What’s the Matter with College?
By Rick Perlstein
When Ronald Reagan ran against Pat Brown in 1966 for the governorship of California, the defining issue was college. Governor Brown was completing the biggest university expansion in modern history – nine new campuses. California’s colleges and universities had been instrumental in turning the nation’s biggest state into the world’s seventh-biggest economy and an international cultural mecca – and they formed the heart, Brown presumed, of his re-election appeal. Ronald Reagan’s advisers agreed and sought to neutralize the higher-ed issue by having the actor announce his candidacy flanked by two Nobel Prize winners. Reagan had other ideas. For months he told campaign-trail audiences horror stories about the building takeovers, antiwar demonstrations and sexual orgies ”so vile that I cannot describe it to you” at Berkeley, the University of California’s flagship campus. Reagan’s advisers warned him that disparaging the jewel of California civilization was political suicide. The candidate snapped back, ”Look, I don’t care if I’m in the mountains, the desert, the biggest cities of this state, the first question: ‘What are you going to do about Berkeley?’ And each time the question itself would get applause.”
It’s unimaginable now that a gubernatorial race in the nation’s largest state would come down to a debate about what was happening on campus. But it seemed perfectly natural then. The nation was obsessed with college and college students. It wasn’t just the building takeovers and the generation gap; the obsession was well in gear by the presidency of John F. Kennedy. (In October 1961, Harper’s devoted an issue to the subject.) The fascination was rooted in reasons as fresh as yesterday’s op-ed pages: in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, good colleges were a social-mobility prerequisite, and between 1957 and 1967, the number of college students doubled. Reagan actually cast himself as this new class’s savior, asking whether Californians would allow ”a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority.” To that, liberals responded that these communities’ unique ability to tolerate noisy, dissident minorities was why universities were great.
Now, as then, everyone says higher education is more important than ever to America’s future. But interesting enough to become a topic of national obsession? Controversial enough to fight a gubernatorial campaign over? Hardly. The kids do have their own war now, but not much of an antiwar movement, much less building takeovers. College campuses seem to have lost their centrality. Why do college and college students no longer lead the culture? Why does student life no longer seem all that important?
Here’s one answer: College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.
For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago – as an undergraduate between 1988 and 1992, and again since 2002. After growing up in a suburb that felt like a jail to me, I found my undergraduate years delightfully noisy and dissident. I got involved with The Baffler, the journal of social criticism edited by Thomas Frank, who went on to write ”What’s the Matter With Kansas?”; every Sunday, I trekked down to the neighborhood jazz jam session, where ’60s continuities were direct. The bass player was a former Maoist, the drummer a former beatnik.
Early in May I had lunch with the beatnik, Doug Mitchell, who received his undergraduate degree in 1965 and then went to graduate school here and is now an editor at the University of Chicago Press. ”I suspect I got in this university primarily because I had a high-school friend who got a pirated copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,”’ he said. ”I put that on my reading list. And the admissions counselor was utterly astonished: ‘How did you get this?’ It was truly banned in 1960.” He settled into an alienated suburban kid’s paradise. ”We had a social life that kind of revolved around the dorm lounge, because that’s where everybody hung out after midnight. And some people got way into it and didn’t survive. They would never go to class. They would argue night and day in the lounge!”
Mitchell and his friends enhanced their social life with special celebrity guest speakers, lured to their dorm lounge with little more than chutzpah and a phone call -people like Anais Nin, Eudora Welty and Ralph Ellison. One kid, a loudmouthed New Yorker (overrepresented at Chicago, which didn’t have Jewish quotas), confronted Ellison over the latter’s distaste for Charlie Parker. Mitchell shakes his head in wonder. ”It was extraordinary to see this kind of head-to-head thing go on practically the first week you showed up on campus. The scrappy kids who were there wanted to mix it up with whoever came in.” Mitchell’s stories tumbled forth: baiting rednecks by reciting Lenny Bruce routines; listening to Elaine May and Mike Nichols records (they helped invent modern sketch comedy at the Compass Theatre two blocks from campus in the 1950s); the midnight concert students organized in which John Cage shared the bill with Chicago jazz players. ”We seemed to have boundless verve. I had a friend who said, ‘Why don’t we call Dexter Gordon and get him to come to our dorm lounge and play?’ Then we called John Coltrane and said, ‘Would you like to do a concert with Ravi Shankar?’ The point I’m trying to make is that the adventure of going to college consisted of a kind of freedom that you couldn’t imagine until you turned 18, you were no longer under adult control and you made your own schedule. This is the most liberating moment Americans have in life.”
