Serious Games
Graduate School and the Perils of Independent Thought
Higher education has always been about advancing social status and breeding elites, turning the educated few into a ruling caste of Brahmins. As Henry Adams noted in the 19th century, "college offered chiefly advantages vulgarly called social, rather than mental."[1] Both the older ecclesiastical university and the modern research university have been hierarchical and authoritarian institutions, molding young minds by socially conditioning them to carry on a prescribed intellectual tradition.
In 1876 the college student G. Stanley Hall famously fumed about "the erroneous belief that it should be the aim of the professors of this department to indoctrinate rather to instruct - to tell what to think, than to teach how to think" [author's emphasis].[2] Professorial indoctrination of ignorant youth was standard university practice in the 19th century and it remains standard practice in the 21st century.
While the basis of elite power has changed from the dogmas of culture and religion to the dogmas of business and science, the phenomenon of social distinction based on academic degrees has been around for thousands of years and will never disappear. Because universities are primarily institutions of socialization, learning is often subsumed to ritualized performance, deference to power, and rites of passage.
Professors form a priesthood. These sacred officers preserve canonical knowledge and officiate traditional practices. Education, if it is offered, is often reduced to memorizing information and replicating ritual. Disciplinary theories and methodologies "degenerate into rigidity,"[3] and they are often transformed into "unchallengeable dogmas" that students must accept to pass exams.[4]
In college, students are taught "the one and only right way"[5] to do things, and they jump through intellectual and behavioral hoops in order to become initiated into a sacred professional guild, which is now referred to as a mere “major” field of study. Students strive to earn public distinction and academic degrees. Learning is optional.
Students use these markers of social status to enter the labor market or to climb further into the holy academic ladder to graduate school and maybe the pinnacle of a PhD. Those who correctly internalize the institutional norms of the university gain a sense of accomplishment and superiority, as Herman Hesse noted, “somewhat toward smugness and self-praise.”[6] Thorstein Veblen was so critical of the modern university system that he wanted to subtitle his treatise on the subject with "A Study in Total Depravity."[7] He wasn't far off the mark.
One of the greatest disappointments of my life was discovering that the citadel of the modern American university was cracked, corrupted, and crumbling from within. From an early age we are all socialized to respect teachers, worshiping them as an almost mystical class. University professors are often revered as high priests holding the keys to the intellectual kingdom. But deserving of reverence, most are not.
Even if many professors are sometimes brilliant, these custodians of higher education are self-absorbed, narrow-minded, vindictive tyrants, most of whom cannot teach, and would not stoop to do so if they could. Apocryphal stories of the absurdity and cruelty of higher education have abounded for ages.
One graduate student recalled a typical class, notable only by the fact that it was led by one of the luminaries of the American academy, "He read from his text for an hour or more, every so often losing his place...Such silly stories did not interest me, and [his] summary of them remained remote from anything I knew or cared about...Altogether, a puzzling performance from a man reputed great...Why did he teach so badly? It seemed unpardonable."[8]
The modern university is focused on one primary goal: the creation of new knowledge through scientific research. The traditional goal of transmitting knowledge has been eclipsed, but it is still a necessary function; however, it is clear that most professors grudgingly dole limited amounts of time and energy to deal with students. Established forms of knowledge transmission have always been based on tradition, authority, and the ritual socialization of students.
Teaching is a relatively novel invention, especially within institutions of higher education. Students are mostly a burdensome bother to professors who are obsessively concerned about cornering academic niches of power and prestige through publications, conferences, and committees. Professional academics endure a "living hell"[9] of intense scrutiny and competition, trying to reach a pinnacle offered by no other occupation: a well-paid, self-directed career with full benefits for life.
Professors are trained to do research, not to transmit information, and certainly not to teach. For this reason, most professors merely propagate canonical dogma in the classroom and initiate students into a ritualized academicism, as their autocratic professors had done to them for generations. Having become thoroughly institutionalized themselves, professors as the agents of the institution we call "higher learning" merely replicate the socialization process they were once put through. This is called "schooling," after the Latin term schola, which meant a sect with a distinct set of practices.[10] Official knowledge is therefore by definition "what you learn when you are taught at school."[11]
Within their classrooms, professors are often autocratic dictators who merely throw a barrage of information at a class full of bleary-eyed and confused students. Many professors do not bother to acknowledge (let alone get to know) the ill at ease and tongue-tied young people populating their classes. These ignorant beings awkwardly seeking social mobility are merely powerless pawns to be pushed around the "serious game"[12] called the university. These naive lambs are led by the nose through intricate rituals, duped into thinking themselves knowledgeable, and eventually dumped unprepared into the slaughter house of the real world.
Most university courses are cruel and boring jokes with limited application to students' lives or career aspirations. All students, except the most eager and stupid, intuitively know this. Most of the time professors simply lecture to a crowd for an hour. Learning has been "bureaucratized,"[13] as content is pared down to a meaningless fiction of formulas, graphs, and factoids. If you're lucky you might get some face time for twenty minutes during office hours, but the most prestigious professors can't be bothered with even these few moments of human interaction, delegating them instead to teaching assistants.
Few professors try to understand a particular student's learning needs or educational goals. Even in graduate school, in an expensive doctoral program no less, I had my graduate advisor tell me that he had no time to hear about my academic goals or personal life. He was perturbed at the suggestion that he should even care about such trifling matters.
As one relatively frank professor noted, "Your advisor may be crucial to your life, but you are not at all crucial to your advisor's."[14] This of course can be extended to every facet of the university. Students are simply transient, expendable, cogs in the academic machine. Most of the time students are merely tolerated and treated with "benign neglect."[15]
After the initial glow of earning an undergraduate degree, many students decide to move into the academic holy of holies, clamoring to become rich or join the academic priesthood. Unlike undergraduate studies, a graduate program initiates students into a specific professional practice by socializing them into ritualized disciplinary norms.
