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c h ap t e r 5 Prestige and Prestige Envy As one moves outside the realm of for-profit universities and the community colleges that increasingly resemble them, the key term in the marketing of higher education ceases to be ‘‘jobs, jobs, jobs,’’ as Stanley Aronowitz decried, but instead becomes prestige. Prestige is both fascinating and frustrating to write about because it is so ghostly. Yet I believe that the concept of prestige is so crucial to understanding the current and future trends of many American universities, and of the humanities, that I will use it in this chapter to map both institutions and academic disciplines. My analysis will be guided by the assumption that the American version of prestige is distinctive: it is not perceived as a natural quality or necessarily as an aspect of long-standing, time-honored traditions; rather, it is integral to consumer culture. In our nation of aspirational shoppers, where purchases so often express envy or anxiety about social status, prestige almost always manifests itself as the aura around any expensive commodity : a house, a car, a watch, a pair of shoes, or, for my purposes, a college. Thus, though the concept of prestige may itself be ineffable, Americans who are conscious of prestige tend to want to assess it, put a price tag on it, brand it, and acquire it. This preoccupation with measuring prestige, in turn, leaves a host of traces that I can use to navigate the higher-education system. That is, if we bracket those institutions, discussed in my last chapter, which advertise only their job-training capability, the rest of America’s colleges and universities market themselves by establishing a relationship to prestige. Making sense of this commodified version of prestige allows us to sort out these institutions and predict where they are headed. One can similarly map academic areas, not only the humanities (my main focus), but also law schools, business schools, university medical centers, 111 112 The Last Professors and even athletic programs, each of which establishes its own relationship to commodified prestige. Finally, while my treatment of prestige and prestige envy as an organizing category in higher education constitutes a new chapter, the model of college as occupational training remains a significant presence. It is now a ready-made, legitimate alternative mission for those colleges that choose not to compete in the prestige wars that I will shortly describe. As appealing as prestige may be as a potential measure of higher education, the notion of college as an investment in oneself and the means to one’s professional self-actualization is a powerful force as well. Not only individuals, but also universities sometimes find themselves torn between the two. The seeming incompatibility between the two messages—college as job training and college as a prestige marker—prompt an assortment of further questions. When for-profit universities renounce the quest for prestige , what exactly are they rejecting? At the other end of the spectrum, when an elite university bases its reputation and its claim to excellence on prestige, it would seem to be making a peculiar kind of circular argument. Why does such reasoning almost always go unchallenged? What motivates state universities without money or selective admissions to compete for prestige, a contest that they are bound to lose every time? I argued in chapter two that every professor has an individual investment in prestige, as marked by research, publication, and tenure. Professors also function, though, both as willing participants and as prizes in the institutional competition for prestige. Since the prestige wars show no signs of abating, any attempt to predict the future of higher education involves anticipating their outcome, the impact that they will ultimately have on the universities that wage them, and on the professors who work for those universities. I will begin by examining two ingenious and heroic attempts to measure prestige. Neither is entirely successful, but they serve as a useful prelude to the crude banality of the most familiar prestige measure in higher education , the annual U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings issue, which I will discuss later. Those rankings are, as everyone knows, presented as a series of categorized lists without a rationale. U.S. News divulges the various metrics that it uses to evaluate schools, but owes its success to the fact that everyone focuses on the rankings themselves, not on the methodology used to devise them. By looking first at attempts to...

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