I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This seems to me not very well phrased, because the distinction between an institutional ideal (which is really what this is about) and institutional reality is not well established; and “instrumentalism” is very clumsily formulated. Fish mentalistically defines being “instrumental” as a matter of purpose or intention; while of course not everything that’s intended to be “useful” actually ends up being useful, and purposes are not often as monolithic as Fish makes them out to be. Is my intrinsic enjoyment of a bag of potato chips, to take the most laughable example, diminished or even altered by the fact that eating is also instrumentally useful for avoiding weakness and eventual death by starvation? Not really; contra Fish, something can be instrinsically valuable while also being useful for some other end, even when that “other end” is, abstractly, far more important than the immediately valuable experience of, say, chewing up crisp little ovals of grease and salt. Purposes can be multiple with regard to a given activity, whose “intrinsic” merits, moreover, aren’t automatically distorted by an instrumental attitude projected onto it. Extrinsic and intrinsic value, instrumentalism vs value en soi, are not mutually exclusive. And Fish is wrong to imagine that scholastic “understanding and explaining” are automatically distorted the minute that someone starts having an intention of  “intervening in social crises,” or that the academic merits of academic knowledge are incompatible with their having some other function, like job training.

Faced with demands for higher education to be “relevant” or “engaged,” either by producing a better corporate workforce as business leaders might want, or by teaching social justice as progressive activists would prefer — faced with these demands, anyway, Fish retreats into the argument that “higher education has no use; it is just intrinsically valuable.” It strikes me that this is actually an strangely deceptive move, because as a professor, higher education is obviously, trivially useful: Fish stands to gain an obvious utility — in fact a paycheck! — from the higher education that he argues is a “determined inutility.” Here is the unspoken reality of Fish’s argument: academic knowledge is useless to everyone except those faculty who are paid to reproduce it.

But part of the problem here lies in an overly dichotomous view of the relationship between the pragmatic instrumentality and the fanciful end in itself. It strikes me that Thorstein Veblen, a hundred years ago, had a much more insightful view of this relation, which I wrote about in my orals. I’m going to excerpt my analysis because it seems relevant here (you’ll probably notice the writing style becoming more academic):

In The Higher Learning in America: A memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men, the distinction between pragmatism and fantasy, the instrumental and the in-itself, is turned on its head so very many times that any settled synthesis of its terms becomes unfeasible. Veblen begins by examining “esoteric knowledge” in cross-cultural perspective. Although its “content and canons of truth and reality” vary, being products of a social group’s “institutions” and “habits of life,” he finds that esoteric knowledge is generally ascribed “great intrinsic value… of more substantial consequence than any or all of the material achievements or possessions of the community” (2). The pursuit of this knowledge is based on two instincts: the Idle Curiosity, and the Instinct of Workmanship. Now, here there is already a contradiction, multiply expressed. For one thing, esoteric knowledge is universally rated higher than practical material achievement, and yet it is itself a product of the work of institutions and specialists — in a sense, a practical achievement of its own. For another, the two instincts that lead to the production of esoteric knowledge are themselves opposed as pragmatism is to idealism: the Instinct of Workmanship is a kind of practical principle of production, while the Idle Curiosity is that which yields “a knowledge of things… apart from any ulterior use,” that is, a definitionally anti-pragmatic principle. To add one more wrinkle, in an earlier article Veblen had defined the Instinct of Workmanship as a “quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or industrial merit,” suggesting that even within the very principle of pragmatic action lies an a priori aesthetic norm.

In sum, at the most general level of collective symbolism, esoteric knowledge (which we Westerners call “higher learning”) is cast as impractical, as over and above practical activity. Yet the making of this esoteric knowledge is, for Veblen, a thoroughly practical institutional project, based moreover on a divided set of instincts which themselves recapitulate the troubled opposition between practical and impractical. Of course, “pragmatic” is not a monovalent term here either; higher learning is pragmatic inasmuch as it is the outcome of practice, but it is not pragmatic in the sense that it is not (for Veblen) directly instrumental knowledge, not necessarily useful in the doing of any other task. In other words, ‘esoteric knowledge’ is not pragmatic to the extent that it is (or should be) allowed to be an end in itself. Veblen, however, is skeptical that this knowledge embodies “fundamental and eternal truth,” commenting that “it is evident to any outsider that it will take its character and its scope and method from the habits of life of the group” (2). Insofar as the group inevitably disavows this institutional determination of its highest verities, it appears as if esoteric knowledge were, from the start, the product of a community’s fantasy of anchoring its ultimate view of reality in something other than practice.

