The American College and University: A History - Frederick Rudolph

The development of American higher education demonstrates an interesting reimagination of both the English college and German university. A marriage between these two approaches, wed within a sort-of Jacksonian democratic ideal  accounts for a large part of the strengths, and difficulties which have come to characterize colleges and universities, both public and private, across the United States.

Tracing the growth and movements of higher education, from the birth of Harvard University, to the debates which typified Robert Hutchins' tenure at the University of Chicago, Rudolph situates his own history along the dominant streams of American cultural and social history. In so doing he has captured the notion and the feeling that the history of higher education, particularly those elite institutions which comprise the thrust of his work, stands at once separate from, and responds deeply to, changes throughout American history. Though schools like Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, and Cornell continue to play such a formative role in creating many of the country's preeminent leaders and thinkers, Rudolph succinctly illustrates how these institutions are responsive, albeit sometimes slowly, to the exhibited needs of the world around them. To the extent that this influences the type of experiences the next generation of leaders and thinkers will have, the arena of higher education cannot help but feel like a slightly conservative force within American society (there are, of course, exceptions to this).

Rather than moralize over the extent to which colleges and universities manifest democratic ideals - a critique so readily leveled in contemporary discussions of higher education - Rudolph traces the very growth of the democratic spirit, and how this has helped to expand colleges and universities, while often compromising the very mission they often pursue. The tension between trying to create an education which is deep, rigorous, and broad, and the possibility of providing for the learning of the many, may forever remain unresolved in American higher education. Perhaps this reflects a tension within society. Though it need not necessarily be the case, the demands of a practical education always seem to oppose the dreams of a scholarly and introspective one. While we may regard this as a failure of educational theorists and developers, we might conversely wonder if our social world forecloses the prospect of living a thoughtful and introspective life which is also social? If we agree that this tension exists in education, can we similarly assert that the same tension exists in society, and within ourselves?

The Age of Jackson - Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The battle between the differing ideals of Thomas Jefferson's small-government notions, with freedom and energy based in the hands of the decentralized electorate, and Alexander Hamiliton's Federalism, which recognized the needs for a strong centralized government around which the states would have to orbit, would only begin to be settled by the generation which succeeded the Founding Fathers. As the young nation battled over the less revolutionary issues of governance and domestic tranquility, the form and function of American government and society would begin to take lasting shape. Such becomings, Schlesinger argues, could not be understood isolated from the rise of industrialism, and the awakening of class consciousness which attended it. Debates centering upon issues such as the Bank of the United States, the Free Soil difficulties (and eventual violence), the annexation of Texas, the American System, and the Tariff of Abominations (to name just a few) are best understood as a young nation not only trying to negotiate the civil relation to government, but also between the classes. Would power be vested in manhood, or in property? While we may know the country's answer to this question (how certain are we really that the people won-out?) the years of Jacksonian America were a time when these contestations were far from settled.

To historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr's way of telling it, Andrew Jackson's founding of a vigorous and powerful executive branch upon the will of a democratically empowered electorate, was to set the standard for how America would come to expect the relationships between democratic and republican principles to be negotiated. More than any other single time period, it was the Age of Jackson, and the years which followed it, which set the course for American government as part of American society.

While it may be tempting to see these largely democratic principles as the spawn of Jeffersonianism, Schlesinger reconciles Jefferson's calls for limited government with the strong unifying power of the federal system which the country felt in 1944, and which we feel still today. The rise of industrialism and the centralization of populations, coupled with the coming storm of civil war, meant that Jefferson's ideal (over-emphasized by many) of a country composed of yeoman farmers would prove largely impossible. As wealth became divorced from the land, and was refounded in the cities, it was no longer enough to say "that government is best which governs least." Were the government to continue to retreat from the civic sphere, it would only ensure the rampant growth of industrial wealth, further vesting power in the upper class. Such would sound the death-knell of Jefferson's democratic principles.

Though the author of the Declaration of Independence could not have foreseen such eventualities, during the Age of Jackson Jeffersonian democracy would become unified with a vigorous and powerful executive branch. Were either capital or labor, during these crucial years when their relationship seemed still in its birthing pangs, to fully gain the upper hand over the other, the history of the United States would look very different. The changing arenas of presidential and congressional politics throughout this age simultaneously responded to and altered social and business spheres. Yet the age was governed largely by democratic principles responsive to Washington as the seat of power. As the electorate struggled to reorient itself to a changing world, so too would the political sphere be transformed. Much was uncertain during these formative years, yet they can be properly termed the Age of Jackson because the tenor of American class and political contests cannot be understood without reference to the role the Jackson played in founding the power of a strong central government directly upon the will of the people. This centralized American democracy still exists today.

