The Crisis of Transcendent Values: Higher Education at a Crossroads

ABSTRACT

The faith in progress that propelled the West for over four centuries is in decline due to its own success. The emergence of capitalism with its novel market imperatives has created both the poverty that causes political crises and the material growth that has destabilized the Earth’s climate. There is a growing sense that we are dominated by the technologies and social organizations that we hoped would liberate us. Individualism and secularity have left people feeling isolated and without a sense of higher purpose, leading some to reject Enlightenment values in favor of traditionalisms and even neofascism. In universities, faculty struggle to prove their utility and relevance, because they cannot guarantee their graduates a decent living in a world of automation and globalized production. As a result of these trends, the West’s ability to produce responsible citizens is in question. Our students are largely inured to appeals to transcendent values because they are urged to be “practical.” Faculty are no longer encouraged to care about the character-building nature of a liberal education. United States universities are in danger of not having an independent voice, as those departments that can consistently get major external funding seek commercial applications for the products of their research. In the United States, ideologically based harassment and censorship of unpopular ideas takes place regularly and is a major deterrent to pursuing a career in higher education. Given these challenges, can intellectuals still make a difference in universities? Many have taken to social media and other ways of getting their ideas around the increasingly steep paywalls of academic publications and the de facto censorship in their institutions. Some of the most vibrant exchanges of ideas are now happening in other places, largely online. These venues draw in people who are trying their best to learn something they are unlikely to learn at universities. But are such alternatives truly sustainable or good enough? Higher education is at a crossroads in which even this “retreat and regroup” strategy is highly problematic.

KEYWORDS:

• U.S. higher education
• transcendent values
• Enlightenment
• culture wars
• academic censorship
• social crisis

Acknowledgment

Thanks to my colleague Jakob Hanschu for his suggestions and edits in earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. No one lays this history out better than Richard Hofstadter did in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

^2. See Thompson, Anti-Intellectualism to Anti-Rationalism to Post-Truth Era.

^3. Of course, vicious anti-intellectualism is hardly the exclusive property of the right wing, or the United States. The Soviet Union, motivated by similar paranoia, suppressed the same types of people in the name of anti-capitalism. The Nazi regime terrorized and killed those labeled the enemies of the people, burning books and locking schools and universities into a vicious ideological propaganda machine.

^4. Sherman Williams of the Kansas Reflector recently reported that public university Emporia State fired 11 tenured professors for non-specific reasons. Some of them have now fired a federal lawsuit alleging their firing was prompted not by financial exigency, but because of their political views or their history of faculty leadership and attempted unionization. The state’s largest university, the University of Kansas in Lawrence, has successfully unionized. I put “conservative” in scare quotes because these people are quite radical. As an example, Turning Point USA encourages young Republicans to “unmask” their “radical” professors on this website, https://www.professorwatchlist.org/. According to Influence Watch, “Turning Point USA is funded by numerous right-of-center foundations and big Republican donors. TPUSA received $275,000 from the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Rauner Family Foundation (run by former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner (R)) gave $150,000, the Foglia Family Foundation gave $210,000, and the Marcus Foundation gave $72,500. TPUSA has also received smaller donations from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Michael and Andrea Leven Family Foundation, the Huizenga Foundation, the Mike Miller Foundation, Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking, the Einhorn Family Foundation, and Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation (run by the in-laws of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos), the Gianforte Family Foundation (run by Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R)), the Thomas Patrick Morrison Foundation, and the Family Taxpayer’s Foundation. In addition to traditional funding, other organizations sponsor TPUSA events, usually within the range of $5,000-10,000. Sponsors have included the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Reason Foundation, the Foundation for Economic Education, PragerU, the Job Creators Network, the Leadership Institute, and the Generation Opportunity Institute.” https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/turning-point-usa/.

^5. These are the broad geographical outlines of the problem of politicized education in the US. The reason why we hear more about left-wing cancel culture is because Democrats are more prominent on the coasts, as anyone can observe by looking at a political map of the United States, and some of the most elite/prestigious universities in the country are also on the coasts, so we hear more about their problems than we do about the many public and private universities and colleges in the vast American middle and South. Obviously, one can find examples of left-wing harassment in the Midwest and right-wing harassment on the coasts, but the general rule holds. The problem is not solved, therefore, by one political side or the other winning this war but by helping citizens to remember what education is really for. I personally do not think the problem is solvable, because the economic and technological forces I will describe below are overwhelming. Instead, universities will continue to be transformed and will then be superseded by other methods of education.

