Americans can't get a good education for love or money, argues Stanley Aronowitz in this groundbreaking look at the structure and curriculum of higher education. Moving beyond the canon wars begun in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Aronowitz offers a vision for true higher learning that places a well-rounded education back at the center of the university's mission.

The Knowledge Factory

Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher LearningBy Stanley Aronowitz

Beacon Press

Copyright © 2001 Stanley Aronowitz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780807031230

Preface

Although I have been accused of being chronically gregarious, I have alwaysloved learning new things, an activity that periodically takes meaway from the social world and into books, articles, and libraries. Nothinggives me more pleasure than to discover some idea that knocks me onmy rear end. But in the course of a fairly long life, I am occasionally atpains to remind myself to be cautious about rejecting the "new," particularlywhen it challenges what I have taken for granted. The more violentmy response, the more certain I am that eventually I will embrace thestrange and often despised idea(s), at least for a time. For this reason Ihave tended to be suspicious of received wisdom. Perhaps this is the reasonI have never trusted institutionalized knowledge.

    I come to write this book out of personal engagement, not alone as aresult of the intellectual curiosity that sometimes inspires in me dispassionateinquiry. I teach sociology and cultural studies, but I have alsofound time to try various types of educational innovation, both withinthe system of public secondary and higher education and outside of it.From 1970 to 1972, I was a planner and director of the first experimentalNew York City public high school in the post-World War Two era. ByMay 1999, I had completed more than twenty-six years as a teacher infour American institutions of postsecondary education?a communitycollege, a leading public research university, an Ivy League school, andfinally the graduate school of the largest urban university in the country.But, I must confess that although I am in the academy, I am not of theacademy. Like many who have completed various stages of their education,I was never sure why I was there. My unorthodox professorial careerbegan in 1972 when I was appointed assistant professor in the experimentalschool of Staten Island Community College. I was thirty-nineyears old and possessed only a bachelor's degree from the New School, acredential I obtained in circumstances virtually unimaginable today.

    Until I graduated high school, the most memorable experience ofmy schooling was in the sixth grade under the tutelage of Dr. Helen Harris,whose degree was in languages. Later, my mother told me PS 57 in theBronx had been designated a "progressive" experiment by the Board ofEducation. The experiment consisted in a transdisciplinary curriculumin which, excepting math, all of our subjects were integrated. We learnedsomething of the geography, culture, and history of Italy, Mexico, andRussia. We sang their respective national anthems in the original languagesand read stories by native authors. I know I learned something inDr. Harris's class because I can still sing these anthems, although I've forgottensome of the words, and I have never lost my affection for the cultureof the three countries.

    From Dr. Harris's perspective, I was a bright but disruptive childwho used my skills of persuasion to lead many less talented students awayfrom the beaten path. Consequently, my friends and I spent large chunksof time in the principal's office for disruptive behavior, and my motherwas hauled into school on more than one occasion to answer for my indiscretions.Yet in Dr. Harris's class, I discovered for the first time sincekindergarten that school knowledge could be pleasurable and intellectuallystimulating. Sixth grade became the benchmark against which Imeasured my subsequent schooling and, invariably, found it wanting.Seventh grade was not a complete washout because it was there that Ilearned to type, without which, given my atrocious handwriting, I amsure that this and my other books would never have been written, letalone read by prospective editors.

    I was in the "rapid advance" program, which enabled me to completetwo years of junior high school in one, and sometime early in theeighth or ninth grade I learned of the exam for New York's Music andArt High School, which survives today as part of the much larger LaGuardia High School. Although I was never a good enough violinist tocontemplate a career as a professional musician, I passed the M and Atest for music because it was based on identifying tonal intervals andrhythms, which required no particular training. I took the test becausemy neighborhood high school was, even in the late 1940s, one of the classic"at risk" public high schools in New York. What I didn't realize wasthat, music and art subjects aside, M and A was an academically "challenged"school. As a group, its teaching staff was of indifferent quality;some even bordered on incompetent. No English teacher inspired me,the math was rote, and the science actually off-putting. Only one socialscience teacher managed to engage my attention. Like many in the department,unless he was cheating on the dues, Mr. August Gold wasprobably a card-carrying Socialist Party member and an official in thethen vibrant consumer cooperative movement. He was a follower ofCharles Beard, whose economic interpretation of the Constitution andother aspects of American history was considered quite avant-garde inan era when the prevailing textbook interpretations proclaimed the doctrineof Manifest Destiny, and of the centrality of Great Men. The historiansof what Richard Hofstadter has called the "progressive" schoolwere regarded as dissenters from received wisdom, and sometimes condemnedincorrectly as Marxists.

