chapter 14 the 20th century reform movements to 1950 of...chapter 14 the 20th century reform...

Critique of the American Institution of Education Richard B. Wells © 2013

Chapter 14 The 20th Century Reform Movements to 1950

§ 1. Historical Sources and the Educational Spectrum

I find these last three chapters of the Critique the most difficult to write. The reason is owed to a level of uncertainty I feel concerning the extent to which details in the history of education in 20th century America should be reexamined here. I want you to clearly understand that I am not saying the authors of these histories make serious blunders in reporting facts. But historians are people and, through lack of metaphysical grounding in a social-natural science of history, historians are as vulnerable to subjective judgments of taste as all the rest of us. This can color the lens of historical reporting when the subject matter is one that tends to be important to almost everyone in a Society. Education is such a subject. I know a lot of people from all walks of life and greatly diverse mini-cultural backgrounds, yet I do not think I know one single person who is actually indifferent to or apathetic about public education. I do know many people who are intensely passionate about it – probably more passionate than bodes well for its future prospects, In this study, I strived to identify the body of objective facts but also have had to ask myself, "To what extent must the Critical analysis of how this was done be reported here?"

Different historians view matters from individual perspectives. Those I regard as the most professional of its practitioners also take advantage of the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of other historians when they produce their historical accounts. History is the great fact-gathering enterprise of civilization. It is at the least the practice of a natural history if not yet a natural science, and its role can hardly be overstated. But because it is at present more the practice of a natural history than a natural science, subjectivism is always present to some degree in histories. In this treatise, I have referred to and quoted from those histories, or those segments within a particular study of history, that appear to me to be the most objective and the least affected by judgment of taste and the human-natural inclination to draw satisficing conclusions. The histories to which I refer are summarized in the reference section at the end of this chapter. Yet, though these represent the best efforts I have come across in my own research, few of them are without some evidential appearances of rhetoric warning the account might there become a bit colored and walk a thin line between objectivity and inclinations of partisanship. The only recourse one has to this entirely-human state of affairs is to follow the practice required generally in historical analysis of any topic: one must keep the parts of it that are apparently correct, discard the parts that are clearly erroneous, and set the rest down as matters for further investigation.

The topic of education history has the peculiarity that nearly all professionals who report on it are personally involved, in one way or another, in the practice of education. It is one thing to report on Queen Anne's War from the comfortable vantage of the 21st century; it is another thing altogether to objectively report on a subject matter that is also one's daily enterprise. The latter requires an abnormally higher standard of practice than does the former, but standards of practice are much more difficult to establish for a natural history than for a natural science.

I am confident you have long noted that I am not without some influence of partisanship as I write this treatise. Honest disclosure demands of me that I state quite clearly what exactly it is I am a partisan in the Cause of: I am a supporter of and advocate for the Idea of the American Republic developed in the founding days of this country, and of a Society and a nation in which the system of governance well and faithfully serves the six fundamental objectives of government (at all levels of government) stated in the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States: (1) to form a more perfect Union; (2) to establish justice; (3) to insure domestic tranquility; (4) to provide for the common defense; (5) to promote the general welfare; and (6) to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. That is my Cause. As for educational "-isms," I don't give a damn about any of them. They didn't work and are inimical to my Cause. But each

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Chapter 14: The 20th Century Reform Movements to 1950 Richard B. Wells © 2013

of them did contain, at one time or another, ideas and practices that are congruent with human Nature and with Order and Progress in a free nation dedicated to liberty with justice for all its citizens. We must extract from each of them those parts, and only those parts, that are correct and beneficial to our country, then toss what remains of the "-ism" on the trash heap of history.

One source in which there is no trace of partisanship is Johnson (1904) and there is likely a very simple explanation for this. In 1904 the 20th century conflicts had not yet begun and Johnson was merely reporting a history of a bygone era in American education with visible evidence of a degree of nostalgia coupled occasionally with fond amusement. There is also little to no evidence of partisanship in Blake (1961). Blake's little book is a series of historical time-lines with annotations of when some important events occurred and people of notoriety lived. It would be difficult to unintentionally interject partisanship in such a format. I think it is worth noting that Blake was assistant director for audio-visual instruction in the San Diego City Schools and wrote his little book as a learning aid for beginning students of education history. Alone among the collected authors here, Blake was not a college professor did not hold a Ph.D. He was simply a man who was interested in the history of education and made himself a scholar of it.

Reese (2011) examines educational history and how institutional changes reflected changes that were taking place in American Society at the time. The presentation is impartial although not without occasional wry comments. If Reese subscribes to an "-ism," it is not apparent in the book.

Angus and Mirel (1999) present a thesis that on the whole appears to be the outcome of care-ful and professional scholarship without ideology. Statements are backed up by statistical data and if either author had sympathies inclined toward one or another brand of "-ism" this is not especially evident in their book other than for some occasional speculations regarding the motives or psychology of particular players in the on-going conflicts in education. These few instances lead me to speculate that the authors are at least somewhat sympathetic to tenets of Essentialism, but if this is so it does not harm the scholarship in the book.

Bloom does not attempt to conceal his partisanship or the fact that his book is a denunciation of developments in higher education during and after the 1960s. At least this is honest partisan-ship because the reader would have to be dull-witted to not understand he was reading a protest. Bloom was, according to divers accounts, not a particularly patient man, or given to sugar-coating his statements, or one who was much concerned over whether or not others found his style abrasive. His book enraged surviving partisans of progressivism and reconstructionism, who retaliated by labeling him a "perennialist" – which seems to be the strongest denunciation in their vocabulary – and calling into question whether he was a scholar at all. Bloom's book is clearly a one-sided presentation, and because he too engaged in some amount of character assassination in its pages, I don't feel sorry for him when those he offended retaliated in kind. But saying that lessons from the past have pertinence for the present does not make one a "perennialist." His aim was to be provocative, and he obviously did succeed in achieving that aim. The weakness of his book, as I see it, is that Bloom did not offer to show us a way to follow in order that the problems he points out could be corrected. Anyone can denounce and criticize, and sometimes denunciation and criticism are needed. But for criticism to be constructive, there must be some positive follow up to the negative. Dutiful practice of science entails: (1) not ignoring what Bloom had to say (that would be type-α compensation); and (2) an impartial investigation of his charges to identify real causes of problems he correctly points out. What Bloom was attacking at root is a post-1960s trend in education others have called "multiculturalism." If there was one label – which there is not – that describes the faddish character of 20th century educational reforms, this label would not be it. Its practices abandon instruction that assistants learners in achieving Progress in their personal Personfähigkeit for fulfilling their Duties to the corporate Personfähigkeit of our civil Community. More accurate practical terms, in regard to its outcomes, would be anticulturalism or perhaps anti-intellectualism or perhaps even outlawism; but there is nothing "cultural" about it.

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Cubberley was a full member of the Progressive Education Movement in the opening decades of the 20th century, and his book is written entirely from the standpoint of progressivism. If one knows this going in, the partisanship, presuppositions and prejudices he exhibits, particularly toward minorities and immigrants, can be rendered harmless. If his or any other author's attitude irritates you, you can probably best deal with it and maintain your objectivity if you remember that neither a Moses, nor a St. Paul, nor an angel, nor a Buddha writes history books.

Hansen was likewise a member of the Progressive Education Movement. In his case, the biases he occasionally exhibits are evidenced in a few rhetorical remarks, by his persistent mis-use of the word "democracy," and his obvious reverence for an ideal of "liberal education." In the main, however, his scholarship is impeccable and his reporting of facts solid. His is an excellent work and the standard for assessing the outlooks of the Founding Fathers in regard to the sort of public education they saw necessitated by the novel form of Republic they had established. His own occasional interpretations are set out as distinguishably his own and not disguised in the form of an allegation of historical fact. Hence they are easy to treat as his and his book is cleared of all charges of presenting propaganda. It is perfectly permissible for an author to have opinions and to express his conclusions provided his reader can clearly recognize them as his and the author does not attempt to buttress them by presenting them as someone else's.

