The Death of the University and the End of the Middle Class

(NLNS)—From the outside, University politics may look bewildering. Administrators representing “liberal interests” off campus represent the right wing on campus. Many mistakenly presume they either have power or pursue agendas with ulterior motives serving powerful interests. There’s a visible group of campus “radicals,” who are made to look like kooks—bean-curd eating, tree lovers and assorted violent revolutionaries kicking in windows and using swear words in lieu of rational discourse. Indeed many are unseasoned propagandists; but then again, many of them are too young to be good propagandists, prone to self indulgence and substituting public spectacle for meaningful political action.

Part of the reason conservative campus administrators become liberal special interests once they get off campus is the general hostility Americans have towards education. “Liberal” educators are often portrayed as elitists out of touch with the values most Americans hold dear. Ruling elites often encourage this view, generally because education sometimes encourages independent thinking, a practice rulers may laud in abstraction but despise in any other form.

Even conservative intellectuals grapple with expressions of right wing populism because it’s so offensive to their belief in rationality. It’s a rare intellectual that doesn’t regard issues like flag burning amendments as a manipulative distraction from more important issues. The conservative campus intellectual avoids looking like a blind supporter of any particular agenda, as do the majority of liberal and radical professors. People freely acknowledge a basic philosophy, but are always careful to point out particular deviations to distinguish themselves from the rigidly orthodox and irrational. Skepticism, even unwarranted and foolish skepticism, is the ideal professorial attribute. As long as you suspect everything and believe nothing, you will at least be smart.

Few on campus accept much in politics without at least some reservation. Universities are places where every answer is subject to a new question, which accustoms people in universities to the kind of discourse usually discouraged in politics where people have so much to hide.

This is not to say universities are not political. In fact, universities are, comparatively, places of great political ferment. A wide range of ideas exist in universities, but few of them ever get a hearing in politics. What is heard infrequently in political institutions is often discussed and debated regularly on campuses. Thus universities are politically “isolated” because, intellectually at least, they are so politically aware.

Universities are now paying for their isolation. Campus protests continue to cause public relations problems for administrators hoping to demonstrate the worth of the university to the general public. Moreover, administrators have to demonstrate to politicians that campus politics do not reflect the mission of the university while at the same time telling the student body that they encourage “open discourse” and the practice of other tenets of liberal philosophy.

The intellectual climate fostered by the Cold War inculcated in liberal educators the knee jerk response of denying radicals within their midst. The truth is, those who attack universities as hot beds of leftism are right. There are a lot of political radicals in universities; in fact, the most vibrant group of school sponsored, politically active students at the University of Oregon are not student Democrats or Republicans, but student “radicals,” encouraged in their beliefs by radical professors.

This climate fosters the kind of visible political action we have come to expect from UO. It does very little, however, to help administrators and others begging for money from philanthropists and the State Legislature to appease the belief that the University is not conservative enough to merit their support.

Like most liberal institutions, universities face the same dilemmas they faced over twenty years ago when they became the maelstrom of political dissent. How can universities play a functionary role in a capitalist economy while at the same time facilitating the kind of open dialogue and exchange of ideas which often threaten the most powerful interests in that economy?

This is not an easy dilemma to resolve, largely because our high-tech industry is very dependent on brain power. Its rulers, however, are dependent on brain numbing propaganda. Herein lies one of the great contradictions of high-tech, monopoly capitalism: How to somehow narrow brain activity to serve one purpose while shutting down its capacity to serve another without jeopardizing the effectiveness of the first.

To a large degree, this is the question bureaucracy has tried to answer, and not without success. Just as Taylorism (the system invented at the turn of the century that broke down tasks requiring skilled organized labor into tasks an ape could do, and made workers slaves to the time-clock) in the industrial workplace proved most effective in controlling the blue collar working class by fostering alienation within its ranks, so bureaucracies control the white collar working class. Bureaucracies are very unique systems. They are systems of collective alienation. But, at least until recently, it has become possible to alienate working people without too much of a progressive backlash.

Politics and the University in the Post-War Era

Even before World War II, American universities were politicized owing to their relationships with corporations, mostly as part of the military industrial complex. Universities served as research and development centers and trained much of the workforce for high-tech industry. The student rebellion of the 60s, at least at its inception, was a rebellion against the university’s entanglements with the military industrial complex, and the moral questions those entanglements provoked. Liberal, enlightenment philosophy, compromised by corporate influence on the “mission” of the university, did a great deal to produce the political convulsions that rocked the university in the 1960s.

The 1980s, a period in which already extensive, governmental allocation of tax payer funds to high-tech military industries was expanded even further, also witnessed a sharp drop in spending on education. While America’s investment in military industries was expanded, its investment in universities that had served as the research and development arm of military industries was cut substantially

The convulsions of the 1960’s produced a conservative backlash against universities. Liberal, elitist, and isolated intellectuals allegedly spearheaded the erosion of values, and the right lambasted these liberals with great effectiveness. Campus had produced the research and development powerful economic interests desired, but it also produced political confrontations and challenges they didn’t want. Fortunately, universities were associated with elitism in the public mind, making them vulnerable targets in the right wing’s effort to discredit dissent largely aimed at elite rule.

