“Education is intended to improve people’s intellectual ability. What it really does is create arbitrary competition among people.”

“To gain knowledge, $$, and power.”

I thought their answers were quite interesting, partly for the interrupted way in which a healthy cynicism makes its furtive appearance, and partly because I suspect that my students largely fed back to me the stock narratives that the college was always feeding them (about critical thinking, opportunity, etc). In other words, the students always tell you what they think you want to hear. Or rather, since they rarely know much about you individually, what they think a generic professor would want to hear.

At the same time, perhaps I should give them credit for being quite idealistic on the whole about the value of education. Here’s what they said.

• Education is for students to learn how to critically think. Being educated helps you understand the world and aspects within it.

• Education is supposed to be for the expansion and knowledge of all people regardless of age, race, gender, or religion. However, education has become a privilege to those who can afford to pay for it and the access to resources.

• Education is for the purpose of creating an elite status. Education (for the most part) accelerates an individual to success + subsequent wealth (usually). I think this is the motivation to pursue higher education.

• To provide us with options, expand our perspectives & increase understanding/empathy. Also, to let us know how little we really know.

• To learn – learning fosters personal & societal growth. So essentially education is for fostering growth.

• To gain knowledge, $$, and power

• Upward movement/mobility + to extend the mind

• Education is intended to improve people’s intellectual ability. What it really does is create arbitrary competition among people.

• Education is intended for ensuring that the mass population can make well-informed decisions in their lives, giving us the highest-functioning society.

• Education is used to teach people basic knowledge or skills that will be beneficial for the future.

• To learn & develop skills for your everyday life.

• Knowledge = opportunity. The more you know the better.

• Education is a tool to help those who receive it be able to use knowledge and information positively and with good judgment to better oneself.

• to expand
  the mind
  of
  an
  individual

•  To gain knowledge about a subject, often so you can find a career within that subject.

• To show employers you have knowledge of a particular field.

• To have a certain status.

• It is to pass on knowledge so we can continue to build and grow our society.

• It’s to help you become a more well rounded person, does it always work? Nope.

• Choice that can give you choices (which you may not want to make) / To see the world with a more critical (less ignorant) eye / Opportunities to make change for yourself and others. Education gives choice and opportunity; it’s up to the individual to take it or not.

Reading back over their responses, I’m struck by the decidedly composite nature of many of these accounts. Many of them say in essence: learning is good in itself, and it serves instrumental functions (career, social change, money, etc). Really, it seems unsurprising that something as overdetermined as mass higher education would leave people with complicated feelings about its purpose.

It’s also interesting that many students want to preserve a definite distance between the self and the educational process. “Education… it’s up to the individual to take it or leave it.” “Education is a tool.” “Does it always work? nope.” In answers like this, education isn’t about the core of who you are. It’s about a process outside you that may or may not penetrate you. A humanist might exclaim here that all instrumentalism is alienation.

But I was more intrigued by Plato’s remarkable, zany account of the origins of ambivalence, which I don’t think has gotten so much recognition. We have to be a bit anachronistic to read “ambivalence” into this text, to be sure, since the term in its modern psychological sense was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. Nevertheless, I want to explore here how Plato comes up with something that really seems like a concept of ambivalence avant la lettre. It emerges in the text from his long meditation on the nature of a guardian, which is premised on the initial assumption that the guardian’s nature (or anyone’s nature) has to be singular and coherent.

SOCRATES: Do you think that there is any difference, when it comes to the job of guarding, between the nature of a noble hound and that of a well-bred youth?

GLAUCON: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: I mean that both of them have to be sharp-eyed, quick to catch what they see, and strong, too, in case they have to fight what they capture.

GLAUCON: Yes, they need all these things.

Hilariously, the dog is being set up from the outset as the being that cumulates vision and muscle, and therefore gets to be the founding image of a human guardian class. These two facilities are also something like the two branches of what we now call the national security services —  “sight” metaphorically gets us the “intelligence services,” and muscular strength stands in for the “armed forces.” That is, the guardian is a miniature state apparatus. Of course, it also needs some moral virtues:

SOCRATES: And they must be courageous, surely, if indeed they are to fight well.

GLAUCON: Of course.

SOCRATES: Now, will a horse, a dog, or any other animal be courageous if it is not spirited? Or haven’t you noticed just how invincible and unbeatable spirit is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless and unconquerable in any situation?

GLAUCON: I have noticed that.

SOCRATES: Then it is clear what physical qualities the guardians should have.

GLAUCON: Yes.

SOCRATES: And as far as their souls are concerned, they must, at any rate, be spirited.

GLAUCON: That too.

So the guardians are also supposed to have coherence between mental and physical characteristics. Their spirited and invincible “souls” go along with their finely honed physical faculties. And yet a problem occurs to Socrates: who would want to live alongside these fighting machines?

SOCRATES: But with natures like that, Glaucon, how will they avoid behaving like savages to one another and to the other citizens?

GLAUCON: By Zeus, it won’t be easy for them.

SOCRATES: But surely they must be gentle to their own people and harsh to their enemies. Otherwise, they will not wait around for others to destroy them, but will do it themselves first.

GLAUCON: That’s true.

