The Academy and Groupthink

Reviewed by Gerald Graff

 

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, by Louis Menand

Harvard University Press, 176 pages, $24.95

 

University of California Chancellor Clark Kerr once wrote that “few institutions are so conservative as the universities about their own affairs while their members are so liberal about the affairs of others. . . . The faculty member who gets arrested as a ‘freedom rider’ in the South is a flaming supporter of unanimous prior faculty consent to any change whatsoever on his campus in the North.” Louis Menand quotes Kerr’s witticism in the introduction to his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, which takes as its point of departure the paradox that professors love radical change so long as it doesn’t apply to them.

On the one hand, Menand notes, the American university has changed dramatically in many ways since World War I, including “demographically, intellectually, financially, technologically, and in terms of its missions, its stakeholders, and its scale—and these changes have affected the substance of teaching and research.” On the other hand, the university “has changed very little structurally” during this period—“the system is still a late nineteenth-century system, put into place for late nineteenth-century reasons.” For Menand, the roots of the inertia lie in “the way in which institutions of higher education sustain and reproduce themselves.” Menand writes “as a historian” of the university rather than to prescribe a cure, but he says he is “in favor of reform when it shakes the system and not when it breaks the system.” That the university is a “marketplace” dependent on economic forces motivates both reform and resistance to reform. “When the financial universe was expanding, universities could often add on new things without taking away from old ones, but the universe, as higher education (and everyone else) learned in 2008, can also shrink.”

Menand pursues these themes in chapters that address the following questions: “Why is it so hard to institute a general education curriculum? Why did the humanities disciplines undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ become a magic word? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?” Although the relationship between these topics is not always clear—probably because much of the book grows out of separately published articles—they come together more or less in the argument that the system of academic production is closed, self-replicating, and resistant to external criticism, especially in the humanities disciplines, which are Menand’s primary focus.

• • • • •

What Menand means by “the system” is suggested in the following passage:

It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. The discipline relies on the principle of disinterestedness, according to which the production of new knowledge is regulated by measuring it against existing scholarship through the process of peer review rather than by the extent to which it meets the needs of interests external to the field. The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor.

Menand concludes that “since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is reproduction of the system.” Thus although much in higher education has changed, what has not is “professional reproduction,” which “remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago,” particularly in the production of PhDs:

Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught . . . to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

In short, humanists are trained and credentialed to produce specialized research while the society that subsidizes them expects them to teach undergraduates and perpetuate society’s values. In order to reform itself, according to Menand, the humanities need to confront the gap between their closed system of professional production and the demands of a society that may no longer see the point of subsidizing them. They need “to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy,” though without sacrificing the critical perspective that society needs.

My summary fails to do justice to the brilliance of Menand’s local insights from page to page of this book, but there is something facile about his larger argument regarding the “closed” nature of academic culture and its independence from nonacademic audiences. It’s true, as Menand says, that history departments don’t ask the mayor, the alumni, or the physics department to judge the merits of faculty work, but it’s also true that today’s historians gain status in their discipline when their work is reviewed and reported on in the popular press—in contrast to the days when having a wide readership was the kiss of death for an academic career. Menand himself is an example of the kind of new academic whose career is advanced by publishing intellectual journalism—and producing scholarship that has the virtues of good journalism—whereas such popular accessibility would once have gotten him professionally ostracized or marginalized. Not every professor becomes a media star, but those who do no longer suffer in professional prestige.

Menand’s mistake here is to accept the half-truth that the humanities require “a high degree of specialization.” It’s true that opaque theoretical jargon seems a symptom of hyperspecialization, but once you look past such jargon to the subjects being addressed and the claims being made, you find that the concerns of humanists are not narrowly specialized at all, but big, global, and general. That is, although current academic humanists employ a “specialized” language that is often incomprehensible to nonacademics, this kind of specialization is very different from the kind that scholars practiced when their standard topic was something such as “The Syntax of At and Ana in Old Icelandic.”

It’s noteworthy that the jacket blurbs on Menand’s book praise it not for being a carefully specialized work but for being a “compelling” and wide-ranging “manifesto.” There is considerable overlap between the concerns of academic queer studies, say, and journalistic debates about gay marriage, or between poststructuralist analyses of the ways power shapes representation and discussions of “spin control” in the popular media. Indeed, it’s difficult to get a job, a promotion, or a grant unless you can plausibly describe your work as broad gauged and paradigm challenging. And the same critics who excoriate humanists for being overspecialized pedants often excoriate them in the next breath for pronouncing on large socioeconomic topics that are beyond their areas of expertise.