Potter's book is likewise a textbook case of professional practice. He examines the history of American education from many different perspectives and identifies whose perspectives they are. In some ways, his book is more of a textbook aimed at illustrating for students how to practice the use of history than it is a traditional history book. He devotes a 17-page prologue to precisely that subject. I have been able to identify very few presuppositions of importance embedded in the main text. The only mild concerns I have are: (1) it is unclear if Potter merely presents Brameld's taxonomy or if he subscribes to it; and (2) he does not distinguish between what is philosophy of education vs. what is philosophizing about education – and here my concern is that he apparently takes it for granted that these are one and the same or nearly the same thing.

Pulliam & Patten (2007) is a college textbook for future teachers rather than a 'pure' history of American education. As such, by the nature of its objective the authors find it necessary to set out what they regard as the most instructive examples, and they necessarily must present the subject-matter in its standardized current form. The need for selection and summary means that a higher degree of author preference must go into the composition of the book, and this cannot be done otherwise than through a mental process of judgmentation in which the role of judgments of taste is prominent. The book exhibits an unfavorable regard for essentialism and speaks for modern progressivism. One must keep in mind that disciplinary paradigmatic teaching and not history per se is the objective of this book. Its statements are easily cross-checked; doing so is necessary.

If the book has a weakness, this is found in the second chapter, which presents the 'educational philosophy' paradigm, critiqued in chapter 13, as a given. This, however, is congruent with what teachers of a discipline are expected to do, namely to teach that discipline. The teacher-training discipline purchases its understanding of philosophy from an outside vendor, specifically, a philosophy department. If the product purchased is flawed, it is the responsibility of the vendor to correct this. No discipline operating with public funds is granted a license to exist as an island universe cut off from all the other disciplines, or to take public money and do as it pleases with it, least of all philosophy or teacher-training. Public funding is not a hog trough.

Ravitch (2000) examines education history from the perspective of educational reforms, policies, reformers, and programs. Because of the tone of Ravitch's rhetoric, e.g. pages 16-18, and her occasional use of statistics that are somewhat misleading, I regard the book as a not-impartial treatment of the subject. Its presentation seems to favor an essentialist viewpoint. Consequently, it must also be used with precautions and crosschecks. Ravitch counterbalances Pulliam & Patten.

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Figure 14.1: The socio-practical spectrum of public instructional education in comparison with the socio-

political spectrum and Brameld's taxonomy of education theories.

Some writers of education history, e.g. Cubberley, write from the perspective of the discipline of educators-of-educators, i.e., from the perspective of people engaged in the development of education theory. Others, e.g. Reese or Angus & Mirel, write from the perspective of history as a discipline, i.e., from the perspective of professional history-reporting. The latter group tends to be less tied than the former to theoretical constructs such as Brameld's taxonomy. Professional education theorists tend to employ or embed theoretical constructs in their historical accounts to a significantly more notable degree. Professional historians, by contrast, tend to view education history in a manner that more directly ties the character of the institution to the socio-political spectrum of opinions and views found in the broader Society. The difference in perspective leads to differences in how the same historical events are interpreted.

Figure 14.1 illustrates this in regard to the socio-practical spectrum of public instructional education vs. the spectrum of education theory. Brameld's taxonomy distinguished four classes of "educational beliefs"; these "belief classes" correspond to the four most popular "-isms" favored by the 20th century educators. In contrast, although Reese and others do not attempt to present a formal taxonomy, study of the histories written from the pure historian's perspective tends to show a five-fold set of logical divisions closely aligned to the socio-political spectrum of opinions. The difference between Brameld's four-fold logical taxonomy of "beliefs" and the five-fold logical division of education institution from the perspective of the practical character of the institution is both significant and important. In Brameld's taxonomy, the restorative-transmissive half of the spectrum and the moderative-innovative half are mutually negative with respect to each other. What I mean by this is that, e.g., the Brameld transmissive "belief system" and the Brameld moderative "belief system" are such that effects of efforts by one group of believers act so as to cancel the effects of efforts by the other group. The relationship between the two groups is inherently one of real opposition (Entgegensetzung) and the resultant of efforts by the two groups has the Quality of real antagonism (Widerstreit). There is no common ground here and reform efforts by opposing "belief groups" cannot yield a stable equilibrium but, rather, can only lead to cancellation of each other's efforts and a chronic state of social disturbance (lack of social equilibrium). Here is the classic Toynbee symptom of social breakdown. It is a direct consequence of reforms grounded in ontology-centered theoretical suppositions and the adult moral realism characteristic of the behaviors of the major 20th century "belief groups" or "-isms."

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Basing reform on the now-traditional education speculations and theories tends to leave the overarching consideration of the real interests of the civil Community (to whom the instituted public education system belongs) out of the specific aims of the opposing groups. When the reforms are viewed from the perspective of practical divisions of the institution's character, what is made evident through this perspective is that there are five non-antagonistic possibilities for the institution, each one of which corresponds to the character of present social needs. What I mean by this is the following. In times of domestic tranquility and the absence of Toynbee challenges, the education institution is in an equilibrium condition with: (1) moderate changes occasionally taking place to assimilate new social conditions; and (2) moderate innovations occasionally being put into practice to accommodate social perturbations. When assimilation and accommodation are thus in balance with each other, the outcome is an institutional equilibrium suitable for preserving Order in the Society but still plastic enough to allow for its gradual Progress. In figure 14.1 this is what is denoted as "liberal education." This technical term requires further explanation because the phrase "liberal education" was so heavily embroiled in propaganda campaigns during the 20th century that it became associated in many people's minds with strictly political connotations that distort its role in the civil objectives of the institution of public instructional education.

In Critical applied metaphysics liberal education means institution of a system of education designed with the purpose of developing personal tastes and tenets of cooperation in such a way as a civil Community deems desirable. The adjective 'liberal' used in this terminology descends from the Latin liberalis: of or pertaining to a free man. This has nothing to do with any political ideology or even with specific educational curricula. Its pertinence and meaning is tied instead directly to understanding the terms and conditions of a Society's social contract. This is a very different connotation from the usual dictionary one, i.e., "a general extensive education not necessarily preparing the student for any specific profession." Hutchins almost got, but did not entirely get, the practical connotation of 'liberal education' stated correctly when he wrote,

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public . . . Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. . . .

Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It strives for a grasp of methods by which solutions can be reached and the formulation of standards for testing solutions can be proposed. [Hutchins (1952), pg. 3]

Where Hutchins erred was in making the identification of liberal education dependent upon the presence of specific elements in a curriculum. He contended there was a time in American history when "liberal education was the education of the Founding Fathers." Historical evidence contradicts this when one seeks and fails to find when curricular elements Hutchins identifies as "the method of liberal education" were present in the American institution of education. His view of 'liberal education' was object-oriented – which is to say it was ontology-centered – but the Object of liberal education is a practical Object and its objective significance is epistemological, not ontological. Liberal education is not defined by, e.g., books but, rather, by what Hutchins called its "aim"; the aim provides specifications for the books; the books do not specify the aim.

