From: New Liberation News Service <nlns@igc.apc.org>
Subject: NLNS: Death of the University
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 15:33:10 GMT

The Death of the University and the End of the Middle Class
Jason Keuter, The Student Insurgent
 
EUGENE, OR (NLNS)--From the outside, University politics may look 
bewildering.  Administrators representing "liberal interests"  off campus 
represent the right wing on campus.  Many mistakenly presume they either 
have power or pursue agendas with ulterior motives serving powerful 
interests.  There's a visible group of campus "radicals," who are made to 
look like kooks--bean-curd eating, tree lovers and assorted violent 
revolutionaries kicking in windows and using swear words in lieu of 
rational discourse. Indeed many are unseasoned propagandists; but then 
again, many of them are too young to be good propagandists, prone to self 
indulgence and substituting public spectacle for meaningful political action.  
	Part of the reason conservative campus administrators become 
liberal special interests once they get off campus is the general hostility 
Americans have towards education.  "Liberal" educators are often portrayed 
as elitists out of touch with the values most Americans hold dear.   Ruling 
elites often encourage this view, generally because education sometimes 
encourages independent thinking, a practice rulers may laud in abstraction 
but despise in any other form.  
	Even conservative intellectuals grapple with expressions of right 
wing populism because it's so offensive to their belief in rationality.  It's a 
rare intellectual that doesn't regard issues like flag burning amendments as a 
manipulative distraction from more important issues.  The conservative 
campus intellectual avoids looking like a blind supporter of any particular 
agenda, as do the majority of liberal and radical professors.  People freely 
acknowledge a basic philosophy, but are always careful to point out 
particular deviations to distinguish themselves from the rigidly orthodox and 
irrational.  Skepticism, even unwarranted and foolish skepticism, is the 
ideal professorial attribute.  As long as you suspect everything and believe 
nothing, you will at least be smart.
	 Few on campus accept much in politics without at least some 
reservation.  Universities are places where every answer is subject to a new 
question, which accustoms people in universities to the kind of discourse 
usually discouraged in politics where people have so much to hide.  
	This is not to say universities are not political.  In fact, universities 
are, comparatively, places of great political ferment.  A wide range of ideas 
exist in universities, but few of them ever get a hearing in politics.  What is 
heard infrequently in political institutions is often discussed and debated 
regularly on campuses. Thus universities are politically "isolated" because, 
intellectually at least, they are so politically aware.
	Universities are now paying for their isolation.  Campus protests 
continue to cause public relations problems for administrators hoping to 
demonstrate the worth of the university to the general public.  Moreover, 
administrators have to demonstrate to politicians that campus politics do not 
reflect the mission of the university while at the same time telling the student 
body that they encourage "open discourse" and the practice of other tenets 
of liberal philosophy.
	The intellectual climate fostered by the Cold War inculcated in liberal 
educators the knee jerk response of denying radicals within their midst.  The 
truth is, those who attack universities as hot beds of leftism are right.  There 
are a lot of political radicals in universities; in fact, the most vibrant group of 
school sponsored, politically active students at the University of Oregon are 
not student Democrats or Republicans, but student "radicals," encouraged in 
their beliefs by radical professors. 
	 This climate fosters the kind of visible political action we have come 
to expect from UO.  It does very little, however, to help administrators and 
others begging for money from philanthropists and the State Legislature to 
appease the belief that the University is not conservative enough to merit 
their support.
	Like most liberal institutions, universities face the same dilemmas 
they faced over twenty years ago when they became the maelstrom of 
political dissent.  How can universities play a functionary role in a capitalist 
economy while at the same time facilitating the kind of open dialogue and 
exchange of ideas which often threaten the most powerful interests in that 
economy?  
	This is not an easy dilemma to resolve, largely because our high-
tech industry is very dependent on brain power.  Its rulers, however, are 
dependent on brain numbing propaganda.  Herein lies one of the great 
contradictions of high-tech, monopoly capitalism: How to somehow narrow 
brain activity to serve one purpose while shutting down its capacity to serve 
another without jeopardizing the effectiveness of the first.
