How higher education became a private, not a public, good, and the epicenter of the culture wars.

There’s an arresting scene in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that strikes a familiar chord, even though the book is nearing its 300th anniversary.  On his third voyage, Gulliver, marooned by pirates, spies “an island in the air,” Laputa. With one eye pointed upward and the other turned inward, the island’s inhabitants, anxious and neurotic, are utterly impractical, their clothes ill-fitting, their homes in shambles, their sex drive absent, their ears fixated on the music of the spheres.

Yes, Gulliver has encountered something that resembles a college, where learned men’s minds are up in the clouds.

In a stinging satire of Enlightenment intellectualism, Swift pokes fun at abstract philosophizing and dreamy theorizing without practical application.  

Next, Gulliver visits Balnibarbi, a kingdom that the inhabitants of Laputa, those wise men, literally lord over. There, in a cutting parody of Britain’s Royal Society, he looks aghast at the experiments conducted at the Grand Academy of Lagado, like trying to make pillows out of marble and sunbeams from cucumbers.

Town-gown tensions and ridicule of intellectuals are as old as the academy, but now these conflicts take a somewhat novel form, as a college education has increasingly come to define the nation’s political, ideological, religious, and class divides.

These social, economic, and attitudinal rifts are the subject of a new book by the journalist Will Bunch, a wrenching analysis of a nation fractured along stark educational lines.  Somewhat like Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert D. Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, After the Ivory Tower Falls begins his book by examining a single community, the area surrounding Gambier, Ohio’s Kenyon College, to examine how this nation’s inequality and opportunity gaps have contributed to political and social polarization.

Bunch’s study is a tale not of two Americas, but of four: 

Bunch’s book is organized around the theme of declension.  He charts a fall from grace, as the nation gradually abandons the idea that higher education is a public good that should be broadly accessible to “anyone with ambitions for a better life.”  As he puts it:  

“the collapse of this utopian vision would become the secret sauce behind our modern political gridlock, the revolts of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, the resentment-fueled rise of Donald Trump, and finally a deadly insurrection on Capitol Hill.”

His book sparkles with fascinating sidenotes and insights:

Bunch’s most important argument is that while the nation’s leaders came to embrace the ideal of meritocratic and democratic access to higher education, true equality of opportunity would require much more than many imagined.  It would not only demand significantly increased financial aid, enlarged outreach and bridge programs, and expanded student support services,  but also alternate pathways to rewarding jobs tailored to those who can’t afford to spend four, five, six, or more years attending college.

Why didn’t American higher education sustain the post-Sputnik investments that culminated in Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program?

We know the answers.  A backlash prompted by campus protests and student radicalism. The stagflation, deindustrialization, and energy crises of the 1970s.  The 1978 statute that removed limits on guaranteed student loans and which encouraged colleges to sharply raise tuition. The 25 percent decrease in federal spending on higher education between 1980 and 1985.  The birth of credentialism, which made college the essential ticket into a secure middle-class job, fueling demand for college diplomas.

Bunch does a masterful job of explaining how college gradually became a center of contention in the culture wars, with affirmative action, multiculturalism, and identity politics key flashpoints.  He also offers striking examples of how colleges became the targets of white working-class resentment over the arrogance of cultural, academic, and professional elites and the dream hoarding of the winners in the emerging knowledge economy.  

Bunch quite rightly expresses outrage at the ways that the Ivies and other elite institutions shaped the direction of the higher ed marketplace, emphasizing “prestige, ‘branding’ … exclusivity, luxury perks, and sky-high tuition.” Rather than competing on price or educational quality, these institutions instead vied over prestige and amenities.  This emphasis on prestige, in turn, “trickled down through the rest of the system.”  For those lower down the status hierarchy, the answers involved admission of full-pay international and out-of-state students, expanded master’s offerings designed to exploit credential inflation, and an increased emphasis on contract research and on the campus (that is, the non-academic) experience.

The author also voices indignation at the way that higher ed system has become dependent on $1.7 trillion of borrowed money, owed by the students (and not even including the sums borrowed by parents).  

What, then, is to be done?  He suggests expanded public service programs or what he calls a “universal gap year” in exchange for tuition free college and advanced training in skilled trades.  But that, he makes clear, will require not only money but a fundamental change in the nation’s mindset.  

Perhaps you saw a recent essay in Science entitled “As a Ph.D. student with an expensive chronic disease, low stipends make academia untenable.”  You’d need to have a heart of stone not to empathize with the essay’s author, who describes how he left Egypt at age 17 to pursue undergraduate and graduate education in Canada.  

Because his stipend is barely enough to cover his living costs, let alone his medical expenses, he explains, he had to take on extra hours as a teaching assistant.  Overwhelmed by financial stress, his anxieties were intensified by the judgmentalism of his peers and faculty advisers, who imply that he’s not sufficiently focused on his research, and who do not recognize or value his special circumstances: “my health condition, greater expenses, and lack of family support.”

Now, he writes, “I look forward to leaving academia for a job where my efforts are appreciated and my well-being respected.”  He and others like him, he says, “should be helped through those challenges—for example, with less humiliating pay and reasonable work expectations—instead of being judged for being insufficiently dedicated.”

The author is right.  And yet…  After reading Bunch’s book, it’s hard not to weigh that student’s experiences against the many other inequities that characterize contemporary society.  There are, of course, knee-jerk responses to the Science essay:

Then there are the bigger issues that the cri de coeur raises, concerns that have been raised by higher ed commentators as diverse as Kevin Carey, Ryan Craig, Freddie DeBoer, Caroline Hoxby, and Matthew Yglesias: 

The words of Pope Francis come to mind:  “Who am I to judge?”  Indeed, I should be the last to judge lest I be judged, given my own privilege. 

However uncertain my career has been, I did get tenure at a public flagship and access to the benefits that affords: flexibility without parallel in the job market, access to paid leaves, extraordinary research support, and the chance to shape the minds of the rising generation.  

I never imagined that I’d look back and think for a moment that I was a professor during higher ed’s golden age.  But for those with tenure, especially those at research universities, this has been at least a silver age.

As my generation exits the building, we must recognize our special responsibility to do more to ensure that those who follow us can achieve something like the work life I had. The priorities are obvious:

Near the end of his book Bunch writes, in a phrase that strikes me as pitch perfect:  American higher ed “will struggle to move forward until it asks itself some hard questions about how to reasonably apportion the cost of higher education.”  The answer to that question isn’t self-evident.  It will involve tough choices and daunting trade-offs.  It will also require a genuine commitment to equity across intersectional lines.   And let’s not forget those who, for whatever reason, will never enroll in college.

But none of this will happen if we don’t make it happen. In the words of the Everly Brothers, “wishing won’t make it so.”

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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