In a scientific practice of educating, the contingent nature of human experience and the basic satisficing character of human decision-making and reasoning will always from time to time lead to either excesses in educational practices or deficiencies in the effectiveness of practices that challenge the institution beyond its normal range of equilibrium. When (not if) this occurs, the restoration of civil equilibrium will sometimes require restorative efforts to roll back discovered excesses (restorative education), and will sometimes require new innovations in curricula and

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methods (innovative education). The left-most and right-most ends of the socio-practical ed-ucation spectrum recognize that counter-revolutionary measures (repeal of innovative excesses) and revolutionary measures (the invention of radically new methods and curricula) are occasionally necessary to ensure the overall maintenance of Order and the overall achievement of Progress in the Personfähigkeit of a Society in the presence of Toynbee challenges. Rather than Brameld's spectrum of theories-in-conflict, it is the practical spectrum of the institution of public instructional education that provides a proper Critical standard for evaluating the institution. This is, consequently, the idea of the standard by which the 20th century reforms are critiqued in this chapter. When the standard is not met, I'm not going to soft-pedal reporting the shortcomings.

§ 2. Overview of the 20th Century Reform Timeline

The turmoil of the 20th century conflicts in public instructional education was so increasingly chaotic as the century progressed that it becomes a challenge to present a general picture of this period in American history. Furthermore, the educational reforms over which the battles were fought cannot be considered separately and in isolation from the economic history of the century. That is why this treatise devoted so much space to the economic picture of America in the 20th century: to see where reform took us. Figure 14.2 presents approximate timelines when the divers movements took place. The century can be roughly divided into three major logical sections.

Figure 14.2: Approximate timeline for education reform movements in the 20th century. Starting and ending dates are approximate. Dashed lines denote: (1) non-organized continuations of reform efforts

following the breakdown of recognized major formal reform movements; (2) counter-reactions opposing one or more of the former; or (3) movements by citizen factions reflecting an onset of Toynbee proletariat

formation. Some of these non-organized movements are carried out by persons sympathetic to the PAPE of a predecessor movement. Others enlist persons who are responding to personal equilibrium disturbances

with maxims grounded in pseudo-metaphysics prejudices. In all cases these reform proposals contain little else than ad hoc quack remedies favored by ad hoc political factions. These are abetted temporarily by organized political Party politicians. The latter seek to exploit factional prejudices and the anti-bonding relationships between factions as means of serving non-educational interests of their particular political

Party. In all cases, dashed-line movements are characterized chiefly by propaganda campaigning.

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I compiled figure 14.2's timeline from the histories contained in the references described in the previous section. These sources contain a great mass of detailed data on events and those most directly involved in them. Although in some particulars these historians see some events from slightly different perspectives and draw slightly different inferences in regard to causative factors, on the whole they are remarkably homogeneous in their reporting of observed events. This is, of course, what one expects to find when historical research has been carried out carefully and with a high degree of scholarly competence and impartiality.

In this treatise I do not attempt to repeat details already competently reported. They are amply provided in the sources cited. Any useful recapitulation I might attempt in this treatise would merely add several more chapters and accomplish little else than redundant reporting of the detailed history already provided and accessible for your own review. What I do intend to provide in this treatise is a non-redundant Critical assessment of events as this must be scientifically carried out in a unified context of human Nature, mental physics, and the American social contract. When I think plain-speaking is essential for future reform, I state my findings bluntly.

The three major logical divisions in the 20th century timeline are: (1) the period covering epochs M1 through M3 (chapters 10-11), which I call "the rulership of academic educologists"; (2) a period of challenge approximately placed from around 1946 to 1968; and (3) a period of break-down from around 1968 to the present day. You will note that period 2 closely corresponds in time to epoch M4 (chapter 11) and the breakdown period closely corresponds to epoch M5.

Within the body of the timeline are seven interlocked thematic factors contributing to overall civic breakdown in the institution of American public instructional education. These factors are: (1) a reformation of American higher education from 1890 to 1910 that prepared the groundwork for subsequent disastrous innovations; (2) PAPE fanaticism by professional administrators and educologists that led to perversions of the purpose of institutionalized public instructional educa-tion; (3) establishment of uncivil curricula in the public schools; (4) counter-reactions by members of the public; (5) uncivic rulership by political party factions at state and national levels; (6) ad hoc speculative policy development without efforts to establish a social-natural scientific basis for instructional education practices and policies; and (7) Taylorism.

§ 3. Higher Education

It is probably more accurate to regard the period from 1890 to 1910 as the second phase of a revolution in higher education (with its first phase beginning in 1865) than it is to regard it as a second revolution. If so, this mirrors the point of view that the industrial revolution in America was a second phase of what the earlier Economy revolution had begun. Veysey called the period from 1890 to 1910 a "turning point" for higher education rather than a "revolution" in higher education. He wrote,

The two most important types of academic conflict in the late nineteenth century were over the basic purpose of the new university and over the kind and degree of control to be exerted by the institution's leadership. The first of these issues was dominant from the Civil War until about 1890. . . . Arguments tended to center upon definitions of the proper nature and function of the university and were maintained in fairly abstract terms. Then, beginning in the nineties, the emphasis of the dispute shifted to a concern over academic administration, as factions appeared in response to the tightening executive policies of the institution. The battles which determined the fundamental direction of American higher education were fought first along the lines of competing academic goals, then over questions of academic command. [Veysey (1965), pg. viii]

Prior to the higher education reformations of the Gilded Age, American higher education was

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regarded by educators and governing boards of college trustees as primarily an institution for moral Order in Society and as an institution for training up the next generation of elites destined to exercise benevolent rule over their fellow citizens. This was rather literally a shepherd-and-the-sheep mindset because it presumed the benevolence of the ruling elite would flow from religious convictions college education was to develop and hone – specifically, from Protestant Christian religious convictions. The unquestioned presupposition of rulership was utterly at odds with the principle of civic liberty in self determination that had grounded the American Ideal of a free Republic. There is a difference between the reform paradigm and what Jefferson wrote that the objects of higher education applicable to all students in every particular should be, namely,

To form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend; To expound the principles and structures of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another; To harmonize and promote the interests of agriculture, manufactures and commerce, and by well informed views of political economy to give a free scope to the public industry; To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order; To enlighten them with mathematical and physical sciences, which advance the arts, and administer to the health, the subsistence, and comforts of human life; And generally, to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves. [Jefferson (1818), pp. 334-335]

Although it was no longer accurate to say higher education was preparation for the ministry, as it was in the 18th century, it is nonetheless accurate to say a PAPE that can be called Protestant Perennialism dominated the attitudes of professors and administrators for the first half of the 19th century. Hutchins called 1900 to 1925 the era of "the classical dissectors and drillmasters" [Hutchins (1952), pp. 27-29], but he erred in thinking that there was ever an earlier period in American higher education when this label would not somehow have been applicable. The education he described as that of the Founding Fathers never was part of any formal institution of higher schooling. The admirable traits he ascribes to it and credits to the Great Books was real enough, but it was the product of educational Self-development activities, not formal schooling. His label does, however, aptly describe higher education prior to 1865 and, to a lesser degree, a fraction of it still extant from 1890 to 1910. It is not, however, either fair or accurate to say it applied to educators like Royce. It is not surprising, then, that higher education was not looked upon with favor by the majority of American citizens. To the extent it can be correctly said that a single PAPE ever exercised sole domination of the institution of American higher education, this can be said of the period prior to 1865.

The first phase of the higher education revolution from 1865 to 1890 took as its theme an idea of utility. Of Jefferson's six objects of higher education, Protestant Perennialism failed to provide for the second through fifth Jeffersonian objects. It was argued the reforms of the first phase addressed all these omissions, but in fact they promoted only the third and fifth objects, mainly through the innovation of the elective system (whereby a student had choices in the subject matter he undertook to study) and the promotion of education in the technical arts (natural science and engineering). The second phase, 1890 to 1910, undertook to establish a reorganization of higher education. It was the product of this undertaking that turned the institution into a non-civil agency. Because professors from the agencies of higher education played a dominant role in all later reforms, this misorganization and failing to meet the last two objects were partial causes of the failure of the other education reforms in primary and secondary public instructional education.

