City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University

A number of books have appeared in recent years exploring the role of universities in society. The vast majority of these are critical of the current system, bowing as it is under the pressure of a neoliberal agenda that has marketised higher education and turned students into consumers whilst simultaneously stripping universities of funding and prestige. Recent works focused on UK universities by Jones (2022) and Sperlinger et al. (2018) – amongst others – have suggested the current system is deeply flawed.

From across the pond comes another recent contribution to the debate, written by the former Chancellor of Berkeley, Nicholas B. Dirks. As Dirks acknowledges in his introduction, the last decade has been a particularly turbulent time for all universities, but particularly those in America. His tenure as Chancellor (2013–2017) saw Berkeley as ‘the scene of steady and escalating protests, some ending in violence’ (6). There were well-documented examples of sexual assault and harassment on campus, increases in tuition and levels of student debt, and tensions around protecting free speech whilst counteracting hate speech … 'and all this took place with the backdrop of escalating, and at times staggering, budget shortfalls' (6).

Under the circumstances, it is not unreasonable to pause and question the purpose of higher education. Dirks’ take on this is a highly personal affair – part memoir, part manifesto – in which he looks back on his university career as a means of both reflecting on the past and constructing an argument for the future role and identity of higher education. Thus, we start with his years as a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where his students sometimes fall asleep in class but life is otherwise good. It is 1978 and the academic job market is already contracting, but Dirks appears to have fallen on his feet. He has a reasonable teaching load, completes a book, is allowed to conduct extensive fieldwork in India, and is awarded tenure.

However, in order to teach graduate students, he must move universities, and finds himself at the University of Michigan, where ‘little did I know at the time that the campus culture wars had just begun’ (35). There is constant pressure to write more papers, recruit more students and raise one’s profile through conferences and invitations to lecture elsewhere. Even worse, a conference intended to be a significant event in the new field of cultural studies is overshadowed by a misjudged poster that is widely seen as offensive, indicating that there is an ‘enormous chasm between academic and non-academic worlds’ (34) that makes the university appear embarrassingly out-of-touch. Much of this will strike a chord with academics today, many of whom find themselves juggling ever-increasing workloads whilst sometimes feeling alienated from the wider world.

Dirks moved into a senior administrative role at Columbia in 2004 as Dean of Arts and Sciences – a Vice Principal role that soon has him immersed in the world of budgets and spreadsheets (the total budget for which he is responsible in his year of appointment is close to $650 million). The first crisis does not take long to arrive, with the New York Post publishing an article about ‘the climate of hate at Colombia’ (52) following an incident involving a video claiming the prevalence of anti-Semitism on campus. Other headaches follow – student strikes, claims of intimidation, inadequate grievance procedures, receivership, political disputes, hunger strikes, and the financial crisis to name but a few. All of this serves to confirm Dirks’ belief that administration is a vocation and that ‘the protection of academic freedom also required a professional commitment to fairness, open-mindedness, and good faith efforts to operate with as much neutrality of judgment as possible’ (59).

However, if being a Dean allowed Dirks to remain ‘much closer to faculty life’ (94), he is soon ‘to experience a completely new kind of life in Berkeley’ (94). He takes up the position of Chancellor in 2013 where, as noted earlier in this review, he handles a succession of challenges, culminating in ‘a test of our capacity to deal with the cataclysmic election of Donald Trump as president and associated assaults on the campus’ (155). When Dirks finally steps down in 2017, he realises that he has given 15 years of his life in the service of two universities to the exclusion of virtually all else, including his scholarly interests: administration has consumed all other passions.

Whilst Dirks is clearly a knowledgeable companion, his narration is sometimes rather flat. He covers a huge number of interesting events both on campus and beyond, and I personally would have enjoyed greater depth and colour in their description. That is not the book’s intention, however, and so in the second half Dirks turns to what he describes as ‘A History of the Future’ (169). As he has already argued in his introduction, universities have simultaneously ‘become the mainstay of conservative media outrage’ (8) whilst also coming ‘under attack from many of the left, for being profit-maximising neoliberal institutions’ (9) – so where does the sector go next? For Dirks, the university requires a complete reimagining, to become a place where Arts and Sciences are not polarised, and where greater flexibility in course design can provide ‘a genuine liberal arts education’ (184) for students of any age, facilitating lifelong learning. He suggests embracing technology and reducing costs through a ‘newly flexible architecture for university learning’ (288) that affords students greater freedoms and recognises that some institutions will have to close or merge with others.

Overall, Dirks calls for the university to be ‘more flexible, less top-down’ (291) in order to secure a more central role in the future. He reminds us that it is essential to acknowledge the current threats to its existence, whilst insisting it remains ‘the vital repository of stubborn commitments to the importance of knowledge … it holds a critical function for any society, but especially one in which questions of truth, value, and epistemic autonomy are as fundamental as they are today’ (309). While Dirks’ volume may be rather ponderous at times, many readers are likely to agree with his sentiment and recognise that the issues he highlights resonate far beyond the United States.