The Reagan revolution chose to fight campus political ferment the only way it knew how, by cutting the financial base that supported it. As a result, however, the Reagan Revolution eroded the research and development infrastructure that had historically served its biggest constituent—the military- industrial complex—so well.

The UO administration is now seeking to restore the tattered thread linking higher education to industry. In its “Strategic Plan,” a manuscript authored by Senior Vice-Provost for Planning and Resources Gerald Kissler, the administration attributes the steep decline in our economy to short- sighted lack of investment in research and development. In order to restore the strength of our economy, investment in research and development is vital. As our nation’s historical center of R & D, the American University requires a return to the kind of governmental support it lost in the Reagan years.

Since the corporate community overwhelmingly supported Reagan’s policies, and the political spectrum has shifted far enough to the right so that there is no viable opposition to the continuation of those policies, how can the university gain business support for its renewal? It must convince the business community that it has resolved its identity crisis. It must prove that it will serve corporate interests and no longer facilitate the kind of disruptive political dissent that corporate interests regard with great hostility.

The (U of O President) Brand administration hopes to distance itself from the kind of dissent the general public has associated with universities over the years. In fact, the existence of this particular administration could arguably be traced to former President Paul Olum’s outspoken criticism of nuclear weaponry, criticism that had the added benefit of coming from a man who helped design our first atomic weapons—a strong slap in the face to the military industrial complex upon which America’s universities have been so dependent. Although the administration may now be “politically correct” and wish to foster strong relations with the corporate world, recent campus protest has helped them little in their efforts to cultivate such relations.

The Right’s Attack on the Universities

The Reagan Right targeted universities as a bastion of elitism, while it pursued the agenda of economic elites. Some of these elites now regret the loot and pillage of the Reagan years, recognizing that short term gain comes at the expense of long term stability, a sentiment well articulated by UO Vice Provost Gerald Kissler, who is, by most standards, a liberal-regardless of how far on the right he may fall on the campus political spectrum.

The 1980s witnessed an intense erosion of our educational institutions. Education, a value in a liberal-capitalist order, lost ground with capitalists when it became too liberal. Reverberations of the campus revolts of the Sixties are with us today. It should come as no surprise that the Governor who led the establishment’s attacks against Berkeley in the 1960s, expanded and intensified those attacks to encompass all of higher education as President of the United States in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, higher education continues to lose ground, and its comparative tolerance and diversity of opinion places it even further outside the parameters of an increasingly narrow political system. This development cannot come as good news to the right wing. The degree of “isolation” the university has from the American people in no way equals the political alienation the American people share with the university, a common ground which may prove politically disruptive for elites wishing to divide students and educators from the rest of the American people.

Administrators cannot abandon these remnants of liberal tradition. Too many who work in higher education value that tradition too much, and therein lays the dilemma universities face: maintaining the precarious balance between a liberal intellectual tradition and its service to economic elites. The Reagan Right seems to have resolved this dilemma for universities by granting them the freedom to pursue potentially disruptive intellectual matters while at the same time cutting the financial base upon which such pursuits rested.

For those fortunate enough to afford school, a Darwinian ethic of collective selfishness consumed them. It is interesting to hear conservatives educators attack “multi-culturalism” as the root of our educational decline, while ignoring the reign of business education—arguably the most mind numbing education a person can receive—that ballooned in the Eighties. Of course that bubble burst, and business students now find themselves without work too - the flip-side of their Darwinian dreams, the realization that you are dispensable, subject to the whims of your environment, and if being upper class isn’t in your DNA, you won’t survive.

During America’s post WWII economic boom, universities and public education were part of an infrastructure which supported a vast middle class. In large measure, this middle class helped blunt the kind of dissent and political disruption usually found in societies characterized by extreme polarities of wealth and poverty. The Reagan years witnessed the polarization of not only rich and poor, but also within the middle class itself.

The Reagan Right successfully exploited cultural issues that appealed to the white, working class/”middle class”—the proletariat of the affluent, post-War society. But while the Reagan Right directed its most visible attack against the poor and blatantly vulnerable, it also eroded a governmental infrastructure upon which middle class life was sustained, thereby sentencing the middle class to downward mobility to compete with the already poor over what few resources remain after the Reagan cuts.

Some in the upper-middle class did quite well, but their prosperity was short lived. The Yuppie Dream, an ugly narcissistic nightmare that makes the repressive conformity of the fifties seem desirable, is no longer attainable, and for those who already have it, easily lost. Not being able to “make it” on $50,000 a year sounds less absurd as time goes by and inflation continues to skyrocket, especially inflation which destroys hopes of home ownership and a college education. Although people with $50,000 a year may live comfortably in this generation, they will not be able to pass a legacy of middle class affluence on to their children.

