Creative, Adobe Stock Images Conservatives interested in higher-education reform often ask themselves where things went wrong. Answers usually range from the radicalism of the 1960s to the rise of social media or the triumph of critical theories in various departments and then the university as a whole. True, but the problem lies deeper, as well.
Few are willing to trace today’s ills to the rise of the Progressive University or, what is the same thing, the making of higher education in the image of the modern research university. The modern research university is a source of pride among modern peoples. Commercials for universities during football games emphasize how universities contribute to scientific progress, vanquishing diseases and engendering more prosperous living and economic growth.
Few are willing to trace today’s ills to the making of higher education as the modern research university. American universities and universities worldwide (especially in Germany) have contributed much to the storehouse of scientific knowledge. Research universities have produced, collected, and organized knowledge for the relief of man’s estate. Yet, when the research university becomes the model for all fields of knowledge, intellectual corruption is not far away.
When the research university becomes the model for all fields of knowledge, intellectual corruption is not far away. The Progressive University seeks to achieve progress through socially organized intelligence. Classical colleges, in contrast, were keepers of our civilizational flame. Frederick Rudolph’s fascinating Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636 (1977) celebrates the rise of this new vision of university life. Before the research university, American colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and William & Mary were small classical colleges with fewer than two dozen faculty members each. Each designed its own admissions standards, and students interested in applying might attend “prep” schools to prepare for entrance exams. A fixed classical curriculum emphasizing Latin, moral philosophy, mathematics, and natural philosophy awaited students. Faculty were called professors (e.g., professor of moral philosophy and belles-lettres), but they did not belong to formal departments and did not have anything like PhDs. They were intelligent amateurs, in love with their subject matters and deemed acceptable by the rest of the faculty. There were no majors, no accreditors, no electives, no professional organizations, and no departments. Well fewer than five percent of Americans attended such schools, though the institutions had an outsized influence on American politics through preparing statesmen, community leaders, and ordinary politicians.
Other educational institutions existed during the heyday of the classical college. Academies arose locally to prepare people for professions. Agriculture, trade, and engineering academies, for instance, staffed by intelligent practitioners in those areas, trained future practitioners. Professional schools in theology, law, and medicine would admit and train graduates from classical colleges or others able to pass entrance exams. Common schools gave citizens a good enough education for purposes of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Prep schools would get students ready for entrance exams for colleges. Societies of amateurs arose to pursue scientific knowledge, making no few advances over the course of time.
The somewhat haphazard American system of higher learning was not, under the classical model, harnessing educational institutions for the advancement of knowledge and the relief of man’s estate, as other systems around the world had begun to do. Germany was late to the big-power competition in Europe, but it caught up with a more dedicated form of national pride and a super-competent system of education with the research university at its apex. Americans borrowed liberally, but not slavishly, from the German idea of the university as they built the Progressive University.
It took generations for the new model to fully conquer American higher education. The Progressive University is organized around specialized and professionalized departments with an overarching and increasingly professionalized administration. Curricula revolve mostly around departments. Departments conduct hiring. Hiring is increasingly specialized and credentialed, such that a department will hire PhDs only from acceptable degree-granting departmental programs. Departments grant tenure and promotion, based on discipline-specific publications. Remnants of the old classical idea persisted for a generation in general education, but increasingly specific departments now offer it.
Less than a third of faculty in higher education had PhDs in 1900. Still, in 1903, William James, a mere amateur, penned “The PhD Octopus,” critical of the coming necessity that all future college professors have PhDs. “America is,” James wrote, “rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him.” He hoped to “cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency” lest America, like other nations, “suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease.” The “institutionalizing on a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive,” he warned, “always tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.”
We are five generations into an experiment in which the higher-education system is dominated by PhDs. Slowly but surely, the demand for PhDs increased as more were produced. First, in the early 1900s, major universities aspired to have department chairs with PhDs. A half-century later, a majority of faculty in the hard sciences had PhDs. By the 1960s, most faculty in the humanities had PhDs, too. What the PhD indicated, however, was the rise of the academic discipline or department as the central organizing principle of higher education. Students major in a discipline. Departments provide classes for general education. Departments staff the university. PhD programs produce professors, not “men of letters.”
