Archishman Raju

It needs to be stressed that the university in the United States in its very foundation was a white supremacist institution. White supremacy, whose origins are in Europe, should not be confused with mere discrimination on the basis of colour.


“All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority” - James Baldwin”

The UGC announced last year that a PhD from any of the top 500 universities qualify to apply directly to Assistant Professor positions in Indian universities. The criteria for top universities are set by three privately owned companies, whose ranking criteria are worth a separate study. In any case, even a cursory look at the list reveals its complete dominance by institutions based in the United States. The list points to, and in some ways helps to cement, the complete dominance of the US and its junior partners in knowledge production and their control over ideology. Moreover, the higher education model in the United States is presumed to show the rest of the world a mirror to their future. This is already becoming clear in the form of the increasing number of new private universities in India which are modeling themselves on the American image. Hence, an examination of the state of Higher Education in the United States has far reaching ramifications for our own higher education.

Notwithstanding the optimism of the dominant classes in other countries, it is interesting to note that pessimism about the state of higher education in the USA itself is widespread.  One of the top reads of 2018 in The Chronicle of Higher Education was “Higher Education is Drowning in BS”[i]. The New York Times has carried a report “The Anti-College is on the Rise”[ii]. Even the Gallup Blog reports “A Crisis in Confidence in Higher Ed”[iii]. While too much should not be made of opinion pieces, or even opinion polls, they do reflect part of the reality about the higher education system in this stark statistic reported in a 2018 report[iv]: More than 60% of college students in the United States at some point experienced “overwhelming anxiety” and more than 40% at some point felt “too depressed to function”. It is unclear from the survey itself what the causes of this anxiety are, though “Academics” was one of the top reasons reported. I would venture to guess that the percentages are even higher in those universities which make it to the top 10 or 20 in rankings.

This statistic is in fact completely unsurprising to most people who have had any recent experience with an American institution, and been conscious of their surroundings.  I believe it is important to take a broad historical view. An explanation of the crisis in higher education in the United States is to be found outside the university: in the broader society and its history.

 It needs to be stressed that the university in the United States in its very foundation was a white supremacist institution. White supremacy, whose origins are in Europe, should not be confused with mere discrimination on the basis of colour. While it does have psychological and sociological dimensions, its basis is in a fundamental assumption: the right of one civilization (Western civilization in particular) to dominate and destroy other civilizations. This assumption is certainly not held only by white people. It works implicitly in the logic of American institutions and periodically finds explicit support in intellectual work (Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations being a prominent example), or in popular level works (Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens being the most recent example). Hence the task of the American university was always an indoctrination of the student body that perpetuated the dominance of this particular ideology. This deeper truth often also took a more open racial character. Princeton University, for example, did not admit a single black student until near the end of the second world war. John Dewey, one of the foremost American theorists on education, asked for higher education for whites, but only vocational education for blacks.

The universities in the US gained prominence after the end of the second world war and the collapse of the British empire; for it was then that the dominance of the United States in the world was cemented.  This led right into the Cold War, along with the Korean war, which in the words of Joseph McCarthy was “only one phase of this war between international atheistic communism and our free civilization” (emph. added).  The McCarthy era cemented a place for anti-communism in all institutions of the United States, from labor unions to universities. The free civilization did not even offer voting rights to blacks or allowed their presence in white universities or schools well into the 1950s. Moreover, every professor had to sign a document verifying they were not a communist. The communists themselves were thrown out, and there were very few non-communists who had the courage to refuse to sign on principle. This was the first step in the post war transformation of the American University. The response of the intelligentsia to the McCarthy era is well described by the black writer James Baldwin, whose description is worth quoting at length:

“Some of the things written during those years...taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community which I will never forget. Their performance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which this community has always protected itself against the deepest implications of black suffering, persuaded me that brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility. It must be remembered, after all, that I did not begin meeting these people at the point that they began to meet me: I had been delivering their packages and emptying their garbage and taking their tips for years. (And they don’t tip well.) And what I watched them do to each other during the McCarthy era was, in some ways, worse than anything they had ever done to me, for I, at least, had never been mad enough to depend on their devotion. It seemed very clear to me that they were lying about their motives...For intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested— the truth is a two-edged sword– and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.”[v]

 In 1965, there was a very instructive debate between Baldwin and William Buckley at the Cambridge Union Debating society. Baldwin, a black writer who had never been to college was a trenchant critic of the American establishment. He made a plea to all Americans that they absorb history and act on it, which he thought would require the complete transformation of American institutions and was the only hope for the improvement of relations between whites and blacks in America. In response, William Buckley, (by then a famous public intellectual and a graduate from Yale) who was in effect representing the institution, warned that if the black movement opted for a radical solution to the problems they face, then it would be a threat to “our civilization” and will require that America fight them on the ground.

At around this time, in the late 1960s, Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the Black Panther Party, were foremost in fighting for the establishment of Black Studies in universities in California. This led subsequently to the movement for the establishment of “Black Studies” and later “ethnic studies” departments in the universities.  Meanwhile the Vietnam war had led to large scale anti-war demonstrations. The black freedom struggle and the anti-war protests created space for the transformation of the university. The demands of the Black Panther Party on education, for example, were both remarkably simple and profound:

“We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.”

