Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship?

William Talcott
Visiting Scholar, University of Maryland
talcott@polityforum.org
CIRCLE WORKING PAPER 39
SEPTEMBER 2005
Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship?
Historical Perspectives
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CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives
The historical study of university campuses
can tell us much about the changing character
and presuppositions of citizenship. Likewise, the
study of citizenship can shed considerable light on
the nature of universities. Throughout American
history, various elite institutions can be seen
struggling to establish a semblance of order and
control in political society?most clearly in the late
19th century with large numbers of immigrants
changing the urban landscape, and with populist
movements threatening elite cultural and political
dominance, but equally in the face of early 20th
century phenomena of mass society, propaganda,
and global interdependence.1 I find it helpful to
think of modern universities, emerging in the
late 19th century, as right there in the struggle,
as new institutional arenas of public practice to
shape new kinds of citizens. From this perspective,
universities and modern citizenship are intertwined
in ways mutually complicating and obscuring. With
the aim of untangling some of these connections,
this review covers a sample of formative texts on
the broad topic of citizenship and the historical
development of modern universities in the United
States.
My focus is primarily on major research
universities, with the rationale that these have had
disproportionate cultural and institutional influence
over the development of higher education as a
whole. The university model of higher education in
the U.S. is often distinguished as having stemmed
from German traditions emphasizing specialization
and research, as opposed to the 19th century
collegiate model deriving from British traditions of
training the whole person. This distinction between
colleges and universities greatly oversimplifies their
institutional histories, but points to the general
direction of change in the latter 1800s toward
research, graduate study, and specialization.
Nineteenth century colleges clearly saw education
for moral character, ?mental and moral discipline,?
as one of their main objects. A student?s training,
for example, was typically capped by a yearlong
mandatory seminar in ethics taught by the college
president?who was, most likely, an ordained
minister.2 But modern research universities were
a different sort of institution, one in which religion
and character-building might be described, as they
were by a Berkeley student in 1892, as ?elective
studies.?3
Several developments stand out in the
formation of the university model. Following Johns
Hopkins? lead, institutions emphasizing research
and science came increasingly to dominate higher
education in the post Civil War U.S. Charles
Elliot?s elective system instituted at Harvard freed
undergraduates to pursue their own interests rather
than following a course set by the institution. Land
grant universities emphasized practical training
for farmers, mechanics, miners, engineers, as well
as primary and secondary school teachers. New,
more private and scientific notions of citizenship
were gradually eclipsing the collegiate emphasis
on moral character. Ostensibly handing the task
of character development to secondary and lower
schools, the university became more concerned
with technical expertise, scientific research and
professional development.
One persisting result of this transformation
in higher education has been to make discussions
of citizenship with reference to the university
sound dated, restrictive, or peripheral. The
concept pairs easily with 19th century collegiate
traditions, but not with modern universities. For
some, the idea of citizenship carries connotations
of moralizing authority, of being disciplined to fit
a good citizen mold, of sitting quietly and raising
one?s hand before speaking, and so on. President
Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago, for
example, in 1933 asserted in no uncertain terms
that ??education for citizenship? has no place in
the university.? (Ironically, the same Hutchins who
later defined liberal education as most simply ?the
education that every citizen ought to have.?)4
Note, however, the symbolic contrasts
between community and society, integration and
fragmentation, embedded in the simplified history
of transformation above. Either pole in these
contrasts can hold a positive or negative valence
depending upon one?s framework for understanding
political society, and one?s assessment of the
current state of society. The college/community/
integration link, for example, might connote antidemocratic,
stifling conformity, as easily as it might
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
suggest an antidote to a dysfunctional, fragmented
society. These valences come up frequently in
historical and sociological writing on universities,
and, more to the point, play an important ongoing
role in directing and legitimating choices within
the institution. For example, Hutchins? 1933
argument that the true aim of the university was
?the advancement of knowledge,? was situated in a
particular reading of the state of American political
society which emphasized a need for intelligent
direction, not conformity or unity.5
In contrast to their collegiate predecessors,
the modern universities? relationship to citizenship
was (is) less evident, more puzzling, and perhaps
more contentious. I say perhaps because the
character of appropriate instruction was often a
heated issue in colleges, as well, with contention
typically centering on religious matters.6 However,
my research on the development of modern higher
education in the U.S. has led me to the view that
citizenship was and is just as important to the
university as it was to the older college model. The
important difference is that citizenship here took on
new meanings and adopted new practices.
The question of education for citizenship
has recently seen revived interest, with several
volumes and many more articles dedicated to the
topic. This literature rarely refers to citizenship
as a cultural influence already embedded in,
and actively shaping, higher education. This is
a problem because models of the public sphere
and citizenship have long shaped universities
and colleges. In effect, the institution ?thinks?
of its mission(s) in terms of received patterns of
citizenship. Proposals for change are more likely
to be effective if they acknowledge and respond to
these models.
The single most influential model of the
university/citizenship relationship in the 20th
century, what I call the modernist model, emerged
in the late 19th century and eventually culminated
in the influential 1945 publication, General
Education in a Free Society. Written by a Harvard
committee of twelve, General Education surveyed
the cultural and educational elements necessary
for a modern democratic society. With the
relationship between higher education and public
practice as one of its central themes, the report
was important in setting the terms of discussion
of American higher education through the 1960s.7
The committee clearly articulated a model of public
practice that framed good citizenship as a matter of
free individuals making informed, rational choices,
individuals voluntarily forming a ?free society?
through mutual obligation. Universities were one
of the vehicles, and one of the expressions, of this
model of practice?chiefly, though not exclusively,
through the universities? scientific leanings.
