by John B. Cobb, Jr.
It might be better if, instead of writing about the American university, I specified “the research university” as my topic. I could state my objection to allowing the model of the research university to dominate all higher education. There has been criticism of this tendency all along, but it has had little effect in deflecting the movement in this direction, so far as I know.
However, I know so little about the situation in other countries that I will consider only how this has happened in this country. I recognize and celebrate the fact that there are universities in the United States that differ from what I describe, but I believe that what I call “the American university” is very widespread in this country. So I choose the title “The Anti-Intellectualism of the American University.
To those who consider all rational thinking, scholarly research, and diligent study “intellectual,” my title is, of course, ridiculous. There is lots of careful thought, refined scholarship, and hard work going on in American universities, and an enormous amount of information is produced every year. But according to my understanding, scholarly research is not, as such, an intellectual activity.
Before proceeding, let me acknowledge that there is little that is really new in my critique. The American research university is the epitome of the modern, and long ago, in Science and the Modern World, Whitehead identified modernity as an “historical revolt,” and wrote: “It is a great mistake to conceive this historical revolt as an appeal to reason. On the contrary, it was through and through an anti-intellectualist movement.” (p. 8) The modern research university is a collection of academic disciplines, what the Germans called “Wissenschaften.” Heidegger wrote an essay whose title asserts that these do not think. I want to try my hand at spelling out this anti-intellectual character of the research universities in this country.
I
Colleges and universities are very conservative institutions. Long after the beginnings of modernity, universities continued their medieval traditions and remained centers of intellectual activity. As recently as a hundred years ago, the general image of post high school education in the United States was the liberal arts college. Speaking very generally, these aimed at the cultural development of students with the expectation that this would enable them to be better leaders in society. Although these colleges were not primarily oriented to the intellectual life, they did not discourage it. They were not anti-intellectual.
In addition to liberal arts colleges there were by then a good many universities. Most of these were liberal arts colleges with associated professional schools and some graduate programs. These graduate programs could not compete in quality of research with those in Europe. Americans looked especially to German research universities to lead in the advance of scholarship. Ambitious Americans went to Germany for graduate work. A few American institutions were modeling themselves on European ones. However, post high school education was assumed to be in what could properly be called a liberal arts college. Research was not their primary goal.
The American universities did not have an articulated alternative to the German research universities for their PhD programs. Hence they modeled themselves on systems that were successful in producing researchers. After one was educated in a liberal arts program, one could choose a specialty, structured as an academic discipline, and get a PhD. This supposedly qualified one to become a professor in a liberal arts college.
There is a rather obvious misfit here. The professor in a liberal arts college had qualified to teach, not by becoming excellent in the liberal arts, but by developing skills in research in an academic discipline. The task of teaching liberal arts was quite different from research in an academic discipline. Many made the adjustment well, being themselves graduates of liberal arts colleges. But teaching liberal arts was not conducive to advancing research in the disciplines in which they had specialized.
Measured in terms of research, American scholars lagged behind their German colleagues for two other reasons. First, Germans completed their gymnasium and started their training for specialized research two years earlier than Americans completed liberal arts colleges. Second, there was an added step in Germany for the really serious researchers. They continued their studies and wrote a second dissertation in close association with an established scholar. They were then habilitated, qualified not only to teach in gymnasia but also in universities. American universities produced by chance a few scholars who could be considered in this elite category, but overall, even during the Nazi era in Germany, Americans looked to Germany for leadership in most academic disciplines.
Meanwhile, in the United States, academics increasingly prized research, and the prestige of academic disciplines as the loci of research grew. People forgot that the purpose of organizing around such disciplines was quite different from that of liberal arts colleges. Indeed, there was little reflection about liberal arts and almost no effort in graduate schools to prepare students to teach them. The closest the universities could come to liberal arts was in interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary courses.
As a result, college teachers more and more taught introductions to their disciplines rather than liberal arts. Those who majored in a discipline were well prepared by the time of their college graduation to pursue a PhD. At the cost of abandoning liberal arts education, Americans caught up with Germans in research.