^6. See Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism.

^7. See Britton, “From Fire to Ice.” See also Hight and Egbert, “Inside the K-State Archives.”

^8. “When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested. In a passionate op-ed in the Yale Daily News, one student accused the university librarian—who oversees 15 million books in Yale’s extensive library system—of failing to “understand the crucial relationship of books to education.” Cohen, “Books of College Libraries Are Turning into Wallpaper.”

^9. Associated Press (Staff), “Kansas State Cuts Library Hours, Staff and Subscriptions.”

^10. For a good explanation of the neoliberal takeover of higher education, see Chapter 6 of Brown’s Undoing the Demos. See also Morgan, “Neoliberalism’s Influence on American Universities.”

^11. Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees might be instructive here. His insight that wealth is based on each pursuing his private vices, and that virtue does not pay, is a story for our times.

^12. Then-President Gen. Richard B. Myers, in a 2017 report to the Kansas legislature stated the reason for this move as “Created shared services functions in major administrative areas to increase productivity while reducing headcount through attrition.”

^13. The practice of chargebacks, in which one university department bills another for services, is so prevalent that many institutions have published full policies on how and when to charge, as well as regulating the practice to avoid mistakes or unethical charges. Google “chargebacks at universities.” For example, Loyola University, in Maryland, has a policy which states “A chargeback occurs when one University department provides a good or service to another University department and seeks to recover the cost of the good or service. Rates utilized should be reasonable; recovery billing should be timely; and proper guidelines should be followed.” “Chargeback Policy,” Loyola University, Maryland, April 4, 2017.

^14. See Wood, “Outsourcing in Higher Education.”

^15. Carlson, “Kansas State University Announces Permanent Closure of Natatorium.”

^16. See Lysen, “Occupancy Limited”; Dome, “School Notebook.”

^17. For insights into diffused responsibility, one can do no better than read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adams, Balfour, and Nickels’s Unmasking Administrative Evil applies this concept to multiple episodes in history including the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

^18. This story about a private business seems emblematic of this state of affairs: Tassi, “The Missing Titanic Submarine.”

^19. See, for instance, Moody, “University of Kansas Looks to Cut 42 Academic Programs,” and Garcia, “Emporia State Will Cut Dozens of Faculty and Staff Positions.” Emporia State’s mismanagement is becoming the stuff of legends. Recently the American Association of University Professors conducted an independent investigation of major cuts and re-hirings (at adjunct rates) of tenured professors, and massive restructuring, and declared both the university’s administration and the Kansas Board of Regents “unfit to lead.” See Kansas Reflector, “Emporia State University, Kansas Board of Regents Members.”

^20. At the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 18% of the university’s budget comes from state appropriations. Tuition makes up 24%, grants and donations 21%. See https://publicaffairs.ku.edu/budget#:~:text=Since%20then%2C%20state%20funding%20for,18%20percent%20of%20KU%27s%20revenues.

^21. As Metzger points out in “Privatization as Delegation,” privatization is a form of delegation of power. It does not necessarily mean a shrinking of government power or scope so much as a shrinking of the area of public oversight and control of government functions. Indeed, government can expand under privatization with far less public awareness and scrutiny because the firms themselves are not directly accountable to the public but to their bureaucratic government contractees.

^22. There are many books and articles on, for instance, Thomas Jefferson’s views on public education at various levels. Jefferson had an expansive vision of education and thought that to have a thriving democracy, citizens needed to be exposed to knowledge both philosophic and practical if they were to hold onto their democracy. See Conant, Thomas Jefferson and the Development of American Public Education; Holowchak, Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophy of Education; Brogan and Brogan. “The Formation of Character.”

^23. See Burnham, The Managerial Revolution; and Graeber, Bullshit Jobs.

^24. Wark, Capitalism is Dead.

^25. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling; and Konings, Capital and Time.

^26. Kansas is among the states involved in recent FBI raids that exposed the widespread use of child labor in meat packing plants. Weissner, “U.S. Company Fined for Hiring Kids.”

^27. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

^28. Beckert, Imagined Futures.

^29. Aaronson and Mazumder, “Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the United States.”