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Figure 14.3: Number of 4-year colleges, enrollment (in thousands), and enrollment as percent of 18- to 24-year olds from 1880 to 2010. C = number of 4-year colleges; E = enrollments in thousands; P = enrollment as percent of 18- to 24-year-olds. Sources: Bureau of the Census (1976), H 689-693, 700, 706; U.S. Census

Bureau (2011) tables 7, 278.

It can be accurately said that the first phase of the higher education reform, the utility phase, was successful. In 1880 only 1.6% of 18- to 24-year-old Americans went on to college. Just as the second phase of reform was getting underway, college attendance began a boom period that lasted from 1890 to 1980 (with a brief interruption due to World War II). Figure 14.3 graphs the number of 4-year colleges, enrollments, and enrollments as a percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the 20th century. One should bear in mind that, of the total number of American higher education institutes, only a minority consists of large universities (i.e., higher education institutes comprised of multiple special colleges). The rest consists of smaller universities and small colleges, some public and some private. The large universities stand in relationship to the smaller universities and colleges in much the same relationship that large cities bear to the rest of the smaller urban and rural communities. Most of the innovations in the reorganization of higher education came from the large universities, and the smaller institutes for the most part copied what the larger schools did either all or in part. To put this in perspective, in Fall 2009 there were 296 institutes of higher education with enrollments of 10,000 students or more out of 1813 institutes total (these figures exclude specialized institutes and 2-year institutes). Of these large institutes, 270 were public institutes of higher education. The largest institutes accounted for 19.4% of the total number of institutes. They accounted for 65.6% of total higher education enrollments [Snyder and Dillow (2011), table 244].

Reliable equivalent figures from the beginning of the 20th century are not easily found and might not be available at all, but it is beyond reasonable doubt that the number of trend-setting universities was a very small percentage of the institutes in existence at that time. The institutes most prominently involved were Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Clark, Cornell, Michigan, Chicago, and Wisconsin. Other institutes with some notable presence in the reformation included Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and California. Although it is by no means true that all the leadership for innovative reform in American higher education came from university and college presidents, there were five university presidents who greatly influenced the course of events from 1868 to 1910: Charles W. Eliot at Harvard (president from 1869 to 1909), Andrew D. White at Cornell (1868-1884), Daniel C. Gilman at Johns Hopkins (1877-1901), Stanley G. Hall at Clark (1889

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forward), and James B. Angell at Michigan (1871-1909).

Veysey wrote,

By 1910 the structure of the American university had assumed its stable twentieth century form. . . . Few new ideas have been advanced on the purpose of higher education since 1900, and there have also been few deviations in its basic pattern of organization. . . .

Looking back, it could be seen that the decade of the nineties witnessed the firm development of the American academic model in almost every crucial detail. Again and again the first widespread occurrence of a particular academic practice may be traced to those years, usually after preliminary pioneering by one or two institutions during the [eighteen] seventies and eighties. The precedents that came into wide adoption in the [eighteen] nineties proved all but irrevocable.

One may well pause to ponder this rapid stylization of institutional relationships. Before 1890 there had been room for decided choice about paths of action; there had been academic programs which differed markedly from one another. . . . During the nineties in a very real sense the American academic establishment lost its freedom. To succeed in building a major university, one now had to conform to the standard structural pattern in all basic respects . . . A competitive market for money, students, faculty, and prestige dictated the avoidance of pronounced eccentricities. Henceforth initiative had to display itself within the lines laid down by the given system. [Veysey (1965), pp. 338-340]

Toynbee's term for a Society answering to a description like this was an arrested civilization:

Once a civilization is born, and provided it is not nipped in the bud, as has been the fate of what we have called the abortive civilizations, may not its growth be expected as a matter of course? . . . The answer is that some do not [grow]. In addition to the two classes already noticed, developed civilizations and abortive civilizations, there is a third, which we must call arrested civilizations. It is the existence of civilizations which have been kept alive but failed to grow that compels us to study the problem of growth . . .

All these arrested civilizations have been immobilized in consequence of having achieved a tour de force. They are responses to challenges of an order of severity on the very border-line between the degree that affords stimulus to further development and the degree that entails defeat. [Toynbee (1946), pp. 164-5]

Two characteristics, common to all these arrested societies, stand out conspicuously – caste and specialization; and both these phenomena can be embraced in a single formula: the individual living creatures which each of these societies embraces are not all of a single type but are distributed among two or three markedly different categories. [ibid., pg. 181]

The characteristics of caste and specialization are both highly descriptive of an American institute of higher education. In one sense, caste was always present even if originally it was only presented as a caste of faculty and a caste of students. The caste system has diversified since then and is now additionally represented by an administration caste and college- and profession-based castes, notably those called the humanities, the social sciences, the physical-natural sciences, engineering, business, education (the descendent of the normal schools), and 'the professions' of law, medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine. In addition, there is a caste system in the various academic ranks and designations, e.g.: professor vs. associate professor vs. assistant professor vs. instructor; teaching faculty vs. research faculty; regular faculty vs. graduate faculty; tenured and tenure-track faculty vs. non-tenure-track faculty; etc. The multiplication of castes is traceable directly to specialization in the institution of higher education.

Specialization developed from 1890 to 1910, and it was this development that most directly

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led to American institutes of higher education becoming arrested mini-Societies. It is obvious that higher education mini-Societies, individually and collectively, managed to achieve a state of Order for themselves. The institutes are still here more than a century later and are, at least for now, sustaining themselves. But they did not become agencies of Progress either for themselves or for the greater Community whose property they are. An arrested institution cannot make itself an agent of Progress for the Community it is established to serve. But, because of the Enterprise protein structure of a Society's corporate tangible Personfähigkeit, it can became an agent of arrested development in the greater Society of which it is a part, and this is the case for the 20th century American institution of higher education.

It is possible for an arrested civilization to long endure. The premier example of this is found in the case of the BaMbuti Pygmies, who may well be the oldest civilization on earth. But it is more often the case that arrested civilizations become fallen civilizations. Toynbee documented five specific arrested civilizations in his study of history. Of these, four no longer exist.

To understand how it came to pass that American higher education became arrested, and how it likewise came to exert a dominate role in the development of the internecine PAPE conflicts of 20th century public instructional education speculation, there are five interlocking contributing factors that must be examined. These are: (1) the 'utility' movement; (2) administrative feudalism governing through the bankrupt practice of Taylorism; (3) curriculum; (4) the over-specialization of faculty; and (5) the silo effect of departmentalization within colleges and universities [Veysey (1965), Thelin (2004)].

§ 3.1 The Utility Movement in Higher Education

'Utility education' is Veysey's aptly chosen name for an academic reform movement variously known to its supporters by the names 'practical,' 'useful,' 'service,' or 'vocational' education. The variety of labels by which the movement was known to its own supporters serves as a warning that its basic idea was ill-defined and, consequently, served as more of a slogan than as a plan or an objective. Veysey used "utility" as the common name for the collective of diverse attitudes that came together just after the Civil War of 1861-65 to change American higher education.

The word 'utility' as so used has only a tenuous connection with the moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, with its Epicurean underpinnings, promoted by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill. At least this is so with regard to the education reformers; the name is aptly used in the latter context when referenced to the attitudes of the college students. This deontological disconnect between the moralities of educators and education reformers and those of the student body did not begin in 1865. There was also such a deontological disconnect between student mini-Society and faculty mini-Society before the post-Civil War reform era began. Even so, this disconnect had a largely unrecognized importance during both phases of higher education reform. Whenever debate occurs over what education "should" be or what the "right" kind of education is, there are always moral presuppositions standing behind the particulars of reform proposals because words like 'should,' 'ought to,' and 'right' always ultimately refer to objective maxims of mores and folkways. As these are almost always conceived in ontology-centered prejudice and they present only the personal and peculiar effects of individuals' moral codes, the disconnect is ignored only at peril to the success of reformers who ignore or fail to notice it, or to appreciate it de-ontologically. Bode was one of the very few who did notice it and had some appreciation of its effect, a point to which I return in volume III of The Idea of Public Education.