    Like many other good enough high schools, what saved M and Awere the students. They divided into two groups: the professionally oriented,most of whom, in music, aspired to performance and in art wereequally divided between the commercial and "fine" art camps; and anequally large group of those, like myself, who had some artistic inclination,but were there primarily to escape the parochial environmentsof our neighborhoods. Many were sons and daughters of New Dealers,some of thirties radicals, mostly of the communist variety, a distinctionoften blurred by the virtual end of intellectual radicalism by the war'soutbreak. Some were members of the labor Zionist movement and hadbroad left-wing sympathies, but since they were destined to emigrate tothe newly formed state of Israel, kept their distance from involvement inAmerican politics. Those young radicals who were not Zionists tended tohang out together, and in the immediate postwar period, a substantialminority joined the prevailing CP-led "progressive" youth groups. In aschool of some 1,800 students, our chapter of the Young Progressives had250 members and, in the 1948 presidential election, carried our school'sstraw poll for third party candidate, former vice-president Henry A.Wallace. We met in the local club of the American Labor Party and hadabout a hundred students in monthly attendance. Most of us performedwell enough in school but reserved our real education for the drama andstudy groups we formed among ourselves.

    Some of us attended the CP-controlled Jefferson School of SocialScience, where we learned everything from drama to Marxist orthodoxy.Jefferson School turned out to be my real university. At age sixteen, I enrolledin the Marxist Institute, which, among other subjects, exposed meto philosophy. We read Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus from thepre-Socratics, Plato's Republic (but only in order to refute it), and Aristotle'sMetaphysics as a precursor to Hegel and Marx. We studied Descartesand the English empiricists, especially Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, ademonstration in the futility of bourgeois idealism. We learned howMarx turned Hegel on his head by preserving the dialectic and throwingout the idealism. The interpretation was, to say the least, incomplete,but I got to read large portions of the Phenomenology of Mind in the turgidtranslation of the English Hegelian, John Baillie. Finally, I studiedMarx's German Ideology, Capital, and the historical writings. A hefty menuof Lenin and Stalin brought us to the apex of human knowledge. Someof my teachers were stimulating: in particular, Marx Wartofsky, later ofBoston University and Baruch College, and Harry K. Wells, a rather orthodoxMarxist who wrote his dissertation at Columbia on Alfred NorthWhitehead and later published an unrelenting attack on pragmatismand a more modulated materialist critique of Freud.

    As I look back, my group was quite separate, not only from the futureJascha Heifetzes and Vladimir Horowitzes or the prospective abstractexpressionists who had no place in the art curriculum, but from the apoliticalsin our midst?although we probably had some ideological influenceon them. I made a few enduring friendships, but the curriculum hadlittle impact on me. I was completely uninterested in science and mathematics,and my high grades in social studies and English were accomplishedthrough my reading of alternative texts. Indeed, by the time Ireached college age, I was truly unclear as to what I might do there. Butthe aspirations of my parents prevailed over my strong impulse to postponefurther formal education.

    In fact, I barely qualified for entrance into Brooklyn College.Founded in 1931, Brooklyn was one of only four senior public colleges inNew York and had slightly lower admission requirements than the famedCity College. Like the other New York municipal colleges at the time,Brooklyn was tuition-free. Otherwise I would not have been able to go tocollege, since my family was unwilling?and probably unable?to paythe tuition fees. As it turned out I did not stay very long, for when I arrivedat Brooklyn, McCarthyism was in full swing.

    New York State's legislature had enacted the Feinberg law, whichprohibited communists from teaching in public schools and colleges.Brooklyn's president, Harry Gideonse was, in fact, if not formally, apractitioner of Sidney Hook's idea of academic freedom: faculty wouldenjoy freedom of expression, provided they were not communists or followersof their line. Students would have the right to question authority,but within the rules of "civility," that is, no student had the right to transgresscampus facilities to demonstrate against the administration and itspolicies. In my freshman year, the administration banned the studentnewspaper for an editorial opposing its refusal to grant official club statusto the Labor Youth League, a procommunist student organization. As amember of the Young Progressives (which did have official status) andpresident of the Philosophy Club, I joined seven other student leaders insponsorship of a demonstration at the dean of students' office. Four hundredstudents sat in, and the eight leaders, including myself, were suspendedfor "conduct unbecoming a student." We were offered a reprieveif we apologized for our unruly behavior. Some seniors recanted in orderto be eligible for graduation and to prevent a report of their activities ontheir transcript. I was one of three who refused to apologize. Suspended,I happily retired from college, for the next fifteen years.