Today the research university makes no pretense of helping students to mature, developing cultural understanding, or preparing students for leadership in their communities. It prepares students to become skilled specialists in some branch of research. In terms of its self definition as a research university, its organization in terms of academic disciplines instead of liberal arts has been a great success. Just why this has ever been regarded as the normative form of higher education is not so clear.
Of course, training for research is not all that goes on in universities. They also prepare people for jobs. They teach the specialized knowledge needed in different forms of employment. In part this is a matter of particular academic disciplines, but in part it is skills of various sorts. The older idea of professional schools has faded as the distinction between professionals and employees has largely disappeared.
II
Organizing a university as a collection of departments each committed to promoting an academic discipline worked well in promoting research. I have stated that scholarly research as such is not an intellectual activity. Before proceeding to describe the anti-intellectual character of the American university, I want to make clear my own judgment that research can be done in an intellectual context.
I am quite sure of this because I had the good fortune to study in an intellectual university. Perhaps the best way for me to clarify what I miss in the American university today is to describe my own educational experience. I attended the University of Chicago at the peak of the influence of Robert Maynard Hutchins. He was struggling against the reduction of academia to preparation for research in segregated disciplines. At the time I did not realize how unusual my experience of higher education was. It seemed to be what education should be.
I went to Chicago with my childhood faith largely intact. There had been nothing intellectual about my studies in junior college in Georgia, but in the Army I had Jewish and Catholic friends from New York, who introduced me to the life of the mind. I became aware that the progressive culture of the time considered the culture in which I had been raised naïve and backward. This did not shake my desire to serve professionally in the church, but it did make me eager to test my faith by full exposure to the contemporary world of thought.
I enrolled in the Humanities Division and chose a non-departmental program on “The Analysis of Ideas and the Study of Method.” To work in that program one was required to state one’s topic of special interest. I chose the reasons that modern culture had rejected belief in God.
I did not complete that program. Within a year I had learned what I needed to know. The problem with belief in God was not that arguments against belief had proved stronger than arguments for it. Rather, modern thought was largely founded on the assumption that everything about nature and history could be explained in terms of nature and history. No one supposed that this project was complete. But science and history were both pursued in the faith that this was the right project. Failure to accept this project was to exclude oneself from participation in modern culture and, of course, in the university. Can you imagine hiring someone to teach in a history department who declare her project to be to identify the acts of God in history?
Since modernity excluded God from acting in nature or history, the only act that could be attributed to God was as originator of the whole. This fell outside the bounds of any academic study. When evolution brought the creation of the world we know into the bounds of the nature we study, the role of initiation lost interest. There was no longer any reason to posit a beginning. God disappeared from the realm of efficient causes. Meanwhile modernity as a whole grew up out of the rejection of final causes, and formal causes were purely abstract. This left only material causes, and belief in God continued here and there as the ultimate in the line of material causes. That, is everything is ultimately an instantiation of Being Itself. This could be said without threatening the modern faith, but the connection of Being Itself with the God portrayed in the Bible is obscure.
This means that there is a deep conflict between biblical faith and modern faith. For modern faith, the sphere of finite entities is self-contained and self-explained. For biblical faith it is not. But this sort of formulation of the issue is not part of the modern discussion.
Although this formulation of my conclusions expresses my current thinking rather than the way I would have formulated things then, I do not think it distorts my thinking of that time. I ceased to be interested in arguments for or against God. My interest shifted to basic worldviews. During the year in the Humanities Division, I became aware that there were criticisms of the modern worldview and that other worldviews were proposed. My limited contacts with Divinity School faculty made me aware that they were concerned with worldviews. I transferred to the Divinity School.
I hope you will understand my use of the term “intellectual” with respect to the year I have described. I was asking an intellectual question and found an intellectual answer. But my point here is not that my personal quest was intellectual. It is that the university supported me in this quest. It invited me into a program that I could shape to enable me to pursue my quest. It created a climate among students that encouraged interchange of ideas of this sort.