	To a large degree, this is the question bureaucracy has tried to 
answer, and not without success.  Just as Taylorism (the system invented at 
the turn of the century that broke down tasks requiring skilled organized 
labor into tasks an ape could do, and made workers slaves to the time-clock) 
in the industrial workplace proved most effective in controlling the blue 
collar working class by fostering alienation within its ranks, so 
bureaucracies control the white collar working class.  Bureaucracies are 
very unique systems. They are systems of collective alienation. But, at least 
until recently, it has become possible to alienate working people without too 
much of a progressive backlash.

POLITICS AND THE UNIVERSITY IN THE POST-WAR ERA
	Even before World War II, American universities were politicized 
owing to their relationships with corporations, mostly as part of the military 
industrial complex.  Universities served as research and development 
centers and trained much of the workforce for high-tech industry.  The 
student rebellion of the 60s, at least at its inception, was a rebellion against 
the university's entanglements with the military industrial complex, and the 
moral questions those entanglements provoked.  Liberal, enlightenment 
philosophy, compromised by corporate influence on the "mission" of the 
university, did a great deal to produce the political convulsions that rocked 
the university in the 1960s.
	The 1980s, a period in which already extensive, governmental 
allocation of tax payer funds to high-tech military industries was expanded 
even further, also witnessed a sharp drop in spending on education.  While 
America's investment in military industries was expanded, its investment in 
universities that had served as the research and development arm of military 
industries was cut substantially.	
	The convulsions of the 1960s  produced a conservative backlash 
against universities.  Liberal, elitist, and isolated intellectuals allegedly 
spearheaded the erosion of values, and the right lambasted these liberals 
with great  effectiveness.  Campus had produced the research and 
development powerful economic interests desired, but it also produced 
political confrontations and challenges they didn't want.  Fortunately, 
universities were associated with elitism in the public mind, making them 
vulnerable targets in the right wing's effort to discredit dissent largely aimed 
at elite rule.	
	The Reagan revolution chose to fight campus political ferment the 
only way it knew how, by cutting the financial base that supported it.  As a 
result, however, the Reagan Revolution eroded the research and 
development infrastructure that had historically served its biggest 
constituent--the military-industrial complex--so well.
	The UO administration is now seeking to restore the tattered thread 
linking higher education to industry.  In its "Strategic Plan," a manuscript 
authored by Senior Vice-Provost for Planning and Resources Gerald 
Kissler, the administration attributes the steep decline in our economy to 
short-sighted lack of investment in research and development.  In order to 
restore the strength of our economy, investment in research and 
development is vital.  As our nation's historical center of R & D, the 
American University requires a return to the kind of governmental support it 
lost in the Reagan years.
	Since the corporate community overwhelmingly supported Reagan's 
policies, and the political spectrum has shifted far enough to the right so that 
there is no viable opposition to the continuation of those policies, how can 
the university gain business support for its renewal?  It must convince the 
business community that it has resolved its identity crisis.  It must prove 
that it will serve corporate interests and no longer facilitate the kind of 
disruptive political dissent that corporate interests regard with great hostility.
	The (U of O President) Brand administration
hopes to distance itself from the kind of 
dissent the general public has associated with universities over the years.  In 
fact, the existence of this particular administration could arguably be traced 
to former President Paul Olum's outspoken criticism of nuclear weaponry, 
criticism that had the added benefit of coming from a man who helped 
design our first atomic weapons--a strong slap in the face to the military 
industrial complex upon which America's universities have been so 
dependent. Although the administration may now be "politically correct" 
and wish to foster strong relations with the corporate world,  recent campus 
protest has helped them little in their efforts to cultivate such relations.

THE RIGHT'S ATTACK 
ON THE UNIVERSITIES
	The Reagan Right targeted universities as a bastion of elitism, while 
it  pursued the agenda of economic elites.  Some of these elites now regret 
the loot and pillage of the Reagan years, recognizing that short term gain 
comes at the expense of long term stability,  a sentiment well articulated by 
UO Vice Provost Gerald Kissler, who is, by most standards, a liberal--
regardless of how far on the right he may fall on the campus political 
spectrum.
	The 1980s witnessed an intense erosion of our educational 
institutions.  Education, a value in a liberal-capitalist order, lost ground with 
capitalists when it became too liberal.  Reverberations of the campus revolts 
of the Sixties are with us today.  It should come as no surprise that the 
Governor who led the establishment's attacks against Berkeley in the 
1960s, expanded and intensified those attacks to encompass all of higher 
education as President of the United States in the 1980s. 
