Is the university worth saving? Three rescue strategies

“We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of justice.” –Harold Bloom (1995: 35). “Racialized and Indigenous academics and students across the country are raising critical questions such as: Whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge is discounted? Whose voice is heard and who is ignored?” – Frances Henry and Carole Tator (2009: 22) “As universities adopt the ideology of the transnational corporation and become subordinated to the needs of capital they are less concerned about how they might educate students in the ideology and civic practices of democratic governance and the necessity of using knowledge to address the challenges of public life.” – Henry Giroux (2009: 671) Is the university worth saving and if so, from what, for whom, and to what ends? This essay explores three different answers to that question. Traditionalists, like the American literary critic Bloom, understand the humanities and social sciences as exercises that help us grapple with the most profound existential questions. They seek to defend this approach against those who would moralize or politicize scholarship. In contrast, social justice scholars, like Henry and Tator, challenge the historical and ongoing exclusion of much of humanity from traditional university spaces and curricula, arguing for a more truly universal academy that responds to the urgent political and social questions of our times. Anti-capitalist intellectuals, like Giroux, seek to secure the university as a place to learn democracy and civic-mindedness against the transformation of the academy into a corporate institution operating in the interests of capital and with a corporate managerial style of governance. In this essay, I provide a stylized representation of each of these three approaches, as a way of recalling debates from the 1990s and early 2000s that continue today in new but still recognizable forms. I then offer a short discussion of how each raises questions and critiques the other approaches. If I bring my own commitments, this discussion is not an endpoint. Instead, I hope the exploration of three different answers to rescuing the university is a provocation, helping to create space for a serious, open-minded discussion about what the university is today, what the university ought to be tomorrow, and how we might get there. Scholars like Bloom, who was a major protagonist in the so-called “culture wars” of the 1990s, see themselves as guardians of what the university once was and could be again. Although Bloom was specifically concerned with his own field of literary criticism, his arguments have a broader import, as the opening quote suggests, concerning not just his own discipline but “the humanities and social sciences” (1995, p.35) and their future in the university. Bloom offers an impassioned defense of the “Western canon” (1995),1 while vigorously rejecting all those who seek to impose their political and moral values on the university curriculum (1995, p.4). It is an error to read and study in pursuit of “personal moral values” (1995, p.29), he argues, including those values that conservatives identify as virtues. He ridicules the idea that moral lessons can be drawn by reading Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy, and others, characterizing this as the “silliest” defense of the Western Canon (1995, p.30), as if, Bloom laments, literature is nothing but an instruction manual in “normative values and democratic principles” (1995, p.29). The university requires saving from such narrow-minded “ideological” readings of literature (1995, p.29), a position that Bloom, if he were still alive, would doubtless repeat today against conservative moralists seeking to limit access to books for any reason. Yet Bloom reserves most of his criticism for another moralist movement, namely, participants in what he calls the “School of Resentment” (1995, p.4). These are variously characterized as “feminist cheerleaders”, “multiculturalists” and racialized “literary activists” (1995, p.7), as well as Marxists.1 Bloom argues that the community of “Resenters of the aesthetic values of literature” (1995, p.517) misguidedly seeks “to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed…programs for social change” (1995, p.4). The “Resenters” embrace texts, not because they are aesthetically valuable but because the message is “simple, clear, and wonderfully conducive to social change” (1995, p.30). The point is to be “socially acceptable” (1995, p.30), conforming with whatever “preferred trope” (1995, p.31) is the politically correct (today we might say “woke”) message of the moment. As with conservatives and for the same reasons, this program of reading and critiquing to advance social change is a radically ill-conceived effort, since “Whatever the Western Canon is”, Bloom observes, “it is not a program for social salvation” (1995, p.29). Literary criticism, he states unequivocally, cannot “place itself in service of any social aims, however, morally admirable” (1995, p.29). In short, great literature is not meant “to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence” (1995, p.518), opening up new understandings within the private conscience of the student and the scholar. The intellectual accepts the difficult, complex task of analyzing an exceptional text that can be read and re-read, eschewing easily digested literature and instead preparing to grapple with “the great shadows of pain and of death” (1995, p.153) revealed in and through a literary work, as an author speaks to us from across the ages. Shocked into “wonder and astonishment” (1995, p.171) by vocabularies and imageries of “radical originality” (1995, p.147), in Dickinson, Eliot, Proust, and Beckett, we can begin to understand ourselves in new ways. Extending this argument to the social sciences, in ways that Bloom does not do explicitly, the point of social scientific scholarship is to understand ourselves and the social world that we are part of through innovative theories and concepts that can be applied across different social contexts. This understanding of the social self is the task of good scholarship, beyond the politics of any moment – and irreducible to politics, whatever misguided