Science, with its characteristic practice of forming
?objective, disinterested judgments based upon
exact evidence,? was singled out by the authors for
its ?particular value in the formation of citizens for
a free society.?8
The Harvard committee?s aim to develop a
model of democratic citizenship, and the manner
in which it addressed the topic, can in part be
attributed to the historical moment in which it
was written: in 1945, global concepts such as that
of a ?common fate? for humanity, and the threat
of totalitarianism, were immediate and tangible.
However, the cultural parameters of the ?red
book? (as the book became known for the color
of its cover) were already being circulated and
enacted early in the emergence of the American
university. In a sense, the Harvard committee?s
report symbolizes the culmination of political
and educational reform movements dating to the
late 19th century. The result of these movements
embracing science as a model of democratic polity
was the eventual dominance?especially in research
universities?of a modernist model of citizenship.
One of the ironies of modernist citizenship
is that it tends to inhibit discussion of substantive
moral aspects of public life. As a model
emphasizing rational choice and non-coercive
discussion among equals, citizenship is cast
primarily as a matter of procedure or method. A
modernist institution can thus speak volubly about
promoting independent, critical inquiry, and is
amply stocked with critical skills to detect any
suggestion of interference with independent inquiry,
free speech, or any distortions in communication.
The notion of citizenship itself, however, becomes
problematic here insofar as it suggests an
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives
element of loyalty or obligation to particular
values, traditions, or groups. Modernist citizenship
emphasized individual rational choice, as opposed
to the highly partisan, physical and occasionally
spectacular form of citizenship characteristic of late
19th century electoral politics.9
The shift in the meaning and practice of
citizenship around the turn of the 19th century
gradually gave the term ?citizenship? a connotation
of being somewhat outdated. By the 1930s, an
ambitious academic leader could reasonably
dismiss citizenship as something contrary to the
spirit of a university, even though universities had
worked very hard over the past several decades to
institutionalize new, modern forms of citizenship.
This historic shift toward modernist citizenship
helps to explain why few historical studies of higher
education place citizenship anywhere near the
center of the institution: universities had distanced
themselves from older models of citizenship. But
the university?s newly formed relationship to the
realm of modern public practice has frequently
been overlooked, disavowed, or unrecognized by
university members.
Among the major historical studies of
higher education written since 1960, Laurence
Veysey?s exhaustive and influential study, The
Emergence of the American University, merits
a close look. Veysey argues that by 1890 the
modern university had consolidated around
three aims: utility, research, and liberal culture.
Veysey points out that educators throughout
the Progressive Era used the terms ?democracy,?
?public service,? and ?public uplift? liberally to
describe the purpose of the institution. However,
he concludes that these appeals to democracy
had little specificity and eventually became cheap
coinage, with no significant impact on the structure
of the institution.10 Sorting out the various uses
of ?democracy? by educators, Veysey finds six
different meanings linked only by a shared appeal
to ?the maintenance of a high standard of individual
morality.? None directly related to citizenship as
public participation.
Citizenship clearly would not have worked
as a fourth category alongside Veysey?s three part
model of utility, research, and liberal culture, nor
could it have fit within any one of the three: a
university?s relationship to the public sphere cuts
across and can almost be said to encompass these
categories. However, if citizenship cannot be easily
slotted into Veysey?s framework, it nevertheless
shows up in various guises throughout the book.
In fact, The Emergence of the American University
implicitly highlights the extent to which each of
the three aims was saturated with notions of
citizenship. The concept of utility, for example,
incorporated the idea of serving public interests
through professional training. Research was widely
associated with moral progress and the cultivation
of civility. And among advocates of liberal culture
?the temptation remained overpowering to identify
oneself with an ideal America, however great
the discrepancy between it and the uncivilized
reality.? Thus scholars ?usually persevered in
seeking national uplift, even if by non-political
means.?11 And so on. As Veysey describes it, the
emerging university was very much situated within
constructions of political society. The key is to
look closely at what was taught about citizenship
through these ?non-political means?
Veysey saw the modern university as a
bureaucratic shell, and emphasized institutional
elements of conservatism and conformity as
they worked against the possibility of critical,
autonomous citizenship. The prevailing trend he
identified in modern higher education was toward
accommodation with non-academic demands in
American society, such as by acting as an agent
for individual success through technical skill
training. The aim of utility for democracy, for
example, had by the end of the progressive period
?silently evaporated as an ideal, leaving bare a
large institutional structure that functioned as its
own end.?12 The institution succeeded in creating
and protecting specialized departments, but the
result was hardly democratic: ?If the spirit of
scientific investigation had any intrinsic effect upon
the public role of the university, it was anything
but subversive, for it led either toward apathy
or toward a form of conservatism.? The problem
was that the habit of flexible thought associated
with scientific pursuit ?was bound to promote an
acceptance of nature as it was, hence of man, as
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part of nature, as he was.?13 While early educators
and scientists thought they were acting as a
progressive force, contributing to a model public,
they were actually reproducing the status quo.