	Meanwhile, higher education continues to lose ground, and its 
comparative tolerance and diversity of opinion places it even  further outside 
the parameters of an increasingly narrow political system.  This 
development cannot come as good news to the right wing.  The degree of 
"isolation" the university  has from the American people in no way equals 
the political alienation the American people share with the university, a 
common ground which may prove politically disruptive for elites wishing to 
divide students and educators from the rest of the American people.
	Administrators cannot abandon these remnants of liberal tradition.  
Too many who work in higher education value that tradition too much, and 
therein lays the dilemma universities face: maintaining the precarious 
balance between a liberal intellectual tradition and its service to economic 
elites.  The Reagan Right seems to have resolved this dilemma for 
universities by granting them the freedom to pursue potentially disruptive 
intellectual matters while at the same time cutting the financial base upon 
which such pursuits rested. 
	For those fortunate enough to afford school, a Darwinian ethic of 
collective selfishness consumed them.  It is interesting to hear conservatives 
educators attack "multi-culturalism" as the root of our educational decline, 
while ignoring the reign of business education--arguably the most mind 
numbing education a person can receive--that ballooned in the Eighties.  Of 
course that bubble burst, and business students now find themselves 
without work too - the flipside of their Darwinian dreams, the realization 
that you are dispensable, subject to the whims of your environment, and if 
being upper class isn't in your DNA, you won't survive.	
	During America's post WWII economic boom, universities and 
public education were part of an infrastructure which supported a vast 
middle class.  In large measure, this middle class helped blunt the kind of 
dissent and political disruption usually found in societies characterized by 
extreme polarities of wealth and poverty.  The Reagan years witnessed the 
polarization of not only rich and poor, but also within the middle class 
itself.  
	The Reagan Right successfully exploited cultural issues that 
appealed to the white, working class/"middle class"--the proletariat of the 
affluent, post-War  society.  But while the Reagan Right directed its most 
visible attack against the poor and blatantly vulnerable, it also eroded a 
governmental infrastructure upon which middle class life was sustained, 
thereby sentencing the middle class to downward mobility to compete with 
the already poor over what few resources remain after the Reagan cuts. 
	Some in the upper-middle class did quite well, but their prosperity 
was short lived.  The Yuppie Dream, an ugly narcissistic nightmare that 
makes the repressive conformity of the fifties seem desirable, is no longer 
attainable, and for those who already have it, easily lost.  Not being able to 
"make it" on $50,000 a year sounds less absurd as time goes by and 
inflation continues to skyrocket, especially inflation which destroys hopes 
of home ownership and a college education.  Although people with $50,000 
a year may live comfortably in this generation, they will not be able to pass 
a legacy of middle class affluence on to their children.
 	The capacity of states all over the country to finance education was 
eroded not only by a loss of funds for education but by across the board 
cuts in  federal funding for an assortment of government programs and 
services.  This withdrawal of federal support created an insurmountable 
funding burden for states and cities, forcing them to deficit spend and raise 
taxes in order to maintain programs - or at least avoid sudden and drastic 
cuts.  Thus the Reagan years, contrary to promulgated orthodoxy, can best 
be characterized as a time in which taxes went up and services went down.  
The sentiment that led to the passage of Ballot Measure 5 here in Oregon 
becomes more understandable as a legitimate tax revolt when this squeeze 
on the middle class is taken into account. 
	 The government withdrew its support from the American middle 
class, and now faces the danger of the American middle class withdrawing 
its support from the government.  Alienation from government, long the 
trademark of the underprivileged, is now rampant among the formerly well-
off American middle class.  Symbolic of this loss of privilege is the decline 
of the American university.
	In a larger sense, the death of the university is part of the death of 
the American middle class.  Wealth and political power have been 
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands over the past 12 years--a fact one can 
rationalize but hardly refute--and much of the wealth that has been taken 
away has been taken from the middle class, both blue and white collar.  
	In a way, UO's Gerald Kissler and other establishment liberals are 
right.  The business community did sacrifice its long term interest in their 
pursuit of short term gain.  By eroding the institutional mechanisms through 
which the middle class maintained their existence, the Reagan right 
eliminated the buffer standing between the rich and poor.  Politically, the 
middle class is now hostile and unpredictable.  Hardly a stabilizing force in 
a society increasingly characterized by extreme polarities of wealth. 