Mitchell was beaming, but his face fell when I told him about my conversation the previous evening with Hamilton Morris, a New Yorker finishing up his first year of college. His parents make documentary films. He attended a high school of the arts where ”they sort of let me do whatever I wanted.” He is a filmmaker, a painter, a photographer, an experienced professional stand-up comedian. His life precollege was exceptionally fulfilling, and he expected it to remain so here at one of the nation’s great universities. Then what happened?
I hated it from the first day,” he told me. ”People here are so insanely uncreative, and they’re proud of it.” His fellow students ”had to spend their entire high-school experience studying for the SATs or something and didn’t really get a chance to live life or experience things.”
What was most harrowing was Hamilton’s matter-of-fact description of a culture of enervation – ”that so many people hate it with a passion and don’t leave.” I heard similar things from several bright, creative searchers on campus – the kind of people in whom I recognized my own (and Doug Mitchell’s) 19-year-old self. I sat down with a group of them at the Medici cafe, a campus fixture for decades, and they described college as a small town they’re eager to escape. ”Everyone I talk to has that kind of feeling in their bones,” Mike Yong, a Japanese literature major, insisted. ”Even if they’re going into investment banking.” Someone offered the word ”infantilizing.” Murmurs of assent, then the word ”emasculating,” to louder agreement. One even insisted his process of political, social and creative awakening had happened, yes, during college – not because of college but in spite of it. Is their diagnosis a function of college itself today, or just this particular college? Hamilton Morris told me stories that suggest the former. He visited his adviser and described his frustrations with the university. Her response: ”You’re not meant for college. You should really drop out.” He struck up a conversation with a student on his floor ”who as far as I can tell doesn’t have any friends at all and nobody talks to him. He has no desire to transfer – even though he’s unhappy. I feel like a lot of people are like that as well. You know: ‘College sucks anyway, so I might as well stay here.”’
Most of my interviewees were happy. Caroline Ouwerkerk was ecstatically so. As I futzed with my digital recorder, she gushed, ”I’ll talk all day about the university, whether or not I’m being recorded!” She gushed about the housing system, which sorts students randomly into teamlike ”houses,” where ”someone is caring for you right from the start.” She gushed about her job with the university-sponsored Community Service Leadership Training Corps and about her volunteer work advising prospective students. We met in the spacious lobby of the campus art museum, where she had already been three times but had yet to see the paintings; she was always there for a reception or a meeting. I asked if many of her fellow students felt alienated from society, as many young people did in the 1960s. ”I don’t think anyone really feels that,” she responded. ”I am so impressed with so many of my peers at the university, with what they’ve accomplished before they go there in their high-school years, what they’ve accomplished now.” Caroline is smart. She is passionate. She has a social conscience and a mature grasp of the extraordinary privileges life has handed her. A reporter slotting her in for an interview also discovers she’s astonishingly overscheduled – ”Right now it’s probably the worst time to ask me what I do for fun!” – but even her fun is impressive: an anthropology major specializing in food culture, she has been all over the city discovering exotic new ethnic restaurants. Caroline is a pristine example of what the Times columnist David Brooks called, in a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article on college, an Organization Kid. She is, indeed, a cog in the organization – specifically, the bureaucracy that schedules students’ self-exploration, the very facet of campus culture that Mike Yong and his friends find most ”infantilizing.” Organization Kids don’t mind it.
