In his latest book, Louis Menand writes about four issues in the academy today -- he calls them “pickles” -- to explore the question of why it’s difficult to reform the system of higher education.
In writing about general education, interdisciplinarity, the humanities and ideological diversity among faculty, he explores the history of the educational system that produced today’s faculty members and how that history impedes change.
Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history for the book “The Metaphysical Club,” an intellectual and cultural history of late-19th- and early-20th-century America.
Menand was one of five speakers in a lecture series at Duke University called Re-Imagining the Academy. He spoke to Faith & Leadership about his latest book, “The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.” The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Why write about academia in this particular way?
The intention of the book is to try to answer four questions about the contemporary university by looking at the history of the university: general education, interdisciplinarity, the legitimacy of or justification for the humanities, and ideological diversity among faculty.
All four represent things that we would like to change or reform or make better or do differently but find are very problematic. Even though they usually don’t involve money or major structural reform -- or don’t seem to -- they create logjams. When I originally wrote these, I called them “pickles.”
I do offer some suggestions about how we might do things differently, but the point is really not to produce a program for the future. It’s more to explain how we got where we are.
Q: One of the things that you talk about is the conservatism of institutions of higher education when it comes to the system itself. What do you mean by this?
Professors are products of this system, so we’re very invested in the system as it is, because it produced us. There is always the fear that if we change it in some way, we’ll dilute the product or somehow let people in who aren’t as rigorous or serious or whatever as we would like them to be.
Because we’ve spent our whole lives in education becoming professors, it’s very hard for us to imagine a different system. That’s just the way people are.
There’s always the anxiety that administrators or outsiders will try to mess with your intellectual territory -- and that fear is very legitimate, because in the history of higher education, that has happened.
I think professors often feel that reform is in the name of some more utilitarian or quantifying set of priorities which they don’t accept.
So there are legitimate reasons for professors to be worried about change. It’s not like we make tons of money, but we do have authority over our product and we don’t want other people messing with that.
However, there are changes that professors would like to make that they find difficult to make. Often, they want to be doing things a new way, but they’re afraid of giving up something else if they have to give it up to get there.
Q: I wonder if you have thought about parallels to other institutions or systems.
There’s a general parallel between the academic world and the professions, like law and medicine. So any professional occupation which requires a credential in order to enter into it is very similar to academic life, where you need a Ph.D. The way in which people are socialized into those occupations is very similar.
On the other hand, higher education has its own somewhat idiopathic qualities. We have tenure. We’re not for profit. So in those ways the academic culture is quite distinct from anything else, really, and you have to be able to appreciate what makes it idiosyncratic.
Q: You say in the book that the system of doctoral education is really about producing more people with the same credential.
We reproduce ourselves. That’s the most important thing we do. Then everything else follows from that, but if we don’t have control over that process, then nothing will work. That’s the heart of the system, but with that come all kinds of problems.
Q: Isn’t the main product of education knowledge itself?
Well, it is knowledge, but we don’t trust the knowledge unless we can trust the producers of the knowledge.
So what we do is we take people 21, 22, 23 and we push them through a six- to 10-year program of rigorously training them to do what we do.
College students often are a little shocked by doctoral education, because it’s much like law school. That’s not what they expected. It’s not like college.
The process is all to ensure that the people who are producing knowledge are people we can trust, because we’ve validated them by passing them through the same system that we were validated by, and that validates the knowledge that they produce.
We can trust the knowledge that higher education researchers produce because we can trust the producers of the knowledge. That’s why that’s the key part of the system.
Now, the knowledge itself is really important. But what makes the knowledge valuable is that the knowledge producers are produced in a certain way.
Q: You also address the legitimacy of the humanities in your book.
The humanities introduced a lot of ideas into the university that affected all or parts of the institution. One was what we call post-structuralism in the humanities -- questions about objectivity and interpretation, which for a while were very powerful theoretical questions.