^30. Citizens United v. The FEC (2010) established the rule that corporations, nonprofits and labor unions could not be limited in their campaign donations due to their First Amendment right to free speech. This ruling put the rights of corporations on the same level as individual rights, and because they have much more money and capabilities at their disposal, they in effect have more rights. They can spend as much as they want on political advertisements if their efforts are not coordinated directly with a politician or political campaign. Political action committees (PACS) help corporations get around any limits on per-person donations to candidates.

^31. See Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying.

^32. For every book like Drutman’s there is a book like Smith’s American Business and Political Power. But simply based on common observations at various levels of U.S. government the general bias in favor of corporate business is fairly easy to see.

^33. Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class.

^34. Lasch, Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

^35. For a discussion of the U.S. political spectacle, see Kellner, American Nightmare; and see Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

^36. We have indeed created a synthetic food system for many, but it has not eliminated hunger.

^37. Ellul, The Technological Society, 432. See Zaldívar, Olmeda, and Uceda, “La educación y su conceptualización como técnica autónoma.”

^38. Tyburski deals with the mechanisms of the migrant economy in articles such as “Curse or Cure.”

^39. Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land.

^40. Johnson, Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right.

^41. Hanschu and Johnson, “Economic and Psychological Origins of Right-Wing Radicalization.”

^42. Plato, Gorgias, 484–486.

^43. Twitter is very popular with Political Scientists, it seems. They also seek publication in public outlets such as the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, https://www.washingtonpost.com/monkey-cage/, and The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/us.

^44. Examples I am familiar with include The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London (https://www.bbk.ac.uk/research/centres/institute-for-the-humanities), the Open Table Conference (https://www.opentableconference.com/), Front Porch Republic (https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/), and the Institute for Social Ecology (https://social-ecology.org/wp/).

^45. https://www.youtube.com/@PoliticalPhilosophy.

^46. The Maurin Academy, https://pmaurin.org/.

^47. For information about Maurin, one can do no better than read Dorothy Day’s biography, Peter Maurin: Apostle to the World.

^48. For Maurin’s thought on all three, see Maurin, Easy Essays.

^49. Sources for Day’s thought are more numerous, including many articles in The Catholic Worker newspaper, which is still being published, and whose issues are all to be found on the Catholic Worker website, https://catholicworker.org/. The best place to start when reading Day is her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.

^50. To learn about this history in more detail, see Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness.

^51. Maria Benevento, “Peter Maurin’s Farm-Rooted Vision.”

^52. Maurin, “Scholars and Workers.”

^53. In “The Perennial Nature of the Catholic Worker Farms,” Stock covers the initial results of the Catholic Worker farm experiments and repeated attempts throughout time.

^54. In “Peter Maurin’s Green Revolution: The Radical Implications of Reactionary Social Catholicism,” Novitsky explains Maurin’s views on the dignity of human labor and how those intertwined with the Catholic Worker movement’s approaches to labor unions as well as work in factories and farms. The term “reactionary” is arguable, but the description of Maurin’s views is informative.

^55. See Maurin’s Easy Essays, which is most of what is published by Maurin. They are a bit too easy for my taste, but they were designed to communicate big economic, political and religious ideas to workers.

^56. Gilbert, “Silos of Academe Thwart Diversity on Campuses.”

^57. We juxtaposed two works for this: Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto and Jack Kloppenburg’s First the Seed.

^58. Pope Francis, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home.

^59. This class explored the ideas of thinkers like Kant and Burke on the sublime, and Nye’s views on the American Technological Sublime.

^60. Co-founder Spencer Hess discussed the ideas of Guardini’s End of the Modern World.

^61. All of this information can be found in more detail at https://pmaurin.org.

^62. For more information about the JPII Catholic Worker Farm, see https://jpiicatholicworkerfarm.com.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurie M. Johnson

Laurie M. Johnson is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Primary Texts Certificate at Kansas State University, USA. She is the author of seven books and numerous book chapters and articles. Most of her work has involved developing a thorough understanding and critique of classical liberal theory, and includes works on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Her most recent book, Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right: The Political Thought of Carl Jung, was published in 2019 by Routledge. She is currently working on a new book, The Gap in God’s Country: Towards Repairing Our Rural/Urban Divide, which will be published by Wipf & Stock. Her teaching includes courses on the history of political philosophy, ideologies, and environmental political thought. Johnson is a co-founder of The Maurin Academy and provides political philosophy and political theology content for the Maurin Academy weekly on her Political Philosophy YouTube channel, currently with 22,000 subscribers and over 100,000 hours of watch time, and its associated podcast.