Making the Case

State-of-the-academy books in the United States still see more in higher education than the lifetime earnings of graduates. Almost a genre in its own right, the American academic jeremiad has at different points treated struggles over curricula, tenure, or promotion procedures as fiercely, even dangerously, important.¹ Louis Menand's title refers to a key conception of the university that underlies this sense of importance: as the site for the untrammelled play of ideas, it is an essential preserve of democratic freedom of expression. In the 1967 Supreme Court judgment in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, Justice Brennan declared 'academic freedom' to be 'a special concern of the First Amendment', and that '[t]he classroom is peculiarly the "marketplace of ideas"'. Menand's use of the phrase as shorthand for the university in his title thus yokes a national ideal to his discussion of the history and culture of the American university.

Hence, perhaps, the portentousness of the five menacing questions with which the publisher Norton leads on the dust-jacket:

• Why do professors all tend to think alike?

• Why have the humanities struggled to justify themselves?

• What makes it so hard for faculties to decide which subjects should be required?

• Why do teachers and scholars today want to transcend the limits of their disciplines?

• Why are so many problems that should be easy for universities to solve - problems that are mainly about ideas, not money - so intractable?

The last four questions insinuate various kinds of incompetence among academics (can't justify themselves, can't decide what subjects should be required, their disciplines aren't enough for them, they make intractable problems of non-monetary issues). Menand's book of four shortish essays is more complex and less question-begging than this suggests. He first examines the history of approaches to 'general education', the ways in which American universities have sought to provide either a well-rounded disciplinary breadth or else what they deemed to be the basics of a cultured education. They have tended to require students to take either courses from a spread of disciplines or a compulsory course, organised apart from specialist teaching. Comparing general education courses at Columbia and at Harvard over the last century, Menand explores the sometimes competing assumptions involved: socialisation, preparing students for life, or the idea of 'liberal culture', in distinction from or opposition to the professions.

The second essay considers what Menand calls an 'institutional legitimacy crisis' for the humanities, beginning in the United States in about the late 1980s (p. 61). The problems, including the 'Culture Wars' over theory and the politics of literature, were produced by a combination of changes - in universities' economic position and demographics as well as new ideas and methodologies. During what some call the 'Golden Age' for American education, for Menand 1945-75, universities expanded as the baby boom and the Vietnam draft brought record numbers of (mostly white male) students into universities, while Cold War competition with the USSR prompted direct government subsidies. By the mid-1970s, however, the bulge in the college age population straightened out, alongside a recession and the beginning of a fall in the 'economic value' of a degree; it was at this point that universities began to admit women, minority, and foreign students in larger numbers. By the mid-1980s, the composition of university and college teachers ('professors') had started to diversify too, and at the same time some teachers were placing more emphasis on multiculturalism, ethical implications, and education as a collaborative process. Their critics complained of radicalism and elitism, of universalism and 'great' works being replaced by diversity and difference. These controversies have largely 'evaporated', though Menand remarks sharply on their effects: 'there was a period in the eighties and nineties when some disciplines were almost defined by the internal critiques they generated. The...