The assumption is that students enrolling in an anthropology or economics program want to be anthropologists or economists. Thus, graduate school is actually glorified vocational training. A student is trained to become a professional knowledge worker in a specific academic market. As far as professors are concerned, there is no other possible aim or objective for graduate studies - certainly a student would never enroll just to learn and gain knowledge. That would be inconceivable!
But unbeknownst to most students, these programs operate more like medieval guilds than modern trade schools. The young apprentice is sold into virtual slavery for a number of years as the price of initiation into the secrets of the restricted trade. What is the most important characteristic of a graduate student? Brilliance? Hard work? Team player? Talent? No!
According to one professor who's written a book on the subject, the most important single characteristic is "resiliency." It is the "power to persevere" in the face of all the "countless hoops and hurdles" thrown at the graduate student in a veritable gauntlet of painful bullshit.[16] Students are taught the supreme value of "conformity" and walking "the straight and narrow path."[17] Success in graduate school is not about knowledge or skills, it is about endurance and compliance.
One former grad student explained his low position within the academy as "masochistically overworked and under-appreciated." He viewed himself as an "idiot" for thinking that graduate school would advance his future career.[18] Authoritarian professors treat graduate students like dumb pack mules. They're loaded down to the breaking point and then lead around by the bit, tracing some proscribed and monotonous course that tradition dictates is appropriate.
Most professors don't care about students' educational or professional goals. Students exist to be molded by the institution while serving their masters' interests. John Dewey once quipped about a fellow academic, "[He] is incapable of either permitting men near him to work freely along their own lines of interest, or to keep from appropriating to himself credit for work which belongs to others."[19]
Graduate school is a not-so-disguised form of exploitation. While professors would no doubt be offended by such a remark, most graduate students clearly realize and suffer from their subjugation. Stanley Aronowitz is one professor who has acknowledged that graduate school often "destory[s] the spirit of the aspiring intellectual."[20] Louis Menand also acknowledged that "lives are warped."[21]
Lucky graduate students actually get paid to debase themselves, but of course most of these student workers are no more than glorified indentured servants, lacking "health insurance, benefits, parking, unionization, or a living wage." Many grad students spend their time turning a tenured professor's grant money into more grant money, which primarily benefits the established professor's academic prestige and economic security, but does little to help the graduate student.
Thus, some students have described themselves a little more than "slave labor" and "disposable academics."[22]
As a graduate student, the pinnacle of academic success is to "discover something extremely trivial about the world."[23] Then you take this information and "share your observations with a small room of social awkward people paying minimal attention." Or, if you're extremely lucky, you get "to publish your ideas in a small, unpopular journal." Of course, if your research does get published, your major professor is more than happy to take credit for your success, often claiming primary authorship, even though this person didn't do anything except criticize and berate you every step of the way.[24]
But even if you're a model student, suffer through the shit, and work your way through to a PhD, there is no guarantee that you'll ever be able to fully capitalize on your degree. Graduate schools have been overproducing PhDs for years, while the amount of full-time academic positions has steadily declined. Currently only about 50 percent of the academic jobs in universities are staffed by full-time professors, while the other half are staffed by part-time adjuncts. This is an exploited and vulnerable group of workers one critic called "academic lettuce-pickers."[25]
The ratio between full-time and part-time instructors jumps to about 30/70 in the community college. Between 1990 and 2004 only 34 percent of history PhDs were working in a higher education history department. This problem has only been exacerbated by the Global Recession of 2008-9, as many universities and community colleges have cut budgets and slashed academic jobs. In California, one of the hardest hit states, the California State University system cut 10 percent of its full-time professors, around 1,230 jobs - not to mention the thousands of lost jobs at the University of California and the community college system.
After surviving the gauntlet, one recent PhD graduate emerged into a wasteland without any employment options. She now makes a living playing on-line poker.[26] This has led some to criticize doctorate degrees as "a waste of time" and even a "Ponzi scheme."[27] Louis Menand is more gracious. He simply calls it "inefficient": "There is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get."[28] William Deresiwicz calls this situation a "human tragedy."[29]
Most students, like myself, entered graduate school with their own educational aspirations and vocational goals, many not even planning on an academic career because there are few full-time jobs available. Almost all graduate students are eager, smart, ambitious, and idealistic young people looking to make a mark on the world. Some, like myself, had very specific academic objectives to accomplish.
Given the democratic and liberal rhetoric of most western institutions of higher education, you would expect that professors would try to understand the personal interests of their students so as to individualize courses of study and help the student on his or her path to success. Worse case, you would expect professors to be open to negotiation on the subject of course projects and supplementary reading.
The nightmare reality is that most professors are narrow-minded petty tyrants who nail graduate students to the syllabus as if it was canonized holy writ. Some of the more boorish even dictate the exact subject, style, and method of the assignments, leaving the student in the position of a mere scribe transferring doctrine from textbook to term paper. Many of my professors were like this.
To put it nicely, most professors are guilty of "professional malpractice" when it comes to teaching and student learning, which is exceptionally ironic if you are studying in a Department of Education! However, I would never put it so nicely. These intellectual cops often brutally abuse their status and authority because there is no one to keep watch over the knowledge police. While free inquiry and academic freedom are hallmark values of the modern university, these mores are meaningless to graduate students and many junior faculty.
Most professors are "ideological bullies" and they indoctrinate students after their own disciplinarian and methodical molds.[30] Every academic discipline has a set of "canonical hypotheses" that are the specialized province of a "religious imperium," which rules over a small corner of the intellectual world like royals controlling a fiefdom.[31] This kind of "academic dogmatism" is not only a threat to students' academic freedom, but it also violates students' intellectual development and maturation, turning students into mere clones of their professors.[32] It also stultifies knowledge and prevents the progress of new ideas.
I was acutely aware of this situation when I was in graduate school, and I did my best to hold my ground, demand respect, and define the contours of my education. At first, I tried to negotiate with my professors. I had thought, wrongly it turns out, that these people are reasonable and good-natured individuals who could be persuaded by the light of logical arguments. Some were, but most were impervious.