Where classical colleges were strong, the Progressive University is weak. We are, in a sense, five generations into this experiment in which the higher-education system is dominated by PhDs and departments. We can conduct a postmortem on the Progressive University’s living body.
On one hand, aspects of the Progressive University are powerful and attractive. In theory, faculty focusing on one area of knowledge in research and teaching contributes to the project of conquering nature by obeying and understanding it. The more faculty in the hard sciences focus on medical research or oxidation, the more likely they are to go deep and make discoveries into the secret workings of nature. Much evidence exists that physics, biology, medical, and nursing faculty make precisely such advances. Students benefit from learning about science from such experts. America’s polytechnic and engineering programs are envies of the world, as evidenced by how many foreigners attend American engineering schools.
“The ignorance and general incompetency of the average graduate of American Medical Schools,” wrote Harvard’s Charles Eliot in the 1870s, “is something horrible to contemplate. The whole system of medical education in this country needs thorough reformation.” And medical schools were reformed, in part through professional associations dedicated to improving specialties, in part through the hiring of faculty capable of producing and knowing the latest research, and in part by the building of standardized medical schools with real admissions standards. No one would repeat Eliot’s critique of medical schools today!—where universities contribute to progress and technical training with the real stuff of nature: atoms, mechanical structures, or the human body.
Real downsides exist for the Progressive University, however. Where classical colleges were strong, the Progressive University is weak. Universities trade depth and specialization for breadth and wisdom. Faculty were more attached to their colleges than to a discipline under the classical model. Faculty were intelligent generalists hired for their ability to teach and inspire, not for their ability to conduct research. Faculty often grasped the wider swath of Western Civilization, being knowers of philosophy, history, literature, and theology—or what was once called “belles-lettres.” The backward-looking understanding of our civilizational roots was front and center, while the progressive and technical branches were to be learned elsewhere.
Nearly all of the non-hard-science “disciplines” now adopt the research methods of the hard sciences, as if the social sciences or the humane “disciplines” are just different versions of physics or biology. The center of gravity on the Progressive University is toward the hard sciences. Political science, for instance—my discipline—no longer aspires to understand the regime or offers a diagnosis of our political situation with a remedy but makes itself irrelevant to politics through “positivistic” research methods borrowed from the natural sciences. Other social sciences, even less grounded in reality, are simply dominated by ideological thinking.
Consider, for a moment, the plight of the many civics centers being established around the country—something reformers put much faith in. Each civics center is trying to do something bigger than a department. They are trying to restore some understanding of the classical college in a part of the Progressive University. However, they must all use the tools of the Progressive University to do so. They must find scholars who have earned a PhD in a specific discipline, who conduct ongoing research in their field of study, who are well-published through the peer-review process, et cetera. Each genuinely classical faculty member is a kind of miracle, surviving as a generalist in an age of extreme specialization and scientism. “Where will we find aligned faculty?” is the question on the lips of every administrator in civics centers.
Must practically every university have, mostly, the same administrative and curricular form (as they do today)? Higher-education reformers should put the Progressive University—the university designed to produce organized social intelligence through modern research methods—in the dock. The Progressive University is, according to its supporters, something liberating and powerful. There is something to that. Nevertheless, we should revisit questions long thought to be settled: Can different disciplines coexist easily on campuses? Is organizing curricula around disciplines a salutary development, or does it hamstring reformers’ efforts to preserve our civilizational heritage? Must we have PhDs teaching all university courses? Must practically every university and college have, mostly, the same administrative and curricular form (as they do today)?
No simple return to the classical college is possible. We will have research universities, and we should. We will have big medical schools, and we should. But the Progressive University is not an unmixed blessing to the cause of civilization. The Progressive University cannot and should not be simply destroyed. Instead, we should painfully, deliberately peel back the assumptions on which our Progressive University system has been built and reconsider.
Scott Yenor is director of the Kenneth B. Simon Center for American Politics at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a professor of political science at Boise State University.
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Scott Yenor