The Great Triumvirate - Merrill D. Peterson

The American Revolution may have been a fundamental break – one setting not only the infant nation, but indeed the entire global dialogue concerning democracy along a new path. The founding fathers were a generation which hewed and built a government unlike any of its age. Their works and deeds resound through the ages, as do their names. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin; for most Americans these require no introduction. Through the years of that first generation the country’s laws and government would take shape. Before the court of Marshall, in the doctrine of Monroe, along the journey of Lewis and Clark, the country as a land and an idea would emerge. Yet it was only with the passing-away of this first generation that the first few staggering steps of the country could be transformed into the assured pace of a certain nation. If America was to be a grand republic, and not simply the bright flash of a single generation, then it would be the free-born sons of the revolution who would make it so. The country could only be truly forged once it dealt with the business, less of creation, and more of persistence.

From the presidency of John Quincy Adams, to the years of the Fillmore administration, three men would do more to shape and define the country’s ideals, values, and extent than any others. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina represented not only the three regions composing the young states (New England, the West, and the South, respectively) but also three ideals of the republic which would be contested in front of the courts and underneath the Capitol dome. While Webster embodied the Federalists’ call for a stronger union, Calhoun’s states’ rights southerners fought for the preservation of their own way of life. In-between was the star of the West, the voice of union and compromise, Henry Clay. Each, in his own way, would take up his own banner, and the banner of diverse causes; each with one foot planted firmly in the foundations of the past, while simultaneously striving towards what they believed was both a proper and necessary future. Both the originality and the difficulty of the American Constitution can be understood through the differing interpretations these three gave to it. While their conclusions and moralities may occasionally seem outmoded – perhaps even quaint to the modern ear – we cannot disagree that each latched upon a crucial strain of thought in the nation’s founding documents. Their status as great minds is assured. That the words and ideas which founded the republic can be so diversely meaningful and open to interpretation may do more to support the continuation of the American republic than the work of any person, or the protection of any force. Through their struggles, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun not only helped to forge the nation, they served as exemplars for how the country might be continually renewed.

While the evolving political climates of their time would variously place each at odds with the other, these climates would also create strange bedfellows and unlikely alliances. The capriciousness of changing parties, and the turbulence of the era, may have led the country to select more belligerent or politically-minded executives. It was, through no small fault of the mansion’s tenants, the era of a diminished White House. While each of the triumvirate would repeatedly try for the country’s top post, and variously be humbled, humiliated, debased, and denied in their attempts, this was not the era of the powerful presidency. It was within the Capitol that the great debates would take place; from which the edicts shaping the coming generation would issue. At no other time has America more closely embodied a true republic. At the height of congressional influence three men stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. Webster, Clay, and Calhoun: each is celebrated and lauded, denigrated and excoriated. Each similarly provides a multitude of interpretations down through the ages. Thus we may say that they have truly joined the American pantheon. Together they support our own continual re-founding of the nation.

The Conflict in Education in a Democratic Society - Robert Maynard Hutchins

"What belongs in education is what helps the student to learn for himself, to form an independent judgment, and to make his part as a responsible citizen."

Throughout the twentieth century (and, now, into the twenty-first) the mission of the university in America has been uncertain. Are young people to be educated with an eye towards adapting them to their environment, towards what is immediately practical, towards social reform, or with some other purpose in mind? Echoing Montesquieu's assertion that the principle of a republic is its education, former University of Chicago President, and noted educational theorist, Robert Maynard Hutchins, places these concerns at the center of societal formation and function. If a society is to be best, if it is to nurture independent thought and freedom of the spirit, then a liberal education must provide citizens with the capacities to be life-long learners and critical thinkers. Ours must become a society of the logos; of the dialogue, and questioning. It must continue to foster what Hutchins calls the Great Conversation.

