its history where it can have a conversation about canonic texts. Katz, Peters, Elihu, & Orloff explicitly deal with the value of having a canon in a newly constituted field in their work Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are there any? Should there be? How about these (2003)17. For the authors, a canon does not to valorize one specific set of works over another set of works, but instead enable scholarly conversation. For them, canons function as devices of intellectual organization and allow individual scholars to handle the 17 Media studies is fifty years old. This is a similar age to higher education studies. Although fifty may seem quite old to contemporary eyes, it is a far shorter lifespan for a field than one can see in anthropology, history, or chemistry to name a few. 186 overwhelming amount of research and information available in a given field. Katz et al. (2003) are not suggesting that any such organization is value neutral. Rather, they suggest that canons provide shortcuts and establish starting points, while also allowing scholars to rebel or otherwise defy tradition within their field. The authors point out that you cannot innovate or challenge dominant norms without first creating and agreeing on what these norms are. A Model Canonical Debate For some scholars, a discussion related the canon may seem backwards facing and primarily relevant to previous generations of scholars and scholarship. Much as it is possible to view the canon as an intellectual shortcut that enables discussion, it is also possible to see the canon as limiting the range of acceptable scholarly conversations. Nonetheless, the canon remains a topic of serious concern for scholars across fields and disciplines today. In 2017, the Journal of Ethnographic Theory devoted a special issue to the canon in anthropology (Col & Sopranzetti, 2017). This special issue was a direct response to a public blog post made by Marshal Sahlins in which he lamented that contemporary anthropological training had abandoned its roots. Although Marshall Sahlins’ blog post provided the initiative, the issue itself was organized around the question of “Why read the classics?” When I first encountered this special issue, I said to myself “this could have come out of higher education studies.” However, as I spent more time engaged with it, I came to realize that it could have come out of any number of other fields. Of course, the specific works these scholars reference resonate most closely with anthropologists, but the positions these scholars take can very easily be associated with positions scholars in other fields might also take: Anna Pilliavsky (2017) defends the classics; Yarimar Bonilla (2017) thinks about how one might decolonize the classics; Paul Stoller (2017) takes an international perspective on the classics; 187 Fred Myers (2017) thinks about reading the canon through the lens of content acquisition; Adia Benton (2017) centers the canon in terms of whiteness and how a canon comes to be defined; and John Jackson (2017) thinks about how the classics give a field legitimacy. I will now focus on the four positions that we might most easily see and understand in higher education studies: a defense of the canon (Pilliavsky); the desire to decolonize the canon (Bonilla); the canon as a mechanism for centering whiteness and privilege (Benton); and the canon as an element in teaching and content acquisition for new scholars (Myers). Pilliavsky (2017) thinks of the classics as an antidote to the “peer-review meat mincer” of modern anthropology (p. 13). She suggests that the horizon contemporary scholars consider has shrunk and that the classics are usually cited in a perfunctory manner. Pilliavsky (2017) in turn suggests that a “failure of disciplinary memory undermines anthropology’s founding intellectual achievement, turning anthropologists from the most enlightened and progressive of human scientists to the most derivative” (p.14). By distancing itself from the classics and losing disciplinary memory, anthropology loses the radical element that these classical texts represented at the time of their writing. Instead, anthropology “generates results that are complacent, conventional, and closed to the discovery of new things” as anthropologists have come to confuse advocacy and social theory for analysis (Pilliavsky, 2017, p.15). For Pilliavsky, classic foundational works represent a way for anthropology to renew its intellectual diversity. Rather than being regressive works that represent the past, canons are comprised of forward-thinking works that signify a diversity of ideas and methods. Yarimar Bonilla (2017) grapples with the conflicting need to preserve the classics and “the desire to burn it all down” (p. 26). In so doing, she deals with the distinction between the classics and the canon, suggesting that the classics are works that allow her to do her own 188 research: “They are the books that I am reluctant to pack away when I go on leave because I might ‘need’ them” (Yarimar Bonilla, 2017, p. 24). In contrast, the canon is made up of works with which students and scholars in anthropology should be familiar regardless of specialty. Bonilla would, of course, have scholars read the works that she finds to be classics, but the key difference is that the classics allow her to do her own work, whereas the canon allows anthropology as a field to be. Despite Bonilla’s desire to decolonize the classics, she also invites us to “be critical about how and why new orientations [have] succeeded the previous ones” (Bonilla, 2017, p. 25). Her desire to decolonize the canon is a product of a specific place and time, much as the older works that drive her desire to decolonize in the first place are themselves the product of a specific place and time. In essence, both the works themselves and Bonilla’s response to them are historically constructed and should be understood as such. Thus, Bonilla (2017) suggests that we should be careful about simply abandoning our canonical works and instead work to unsettle them in a way that subverts their meaning: “don’t silence the past; instead unsettle the silences through which that past was built” (p. 26). For Adia Benton (2017) the very idea of a canon is a mechanism of marginalization: scholars who are deemed unworthy are silenced and “displaced from the very idea of a canon because of their social position within the hierarchies of disciplines” (p. 30). This leads her to suggest that whiteness and colonialism permeate the canon. However, she asserts that whiteness “does not make it unworthy of pursuit . . . does not make it irredeemable or incapable of reform” (Benton, 2017, p. 30). Indeed, for all of Benton’s desire to decolonize anthropology, she acknowledges that this desire requires an involvement, an investment, in the very canon she is trying to decolonize. Instead, she suggests that we think of the “classics” or the canon as our intellectual ancestors and that, as scholars, we can choose our affiliation with these ancestors. A 189 canon chosen