It is in a quasi-apologetic spirit that I return to some subjects only recently touched upon. Like many others who have spent a lifetime teaching, I find many aspects of our unsettled cultural moment disquieting. In assessing the strengths of American social institutions, we may be apt to underestimate the importance of our system of higher education. American colleges and universities are unique in the world in terms of their number, their variety, and the role they have played in advancing important national goals and aspiration, including democracy itself. To be honest, one has to point out the contrast between the exceptional nature of American higher education and its sometimes mediocre (or worse) public high schools. It is therefore a cause of particular sadness to me when I sense, as I do at this moment, a diminution of the respect with which Americans regard the state of higher education just now. Our American system of higher education has been pricing itself out of the easy reach of the general population for decades. It seems to me now in danger of stumbling into outright cultural hostility with that population as well.
At one level the problem is a money problem, as so many of our national problems are. There are macro- and micro-manifestations of the financial problem. On the macro level, there has been an agreement between government and research institutions that universities would conduct all kinds of scientific research useful to the government and mainly paid for by the government—theoretically, but only theoretically, with no strings attached. The cultural contract between our colleges and the general population is informal and implicit, but it has been reasonably clear. Whatever other benefits collegiate institutions may claim to offer—principal among them the personal and spiritual growth of individual students and the preparation of citizens prepared for vigorous and informed participation in democracy—the frequently explicit claim of life-long economic advantage has been prominent. Parents have been willing to scrimp and save for the demonstrable probability that their material sacrifice will enhance the prospects for the material prosperity of their offspring. For a variety of reasons, this rationale is no longer a consensus.
Columbia University in New York City, possibly the most famous of the many great educational institutions in what is probably still thought of by many as our nation’s greatest city, is going through a stressful time. In fact, it is in a huge mess. The latest tribulation is the resignation of an interim president appointed after the resignation of a predecessor who herself barely warmed the seat in the presidential office. This has pretty much been an all-girl band. And the latest lady is already being menaced by the congresswoman whose Perry Mason-stye cross examinations in a congressional committee hearing ended the executive career of the Penn president nearly instantly. Ex-President Shafik of Columbia, who happens also to be a peer of the British realm and returned to England after only a year in New York, was in my opinion an outstanding educational leader. But she was not a commando nor a barroom brawler, both of which roles may now descend upon a college president almost capriciously The newest temporary leader is being called an acting president as opposed to an interim. Though I have never taught at Columbia University, I have had some reasonably close connections with the institution and have had many friends there. To observe from a distance the distress of one of the world’s flagship institutions must be painful to anyone concerned with high quality higher education.
Our universities inherited from their medieval European ancestors a certain sense of privilege when compared with other sections of civil society. The phrase “ivory tower” is one that suggests an institution liberated from our own daily struggles and challenges in order to pursue a contemplative purity. Many college professors think of themselves as modern ascetics who have sacrificed the fleshpots of Egypt for the cold but bracing water streams of Academe. Never mind the fatuousness of the idea. It is one that preserves a faint racial memory of the monastic origins of our universities in the Latin Middle Ages. But just how unmonastic a great American university actually is may be suggested by the fact that Columbia now needs many millions of dollars of government money to operate on all cylinders. And I mean many: four hundred million. The Trump Administration says it is unwilling to provide the wanted and wonted money unless Columbia redresses certain alleged features of its “campus culture”. The dereliction of which Columbia is accused is being soft on anti-Semitism. The context in which this dereliction is supposed to have manifested itself are campus protests relating to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, a militant group of Palestinians.
In the neo-Manichaean style preferred by the New York Times the issue was thus analyzed: “Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.” One discovers what the it was in that sentence—either surrender or reward, in the paper’s dramatic prose—only later in the sentence. It was the decision by the administration of Columbia University to cooperate with requirements concerning the conduct of students participating in political protests on campus.
It is easy to deplore the implications of a full-throated culture war between American academia and the current presidential administration, but rather harder to avoid the conflict itself. That the research universities truly need government money is suggested by the staggering shortfall of four hundred million dollars with which Columbia was threatened. It may require a little more intellectual subtlety to appreciate that the government is no less in need of what American colleges and universities uniquely provide to the nation’s well-being. And it is just possible that intellectual subtlety ought to be more of a national priority.