But this purely abstract critique of higher learning is not the end; rather, Veblen treats it as the start of a more specific institutional critique of the intrusion of business logic into higher learning. Such an instrusion seemed to Veblen of relatively recent origin, a feature of post-Civil-War university expansion, the decline of clerical power in colleges, and the general system of business and industrial production of the period. For Veblen, business influence stemmed from the Boards of Control (as he summarized Trustees, Regents, and the like). Above all, the Board appointed the President, and controlled the budget; hence it was able to re-orient the university toward vocational and professional ends, to mandate constant financial and institutional growth, and to influence the hiring of business-friendly faculty and the removal of those who disrupted the institutional image — among other things.

In the course of the analysis, a whole new host of contradictions developed around this intrusion of the pragmatic into the academic. In theory, Veblen felt that “if the higher learning is incompatible with business shrewdness, business enterprise is, by the same token, incompatible with the higher learning… they are the two extreme poles of the modern cultural scheme” (12). In practice, however, this radical incompatibility seemed not to obtain. On the contrary, Veblen ascribed the institutional success of “practical men,” coming from technical and professional schools, to “that deference that is currently paid to men of affairs, at the same time that [their] practical training gives them an advantage over their purely academic colleagues, in the greater assurance and adroitness with which they are able to present their contentions” (9). In other words, practical men may have been out of place in academe in theory, but not in practice. As a result, “while the higher learning still remains as the enduring purpose and substantial interest of the university establishment, the dominant practical interests of the day will, transiently but effectually, govern the detail lines of academic policy, the range of instruction offered, and the character of the personnel” (16). Here, far from the university being opposed to business, this very distinction becomes the principle of the university’s internal operation: while the academic principles of impractical learning govern the outermost reaches of institutional form in the longue durée, all the practicalities of the university are shaped by practical men.

But in another set of dialectical reversals, Veblen took pains to show that the so-called practical men were themselves prisoners of a rather extensive panoply of fantasies and irrationalities. To begin with, Veblen views the incursion of the practical, professional men into the university as, in part, an effort to “lift [their work] to that dignity that it is pressed to attach to a non-utilitarian pursuit of learning” (9). In effect, pragmatists were in full pursuit of the non-instrumental, of values in themselves. More profoundly, insofar as the businessmen were ultimately representatives of the leisure class, their pursuit of profit and practicality was ultimately not practical, but was designed rather to afford opportunities for conspicuous leisure and consumption, that is, the intentional waste of resources in the pursuit of status. These businessmen, Veblen argued, steered the university into the same game: a headlong pursuit of institutional status by way of increasingly ostentatious buildings and grounds, student sports, grandiose academic ceremonies and the like (30, 37, 41). And these vast departures from the pursuit of learning became, for Veblen, a massive exercise in public and self-deception: “this large apparatus and traffic of make-believe… is the first and most unremitting object of executive solicitude” (64). All the while, this irrational “make-believe” was cloaked in a near-fetish of “the practical,” which became a justifying rhetoric for executive decisions in the service of private gain (49, 61).

“All of which may suggest reflections on the fitness of housing the quest of truth in an edifice of false pretences,” Veblen is led to exclaim at one point in this analysis (37). But the upshot of Veblen’s analysis is less a simple negation of higher learning by the forces of pragmatism, more a complex institutional vortex in which pragmatism constantly comes into new contradictions with the cultural, the moral, and the utopian. In one place he advocates the impracticality of scholarship; in another he paints scholarship as itself practical in relation to the fanciful delusions of the university presidents. Veblen himself, it seems, valued “practicality” more in theory than in practice: far from adapting to the demands of academic life, he was, as C. Wright Mills puts it, “a natural-born failure” in terms of institutional success. In short, I think we can see in Veblen an ongoing synthesis of fantasy and pragmatism, one contradicting the other only for the contradiction to become productive of the social system as a whole — only to again be brought into contradiction.

About Fish, then: he seems stuck at the zero degree of this synthetic process, not seeing the instrumental use to which he puts the “inutility” that he advocates, nor observing the ways in which the institution itself is internally structured by the distinction that he thinks should distinguish it from its outside. I’ve just been reading a book called L’empire de l’université (The Empire of the University) that argues for an end to any rigid intellectual distinction between the inside and the outside of the institution – an argument which would have fatal consequences for all efforts to evaluate the university’s value ahistorically in isolation from its societal context. Such as Fish’s.