What I have said about the support of intellectual activity in the university as a whole was true in spades of the Divinity School under the deanship of Bernard Loomer. For him faculty and students were engaged in a joint quest for truth about reality and meaning. We were required to pass exams in various fields, but these were subsidiary to coming to our own convictions about matters of ultimate orientation.
The climate of discussion emphasized the need to think facts and values together, although anyone who was convinced that they should be kept separate would receive an open hearing. In this respect it was postmodern, even though the term was not used. The faculty was keenly interested in scientific developments that showed the limitations of the mechanistic worldview that excluded value from the world studied by science. The climate of the school urged faithfulness to experience. In this sense it emphasized empiricism, but the empiricism it favored was “radical” over against the exclusive emphasis on sense data. This meant that aesthetic, moral, and religious experience should be taken seriously. The boundaries of modernity were being stretched. Indeed, I think the new naturalism, which many of my professors affirmed, broke with modernity.
Some of them, however, retained the notion of the world of finite things being self-contained. They thought that, by vastly enriching the world of nature, its self-contained character became plausible. One did not have to deny the existence of purpose, for example, in order to explain everything mechanically, because one no longer needed to limit explanations to efficient causes. Henry Nelson Wieman showed both the possibility and the limits of thinking in richly naturalistic terms when one broke with the rigidities of modern thought.
Others believed that systematization of the new naturalism, grounded in new developments in science and in the methods of radical empiricism, required re-introducing God into the explanations of what is and what happens. Charles Hartshorne, in the Philosophy Department, belonged to this group. He had been an assistant to Whitehead at Harvard. My empirically-minded professors in the Divinity School also talked much of Whitehead. He was the thinker who pursued the discussion furthest and most rigorously.
I hope you will also understand why I say that the Divinity School was an “intellectual hothouse.” Issues of fundamental importance were discussed in a context in which all opinions were heard and criticized. Nothing was more strongly supported than students coming to their own convictions, as long as they were prepared to defend them in open discussion. Since this is just what I needed and wanted, I flourished there.
The Chicago of Robert Maynard Hutchins and the Divinity School of Bernard Loomer ended. In this sense the experiment with the focus on intellectual freedom and activity failed. Soon after I left, the trustees fired Hutchins and within the next few years the Divinity School faculty under which I studied scattered. The replacements changed the nature of the school.
III
Because of my personal experience I know that a university can be supportive of intellectual reflection and that scholarly research can be guided by intellectual concerns. I think I have been able to support such reflection in my own teaching, and I am sure that this is true of many others. Intellectual reflection goes on to some extent in many universities without reduced interest in scholarly research. When I describe universities as anti-intellectual I do not want to belittle this.
Nevertheless, I hold to the thesis that American universities are organized in a way that discourages intellectual activity. As a result of this discouragement the amount of intellectual activity there has declined. I will illustrate first by changes in philosophy departments.
At Chicago when I was there we took for granted that those who taught us philosophy were persons who had worked out their own philosophical ideas. We expected these to provide answers to existential questions and to cosmological ones as well or to explain why they did not do so. Even when I was in the Divinity School I took half my courses with philosophers.
Even then, there were those who taught the history of philosophy without betraying their own judgments. Their gift was to help us confront the thinking of persons other than our own teachers. Expanding the range of those we encountered was thought to contribute to our coming to our own convictions. Although I think Chicago was particularly strong in thinking of philosophy in this way, on many campuses it was the major locus of intellectual activity.
However, philosophy departments today are much more like other departments in the university. They understand that philosophy should be one academic discipline alongside others. For this, it requires a subject matter that can be distinguished from others and a suitable methodology for dealing with it. What I described as intellectual activity is seen as speculation, and this is discouraged. The goal in any academic discipline is the increase of knowledge, and this can be attained only by limiting ourselves to rigorous methods of analysis and testing.