I tried to explain my own educational objectives and interests, and how I wanted to design the parameters of my research papers and course of study. But to most professors, merely making such a monstrous request was proof of my general impertinence and disrespect.
How dare I presume such an insolent posture towards my intellectual betters? I was told to just make it easy on myself and do the assignment as the professor had dictated. When I pressed forward with my impassioned plea to do my own research to accomplish my own objectives, the glare of disapproval and impatience lashed out.
How dare I disrespect my superiors with such trifling sophomoric arrogance. Just do the assignment or leave the class. Some professors made a more damning and vitriolic judgment: Just do the assignment or leave the program! Why are you even hear if you are not going to do what you're told? Unbelievable!
I had always wrestled with professors over course essays because I always wanted to research well beyond the narrow syllabus and engage in interdisciplinary and historical research. Although I always did superior work and was without exception at the top of every class I took, I was often punished for going beyond the narrowness of the syllabus and course readings. However, I suffered no more than lower grades (the lowest being a B) and bruised pride.
My first real experience with the seriousness of the game of academia was in a formal defense of my second Master’s degree. I had competed a traditional Master’s degree in English and now I was working on a very ambitious interdisciplinary theoretical work on religion and ideology for a second Master’s degree in the field of Interdisciplinary Studies. I wrote a two-hundred-page critical tome on the historical Jesus and the birth of Christianity, which fell flat in front of a committee comprised of some of the finest minds in the fields of English, History, and Philosophy at my university.
They acknowledged my interdisciplinary ambition, but thought it was merely a guise for an undisciplined mind that could not do serious academic work. They questioned whether I had the ability to write a bounded disciplinary monograph and voted 3-0 to deny my degree, albeit with provision that I could resubmit a new thesis paper for their consideration by the end of spring semester.
I finished a new manuscript (over 100 pages) in six months, brought a fourth member on the committee, and passed 4-0, earning a second Master’s degree. I had tried to tell them all along that my interdisciplinary mind was not "undisciplined," as they had claimed, but it took sacrificing my own principled interests to produce a more traditional monograph to prove my point.
Of course, it also meant producing a monograph that was not really interdisciplinary, which was ironic. I had to betray the very purpose of my educational endeavor to earn an academic degree. At best, I earned a multi-disciplinary degree and wrote disciplinary monograph with multi-disciplinary relevance. That wasn't what I had wanted to do.
The apogee of my quest for interdisciplinary excellence, and its unfortunate consequences, came during a meeting for my PhD dissertation. I had one young assistant professor hijack the meeting so that he could complain about my lack of respect for disciplinary boundaries and deference to the traditional authority of professors. I had had deep methodological disagreements with this young professor who had only just recently completed his dissertation.
I had taken a class with him during a previous semester and tried to engage him in discussion about his methodological assumptions, course readings, and course assignments. He viewed my criticisms and collegial debate as impertinent and disrespectful. He ranted to my PhD committee about how I did not belong in academia. Who was I to think that my educational needs and objectives mattered? Who was I to ask that courses be modified to satisfy my research aims? Who was I to criticize my professors' judgment? The committee agreed and I was censured. I was told to toe the line or drop out.
But really, what kind of arrogance is this? As a graduate student I've spent a lot of time, effort, and money, not to mention all the personal sacrifice and stress, to join a department in order to reach my goals. I did not come to a university to invest this much of myself just to mindlessly do someone else's work. Am I really paying tens of thousands of dollars and enduring hell just to be institutionally socialized by self-obsessed and arrogant assholes?
As it turns out, yes, that is exactly was graduate school is all about.
After a while I stopped negotiating because I knew it would be perceived as lack of respect. Instead, I took a different approach. I ignored the specific intent of course assignments imprinted on the syllabus and exploited its vague wording to justify a different, yet related project that met my own research agenda.
I wanted to do more than slavishly follow one specific disciplinary procedure and the narrow confines of the course book list. Instead, I wanted to incorporate interdisciplinary methods, read an expanded bibliography, and study more complex research questions - all against the grain of standard graduate programs.
So, I began to do course projects my way and just handed the modified assignment in at the end of class. Sometimes I would preface my papers with a logical page-long "defense." I explained why I did not follow the exact prescriptions for the course project, and the intellectual merits of my own research subject and methods. Needless to say, I was always penalized for such impertinence, written defense of my position or not.
Despite being the most vocal and knowledgeable student in every class I took, demonstrating advance mastery of all the material and more, and producing professional "A" level work, I would almost always receive lower grades than I deserved - although I was able to keep an A- average throughout eight years of graduate school. Some of the more vindictive professors would give me a B grade, which in graduate school is considered just a hair above failure.
One professor even gave me an F on my final project, although it had been hastily crossed out and officially recorded as an "incomplete." My financial aid was held up. I also got a written warning from the graduate advisor questioning my intellectual abilities and commitment to my studies. She said it might be better to throw in the towel and leave the program because it seemed like I was unable to do the work. This comment made me both furious and embarrassed.
What was my heinous sin? Instead of writing a traditional, positivistic, theory-laden literature review, I dared to historicize the subject, criticize a lot of vapid scholarship, and explain how the scholarly literature was effected by temporal and political processes inside and outside the academy. I tried to explain, as Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Toulmin and others have argued, that it is "irrational" to force positivistic methods used in natural science on every possible social scientific inquiry.[33] Of course, this line of argument was unacceptable.
Merely opening my mouth to talk back and argue with my professor (the chair of my dissertation committee) was deemed impertinence. Stanley Aronowitz has perceptively captured the unstated graduate school status quo, "In no case ought the neophyte attempt to forge a new paradigm, or even suggest a novel interpretation that might offend the intellectual powers-that-be."[34] My professor was pissed!
The chair of my dissertation committee, the man who held my degree in his hands, gave me the option of dropping out of the program or retaking the class during the summer. I seriously wanted to do the former, but instead I did the latter. I rewrote the term paper following the exact letter of the syllabus, which meant producing a boring, formulaic, and meaningless literature review that was of no real use to me. I got an A.