It’s probably also false. What’s actually happening, according to another article a few weeks later, is that applications to expensive private universities are dropping, while more students are probably going to go to cheaper schools, particularly public schools. But the question remains: if fewer people got to go to college, why would that be a bad thing? Or rather, what makes higher education valuable?

I have to say I’m skeptical about most of the arguments I’ve encountered in this arena. I have an intuition that there is something worth defending, but most of the existing arguments seem deeply flawed. Here I just want to outline some critical and methodological theses that seem to demand our attention.

1. Sound arguments are neither necessary or sufficient for a thing’s existence or value. Higher education does not stand or fall on the basis of a sound argument in its favor. Many, probably most, teachers and students have no good argument to justify their activity, and that doesn’t necessarily make a difference. (Social practice, mercifully, need not be founded on philosophically valid premises.) Insofar as going to college has become a customary part of the life course for Americans of a certain social class, it can just become something that one does, almost as a matter of ritual. Does one go to college because it is valuable to do so, or does it come to seem valuable because one does it?
2. Moreover, arguments for the value of higher education vary across time and place, and as a function of people’s social positions, interests and aims. To understand higher education, and thus to account for its value, is in part a matter of understanding the differentiated social worlds in which many different values are ascribed to the institution. How does one understand the value of a polymorphous institution, or reckon with value claims that are contested and plural? Any argument I could present here would equally take its place in this field of existing arguments, in tension or harmony with them, and would likewise have to examine its common origin in broader sociohistorical fields and processes.
3. At a strictly logical level, there are different ways to structure arguments for the value of higher education. We have to make a number of conceptual choices just to pose an argument of this sort. For instance:
   1. Is higher education valuable as a process or as a product? Does the process, the sheer experience of higher education, taken as a polyphonic set of moments, matter, no matter how ephemeral its results? Or is it the product or outcome, the effect, the state of being educated, of having survived, of being credentialed, that matters? Or if both, how does one relate to the other?
   2. Relatedly, is it the formal aspect of higher education that is relevant to its value, or do we evaluate the whole life process associated with college? Are we thinking of higher education as what one’s supposed to learn in a classroom, or do we include the dorms, the frats, the clubs, the odd jobs, the late nights, the whole mythical American college experience?
   3. For whom is higher education valuable? I might argue that my college education was valuable to me as a single person, without making claims about the value of anyone else’s education; or that higher education is valuable to some social group or another; or even that higher education is valuable for society at large.
   4. What temporal horizon do we use to evaluate the value of higher education? An hour? A year? A century? Surely its value must change over time, just as higher education and its social contexts have changed drastically over time? And longer timespans tend to fit well with larger units of analysis. Perhaps higher education is valuable now, at this very moment, for some teenager in the midst of a transcendental intellectual awakening; perhaps on the other hand it has been valuable for society on the whole over the last five decades, promoting social mobility, as some argue.
   5. What kind of value do we ascribe to higher education? Is it in some sense intrinsically valuable? If so, what is its content such that it has intrinsic value – skills? knowledge? cultural awareness? habits of mind?* Or does one simply see education as intrinsically valuable without being able to explain why – which would most likely be rooted in the central cultural premise of formal education, which is that the state of being educated, whatever its content, is simply recognized as having a higher status than the state of “not being educated”?
      
      Or is higher education less intrinsically valuable than instrumentally useful, by opening up possibilities beyond itself — jobs, professions, worldviews, cultural affiliations? Or is it perhaps neither intrinsically nor instrumentally valuable, but rather valuable for its side-effects: the skills, for instance, one has to develop to cope with the contingent conditions of college life, skills for sociability, money, cuisine, stamina, and so on.* Or, finally, is higher education valuable because it is functionally necessary, inasmuch as it performs functions that “society” needs or desires? For instance, one might say that higher education is necessary for producing a skilled, flexible workforce, an informed and critical citizenship, a technocratic elite, a nation of depoliticized debt-laden consumers, or whatever.
   6. Do we argue for the value of higher education as it exists now? Or as it was in the past? Or in our nostalgic fantasy of its past or our utopian vision of its future? What degree of idealization should our arguments countenance? Does value reside in what something is, or in what it could be?

