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The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University
Reviewed by David Damrosch
Steven Brint, ed.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002, 380 pp.
Forty years ago, Clark Kerr, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, published his stimulating book The Uses of the University. Promoting a vision of the university giving way to a "multiversity" serving many diverse constituencies and purposes, Kerr argued that the university should no longer be thought of as an organic community but should instead be seen as an industrial complex; as he put it in one trenchant formulation, a contemporary university is less a community than a "mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money . . . I have sometimes thought of it as a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking." Kerr was roundly criticized, both by those who held out for an older vision of academic community and by those who felt the university should be doing much more to promote social change. At Berkeley, student protesters sometimes wore T-shirts bearing the motto "Forward Under Clark Kerr," with the capital letters printed in boldface to express, with acronymic irony, their true feelings about their chancellor. Yet Kerr's account of an expansive multiversity, engaged with society on many fronts and funded by many sources, captured key features of the postwar reshaping of the American research university, and his book was shot through with an idealism of its own, as he stressed the new openness and dynamism of what his concluding chapter described as the "city of intellect."
Kerr's often-cited book, now in its fourth edition, remains a touchstone of current analysis of higher education, but the very changes Kerr celebrated have accelerated and mutated in ways that endanger the future of his "city," not to mention the livelihoods of the intellectuals within it. This is the overriding theme of the thirteen essays in Steven Brint's book, the product of a February 2000 conference at the University of California, Riverside. The contributors focus on demographic, economic, and technological forces of change that give the research university new responsibilities and ever more fields of inquiry to explore, even as resources stagnate or shrink, enrollments migrate away from the arts and sciences and into vocational fields, and increasing numbers of courses are taught by minimally paid and benefit-deprived adjuncts. The distinguished senior scholars who contributed to this volume may themselves be members of an endangered species. Perhaps the conference shouldn't have been held at Riverside at all, but fifty miles west at the La Brea Tar Pits, famous for their fossils?
A number of the essays in this volume argue that recent changes have been mostly incremental and that radical disruptions are unlikely to occur anytime soon. Several of the contributors, however, see the system as reaching a tipping point, with dramatic decreases under way in the autonomy of universities, in the dominance of the arts and sciences on campus, and in the viability of fundamental, uncommercial research. Looking at the essays together, we can see two broad changes, both of them double-edged in their implications. The first is the dramatic growth of electronic and Internet-based instruction.
David Collis, who has surveyed many commercial ventures into this field, finds that most for-profit efforts are still focusing on vocational and low-level instruction and not yet affecting the advanced teaching at the heart of arts and sciences programs (or their enrollments and funding). He foresees, though, that as these companies gain expertise they will begin to move rapidly into core areas, and he soberly concludes that "by the time the tide arrives, the opportunity to halt it may have passed."
A lively essay by Richard Lanham counters that the technological revolution needs to be embraced far more fully than it has been to date; the result will be to free students and teachers alike from repetitive, rote work, breaking the hold of pre-industrial modes of professorial piecework and thereby making education more affordable while opening up new opportunities for creative thinking and research. Lanham is particularly witty on the limitations of well-intended efforts to co-opt technology by wiring traditional classrooms: "Why put computers there?" he asks. "That's where the students just escaped from."
Whether accommodated or welcomed, technology is bound up with the other major shift these essayists collectively probe: the increasing stratification of higher education. The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and those in the middle are scrambling just to stay in place. Further, as several essays show, this growing stratification is occurring on individual campuses as well as between institutions. The rich (tenured faculty and administrators) get richer, while the poor (adjuncts and teaching assistants) continue to lose ground in most places. As with faculty, so with fields: a few commercially linked fields in the arts and sciences—economics, biology, psychology—are steadily growing, while most arts and sciences fields are in relative or even absolute decline.
This growing stratification may actually benefit top-level research. As Brint shows, most tenured faculty at major research institutions are surprisingly satisfied with their jobs, and their working conditions have improved over the past thirty years. But economic pressures, and technological advances like the creation of Web-based courses around academic stars, are likely to increase the gap between the favored few and the disfavored majority. As Randall Collins says, "It is entirely possible for the intellectual condition of the system, determined by what is done by the research elite, to be flourishing, while there is pressure, alienation, and misery at the levels below."
The tensions of our present moment are well summed up in an introductory essay by Kerr himself, who bids a "fond farewell" to what he calls "Shock Wave I"— the transformational period between 1940 and 1970-and offers "apprehensive greetings to Shock Wave II"— a period he projects as lasting from 2000 to 2030, and perhaps beyond. As we ride with this new shock wave, or brace ourselves against it, Brint's wide-ranging collection of essays makes good reading, whether at poolside or pit-side, for anyone wishing to gain a better grasp of the urban ecology of the contemporary city of intellect.
David Damrosch is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University and Meetings of the Mind.
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