Backed into a corner, I acquiesced. I did what he wanted me to do. I was a good dog and rolled over. Of course, I could do the assignment, I just didn't want to because of cogent intellectual grounds. The paper was a waste of my time. It actually kept me from doing the important research that I wanted to do. Bullying and intimidation were a constant threat. In order to survive, I had bow before the voice of authority and toe the line. And this always kept me from spending my time working on my own research agenda, for which I had come to graduate school to accomplish.
It was a nightmare, straight out of Henry Adams' critique of the 19th century American college, which was itself a holdover from the middle ages:
He found only the lecture system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a degree.[35]
I could appreciate the irony of this archaic drama, as I pulled my hair out and my stomach turned in knots. Here I was in a 21st century Department of Education at the University of California, one of the premiere institutions of higher education in the world, and I was receiving a 13th century course of study, delivered with all of the pompous and prejudiced authority of a pack of medieval catholic priests.
Having survived this bullshit in two Masters programs, I had hoped to be treated better once I reached the PhD level, but actually things got worse. I had graduated from an Oregon university with a rare level of accomplishment: I had earned two graduate degrees in three disciplines, I had an academic book published (and another almost finished), I was an internationally published poet, I had organized several cultural festivals and edited two volumes of local poetry, and I had been invited to teach as a Lecturer at the university.
I thought this would help me advance to the next stage. I had proved myself competent as both student and faculty. When I entered a PhD program at the University of California, I assumed that I had earned a level of distinction that would enable my professors to treat me (for the first time in my career), if not as an equal, then certainly as an outstanding junior colleague. I was wrong.
None of my professors knew anything about me or my accomplishments, nor did they care to know. When I tried to explain my situation, I was quickly silenced. My degrees were labeled an inferior product because "humanities" methods had no place in the field of Education, which was supposedly an austere academic discipline of "social science." Unbeknownst to me, all my previous knowledge and publications had instantly become a liability.
When I would ask philosophical, historical, critical, or hermeneutical questions in class, they were dismissed as "out of place" and "inappropriate." We do not ask those types of questions in this department, I was told. It is just not done in our discipline, professors would sneer. And I was duly told that it was not my place, as a lowly graduate student, to challenge disciplinary norms or institutional conventions.[36]
Of course, what none of my professors would ever acknowledge is that the university is a fractured political body of diverse units fighting over scarce resources, jockeying for legitimacy, authority, and social prestige. All academic disciplines, especially ad hoc ill-defined disciplines like Education,[37] were rife with methodological diversity and factional dispute, as well as interpenetrated with various stripes of interdisciplinary niches. As Henry Kissinger quipped, "academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."[38]
There is no such thing as a unified professoriate and the notion of scholarly "consensus" on any subject is largely a myth. Robert Maynard Hutchins once joked, "the modern university [is] a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central heating system. In an area where heating is less important and the automobile more, I have sometimes thought of it as a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking."[39]
I specifically entered the field of Education not only because I wanted to be a better teacher and impact educational reform, but also because the field of Education was known for many outstanding interdisciplinary works of scholarship. In 2000 I had started my first Master’s thesis with these words, "Creativity and independent thought seem to have been sucked out of the learning process in all stages of education. I find that a travesty and something that needs to be addressed and remedied."[40]
I thought getting a PhD in Education would not only make me a better teacher, but would give me a platform to help effect real educational change in the United States. I realize now that I was a naive fool. At the specific university where I was enrolled there were only two acceptable forms of research: quantitative statistics or qualitative ethnography. It turned out to be a dichotomous multidisciplinary department, and not at all interdisciplinary. You learned to be a sociologist or anthropologist - and that is all. No other options. Case closed.
Of course, there was a deeper irony. In university Education departments across America, most professors had no professional background in the practice of education, like teaching, curriculum construction, or student learning.[41] It was like joining an Engineering department filled with sociologists and economists and no experienced engineers, or like a department of Medicine with anthropologists and philosophers, but no experienced doctors. It borders on the absurd! But university education departments in the United States, and before them 19th century normal schools, have always been staffed with pedantic academic lecturers training unimaginative bureaucratic task-masters masquerading as teachers.
The progressive movement to reform education in America during the early 20th century was never very effective and left most of its reforms unfinished, slowly reversed by the "back to basics" movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and then completely undone by the "accountability" movement at the turn of the 21st century which now cripples all facets of our educational system.
As if inhabiting such as stale academic environment was not bad enough, what was worse was the fact that I could find no niche to nurse my interests. My background in history, philosophy, textual criticism, and the sociology of knowledge had no place in this Education department. Although "education history-cum-philosophy" once had a central place in the discipline of education, this form of inquiry has been gradually abolished from most university schools of education over the 20th century.
This precipitous loss of prestige followed the more general "devaluation of the humanities" in the western university - a field of study I squarely work within and have tried to defend in my own academic work. Literally, everything about me and my intellectual objectives were considered invalid, inappropriate, and unacceptable. How could this be? How did I ever get accepted into this department in the first place?
Now I bear part of the blame for enrolling in such an inhospitable department. Most graduate students don't know how to select a good program that fits their aims. However, there was really no way for me to know how bad it was before I got there. In fact, while I was enrolled, there was an external audit of our department because there had been so many complaints from graduate students and adjunct lecturers.
Based on the departmental website, it seemed like nice enough place. But once I arrived, I quickly realized my descent into hell. I was told time and again by my professors that I did not belong in this department and that I should have gone somewhere else. Yet, how fair is this claim? Graduate students are extremely limited by geography, lack of money, lack of personal connections, and lack of direct knowledge of organizational cultures.
Even if a perfect department is found, one cannot necessarily get accepted into that university for various reasons. But the whole idea of fitting into a perfect department is a myth. Most academic departments in this country are dysfunctional, perhaps not as bad as the one I was enrolled in. And "fitting in" is often random, as it depends upon finding a small group of professors that like you and your work, which can't really happen until after you've been with a department for a while.