    In rapid succession I became a factory worker, got married, had achild, moved to Newark to be near my job, had another child, and becameactive in union and community affairs. For me, the 1950s were notdismal; they were exciting. If the 1950s were years of very local concerns,in the 1960s I found myself in the swirl of the new social movements, inthe first place civil rights, and then the student and peace movements. Bythis time I had moved back to New York, leaving my estranged wife andmy children behind in New Jersey. I saw them on weekends and providedfor their financial support, but I had relinquished everyday parenthood.

    In reality, my academic career began in 1964. It was then that I wasinvited to join the editorial board of Studies on the Left, started only fouryears previously by a group of William Appleman Williams's graduatestudents in the history department of the University of Wisconsin andprobably the most influential intellectual journal of the growing newAmerican radicalism. At the time, I'd just left the Amalgamated ClothingWorkers, where I'd been running the union boycott and some of itsnational organizing campaigns, to take a job as an organizer for the Oil,Chemical, and Atomic Workers in the northeast region. I think the invitationto join Studies was mainly related to my trade union experienceand also to the fact that I was associated with the Students for a DemocraticSociety. I served as an advisor to the SDS Economic Research andAction Project, a community organizing program to send college studentsinto black and white poor communities in major northern cities.I had arranged for an SDS group to go to the Clinton Hill section ofNewark, where an active community organization, of which I had beenvice-chairman, was fighting city hall on a host of neighborhood issues. Atseminars and workshops and innumerable meetings to plan the communityorganizing activities and in informal conversations with prospectiveorganizers, I taught the fundamentals of organizing some political economy,and the history of the labor movement.

    As a result of these experiences and because I had witnessed firsthandthe devolution of the once promising industrial union movementinto a series of bureaucracies that functioned more as insurance companiesthan as social movements, I began to think about writing a book onthe American working class and its movements. Since the United Stateshad few, if any, Borgias to support someone who aspired to write such atract, at the back of my mind I was considering whether it would be agood idea to get a B.A. as a preliminary step toward an eventual teachingcareer. The opportunity arose when I learned of a Ford Foundationprogram at Brooklyn College that enabled what we now call "adultlearners" (I was thirty-one) to obtain a baccalaureate degree. I didn'tknow whether I could make time for this three-night-a-week regimen,but I applied and took the requisite Graduate Record Examinations inverbal, quantitative skills, and the humanities. My math scores were mediocre,but I scored high on the other two tests and was admitted.

    I attended classes for one week and dropped out, I told myself, becausethe organizing duties presented insuperable scheduling conflicts. Iguess that was part of it, but the main reason for my departure was thatI found the classes boring. I don't remember whether it was the relatively"basic" content or the pedagogy or both. But it was clear that the sameunderlying impulse that drove me out of Brooklyn College fourteenyears earlier was still at work: I simply lacked the motives to tolerateboredom for the four years of the program, which didn't acknowledge"life experience" as a legitimate curriculum component.

    Nevertheless, I started to write longer pieces than leaflets for organizingcampaigns. In the winter of 1964, I published a review essayof three books on labor for Studies, and subsequently wrote occasionalpieces for the Village Voice, the Nation, and Liberation. But it was not until Itook leave of union organizing in spring 1967 that I tried again to reenteracademia. Through the generous offices of Norman Birnbaum, then asociology professor on the faculty of the New School, I presented myGRE scores, some of my published writing, and my resume to the deanof the graduate faculty, Joseph Greenbaum. My proposal was to waivethe B.A. requirement and enter the graduate program in sociology. Hedemurred, insisting that I spend at least a year "in residence" in the generalstudies program as a B.A. student. I was to be assigned a mentor andwas required to write a "major research paper," although I was sparedthe obligation to attend classes. Since meanwhile Birnbaum had accepteda position to teach at Amherst, Trent Schroyer, an assistant professorof sociology and a recent graduate of the Ph.D. program, was assignedto work with me. I wrote a seventy-five-page paper titled "TheFate of Historical Materialism in Advanced Capitalism," a critique ofMarxism along the lines of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt schooland, after receiving my degree in 1968, entered the graduate school insociology.