What could over-generously be called 'the utility PAPE' affected more than higher education alone. We see it represented in figure 14.2 by the trade school, vocational education, and business education movements. It appeared also in the junior high and high schools. But it was in higher education where the movement had its deepest antisocial impacts. Veysey wrote,

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During the ten years after 1865, almost every visible change in the pattern of American higher education lay in the direction of concessions to the utilitarian type of demand for reform. This was the period when important numbers of utility-minded leaders first achieved respectable positions. . . . The initial academic revolution, if such it was, constituted far more of a voluntary accommodation than it did an armed invasion from below.

Soon faced with competition from other types of academic reformers, the advocates of utility gained two conspicuous havens within the new university framework. First, they frequently became administrative leaders. For the administrator, useful service was a notion broad enough to encompass the variety of unrelated studies which was actually appearing; also, in the newly energetic state universities, emphasis on public service was enforced by the peculiar position of the president in relation to the legislature and other non-academic pressure groups. Then, secondly, at the faculty level belief in the primary importance of utility characterized most of the professors in the new applied sciences and a majority of the social scientists. As was noted in the instance of philosophy, symptoms of this outlook eventually made small but significant penetrations within the humanities. The combined weight of all these academic men . . . assured that this sort of demand would never lack an adequate hearing. [Veysey (1965), pp. 60-61]

What I would like you to especially note here is Veysey's use of the word "accommodation." The utility movement did not unite the academic, political, and business mini-Communities, much less unite them in common cause with the general public or, especially, with the students. It is quite possible for one mini-Community to accommodate others without assimilating with them. This is easily accomplished through type-α compensation behavior, which in this case takes on the appearances of that which is described by the proverbial phrase "live and let live." Students come and go, staying for only a few brief years; administrative officials likewise come and go, often with little greater longevity than a student's college tenure. Faculty members, on the other hand, come and stay for often a very long time. Accommodation for this reason tends to be made to favor the divers faculty mini-Communities more than anyone else.

This sort of tenuous attitude of mutual accommodation does not produce the unity of a higher education system. It is more aptly described as a convention of traffic laws made for the more convenient and safe passage of independent travelers on the same highway making their own ways to their own divers private destinations. Compensation behaviors of this sort can and do expediently serve to provide for the short-term satisfactions of diverse mini-Communities, and all people are satisficing decision makers. As a side effect, it also places the college dean and the university president and their staffs in the position of attempting to maintain peace and tranquility by what can be likened to herding cats. Because cats are not easily herded, this lays a sufficient subjective groundwork for the emergence of administrative feudalism.

It was a major problem for utility that accommodation was not what any of the utilitarian re-formers had in mind as an objective. Some were committed to "the good of society"; a few to "the good of the students"; others to "serving the public"; others to "the good of" science or art or culture. Other idealistic godheads also existed within the reformers' collective. Accommodation, though, serves none of these aims. As soon as one or more mini-Communities conceived that their aims were not being served to their satisfaction, they would take action to correct this and the tenuous peace and tranquility of type-α compensation would be upset by a new disturbance.

As for the mini-Community of students, their foundational aims – the Duties-to-themselves and the Duties-to-others underpinning the students' divers reasons for becoming students – did not have a representative seated at the negotiating table. This attitude on the part of the reformers is called paternalism, and it amounts in practical terms to regarding and treating young adults as if they were children who required the benevolent protection of an institutionalized Duty of in loco parentis. No reformer asked a student why he was studying engineering or chemistry or literature.

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The reformers merely presumed they already knew the reason, and so the aims of the reformers never took into account actual aims of the students, nor did they give consideration to the reconciliation of these aims with those of the Society to whom the institution of public higher education belongs. Unintentional violations of the social contract were therefore inevitable even among the educator mini-Communities. So it came to pass that in 1987 Bloom could write,

In looking at [the student] we are forced to reflect on what he should learn if he is to be called educated; we must speculate on what the human potential to be fulfilled is. In the specialties we can avoid such speculation, and avoidance of them is one of specialization's charms. But here it is a simple duty. What are we to teach this person? . . . It is childishness to say, as some do, that everyone must be allowed to develop freely, that it is authoritarian to impose a point of view on the student. In that case, why have a university? If the response is "to provide an atmosphere for learning," we come back to our original questions at the second remove. Which atmosphere? Choices and reflections on the reasons for those choices are unavoidable. The university has to stand for something. . . .

The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a demo-cracy of the disciplines – which are there either because they are autochthonous or because they wandered in recently to perform some job that was demanded of the university. This democracy is really an anarchy because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is. The question has disappeared, for to pose it would be a threat to the peace. . . . The student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn. [Bloom (1987), pp. 336-337]

Bloom is wrong about one thing here: there are multiple contrary visions of what an educated human being is, each held with sincerity and good intention. The issue is not want of vision; it is surfeit of contradiction among the manifold visions of educators and citizens regarding "what an educated human being is." I encounter manifold diversity in precisely this in nearly every inter-collegiate and university-level committee or panel I serve on. They are frequently held with such a fierce passion as would by its example make a saint feel ashamed of his own comparative lack of devotion to Christ. Type-α compensation behavior via accommodation resulted in lack of unity in understanding what "utility in education" meant. This could point reform towards only one destination – the "democratic anarchy" that Bloom passionately denounced.

§ 3.2 Feudalism and Taylorism in Higher Education

The utility movement from 1870 to 1890 changed the academic face of American colleges, but it was not until the second phase of the higher education reformation that the American university came into being. Thelin tells us,

Between 1880 and 1890 only a handful of institutions in the United States had legitimate claim to being a "real university." Apart from Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Harvard, Clark, and Columbia, the list of serious contenders was slim. . . . All this changed dramatically over the next three decades. A landmark event occurred in 1900, when the presidents of fourteen institutions met to form the Association of American Universities1 . . .

Growth and success characterized the era of the "university-builders" between 1880 and 1910. The wealth and energy of the period made for an exciting time in higher education. It

1 Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of California, Clark, Cornell, Catholic University, University of Michigan, Stanford, University of Wisconsin, Princeton, Yale, and University of Pennsylvania.

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was not, however, a smooth evolution. Accounts of the university-builders – a mix of donors and presidents – indicate that the risks and rivalries that defined American business competition of the era were replicated on the American campus. The similarities prompted Thorstein Veblen2 to coin the satirical term "captains of erudition," echoing the popular phrase "captains of industry," to characterize the university-builders' approach to academic affairs. Among the university-builders there was distrust, contempt, chicanery, and sabotage. . . .

One factor contributing to the emergence of many universities during these decades was industry – the discretionary wealth generated by American corporations and enterprises in the late nineteenth century. . . . Beyond the philanthropy made possible by business fortunes, industrial organization provided models for academic structure. Foremost among these influences was the approximation on the campus of a corporate model of hierarchy and offices for faculty and staff. Second was the growing numerical presence of industrial leaders as trustees on university boards, eventually leading to the rhetorical slogan, "Why can't a college be run like a business?" [Thelin (2004), pp. 110-113]

Given the profit performance comparisons between corporations and proprietorships presented in previous chapters and the fact that people who use this slogan usually mean "managed like a corporation," it is better to ask, "Why are businesses run like businesses are?" Thelin continues,

"Science" as it was invoked in American institutions – government, business, and education – was less a value system at odds with religion than an organizational ethos that prized order and efficiency. Whether reforming public schools, businesses, or higher education, the Progressives had confidence that their reliance on expertise and analysis could promote the "one best system" in American institutions. For an endeavor or an organization to be "scientific" meant that it was disciplined, ordered, and systematic – in other words, that it adhered to the principles of "scientific management." [ibid., pg. 114]

Thelin's use of the word "science" here, even if it is allowed that he is attempting to describe how that word was misused by university administrators and trustees, is equivocal. It is very important to mark the distinction between "science" – as in physics, chemistry, etc. – and "scientific management" (otherwise known as Taylorism), which was and is a pseudo-science. It is an historical fact that "science" is often abused by propagandists seeking to cloak something that is not science in the respectability that actual science often commands. This takes place, for example, when Aquinas claims theology is a science because "divine revelation" is to be regarded as a scientific fact, or when present day fundamentalists employ the term "creation science" to dress a religious dogma up as something it is not. This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time indeed. Plato contemptuously called the practice "flattery" in Gorgias, and this seems to me an apt label. Not all Progressives mistook Taylorism for science, but many clearly did.