moralists of the right and left might argue. Scholars like Henry and Tator, who foreground race equity in the Canadian university, seek to challenge historical and enduring exclusions in the academy. They are forthright about their commitments, as the subtitle of Henry and Tator's (2009) edited book, Racism in the Canadian University: Demanding Social Justice, Inclusion and Equity, makes clear. In contrast to Bloom's preoccupation with what is timeless in the Western Canon, Henry and Tator begin by describing the university's historical roots. Since they are concerned by and motivated to end sexisms and racisms, they observe that the university has its origins in the interests of a “relatively homogeneous” community (2009, p.6, italics in original). Specifically, in North America, “The university institution was created and controlled largely by White males of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity who reflected their European origins and experience” (2009, p.5). The founders of the academy took for granted the absence of women and the exclusion of Indigenous and racialized people, so consolidating institutional practices, norms, and knowledges that reflected their own concerns. The university, thus marked by its foundations within “a dominant White Anglocentric, Eurocentric and racialized culture” (Henry & Tator, 2009, p.3) is not as universal as it pretends. Henry and Tator's edited collection documents and analyses both “overt and covert forms of racism and other forms of oppression” (Henry & Tator, 2009, p.8) that mark the academy, describing and analyzing these inequities to better challenge them. Unjust inequalities in the academy, they observe, include the explicitly racist, sexist harassment of racialized minorities and women (2009, pp.9–10), narrow syllabi that purport to teach “The History of Political Thought” but that actually teach “The History of Western Political Thought” (2009, p.13, italics in original), and the underrepresentation of racialized faculty (2009, p.14) combined with the under-resourcing of interdisciplinary departments of Black and Indigenous Studies (2009,p.16), among other concerns. To match the racially diverse social reality and equity aspirations of today's society, Henry and Tator argue, the university must be saved from its origins in White male Euro-centric experience and thought and associated, systemic inequities. In this view, the university and its activities are inescapably politicized, from the academy's origins. As Henry and Tator observe, “teaching and learning are deeply political practices” (2009, p.20), raising questions about whose voices are taught, to whom and how in university classrooms. To better reflect today's social realities, they argue, the university must undergo “sweeping changes” (2009, p.6) to take up the questions and challenges posed by a “heterogeneous culturally and racially pluralistic society, characterized by values such as equity and access to and inclusion of…diverse communities and ideas” (2009, p.6). The historically White, male European university can be remade, refusing to continue as a site of exclusion, instead fostering “the rights of all Indigenous and racialized students and faculty to find a safe, inclusive, and intellectual home.” (2009, p.20). This will mean new thematics in university classrooms as pedagogical and scholarly activities are re-oriented to grapple with “significant problems in society” (2009, pp.7–8), including “the racialization of poverty, Aboriginal homelessness, and racism in systems of cultural production, healthcare, and employment systems.” (2009, p.7). Inspired by social justice struggles outside of the academy, Henry and Tator urge the transformation of contemporary university. From its narrow origins in patriarchal Eurocentric experience and knowledge, they argue, the university can be re-imagined and re-made as an expansive space where those who have been marginalized within the academy can now be heard on the most urgent social questions of the day. Scholars in the tradition of Giroux, a strong critic of the corporate university, call attention to the ways that the university has become increasingly embedded in capitalist relationships, including corporate managerial decision-making cultures. Giroux argues that the historic function of the university is to “educat(e) young people in the public spirit of democracy by providing them with the knowledge, passion, civic capacities, and social responsibility necessary to address the problems facing the nation and globe” (2009, p.670). These aims have long been threatened by “the cult of expertise” (2009, p.670), authoritarian attacks on academic freedom, and “rigid” (2009, p.670) disciplines ill-equipped to deal with real-world dilemmas, but the university now faces an existential threat. Increasingly imagined as a “training center for future business employees” (2009, p.671), professors are rewarded for ideas that attract corporate funding (2009, p.670, p.673) or that can be patented as profitable intellectual property, while students are imagined, not as learners or citizens, but as consumers, future workers, and profit-making entrepreneurs. The university as a place of critical inquiry, truth-seeking, and “spirited debate” (2009, p.669) has given way to the corporate university. Increasingly, universities are governed by administrators whose main experience is from the business world, who market their institutions as “brands” (2009, p.671) and whose vision is driven by concerns around “cost-efficiency” and “short-term returns on revenue” (2009, p.682). Tenured faculty are replaced by contract faculty, who have no job guarantees and who participate only marginally in research and academic governance (2009, p.681). Heavily indebted students, whose tuition makes up for the shortfall in public funding, enroll in classes that will lead directly to much-needed employment, eschewing learning in the social sciences, humanities and the arts (2009, p.686). Philanthropists and corporations determine the directions of university programs and departments, privatizing knowledge production and threatening academic freedom (2009, pp.687-689). Unsurprisingly, given this bleak view, Giroux argues that the university must be saved from “(t)he