According to the model of public practice Veysey
employs, the quality of citizenship in the early
20th century university fell short, as it lacked an
element of moral-critical engagement.
The critical lens Veysey employed in
The Emergence of the American University was
common, but not new or specific, to social thought
of the 1960s and later: this was a model of public
practice in which good citizenship requires a
coherent moral-critical vision to retain a quality
of independence or freedom. Applied to the
university, the argument was that vague definition
of institutional purpose, and the flexible outlook of
scientific thought, allowed business-like practices
to ?infiltrate? or ?penetrate? the institution. Higher
education over the course of the Progressive years
lost institutional coherence, and increasingly served
needs defined outside of the institution?and hence
did not have the quality of an independent public
actor. Veysey pushes the criticism only so far: by
the early 20th century, educators ?ran the danger?
of ?accepting the dominant codes of action? of
business, but the infiltration was incomplete and
to some extent necessary. The institution could
not run without financial support, and at major
universities it was rare to find a case where
business was ?made to stand for the whole? of the
institution.14
There are revealing similarities between
Veysey?s The Emergence of the American University
and a study published three years later by
Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, Academic
Revolution. At the heart of both works is a deep
ambivalence about the character of public practice
in modern universities; if this is public theater, it
is a rote, mechanical performance. In Jencks and
Riesman?s account it is unclear whether universities
in the ?academic revolution? were among the
agents of social change, or the products of social
change. At times they portray modern universities
as the result of inexorable late 19th century societal
forces, chiefly having to do with the emergence
of national institutions in the U.S. This social
transformation put higher education at the center
of a new, more vertical organization of American
society dividing people according to ?merit? rather
than locality.
Emergence describes the transformation as
unfolding in necessary steps: in ?highly organized
societies with a very specialized division of labor,?
the rule of merit ?seems to us an inevitable
feature.? Meritocracy in turn ?brings with it? what
Jencks and Riesman describe as ?the national
upper-middle class style: cosmopolitan, moderate,
universalistic, somewhat legalistic, concerned with
equity and fair play, aspiring to neutrality between
regions, religions, and ethnic groups.? Change in
American society was ?inevitably? accompanied
by change in higher education.15 Merit needed
standardized, reproducible scales in order to be
recognized and distributed, making objective,
scientific method the dominant organizing principle
in higher education at the expense of subjective
knowledge. The end of this logical chain, beginning
with the demands of ?highly organized societies,?
is a form of self-denial: an institutional ?quest for
impersonality.? Predominant research methods
?go a long way toward determining the character
of the academician himself?? A graduate student
tends to become ?a passive instrument ?used? by
his methods and his disciplinary colleagues.?16
Supposedly neutral means unwittingly shaped
institutional ends.
It is unclear, again, if universities have some
status as independent institutions?if, in effect,
they are citizens? or if they are subjects to a
deeper systemic logic such as a specialized division
of labor. The exclusive push for objectivity, for
example, works counter to public participation and
against independent citizenship, with faculty ?hiding
behind evidence? and afraid to ?stick their necks
out.? The academic revolution seems to take place
in passive voice, without actors or action. It is clear
that Jencks and Riesman would have it otherwise:
they end the book with a call for greater freedom
and variety, arguing that the institution ought to
link objectivity and subjective experience as ?two
modes of knowing.?17 Such an institution would
recognize virtues other than skepticism and clarity
of thought, virtues including ?tact, practicality,
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives
social inventiveness?and even faith, hope, and
charity.?18
It does not take too much of a stretch to see
a rough model of citizenship education in this list
of virtues (republican?) undervalued by research
universities. Jencks and Riesman?s study remains
one of the more insightful accounts of the origins
and character of what I refer to as the modernist
model of citizenship embedded in modern higher
education. As with Veysey, they tend not to see
this dominant strand of institutional culture as
modeling?however inadequately?citizenship
practice.
The depiction of modern universities as apublic,
as public absence, is in part a limitation of
method: Veysey?s discussion of democracy does not
look beyond the writings of leading educators, and
tacitly assumes that where the word ?citizenship?
was not used, there were no concerns relevant
to citizenship. Jencks and Riesman use a form of
modernization theory which gives their writing a
deductive and a-historical tone. The early research
university might have looked different in both
books if, for example, it had been situated in the
context of turn of the century political reform
movements. By ?reasoning backwards,? instead of
studying the historical production of the institution,
Jencks and Riesman do not see that some
aspects of ?meritocratic? values were promoted
and consciously identified by reform movements
and Progressive educators in an attempt to push
cultures of citizenship away from the reigning spirit
and style of partisan politics. Universities did not
just serve other powerful institutions; rather, the
turn of the century university movement made a
claim on the nature of national public institutions.
The absence of citizenship as a theme in
both books may also be a consequence of their
particular approach to the concept: by the mid-
1960s, some aspects of the institution were not
recognized as modeling public practice. Or, stated
differently, by the mid-1960s, Progressive-era
cultures of citizenship in the institution did not
respond to progressive critical concerns. This was
especially so for scientific research?which both
books depict as a kind of conservative force? but
also, more abstractly, in the institution?s structuring
of relations between members. To Veysey the
university had the appearance of a shell, a
structure that ?functioned as its own end?; Jencks
and Riesman at times refer to the institution in
terms of impersonal ?machinery.? In both cases
university practices were not seen as serving
public ideals, ends other than the institutions own
functioning.
