What Am I Arguing Again?

I am currently hashing out my own version of a history of American undergraduate education from, oh, the Colonial era to the 1960s.  It’s not a simple story to tell.  Beyond the years dominated by the classical course (and, really, even within them), there were multiple “reasons” behind the particular and increasingly diverse forms of undergraduate education proffered by various colleges.  Still, one can and must generalize – indeed, this is a painful and necessary task of historical writing, to find a broad enough explanation to account for multiple idiosyncratic particulars.  And, in this case, I have to make that broad explanation of continuity and change over time no more than a chapter in length.

Such broad explanations must be true, of course – no historian worthy of the name would champion an explanation that they don’t actually believe to rest upon a faithful and reliable and complete-as-can-be-managed accounting for the particulars.  Indeed, this is one of the reasons that we are incessantly beleaguered by so many truly bad and stupid “histories” of higher education (and much else besides):  a lot of the people who take it upon themselves to make claims about the past are manifestly not committed to the ethical norms of historical inquiry.

David Brooks and Max Boot, to take two reliably bad examples, do not seem to care whether or not their declension narratives about a sound general education or the cultural turn in history are true; what matters to them is simply that they are rhetorically useful in evoking a Golden Age when white men’s voices were always the most important voices in the room, and when white men’s experiences were always considered the most worthy subjects of inquiry.  (Relax, fellas. In many graduate seminars and undergraduate classrooms, that Golden Age is, like, the day before yesterday.)

But even for conscientious historians, we tell our stories the way we do because that way and not another helps us achieve our narrative aims.  Our broad explanations are always useful beyond simply providing a reliable general account of past particulars. This is especially the case for an introductory chapter offering a sweeping survey of undergraduate education.  My aim is to “set the stage” for a tighter focus on one particular conflict over the undergraduate curriculum at one particular university at one particular time in American history.  So the argument of this introductory chapter – “here is a true and useful way of thinking about the history of undergraduate education in America from the Colonial era to the late 1960s if we want to understand the Stanford debates” – is necessarily shaped by what will follow it:  my account of 1980s debates over Western Civ/Great Books courses.

That “account,” like any historical account, is of course a reckoning – not just a narrative, but an assignation of meaning and value.  And the meaning assigned to or drawn from any particular (selected) set of past circumstances depends very much on the larger story one is trying to tell (or finds oneself telling), as Kenneth Burke and Hayden White have aptly explained.  What’s up with Stanford in the 1970s-1990s, what can it help me say about American higher education more generally during that time period, and is this account shaping up as a comedy, a tragedy, a satire, a farce? Am I telling a declension narrative? If so, what is in decline?  Am I sure about that?

I thought I knew the answers to these questions.  As it turns out, I did not.  Or, rather, I knew answers that were adequate to the task I had set for myself:  to explain the connection between the Stanford Western Culture debates and the increasingly successful assault on American higher education by “conservative” groups/activists of various stripes.  And that explanation is still a part of my project. Maybe it’s still the main part.

But I don’t know that for sure any more.  And I have become ever so slightly suspicious of my own tendency toward declension narratives – or, rather, my tendency to idealize “the university” or “a humanistic education” as repositories or manifestations of a particular set of values that are newly (or freshly) imperiled and in need of defending. In some ways, that’s simply a restatement of my opinion on the matter in the 1980s.  Maybe I was right then. But maybe I wasn’t.

The key here in framing this moment of conflict or crisis is in those adverbs:  newly and freshly.  Is it really the case that a humanistic education is newly imperiled?  Is it really the case that the research mission and teaching mission of the university are freshly endangered by dark-money-funded libertarian rent-seekers?  Are these new crises? In what way are they new?  Are they new manifestations of old crises?  How so?  Are they even crises, or are they rather constant conditions that have always accompanied American higher education?  Has American higher education always been in crisis?  If something is always a crisis, is it even a crisis?  And what does the word “always” mean, what work does it do, in the hands of a historian?

I’m not really expecting anyone to answer these questions – well, not anyone except myself.

And because I am not sure any more where this story will end, I hardly know where or how to begin.  Yet the way in which I begin will all but determine how it all ends.

Sonofabitch.