Serie mensual de artículos publicados en The Chronicle of Higher Education sobre la universidad en la literatura. Cuarto artículo dedicado a Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step: a Study of American Education.
Rereading the University Classics, Part 4
By Kai Hammermeister, The Chronicle of Higher Educatiom, January 5, 2011
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions. The first three columns are here, here, and here.
There are two ways to ruin a university. The first is to submit it to the demands of industry and finance. That is the way that Upton Sinclair criticizes in his 1923 treatise, The Goose-Step: a Study of American Education. The other way is to hand it over to a revolutionary political agenda. That is the way that Sinclair advocates.
In his book on higher education, the self-confessed “socialist writer” Sinclair travels the country and visits colleges and universities. Every time he boards the train, he relates the overlap between the local railroad magnates and the board of trustees of the largest university in the region he’s visiting. His conclusion: “Our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist.”
Yet that radical condemnation of the university system is not reached so much by theoretical argumentation, as it is through a lengthy string of anecdotes, case studies, interviews, and small-scale satire.
To be sure, Sinclair’s satire is frequently amusing, mostly because it hits its target. He likens the career of a ruthless and autocratic college president to that “of a drunken motorist in a crowded street; he has left behind him a trail of corpses.” And about the professoriate at one institution—never mind which one, because they are mostly interchangeable in Sinclair’s view—he reports that one moves among them as in a “twilight zone of mediocrity” where all that matters is the question of whether a particular Greek course should carry four, or four and a quarter, credits.
Satirical criticism, however, is often like shooting a sitting duck. And once Sinclair turns from the risible foibles of the professoriate to his fundamental critique of the system, he quickly begins to look ridiculous himself. We may be willing to consider whether higher education might actually be a “deliberate exclusion of new ideas, and of living, creative attitudes.” Once we learn what Sinclair means by “creative,” however, our hearts sink.
The education at Harvard University is flawed, Sinclair writes, because “the modern revolutionary movement is not explained to the students.” The one redeeming feature Sinclair discovers at Harvard is the undergraduate who left his alma mater to travel to Russia and fight in the revolution. He died there as a martyr to the communist cause. “His generous spirit will wipe out in Russian history the infamies committed by American capitalist government against the workers of Russia,” Sinclair writes.
Fighting for the communist revolution is a redeeming act for Sinclair. But he notes that American universities at large are in for a washing because they have “come to be run more and more on the lines of an army.” A capitalist army, that is. The professoriate from the twilight zone also turns out to be thoroughly militarized in mind and body.
It goes without saying that he thinks their militarization is of the wrong kind. Sinclair, again and again, points out which professors have studied in Germany before World War I, and, thus, have been infected by the spirit of German imperialist militarism. It is enough to have spent an exchange year abroad to come under Sinclair’s verdict: Every professor who ever set foot on German soil “learned the Goose-step under the Kaiser.”
Clearly no valid educational experience is to be had in such militarized (in the noncommunist vein) and industrialist-dependent institutions. Hence, college not only fails to impart culture but also instills in its students a “spirit of bigotry, intolerance, and suspicion toward ideas.” Academic freedom has long been undermined by “class prejudice and class repression.”
So what is to be done?
Sinclair wants to revise the entire curriculum by refocusing it on the coming revolution. “That is my program for colleges—to discuss the vital ideas, the subjects that men are arguing and fighting over, the problems that must be solved if our society is not to be rent by civil war. Everybody is interested in these questions. … You solve the problem of getting students to study, and also the problem of student morals; you turn your college from a country club to which elegant young gentleman come to wear good clothes and play games … into a place where ideas are taken seriously, and the young learn the use of the most wonderful tool that the human race has so far developed, that of experimental science.”
Because it might not be enough to turn colleges into debate clubs for blossoming revolutionaries, Sinclair advocates the “control of universities by organized farmers and labor unions.”
Reading such naïve statements today, there is little reason for historical cynicism by pointing toward the deplorable state of the Russian universities during the Communist decades. Instead, we might want to consider how the socialist agenda in the West morphed into that of multicultural globalism. Whenever the aim of education becomes the dismantling of an allegedly failed tradition that has only served to privilege those in power, universities become instrumentalized. Furthermore, the notion of a revolutionary education is a contradictio in adjecto. The aim of every educational effort is to duplicate the current state, with some minor adjustments and improvements. All true revolutionaries must educate themselves.
To abandon Sinclair’s vision for our universities does not entail the dismissal of all of his critiques. Some are valid in more or less significant ways. Here is a minor correct observation: “College athletics, under the spur of commercialism, has become a monstrous cancer, which is rapidly eating out the moral and intellectual life of our educational institutions.” One of his major correct observations might be his insistence that business and industry have gained too much of an influence on the universities.
To paraphrase Denis Diderot, the French philosopher and writer, our universities will not be free until the last educational industrialist is strangled with the entrails of the last educational socialist.
Kai Hammermeister is an associate professor of German at Ohio State University.