Veysey provides a clearer account of changes that took hold in the character of the behaviors and attitudes of chief officials at the new universities from 1890 to 1910. First,

Students, benefactors, alumni, and trustees all constituted concrete sources of business-minded influence upon the university. Equally important were the ways in which the internal structure of the academic establishment came to suggest a "businesslike" tone in its arrangements. . . . In this context it was entirely to be expected that academic administrators should be admiringly compared with the actual "captains of industry." The

2 Veblen was a maverick professor who succeeded in gaining some public notoriety for his witty writings on the topics of "the leisure class" and "conspicuous consumption." By all accounts he was a poor teacher, a womanizer whose escapades were considered scandalous, and a constant thorn in the side of university presidents. He was fired from several leading universities and ended his career with a succession of visiting professor appointments arranged through former graduate students who had become professors.

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selection of a university president was admittedly analogous to the choice of a business executive. Furthermore, any organization requires internal discipline, and in an age of enterprise it was understandable that university presidents often viewed "their" professors as "hired men." "University custom tends to hold the department executive responsible for his associates, after the fashion of business corporations," noted David Starr Jordan3 in 1907. The administrator also compared his role with that of a general organizing an army, or with the coxswain in a racing shell. More strikingly, Andrew D. White4 declared: "I lay much stress on good physical health as well as intellectual strength [in choosing a faculty]. I want no sickly young professors, if I can avoid them." Such words suggest a plantation owner in the antebellum South anxious to secure prime field hands. . . . Like shrewd businessmen, university presidents and trustees sought to pay their faculty as little as the "market price" demanded; both Eliot5 and Gilman6 were more parsimonious in this respect than the financial condition of their institutions required. [Veysey (1965), pp. 351-352]

As if university presidents are not also "hired men." Personally, I would not hire most business executives, including most of the pseudo-business-executives hired to be university presidents, to manage a lemonade stand. It is a mark of the power of propaganda that Veysey refers to the latter half of the 19th century as "an age of enterprise" but means only the phenomenon of industrial enterprise (as represented by Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al.). The most fresh-faced apprentice learning his future trade in a Philadelphia shoe shop of 1700 was engaged in personal enterprise no less than was J.P. Morgan when he brokered the founding of the U.S. Steel Corporation early in the 20th century. From the day colonists first set foot in Virginia, there has never been an era in America that was not an "age of enterprise." It is pompous aggrandizement to say Carnegie was an entrepreneur but a teenager working the drive-through window at a local fast food restaurant is not. One can, however, speak of an age of uncivic enterprise. No public institute habituated to uncivic practices can well and faithfully fulfill the civil Duties for which it was established. The behaviors are incompatible with fulfilling the expectation. Veysey continues with

It was no special sign of dollar-madness when stationery was changed to read "President's Office" rather than the older form of "President's Rooms," or when the professor's "study" likewise underwent this change in terminology. Sometimes, however, there were symptoms of a deeper change in attitude. In 1900 a college president who chose anonymity wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly zealously pleading for the freedom of any "other" business executive. He chafed at the irritation of not being able to discharge faculty malcontents without being challenged. Deplorable waste would continue, this man argued, "until the business of education is regarded in a business light, is cared for by business methods."

It is easy to see why academic institutions came in many ways to resemble businesses; it is more interesting, possibly, to observe the ways in which they did not. At all the major universities a sense of informal limitations developed beyond which the exercise of power from "above" was considered unjust, according to criteria that were never clearly stated. These limitations prevented the university from becoming a department store. Trustees themselves, ironically enough, could lack the business acumen to invest endowments wisely. And professors did not hold "office hours" forty-eight hours a week.7 They did like to bargain for more money, but there was a point beyond which many of them could not be

3 then-president of Stanford University; prior to 1891 he was president of Indiana University 4 president of Cornell University 5 president of Harvard University 6 president of Johns Hopkins University 7 The average work week for postal employees was 48 hours per week from 1890 through 1920. In other occupations in the year 1890 it ranged from 62 hours per week for payroll employees in manufacturing industries to 51 hours per week in the building trades. The 40 hour week work did not begin to take hold until 1946 and in the 1960s there were many wage-earner entrepreneurs whose standard work week was 48 hours (eight hours per day, six days per week). [Bureau of the Census (1965), D 589-600]

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bought in this fashion. Leland Stanford and William R. Harper both discovered this fact as they offered prospective employees larger and larger sums, only to be met in a number of cases by firm refusals. Here was the most concrete indication that educational entrepreneurs could not have everything their own way. Much opposition, intellectual as well as self-protective, existed when the Taylorite "efficiency" craze began to seek academic targets just after 1910. . . . Even Andrew S. Draper of Illinois, the arch-example of worldliness among university executives, was forced to admit: "Of course the university cannot become a business corporation with a business corporation's ordinary implications. . . . The distinguishing ear-marks of an American university are its moral purpose, its scientific aim, its unselfish public service, its inspirations to all men in all noble things, and its incorruptibility by commercialism." . . . The distinction which Draper emphasized was echoed by most other university presidents: business means but not business ends. . . . That the leadership of the university tended to identify itself with business aspects rather more than did the lower ranks of the faculty was not as ominous as it seemed, for the consequent misrepresentation of the academic center of gravity gave the public an important and necessary feeling of reassurance. . . . This did not mean that, from the point of view of a clearly articulated academic role, danger was lacking in the situation. The misrepresented center of gravity could acutely threaten to become the real one. [ibid., pp. 352-354]

Personally, I'm far from convinced it was either important, necessary, or not-reprehensible to mislead the public. I do agree it was important and wise to inform the public that a fundamental change had happened, that the old church-centered, minister-preparing, sinecure-like character of the pre-Civil War college institution had been overthrown, and that reforms were being attempted so as to make colleges and universities better serve the general public.

Frederick W. Taylor did not invent a science of "scientific management." He presented a few platitudes over-generalized from a set of experiments with low-skilled jobs, and he presented a quack pseudo-psychology. Publication in 1911 of Scientific Management provided a cover of respectability for uncivic practices, contributed to exaltation of these practices, and helped to spread the influence of a gospel of managerial incompetence far and wide. Taylorism was already being practiced in the steel industry long before Taylor's book hit the bookstores and his name came to be associated with the practices. A single excerpt from his book serves to unmask the underlying state-of-nature outlawism that permeates every fiber of Taylorism:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron is . . . that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type. . . . he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself [Taylor (1911), pg. 25].

The net effect of the administrative changes that took place from 1890 to 1910 was institution of an uncivic feudal system as the method of managing the leadership dynamic within the 20th century university and college. It established a system of enterprise management, conforming to governance by the monarchy/oligarchy form of governance, that has been perpetuated to this day. It does not abolish feudalism when one merely changes who shall be the lord, the varlet, and the serf. I think it ironic that administration and management in both public education and business should have come to be governed by the same antisocial form of governance that the American Revolution fought to abolish. If it were not for the power of folkway, I would think it peculiar that a great majority of Americans accept without question the inconsistency of having sanctioned elements of moral outlawism instituted into American Society as a casual matter of normalcy.

