Life is turning into college
Some people think this is a good thing
1 - the best days of our lives, right?
American civil society continues to splinter along innumerable lines, but one theory that caught my attention recently goes like this — we are divided between those who want society to be like university and those who don’t.
Nick Burns proposed this idea in his long form piece “America’s Medieval Universities” (well worth the read) where he moves from an analysis of the form of the university to the demands which that form engenders in students, arguing the social changes agitated for by the elite classes today reflect a demand to re-shape society into something more like the university experience.
Burns produces a myriad of interesting resonances between the university experience and recent changes in civil society, such as how the YIMBY demand for walkable cities closely mirrors the design of university campuses or how the rise of remote work resembles the life of a student in which the lines between work and play are flexible and constantly blurred. Even the expansion of campus police and surveillance closely tracks the increasing demand for the deployment of private security forces in civil society.
II - How college created activist politics
In particular though, I was provoked by Burns’ description of how campus activism emerged organically from the structure of the university, and how the activist form of politics re-shapes political activity more generally in society.
The governance structure of a university is composed primarily of a board of trustees, permanent administration, and long term faculty appointments, as well as occasionally the monetary influence of wealth alumni. Because students come and go every four years, being more consumers of the university’s product than the producers of the organization, this governance structure systematically excludes students from making decisions or obtaining redress of grievances.
At college, students live in the dorms, eat the food in the cafeteria, are subject to the policies and disciplinary actions of the school, and are reliant upon a myriad of services to maintain their highly curated environment. Unlike primary or secondary schools where parents are actively involved and can vote with their tuition dollars, most institutions of higher education remain largely immune to parental interference, and thus students suffer what they must at the hands of the institution which hands down it verdicts from on high.
Burns argues that this alienation from the decision-making process combined with an extreme dependence on the institution produces the type of campus activism which we began to first witness during the Vietnam War, and which continues today with an unabated vigor. The student’s mode of redress against an impersonal and totalitarian institution is to stage sit ins, engage in sabotage and disobedience, deploy ideological mind games, and organize ways to apply practical pressure to the institution.
Ultimately, the activist form developed on college campuses re-shape politics from one of responsibility, bartering, and decision-making to one of attempting to apply countervailing power to an existing bureaucratic administration, thus reinforcing the perception that governing apparatuses are simply given, and that politics is therefore about coercing the ruling party to implement your group’s interests, regardless of the current social consensus.
This state of affairs can only arise because of the wide latitude which private institutions have to impose their dictates on those who have contracted as members of the community. Burns points to the draconian restrictions imposed by universities on their students during the Covid lockdowns, including confining them to their dorms, prohibiting contact between opposite sexes, mandatory testing, and tribunals for receiving anonymous reports from students snitching on each other’s behavior.
III - Expert knowledge and juridical power
In many ways then, universities have served in our time as the laboratory for totalitarian experiments conducted in the name of the citizen’s (student’s) good and justified on the basis of technocratic expertise.
Hearkening back to early internal legal tribunal in medieval French universities, the modern university also possesses an unelected, secret, and unaccountable system of internal policing for applying policies, reviewing violations, and meting out discipline. Title IX remains the most prominent example of this institutional structure today, but it nonetheless holds an ancient pedigree within the university form itself, and thus informs much of the institution’s operational logic in other domains.
These experiments in forms of governance which much more closely mirror the internal organization of the Soviet Union and its ruling Communist party issue both from college-educated administration and from the students themselves — the demand for safety, for protection, for care, and for inclusion often comes most vociferously from the student body itself, and thus students become enlisted in the process of their own self-policing.
How can we not expect this same mindset to carry itself into the public sphere?
While we’ve perhaps an increase in extreme examples within college campuses in recent years, Christopher Lasch was raising the alarm about these types of phenomena decades earlier. There is something endemic about the consciousness of the schooled subject to the university form, and Burns takes as one of his primary goals to demonstrate this from the historical structure of the university itself.
The activist form of politics has been greatly exacerbated by another byproduct of the historical university form — the increasing fragmentation of knowledge into various specializations and subfields. Burns traces this to von Humboldt’s vision for a renewed university system in Germany which would unify scientific learning under one aegis, but which largely succeeded in presiding over a centuries long siloing process leading to the perception that learning has no center or organizing principles.
Now we find ourselves in our present predicament where the experts in a field will only (indeed, can only) speak to others in their field, and those of us who are subject to their policy dictates are enjoined only to “trust them,” even as these experts flagrantly ignore the cautionary remarks of the experts in other fields. What could an economist possibly contribute to public health policy?
IV - a sketch of society as university
I want to end this piece by asking about the problem which Burns is trying to draw our attention to — what are to make of the fact that the people who staff our most powerful institutions have almost without exception passed through the pedagogy of the university experience? Further, how does this experiential divide between the college educated and those who dropped out or never attended affect the ways that we dream about our community and how we think about the means of achieving that dream?
Here is a very non-comprehensive list of items I see as composing the society-turned-university vision:
Government as a permanent apparatus of trained professionals/experts
Policy-making and judgments increasingly done by internal or unaccountable panels of appointees and experts
Activist politics which uses countervailing force, violence, or institutional capture to bypasses society’s democratic decision-making process
Politics taking the form of demand for expanded services of care or systems of protection for victimized groups
Broad license for the government to impose restrictions and punishments on the basis of demands for protection of citizens and the recommendations of credentialed experts
Increasing surveillance, documentation, and presence of armed security
Denser and safer communities with more shared space, maintained by an institutional apparatus with a moral mandate to provide for all aspects of the citizen’s life
Work more closely resembling the disembodied and dis-located experience of the student where the line between work and play is continually blurred
Employers providing more and more of the foundational amenities of elite life, such as healthcare, philanthropic opportunities, free food and drink, flexible working policies, unlimited vacation time, and more.
The demand for an overriding moral or ethical direction for all organizational activities in order to satisfy the employee’s desire for meaning
The proliferation of credentialing, licensing, and testing for all social roles
The increase in using metrics to justify expertise, rather than outcomes
Try using this lens when you listen to our nation’s discourse about who we are and what we should do — is this vision for America more like the structure of the university and the life of the student?
The question to be explored in light of this question and possible division within our people would be this — what other vision animates America, a vision not of society as university, but some other way of thinking and seeing? I hesitate to say that this would be a working class vision, as the imaginative capacity of the working class has been seriously hollowed out by a continual stream of Hollywood entertainment, poor education, and consumer ideology.
However, if this other vision of America still exists, perhaps the most likely place to find its holdouts would be amongst the working class peoples. I could be wrong about that. But, I think the anthropological effort would be well worth it for anyone, like myself, who wishes to oppose this vision of life as college.
Thanks for reading! Before we go, I want to draw your attention to my recent appearance on a livestream with ’s Dave and Nance — we talked about money realism, how to face your own death, and how school is damaging our ability to learn. Give it a listen!
Extremely interesting analysis. Burns' article was also extremely engrossing and very much worth the time. Nice to see Lasch mentioned. Illich of course also made similar observations.