[Peace-discuss] She innocently asks:

[C. G. Estabrook]

My family has been involved with American colleges and universities for 350 
years. Obviously, that fact gives me no special insight to the matter; it does 
direct my attention to it, though.

I've been an interested observer of US universities for no less than five 
decades myself, going off to college in the 1960s and thinking I'd been given 
the key to the candy store. "Bliss was it then to be alive..." (although I 
thought then and would probably think today that one of the most affecting 
accounts of that experience is contained in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury). 
I couldn't imagine living in any other world, although I may have been better 
off if I could have.  Each time they threw me out I crawled back in, largely 
owing to a failure of imagination.

In my dotage I think perhaps too much is made of the matter.  It's hardly novel 
to think that academic intellectuals suffer from a certain narcissism, but I'm 
suggesting that we overrate the importance of colleges and universities. 
There's been a suspicion abroad for a while that they are largely irrelevant to 
the health of the polis.  Many of the great spirits of Euro-American 
intellectual history, from Erasmus to Marx, were thrown out of universities; 
others, from Shakespeare to Einstein, had minimal contact with them.  (Chomsky 
is a counter-example, more so as his linguistic work was originally funded by 
the military - although I don't doubt that he would have done it even if the 
Pentagon and MIT hadn't embraced him as the Spartan boy did the fox...)

On the negative side of the ledger is the fact that the primary effect of the 
modern US university system is the inculcation of regime-supporting intellectual 
conformity. While it's true that university-based critiques of government policy 
40 years ago made a big difference, having been there I know that fewer people 
were involved than later said they were.  It was always a minority phenomenon.

More importantly, what survey data we have show that support for the USG 
position in regard to the Vietnam War was positively, not negatively, correlated 
with years of formal education.  The more schooling you'd had, the more likely 
you were likely to support the US war in Vietnam (although non-support included 
the "win-or-get-out" position). US education was doing its job.

The two great ideological institutions of the 20th-century US - the university 
and the press - look like being about to undergo substantial changes. That may 
be no bad thing.  --CGE



David Green wrote:
> "...does the profit motive pervert the mission of ...universities?"
>  
> An obfuscationist NYT book review that manages to avoid mentioning the 
> relationship between higher education and military research. We are 
> instructed to believe that the problem is one of harmony between 
> publicly funded research and private profit.
>  
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Goldin-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/books/review/Goldin-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print>
>  
> DG

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