• • • • •

Menand’s misleading description of academic work as highly “specialized” leads him to underestimate the degree to which academic ways of thinking have permeated the wider culture since the 1960s, when the line started to blur between scholarship and intellectual journalism. It’s true that the culture wars have often pitted academics against journalists, but this very antagonism is now a sign of the closeness of these groups, who compete to explain the contemporary world to itself. This new closeness was noted by the academic journalist Ellen Willis, who observed that many of the same theories, terms, and debates now circulate between the university and the media, and back:

Ideas that matter, for better or worse, have a way of spreading as they get picked up, translated, recycled for different audiences up and down the media food chain.

Cultural criticism written by academics influences writers for journals of opinion, who in turn feed the heads of New York Times writers and commentators for PBS; eventually every aspect of the culture war finds its way into USA Today, Roseanne, ER, and the Movie of the Week.

Again, however, the circulation of “ideas that matter” has its limits, as the university's increased pursuit of big-picture ideas has not been matched by efforts to clarify those ideas to more than a minority of high-achieving students.

Had Menand asked how academic intellectual culture registers—or fails to register—on students, he would have found support for his argument that the more things have changed the more they have stayed the same. But students represent a curious absence in Menand’s discussion, as do the recent concerns about what they are getting out of college that animate demands for accountability and assessment. You would think that a book about “reform” in higher education, whose author wants humanists “to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy,” would at least mention these calls for accountability, which are pushing colleges to go beyond merely putting an attractive smorgasbord of courses before students and to measure “learning outcomes.” What are the students actually taking away from the experience?

Elite universities such as Harvard, where Menand teaches, have the luxury of ignoring these demands for accountability, but state universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges have been obliged to institute serious assessment procedures. How intelligent and productive these assessments will be remains to be seen (resistant faculty fear a collegiate version of the testing imposed on the schools by the No Child Left Behind Act), but the pressures for accountability have resulted in an openness to self-scrutiny at the lower-status levels of higher education—and a willingness to take responsibility for whether students succeed—that contrasts with the complacency of the high-prestige campuses.

In the past, higher education has changed only when Harvard and other elites have led the way, but change in the future may come from the bottom up. •

Stoic Self-Help

Reviewed by James Fulcher

 

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, by William B. Irvine

Oxford University Press, 336 pages, $19.95

 

William B. Irvine’s book differs from those by other twentieth-century Stoics, notably Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946) and Jim Stockdale (Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, 1995). Those authors apply Stoic ideas to unusual adversities: Frankl’s book grew out of his experience in a German concentration camp, and Stockdale reflects on being a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Their books also reinforce the conventional view of Stoicism: in Irvine’s words, “passive individuals . . . grimly resigned to being on the receiving end of the world’s abuse and injustice.”

Instead, Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy situates Stoic philosophy for those of us living in less extreme circumstances. Irvine’s book speaks to more mundane experience. He grapples with the losses suffered due to aging, the possibility of going blind after eye surgery, the moment when he finds himself visiting his mother in a nursing home, giving her ice cubes following her stroke. Irvine also offers an argument for the unconventional view that the ancient Stoics did not intend to eliminate emotions and were “fully engaged in life.”

Thus Irvine’s brand of Stoicism carries a high level of zest. He learns how to play the banjo and how to row a racing shell competitively. He considers his responses to his mother in her nursing home environment as part of the challenge of becoming a “practicing Stoic.” He describes practicing the finger positions on the banjo neck that offer an opportunity for developing new body-mind-brain coordination but that also inflict pain in his fingertips, which must be endured for the higher pleasures received. As his practice slowly improves his performance, he sometimes feels delight. Besides, participating in a banjo recital helps him overcome his butterflies and his fear of public humiliation. Another instance is that by learning to row in rain, sunshine, or snow and by rowing out in the lake in an unstable shell, he learns to cope with discomfort and overcome fear. He also learns that instead of desiring to win, which may be beyond his control because of his opponents’ (or teammates’) superior skill, it is better to aim at working hard and doing his best, which are within his control.

• • • • •

After her stroke, Irvine’s mother was forced to move from her home into institutional care. She could not move the left side of her body, and her swallowing was compromised. During his visits, Irvine often echoed Stoic ideas in his words of encouragment. When she talked about being able to walk again, he suggested that she should try to do her best in the physical therapy room. When she lamented about not being able to move her left arm, he reminded her that when she first started the nursing home therapy, she could not feed herself, move her right arm, or speak clearly. He told her that he hoped she was as thankful as he was that she progressed with her right arm and her speech. She was at least temporarily less distressed, and so was he.