I had applied to Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, places where quality interdisciplinary work is done, but I was not accepted. I wasn't told why, but obviously I didn't have outstanding test scores or a straight A average, which probably disqualified me from the start. Even if I had been accepted, I would never have been able to afford the tuition and living expenses to attend such universities. So, while students do have some power over "choosing" a specific school that could fit their interests, there is no way to fully grasp the disciplinary culture of any given department, nor is there any real control over which institutions will accept you and how much the program will cost. Rational choice models ignore not only the powerlessness and ignorance of graduate students, but also the mystified and dysfunctional nature of most academic departments.
Is it so outlandish to think that academic departments should adjust in some way to the educational objectives of the student? But they don't. Graduate students are expected to assimilate completely into their new institutional environment. No melting pot, just a uniform mold slammed down imperiously on each graduate students' head! How ironic, if not flat out hypocritical, given the outspoken condemnation of many liberal professors when it comes to ethnic assimilation in nation states. However, when it comes to their own department or class, most professors act like rabid supremacists: shut up and assimilate, or get out! This is how I was treated, as were all the graduate students in my department and many others in graduate programs across the country.
However, unlike the rest of my peers, I didn't put up with being pushed around, nor did I accept being mistreated. I earned a reputation for leadership and independent thought, and most of my peers looked up to me - although at times their veneration morphed into catharsis as I was crucified time and again. I advised fellow students on how to survive the tortures of institutional assimilation and helped however I could. I never gave into the petty dictates of my professors and I would speak up in class if I found something to be unreasonable or unjust. I have a strong set of values, especially when it comes to education, and I would not compromise these values just to make things easier on myself. I consider this attitude to be a virtue, one that I will never forsake, but it eventually led me into trouble. In fact, it led me to drop out of graduate school and leave my PhD unfinished.
Of course, the department should have known better. My former history professor had warned in my letter of recommendation, "He will debate with anyone, challenge anything, ask deeply searching questions, spread doubt and confusion about certainties, in short, play the role of a gadfly, albeit one with deep convictions of his own... He will yield, but only after considerable butting of heads, argumentation, and resistance." And so, I did.
But isn't this a description of the vocation of scholar, critic, and scientist? How do we ever reach the truth if no one questions certainties and asks searching questions?[42] The physicist Werner Heisenberg said that the scientist "should always be prepared to have the foundations of his knowledge changed by new experience."[43] Looking back on the history of western thought, Karl Popper argued that "the tradition of critical discussion" is the "only practical way of expanding our knowledge."[44]
How will scholarship or science advance if everyone simply gives in to the voice of established authority, and rolls over like a dog when the master speaks. Many scholars grow complacent in their tenured security, preserving the antiquated custom of a gentleman's game (dandy, prim and proper with status and authority) rather than doing the dirty, hard work of scholarship and science.
Few professors were gracious when I asked difficult questions. Some professors were outright unkind. Some were out of touch, and should have been fired long ago for malpractice, or worse.
One tenured professor I had spent most classes ranting and raving about the "filth" and moral decay of American culture, sometimes jumping on desks or screaming in students' faces. He was raised a Jesuit, attending a masochistic parochial school, which he later wrote about. He carried his ideological rigidity and moral fervor into his classrooms, decrying communists, fascists, capitalists, and moral relativists all in one breath. He was culturally conservative, intellectually traditional, and socially combative.
Often, I was public enemy number one. Once, discussing the validity of a source I had used, and by extension the place of ethnic studies programs in the American academy, we spent over an hour deadlocked in an unceasing debate, just the two of us, as the rest of the class sat silently watching. My arguments were sound and I wouldn't give in to his conservative traditionalism and intellectual bullying. I looked at my classmates from time to time in exasperation, but the professor would not stop attacking me. Eventually I said, look, all of these other people are paying for an education and you're wasting their time so let’s get back to the agenda. It wasn't the last time that we would but heads.
But he wasn't the only one I had trouble with. Some professors can be kind, yet still equally rigid in their authoritarian traditionalism. There was a young associate professor of educational history. She was soft spoken, engaging, and kind. But she had rigidly prescribed assumptions about "proper" scholarship and disciplinary standards, and she expected assignments to be completed in a very specific way. In one class I earned a final grade of B because of a B- on the term paper (remember, B grades are one step away from failure in graduate school, so the term paper was technically a failing paper).
She did not directly address the merits of the paper itself, instead pointing out how I did not follow the assignment stated on the syllabus. That same paper, with only slight revisions, was peer reviewed and accepted several months later by a scholarly journal for publication. Granted the paper had its faults, but if my paper was a "failure" then how did it pass a professional peer review and get published?
When it comes to the judgments of professors in their classrooms, they are local gods and their evaluations are sacrosanct, above dispute. But when it comes to the actual activity of professional scholarship, it is a messy game of reasoned debate and power politics.[45] Henry Adams once complained that while both congressmen and professors suffered from the same "maelstrom" of political bickering, "he preferred Congressmen," perhaps because they were more honest in the naked exercise of their power.
Adams dryly noted, "Education, like politics, is a rough affair."[46] A couple of professors have frankly noted in a book on academic culture, "Most academic fields are dominated by...powerful people."[47] These powerful academic barons battle each other for intellectual supremacy, prestige, and research grants, and they autocratically reign over their own local fiefdoms like kings.
While some academics will admit that the practice of science is filled with "disputes," "controversies," "violence," and "political methods,"[48] I've found that most professors hide this aspect of their profession from the public (and students), concealing the messy nature of knowledge creation behind the myth of "consensus." Academics also frequently ignore or deny the very real "exercise of authority or other power" in scholarly debates.