   These issues tend to overlap with each other, but I think they are each conceptually distinct, and I think in many cases there is no a priori reason to choose one way or another.

4. I tend to hear two major sorts of arguments in circulation when it comes to higher education’s value. First, the vocational argument would have it, roughly, that higher education is good because it helps one to get a job, and indeed opens up routes to various high-status professions and occupations, not to mention greater wealth and income. At the individual level, this tends to become an instrumentalist argument: “it’s good to be wealthy” or even “college is a good investment.” At the societal level, it becomes a functionalist argument: “society needs higher education because it needs to reproduce a skilled workforce”.

   The problem with this argument, of course, is that college education is often not very good preparation for a job (with big exceptions in engineering, nursing, social work, and other applied fields), and that the university’s role in reproducing class hierarchy is not necessarily something to celebrate. I note that the potential for individuals to rise up in class status through higher education actually presupposes the continued existence of class hierarchy and inequality, at a structural level. If there were no hierarchy, there could be no mobility. Elite American universities, moreover, seem to have served for a long time as bastions of upper-class social reproduction. So this argument seems rather politically problematic (not to mention somewhat dismissive of the general education that college often involves).

   Second, a more liberal artsy argument holds that college need not (and probably should not) be directly vocationally relevant. Rather, higher education is reckoned valuable because it makes one a critical thinker, a creative and well-rounded person, knowledgeable, virtuous, autonomous, historically and politically and scientifically aware, fluent in foreign tongues. Sometimes this argument is linked to ideas about what a good citizen should be, about general culture, and so on.

   Like a good academic, I don’t have anything against this per se, but it strikes me that the values expressed here are actually those of a certain class of professors, universalized as if they ought to become everyone’s values. Critical thinking in particular is somewhat fetishized by academics, and tends to be mentioned almost robotically in defenses of higher education. Also, there may be troubling class polarization around these two arguments. Is it mostly the privileged who can go to liberal arts colleges, disdain immediate vocational utility, and in short, afford to pay for non-instrumentally-useful educations? If so, the former argument may be an argument given preferentially to the children of the privileged (though I don’t have statistics on this), and that would be disturbing.

   Andrew Abbott, for instance, told incoming University of Chicago students, in 2003, that education is good in itself simply because being educated makes one able to have more experience, richer, more meaningful and more complex experience, than an uneducated person. I won’t bother to refute this bit of anthropological lunacy here; I just want to note that, at a highly elite institution, Abbott specifically dismisses vocational training as a candidate for the value of education. Over at the nearest community college, Malcolm X, on the other hand, the most prominently displayed field is the most vocational: nursing.

5. It would be easy to argue for the value of higher education if I were certain that scholarly knowledge is an authentically, intrinsically good thing, like my philosophy teacher in college, who once said directly that a culture without philosophy was an impoverished culture. If this were the case, it would certainly be easy to argue that it is desirable to become versed in scholarly ways.

   Alas, things are not so easy, since I am skeptical and ambivalent about the value of scholarly knowledge. It’s so easy to find things that are wrong with academic culture (isn’t that the very premise of this blog?). At the same time, it is just this skepticism and ambivalence that higher education, according to arguments about “critical thinking,” is supposed to impart. So perhaps it is a measure of the very success of higher education that one should become skeptical of its value.

6. College is, for “traditional” students ages 18-21 or so, a phase in the lifecycle in which one doesn’t have to work. Of course, Marc Bousquet has demonstrated just how exploitative “student jobs” can get, and Jeff Williams emphasizes that student debt is a new form of indenture. So perhaps we should say: in which some people manage to avoid the full force of the work world for a few more years.

   Insofar as most jobs suck this may well be a valuable thing in itself.

7. The value of higher education is something that is the subject of intense marketing and propaganda by colleges and universities themselves. It isn’t just that there is a socially determined field of arguments; the arguments themselves are politicized, politically and institutionally motivated.
8. But one can nonetheless plausibly argue that, on the whole, it has been very good for those millions of Americans who have gotten to go to college, especially in the post-World-War-II era. Although that said, it may not have been good for all these people in the same way. Different kinds of people go to universities; it requires a charmingly universalistic value theory to imagine that its value would be identical for all of them.

… And yet if higher education is to become more scarce — or just more stratified – a general argument for its value would be a crucial political resource. Although I hate to say it: the most valid argument is not necessarily the most politically effective.