    This time I went to classes filled with high hopes. The New Schoolenjoyed an international reputation as the intellectual and political refugefor outstanding European scholars. At the time, its faculty includedthe political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the great phenomenologistAron Gurwitch, the economist Adolph Lowe, whose classes I sometimesaudited while writing my senior paper, the historical sociologist HansSpeier, and ethicist Hans Jonas. When I arrived, visitors from a more recentgeneration of mostly German academic intellectuals also gracedthe faculty: Iring Fetscher, the eminent Marxologist, and Albrecht Wellmer,one of the bright lights of the second-generation Frankfurt school,whose best-known member was, of course, Jürgen Habermas, anotherregular New School visitor. I was especially drawn to a less well knownfigure, Hans Peter Dreitzel, a sociologist from the Free University of Berlin,whose work had a much more empirical bent. He brought his studentsinto his home and sponsored miniature salons on a wide variety oftopics. On balance, my first semester in graduate school did much to allaymy fears that my history in institutions of higher learning might repeatitself.

    Meanwhile, I participated in several experiments in radical education,notably the Free University of New York?founded in 1965 as anon-degree granting, noncredit school situated in a loft on West 14thStreet?and its successors, the Free U and the Alternate U (the "U" beinga concession to the New York State Education Department, whichforbid the schools to use the designation "university"). I taught courses inpolitics, labor, and culture. My colleagues included James Weinstein, editorof Studies; another Studies editor, Staughton Lynd, then in the throesof a tenure battle at Yale; the social ecologist Murray Bookchin; the well-knowneconomist and follower of Frederick Von Hayek, Murray Rothbard;his friend, libertarian political theorist Leonard Liggio; RosalynBaxandall, who taught women's social history; and Susan Sherman,among several writers who taught poetry. Grace Paley taught short-storywriting. Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs, a performer and song writer, was astudent in one of my classes, as were Ellen Willis and Robert Christgau,both of whom were among a small group who were just beginning to inventrock criticism. There were writing and painting courses, children'sprograms on Saturdays, and music and theater workshops. It remindedme of Jefferson School, but without the Stalinist or any other dogma.

    What impressed me about these schools was that students of all agescame to learn new things as well as to meet people and socialize withoutthe expectation of a credential that would prepare them for a job or a career.Most of them were young radicals, many burning to change theworld. So the Free Universities were not institutions of "useless" knowledge,except from the perspective of the economic and political system.But unlike American colleges and universities, private as well as public,they were not founded to serve the state or to transmit what had beenthought and said by icons of national culture. Instead, in the minds of thefounders, we were fulfilling one of the requisites of Marx's eleventh thesison Feuerbach: "Philosophers have sought to interpret the world in variousways; the point is to change it." We did not hope, nor did we expect,to be integrated into the prevailing system of economic, political, andcultural power. Notwithstanding the Free University's leftist tilt, we wereswept up in the New Left wave of nonsectarianism. We welcomed freemarket libertarians like Rothbard because we opposed the tendency, alltoo apparent in the late 1960s, of mainstream higher education to demandhomogeneity in political and intellectual standpoints. There wereMarxist-Leninists on the "faculty" but also anarchists and libertarians,antistatist socialists like Lynd and myself.

    The Free University thrived on the turmoil that constantly raged inits administrative and political councils. In radical democratic fashion,prospective teachers submitted their course proposals, not to the tiny administrativestaff, but to the community of students and faculty, whichmet frequently to decide school policy. So the typical "curriculum" wasa melange of ideological orientations, and there was no principle of exclusionsave what the community thought was "relevant," a criterion thatsometimes masked serious ideological differences. But under pressureof the "new communist movement," which glorified centralism andtrashed democracy, the New Left splintered into warring factions. In1970 the Alternate U, the surviving incarnation of the Free University,imploded.

    I ran out of visiting Germans at the New School. I was obliged totake the core courses offered by those trained in post-World War TwoAmerican sociology. Apart from the regrettable pedagogy, I found thecontent painfully thin. One instructor did nothing in class but read fromMax Weber's texts, without inviting discussion or offering commentary.Another, although a much nicer and more open person, was so wrong,in my estimation, that continuing to follow his course would have elicitedconstant disagreements and hostility. Within weeks of the start of thesecond semester, I was contemplating switching from sociology to politicaleconomy. But since I already had a fairly good grounding in Marx,Keynes, and their followers, I was not inclined, at age thirty-seven, to goover familiar ground in order to earn a Ph.D., so with some trepidation,I quietly left.