His intentions are clearly stated. Near the beginning he mentions that he wants to address important topics of ancient individual Stoic philosophers, including Epictetus, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius, especially as they pertain to topics and circumstances in our time. Irvine briefly introduces his argument that the ancient Stoics intended to reduce negative emotions rather than to eliminate all emotions and that they even prized feelings of delight, gratitude, and joy in hard times and rough country. He mentions that he is reporting his own experiment while searching for clues in ancient Stoic texts. Later he elaborates that his experiment as a “practicing Stoic” is based on clues and principles “derived from the ancient Stoics” without being identical to “any particular Stoic.” He adds, “The Stoics regarded the principles of Stoicism not as being chiseled into stone but as being molded into clay that could, within limits, be remolded into a form of Stoicism that people would find useful.”

In part 1, Irvine clearly locates the primary purpose of Stoicism as a struggle to achieve and maintain tranquility associated with peace of mind or serenity. “Who among us, after all,” Irvine asks, “would not like to reduce the number of negative emotions experienced in daily living?” While constructing a Stoic answer, he concisely introduces ancient Stoic thinkers and texts. He argues that the ancient Stoics valued positive emotions and they firmly believed that people, in most circumstances, could manage their emotions on their own and for themselves—a controversial topic he revisits later when he critiques psychological therapists. Moreover, he notes that none of the ancient Stoics actually composed a handbook for how to become a Stoic, because such a book was unnecessary at the time. If one wanted particular guidance in the actual stages of becoming a Stoic, one attended one of the Stoic schools. Thus, he suggests his book is necessary in our times because Stoic schools do not presently exist.

Addressing anyone who wants to know or is curious about how to become a “practicing Stoic” in our contemporary circumstances, Irvine, in part 2, identifies several practical activities one can adopt in daily life. His explanations of everyday activities or techniques include imagining a worst-case scenario; distinguishing among things within our control, things within our influence but not our control, and things beyond our control; focusing on the present without dwelling on the past; and meditating or reviewing one’s uses of these Stoic activities daily.

In addition to explaining these particular activities, Irvine offers specific elaborations of how to not only begin but also continue to apply and evaluate one’s use of these Stoic activities in everyday experiences. He believes that Stoic meditation, unlike Zen meditation, takes the form of reviewing how well one’s practice of an activity or technique worked on any given day. In such daily meditating or reviewing, practicing Stoics may discover moments of progress toward a goal of “spending less time than we used to wishing things could be different and more time enjoying things as they are.”

• • • • •

Thus how do we, in everyday life, overcome those perennial matters that can disturb personal tranquility? How do we cope with other people, insults and criticisms, grief and anger, exile and old age? In part 3, Irvine suggests that if and when “we imagine never having had something that we have lost,” perhaps then “we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.” This advice applies both to grieving about a dead friend and mourning the loss of one’s own skills.

Such advice seems both useful and elegant. But if that is so, one wonders how to account for the decline of Stoicism in the modern world. In Part Four, Irvine provides an explanation as well as an attempt to reanimate practicing Stoicism. He argues that Stoicism’s decline prior to the twentieth century had much to do with Christianity, especially the latter’s promise of an afterlife. As for the continued decline of Stoicism today, he names several culprits. He suggests that psychological therapists work from the implicit claim that individuals cannot manage emotions for themselves; political reformers toil to help the public become happy by improving external circumstances; and academic philosophers, who should know better, claim philosophy has little to do with questions of how to live and too much to do with language puzzles and esoteric theories of gender, class, and ideology.

• • • • •

Although Irvine has given us a welcome and perhaps necessary tool for anyone wanting to practice Stoicism or for anyone trying to understand Stoicism as a comprehensive and coherent philosophy of life, the book is perhaps too Stoic. Consider, for instance, the relations of Stoicism to pragmatism, an opposing but also comprehensive and coherent way of life. Irvine mentions but neglects to discuss some pragmatist aspects in Stoicism, such as Epictetus’s emphasis on the importance of habits in family relationships, Seneca’s emphasis on the significance of breaking some old habits and of building some new ones in pursuit of either personal transformation or social reform, and Marcus Aurelius’s emphasis that his questioning of his own practices, and his questioning of the irrational habits of both populace and rulers, are vital components of a full life. Still, Irvine’s book excels as a guide for practicing Stoics or for individuals seeking to improve that practice. It is self-help of a high order for all of us, whether facing the challenges of parenting, the wounds of war, or the diminishments of dementia. •