In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

boundary 2 27.1 (2000) 135-149



[Access article in PDF]

American Universities:
A Personal View

Karl Kroeber *

The following reflections on American universities are both unabashedly personal and recklessly generalizing. I hope these qualities will dramatize the near impossibility of evaluating objectively the twentieth-century history of our universities—although probably no other institution has more significantly shaped the democratic character of our society.

To begin with the personal, my father, Alfred Kroeber, graduated from Columbia College in 1896 at the age of twenty, becoming, at the very beginning of this century, Franz Boas’s first Columbia Ph.D. in the new field of anthropology. He then took an academic appointment at the University of [End Page 135] California, where he served until his retirement in 1946. After retiring, he accepted positions as visiting professor at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Yale University before his death in 1960. I earned a B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1947 and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1956. After fourteen years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, starting as an instructor and finishing as a full professor (with a brief descent into sin as a dean), I returned to Columbia, from which, to the distress of some administrators, I’ve not yet retired, although I have left the University senate after serving for twenty-two years, which included chairing at one time or another all of its major committees. If to this sketch is added the fact that my two brothers were professors and that one of my sons holds a Ph.D., a significant pattern of change in academic life emerges. Like almost all professors of his era, my father was the first academic in his family. In the first portion of the twentieth century, the success of American universities was created chiefly by men with no familial connections to higher education.

Until the 1960s, universities, in fact, enforced rules against nepotism. Nepotism excluded not so much the hiring of nephews and children as the hiring of spouses in the professor’s department, and sometimes in any department in the same university. Today’s inversion of nepotistic policies (academic pairs are now often the object of hiring) results from affirmative action regulations instituted at the beginning of the 1970s. This reversal, usually identified with “sixties radicalism,” has deeper roots. The sixties coincided with a surge of young people pursuing suddenly well-paid careers in higher education as a comfortable “way of life”—middle-class successors to the “intellectual proletariat” of our professoriat, described by Abraham Flexner in his Universities: American, English, German (1930). Earlier professors had been driven less by expectations of comfort than by intellectual obsessions and personal compulsions, including the immigrant desire to Americanize.

Our universities refract broad demographic and economic currents. Teaching at Columbia (then an all-male school) during the 1950s, I remember only one Oriental student, a feisty Korean, whereas in the past three years, a large proportion of my classes (and a larger proportion of my best students) have come from families originating on the other side of the international date line. Here, personal experience coincides with national trends. Today, 15 percent of California’s high school graduates are Asian Americans, and the same group constitutes 37 percent of the University of California’s 130,000 students.

Such demographics dramatize how universities function simultaneously as socially “radical” innovators and “conservative” bastions of tradition, thus exploding absolutist claims of both educational radicals, such as the longhairs of the late sixties, and more recent educational crew cuts, such as Allan Bloom and William Bennett. The distinctive character of the [End Page 136] American university historically has been an illogical success at serving socio-intellectual innovation while acting as a major preserver of traditional values.

Our universities have long been simultaneously democratic and elitist, at least since the emergence of public, open-admission, land-grant universities of the Midwest and Far West as interactive competitors with the northeastern Ivy League schools. The South, one notices in passing, has contributed little to the triumphs of American higher education. Institutionalized racism...

pdf

Share