As Charles E. Lindblom has noted, "Aside from flights into the most fanciful utopias, one cannot even conceive of a solution or outcome reached wholly by examining its merits. For all participants in problem solving live in a network of existing impositions and coercions."[49]
The notion of scholarly consensus became more important as disciplines became professionalized during the early 20th century because "internecine intellectual warfare carried on in public compromised the image [academics] were trying to cultivate as professionals with insights that deserved to be taken seriously."[50] But this myth of consensus now makes it much harder for scholars to criticize academic practice or the university system from within.
As the philosopher and academic maverick Stephen Toulmin once confided, "Academics who criticize the Academy, of course, put themselves at risk."[51] I find it disingenuous, if not flat out hypocritical that academics consider it their right and duty to criticize every aspect of social and physical reality, except themselves and their own practices. And when the public finds out about the dirty little secrets of academia, as it did in the recent debate over global warming, it does much more harm to the reputation of science than if practitioners simply admitted the existence of politicized debates within the academy.
The myth of the "ivory tower" must be overcome and replaced by the more sordid but palatable truth: professors play at power and politics just like everyone else. Knowledge, like other disputed goods, is shaped by subjectivity and power, and it is constructed through messy political processes. And while like laws and sausages, most people would prefer not to see the gritty truth, there is no excuse for practitioners to deny the dirty nature of their work - especially to graduate students who are being initiated into the trade.
In such an environment, open and reasoned debate should be the highest virtue, but sadly, "intellectual orthodoxy" and "ideological conformity" define the rules of the game.[52] As one scholar noted, an academic discipline is "a group of scholars who ha[ve] agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions."[53] These "canonical assumptions"[54] cannot be questioned because doing so would reveal the arbitrary and overly simplified analytical boundaries demarcating one field of study from another. And unfortunately, since I was young, I have always pushed boundaries and questioned dogma. In this I shared a sentiment with John Kenneth Galbraith, who once said of himself, "For me, at least, there has always been a certain pleasure in questioning the sacred tenets."[55]
Once I went all the way to the Dean of the university Graduate School to make this argument about the politics of disciplinary boundaries and the unstated dogmas of academic discourse. I was trying to dispute the unreasonable and invisible rubric that professors were using to subjectively grade and unfairly judge students - the same invisible and subjective rubrics that most professors use to evaluate their peer's work.[56] I was told that the university operated on the assumption that all professors were experts in their fields, which meant their knowledge was infallible and their judgments beyond reproach, especially by students.
The voice of tradition and authority was unassailable. It was a frank admission that the university and scientific practice is founded not on reason and consensus, but on the ancient feudal tradition of power and authority, as Michael Polanyi had argued.[57] More recently Jonathan Cole pointed out that faculty "tend not to be tolerant of those in their midst who are courageous enough to challenge prevailing systems of thought," instead most faculty "define and enforce dominant orthodoxies."[58]
And as I know all too well, when you question the dictates of established authority, the hammer of tradition falls on your head. As I had done with other professors, I ended up getting into an argument with my PhD program chair, except this wasn't just any term paper, it was my dissertation. We had been butting heads for some time over the scope, methods, and arguments of my dissertation. Quite frankly, he told me that historical research was not done in his field and that I was addressing too many large questions. I knew that he was uncomfortable with the project because most of it was beyond his expertise (in terms of methods, scope, if not also in terms of the breadth of issues I wanted to address). He didn't even have a PhD, he only held a EdD, which does not signify advanced competence in research or disciplinary knowledge. Yet he was the only scholar in the department who was an "expert" in the general subject matter that I wanted to study.
I had several other professors sign on to the project, both inside our department and outside in the history department. But most of the committee had to come from one specific area of the department because this is where my subject was arbitrarily located within the intellectual bureaucracy. Needless to say, none of these scholars really fit my research agenda, nor did they really want to work with me because I had a bad reputation for independent thinking. I kept pushing for a historical dissertation that addressed several key philosophical issues and I was getting nowhere. I was instructed to make things easy on myself and just do as I was told. I couldn't do it. This was my project and I would do it my way. Why else did I come to this university?
My advisor, the chair of the committee, was very upset with my persistent attempt to have a say in my own education. He was the one who gave me the failing grade in his class and forced me to re-write the term paper over the summer. There is no doubt in my mind that the failing grade in that class was a deliberate move to coerce me into accepting his agenda for my dissertation. He wanted to make it clear how much power he held. But it wasn't the worst thing he did to me.
I had been working for a year and a half as his research assistant. I was outperforming all of his other graduate students, and he often praised my work. I had authored a research paper (which he took primary credit for), which was later published in a peer reviewed journal. I also authored several conference proposals (all of which he took primary credit for), which were accepted at two important national conferences. No other graduate research assistant came close to my intellectual output. As a bonus for all researchers, he had always generously paid for us (out of his grant money) to go to conferences. We did all of the work writing and presenting the proposals, he took primary authorship and increased his prestige, and he paid our expenses. It wasn't a bad deal.
Well, just after a nasty dissertation committee meeting, he failed my term paper (as already described), and then he withdrew funding for a conference where I was to present my original research and join with the other research assistants to present our group projects. I had already bought my plane ticket and was registered for the conference. But because he was no longer reimbursing my expenses, I couldn't afford to go. He ended up presenting my paper, which he had taken primary credit for, and I was stuck at home with a non-refundable plane ticket.
Less than two weeks later, I was fired - no cause given. He sent me an email saying that I would no longer be needed. My contract was going to be canceled at the end of the month. Had I been a regular graduate student employee, I could have sued him for unjust termination. But there is a dark side to graduate research positions paid by grant money: you are a private employee with no rights, completely unprotected by university labor laws or contracts.
After talking with the graduate union, I found there was nothing I could do. Thus, not only did I lose a good paying job (half of my monthly income), I lost my tuition grants (around $3,000 a term), I got stuck with a $600 non-refundable plane ticket, I received an incomplete on my transcript, and I had to retake a class over the summer. This professor made his message very clear: either I play the game his way and do his dissertation, or he would push me out of the university. Even if I had wanted to stay and to do the dissertation his way, I could not afford to pay the tuition, so really, I had no other option but to leave. Later that summer, after receiving an A on my revised term paper, I dropped out of the program.