§ 3.3 Curriculum and Departmentalism in Higher Education

Probably the most distinguishing feature of higher education reform was the birth of the elective system, pioneered at Harvard by Eliot and by White at Cornell. This shift to "utility" in

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higher education brought with it a multiplication of new subject matters and courses that broadened university offerings well beyond the traditional "classics" that had characterized pre-Civil War colleges. Younger new faculty members developed many more courses than a student could possibly take in four years. This led to the replacement of the old "prescribed curriculum" – in which the college dictated to the student what courses he was required to take – to a system in which he was allowed to choose which subject matters he wished to study. This, too, was mislabeled "democracy" in education and was when higher education abandoned its Duty to the social dimension of PIE. By the mid-1880s educators were judging that excessive liberality in course election was producing too little focus necessary for students' educations. Potter noted,

With the leadership of the land-grant colleges and the technical institutes and the pressure of business interests, colleges began to expand their curricular offerings, though often with great reluctance and against faculty resistance. As new subjects were added, old ones lost their privileged positions. . . .

This expanded curriculum created the problem of which subjects the students would take. In 1884 the eighty Harvard faculty members taught "about four hundred and twenty-five hours of public instruction a week without any repetitions." In four years an undergraduate could not take more than a tenth of what was then being offered. . . .

At Indiana University, President David Starr Jordan introduced a plan of specialization within electives. In 1886 he instituted the "major subject" system, requiring students in their junior and senior years to choose a specialty or major. A "major professor" was appointed to counsel the student in planning his program so that there would be some coherence in the courses taken and yet be "best fitted to his [the student's] tastes and capacity." In addition, students might have minors or elective studies. Some form of compromise between free election and required subjects was the rule among the American universities at the turn of the century. [Potter (1967), pp. 303-305]

The Indiana innovation marked the beginning of the advising system that is still found in colleges and universities today. It marked the beginning of the "major" as the specialized course of study, ubiquitous in higher education today, and the advisor as a helmsman for curricular navigation.

Perhaps because of the laissez faire and ad hoc way in which new courses and new subject matters were introduced at the innovating universities, it is difficult to identify any uniformly applicable taxonomy of subject matters characteristic of the reformed institution of higher education. The usual divisions are: the physical-natural sciences and mathematics; engineering; the social sciences; the humanities (which generally included study of classics as a subset); agri-culture; and education. From various comments by Potter, Veysey, Thelin, and from statistics published by the Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the following rough taxonomy, representing the now-traditional classification, can be sketched:

the technical arts: the basic physical-natural sciences (chemistry, physics, the biological sciences); mathematics; engineering; psychology; and the special technical arts (earth sciences, basic medical sciences, medical science, and the agricultural sciences);

the social sciences: sociology; economics; history; law; anthropology; political science; and other topical subject-matters (e.g. business, a pseudo-science);

the humanities: the classics; English language and literature; foreign languages and literature; philosophy; music; fine and commercial art; architecture (organizationally placed at some schools under 'engineering'); and theater arts.

Awkwardly appended to this is higher education's version of the normal school, i.e., the colleges of education that were established at some institutes of higher education. Like engineering, colleges of education were at first largely regarded by other disciplines – when they were regarded at all – as "tradesman-like" and, consequently, were regarded by traditionally-minded

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"scholars" with the suspicion that perhaps they didn't really belong in "the modern university" at all. It was principally through the sometimes autocratic direction of utility-minded university presidents that these two areas of study were included in the "university community." Both were at first "poor cousins" in relationship to "the more important" academic disciplines. Engineering, by weight of its enrollment growth and ability to attract large amounts of external research funding after World War II, eventually shoved its way into the "academic mainstream" of the university. Today it exists in a state of armistice with the other colleges, more tolerated than accepted by the traditional physical-natural sciences and humanities disciplines.

The college of education, on the other hand, never did quite succeed in being assimilated into this "mainstream" to the same degree, resulting in the not-inaccurate quip that 120th Street in New York City (which separates Teachers College from the rest of Columbia University) is "the widest street in the world" [Mirel (2011)]. This academic discrimination is so pervasive and institutionalized that Census Bureau abstracts often do not place college of education data in the same series with data on other higher education statistics. Both Veysey and Thelin have barely a word to say about the colleges of education. Professors in other colleges rarely have so much as one credit of college study in teaching or curriculum development in their backgrounds. Your author has only three, which I acquired from a teaching practicum as a college senior majoring in engineering. Some acquire their knowledge of teaching and curriculum development through such educational Self-development activities as tutoring, experience from working as laboratory instructors, and/or participation in developing employee continuing education and/or training programs in private-sector industry. Many have nothing more than the "on the job training" they unavoidably experience when they begin their teaching careers. Many a college student has paid a dear price for being made a guinea pig of this informal institution of professorial OJT.

Adding to basic taxonomy difficulties, from the 1890s forward many of the subject areas were busily engaged in redefining themselves. Veysey remarked,

But once the existence of a newer educational ideal ["utility"] had become firmly established, the air of institutional unity quickly began to evaporate. At most universities each subject came to be regarded as just as "good" as any other. In theory a professor of agriculture was as respectable as a professor of Greek; therefore their purposes were entitled to equal consideration by the university president who stood over both of them. Toleration would ultimately emerge from this situation; everyone would leave everyone else alone unless a particular jurisdictional quarrel arose. The university went several ways at once. It crystallized into a collection of divergent minds, usually ignoring each other, commonly talking past one another, and periodically enjoying the illusion of a dialogue on "safe" issues. . . .

On the usual campus could be found pockets of excitement over research, islands of devotion to culture, and segments of adherence to the aim of vocational service – all existing together. . . . Therefore, it should always be kept in mind that nearly every major American university was too diverse a place to be identified with any one academic philosophy. . . .

There is also another entire dimension to this complexity, the one furnished by the individual departments of learning which were coming into being in the eighties and nineties. . . . Many academic disciplines housed professors of strongly clashing educational views. To be sure, a fair number of departments became clearly identified with a single academic outlook of a larger sort: research in the case of the natural sciences, or culture in that of the fine arts. But in these terms some of the most important academic departments instead became intramural battlegrounds. . . . Departments of English were split between partisans of culture and devotees of philological research. Sociology, itself in the process of breaking away from economics during the nineties, had endless trouble defining its relationship both to social utility and empirical research. Economics was divided between

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the upholders of the old classical theories . . . and believers in utility, research, or a combination of the two. . . . These are just a few examples of the extremely complex state of affairs that developed within the new institutions of learning. [Veysey (1965), pp. 58-59]

The emergence of specialized departments, each dedicated to some specialized field of study, contributed to the development of fragmented silos of knowledge that, over time, became ever more isolated from one another. I say more about this in the next section. As both professors and students pursued their own areas of interest in increasing depth, correspondingly less exposure to other subject-matters resulted. It is difficult to say whether the departments created the colleges or the colleges created the departments. There were clearly significant degrees of co-determination that took place in establishing the now-traditional structure of administrators placed over colleges and colleges placed over departments. Hardly anything else was to be expected from a hierarchal business model of corporate organization, a form that was itself copied from the Roman legion. In any case, there could hardly have been a development more inimical to counteracting the divers sources of mini-Community granulation and competition in American Society overall, nor to the practicality of developing an empirical science of education. No one should be surprised that a sort of education alchemy rather than a science of education evolved out of departmentalism.