I read the theme of citizenship-absence in
these two influential books as, in part, a critical
strategy aimed at transforming the authors?
contemporary institutions. In retrospect, it is hard
not to read the books in the context of mid-1960s
calls for institutional change. Both argue for a
renewal of citizenship cultures on campus. But I
have to wonder, if the history of modern education
had simply been a move away from citizenship,
where did the authors? own critical orientations
come from? What made it seem appropriate for
these university members to criticize the modern
university in terms of citizenship?
More recent studies have elaborated
and sharpened the view of the emergence of
modern universities in the U.S. as a negative
turning point and target for criticism of public
practice.19 Thomas Bender places the origins of
this transformation in the late 19th century, while
others point to the interwar years as critical. In
?The Erosion of Public Culture? Bender writes of
late 19th century academic professionalization
as a withdrawal of intellectuals from disorderly
urban centers to the university as an ?intellectual
refuge.? The long-term result of this process, he
concludes, was ?an impoverished public culture and
little means for critical discussion of general ideas,
as opposed to scientific or scholarly expertise.?20
Burton Bledstein, in his important study The
Culture of Professionalism, wrote that by 1900
higher education had ?segregated ideas from
the public?; universities contained controversial
issues within the institution and ?reduced them to
scientific and technical terms.?21 Derek Bok writes
that the low point came by the end of the interwar
period, when ?institutions of learning had not only
ceased to be actively engaged in moral and civic
education; they had lost their former status as an
important source of moral guidance for the society.?
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In Bok?s account, the university embraced ?intellect
and technical proficiency,? not moral education.22
Robert Bellah, et al., in The Good Society, argue
that the early 20th century university, ?rather than
interpreting and integrating the larger society,
came more and more to mirror it.?23 Benjamin
Barber agrees, ?by the end of World War II,
higher education had begun to professionalize,
vocationalize, and specialize in a manner that
occluded its civic and democratic mission.?24 The
direction of critical interpretation, again, is similar
to Veysey?s.
Among more recent works, Julie Reuben?s
The Making of the Modern University (1995)
stands out as an important contribution to the
study of citizenship and higher education?though
its primary target is morality, and not citizenship
per se. Reuben traces the changing status of
science and moral discourse on campuses over
a sixty-year period, from 1870 to 1930. Most of
these changes have direct bearing on forms of
citizenship education. Readers will be surprised
to learn of the extent of change: at one point, for
example, universities embraced hygiene instruction
as a crucial aspect of moral education (158).
The Making of the Modern University emphasizes
the consequences?often unintended?of early
institutional reforms such as the introduction of
electives. As with Jencks and Reisman, the end
result of this chain of consequences is a form of
absence, in this case, a relative absence of moral
education in the Academy. Reuben?s argument is
based on a careful, and highly rewarding, study
of the writings and institutional choices made by
university leaders and faculty between 1870 and
1930. Reuben persuasively ascribes changing views
of morality and science to changes in institutional
practice.
I would like to see the relevant institutional
context expanded, however, to include sociopolitical
patterns beyond the university. Political
context, and contemporaries? perceptions of
political society, rarely enters into Reuben?s
analysis. Without this context it is difficult to
see the institutional separation of morality and
science as anything but a loss. During the decades
in which the marginalization of morality was
occurring, it was thought to be a problem primarily
by conservative religious and nationalist critics of
the university, who correctly saw that modernist
universities had the potential to plant critical seeds
of doubt in the minds of American students.25
University members at all levels of the
institution frequently make comparisons and
contrasts?implicit or explicit?between the campus
and the world beyond. These contrasts help to
construct a distinctive institutional identity and
help to guide institutional directions and practices.
Some measure of the causal force Reuben
attributes to the shape of the research university,
in other words, may be better understood in
reference to broader societal changes. Considering
the transformations Reuben describes in such
broader context, I think that Making of the Modern
University tracks the gradual dominance of a
particular model of citizenship in higher education,
not the gradual demise of citizenship per se.
Reuben?s study vividly illustrates how this model
of citizenship constrained the university?s ability
to address moral and civic issues; we hear less,
however, about the specific citizenship practices
and capacities this model enabled. And these are
not insignificant.
Several studies focusing on specific
disciplines rather than the institution as a
whole similarly identify a shift of emphasis from
?moralism and reform? to ?objectivity and science?
