The "nihilism" of contemporary higher education
Or why the decline in the humanities reflects a profound public confusion about what a college degree is even for
Suddenly the mainstream media seems to be awash with news and commentary about what’s wrong with higher education, especially the humanities.
The most iconic of these pieces, or at least the one generating the most discussion, appeared in late February in The New Yorker and was provocatively entitled “The End of the English Major”. In the article journalist Nathan Heller does not really talk that much about the value of studying English, but about how the ongoing struggle in America to define a four-year college education as either “career training” or the “cultivation of the mind” seems now to have been decisively settled by partisans of the former.
The article is lengthy, rambling, and highly impressionistic, interspersing quotes and anecdotes from students at Arizona State University with sundry observations and reflections of the author himself. It focuses on the humanities, which are in decline everywhere except at ASU, which Heller believes has bucked the trend because it is an affordable state university and caters to working class and first-generation students.
Heller does not draw any significant inferences from his account, all the while avoiding even a hint of what may very well be the real elephant in the room when it comes to diagnosing what is wrong with higher education today. The problem is not that English, or humanities, majors have a hard time finding a decent-paying job right out of college. That has always been the case, at least for over half a century. Nor is that “cultivation of the mind” seems to have lost its allure to Gen Z. For Americans, college has always been about preparing for a specific career.
The enormous, gray, lumbering beast with a trunk over there in the corner that no one seems to want to talk about is that the staggering disproportion, especially in America, between the price of a college degree and the quality of the product itself. In economics this ratio is known as “value”, and it is the only metric that matters in the long run.
If were to speak delicately about what is currently afflicting higher education, we might say it is a crisis of value. But that is still refusing to call our massive and somewhat smelly guest loitering over there by his proper name. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his unpublished manuscripts at the turn of the twentieth century gave it a name. He called it “nihilism,” the “strangest of guests”.
“What does nihilism mean?” Nietzsche asked. “That the highest values devaluate themselves.” That is exactly what seems to be going on in higher education.
Nietzsche, as is well-known by scholars who actually take time to read him carefully, linked the advent of nihilism to the phenomenon “God’s death” – an expression he himself minted as a word play in German (Gott, or “God”, rhymes with tot, or “dead”). Most casual readers of Nietzsche, including a populace only familiar with his overused shibboleth, are under the false impression that Nietzsche joyously proclaimed the death of God, and his low-brow, antireligious groupies systemically misinterpret him this way.
Nietzsche, however, understood it as a metaphor for the loss of any sense of a transcendental underpinning to politics and morality. He considered the death of God a catastrophic “event” that would unleash barbarism and social chaos throughout the world, and he even predicted the coming of the Great War erupted in the late summer of 1914. That is why Nietzsche chose the character of a “madman” to announce the event of God’s death at which the populace, or those milling about the “marketplace”, laughed and jeered.
If one reads Nietzsche patiently and carefully it also becomes obvious that he regarded the modern, secular university, a distinctive invention of the nineteenth century German imperial state apparatus, as the encapsulation of “nihilism”. Why did he hold such an outlandish view?
Universities emerged in Europe in the 12th century as “Cathedral schools”. They were designed to put into practice the principle of Christian life enunciated by the fifth century church luminary Augustine of Hippo – that “faith” must always be filled out with intellectum, or “understanding”. But the acquisition of knowledge was reserved primarily for the ecclesiastic orders that preserved and curated it as well as the aristocracy that defended the social hierarchies that were supposedly God-ordained and immutable.
With the advent of the industrial revolution and technological and economic transformations it brought in its wake, universities came to be seen as having a less metaphysical and more utilitarian purpose. What University of California Clark Kerr chancellor in the 1960s described as the contemporary “multiversity” had its beginnings, much like the “common school” or mandated universal childhood instruction, in the nineteenth century trend toward educating citizens in such a way as to augment their sense of national identity and political loyalty as well as train them professionally in the more inrticate challenges of engineering new forms of wealth and social well-being.
The American land grant university was the original paradigm for the latter undertaking. Unlike Europe where national universities looked after the interests of the state religious establishments, the land grant universities were founded on the principles of the US Constitution separating church from state. Although initially devoted to the advancement of the agricultural sciences, they were designed almost exclusively for the secular purpose of preparing students for employment .
Over time the influence of government supported colleges and universities with their primarily mission of advancing technical knowhow forced other schools, primarily liberal arts institutions with their religious heritage, either to follow their lead, or to restructure their curriculum to make it more useful for job seekers. Hitherto the latter had performed the more traditional function of molding young men and women from the privileged classes with their inherited wealth to acquire the necessary kind of basic intellectual skills and cultural sophistication to assume their rightful places in society.
