Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life

Academic Professionalism and the Betrayal of the Land-Grant Tradition (1999)

69 academic professionalism and the betrayal of the land-grant tradition () Before passage of federal legislation inaugurating the landgrant movement in the 1860s, elite private colleges enjoyed an educational monopoly that exclusively served America’s professional classes. These were colleges that Justin Morrill, father of the land-grant acts, subtly denigrated as “literary institutions” (Parker 1924, 262), by which he implied effete seats of privilege. The land-grant college was supposed to offer an alternative that embodied a passionate feeling for democracy, access, and educational pragmatism : the open road of American higher learning, egalitarian, energetic, and free. I wish to argue, however, that this conceptual framework situating egalitarianism and class privilege as the organizing polarities of American higher education history is misleading. Instead, professionalism—along with an entire cultural complex evoked by the mystique of professionalization— long ago displaced a vigorous if oversimplified democratic ideology as the driving force behind American land-grant colleges. “The Professional Complex ,” as Talcott Parsons pointed out in the 1950s, had long dominated the Learning in the Plural 70 university ethos and rendered obsolete late-nineteenth-century standards of institutional self-definition such as liberty and equality or, indeed, the class perquisites of social privilege, style, and taste. Arguing that professionalism had become the crucial structural component of modern society, Parsons concluded that “the academic emphasis is now much more on achievement criteria and on reputation in a national and international cultural forum” (1967, 542) than on the philosophical dialectic suggested by the land-grant and the elite Ivy League models. Further inquiry shows, in fact, that the new academic professionalism, according to one line of argument, is quite old. Barely a generation separates Morrill’s Land-Grant Act, passed into law in 1862, from Thorstein Veblen’s early twentieth-century attacks on university administrators he called “captains of erudition” (1946, 62) whom he blamed for turning universities into professional/commercial bureaucracies fundamentally no different than banks and breakfast cereal manufacturers obsessed with profit, status, and prestige. Veblen’s critique cut across any meaningful distinctions that could be made between a Harvard or Princeton and premier land-grant universities like Cornell and UC Berkeley. According to Burton Bledstein, “For the past three quarters of a century, the debate about the nature of American higher education has continued to be conducted in Veblen’s terms” (1976, 288). Instead of standing opposed across an ideological Maginot Line separating democratic egalitarianism from the privileges accruing to social class, land-grant colleges and elite universities march, then, to the same drummer, to the same beat, as Bledstein puts it, of “the ego-satisfying pretensions of professionalism” (1976, 289). THE SUBVERSION OF LANDGRANT IMPERATIVES The original imperative undergirding the land-grant movement rested in a moral conception consistent with Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman republicanism , an ideology that fused education, liberty, and civil society into a Academic Professionalism 71 politico-ethical holism (Nevins 1962, 16–17). The land-grant movement represents a characteristic, if not classic, American melding of can-do pragmatism and lofty democratic idealism into a vision of education as the great social equalizer. Innervated by the defining virtues of democratic humanism and driven by an unbending faith in progress and America’s reckless appetite for frontier expansion, the central ideas driving the land-grant movement included liberty and equality, freedom of opportunity, the leveling of geographic and class barriers to higher education, unrestricted access to all occupations, and the application of knowledge and technology to the civic sphere. It is not so much the failure of the land-grant college to live up to such values that has emboldened, even outraged, critics. The acerbic criticism of a moralist like Wendell Berry is directed more at the ease with which land-grant schools have methodically subverted a strapping egalitarianism as their defining character by uncritically adopting a new-style professionalism synonymous with utilitarianism in the service of power, status, and prestige: in short, a wholesale shift in institutional values. The history of the land-grant college, according to Berry, has been a story of the surrender of institutional standards and self-definition in which liberal and practical education gives way to specialized curricula that serve narrower and narrower professional constituencies. If this evolution, Berry considers, “has not been caused by, it has certainly accompanied a degeneration of faculty standards, by which professors and teachers of disciplines become first upholders of ‘professional standards’ and then careerists in...