increasing influence of corporate power on higher education” (2009, p.687), which itself entails a broader refusal of “market fundamentalism” (2009, p.691). If severely threatened, nonetheless the university can become a place of resistance, if only “scholars [are] willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society might become” (2009, p.691). What is at stake is not only the university but the creation of educated publics who are capable of the substantive discussion – the “engaged thoughtfulness” (2009, p.669) – that meaningful democratic political life demands. There is no agreement among these three approaches, as briefly sketched, except that they all agree that the university, as it once was or could be, is under threat—and worth saving. Bloom is essentially conservative, Tator and Henry seek thoroughgoing transformation and Giroux would like to see change towards a university that is a learning ground for democratic dialogue, rather than an expression of market values. Yet despite their important differences and incommensurabilities, I will argue here that each approach contains valuable insights into what makes the university worth saving. Social justice scholars rightly critique Bloom, and those like him, for his reactionary stance, including his willful misunderstanding of feminists, his thinly veiled attacked on the racialized scholars he scorns as “multiculturalists” and his lack of intellectual curiosity about traditions outside the Western Canon. But if Bloom does not merit our regard for his important failings, we might be sympathetic to his desire to maintain spaces in the university for the humanist tradition and for what this tradition can tell us about ourselves, in our singularity and in our shared humanity. We can read and learn in the humanities and social sciences to understand our own lives and the world around us without necessarily privileging political and social change and without knowing if our scholarship will lead us to moral or political betterment. With Bloom, we might agree on the importance of the university maintaining spaces that are open to reading and understanding as an exploration of the (social) self. This demands a radical willingness to read those with whom we fundamentally disagree, those with whom we share no political identification and those whose morals we find dubious, problematic and reprehensible. For Bloom this possibility for scholarship beyond considerations of good and evil – to borrow from Nietzsche – is necessarily the privilege of the erudite few. We might claim that space for each and all of us in the university. Indigenous and racialized scholars of all genders are too often read as necessarily political, but they too should be invited, when they choose, to enjoy scholarship without an explicit moral or political agenda. Bloom and his colleagues understand scholars who are committed to social justice, like Henry and Tator, as eroding the university as a space for aesthetics. More than that, Bloom regrets such approaches as participating in the active shrinking of the university as a unique and uniquely valuable space for understanding the self and for sociologists specifically, the social self. What such criticisms miss is that this space does not exist in a university for far too many, since the academy has historically and ongoingly excluded the vast majority of human beings and knowledges, including women, racialized and Indigenous people and the distinctive ways that they have come to know within relationships of inequality. A determined focus on politics is necessary to expose and challenge the university's business-as-usual, not least the ways that the distribution of university resources – including faculty, academic honors, and administrative support – but also disciplinary structures, and workplace cultures, reflect the parochial priorities and habits of the White European men who founded them. Making universities more representative, that is, more universal with respect to who is in them and what knowledges and questions are taken up, is thus a vital question, one that only those who are already settled within the university, like Bloom, can afford to ignore. Political struggles are necessary, if only to secure the right of each and for all to belong to the university, as senior administrators, faculty and students whose voices shape university governance, academic cultures and scholarship. Anti-capitalist scholars, like Giroux, fear that there is little room left in the corporate university for humanistic reflection and for social justice. Arguments among academics over whose presence, voices and history should count in the university matter. These debates are moot, however, if university governance structures respond to the corporations that fund them rather than the scholars that work in them. If such an approach draws important attention to the interests that govern contemporary universities, unfortunately, these observations have been advanced, emphatically, from the left as a reason to set aside (“for now”) the passionate anti-racist social justice struggles by people like Henry and Tator. Arguing that university corporate governance must be challenged first and then gendered racisms can be taken up later creates what Bloom might see as an unholy alliance between these Marxists and himself, both of whom see questions of gender and racial representation as, at best, secondary considerations. Where Giroux's arguments are useful is when they are seen as part of – and not a priority over—struggles to enlarge the university as a space for reflection and one that welcomes those who have been excluded from the center of academic activities. In a time of climate change, and the existential threat that this poses to all life on earth, anti-capitalist insights might be extended, mobilized to draw attention to the role of fossil fuel corporations in university governance and funding. To end here is no doubt unsatisfactory for partisans of each of the three positions. But if this open-ended discussion stimulates a useful debate over the university and whether it is worth saving, and for what ends, and for whom, then this dissatisfaction is worth the price of seeming irresolute.

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