Most people make their accommodation between the two extremes. Their numbers include, interestingly enough, most of the campus activists. Jonathan Hirsch is a right-of-center example. He has been the president of Chicago Friends of Israel, and one of the actions he led was taking over the Q. and A. session at a panel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the Friends considered unbalanced. Hirsch is a case study of a phenomenon that wouldn’t have made sense even to Ronald Reagan in 1966: the saturation of higher education with market thinking. It cuts against the presumption that the campus should be a place radically apart from the rest of society – its own ”city-state,” wrote the British poet Stephen Spender in a 1968 essay entirely typical of the era’s what’s-happening-on-campus genre. A biology major, Hirsch is most passionate about biotechnology. His ambition is to work for a venture-capital firm. He got excited telling me about the summer job he had at the University of Chicago’s Office of Intellectual Property and about sitting on a committee to help set up a university ”biotech incubator, where a new biotechnology company can be started up.” He also expresses disappointment in Chicago’s relative lack of market mojo: ”Stanford commercializes a lot of stuff very well. This university has a lot of stuff that would be great, but we don’t act on it.” I asked whether incentivizing science according to its marketability might distort the university’s mission to nurture ideas on the basis of intellectual merit, regardless of commercial potential. He’s a bright kid, but I’m not sure he understood the question.
Just before these interviews, there had been a wave of campus activism: Chicago was considering replacing its idiosyncratic Uncommon Application in favor of the so-called Common Application used by many top-tier schools. ”I love the Uncommon Application,” Hirsch said. Then he added, ”But at the same time I want the value of my degree to go up.” One thing that the U.S. News & World Report rankings measure, he explained, is ”selectivity,” and the Uncommon Application (goes the theory) kills Chicago’s selectivity rate by keeping more people from applying. Interestingly enough, when I later spoke to a pro-Uncommon Application advocate, his argument for it was likewise couched in economic terms.
I brought up another goal of campus activists to Jonathan Hirsch: reversing Chicago’s decision, unique among top-tier universities, not to divest from the military government of Sudan in protest against the genocide in Darfur. He responded: ”I understand their whole position. But, well, I’m not going to intrude myself on the investment decisions of the university.” He then began a sophisticated critique of the marginal utility – limited, he says – of the divestment strategy as politics. When I later presented his arguments to a group of Darfur activists, they laid out their own position in market language: ”In terms of the prevailing trend in corporate social responsibility, as a large corporation, albeit a university, we want our university to remain competitive in that respect.”
There is something that these very different students share. Just as the distance between the campus and the market has shrunk (perhaps not that surprising at Chicago, home of the market-based approach to almost everything), so has the gap between childhood and college – and between college and the real world that follows. To me, to Doug Mitchell, to just about anyone over 30, going to college represented a break, sometimes a radical one – and our immediate postcollege lives represented a radical break with college. Some of us ended up coming back to the neighborhood partly for that very fact: nostalgia for four years unlike any we had experienced or would experience again. Not for these kids.
Hamilton Morris, with his hip, creative parents, is an extreme case of a common phenomenon: college without the generation gap. (As I write this at a coffee shop near campus, a kid picks up her cellphone – ”Hi, Dad!” – and chats amiably for 15 minutes. ”When we went to college,” a dean of students who was a freshman in 1971 tells me, ”you called on Sunday – the obligatory 30-second phone call on the dorm phone – and you hoped not to hear from them for the rest of the week.”)
Morris is an exaggeration too of another banal new reality. You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture – and those hip baby-boomer parents – take care of the problem.
Caroline hopped on a community-service track in high school, continued in college and plans on a career working in the same kind of service bureaucracy after graduation as she does now. Jonathan will experience the same sort of continuity – he has embraced a worldview in which erasing the distinction between the university and the world outside it is the entire point. Some of these kids, indeed, might end up having more of a ”college” experience when they enter the workplace than beforehand. The workplace may be more surprising, and maybe even more creative.
Why aren’t people paying attention to the campuses? Because, as a discrete experience, ”college” has begun to disappear. My radical, alienated friends brought up the University of Chicago’s marketing materials: bucolic images of a mystic world apart, where 18-year-olds discover themselves for the first time in a heady atmosphere of cultural and intellectual tumult. But college no longer looks like that. They wondered how long the admissions office thought it could get away with it before students started complaining they’d been swindled. I posed the question to a brilliant graduating senior, someone I’ve been friends with for years. ”They’re assuming that the marketing is for students,” he explained. ”It’s not. It’s for parents.”
Who had, you know, gone to college back when it was college.