The academic Community was not, of course, wholly ignorant of the problem of integration. The 1880-1910 period of higher education reform occurred against a backdrop of general moral customs and national folkways representative of America and distinguishable from European influences. Divers efforts were made to devise "core curricula" covering matters it was agreed all college students should be exposed to (I will not say "educated in"). But there is perhaps no other single area of higher education subject-matter that has been more ravaged by conflicting PAPEs within the universities. This, too, is a predictable consequence of the silo effect of specialization and departmentalization because anything meriting being called a core education is ipso facto an interdisciplinary form of education. That form of education was never achieved anywhere within the institution of 20th century American public instructional education. It is not being achieved now by the few and toothless gropings for reform being called "the interdisciplinary movement" today. Any program or proposal that actually moves in the direction of a true inter-disciplinary system of education is immediately confronted by alliances of specialized silos, competing deans, and higher education administrators responding to disturbance of the Taylorite institutional management structure that actual interdisciplinarity provokes.

§ 3.4 Over-specialization

Disciplinary specialization was at once both the greatest benefit and the most antisocial factor to emerge from the 1880-1910 higher education reforms. Its practical benefits to physical-natural sciences, crafts and applied technologies have been assumed since before the time of Plato. Plato was the great champion of the division of labor two millennia before Adam Smith was born. It reflects the not-unreasonable supposition that if we need to know more about something, that deeper knowledge will be most quickly obtained by those with the greatest degree of expertise about that something. It also reflects a presupposition that depth of knowledge can be obtained only at the expense of breadth of knowledge – something that in fact is untrue.

One should challenge both suppositions because both presuppose the ultimate understanding of any specific thing is understanding that converges to a single point concept, as if knowledge of any subject is like a lonely mountain that rises to a single peak. Upon what is this presupposition based? In no branch of science have we ever discovered that understanding of any phenomenon is like a lonely mountain. All fecund knowledge, if it is to be fecund, requires not only depth of topical knowledge – let us say, for example, knowledge of fluorine chemistry – but also breadth of knowledge – how knowledge of fluorine is applicable to, say, making Teflon. In its turn, the

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fecundity in knowing how fluorine is used to make Teflon presupposes knowledge of some problem for which Teflon is found to be a solution. The perfect specialist, like the perfect generalist, is an ideal – an image or projection – of someone never actually encountered in any sphere of living enterprise. Just as it is true that an ideal generalist "is a guy who knows less and less about more and more until eventually he knows nothing about everything," so too an ideal specialist "is a guy who knows more and more about less and less until eventually he knows everything about nothing." That specialization (or generalization) is an unalloyed good is nothing but a Platonic fantasy. Specialization is beneficial up to some degree and thereafter becomes a disbenefit and a handicap. Generalization is beneficial up to some degree and thereafter likewise becomes a disbenefit and a handicap. But higher education reform saw only the near term benefit and, except in the protests of a few 'old guard' classicists, failed to see beyond that. As is usual in cases where a general movement is fueled by enthusiasm, there was a lunge toward false promise in an ideal that lies forever beyond the horizon of possible human experience.

As academic departments of specialized knowledge were formed, it was presumed that this division of labor tactic walked arm in arm with practicality – the mantra of the utility movement. A new emphasis on research was likewise seen as a vehicle in which both could ride ahead into a glorious future. Veysey wrote,

In two important ways . . . the growth of research produced basic changes in the nature of American higher education. Responsibility for the first change, a tendency toward ever increasing specialization of knowledge, it shared with the movement toward practicality. The second, liberation of the intellect for its own sake, resulted more exclusively from the climate of abstract investigation, although intellect was eventually to owe a certain degree of its increasing acceptance to advocates of liberal culture.

The dominant characteristic of the new American universities was their ability to shelter specialized departments of knowledge. To the extent that these departments represented vocational aspirations, the desire for a practical version of higher learning had set the tendency toward specialization in motion. Few of the new departments, however, avoided all claim to be advancing knowledge through investigations or experiments, and many of the natural and social sciences soon came to justify their existence in terms of the research they conducted. That a scientific outlook would bring with it an inexorable drift toward specialization of effort should have seemed natural to any observer versed in Western traditions. . . .

In consequence, the old-time professor who was jack-of-all-disciplines rapidly disappeared from all but the bypassed small colleges. "Smattering is dissipation of energy," declared G. Stanley Hall in 1882. . . . The most pronounced effect of the increasing emphasis on specialized research was a tendency among scientifically minded professors to ignore the undergraduate college and to place a low value upon their function as teachers. A few bold voices were heard to say that the college ought to be abolished altogether and replaced by an extension of the secondary school [high school]. Others were content to see the college merely languish. [Veysey (1965), pp. 142-144]

Such job-centric attitudes are antisocial in basic character. These are attitudes that at once cut the ground for public higher education from under the university itself. There is no public interest and no justification under the social contract for members of the general public to support the private intellectual interests of individual professors with public money. Yet the move to adopt a system of over-specialization, and to neglect instructional education, was precisely the direction American higher education took between 1880 and 1910. By the 1950s, the public backlash against the sinecures it established began to be felt.

The lopsidedness with which specialization was embraced is reflected in the distribution of Ph.D. degrees granted from 1920 to 1970. Throughout this period, an average of 54.99% of all

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Ph.D. degrees awarded by U.S. higher education were accounted for by just ten of the technical arts: physics, chemistry, earth science, mathematics, engineering, basic medical sciences, medical science, agricultural science, the biological sciences, and psychology. The standard deviation in this statistic is 2.250% and the range is from a low of 49.5% in 1946 to a high of 60.3% in 1923 [Bureau of the Census (1976), Series H 766-787]. Physics, chemistry, the biological sciences, and mathematics alone accounted for between 22.16% (1969) and 36.63% (1924) all of Ph.D. degrees granted. Figure 14.4 graphs the percentage of Ph.D. degrees granted in these ten principal technical arts and selected subsets of these from 1920 to 1970.

Especially in the early 20th century, by far the most common destination for a person who had just obtained a Ph.D. degree was a college or university where he would become a professor. For many years in the early 20th century, the graduate school at Johns Hopkins (the first in the nation) was the sole domestic supplier of professors to other colleges and universities. (The rest obtained their degrees in Europe). That a great preponderance of new Ph.D.s were trained in only a few narrow specialties carried with it the effect of developing a sort of tunnel vision in collegiate education. This might have been a predictable consequence of specialization in higher education, but it was not predicted by its advocates. These advocates, among whom Harvard's President Eliot was the foremost leader, subscribed to a belief in what became known as the "open inquiry model" of education, which held that a liberalized form of mental discipline in one specialized subject area would stimulate the learner to learn about other areas as well [Eliot (1869, 1901)].

This premise is highly questionable on its own merits, but in any case the faith the promoters of specialization displayed was naïve in assuming the ability of a person to expand the breadth of his knowledge implied he would do so. To my knowledge, no comprehensive scientific study has ever been made inquiring into the motivators of personal choice in selecting a specialty, but there are at least four factors known to influence such a choice: (1) the Desire of the learner to acquire a marketable job skill highly demanded in the employment market; (2) the intellectual interest the person has in a particular subject-matter (as a means of satisfying the drive to perfect his own intellectual Personfähigkeit); (3) the effects of counsel and urgings by the person's friends and parents; and (4) his private moral regard by which he views his possible choices.

Figure 14.4: Percentages of Ph.D. degrees granted in selected fields from 1920 to 1970. KEY: TA = the ten principal technical arts (physics, chemistry, earth science, mathematics, engineering, basic medical

sciences, medical sciences, agricultural science, the biological sciences, and psychology); PCMB = physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biological sciences; E = engineering; M = mathematics. Source: Bureau of the

Census (1976) Series H 766-787.

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These are factors that admix private maxims of Duty with factors from the individual's social environmen

chapter 14 the 20th century reform movements to 1950 of...chapter 14 the 20th century reform...

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