The capacity of states all over the country to finance education was eroded not only by a loss of funds for education but by across the board cuts in federal funding for an assortment of government programs and services. This withdrawal of federal support created an insurmountable funding burden for states and cities, forcing them to deficit spend and raise taxes in order to maintain programs - or at least avoid sudden and drastic cuts. Thus the Reagan years, contrary to promulgated orthodoxy, can best be characterized as a time in which taxes went up and services went down. The sentiment that led to the passage of Ballot Measure 5 here in Oregon becomes more understandable as a legitimate tax revolt when this squeeze on the middle class is taken into account.

The government withdrew its support from the American middle class, and now faces the danger of the American middle class withdrawing its support from the government. Alienation from government, long the trademark of the underprivileged, is now rampant among the formerly well-off American middle class. Symbolic of this loss of privilege is the decline of the American university.

In a larger sense, the death of the university is part of the death of the American middle class. Wealth and political power have been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands over the past 12 years—a fact one can rationalize but hardly refute—and much of the wealth that has been taken away has been taken from the middle class, both blue and white collar.

In a way, UO’s Gerald Kissler and other establishment liberals are right. The business community did sacrifice its long term interest in their pursuit of short term gain. By eroding the institutional mechanisms through which the middle class maintained their existence, the Reagan right eliminated the buffer standing between the rich and poor. Politically, the middle class is now hostile and unpredictable. Hardly a stabilizing force in a society increasingly characterized by extreme polarities of wealth.

Liberalism, the great mitigator of social ills in capitalist societies, has no place in an environment of such scarcity for the many. Liberalism, to a large degree, can be taken as a measure of a society’s prosperity. Liberals thrive in prosperous capitalist societies. In times such as our own, liberalism dies. One need only listen to what kind of government spending proposals provoke comments about the “deficit burden” to realize this is the case.

Americans simply cannot afford liberalism any more—economically, politically, or intellectually. Without it, however, we will be able to build the kinds of progressive political movements the Reagan Revolution hoped to suppress as radical political polarities arise as a result of radical disparities in wealth and power.

The ivory tower has historically stood between the many and the few, obstructing the mass’s view of the mansion on the hill. Although it helped obscure the reality of poverty, the Ivory Tower didn’t necessarily provide the illusion of a classless society. It was, however, evidence that ours was a comparatively mobile society. Working class consciousness was largely brunted by access to a middle class lifestyle. But it is no more.

Perhaps the most disruptive element in American society is not the ghetto. It never believed in the “American Dream” owing to its experience with stark realities denying that dream’s availability to all. The falling middle class may become the most disruptive and revolutionary force in American society.

The cacophony, frustration, and anxiety so evident on campus today reflects the cultural strains of the middle class’s economic decline. Taken literally, culture is the way people live their lives. In large measure, “multi-culturalism”, as adopted by white middle class students, reflects a search for a new identity.

The middle class struggles to define itself because it no longer has any base of identity, so it is in drift, part of its adjustment to lower class life. Its ability to drift is ending, and the stark realities to which America’s lower class has long been accustomed are encroaching on a middle class about to fall. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer, paid for by the middle class.

Among people making college campuses more diverse are older students, who are never properly identified as part of a dislocated middle class. They go to college, go deeply into debt, and try to avoid leaving to face a world without much opportunity.

Employment is temporary; home ownership impossible; education will soon cost the $100,000 + we started hearing warnings about long before Measure 5; and inflation far out-paces service economy wages while public assistance is gutted. Our standard of living is not going down (“standard of living,” usually measured in terms of over consumption, needs to drop anyway). We are faced instead with not being able to survive. The children of the “affluent” society, today’s Post-Prosperity generation, were acculturated to a lifestyle it can no longer afford. It may not even fall into the working class. Like the disposable people of the ghetto, the middle class may simply have no place in our crumbling economy.

From the ivory tower, the residents of the mansion on the hill heard critical voices tumbling upwards, and in a moment of irrational excess, they struck the tower down. Now they hear the mumbling of the many and perhaps wish the ivory tower was still there. It could absorb dissent. Allow it to echo through its chambers, causing no more disruption than hurt feelings at academic conferences or animosity between scholastic rivals. For all the scuffling at the bottom, the elite universities and colleges would still be there with their mild, boring criticism; their annoying, but rarely threatening, rational, liberal discourse, which would float upwards with all due civility and respect to an audience that would let it vanish into thin air.

If the voice of the many reaches the mansion on the hill, it won’t float up. It won’t even come knocking, and it will not speak with the civility and deference of a bourgeois intellectual.

And how the owner of the mansion will wish some college professor was there to explain what it all means: drawing allusions to the Storming of the Bastille and exploring the philosophical ramifications of the past living on in the present and what impact this might have on post-modern literary theory, but no! The professor will be in the kitchen, wiping jelly from his face with his former patron’s silk shirts, as his patron is dragged outside to face a gruesome fate at the hands of an angry mob let loose from the restraints of liberal prosperity. And nothing will brunt the sharp edge of the mob’s criticism, nor will anything brunt the sharp edge of the action emanating from it. The bourgeoisie are no more. Make way for the revolt of the masses.

The Student Insurgent can be reached at University of Oregon, EMU Suite 1, Eugene, OR 97403; (503) 346-3716

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