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the end of the university has been declared...

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It gives me little pleasure to read Stanley Fish, a man who has turned a professorship into a small media empire, but without his review I would have been unaware of Frank Donoghue's book „The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the fate of the Humanities. In this book, according to Fish, Donoghue announces the end of liberal arts education as we know it, owing to the prominence of corporate thinking at the administrative level. Running the university as a business, Donoghue alleges, has resulted in a shocking decline in the average number of permanent faculty at our universities to an average of 35%. Along with vanishing tenure goes academic freedom, small class sizes, course selection, and learning for the sake of learning, rather than for the sake of maintaining America's rapidly shrinking middle class. These complaints are not new, of course. Donoghue's innovation is to assert that the threat of corporate thinking to America's universities is much older than most people think. According to the excerpt from the book available on Amazon, the American anti-intellectualism directed against universities found it's voice through such captains of industry as Carnegie at the turn of the 20th century. Donoghue argues that the disdain of liberal arts training has been with us ever since, and that the corporations have finally won.

Without the benefit of Donoghue's book in my hands, I cannot judge whether his announcement of the liberal arts' impending doom is credible, but the review of the book got me thinking again about the university and my relationship to it. I had the privilege of going to an expensive liberal arts college where the humanities reigned supreme, and I enjoyed every minute of it. We were taught that reading the classics and having a cohesive curriculum would teach us how to think better or „learn how to learn®“ as dear old Reed College put it. When I reached graduate school at the University of Virginia, however, I encountered the undergraduate education that most American kids receive: huge lectures followed by half-hearted discussion sessions led by starving, resentful, and extremely under-sexed teacher's assistants like yours truly. I always knew that this sort of education existed, but being at Reed made it difficult to believe. We rarely had a course with more than fifteen students, and the college had no graduate school, so we were always taught by a member of the faculty.

My graduate school experience exposed me to the type of corporate university experience that Donoghue describes. I watched friends and colleagues who finished their degrees trudge off to one year visiting assistant professor positions in such glamorous locals as Alabama and Mississippi. When a few of them came to Seattle for a conference years later, I found them downtrodden and uninteresting. Instead of talking about what they were writing about, the only topic of conversation was how to find teaching positions somewhere less awful. The students at the University of Virginia were even more miserable. Those few who actually wanted instruction had to beg for it from an army of teaching assistants nourished exclusively on Ramen noodles, which was the only sustenance our stipends would buy. It seemed a world away from Reed College, where we would stroll to class eager to absorb all the knowledge $20,000 a year could buy. Here students shuffled off to class like they were going to work on an assembly line. There was no enthusiasm, no curiosity, unless they wanted to know if an exam could be postponed for an upcoming fraternity party.

So if Donoghue is right and intellectual curiosity has left the university, where has it gone? Throughout my university career I always looked at the university as a kind of Noah's Ark of intellectual inquiry, just as some people see zoos as an ark for endangered animals. No matter how anti-intellectual America became, there would still be these institutions where people could live the life of the mind without someone asking: „great, but how does it make money?“ If that is no longer possible at the university, where will thinking take place? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there will always be people who are interested in philosophy, math, music, and art for their own sakes. The question is, where will they go?

If I were a rich man, I would rebuild the Ivory Tower. I would create a university, or university-like institution that was dedicated to the life of the mind. Unfortunately, I'm not rich, so the most I may be able to offer is an Ivory Quonset Hut. The hut offers no library, professors, laboratories, or performing arts centers, just people who are interested in studying for the sake of studying. At first, my Ivory Hut will exist only in the ether of the Internet, where people can find each other. Perhaps later I can build a real hut, or yurt, or perhaps even a house, and invite people to come. I believe there is a precedent for this sort of thing. Long before attending university was commonplace there were groups of interesting people being interesting all by themselves. The university's mission was to democratize the interest in the liberal arts. If Donoghue is correct, that mission has ended in failure. So we're on our own. It's a very romantic notion: a few remaining curious people, perhaps at sunset, reading something interesting by the sea, by the door of their Ivory Quonset Hut. Perhaps I'll see you there.