The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education

Part I. Plufort College

I Plufort College T he American new middle classes are inclined to combine secular and religious values and divergent lifestyles in a seemingly endless search for redemptive direction.1 They incorporate intellectual tradition and the fine arts; reform and radical politics; traditional world and avant-garde religions; preindustrial communal styles of living; transcendental hobbies; and fashionable alternative child rearing, educational, and erotic practices into their lifestyles with a moral ferocity reminiscent of the Puritans. The common thread defining these multi­ faceted newmiddle -class directions is that they are pursued with an intensity, obses­ siveness, and moral self-righteousness characteristic of the religious con­ vert seeking to confirm his faith through frenetic ritual activity. Compli­ cating the missionary dimension of this new-middle-class struggle for secular redemption is the paradox that these redemptive styles invariably necessitate sustaining relationships with those institutions from which the new-middle-class seekers wish to be redeemed. For being true to one’s new-middle-class occupational calling, transcendental hobby, purifying lifestyle, or principled political stance almost invariably includes being subsidized by or working for the bureaucratic world. Current and aspiring new-middle-class youth in their own late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century search for the American dream have been especially cognizant of their inability to experience unpolluted redemption. The industrial, bureaucratic society recruits educated youth with specific technical and social skills for the middle and upper levels of all its crucial social and economic institutions. Yet the very educational training the new-middle-class youth must complete contains ideological material that can focus moral discomfort with the occupational styles and lifestyles for which they are being prepared. As different historical conditions confront succeeding generations of new-middleclass youth, the task of resolving the dilemmas these youth face when they attempt to realize their dreams in new-middle-class institutions becomes even more problematic. Portions of Part I were previously published as Gerald E. Levy and Christian J. Churchill, “New Middle Class Youth in a College Town: Education for Life in the 1990s,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 6, no. 2 (1992): 229–267. 16 / Part I The first generation of new and aspiring new-middle-class youth who experienced the Great Depression and World War II were rewarded with subsidized education and housing, as well as cultural opportunities that they had not expected but nevertheless felt entitled to because of the economic and wartime hardships to which they had been subjected. Such New Dealers and war-based patriots joined the Keynesian society as bureaucratic professionals and cosmopolitan consumers; migrated to the cities, suburbs, and exurbs; and fashioned communities and institutions geared toward preparing their children to inherit the economic and cultural gains they had made.2 With the exception of beats, bohemians, critical intellectuals, alienated artists, and juvenile delinquents, this postwar generation was not in aggravating public tension with the blossoming bureaucratic styles and leisured cosmopolitanism . To the extent that they could identify the postwar industrial expansion as a redemptive consequence of their moral, military victory and work ethic, they could justify their society’s ascendancy and their own upward mobility in somewhat spiritual terms.3 Whatever nagging ambivalence these now successful new-middle-class adults harbored toward their absorption into the Keynesian society did not impede them from insisting that their children join the society on its terms. For they assumed that their children would view easy access into affluent new-middle-class life as an irresistible and attainable advantage. The members of the second generation of post–World War II new-middleclass youth were beneficiaries of a still-expanding economy and their parents ’ generosity, but they resented the expectation that they too should feel redeemed and automatically embrace their parents’ lifestyles. For these youth had not struggled to achieve postwar affluence, had not suffered through the Depression or sacrificed for the war, and were not so easily able to accept or match their parents’ enthusiasm for new-middle-class life. Having experienced no redemptive juncture, they were driven to fabricate one of their own in relation to the secular humanistic values in the educational and cultural institutions with which their parents had provided them. Applying fashionable artistic, intellectual, and religious critiques to their parents, themselves, and their surroundings, they sought redemption through civil rights and antiwar activism, further secular and religious reeducation, countercultural hedonist self-expression, feminism, and rural communal migration.4 The members of...