    I found an answer to this academic crisis in a unique program calledthe Union Graduate School, which afforded people like me the opportunityto earn a Ph.D. on the basis of writing and other evidence of academiccompetence. The school accepted my publications record, thecourses I took, my life achievements, and best of all, my thesis on technologyand its implications for labor, which was later incorporated into mybook Science as Power. I worked with permanent core faculty and adjuncts,but did not attend classes. The school was in the accreditationprocess when I received my degree in 1975. A few years later it was fullyaccredited.

    In short, I write this book from liminal space. I am neither an insider,never having completed a course of study in an institution of postsecondaryeducation, nor an outsider, since I have worked and been visitingprofessor in a fair sampling of the range of colleges and universities comprisedby the American academic system. As with all of my books, my approachhere is critical: I pretend to offer neither a history nor a sociologicalprofile, although there are elements of both between the covers. Idraw from my own experience as well as the corpus of research on highereducation, and my point of view is by no means tucked into the jargonof science.

    My claim is that with only a few partial exceptions, there is little thatwould qualify as higher learning in the United States. By "higher learning"I mean places where students are broadly and critically exposed tothe legacy of Western intellectual culture and to those of the SouthernHemisphere and the East. It is not only that the preponderance of undergraduatecurricula, except for specialist majors, ignore China, India,Latin America, and Africa and the literatures and histories of America'sracialized minorities and women. The typical college graduate generallyleaves without having encountered, in more than a thin survey, Europeanand American philosophy and literature. My intention in writingthis book is not to reform the existing system, for I am not at all persuadedthat it is possible. For those who would do something different,perhaps these ideas might inspire innovation.

Chapter One

KNOWLEDGE
FACTORIES

1

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT "higher" learning and its teaching in America. It isbecoming harder to find a place where learning, as opposed to "education"and "training," is the main goal. Training prepares the student inknowledges that constitute an occupation or a particular set of skills. Forthe most part, graduate schools train students to enter a profession. Educationprepares the student to take her place in society in a manner consistentwith its values and beliefs. Whatever content the school delivers,the point is to help the student adapt to the prevailing order, not assimilateits values in terms of her own priorities and interests. Education issuccessful when the student identifies with social and cultural authorities.

    The United States of America spends more on primary, secondary,and postsecondary schooling than any other nation in the world. Oncelimited, for most, to some ten years, formal schooling beyond high schoolis now the norm for a large percentage of American students. At the endof the twentieth century, about half of those who enter elementary schooland more than three-fifths of those who complete high school attendsome postsecondary institution. In articles, classes, and public talks overthe years, I have used the term "postsecondary" rather than "higher" todescribe what U.S. colleges and universities do. The reason is that for aslong as I have been teaching in these systems, I have observed only rareinstances of "higher" learning, especially in the humanities and the socialsciences. For the most part, undergraduate education in the UnitedStates may achieve what a decent secondary school was expected to deliverfifty years ago. In turn, with the exception of the thesis or dissertationstage in a candidate's schooling, graduate education aspires to nomore than what used to distinguish a good undergraduate degree, andoften falls short of the mark. Postsecondary education is rapidly becomingmandatory, if not in legal terms, in practically every other. Ifpresent trends persist?a question I intend to address in this book?mostAmericans will soon spend an average of eighteen to twenty yearsin school, which implies that a considerable number attend school for alot longer.

    On the eve of World War Two, some 1.5 million students attendedpostsecondary institutions. In 1941, at a time when the labor force wasabout 50 million, the proportion of the potential working population attendingpostsecondary schools was about 3 percent. From 1945 to 1965,college and university enrollments, consisting mostly of young adults ofworking age, grew by 300 percent while the economy advanced 200 percent.In the next thirty years, enrollments grew by two and a half timeswhile the economy doubled; college attendance has maintained a steadyadvance in the half century since the war while the rate of economicgrowth slowed considerably after 1969. By 1991, 61 percent of highschool graduates entered some kind of postsecondary school. In 1997,the proportion of college students to the adult population had risen to13 percent, more than four times what it was in 1941. Of a work forceof some 114 million, more than 15 million people of working age wereenrolled in an institution of "higher" learning. Of that 15 million, almost10 million were full-time students. Since more than 80 percent ofstudents entering high school now graduate, that means about half ofAmerica's eighteen-year-olds are enrolled in a college or university. Seventypercent of American students are enrolled in public schools, sofunding the basic operations of postsecondary institutions constitutes amajor government expenditure. Added to the billions spent on publicuniversities are the annual congressional appropriations for research?nonmilitaryas well as military?to private and public research universities.It is thus no wonder that "higher" education has become a contentiousitem in federal and state budgets and the budgets of millions ofAmericans.