Information is nothing without the understanding and judgment necessary to apply it. Supporting the highest human endeavors means that we must be given the tools to think for ourselves. Educational difficulties mount upon the foundational difficulty of our simultaneously shared humanity and individual difference. People are similar; people are different: this dynamic tension binds us together and casts us apart. Education shares this common difficulty with each of us every day - how are we to make sense of, and make peace with, the similarities and differences of others? Rather than serving as a further divisive force, our education can be the common ground which binds people together. By engaging citizens in the age-old discussions of our culture, by nurturing independent thought and the ability of each to explore his or her own physical and intellectual world, Hutchins argues that we can build a better society. By providing the foundation for a lifetime of rigorous, independent inquiry into our lives and the world we inhabit, a better educational system both brings us together and celebrates our differences.

Hutchins notes that "what is honored in a country will be cultivated there." We might add that what is cultivated there will be the seeds for the country of tomorrow. We might wonder if our educational systems and priorities reflect our values.? If not, whose values are they? Each of us as individuals, and together as a community, will reap what we sow.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes

The minds which made up the international physics community became, in the early half of the twentieth century, a seemingly rootless and stateless society. Moving across international, political, and ideological boundaries, this group of transformative and revolutionary thinkers created what Niels Bohr conceived as a transnational community of science. Seemingly organized around a common pursuit of truth, the only hierarchies here, so we might be lead to believe, were meritocratic. Powerful idealists, as well as great thinkers, scientists like Oppneheimer, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, and Rutherford would come to impact the world of politics, social and human justice, and war and peace, more than any one person would dare to imagine. While it was through the political and military application of their discoveries that the atomic bomb came to wreck previously unimaginable swift destruction upon two cities of Japanese men, women, and children, Rhodes looks into the moral wrestling of these deep thinkers, and finds them not unaware of the havoc they were unleashing upon the world. Though the international physics community could not be said to have begun the Pacific War, the efforts of men and women physicists spanning back to the beginning of the century would conspire to end it, and thrust international politics and the prospect of world order into an entirely new arena.

Throughout Rhodes rich work, the international and collaborative nature of the scientific community is juxtaposed to the national, and therefore seemingly narrow, politics and conflicts between states. With the chaos of two world wars behind him, Rhodes looks to this same community as a potential paragon of hope for a world in which mutually assured destruction is replaced by the open exchange of our most important resource: ideas and knowledge. While he goes to great lengths to trace the political, material, and contextual intricacies of scientific discovery and application, Rhodes remains convinced that our deepening knowledge of reality, and the possible leveling effects of information diffusion, will be our saving grace. He is able to do this, while telling the story of the most terrible of human contrivances, specifically because he believes in the possible future the bomb has helped to create. Extending the logic of state-sponsored violence to the nth degree, atomic weapons demand a recalculation of human morality in light of international conflict. When no amount of armaments, wealth, or man-power can entirely protect a society from the threat of nuclear annihilation, the world must be thrust into a new paradigm of cooperation. Or so the argument goes. It the over-arching terror, the complete destruction, which these weapons assure, that forces us into a post-war world.

History would seem to suggest that Rhodes, and Bohr before him, are on to something. There has never been an atomic bomb dropped in anger since those fateful days in August, 1945. The Cold War shrank to an end, and the prospect of another world war seems remote indeed. Along the way the world has become more overtly interconnected, and seemingly smaller - perhaps we are moving closer to a truly international community. That the full realization of the depths of our man-made horrors might ensure a world in which such devastation is in retreat is certainly an inversion of the obvious lines of thought. In the balance, I wonder if we are truly saved by the development and application of human knowledge? Does such exploration necessarily breed the wisdom to use it? Must we have known our most terrible demons before we become acquainted with our better angels?

The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 - Cecil Woodham-Smith

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish peasantry had become so dependent upon the potato for their survival and livelihood that poor Irish women scarcely knew how to prepare other foods. According to historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, when the crop failed it was inevitable that a people, who annually dealt with lean times verging on a starvation-lifestyle, would suffer mightily. What was entirely avoidable, was that the depths of the famine would reach such biblical proportions that perhaps 1.5 million Irish would die, and that the peasantry would be essentially forced to emigrate, thus altering the country's history such that effects were still felt a hundred years hence. While soil chemistry and agricultural pathology may have birthed the Irish Potato Famine, it was the work of men which turned hunger into a veritable holocaust. The disregard of British politicians and Irish landholders for the peasantry verged upon acts of willful genocide.

