[Discussion] The Pathbreaking, Fractionalized, Uncertain World of Knowledge

[Paksoy, Hb]

 Chronicle of Higher Ed.
>From the issue dated September 20, 2002
 

  The Pathbreaking, Fractionalized, Uncertain World of Knowledge
By STANLEY N. KATZ

Many years ago, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked, 
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"The task of the university is the creation of the future, so far as
rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the
issue." But for many of today's academics, rationality is in question,
civilization is anathema, and universities have not created, for themselves
or for their societies, the future Whitehead envisaged. What, then, are we
about? If, as Stanley O. Ikenberry, former president of the American Council
of Education, has claimed, American universities are "at the top of their
game," then just what game are they playing, and what's the prize?

One way to approach those questions is to look at how our universities
support the intellectual infrastructure of our country and the world. The
task of building and maintaining intellectual infrastructure is much more
daunting today than it was for Whitehead and his colleagues, although the
resources for undertaking it are unbelievably richer. In the United States
and elsewhere, universities have both created some of the changes they face
today, especially those related to the production of new knowledge, and been
affected by others -- for example, the growth in some demographic groups and
the democratization of American society.

The biggest of the changes, however, is probably in how we Americans think
about universities: what we expect of them. Up to the middle of the last
century, we asked higher education to provide basic and professional
education for young people, to discover and preserve the knowledge of the
past, and, especially in the sciences, to create new knowledge. We thought
of knowledge, however, in a unitary fashion, and did not distinguish as
sharply as we do today between the practical and useless kinds (although it
is true that many years ago the philosopher George Santayana spoke out for
the "utility of useless knowledge"). Knowledge grew slowly and
incrementally, and we were mostly content to leave its creation to
university academics and industrial laboratories.

But all of that has changed. One could argue about starting points, but the
rapid pace of discovery in atomic science that took off in the 1930s and
1940s may have been the formative process. For one thing, the Manhattan
Project and the postwar establishment of the National Science Foundation in
1950 began large-scale government support of scientific research. For
another, cold-war competitiveness initiated the state-sponsored expansion of
our university system (just as the earlier GI Bill launched the tremendous
growth in the number of students in higher education). Money and the rapidly
growing scale of the system created the modern research university, in which
the production of knowledge and its publication became virtually the sole
criterion of academic success -- the be-all and end-all of the growing
cohort of research universities.

And produce knowledge they did, at an incredible rate and with astonishing
successes -- with the revolution in cell biology perhaps the largest. They
were able to do so, first and most obviously, because of the scaling up of
the educational system. Not only were more research institutions of all
kinds (including independent research institutes and industrial
laboratories) created, but also an increasing number of well-trained
Ph.D.'s, postdocs, and graduate students (both domestic and foreign), and an
infrastructure to support them (journals, libraries, national and
international learned societies). Second, more money was poured into
universities from more sources than had ever before been available to the
academic research community. Most came from state and (especially) federal
government sources, though private philanthropic foundations, corporations,
and even individuals also made major contributions.

The quantity and quality of knowledge production in the second half of the
20th century was stupendous. Lewis Thomas once remarked that more had been
learned about medicine during his working career than had been learned in
all of history up to that time. And it may be that he was right. The era
witnessed an explosion of knowledge of staggering proportions, and much of
that was generated in the academy, most of it in the research universities.
That was just as true across the humanities, social sciences, and
professions as it was in the physical and life sciences.

But there was a cost. The increase in knowledge depended on a phenomenon
first identified by Adam Smith -- task specialization. In every field, the
growing number of investigators led to narrower and more precise
specification of the problem to be addressed. The traditional fields were
subdivided into finer and finer parts, while, at the same time, whole new
fields of investigation (to some extent in all areas but, because of
funding, particularly in the sciences) were created, sometimes as old fields
were merged into new ones, for example in the creation of biological physics
and medical engineering. New learned societies emerged to professionalize
these suband supra-fields, and new journals emerged to communicate their
findings. In every field, specialization won the day over generalization.

To cite a trivial example, I was trained in American history, with a
specialization in colonial history (which in those days meant from the
arrival of Europeans until the Revolution or the post-Constitutional
period). My minor field was all of English history. I was trained to be able
to teach any course relating to American history, and at the beginning of my
career I was also teaching TudorStuart English history. I tried to keep up
with all the new work in those fields. Within five years, I had begun to
concentrate on colonial-American legal history, and soon I was struggling
simply to keep up with that. It has gotten a lot more specialized since
then.

Nevertheless, universities were held in high regard by the public during
most of the period following the Second World War -- for their training of
undergraduates, for their professional education, for their research
accomplishments. The public was also receptive to the books, speeches, and
interviews of the most articulate university scholars, though those
appreciated were not necessarily those held in highest esteem by their
academic confreres. Similarly, university presidents and other institutional
officials were also once public intellectuals and, sometimes, nationally
important figures.