People in law schools had to answer these questions, people in history had to answer them, and even people in the sciences had to deal with them. Sometimes those people were quite hostile to the theories that were involved, but they felt they needed to engage with them. It was very important to go through that.
The second thing which was really major was feminism in the academy. It really was through humanities departments that feminist criticism and women’s studies grew and became a really important part of the academic system. The whole academic world was, for a period in the ’70s and ’80s, made to examine the way in which gender makes a difference to how we teach and how we know, which is something that people never really thought about in the era when the institution was predominantly male.
So I think the humanities have contributed a lot to higher education and to the academic world intellectually.
Now, in the last 10 years it’s a little harder to point to something that’s come out of the humanities that’s made a big difference. Fields that seem very powerful now are economics and cognitive science. They seem to have a lot of influence even in humanities or for how people think.
So that’s a little discouraging, because you like to feel that your work that you’re doing in your division or your discipline is reaching people in other parts of the university, and that’s a little less true today than it was. But there are lots of things that have happened through the humanities that have had a lot of ripple effects.
Q: You wrote in the introduction that you don’t have an agenda, but you do mention some possible changes to the system.
One view is that I think that undergraduate education should do more to relate the materials students are learning to the lives they’re going to lead after they leave college.
General education is the place where this can happen; students shouldn’t just be spending four years acquiring knowledge for its own sake, because that’s not why people acquire knowledge. I think that really doesn’t value properly what we’re giving them. I’m very much in favor of putting a public face on undergraduate education in liberal arts and sciences.
The second thing is that I think that if you want to reform higher education in almost any of the ways I talk about, the place you have to start is doctoral education. You can’t produce people in the old system and then ask them to do something different when they get out.
So we train people now within a discipline and in a field within a discipline, and we spend six to 10 years getting them to be an expert in that field. Then we give them a job and we ask them to teach something interdisciplinary, and we haven’t trained them how to do that. We ask them to teach general education. We haven’t trained them how to do that.
We need to train them differently and we need to reward them differently, because what we’re rewarded for [now] is being specialists.
So people complain about, Why can’t professors do this? Why can’t they do that? The reason is because they’re socialized to do what they do. They’re socialized not to do this other stuff.
So I think that if I had a magic wand, I would try to reform doctoral education to create people who are less specialized, more capable of teaching broad-range types of courses at a high level, who are comfortable with interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity or some kind of nondisciplinary way of thinking about their subject matter, and who can write, some of them, for a wider audience.
Q: You have pointed out the current problem of too many Ph.D. candidates and not enough jobs for them. What about your seemingly contradictory suggestion that universities should produce more Ph.D.’s? How does that work?
We often think that if we just make it really hard to get a Ph.D., then we won’t have too many Ph.D.’s, but actually that hasn’t worked.
Proportionally, we’re giving out way more Ph.D.’s than we are master’s degrees and bachelor’s degrees -- more and more, proportionally, every year -- and yet it takes longer and longer to get through the programs.
I think that the main thing is to reduce the time to degree. It’s inefficient socially to take really smart people and put them through a program that they only have a 50 percent chance of getting a job in.
Maybe there are a lot of people who would like to get a Ph.D. but don’t want to become a professor. Would that be a terrible thing if they got a Ph.D. and then became a museum curator or whatever, or went off and got a law degree on top of that? No. I don’t think that would hurt them to have a couple of degrees.
So my thought was that we haven’t solved the problem by making it harder. So maybe we should make it easier and reduce the human damage that we’re creating in putting people through these 10-year programs and then not finding jobs for them, so that they have to start all over again when they’re 35 years old. People would go through quickly, and then they would be able to retool if they needed to retool.
And then finally, I felt that one of the problems that academics have in some areas like mine is that people who aren’t in the academy don’t understand what we do and actually are a little hostile to it. So I feel if there were more people who had advanced educations out there, nonacademics, there would be more communication between professors and the general public, the educated public, than there is now.