A Review of "The Marketplace of Ideas” by Louis Menand

An interesting of what seems to be an interesting book - Louis Menand - THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS.

The Way We Learn

By MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ

Published: January 29, 2010

In the four rigorously reasonable essays in “The Marketplace of Ideas,” Louis Menand takes up four questions about American higher education: “Why is it so hard to institute a general education curriculum? Why did the humanities disciplines undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ become a magic word? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?”

Menand, a professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, offers answers notable in part for what they don’t contain: namely, the complaint that it’s all been downhill since 1970 because of feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, deconstruction and queer theory. Yes, humanities enrollments have declined since 1970, as have enrollments in the social and natural sciences. But as Menand points out, that’s partly because departments of business administration and computer science have drawn students away from all fields in the liberal arts and sciences and partly because the decades following World War II were anomalous in the history of American higher education — a “Golden Age” of tremendous expansion, when the number of undergraduates increased fivefold and the number of graduate students ninefold. To assess the American university by starting from 1970 is to take the high-­water mark as if it were the mean.

Menand’s discussion of general education starts on a wry note: “The process of designing a new general education curriculum and selling it to the faculty has been compared to a play by Samuel Beckett, but the comparison is inapt. Beckett’s plays are short.” One usually hears that general education courses are in a parlous state because hyperspecialized professors disdain teaching broad introductory courses. But the real story is more complicated.

Menand shows that general education curriculums have been criticized since their inception less for being too broad in focus than for being too narrow in intent, more invested in making education socially “relevant” than in encouraging the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The earliest exponents of general education — John Erskine, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Mortimer Adler — believed in teaching students the wisdom of the ages to prepare them to confront the pressing issues of the day, and their critics considered the enterprise at once dilettantish and crudely instrumentalist. In other words, it’s not just that faculty members don’t agree on the content of a gen-ed curriculum; they don’t agree that universities should offer a “general” education in the first place.

Menand argues plausibly enough that the crisis of confidence in the humanities, together with demographic changes in the professoriate and the student body, has “helped to make the rest of the academic world alive to issues surrounding objectivity and interpretation, and to the significance of racial and gender difference,” and that interdisciplinarity actually relies on and re­inforces disciplinary knowledge.

Things get more interesting in the final chapter, where Menand explains how academe’s training and hiring system works and suggests, unconvincingly, that the preponderance of liberals in academe is partly a function of “increased time to degree.” It now takes a decade on average to get a Ph.D. in English, and surely that fact discourages risk-taking. But it does not explain, say, why Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1 in departments of physics. Along the way, Menand notes that most graduate students don’t earn Ph.D.’s, and that most Ph.D.’s don’t get tenure-­track jobs: “There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs” — graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations — who can teach introductory courses for a pittance.

Students (and parents) who may not notice the creation of a new Interdisciplinary Institute on campus may well wonder whether a system in which instructors’ annual reappointments are dependent on student evaluations is likely to produce professors willing to challenge their students and uphold high academic standards. But that is a question for another book, perhaps, a book less sanguine and more pugnacious than “The Marketplace of Ideas.”

~ Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and the author, most recently, of “The Left at War.”

Read an excerpt from the book at Harvard Magazine.

Tags: Review, The Marketplace of Ideas, Louis Menand, books, culture, education, humanities, New York Times, Michael Berube, The Way We Learn