This was one of ten major demands of the Black Panther Party which also called for full employment and housing. It should be noted that in fact the Black Panthers were very particular about operating, as an organization, within the American legal framework. Huey Newton was famous for carrying with him a gun (at that time, legal to carry publicly) and a law book. In response to their demands, and their increased ideological challenge, the United States unleashed a violent onslaught against the Black Panther Party, brutally killing its members, infiltrating its organizations and imprisoning its leadership[vi].

In 1975, Samuel Huntington was part of producing a report which argued that universities were failing in their task of “indoctrination of the young” and they required to moderate “the excess of democracy”[vii]. This “moderation” took place subsequently, very violently, and perhaps most effectively after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This ushered in what today is called the neo-liberal era. Tuition costs went up, students piled up huge debts and the university began to have a burgeoning administration with jobs traditionally done by faculty now undertaken by professional full-time administrators. Simultaneously, fewer faculty was hired on tenure track; teaching on contract hours at multiple universities and colleges became the norm for younger faculty. This corporatization of the university, however, is only one part of the story. The other side is the increased ideological assault on past movements and the increased promotion of post-modernism and identity politics.

Completely inconsequential French thinkers were suddenly promoted as great philosophers. Ethnic Studies departments became institutionalized, and their demands reduced to “equal status” within universities. The concept of ‘power’ became diffuse and acquired an almost mystical character where it was present first and foremost in all individual interactions and then in cultural activities. A section of the Indian professoriate, for example, gained extreme prominence as a result of their promotion in American Universities during this period. Past movements were ruthless criticized, i.e. creating the perception that their failure was not primarily a result of state repression or of certain mistakes but a result of their internal irredeemable inadequacies. This criticism usually ignored the testimony of those who were in the movement themselves, but contributed greatly to the careers of many intellectuals. This created an atmosphere where you would be hard-pressed to find a “radical” professor in any major US university today, who speaks out on issues of war and imperialism linking them to problems of poverty and racism at home, which is the intellectual legacy of the black radical and anti-war movements of the past.

Instead political activity today at universities in the United States has concepts which would be considered ridiculous in many other parts of the world: They include “safe-spaces”, “self-care” and even “cry-ins”. Speech and words are analyzed extensively for evidence of cultural bias. Any kind of leadership is attacked as oppressive and the character of past revolutionary leadership is assassinated with particular glee (recent attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. by a historian is an extreme example of a regular phenomena). Spontaneous protests naturally still happen, but they operate in an ideological and organizational vacuum, since they refuse to link themselves with any historical tendency and thus produce little effect. The conservative commentator David Brooks complained in The New York Times last year that this was “A generation emerging from the wreckage”, where he sentimentally lamented the loss of faith in big institutions in the young generation. While these big institutions have never inspired faith for many, it is nevertheless correct that the young generation today has received no education on how to deal with the inadequacies of the institutions they see around them, and hence have little opportunity to have knowledge of their position in the society or the world, except to pursue their career.

All of this has operated alongside a society which is in decay. The economic crisis of 2007-2008 has had effects from which the United States is yet to recover. Poverty and homelessness are very visible on the streets of any major city, and are highly accentuated among the black population. Americans are battling with an opioid crisis. White middle-aged men, in particular, have the highest rate of suicide in the country. Many second-generation Asian immigrants find themselves in an identity crisis in the United States which is difficult to resolve. The white working class is in open revolt in many places, even if the expression of that revolt is not taking the form that one would wish it to take.

The higher education system in the United States provides no way to understand any of these phenomena. The universities themselves are corporations actively feeding off this poverty. Radical political activity on most campuses is non-existent, and classrooms behave as if none of these above mentioned facts exist, or else isolate them so much to make them meaningless. By divorcing themselves so completely from the society they are based in, universities in the United States are making themselves irrelevant. Hence, at a formative age during college, a young person searching for moral direction is only given rank individualism and careerism as a possibility (this extends also to academia where such careerism is all pervasive). It is incumbent upon people in the US that they create spaces for education and knowledge outside of the university. There is much to learn from the 20th century and a new synthesis of ideas is required to help us face some of the major challenges the world faces today.

What then keeps the American higher education system going? It is simply that they continue to have the most wealth and power in the world. The top 20 or so of the “best” universities in the world also happen to be, with few exceptions, the richest in the world. What is required is instead to understand that the American system does not provide “higher” education, it at best does a poor job of providing vocational educational for the new economy and creating disciplined professionals. It is true that it is most successful at doing this because of the wealth and power it enjoys , but nobody holds wealth and power forever, nor should it be a criteria for judging what a good education should be.


Archishman Raju is a physicist doing postdoc at Rockefeller University, USA. Many of the ideas presented in the above article came from discussions at the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation in Philadelphia of which he is a member. 

References


 [iv] American College Health Association National College Health Assessment II, Spring 2018

[vi] https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/

[vii] The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, 1975