The Books of My Life: The Higher Learning in America

 

Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, the Annotated Edition, 2015) is, as the annotator and editor of the this edition of the book, Richard Teichgraeber III notes in his introduction to the text, a social scientific classic. It may not have been the first book to explore the rise of the American university in the late 19th century. It may not have been the first book to explore the inherent contradictions between business interests with their obsessions with profit and status, and teachers with their obsession with learning for learning's sake. It may not have been the first book to explore the increasingly prominent role business interests played in the modern university. It is, however, one of the few books on the rise of American universities and their control by business interests to remain in print pretty much continuously since its delayed publication in 1918.

Veblen in his typically wry, witty, parodic, and satiric way, literary strategies that are almost certainly some of the reasons for Veblen's continuing intellectual and academic relevance and resonance for intellectuals today, argues that it was through college presidents, educators who were typically mediocre in the realm of learning but competent in the realm of business practises, and the president's administrative and academic supporters and enablers, that the business dominated boards of American universities controlled the universities they governed. College presidents, argues Veblen, were the ones who introduced business like time schedules and course schedules, particularly to undergraduate education but also, to a lesser degree, to graduate education, who introduced an obsession with status relative to "competitor" universities, and who introduced an obsession with administrative and extracurricular rituals, to America's college and universities. All of these, Veblen argues, were instrumental in the businessification of the American university and the marginalisation of learning for learnings sake. As Teichgraeber notes, there is some question as to whether Veblen, like Max Weber, who argued that bureaucracies were an iron cage in which modern humans were trapped unless a charismatic bureaucrat came along, saw the businessification and bureaucratisation of American universities, with their inherent hierarchies and celebration of inequality, as a kind of iron cage imprisoning the instinct for idle learning or the pursuit of learning. Some argue that he did see the university bureaucracy as an iron cage. Others point to Veblen's hope that a kind of cooperative global higher education might emerge and allow the university, with its inherent educational mission, to escape, at least to some extent, the iron cage of the business bureaucracy and business culture.

Since Veblen wrote The Higher Learning in America, the businessification of not only the American university but the American college (and universities and colleges throughout the Western world including Oxford and Cambridge), has continued apace. Today, thanks to the growth in the number of academic bureaucrats, the growth in the contingent sector of faculty, the use by academic business oriented bureaucrats of "metrics of accountability", the increasing commercialisation of sport, and the increasing importance of governmental and corporate monies to universities, corporate and business interests seem to have overcome, at least for the moment, whatever countervailing power faculty may still have in America's universities. At this particular time, then, it seems that Weber was right; the corporate bureaucratic university is a trap, a cage, in which learning for learning's sake seems to have been pushed to the margins if not entirely undermined and from which it is unable to free itself.