SOCRATES: What are we to do, then? Where are we to find a character that is both gentle and high-spirited at the same time? For, of course, a gentle nature is the opposite of the spirited kind.

GLAUCON: Apparently.

SOCRATES: But surely if someone lacks either of these qualities, he cannot be a good guardian. Yet the combination of them seems to be impossible. And so it follows, then, that a good guardian is impossible.

GLAUCON: I am afraid so.

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to construe this image of “a character that is both gentle and high-spirited” as an image of ambivalence, in two senses. (1) Affectively, the guardian should be able to inhabit mixed affect. (2) Sociologically, the guardian is supposed to inhabit a tense double role, solicitous towards the in-group and “harsh” towards the outside. Of course, it now seems obvious to social researchers that people can occupy ambivalent, contradictory roles. But that only makes it more entertaining to see Socrates state that role ambivalence is outright impossible (because it contradicts the intrinsic coherence of one’s nature).

It goes without saying that Plato’s equation of someone’s “nature” with their personal characteristics belongs to a social metaphysics of virtue and character that has become archaic, though certainly not altogether incomprehensible to us. Nevertheless, we see that curiously, ambivalence comes across here as a sort of upper-class virtue, one of the things that gives the guardians their exceptional and necessary qualities. Fortunately for the argument, Socrates soon finds his way out of his initial view that ambivalent natures are impossible:

SOCRATES: We deserve to be stuck, my dear Glaucon. For we have lost track of the analogy we put forward.

GLAUCON: How do you mean?

SOCRATES: We have overlooked the fact that there are natures of the sort we thought impossible, ones that include these opposite qualities.

GLAUCON: Where?

SOCRATES: You can see the combination in other animals, too, but especially in the one to which we compared the guardian. For you know, of course, that noble hounds naturally have a character of that sort. They are as gentle as can be to those they are familiar with and know, but the opposite to those they do not know.

GLAUCON: Yes, I do know that.

SOCRATES: So the combination we want is possible, after all, and what we are seeking in a good guardian is not contrary to nature.

GLAUCON: No, I suppose not.

Oh good — the philosophical project of designing a race of supreme but benevolent overseers can continue after all! Now back to the dog analogies.

SOCRATES: Now, don’t you think that our future guardian, besides being spirited, must also be, by nature, philosophical?

GLAUCON: How do you mean? I don’t understand.

SOCRATES: It too is something you see in dogs, and it should make us wonder at the merit of the beast.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that when a dog sees someone it does not know, it gets angry even before anything bad happens to it. But when it knows someone, it welcomes him, even if it has never received anything good from him. Have you never wondered at that?

GLAUCON: I have never paid it any mind until now. But it is clear that a dog does do that sort of thing.

SOCRATES: Well, that seems to be a naturally refined quality, and one that is truly philosophical.

One has to love the easy slippage from behavioral dispositions to characterological qualities. Argument was easier in these days.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that it judges anything it sees to be either a friend or an enemy on no other basis than that it knows the one and does not know the other. And how could it be anything besides a lover of learning if it defines what is its own and what is alien to it in terms of knowledge and ignorance?

GLAUCON: It surely could not be anything but.

SOCRATES: But surely the love of learning and philosophy are the same, aren’t they?

A charming assertion, unsubstantiated by social analysis of “philosophy” (as a modern academic discipline) but no doubt presumptively justified here by the Greek definition of philosophy as “love of wisdom.”

GLAUCON: Yes, they are the same.

SOCRATES: Then can’t we confidently assume that the same holds for a human being too—that if he is going to be gentle to his own and those he knows, he must be, by nature, a lover of learning and a philosopher?

GLAUCON: We can.

I think the reasoning here is something like: If species A does behavior X and has nature Y, then it follows that if species B does behavior X, it must also have nature Y. The unargued premise being: a being’s behaviors follow transparently from its nature.

In any event, we can now “conclude” (at least if we accept the rest of the argument) that the guardian class needs to have this ambivalent nature in order to fulfill its function:

SOCRATES: Philosophy, then, and spirit, speed, and strength as well, must all be combined in the nature of anyone who is going to be a really fine and good guardian of our city.

GLAUCON: Absolutely.

SOCRATES: Then that is what he would have to be like at the outset. But how are we to bring these people up and educate them?

So ambivalence here emerges as the necessary dispositional structure of a good “guardian of a city.” The guardians must be contradictory by nature and ambivalent in behavior: oscillating between philosophy and brute force, kindness and brutality depending on context. What becomes interesting — but what I don’t have time to explore in any more detail here — is that this nature is not entirely innate, but also has to be produced and reinforced by education. So ambivalence is both a functional necessity and an educational product.

I just find that a bit fascinating: that one of the markers of the ruling class, for Plato, is their structural ambivalence. To be sure, this ambivalence is as much a bivalence of virtue as a flexibility of affect, so in that sense it is far from a strictly psychological account of ambivalence, but one can, I think, see the germ of ambivalence as a potential badge of class distinction. In a world where everyone fulfills a social function preordained by their natural capacities and aptitudes, it becomes a curious marker of superiority to have multiple capacities, multiple affective dispositions.

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.

* Thanks to lauren berlant for great discussion of this issue, particularly on the points starred above.