Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[R]onald Reagan, governor of California, appeared before the crowd, wearing a maroon sport coat and white shoes. Thousands of students from the far-flung campuses of the University of California had gathered in front of the state capitol to protest Reagan’s plan to charge tuition at the university, which until then had been tuition-free.
This was 1967. The march on Sacramento was one marginally important episode during a prolonged period of tumult and discord, but it was one I happened to witness. Assassination, riots and war loomed larger than the inroads Reagan was making against public education, but Reagan’s attacks on the university foreshadowed a decades-long battle that is still with us about how we value education and the humanities. Recent assaults on facts, science, media and truth are the latest iteration of that battle.
In 1967 a turning point had arrived. The public universities in most states were settings of grandeur far exceeding anything found in the farm towns, suburbs and industrial centers where most people lived. The exquisite brick buildings surrounding the green at the University of Vermont are probably the grandest buildings in the state. The great halls in Berkeley, overseen by the elegant towering Campanile, visibly express an earlier generation’s veneration of learning. Now institutions that had lifted up returning GIs by providing them with a college education had become, in Reagan’s view, an outpost of privilege for the GIs’ pampered offspring.
Marilynne Robinson, novelist and essayist, has called it the “democratization of privilege” — education previously the province of the few becoming available to young men and women of scant or moderate means from Burlington to Berkeley to the Bronx. The grandeur of those campuses was an expression of the grandeur of the project. For returning veterans of World War II, college was a pathway toward the middle class. What a cruel trick it was for Reagan and his followers to turn around and declare that the children of those GIs had become part of a scorned elite.
Reagan’s war on the university was grounded in a familiar strain of American anti-intellectualism that promotes distrust of “experts” or “intellectuals.” But Reagan was up to something more insidious than run-of-the-mill populist politics. He was engaged in a years-long partnership with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, going back to Reagan’s career in Hollywood. Seth Rosenfeld’s book, “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power,” tells the story in detail of Reagan’s career as an informer who benefited for many years from his alliance with Hoover and who became a willing participant in Hoover’s war on “subversives.”
The value of the humanities — to individuals and to society — had long been a given in higher education. In her new book of essays (“What Are We Doing Here?”) Robinson quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: “Poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought, all these gifts which heaven shares out by chance turned to the advantage of democracy and, even when they belonged to the enemies of democracy, they still promoted its cause by highlighting the natural grandeur of man … Literature was an arsenal open to all, where the weak and the poor could always find arms.”
For a young man of the middle class to seek a degree in English, therefore, was more than dilettantish self-indulgence. He was arming himself from the arsenal of man’s grandeur — “to the advantage of democracy.”
Who even speaks of grandeur anymore? Cynicism of the left and the right has corroded the link between education and democracy, calling into question the purposes of education itself.
The governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, gave expression recently to the utilitarian view of education, which is evident in the nearly universal embrace these days of STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “There will be more incentives to electrical engineers than French literature majors,” he said. “There just will. All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so, they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer.”
In a period when economic dislocation and inequality are creating new obstacles to prosperity, it is not surprising that families would question the value of education that is not strictly career-oriented. And yet subsidizing the student of French literature and other disciplines among the humanities has long been a fundamental purpose of public education. Who is to say what any individual should study, what will fire his or her imagination? Giving students the latitude to find their way either to Flaubert or to quantum physics is to serve the students rather than to subsume the students’ needs to the demands of the economy. As Robinson points out, it’s why early settlers of places like Iowa hastened to build universities and libraries as soon as they had put down roots. The humanities and sciences would be an integral part of the dynamic society they were building.
Disinvestment in higher education, leading to higher tuition costs, is one way government has fostered economic inequality. Tuition and fees at the University of California campuses now exceed $12,000. At the University of Vermont, where state support is lowest among the states, tuition and fees exceed $15,000. In the 1970s, the states provided nearly 75 percent of the funding for public colleges. Now it is about 23 percent. Student debt of $1.4 trillion exceeds even the nation’s credit card debt. It is owed by about 44 million people whose average monthly payment is about $350. I finished at the University of California at Santa Barbara with no debt at all.
“For generations,” Robinson writes, “people had, in effect, prepaid their children’s and grandchildren’s tuition and underwritten the quality of their education by paying taxes. Suddenly legislatures decided to put the money to other uses, or to cut taxes, and families were obliged to absorb much higher costs.” By recasting our democratic obligations as burdens, we have effectively starved those institutions we had always assumed were democracy’s foundation.
If it is a conservative impulse to preserve our cultural birthright by promoting study of the humanities, then acceding to the rapacious demands of the economic system undermines that conservative aim. At the same time the left has also failed to resist these trends, crippled by its own crisis of values.
Richard Rorty’s celebrated volume of lectures, published in 1998 under the title “Achieving Our Country,” has achieved posthumous fame because it seemed to predict the rise of a would-be strongman like Donald Trump. Rorty’s analysis of the fragmentation and failures of the left forms an important part of his diagnosis of America’s social ills.
In Rorty’s view, the left began to crack up in the 1960s when the Vietnam War brought about the rise of the New Left. Meanwhile, the academy became preoccupied with cultural issues and identity politics rather than the economic issues that had been the focus of the left that had coalesced around the New Deal. Literary and political theory focused on power, victimization, identity and ideological purity rather than on the messy politics required to fight inequality and economic exploitation. The left became imbued with “the spirit of detached spectatorship” rather than political engagement, according to Rorty. With the rise of Reagan, the Democratic Party felt compelled to disavow big government and to find a Third Way. It was the capitulation of the left to the apparent marvels of the marketplace. Barack Obama might have become a new FDR, but the left had been hobbled by its inability to combat the ideology of unbridled capitalism.
Throughout this period, as public investments in higher education have declined, defenders of education have been forced to couch their arguments in economic terms — how much education contributes to the economy and to the earnings of graduates. It seems quaint to defend the value of education in and of itself — to the intellectual and spiritual life of the individual and to the broader culture. It may seem that a pot-smoking undergrad grooving on Baudelaire is not partaking of the grandeur envisioned by de Tocqueville and Robinson, but closing off French literature through lack of funds shrivels the culture, which is the world in which democratic citizens live. The humanities have endured through generations of foolish youth, sometimes even coming to the rescue of the young in their foolishness. My life was changed by a freshman English class where I encountered “King Lear.” The grandeur of “King Lear” was something in which I partook, and it remains alive to me today. What’s important is not so much what I gain through an appreciation of “King Lear.” What’s important is that “King Lear” endures in the culture when people learn its value.
Reagan told the gathered students back in 1967 that he was “a little shocked” that they thought he might hold a grudge against higher education, according to accounts of the time. His pretense of innocence was disingenuous. We know that he was seeking to foster distrust in higher education, in the same way that President Donald Trump is working to undermine the credibility of the news media. “Fake knowledge,” Reagan might have said, except he would not have said it so crudely. He would have finessed it, with a smile.
If the left heeds Rorty. it will galvanize its many factions into a force that can establish the credibility of knowledge, learning and freedom, enlisting in a battle across a wide front to democratize privilege once again, while drawing strength from diverse traditions that affirm the grandeur of human achievement.