    These are astounding statistics. It means that nearly 10 percent of theadult population under age sixty-five is enrolled in a vocational, technical,or liberal arts college and millions of others have already earnedpostsecondary credentials. Compare this enormous enrollment to virtuallyany other advanced industrial society. France, Germany, and Italyenroll less than 4 percent of the population in higher education, and enrollmentsin the United Kingdom are only slightly higher.

    The questions leap out: Why in America do we place such a highvalue on college? Why is college rapidly becoming an imperative formost young people and for a substantial number of "mature" students?thoseentering at age thirty or older?as well? What are the implicationsfor the growth of higher education for American politics and culture?What does "higher education" mean for its students and their families?Do burgeoning enrollments signify a more educated population? Or arethey due to the fact that, more and more, even many elite schools offer vocationalprograms? If the latter, does this emphasis subvert the historicfunction of universities as the guardians, even the gatekeepers, of Westernor national culture? Can universities maintain their role as politicalunifiers of an increasingly diverse population by providing the basicguidelines for what constitutes "citizenship" in the contemporary socialworld? Or, as some have claimed, is higher education for sale and destinedto be reduced to a series of advanced and intermediate trainingschools?

    Critics of American society and its culture have expended a greatdeal of print attacking schools. According to one of the most commoncritiques, many schools are not merely neutral institutions that transmitskills and intellectual knowledge; they are highly politicized. In DavidNasaw's phrase, students are "schooled to order." Schools rob studentsof their individuality and, instead, train kids to become cogs in the corporatecapitalist machine. In elementary and secondary schools, thecurriculum is oriented to patriotism, obedience, and above all, to theprevailing morality?the "work ethic," "family values," and citizenship?which equates virtue with responsibility to something called the"community." Of course, the community is not to be equated with theneighborhood but to the nation-state. The visibility of the education systemmay be measured by the degree to which schools contribute to thestability of the social order by helping students to know their place withinit and their responsibility to maintain it. The key to whether schools workis whether kids hold these truths to be self-evident and endowed by theircreator.

    This rough model of the function of school in society is only slightlyat variance with another take: that at the secondary and postsecondarylevels, the role of the humanities is to articulate, in the public sphere asmuch as the classroom, the essential elements of national culture. If thestudent is to situate himself in society, it is by means of imbibing thoseknowledges that mark him as a national subject. Some recent writing onhigher education insists that the process of social and cultural formationis effected, in the main, through literature rather than through historyand philosophy. Certainly the social sciences, which are usually viewedas "debunking" disciplines, cannot fulfill this socializing function, for intheir classical modes, they are preeminently critical rather than positive.

    It is worth noting that, at least in the last thirty years, the relationshipbetween literature and the social sciences has been reversed: since thewar the social sciences are, to a great extent, policy sciences and, with thesingle exception of anthropology, have largely lost their critical character.In contrast, having been deprived of their socializing function by therelative decline of the nation-state after the 1960s, both citizenship and itsconcomitant, national culture, have receded. What is left for literatureis criticism and theory, two endeavors whose utility is constantly questionedby technoscience.

    The social sciences have increasingly veered toward the natural sciencesin their self-conscious subordination to the prevailing order. Theirpreoccupation with questions of research methods by which to measurepublic opinion have made them part of the barometric orientation ofAmerican politics. Social scientists have become the technicians of socialcontrol, providing the scientific legitimacy for social, education, military,and other areas of policy. With few exceptions, the garden-variety socialscientists?sociologists, economists, and political scientists?are the intellectualservants of power. Like natural scientists, they are prone to followthe money. Among the social science disciplines, economists are virtuallytied at the hip to corporate and government bureaucracies. If theothers have not yet enjoyed this intimacy, for many practitioners, it is acondition devoutly to be wished.

Continues...

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