Professors are selected for their expertise in these specialized activities. Since philosophy as a discipline wants to claim its heritage from earlier forms there is also historical teaching about the past. The current focus, of course, influences the approach, but history provides its own norms of objectivity. It, too, tends to focus on more technical issues in past philosophies rather than their comprehensive worldview or responses to existential questions. My generalization is that a student with an interest in broad or deep issues would find little help today in most university philosophy departments.
Two other departments in many universities continued to seek holistic answers to broad questions. Geography expanded from simply learning about the landscape and the location of human habitat to a deeper reflection on how human beings related to their natural contexts and how this affected these contexts. Anthropology sought to understand the world inclusively from the perspective of the people it studied. These approaches cut against the general trends of university culture and departments of geography and anthropology began to disappear.
In the sixties there were protests by students that important topics were ignored by universities. As a result many universities introduced new “programs” such as Black studies, women’s studies, peace studies, ecological studies. These often encouraged intellectual reflection. However, they were considered temporary concessions rather than models of how universities should reorganize. Professors in these programs were encouraged to engage in the sort of teaching and scholarship that is done in academic disciplines. Mary Daly described what happened in women’s studies programs as “methodicide.” Universities worked toward absorbing these programs into established disciplines or developing new disciplines out of them.
I will approach this description of directions taken in universities in one other way. There has been a considerable literature about economic issues recently that is of great interest to the general public, but very little of this comes from academic departments of economics. Some of it is dealing with what is happening in the real world, and no department of the university deals much with current events.
Nevertheless, we might expect a department whose teaching has so much influence among decision-makers to be somewhat interested in what happens, at least in a general way. In the past fifty years financial institutions have become far more important than industrial ones. But the books describing this shift are rarely written by academicians in departments of economics, and the change in the nature of the economy has had very little influence on what is taught.
One glaring example is with respect to money. One might expect this to be a major topic among economists. It is not. As banks and their creation of money have become more formative of the whole of society, the literature on this topic has grown. But most of this has come from outside of academia.
Economic theory deals chiefly with how to increase market activity. Occasionally, an economist raises the question as to whether such increase is always desirable. This question arises from intellectual interests. If colleagues in the department had intellectual interests, they would engage such questioners. Such discussions might lead to reaffirmation of the central importance of increasing market activity. But they might not. They could lead to significant changes. However, because there is such a lack of intellectual interest, the response is simply to view such questioners as nuisances and to silence them.
It is my judgment that intellectuals teaching in departments of economics would be interested in actual economies and attempt to throw light upon them. That there is so little of this interest points to the discouragement of intellectual activity in these departments. Scholars can do their work without attending to such things.
IV
One cause of the anti-intellectual character of universities is their self-designation as “value free.” They boast of this. Scholarship, they think, can be trusted only if it is pursued for its own sake rather than in an effort to support an established belief or commitment or preference. There is, of course, a significant point being made here. Scholars should freely examine the data and do so as objectively as possible.
One place where values might intrude is in the selection of research topics. One might make a selection based on the judgment that certain information is important in order to pursue some reform. But this would imply that the researcher was committed to that reform, and this is not acceptable. Or it would lead to discussion of whether that reform was desirable. The academic disciplines of the university aim not to be drawn into such intellectual discussions.
The only importance recognized by the discipline is importance for the discipline. If past research has led in a certain direction but is being impeded by ignorance of some matter, then it is important to gain additional information. Research is properly guided by such considerations. The narrowness of the parameters for decision prevents such discussions from engaging the sort of issues that involve one in intellectual discussion.
That the university and its disciplines seek to advance knowledge disinterestedly is an ideal of some merit. However, universities actually compromise the ideal on a large scale. Research takes time. Sometimes it takes expensive equipment. Often one must pay people for their contributions. All this is expensive. Universities have limited budgets. Accordingly, in practice, the greater part of research is done at the behest of funders, or is, at least, dependent on finding funders. Indeed, the budgets of universities often depend on a portion of the research grants that meet the concerns of outsiders. These outsiders are certainly not free of values. Money is available for medical research, and the value of healing diseases and extending life lies behind these grants, as well as profits of particular businesses. But the values of most of the corporations served by universities are more problematic. And much research is paid for by the Department of Defense. Just because universities are value free they serve various interests uncritically. A value-free university sells its services to the highest bidder.
