Editor's Note

The Education of Henry Adams teaches that all universities and colleges must be judged failures if their goal is thought to be the education of the young. Writing of Harvard College, Adams insists that the university is always behind its own time, always a poor provider of what is most needed, and useful only as a “negative force” that might weaken biases in politics, knowledge, and desire that are already in place. How did Harvard fail in its task? It did not give Adams knowledge, nor did it give him the means to acquire or produce it. Specifically, it gave him neither mathematics nor modern languages; it never mentioned the name of Karl Marx, who alone, after 1848, “foresaw radical change.”¹

Adams portrays Harvard’s failures as only one of many frustrations in his effort to acquire an education. As the failures in formal education mount, Adams calls the small education he acquires “accidental,” attributing it generally to those moments when the biases of acquired knowledge collapse in encounters with realities to which he is brought totally unprepared. Formal education never lets anyone know what is needed in advance; the educated person is never sufficiently cultivated to deal successfully with the new and unexpected, not without upheaval and surprise.

Of course, this is not (or was not) how it should be. The young Adams (b. 1838) was, after all, on the verge of entering Harvard when Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote that the purpose of the university is “the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued for its own sake.”² If Adams comes to believe anything about education, though, it is that the young should be educated for “success.” In fact, The Education traces many of the ways Americans were educated for success, in the crudest sense of that term. But the person who laments Harvard’s ignorance of Marx lauds success not for its crudity of wealth and position (both of which he inherited and augmented) but for its accuracy as a measure of historical vectors.

Even research universities are like Adams’s Harvard, in that the most they offer is a mechanism for catching up with what has already been thought—this despite the fact that universities have been great machines for knowledge production. Increasingly, of course, as a great deal of recent writing makes clear, university-based research turns toward the “applied,” toward knowledge with immediate market consequences. The sciences, especially, find themselves transformed into devices for capital’s expansion within a culture of entrepreneurial values and corporate transnationalism. The humanities are left simply with the crumbs of service and the marginal business of cultural commodification for the market. This might suggest that universities finally do what Adams urged: educate for success. To a degree, this is just what happens.

To educate for success means two things: to supply a need and to foresee a future. The first of these two is not interesting. For decades, educators have lamented the market forces that, by shaping career possibilities, shape educational paths. The second matters much more. As universities embed themselves within the culture of the practices of transnational capital, they must accept the role assigned to them or be starved of funds; they must produce certain kinds of valuable knowledge and spin off economic entities that both return royalties and enrich the circulation of ideas and products within the technologies of globalized economies.

Yet more important, universities must share in the demand that globalizing economic agents make on all our lives and on history, namely, that the future become what they intend to make it. Universities do this in two ways: by supplying the brains and training these agents require, and by redesigning themselves to act more quickly, to show more speed, both in imagining the future as the present configuration wants it to be and in adjusting to the constantly changing future that the rapidly altering “present” demands. Universities nest themselves, necessarily, within the flows of time...