The role which those schools play and played in American culture has changed over the centuries and decades. They started as academies for a small percentage of the population. The majority of people had no interest in attending college, whether or not it was possible for them.
The bulk of the citizens could achieve a comfortable middle class standard of living without a university education, and, in those previous centuries, secondary educations were good enough to provide a stimulating life of the mind.
In that era, a rigorous curriculum in a broad array of subjects was available to those who pursued learning up to, but not into, college. Without going to a university, students could immerse their minds in the Greek and Roman classics, gain a working knowledge of Latin and a smattering of Greek, explore Shakespeare, and learn both ancient and modern history. In the natural sciences, chemistry, physics, and biology were available at advanced, if less well attended, levels. Arithmetic, mathematics, geometry, and trigonometry were taught at levels up to, and including, differential and integral calculus.
When a university education was needed for only a few professions, there was a greater emphasis within the university on developing the mind, rather than merely training for a profession, as scholar Tom Nicols writes:
Before World War II, most people did not finish high school and few went to college. In this earlier time, admissions to top schools were dominated by privileged families, although sometimes young men and a very few women could scrape up the money for tuition or earn a scholarship. It was an exclusive experience often governed as much by social class as by merit. Still, college attendance was an indication of potential, and graduation was a mark of achievement. A university degree was rare, serving as one of the signposts dividing experts and knowers from the rest of society.
When career training was less central to the university’s mission than it is now, other concerns could be more central: non-utilitarian scientific progress, the growth of individual freedom and political liberty, respect for the impartial rule of law, the traditions of rationality and skepticism, the study of culture, and the preservation of the great works and traditions of Western Civilization.
The university was clear to itself, and to the world, about its mission: to foster the life of the mind.
In a breathtakingly ironic oxymoron, the twenty-first century university is lurching toward anti-intellectualism: sometimes explicitly so, in the mocking of scholarly apparatuses like footnotes and bibliographies, and in the mocking of scholarly pursuits like the catalogues of Indo-European roots and their cognates in various World Languages.
But more often, the university’s anti-intellectualism is covert, because the institution still wants to demand the respect which is accorded to academic rigor. The trend is subversive, in the sense that an intellectual institution is infiltrated by individuals whose mission is to advance anti-intellectualism.
Thus arise the pseudo-sciences and pseudo-disciplines: courses and classes which have no intellectual or academic foundation. Thus, too, occurs the dilution of what had been rigorous academic pursuits: e.g., post-secondary studies of economics drift away from the meticulous precision of equations and graphs, and dissolve into a pool of slogans borrowed from popular politics.
The university’s goal is no longer to provide an individual with a stimulating life of the mind. To fill that vacuum, two alternative goals expand: career training and politicization applied to what had formerly been the objects of academic study, as scholar Robert Bork writes.
Universities now threaten to abandon those ideals and to instruct the rest of society to abandon them as well. As the universities lose respect for intellect, that attitude spreads not only to lower schools but to the society at large. It is perhaps unclear whether the universities are instructing the culture at large in the joys of anti-intellectualism or whether the universities have been infected by a culture already lobotomized by television. Probably the influence runs both ways. The universities have an independent reason to abandon intellect: the barrier that rationality places in the way of politicization.
In former times, a graduate who’d studied economics was considered to be a specialist in a quasi-mathematical study of human decisions, human actions, and the psychology which drives them. Now, however, someone with a college degree in economics is assumed to be someone who has opinions relevant to current partisan policy debates.
Whether the university undid itself, or whether electronic mass communication has undone it, the result is a declining life of the mind in America.