One value prized by the value-free university is accuracy and honesty in scholarly work. Hence the university intends that its scholars provide those who pay them for research with accurate and honest conclusions. Sadly the lack of emphasis on moral norms weakens this implicit value. This weakening is advanced by the decline of the view of truth as correspondence. Although the defenders of other views of truth do not intend this result, a de-emphasis on the need for results to correspond with the way the world is opens the door to adjusting results to the needs of the situation – generally defined by what the one who pays for the results wants to hear.
Much the same can be said of the job-training dimensions of the university. Since the institution is value free, it does not ask about the value of the jobs for which it prepares people. It certainly does not ask about the health of a society that employs people for some lines of work and not for others. To be value free is to be free from critical thought.
Many individual professors have strong values and commitments. These tend to influence their teaching. They want students to share their concerns. As the prospects for the human future become more dire, more professors feel the need to influence students to attend to the questions this danger raises. They want to make a positive difference. Recognizing this tendency, a leading educator, Stanley Fish, wrote a book, addressed to professors. One might have hoped that he would agree that as the global situation becomes more critical universities should think about how their work could become relevant to the world’s needs. But this is not his message. His title says it all: Save the World on Your Own Time.
The university hires people to advance their disciplines by research and by preparing students to take up this task. Saving the world is not its job. If professors want to use their free time in that way, OK, that is none of the university’s business. But don’t mix that into one’s life as a teacher.
V
Another dimension of the university’s anti-intellectual character is its lack of interest in assumptions. Academic disciplines do not encourage efforts to articulate their assumptions. They socialize students into the existing pattern of assumptions and procedures. They rarely state their assumptions, presumably assuming that they are not problematic. In some cases there is study of the history of the discipline. In such a history, it may become clear that assumptions do change over time. Even if this is presented simply as progress so that adopting the current assumptions is encouraged, this does raise the possibility of critical discussion –an intellectual activity. However, this is rarely encouraged.
If we move from the individual disciplines to the university as a whole, the situation is similar. Courses in the history of higher education are rare. Still rarer is any attempt to use historical knowledge to raise questions about the value of the modern value-free university. Almost any self-study in a university is limited to questions of efficiency of the use of resources within the existing context of assumptions.
In my view, the modern research university is deeply Cartesian. I may, or may not be right about this. In either case, in an institution with intellectual interests, such a thesis would be considered worthy of discussion. But the university provides no locus for it. Obviously individuals can raise all sorts of questions, but these have no foothold in the disciplines and are not the sort of thing that could be brought up at a meeting of faculty, administrators, or trustees.
A particular problem in the university is that the assumptions underlying research in various fields are not coherent with one another. A particularly glaring example is that the assumptions of contemporary relativity theory cannot be reconciled with the assumptions of contemporary quantum theory. For anyone with intellectual interests this raises challenging questions. But the organization of the university discourages such questions. It is bad manners for practitioners of one discipline to criticize what takes place in another. As long as a discipline advances in its own research, matters of this sort are ignored.
VI
Actually, the situation is worse than I have described thus far. The lack of attention to assumptions has left unexamined some metaphysical assumptions that force scholars to neglect evidence and to defend positions that are obviously false. This is the real situation, while the university continues to present itself to the world as the source of unbiased knowledge. It places its prestige in support of a particular worldview, one that is demonstrably false. It socializes the elite to accept this unhealthy mental climate.