in the period roughly between 1880 through the
interwar years.26 Edward Purcell, for example,
writes that gradually in the early 20th century
?methodology replaced moralism in the minds of
many younger reformers and social scientists,
and the instrument of social research came to
overwhelm the goal of social reform.? Of course,
as Purcell notes, many felt that social research and
scientific advance indirectly furthered the goal of
social reform, and this belief, ?rationalized in the
minds of most the divorce between social science
and the problems of political morality.?27 And
Bruce Kuklick?s The Rise of American Philosophy,
for example, traces changes in the character of
philosophizing at Harvard University from 1860 to
1930. With professionalization, philosophy insulated
itself to the point where society ?ceased to be a
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives
direct influence in shaping philosophical ideas.?28
A possible implication of this line of
criticism is that higher education in the mid to
late 19th century?prior to the modern research
university?in some respects did a better job of
citizenship education than what followed. And,
aside from glaring exclusions based on gender,
race, and religion, some critics do see in this earlier
period a more integral and coherent moral vision,
stronger connections between individual members
and the shared life and aims of the institution,
and a sense of integration between the scientific
search for knowledge and the construction of a
good society.29 This reading meshes with a trend
in studies of mid 19th century American civic life,
which, again, finds admirable qualities, particularly
for the high levels of participation and deliberation
it fostered. Neil Postman, for example, chose the
1850s Lincoln-Douglas debates as a model of
deliberation and a positive counter-example to late
20th century television sound-bite politics. Michael
McGerr in The Decline of Popular Politics, and
Robert Wiebe in his cultural history of American
democracy, Self-Rule, agree that the 19th century
did a better job of connecting citizens?white male
voters?with political processes.30
Explaining this transformation from
relatively positive mid-to-late 19th century civic
life to negative modern institutions has been
a common historiographic and sociological
task since the late 1950s. When applied to the
university, two common explanations focus on the
growth of bureaucratic administration, and the
growing influence of professionalization as faculty
oriented themselves toward methodology and
professional networks rather than local universities
and communities.31 Of course, Progressive Era
educators for the most part had very different
views about the emerging modern university
and its relationship to public practice, as did,
for example, the authors of the 1945 General
Education in a Free Society.
Bruce Kimball, in The ?True Professional
Ideal? in America, gives a valuable account
of the shift in scholarship evident in the leap
from General Education in a Free Society to the
Academic Revolution. Kimball notes that beginning
in the late 1950s the tone of scholarship on the
professions and universities was increasingly one of
disillusionment. Where previous, more functionalist
studies emphasized the ?validity and utility? of
professions to the public welfare, the new wave of
scholarship tended to read professional institutions
as systems of domination artificially grounded in
scientific expertise.32 In this framework, treatments
of modern higher education selectively highlight
systems of social status, class reproduction, or
institutional co-optation by market interests. Magali
Larson?s influential study of professionalism, for
example, described the central role of universities
in establishing professional organizations and
authority, and argued that ?...the dominant, and
almost the unique, meaning of these professional
movements was the conquest and assertion of
social status.?33 Kimball focuses on American
scholarship, but the more critical direction in
studies of the professions was not specific to the
U.S.: for example, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, by Michel Foucault (published 1975,
with English translation in 1977), stands out for its
harsh reading of modern institutions.34
Kimball argues that the trend toward
disillusionment regarding the professions can
be explained by a form of presentism rooted
in a gradual decline in the social status of
the professoriate over the course of the 20th
century.35 However, I find it implausible that
several decades of critical scholarship can be
characterized by what he calls ?sour grapes.?
Elsewhere in the book Kimball suggests a path
to a more convincing explanation. To explain
the growing appeal of science as a cultural
ideal in the late nineteenth century, he cites the
importance of political context?including the
Civil War, national expansionism culminating in
the Spanish-American War, political corruption,
disillusionment with electoral processes and the
judiciary?in contributing to a loss of faith in
existing political processes. Kimball concludes that
the ?increasing complexity of society,? coupled
with disillusionment with the status quo in politics,
made science an appealing alternative to the
cultural ideal of polity.36 Unfortunately, polity and
political context seem also to drop out at this
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
point in Kimball?s analysis. Instead of attributing
the late 20th century turn in social thought solely
to the change in professorial status, for example,
Kimball could again have referred to context: the
civil rights movement and heightened awareness
of racism, student movements, multiple political
assassinations, war in Vietnam, the Cuban missile
crisis and nuclear arms proliferation, and assorted
political scandal. Events testing faith in existing
institutions.
The shift in Kimball?s explanatory
framework, in which political context plays a key
role for the late 19th century, and yet disappear
for the late 20th century, provides a clue to recent
scholarship on modern higher education. Part of
the problem may be that The ?True Professional
Ideal describes the late nineteenth century leap
from polity to science a bit too sharply. The shift
is better read as one toward a scientific polity as
a cultural ideal, with polity not quite dropping out
of the equation. This is an important distinction:
scientific practice, and more generally, university
practice as it was associated with a cultural ideal
of science, carried an ongoing symbolic reference
to polity. University members well into the 20th
century understood that their actions had an
element, in other words, of public performance.
This again helps provide a more plausible reading
of late 20th century disillusionment as in part due to
the perception that the modern university was not
meeting its obligations to polity.
My suggestion here is that contemporary
representations of modern university history
are, in part, products of late 20th/early 21st
century critical perspectives on the public sphere.
This is a different kind of presentism than that
described by Kimball. Loosely connected public
reform movements in the late 20th century came
in roughly two waves: one in response to 60s
era upheavals and producing volumes of critical
writing on the state of the university, and the other
gaining momentum in the last two decades of the
century. The early phase saw sustained critiques
of objectivism and its association with a militaryindustrial
complex, war in Vietnam, gender and
racial discrimination. The concept of democratic
public practice gained renewed attention in the face
of dysfunctional institutions. One strand of social
thought looked to classical republican traditions as
a critical benchmark?a measure of how far modern
political society had fallen from or failed to realize
democratic ideals? and as an alternative to liberal
models of modern political society. Interestingly,
the more recent wave(s) of public criticism have
come from both the right and left, as dissatisfaction
with the state of citizenship on campus seems to be
shared across the political spectrum.