	Liberalism, the great mitigator of social ills in capitalist societies, has 
no place in an environment of such scarcity for the many.  Liberalism, to a 
large degree, can be taken as a measure of a society's prosperity.  Liberals 
thrive in prosperous capitalist societies.  In times such as our own, 
liberalism dies.  One need only listen to what kind of  government spending 
proposals provoke comments about the "deficit burden" to realize this is the 
case.	
	Americans simply cannot afford liberalism any more--economically, 
politically, or intellectually.  Without it, however, we will be able to build 
the kinds of progressive political movements the Reagan Revolution hoped 
to suppress as radical political polarities arise as a result of radical disparities 
in wealth and power.  	
	The ivory tower has historically stood between the many and the 
few, obstructing the mass's view of the mansion on the hill.  Although it 
helped obscure the reality of poverty, the Ivory Tower didn't necessarily 
provide the illusion of a classless society.   It was, however,  evidence that 
ours was a comparatively mobile society. Working class consciousness was 
largely brunted by access to a middle class lifestyle.  But it is no more.  
	Perhaps the most disruptive element in American society is not the 
ghetto.  It never believed in the "American Dream" owing to its experience 
with stark realities denying that dream's availability to all.  The falling 
middle class may become the most disruptive and revolutionary force in 
American society.  
	The cacophony , frustration, and anxiety so evident on campus 
today reflects the cultural strains of the middle class's economic decline.  
Taken literally, culture is the way people live their lives.  In large measure, 
"multi-culturalism", as adopted by white middle class students, reflects a 
search for a new identity.   	
	The middle class struggles to define itself because it no longer has 
any base of identity, so it is in drift, part of its adjustment to lower class 
life.  Its ability to drift is ending, and the stark realities to which America's 
lower class has long been accustomed are encroaching on a middle class 
about to fall.  The rich got richer and the poor got poorer, paid for by the 
middle class.  
	Among people making college campuses more diverse are older 
students, who are never properly identified as part of a dislocated middle 
class.  They go to college, go deeply into debt, and try to avoid leaving to 
face a world without much opportunity.  
	Employment is temporary; home ownership impossible; education 
will soon cost the $100,000 + we started hearing warnings about long 
before Measure 5; and inflation far outpaces service economy wages while 
public assistance is gutted.  Our standard of living is not going down 
("standard of living," usually measured in terms of over consumption, 
needs to drop anyway).  We are faced instead with not being able to 
survive.  The children of the "affluent" society, today's Post-Prosperity 
generation, were acculturated to a lifestyle it can no longer afford.  It may not 
even fall into the working class.  Like the disposable people of the ghetto, 
the middle class may simply have no place in our crumbling economy.
	From the ivory tower, the residents of the mansion on the hill heard 
critical voices tumbling upwards, and in a moment of irrational excess, they 
struck the tower down.  Now they hear the mumbling of the many and 
perhaps wish the ivory tower was still there. It could absorb dissent. Allow 
it to echo through its chambers, causing no more disruption than hurt 
feelings at academic conferences or animosity between scholastic rivals. For 
all the scuffling at the bottom, the elite universities and colleges would still 
be there with their mild, boring criticism; their annoying, but rarely 
threatening, rational, liberal discourse, which would float upwards with all 
due civility and respect to an audience that would let it vanish into thin air.  
	If the voice of the many reaches the mansion on the hill, it won't 
float up.  It won't even come knocking, and it will not speak with the 
civility and deference of a bourgeois intellectual. 
	And how the owner of the mansion will wish some college 
professor was there to explain what it all means: drawing allusions to the 
Storming of the Bastille and exploring the philosophical ramifications of the 
past living on in the present and what impact this might have on post-
modern literary theory, but no!  The professor will be in the kitchen, wiping 
jelly from his face with his former patron's silk shirts, as his patron is 
dragged outside to face a gruesome fate at the hands of an angry mob let 
loose from the restraints of liberal prosperity.  And nothing will brunt the 
sharp edge of the mob's criticism, nor will anything brunt the sharp edge of 
the action emanating from it.  The bourgeoisie are no more.  Make way for 
the revolt of the masses.

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

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