So, the current university has clearly been doing many things right,
although it is hard to generalize about the 125 or so research universities
that sustain the intellectual infrastructure in the United States. Differing
substantially from one another, they are, in most respects, awesome
institutions. They have superb faculties and student bodies (both
substantially internationalized). They train their students well in most
respects. They produce pathbreaking research in large quantities. They have
magnificent laboratories and libraries. They engage, to some extent, in
serving the interests of their communities through work in the schools,
continuing education, extension services, and the like. To excel in
teaching, learning, and service has long been the professed ambition of
American higher education, and today's institutions largely live up to it.

Yet, current triumphs notwithstanding, the high-water mark of general
admiration for the research universities may well have come by about 1980.
The national political atmosphere of the 1980s was hostile to intellectuals
to an extent not seen since the dog days of McCarthyism in the early 1950s
-- populist anti-intellectualism once again became respectable. For that and
other reasons, public intellectuals have become thin on the ground. On the
whole, professors did best in print culture; as new media have developed,
their overwhelming commercial character increasingly has had little use for
intellectuals unless they are very good looking and can shout with the best
of the commercial talking heads. And today's university presidents are
rarely widely known beyond the fringes of their own campuses -- for good
reason. Hired to be managers and fund raisers rather than educational
leaders, they have largely ceased speaking out on major educational issues,
not to mention their silence on most other issues of public import and
interest.

Indeed, I think the public (and public officials) have come to see research
universities as self-aggrandizing money machines populated by professors who
have lost interest both in teaching and in creating immediately useful
knowledge.

The institutions have, sadly, become too large, arrogant, rapacious, and
impersonal for outsiders to understand and sympathize with (despite their
best efforts to generate loyalty through the introduction of
quasi-professional sports). The public's sense of the professoriate is now
similar to Robert Maynard Hutchins's castigation of his own University of
Chicago faculty at its annual Christmas dinner in 1943 -- you are engaged in
"making molehills out of mountains."

But it's not just the public view that has altered. Even if the abstract
goals of the universities have not changed, their behavior and, especially,
their management have changed profoundly over the past half century. Here
the central fact is not that there are more research universities, but that
each institution has become so much larger, more complex, and harder to
finance. It is not so much that there are more students (nearly 50,000 on
just the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota and more than
that number on the Columbus campus of Ohio State University, for example),
but that there are more departments, centers, schools, buildings -- and
correspondingly more faculty and staff members.

Universities are very big businesses, usually the largest employers in their
local communities, and, like any large organism, they must spend more and
more time nourishing themselves. The raising of funds for research,
physical-plant maintenance, faculty salaries, and other costs requires
personnel, energy, and attention on a scale that dwarfs the needs of
institutions even a few decades ago.

A second type of change is hard to define precisely -- the transformation of
the intellectual atmosphere on our university campuses. At one end of the
political spectrum is the emergence of cultural politics as a dominating
force. That is primarily a function of the emergence of identity politics
that has made a wide range of policies and ideas hard to discuss freely --
gender, sexual orientation, and race and ethnicity, for instance. While
there is broad support on our campuses for diversity as a goal, the academy
has fallen into a self-censorship that makes it hard to express thoughtful
disagreement about relevant policies. At the other end of the spectrum is
the emergence of a variety of politically and religiously conservative
ideologies, which to a lesser extent constrain the development of a truly
civilized campus community of discourse. Should it really be so hard to
determine whether it is appropriate for freshmen to be exposed to some of
the ideas of the Koran?

Why does that matter for what universities contribute to the national
intellectual infrastructure? Mainly, I think, because the institutions are
intellectually out of focus and out of control. Earlier they were organized
around a limited number of schools and departments, and there was
substantial consensus as to what ought to be taught and what ought to be
researched. Faculty members were primarily loyal to their own institutions.
There was a better balance between teaching and research -- and let us not
forget that one of the most important tasks of teaching is training new
generations to carry on the intellectual mission of the academy.

But, most of all, enormous damage has been done to the creation and
sustenance of our intellectual infrastructure by the increasing inability of
teaching faculties to agree upon what constitutes Whitehead's "civilized
modes of appreciation." Both the organization and the content of the
academic life of the mind have become fractionalized, anomic, and
increasingly uncertain. Too many individual professors are running their own
research programs, frequently institutionalized as centers, buying out their
teaching time, and setting their own agendas, more frequently in response to
funding sources than to colleagues or students. The result is that
departments and even administrations have little impact on research
direction, and there is increasingly a struggle to mount plausible
curriculums for undergraduates and even for graduate students.

An analogous phenomenon afflicts faculties more generally, since most
faculty members in universities confine their teaching to their own
increasingly narrow research fields. Less and less effort goes into
constructing intellectually comprehensive and coherent curriculums to help
students make sense of the highly sophisticated knowledge they are taught.
The dominance of research as the primary criterion for faculty hiring,
reward, and promotion has increased the pressure for professors to publish
-- more and more frequently in narrowly professional areas. Contributions
tend to be framed in technical jargon and sharply focused. More and more,
specialists address other specialists.