Joyce Appleby credits Bernard Bailyn
and Gordon Wood?s mid-1960s studies of early
American politics as playing a key role in the
recovery of republican political/cultural traditions.37
Robert Bellah?s Civil Religion in America was
published at the same time, setting the grounds
for a series of influential works on modern political
culture.38 As Appleby notes, the recovery of the
classical republican tradition was important both
for re-introducing a critical model for democratic
politics, and for pushing social-political thought
away from naturalized liberal categories and toward
an anthropological emphasis on culture.39 The
intellectual movement was, again, in some respects
international? Habermas? The Transformation of
the Public Sphere, for example, was first published
in 1962, though little read in the U.S. until its
English translation in 1989.40 Several important
works published in the mid-1970s referred to
republican concepts of political society: Richard
Sennett?s The Fall of Public Man in 1974, followed
in 1975 by The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.
Pocock, and Robert Bellah?s The Broken Covenant:
American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial, each
taking very different approaches to the study of
cultures of public practice. 41 In a sense, the central
themes of 1920s debate between Lippman and
Dewey over the state of American political society
had again come to the fore in various academic
circles.
Scholarship revolving around the related
concepts of the public, citizenship, and civil
society, in the past two decades has been marked
by several events, including: the attention given
to the work of Bellah, et al. in The Habits of the
Heart, the ?liberal versus communitarian? debates
including writings by Michael Sandel and Charles
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives
Taylor, Russell Jacoby followed by Cornell West
and others on the decline of ?public intellectuals,?
the Bowling Alone critique of American public
life by Robert Putnam, interest in the cultural
and institutional bases of democracy spurred
by the newly independent Eastern European
states, and the flurry of scholarship surrounding
the English translation of Jurgen Habermas? The
Transformation of the Public Sphere.42 Benjamin
Barber?s Jihad vs. McWorld, for example, employed
a Habermas-inspired approach to globalization.
And Theda Skocpol, Michael Schudson and
others have published important research in
the historical sociology of civic practices. Taken
together, the multiple, conflicting discussions on
the public sphere in this partial list can be seen as
part of ongoing reformist and counter-reformist
movements.
I mention this strand of civic-oriented
literature because it reflects a period of unusual
ferment and questioning in higher education
about the nature of citizenship. These works have
shaped intellectual (and to some extent popular)
perceptions of the public sphere, and have helped
to shape the terms of discussion about citizenship
in higher education. With few exceptions, when
critics within this public-reform movement have
looked back on the history of the university they
have not seen the aspects of citizenship they
expect or want to see, and come away describing
an absence of citizenship. This stance has critical
rhetorical utility in prodding institutional change,
but it overlooks the powerful existing currents of
citizenship in higher education. These currents may
be different from what critics expect of citizenship,
and may be expressed in unfamiliar cultural
vocabularies, but they are nevertheless influential
forms of citizenship.
Scholarship on citizenship?in higher
education and elsewhere?tends to cluster around
different analytical dimensions of the concept,
dimensions associated with criteria for democracy. I
see these as grouping into roughly three categories
having to do with the inclusivity, character, and
depth of public participation. Though the three
clearly overlap, there are fairly distinct bodies
of criticism associated with each dimension. For
example, levels of diversity and inclusion have of
course been a critical focus in recent decades, such
as in multicultural and feminist critiques of the
public sphere. As for the character of participation,
a range of critics survey public participation for its
quality of informed and reasoned deliberation, such
as in works by Neil Postman, Jurgen Habermas
and mass media criticism. I would also include in
this category arguments about the quality of civic
and moral reasoning in institutions, for example
in works by Alan Wolfe, Robert Bellah et al., Phillip
Selznick, Julie Reuben, George Marsden, and
Martha Nussbaum.43 The third cluster of criticism
looks at levels of participation in public life, such
as in Robert Putnam?s work on civic traditions in
Italy, and his research on declining levels of civic
participation in the U.S.44 Critics and politicians
often favor or trade some dimensions over others,
depending upon context and viewpoint. Robert
Wiebe, for example, argues in Self-Rule that
democracy is basically about open participation, a
mix of the first and third categories.45 Modernist
citizenship put greater emphasis on the character
of participation, with mixed consequences for
diversity and depth of participation.
As we have seen, public (re)construction
criticism tends to read modern institutions,
including higher education, in terms of a public
negation or absence, falling short in diversity,
deliberation, and participation. The research
university that emerged from the Progressive
Era figures as a highly exclusive realm isolated
from public concerns, marginalizing moral and
civic inquiry in favor of narrow procedures and
professional ends, and fragmenting interaction
between its members. This is somewhat ironic
because the vision of an inclusive, rationaldeliberative
(with various understandings of what
this entails), and participatory public draws from
modernist models of citizenship, also emerging in
the Progressive Era. The modernist model framed
good citizenship as a matter of free individuals
making rational, informed choices, individuals
voluntarily forming a ?free society? through
mutual obligation. This was a style of citizenship
reflecting what was widely thought to be an image
of scientific practice. Modern institutions such as
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
universities took shape, in part, as expressions
and vehicles of this model; their creators, too,
were acting upon perceptions of the state of public
participation.
Among other problems, the critical
interpretation of modern higher education as apublic
leads to a significant anomaly: the student
movements of the 1960s have to be seen as
standout examples of modern civic participation.