Leaving that PhD program has been my greatest failure of my life. I still bear the psychological scars. I tried to question some intellectual orthodoxies and blaze my own academic trails, but I was hammered down because of it. Jonathan Cole is one of the few to have exposed the dangers of independent thinking in the American academy: "In truth, there is both intellectual and personal risk involved in challenging the presumptions of the group...rather than viewing unconventional thinking as an appropriate challenge to received wisdom and ideology, those being challenged often become defensive, and these questions, even is posed in the most neutral of forms, get people into trouble."[59]
But looking back, knowing the danger of my intellectual positions, I would not have done anything different. Personally, professionally, and morally I was compelled to resist the narrow, egotistical authoritarianism of my professors. As Michael Polanyi once remarked, there are professors who are "uninspired, pedantic, and oppressive," "misguided by their personal bias," "who try to impose their personal fads" on students. These members of the academy must be "firmly opposed" because education "would be impossible and science would soon become extinct" if they are not firmly challenged.[60]
I've never been one to give in or give up. After this harrowing experience, I pulled myself together, and over the next year and a half I orchestrated a rebirth. I had a great dissertation planned and I had already done much of the research. So, without any funding or support, and living precariously on a slashed monthly income during what would become the Great Recession of 2007-09, I decided to finish the project myself and write a book. When I had finished, several scholarly presses were interested, although almost all of them eventually declined to publish it because I did not have a PhD. I did manage to find a publisher who actually looked at the quality of my scholarship, rather than just rely on my lack of appropriate credentials.
I also sent the manuscript to major scholars in the field of Education at UC Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, and UCLA. And unlike the patronizing and demeaning criticisms of my former dissertation committee, I received a lot of positive feedback. One renowned scholar at UC Berkeley was especially kind, and he agreed to write the forward. In a personal note he said, "I think this is a thought-provoking book, in the sense that it asks us to think hard about why we construct educational institutions that are so contradictory, and checkered in their outcomes. It’s a 'big' book — it asks us to think expansively about what a particular educational institution accomplishes — and we have too few of these."[61]
Another scholar at UCLA called me a "courageous visionary" and praised my "boldness" for researching questions that few had dared to ask.[62] One scholar went so far as to say, "Educators, researchers, administrators, and government officials concerned about the future of community colleges, and U.S. higher education in general, cannot afford to ignore J. M. Beach's findings and conclusions."[63]
Less than two years later, with the book soon to be published, I presented a conference paper on the subject of community colleges, sharing the session with my former dissertation advisor who treated me so badly and pushed me out of the PhD program. He barely acknowledged my presence and wouldn't look at me in the eyes. He scarcely said one word in greeting, a "hello" half mumbled.
We sat uneasily together in the front of the room with one of his graduate students between us. I presented first. After finishing my lecture, I let the audience know it was part of my new book, soon to be published.[64] It was the very same project my advisor had severely criticized and rejected, saying it couldn't be done in our field. It was the very same project for which I had endured the scorn of my committee and sacrificed my PhD.
The book will never bring me fame, fortune, or a stable teaching job, but it was important to finish the project my way. I ask some significant questions and the book has some very important things to say about education in the United States, as early reviewers have pointed out. Like few academic books published these days, this book challenged excepted notions about education, asking the reader to think deeply about difficult and un-resolvable issues - the very issues that often get unaddressed in universities because they fall between the cracks of the intellectual bureaucracy.
Some might say that my experiences were atypical. Perhaps. At some institutions and in some disciplines, the academic ideals of collegial critical analysis and rational discourse are the norm. David Deutsch has recounted his experience with the ideal of scientific debate:
“The majority of the scientific community is not always quite as open to criticism as it ideally should be. Nevertheless, the extent to which it adheres to 'proper scientific practice' in the conduct of scientific research is nothing short of remarkable. You need only attend a research seminar in any fundamental field in the 'hard' sciences to see how strongly people's behavior as researchers differs from human behavior in general...In this situation, appeals to authority (at least, overt ones) are simply not acceptable, even when the most senior person in the entire field is addressing the most junior...The professor tries hard to show no sign of being irritated by criticism from so lowly a source [i.e. a graduate student]. Most of the questions from the floor will have the form of criticisms which, if valid, would diminish or destroy the value of the professor's life's work. But bringing vigorous and diverse criticism to bear on accepted truths is one of the very purposes of the seminar. Everyone takes if for granted that the truth is not obvious, and that the obvious need not be true; that ideas are to be accepted or rejected according to their content and not their origin.” [65]
While I too believe in this ideal, I have never seen it as perfectly practiced as Deutsch portrays. I was the that graduate and junior colleague, as Deutsch describes, and I was often savagely beaten down for my impertinence. Perhaps Deutsch's experience was more ideal due to the fact that he was educated and is still employed by two of the most prestigious research universities in the world, Cambridge and Oxford. At these privileged institutions of higher learning, I would imagine that things work very differently than your average public research university in the United States.
Perhaps Deutsch's experience is also a product of the "hard sciences" where key theoretical assumptions and quantitative methodology are less contentious than the social sciences and the humanities. But even acknowledging these legitimate factors, I think that Deutsch is still overly idealistic, albeit sharing an ideal that I also firmly believe in.
I would agree more with a statement Deutsch made leading up to the above quoted passage, "The academic hierarchy is an intricate power structure in which people's careers, influence and reputation are continuously at stake, as much as in any cabinet room or boardroom - or more so."[66] In short, the academic hierarchy, and the research university as an institution, are fundamentally political, as everything that humans say or do is filtered through various political processes based on power, prestige, and struggles to limited resources or contested values.