Not only does that lessen the chance that they will reach general audiences,
but it also means that the very language they use in their written work is
different from their speech to students, who are not up to or interested in
the publishable production of their teachers. And, of course, this problem
is exacerbated by the increasing proportion of teaching done by graduate
students (who are shooting for a professional foothold) and by
non-tenure-track adjunct professors.

And, in many fields, changes in the sociology of knowledge have created
profound problems in communicating research beyond the inner core of
professional academic elites. One example would be the "turn to theory"
prevalent in the humanities during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s;
another would be the increasingly theoretical bent of the social sciences,
especially economics and political science.

In literature and related fields, the impact of French philosophy in the
United States (in the form of postmodernism and deconstruction) produced,
along with much original and exciting work, texts that were so jargon-ridden
and abstruse that even many professionals had a tough time understanding
them. Many works in the humanities became altogether incomprehensible to
even the most sophisticated general readers. In political science, to take
another example, emphasis on the economistic "rational choice" approach to
political analysis has produced highly abstract statistical modeling that is
not only hard for laypersons to understand, but is driving out the
traditional study of legislatures, cities, and other organizations that
genuinely interests nonspecialist academics and the general public, and is
frequently the basis for public policy.

These problems have been accentuated by continuing administrative attempts
to gain control of the university budget by what amount to neo-liberal
economic strategies to impose rigorous expenditure responsibility on
individual schools and departments. The result has frequently been to
privilege those academic units that have the greatest access to external
funding, and to punish those more traditional departments, especially in the
humanities, that survive on their portion of the general university budget.
A more profound effect is to lessen the communal sense of the institution,
to reward individual departmental initiative rather than commitment to
general university purposes.

In the end, what is the impact of all this on the larger intellectual
structure of American life? There are clearly many things that universities
are doing better than ever before. Despite Hutchins's sarcasm, universities
are generating more knowledge (and better knowledge) than they have in any
previous period of human history. We know more and more about most things --
even if we also learn more and more about less and less. Academic scientific
and technical knowledge is the basis for an incredible range of techniques
and products that serve to better our country and the world. If we are truly
living in a "knowledge economy," then the university contribution to the
economy is profound -- even if it does not result in the quick turnaround to
product and profit that some outside the academy demand. We have, in sum,
become extremely efficient in producing many types of knowledge.

But it could be argued that, in other respects, universities are not holding
up their end of their implicit compact with society. I would say that we are
neglecting undergraduate education in a serious way, although probably not
for the reasons many populist critics of higher education have contended.
They have charged professors with teaching too few hours, ignoring students
and pursuing useless research, out of bad politics and bad motives; such
critics have ignored the context in which change has occurred. It is
interesting to note, however, that public complaint about this aspect of
higher education, intense during the early 1990s, seems mainly to have
disappeared. Today, beyond understandable anguish over the cost of higher
education, critical voices are, for some reason, less frequently heard.

Nevertheless, we should not forget: If "general education" is one of the
bases for democratic citizenship, and I believe that it is, we need to think
much harder about what we are offering our students. The opportunities are
immense, since today's universities educate such a large and representative
segment of the relevant age cohort. But both the material structure and
intellectual direction of the professoriate work against a reform of
undergraduate education. The challenge of the university is to train an
elite cohort (these days increasingly selected on egalitarian terms) to lead
society politically and socially, as well as to run its businesses and
laboratories. Such young people are currently very well trained in
specialized techniques, but not so well prepared in those general critical
thinking skills that have always been thought basic to liberal education.

It may also be the case that the theoretical complexity of the knowledge
currently generated by research universities is too inaccessible to large
numbers of citizens outside the academy. That is true in the sciences and
the humanities and the social sciences, though it may well be that the
tradition of high-level popularization of scientific thought is healthier
than in the social sciences and humanities. There is a sense in which the
modalities for communicating with the public are less vibrant than they used
to be. If so, that is probably as much a factor of the dominance of highly
commercialized new media as it is of the unwillingness or inability of
academics to translate their work for the general public. And the current
crisis -- economic and intellectual -- in serious publishing is surely
another sign of the same phenomenon.

So in some respects the glass is overflowing, but in others it is less than
half full. The intellectual accomplishments of universities are undeniably
rich and valuable to our larger society. One obvious cost of the
accentuation of research, however, has been a relative decline in the
quality (though an increase in the quantity) of undergraduate education. But
the larger question may be whether the recent turn to the
hyper-professionalization of knowledge in research universities has not
subtly and adversely affected the tone of the university's impact on
society. We may be contributing more to information than to what Whitehead
thought of as "rational thought."

Stanley N. Katz is director of Princeton University's Center for Arts and
Cultural Policy Studies and president emeritus of the American Council of
Learned Societies.