The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University

I suspect that Louis Menand's reading audience for The Marketplace of Ideas will be narrower than that for The Metaphysical Club (2001), his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of American pragmatism conveyed via mini-biographies. The current volume deals strictly with higher education, and thus its chief appeal may be mostly to academics directly engaged in the subject. The four principal chapters address differing conceptions of "general education," transformations in the humanities, interdisciplinary initiatives, and faculty political inclinations. Menand's focus is primarily elite institutions, four-year liberal arts colleges and the top universities that stress liberal arts and sciences for their undergraduates. He provides an instructive history of selected innovations at these schools, stretching back to the late nineteenth century. He does a good job, too, of bringing to the surface certain fundamental tensions inherent in the motivating ideas. Menand has a broad vision for how higher education could do better, although in this volume he does not offer any programmatic detail. The strongest chapter, in my opinion, is the first. Menand points out how on the one hand liberal education has been promoted as "preparation for life," but on the other as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, unencumbered by worldly objectives. Liberal education is sometimes thought of as a body of knowledge that all educated persons should know, but also as a way of thinking, applicable to all specialized areas of inquiry. As Menand observes, these various notions of what liberal education is and what it is supposed to achieve are often incompatible with one another. Menand himself subscribes to the views that a general undergraduate education should transmit a way of thinking, a kind of "intellectual DNA," and that the curriculum should be relevant to real-world goals. "[T]hat the practical is the enemy of the true" is a "superstition," he asserts. He is particularly harsh on graduate education, especially in the humanities where the median time to complete a doctorate is nine years. "There is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get," he says. He claims that that the system seems designed chiefly to keep grad students around long enough for them to be useful as instructors to carry a substantial part of the undergraduate teaching load. Menand also looks at the recent evidence regarding the political views of faculty. A large plurality are center left (not extreme). He reviews several possible explanations for the distribution, independent of any possible hiring or promotion biases. He proposes that the greater concern is not that the faculty is to the left, but that the population of professors is relatively homogenous politically. The Marketplace of Ideas leaves the overall impression that there h

Useful in understanding how we got to where we are now. If you are involved in curriculum debates on your campus, you will find this helpful and interesting.

In 1903, the philosopher William James wrote an essay, "The PhD Octopus", available in the linked Library of America volume, William James : Writings 1902-1910 : The Varieties of Religious Experience / Pragmatism / A Pluralistic Universe / The Meaning of Truth / Some Problems of Philosophy / Essays (Library of America) in which he expressed concern about over-specialization in the academic world and about the increased and not entirely beneficial effect on students and teachers alike resulting from efforts to pursue the PhD. Lois Menand wrote about James and his pragmatist colleagues in his Pulitzer-prize winning study "The Metaphysical Club" which broadly examines changes in American intellectual life during the period of roughly 1870- -- 1920. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America Menand's most recent book, "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University" (2010) makes no mention of James or his essay. But Menand uses the history of the reform of the American university system during the late 1800s to suggest how and why the structure of American higher education established over 100 years ago may not be entirely conducive to the educational role of the university in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. The book is succinctly and engagingly written but also difficult and challenging. Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. Menand addresses four questions about contemporary higher education in the United States: "Why is is so hard to institute a general education cirriculum? Why did the humanities disciplines undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has 'interdisciplinary' become a magic work? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?" (p. 16) Each question is discussed in a detailed chapter drawing on both history and on contemporary studies of the state of the American university. As he did in "The Metaphysical Club" Menand pays much attention to the educational reforms in post-Civil War Harvard under its president, Charles Elliott. Elliott drew a sharp distinction between professional and liberal education. Under his administration, a baccalaureate degree became a prerequisite for education in law, medical and other professional schools. Undergraduate education was not intended to be career-oriented. Rather, during this phase of their lives, students were encouraged to pursue knowledge and learning for their own sakes. Liberal arts faculty, the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences to a degree, were not expected to be career oriented but to encourage the pursuit of disinterested knowledge. The partial exception to this would be in the training of other scholars in graduate PhD programs who would carry on the research and teaching of their disciplines. The lines of the various disciplines themeselves, such as English, philosophy, history, social sciences, were themselves established in the universities during the late 1900s.

For the reviewers who give bad reviews based on irrelevant factors like whether it's available on kindle: how about reading the book and leaving a comment based on the quality of the book itself. You're doing the author and potential readers a disservice.

Louis Menand makes a powerful argument in this book that the bright line separating the education and research within the academic disciplines from the world outside the ivory tower is very much blurrier than most academics believe. He offers a fascinating history of the modern university as a series of compromises and maneuvers that from their very start were negotiated across that line while trying to patrol and enforce its boundary. The four long chapters of this slim volume trace this topic and its implications through arguments over general education (ch. 1), the (r)evolution in the humanities (ch. 2), the fetishizing of interdisciplinarity (ch. 3), and the socialization of the professoriate (ch. 4). Some readers may recognize parts of ch. 2, which appeared in an earlier version in "The New York Review of Books." While Menand refrains from making many specific recommendations (his goal is to describe the paradoxes and anxieties of the liberal arts academy rather than to advocate for a particular response), one gets the strong sense that he thinks academics should make their peace with the university's inevitable role in the world and stop trying so hard to tilt against it. Such a conclusion is implicit in pithy statements like the following: "To the extent that this system [American higher education, with its roots in the 19th century] still determines the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge, trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter, or like riding a horse to the mall" (17). These are the words of a reformer; though exactly what reforms Menand wants remain unclear, it seems obvious that they will involve higher education embracing its role in the world more self-consciously and vigorously. In that sense, he forms a kind of mirror image to another prolific writer on the higher education scene, Stanley Fish, who also focuses on the fragility of the wall that divides the independent and disinterested quest for knowledge from the yearning many in the contemporary world feel to tear down that wall. Fish, though, is for shoring up the divide (hence, his book "Save the World on Your Own Time"), while Menand accepts that the wall must come down. Menand is a brisk and persuasive writer, and one wants to agree with him. He seems to be on the side of history (and though an English professor, he is also truly interdisciplinary in being a Pulitzer prize-winning historian too). One thing, ironically, that he leaves out of his argument for change, however, is the long historical view. Although the modern American university began in the 19th century, universities existed far earlier than that (going back to the 12th century), and their consituencies are not just present-day students, faculty, politicians, etc. They also serve to link the distant past with the unforeseen future. Universities are thus conservative in the root meaning of that word. Too much attention to the co