How were these movements possible without
resources for citizenship pre-existing in the
institution, or without an existing identification
of the institution with citizenship? Explanations
typically point to external influences such as the
civil rights movement or generational change to
fill this gap, but I suspect pre-existing patterns of
university?public relations are an important part
of the story. Further, the reading of modern higher
education as a-public has the consequence of
obscuring important aspects of the contemporary,
as well as earlier modern (meaning roughly 1890?
1965), institution. This is especially so for the
scientific, technical, and discipline-specific pursuits
of the institution, pursuits typically regarded as
standing outside the realm of citizenship.
In part, my aim here is to encourage
second looks at dimensions of the institution that
tend to read as structure empty of citizenship;
to see conflict and conversation, public practice,
in a wider range of campus patterns. Science,
for example, figures centrally in the modern
university, and interpretations of the university
often hinge on its representation. The tendency is
to downplay the ethical and political connotations
of scientific research and disciplinary development.
This effectively makes modernist citizenship an
oxymoron, insofar as the aim of Progressive reform
was toward a more scientific public.
One last essay, one that partly avoids the
aim of my criticisms: Carol Geary Schneider?s
?Educational Missions and Civic Responsibility.?
If I were to direct someone new to this field to a
single article, this would be it. Early in the essay
Schneider writes that citizenship in the modern
academy had by mid-20th century retreated to
the narrow limits of general education courses on
Western Civilization. Citizenship education had
shifted from the 19th century emphasis on moral
development to ?education in responsibility for the
heritage of Western Civilization.? This observation
generally fits with the theme of citizenship absence
in modern universities. However, Schneider
recognizes that this was not the whole story. While
discussion and intentional teaching of citizenship
tended to be confined to the space of the Western
Civ course, the institution as a whole embraced
a broader model of citizenship. Schneider writes,
?the university?s primary self-understanding about
education and citizenship came to rest on its claims
of cultivation in students generalized capacities for
leadership, especially intellectual discipline, critical
thinking, and higher order analytical reasoning?
(104). And this learning took place throughout the
academy, not just in Western Civilization courses.
Schneider draws from Michael Sandel in arguing
that these principles of citizenship were based on a
vision of a ?procedural republic? that did not ground
itself in the cultivation of moral virtues.
I prefer the term modernist to emphasize
that this procedural model responded to perceived
problems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Modernist citizenship was liberal, in Sandel?s sense,
but it was also deeply concerned about sources
of vision, autonomy, order and direction in a
mass democracy, and in the context of potentially
overwhelming social and political problems.
University critics?including the authors discussed
above? have variously been pointing out the
limitations of modernist citizenship since the 1960s.
As Schneider writes, ?Cultivating analytical abilities
in citizens is certainly important to the health
of a political democracy as it is to the modern
economy. But it is not, I believe the evidence
persuades us, sufficient to the vitality of a healthy
and self-correcting civic society.?46 Schneider
describes the ongoing movement toward a more
engaged academy, including the introduction
of collaborative inquiry, service-learning, and
multidisciplinary integrative learning, among other
changes. The volume of collected essays in which
Schneider?s article appears? Civic Responsibility in
Higher Education?offers an excellent map of the
current state of initiatives to transform citizenship
education.47 My aim in this review has been to
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives
lend these initiatives and this literature a different,
potentially more productive historical frame.
As we have seen, it is common in historical
studies of modern higher education to depict the
institution as having separated from the public
sphere, as having absented itself of a public
spirit. I see the modern institution as inherently
standing in reflexive relation to the public sphere,
such that studies that minimize or overlook this
dimension miss an important aspect of higher
education. If higher education indeed lacked
such a connection, it would be difficult to explain
the appearance of the long list of scholars since
the 1960s commenting critically on its absence.
I actively support the aim of these criticisms;
universities and colleges ought to engage a fuller
vision of citizenship. Change, though, will not
mean bringing citizenship onto a campus that had
none, but changing the citizenship equation(s)
that now exists. This requires raising awareness
of the tacit models of political society informing
current university structures and practices, and?
through persistent dialogue?finding ways to build
on their achievements. Citizenship reform efforts
will (continue to) encounter opposition if they do
not recognize the significance of, and depth of
commitment to, what at first glance appears to be
empty structure.
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
ENDNOTES
1 See, for example, Paul DiMaggio, ?Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The
Creation of and Organizational Base for High Culture in America,? Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982):
33-50.
2 Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1965), 23. Also see Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience 1783-1876 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1980), 400-409.
3 The Occident, (Berkeley), 5 September 1892, 5. University of California Archives, Bancroft Library at the
University of California, Berkeley.
4 Robert M. Hutchins, ?Education and the Public Mind,? School and Society August 5 (1933): 163; and
R.M. Hutchins The State of the University 1929-1949 (1949), 7.
5 Robert M. Hutchins, ?Education and the Public Mind,? School and Society August 5 (1933): 163.
6 See, for example, James McLachlan, ?The Choice of Hercules: American Student Societies in the Early
19th Century,? in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1974), 449-94.
7 David Hollinger discusses the significance of the Harvard Report in, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture:
Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), 161.
8 Paul S. Buck et al., General Education in a Free Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1945), 50.
9 See Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press,
1998), and Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
10 Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (1965), 62-65.
11 Ibid., 139-147, 215.
12 Ibid., 64, 120.
13 Ibid., 140.
14 Ibid., 354.
15 Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, New York: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1968), 12.