Woodham-Smith casts the most destructive impacts of the famine as those caused by an adherence to illusions of market economic theory. Relying upon forces of price and the ability of labor to jump-start spending and economic activity, during the first two years of the famine British policy makers cast about for ways to productively employ the peasantry. Road construction programs (terminating in the middle of nowhere), measures to combat soil erosion (for untended fields), and other manual labor attempts fell short for want of basic skills, but, more importantly, for a lack of affordable goods to sustain livelihoods. Policy makers and government officials, from their seat of power in London, saw the problem not as one of sustenance, but of economy; all-too-often providing food for the Irish meant helping them procure employment so as to partake in the economy. Once it became universally understood that a people without food cannot hope to work to earn food, it was for so many Irish, simply too late.

Blame for the worst impacts of the famine thus rests at the feet of a men who subjected humane ways of thinking to an economic calculus. Woodham-Smith suggests that a veritable perfect storm of pre-capitalist land tenure, combined with market economic forces, so greatly alienated the Irish masses from the land which they relied upon, that a tenuous position must yield widespread hardship. That it would lead to large-scale ruin and death need not have been inevitable, however, it has come to seem unavoidable. The greatest tragedy is perhaps that the famine never really ended. Concentrated land-holdings did not disappear, rather the Irish struggled on and continued to similarly suffer throughout the nineteenth century. Woodham-Smith places a great deal of emphasis on the iterative character of the natural and economic feedbacks, which would doom so many. Preceding the development of the welfare state, and, to some extent, the welfare global community, Ireland's Great Hunger demonstrated the all-too-real implications for a purely economic manner of treating human life.

The Philosophy of Social Ecology - Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin pursues a philosophy consisting of man and nature, within a unified continuum. It is through the notion of becoming - that things are in the process of fulfilling their potential, as created by their interactive growth within a co-produced world - that Bookchin finds the unifying thread between ecology and society.

Crucial to Bookchin's concept is the assertion that potentiality exists in the here and now, as not only part of any thing's being, but as the fundamental aspect of it. Because potentiality has a history in the things that preceded it, its creation in the world can be traced as an arrival of interactions (emergence, it would seem, guarantees existence). This potentiality is of central import because the interactivity of reality continually builds towards complexity and subjectivity, and it is in relation to this development that an objective ethics becomes feasible. What fosters such complexity and variety of cognition must too, according to Bookchin, be an intrinsic good, as it encourages development towards the fulfillment of evolution. We therefore have the beginning point for an ethic which consists of both man and nature - to Bookchin's thinking one of the insuperable cleavage points in western philosophy. Because our reasoning and increasing subjectivity finds its origin in the natural world, we are given a grounding for an ethics which encompasses both.

The foremost problem with the myriad conclusions from Bookchin's application of a certain brand of dialectics, is the narrowness of his purview concerning concepts of development. Bookchin's assertion that more complex and subjective phenomena are increasingly arising from the natural, groundlessly imputes a specific teleological thinking onto the natural world. That phenomena have become more complex and subjective in historical time, whether a supported assertion or no, does not guarantee the primacy of this particular characteristic. Assessing reality based-upon the presence, absence, or differing shades of a developing continuum of consciousness becomes problematic when other manners of assessment are marginalized by a specific epistemology-cum-ontology. Ignoring other aspects of being threatens to straight-jacket reality. As the adage goes, "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." How we assess the world dramatically impacts what we are able to see.

Bookchin's dialectical leanings, and his assertions that evolution and ecological interactions foster differentiation and complexity, are insights in need of broader social sympathy. Nevertheless, the notion that the pontential created by dialectical processes is an expression of objective morality remains a groundless teleology favoring human ways of being in the universe. While a historical development, from a "metabolic self-maintenance" to more rational self-expressions, may emerge from natural processes, the occurrence of such transformations does nothing to suggest their relationship to the good, whether social or metaphysically defined. Positing such undermines the value of the dialectic from the start: the dialectic itself becomes simply a manifestation of supra-mundane phenomena. We risk an interactive reality driven primarily by some illusory Other - beware the realm of Forms. While Bookchin has certainly made headway towards a more integrated perspective on people and things, his insistence upon the cumulative nature of the dialectic remains problematic.