by individual scholars would no longer have the same gatekeeping effect as one chosen by privileged elders and such canons may no longer center colonialism and whiteness. Although Benton does not say this outright, what she is essentially advocating for is multiple canons that individual scholars can choose from and construct or reconstruct as needed. She acknowledges that what unites us as scholars is common intellectual ancestors but asserts that we need to more carefully choose these ancestors and, in some cases, maybe even lose those who are the most problematic. Fred Myers (2017) conceptualizes the canon in terms of content acquisition and disciplinary history. Some older “canonical” works represent a wealth of content that scholars need to be familiar with if they are going to do research in that particular area. Myers offers early scholarship on witchcraft as an example of canonical work as content, saying that, while this research has become more problematic for us as scholars, the exploration of witchcraft accusations and the process of othering still speaks to contemporary scholars. Beyond simple familiarity with the content in these canonical works, Myers (2017) suggests that “some debates and topics have a history, and the dialogue or conversations that have taken place around these questions can, I think, best be understood through that history” (p. 9). Myers quotes A. I. Hallowell (1965) saying: “‘the history of anthropology [is] an anthropological problem’” (Myers, 2017, p. 10). For Myers (2017), then, conceptualizing history and the anthropological canon in this way highlights the manner in which the canon is a cultural artifact with its own history that should be examined critically: “we learn to read ‘through’ these text to realities unseen by the writers; we understand that we need to critique them for their theoretical, historical, and colonial aporia, but they are artifacts of continuing value” (p. 9). 190 These four perspectives on the canon in anthropology show both a diverse set of beliefs on the value of the canon and clearly demonstrate that the desire to engage with the canon is not a pursuit confined to old white men talking about other old white men. These scholars suggest that canons can be teaching tools for understanding the field itself (Myers) or a means to subvert dominant narratives (Bonilla). Alternatively, the canon can be seen as a process of self-selection as scholars choose their own individual canons (Benton), or even an antidote to the monotony of contemporary scholarship (Pilliavsky). The point of this short analysis is not to show that there are only four possible uses and interpretations of the canon. Instead, the value of this discussion is in considering the diverse positions and opinions that scholars hold about disciplinary canons, and how these positions span fields and disciplines. Furthermore, as Bonilla and Benton make clear, the canon is not only the preserve of dead white men, but a space where the meaning and values of a discipline are contested. Why Have a Canon In some way, the authors of the anthropology special issue mentioned above all engage with Italo Calvino’s Why Read the Classics (1999) as a way to conceptualize the value of having a canon. Although, Calvino’s work is explicitly focused on literature, many of the questions and premises that he raises apply to other canons. For instance, the above authors loosely focus on four of Calvino’s premises,: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say; The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when hide in layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or collectives unconscious; A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise; [and] A classic is something that persists as a 191 background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation” (pp. 3-9). These different conceptions of what the canon is and does begs a number of questions. Where do I see the four monographs in my study fitting in? Am I suggesting that we expand the canon to include these works? Do I see them as part of a competing canon? Do these works represent intellectual shortcuts? Or do I see these works as part of an effort to burn down the canon? The answer is all of these. And none of them. All at the same time. For my own work the canon is an immensely useful tool for thinking about the individual works we consistently return to and why we return to them. Furthermore, expanding the canon on the history of higher education to include works that are not survey texts would represent a step forward in how we think about and engage with historical scholarship in higher education studies. At the same time, I think Bonilla (2017) is correct when she differentiates between the canon and the classics. The value of these four works is not that they allow higher education as a field to be, but rather what they contribute–or can contribute – to our own research. As I have advanced my scholarly agenda I have returned to Professing Literature over and over again. This would be a book that I am reluctant to pack away. As Calvino says, these works “exert a peculiar influence” on the mind (1999, p. 4). And so, while I find the canon a useful heuristic, my preference lies in thinking about these four monographs as classics that persist in the mind and allow scholars to do their work. 192 REFERENCES 193 REFERENCES Benton, A. (2017). Reading classics: Ideology, tautology, and memory. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, 3, 29-33. Bonilla, Y. (2017). Unsettling the classics: On symptomatic readings and disciplinary agnosticism. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, 3, 23-28. Calvino, I (1999). Why Read the Classics. London, UK: Random House. Canon (n.d.). In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www-oed-com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/27148 Canon. (n.d.). In Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/canon Col, G. D., & Sopranzetti, C. (Eds.). (2017). Why do we read the classics? [Special Issue]. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, 3. Col, G. D., & Sopranzetti, C. ( 2017). Why do we read the classics? Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, 3, 1-7. Hallowell, A. I. (1965). The history of anthropology as an anthropological problem. History of Behavioral Sciences, 1, 24-38. Jackson, J. L. (2017). Bewitched by Boas. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, 3, 18-22). Katz, E., Peters, J. P., Liebes, T., & Orloff, A. (Eds.) (2003). Canonic texts in media research: Are there any? Should there be? How about these?. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Myers, F. (2017). Rant or reason: Old wine and new bottles in anthropology. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, 3, 8-12. Pilliavsky, A. (2017). Disciplinary memory against ambient pietism. Journal of Ethnographic Stoller, P. (2017). You can’t walk where there is no ground. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, Theory, 7, 3, 13-17. 3, 34-38. 194