It was the cascade of dollars from the federal government in the 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” mandate that altered the trajectory of higher education in America, which in turn influenced a similar trend in other countries.
The liberal arts as a whole benefited in the short run from such developments, and liberal arts departments and majors, even of the more exotic genre, were added to the catalogues of public institutions, But government largesse also changed fatefully the popular perception of the baseline purpose of college education, that is, career preparation. When federal funding tapered off measurably during the 1970s, liberal arts faculties faced for the first time since the Great Depression the budgetary chopping block, or what was euphemistically termed “retrenchment”. New programs such as ethnic studies, women’s studies, and religious studies were an immediate target.
The turn toward emphasizing career placement in the late 1970s happened in the midst of rampant inflation and a wobbly stock market, much like the present. But the tradeoff proved to be a gigantic fool’s errand when the economy actually did go south a few years later. All those newly minted bachelor’s and master’s degree holders in business administration found themselves unemployable in the early 1980s, insofar as a deep recession and the new move itoward computerization of routine managerial functions across industry reduced the amount of entry-level positions.
By the end of that decade, however, the pendulum swung back again, and a clamor arose for a restoration of the liberal arts. The impetus came on this occasion mainly from conservative politicians during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, who were appalled at the cultural ignorance and lack of civic commitment among students. The call went out for the establishment nationwide of a “core curriculum” with its center of gravity in the humanities. For a relatively short period federal funding proved plentiful, and the liberal arts gained new momentum over the next two decades.
At the same time, both parents and students during this period began to look upon college as something much more than a rite of passage to a financially stable and morally mature adulthood. In the early 1990s there were numerous stories circulated in the press about parents going all out to prepare their toddlers to get into an Ivy League school when they were old enough.
Reviving the principle of in loco parentis that had fallen by the wayside, institutions competed to add all sorts of amenities and luxuries to the “college experience”. In addition, they heaped on many student services, recruiters, and overseers, which contributed to the well-known phenomenon of “administrative bloat,” and helps explain the fact that college tuition increased eight times faster than average salaries and wages. The fact that the federal government through generous student loan offerings further enabled the price spiral is often overlooked by critics of the system.
In other words, the value of a college education like a single family home purchase succumbed to the forces of economic exploitation and speculation – what former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspahn called “irrational exuberance”. Not everyone can get into Harvard, nor should every institution try to emulate Harvard, nor should be Harvard necessarily be regarded as the ne plus ultra of higher education.
I know. I received a PhD from Harvard, and the instan anyone finds that out they somehow believe I walk on water. I tell them without irony that my actual classroom experience at Harvard was subpar, and that it was the intellectual depth and enthusiasm of my peers that made it exceptional, which of course all flowed from its inflated reputation.
A PhD from Harvard made it much easier to land a tenure-track position in academia, but it should not have. The patent absurdity of measuring education by institutional mystique, or its notoriety in non-academic niches (Syracuse University, for instance, saw its freshman applicant pool balloon in 2003 after winning the Final Four in basketball), or its presumed guarantee of immediate employment (the bait used by for-profit, trade school scammers) has been the driving force behind not only inflated tuition costs but also the mounting malaise over the mission of higher education.
The public confusion of prestige, price points, and income potential with the inherent value, or purpose, of a college education became its own kind of self-reinforcing “moral panic” that has lasted now more than a generation. It is also the overriding factor in propelling what might be called the “nihilism” of the higher learning most manifest in the trend toward suppressing free speech, which cannot be separated in any meaningful way from its most fundamental value that now seems tragically to be “devaluing” itself – the discipline of free inquiry.
Much has been written about the purpose of higher education and what it ought to be. For years the American public has been evenly split over whether it is primarily to enhance a person’s livelihood or their quality of life. Of course, as the author of an often cited Forbes article has persuasively argued, it should be both.
The big question, however, is how you one can concretely gauge both the present and future value of a college education using both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Choosing a college along with a course of study is not unlike choosing a house in which to live, except it is largely for a lifetime. You wouldn’t buy real estate solely with the intent of how much you could see it for unless you were in the tricky business of house flipping. Nor would you purchase property that was found to be unsaleable because it is sitting atop a toxic waste dump, even though you loved the layout and felt very much at home in it.
The exorbitant amount of costs incurred by institutions of higher learning over the last quarter century that have little to do with learning itself is analogous to the toxic waste dump, but that is a slightly different elephant in the room that will be described in a future essay.