How this came about can be explained quite briefly. Thoughtful persons concerned to advance knowledge of the physical world called for a break with the dominant, Aristotelian, science of the Middle Ages. That science had allowed investigators to rest too easily with explanations in terms of final causes. One “understood” an organ in the human body when one identified its function. Satisfaction with this understanding blocked investigation of just how it actually worked. The thinkers who noted this problem called for a focus on efficient causes. They thought that these could be observed, and that science could best advance by seeking observable causal relations in the natural world. They bracketed questions of what things were in themselves or for themselves. The world of the objectively given, or the world of objects, was taken to be the nature that was investigated and it was to be explained without reference to anything external to it.
This move toward objectivity served the natural sciences very well for a long time. The wonderful achievements of this science supported treating its view of nature as ultimate truth. A nature that functions entirely by efficient causes and exists only objectively is, of course, totally determined and explicable in reductionist ways.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century human beings were understood as fundamentally different from this mechanistic nature. However, the study of organisms led inexorably to the understanding of evolution and the relocation of human beings within nature. This was, from my perspective, a great gain and a great opportunity for new thinking. If human beings were part of nature, then nature was much richer than had previously been recognized. Nature included subjective experience, and the final causes that had been banished must be allowed a place. There was a burst of intellectual activity along these lines.
Sadly, the university chose a different path. The inclusion of human beings within nature meant that human beings also were to be understood ultimately reductionistically as matter in motion. Scholars is some academic disciplines were allowed to continue talking about reasons for historical events that included human purposes, but this was within a context that assumed that at a deeper level purposes were to be explained in terms of efficient causality.
This choice was partly a matter of inertia. The physical scientists were certainly not interested in rethinking their whole approach. It was also partly the victory of the greatest thinker of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant. He overcame the extremely problematic metaphysical dualism of nature and humanity by shifting to a duality of theoretical and practical reason. Theoretical reason he identified with the study of efficient causation and the Cartesian view of nature. However, he assumed that for practical purposes it was necessary for human beings to think in a quite different way. This was simplified by later Kantians into the distinction of fact and value. From this perspective evolution just showed that from the perspective of fact, the mechanistic understanding applies to everything.
The Kantians who resolved the crisis in this way had no intention to belittle value. But this result is inevitable. If values have no basis in reality, they lose status for thought as well. Universities declared themselves value free.
At one level this may seem to be wonderfully consistent. However, consistency of this kind is not possible. The person who proclaims that he or she is a machine does not really understand saying this as expressing simply the way the machine happens to be programmed. If those who hear it understood it in this way there would be no reason to consider the idea, much less to organize a university on this assumption. Anyone who really understood herself or himself as a machine would have to be institutionalized.
Nevertheless, the commitment to the metaphysics is so strong that the evidence against it must be denied, ignored, or at least bracketed. The most dramatic evidence against it is found in parapsychology. This evidence is not only anecdotal. It is based on thousands of carefully controlled experiments. Efforts to undermine this evidence have been unsuccessful. But universities have not responded by adjusting their assumptions. On the contrary, they have ended this research and created a climate in which anyone who takes it seriously loses status. They do this while continuing to ridicule the Aristotelian scientists of the papal court for refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope.
The evidence for the causal role of subjects shows up in many places. Often it is acknowledged and then ignored. There is plenty of evidence from neuroscience that brain and mind interact. The most difficult evidence for the university to deal with is the growing body of physics, especially at the quantum level, that does not fit the metaphysics into which physicists have been socialized. This gives some hope for change. But thus far, these “anomalous” facts have simply been bracketed.
VII
I’m sure that many of you will feel that my criticisms are exaggerated. If I were describing the personal beliefs and attitudes of the people who make up the university community, what I have said would be highly misleading. I have tried to make it clear that this is not my topic. I am speaking of the value-free research institution and the academic disciplines that carry out the research. The people who are hired to do anti-intellectual work are much more than simply employees. As individual human beings they are concerned with values and ideas. Nevertheless, I will conclude with a negative statement. The structure and assumptions of the university has a great effect on those who study and work there. The university understands Itself to be entrusted with the task of producing experts, and the experts it produces generally see the world in the way the university has socialized them to see it. Overall they contribute more to leading the world into catastrophes than to steering us away.