16 Ibid., 517-518.
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives
17 Ibid., 519.
18 Ibid., 530.
19 For critical works directed more specifically at contemporary (1980s and later) higher education, see,
for example: Alan Bloom, The Closing of The American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987);
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on trial (New York: Basic Books a division of Harper Collins, 1995);
Christopher Lasch, The revolt of the elites : and the betrayal of democracy, 1st ed. (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1995); Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989); Robert Bellah et al., The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991),
Chapter 5; Michael Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1987), and numerous others.
20 Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the
United States (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 46. Bender?s more recent writings,
I should note, develop a more complex notion of the public and revise the thesis of decline.
21 Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher
Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976), 327.
22 Derek Bok, Universities and the Future of America (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990),
68.
23 ?Far from becoming a new community that would bring coherence out of chaos, it became instead a
congeries of faculty and students, each pursuing their own ends, integrated not by any shared vision but
only by the bureaucratic procedures of the ?administration.?? Robert Bellah et al., The Good Society (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 154-5.
24 Benjamin Barber, Foreward to Education for Citizenship, Reeher and Cammarano, eds. (Rowman &
Littlefield, 1997), xi.
25 See, for example, the volume produced by a 1932 conference at NYU entitled The Obligation of
Universities to the Social Order, edited by Henry Fairchild Pratt (New York, 1933).
26 E.g., Robert L. Church, ?Economists as Experts: The Rise of an Academic Profession in America 1850-
1917,? in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),
571-610, 573; Gillis J. Harp, Positivist Republic: August Comte and the Reconstruction of American
Liberalism, 1865-1920 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Mary Furner,
From Advocacy to Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1975); Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science
(Urbana: 1977); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991). Using a longer historical timeline, this is also the theme of Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
27 Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1973), 25-7.
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
28 Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1977), xviii.
29 E.g., Derek Bok, Higher Learning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Julie A. Reuben,
The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and The Marginalization of Morality
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Nicholas H. Steneck, ?Ethics and Aims of
Universities in Historical Perspective,? in An Ethical Education: Community and Morality in the Multicultural
University, ed. M.N.S. Sellers (Oxford and Providence: Berg Publishers, 1994), 9-20.
30 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York:
Penguin Books, 1985); Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-
1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American
Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
31 See, for example, Nicholas H. Steneck, ?Ethics and Aims of Universities in Historical Perspective,? in An
Ethical Education: Community and Morality in the Multicultural University, ed. M.N.S. Sellers (Oxford and
Providence: Berg Publishers, 1994), 9-20.
32 Bruce A. Kimball, The ?True Professional Ideal? in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1992), 309-317. Talcott Parsons? voluntarism does not quite fit this functionalist versus structuralist
model, but for various reasons his massive theory itself came to be associated with the negative aspects
of modern institutions, criticized in roughly the same terms Veysey and others described the modern
university.
33 Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977), 155. Original italics.
34 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage Books, 1979).
35 ?The presentism of analysis has derived from professors? preoccupation with the status and nature
of the professoriate, which entered the twentieth century preeminent and gradually declined.? Bruce
A. Kimball, The ?True Professional Ideal? in America: A History (1992), 325. On the changing status of
professors, Kimball cites Joseph Gusfield, ?American Professors: The Decline of a Cultural Elite,? School
Review 83 (1975): 595-616.
36 Bruce A. Kimball, The ?True Professional Ideal? in America: A History (1992), 200-202.
37 Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 21. Citing: Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), and Gordon S. Wood, ?Rhetoric and
Reality in the American Revolution,? William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966).
38 Robert N. Bellah, ?Civil Religion in America,? Daedalus , no. Winter (1967): 1-21.
39 Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (1992), 23.
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CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
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40 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
41 Robert Bellah, The Broken covenant : American Civil Religion in a time of trial (New York: Seabury
Press, 1975); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public
Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974).
42 Robert Bellah, et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985); Charles Taylor, ?Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian
Debate,? in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989); Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals : American culture in the age of academe (New York: Basic
Books, 1987); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American
Democracy (Washington D.C. and New York: Brookings Institution Press and Russell Sage, 1999); Michael
Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
43 For example: George Marsden, From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-belief: The Soul of
the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating
Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual
Transformation and The Marginalization of Morality (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1996); Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral
Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
44 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2000); Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
45 Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 247-267.
46 Carol Geary Schneider, ?Educational Missions and Civic Responsibility: Toward the Engaged Academy,?
in Civic Responsibility and Higher Education. Thomas Erlich, Ed. (American Council on Education and Oryx
Press, 2000), 108.
47 See also Reeher and Cammarano, eds. Education for Citizenship (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); and
the proceedings of Campus Compact (http://www.compact.org/), especially the ?Wingspread Declaration
on the Civic Responsibilities of Research Universities,? 1999 (http://www.compact.org/civic/Wingspread/
Wingspread.html).
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Modern Universities, Absent Citizenship? Historical Perspectives CIRCLE Working Paper 39: September 2005
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CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) promotes research
on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25. Although CIRCLE
conducts and funds research, not practice, the projects that we support have practical implications
for those who work to increase young people?s engagement in politics and civic life. CIRCLE is also a
clearinghouse for relevant information and scholarship. CIRCLE was founded in 2001 with a generous
grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and is now also funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York. It is
based in the University of Maryland?s School of Public Policy.