In the wake of 9-11 and the political repression of dissent and unconventional viewpoints, Lisa Anderson, professor of political science and former dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, reminded the nation of the importance of free speech. She warned, "We must be constantly, restlessly open to new ideas, searching for new evidence, critical of received wisdom, old orthodoxies, and ancient bigotries, always crating and criticizing ourselves, each other and our world. This is the life of scholarship and we must embrace it for what it is and do it well.''[67]
Over a half century before, in 1945 after the World War II, Michael Polanyi had forcefully argued that scientific enquiry must be based on the freedom of scientific research and discussion.[68] Stephen Toulmin called this openness "intellectual democracy."[69]
Unfortunately, the whole notion of free inquiry and intellectual democracy has begun to corrode and rot away in the very place it was supposed to be preserved and supported. Perhaps this ideal is still strong at the more prestigious (and well-funded) research universities, and perhaps more in the physical sciences than in the social sciences and humanities.
But I contend that this ideal is beleaguered not only from outside the university, but most disturbingly, from within. Unless more academics stand against the authoritarianism, orthodoxy, and conformity of higher education, especially in their own departments and with their own students, we risk the corruption of the whole scientific enterprise, and the death of the last great hope of humanity.
[1] Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 91.
[2] G. Stanley Hall, "College Instruction in Philosophy," The Nation 23 (Sept 1876), 180. Passage was quoted in Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago, 2000), 28.
[3] Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 41.
[4] Andrew Collier, "Critical Realism," in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences, George Steinmetz, ed. (Durham, NC, 2005), 327.
[5] Toulmin, Return to Reason, 42.
[6] Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 348-49.
[7] Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (New York, 1961), 251; Michael Spindler, Veblen & Modern America: Revolutionary Iconoclast (Sterling, VA, 2002), 51-56.
[8] The professor was famed historian Carl Becker who was teaching at Cornell. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays, 149, 152.
[9] One anonymous faculty member described the tenure process as a "living hell." Jack Stripling, "Burning Out, and Fading Away," Inside Higher Ed (June 10 2010).
[10] Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Chicago, 2004), 149-161.
[11] Ibid., 161.
[12] Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, 2006).
[13] Toulmin, Return to Reason, 45.
[14] Steven M. Cahn, From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor (New York, 2008), 12.
[15] Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas, 142.
[16] Ibid., 5.
[17] Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 140.
[18] Adam Ruben, Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School (New York, 2010), ix, xvii.
[19] Dewey's remarks were directed against G. Stanley Hall. Qtd. in. Lagemann, An Elusive Science, 30.
[20] Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory, 148.
[21] Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas, 152.
[22] "The Disposable Academic: Why Doing a PhD is Often a Waste of Time," The Economist (Dec 18 2010), 156, 158.
[23] This quote and the following two quotes come from Ruben, Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School, ix, xvii, 49, 61, 69, 81.
[24] Generalization is these paragraphs are also based on my own experiences as a graduate student. For a brief line on the "exploitation" of graduate students see Paul Gray and David E. Drew, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School (Sterling, VA, 2008), 100.
[25]William Deresiewicz, "Faulty Towers," The Nation (May 23 2011), 30.
[26] Alana Semuels, "Universities are Offering Doctorates but Few Jobs," The Los Angeles Times (June 3 2010); Jenna Johnson Daniel De Vise, "Students Protest Cuts to Higher Education Funds" The Washington Post (March 4 2010); Lexi Lord, Beyond Academe <www.beyondacademe.com>
[27] "The Disposable Academic," 156.
[28] Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas, 152.
[29] Deresiewicz, "Faulty Towers," 30. He went on to explain, "It's also a social tragedy, and not just because it represents a colossal waste of human capital. If we don't make things better for the people entering academia, no one's going to want to do it anymore."
[30] Cole, The Great American University, 60-63, 379.
[31] David M. Kreps, "Economics - The Current Position," American Academic Culture in Transformation, Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds. (Princeton, 1997), 77-78.
[32] While I agree with Cole's emphasis on the "core values" of the university and the importance of these values, I don't think Cole realizes the social gulf between students and professors, and between junior professors and senior professors. I think Cole drastically underplays the importance of "academic dogmatism," especially between professors and graduate students. Cole, The Great American University, 60-63, 379. I agree with Stanley Aronowitz, "I believe that advice that stifles the voice of the student who really has something to say, the intellectual means to say it, and the stamina to tolerate perpetual wagging heads is cockeyed and indefensible." The Knowledge Factory, 147.
[33] Isaiah Berlin, qtd. in Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA, 2001), viii.
[34] Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory, 147.
[35] Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 75.
[36] On this point see Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory, 147.
[37] See Jurgen Herbst, “Nineteenth-Century Normal Schools in the United States: A Fresh Look,” History of Education, 9, no. 3 (1980): 219-27; David F. Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (New Haven, 2004).
[38] The quote is a paraphrase of Kissinger's remark. "A Post-Crisis Case Study," The Economist (July 31 2010), 55.
[39] Robert Maynard Hutchins, quoted in Cole, The Great American University, 141.
[40] Beach, Expression and Identity, 8.
[41] Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago, 2000).
[42] Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, UK, 1970).
[43] Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 114.
[44] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963), 148-52.
[45] Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, Ibid.
[46] Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 306-7.
[47] Gray and Drew, What They Didn't Teach You in Graduate School, 7.
[48] Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 141. See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity’ Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK, 1988); Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore, 2010).
[49] Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society, 46.
[50] William J. Barber, "Reconfigurations in American Academic Economics: A General Practitioner's Perspective," American Academic Culture in Transformation, Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds. (Princeton, 1997), 117.
[51] Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA, 2001), ix.
[52] Cole, The Great American University, 494.
[53] Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization (New Haven, 1989), viii.
[54] David M. Kreps, "Economics - The Current Position," American Academic Culture in Transformation, Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds. (Princeton, 1997), 97.
[55] John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997), xi.
[56] Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, Ibid.
[57] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society: A Searching Examination of the Meaning and Nature of Scientific Enquiry (Chicago, 1964).
[58] Cole, The Great American University, 494.
[59] Ibid., 494-495. Stanley Aronowitz is another.
[60] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society: A Searching Examination of the Meaning and Nature of Scientific Inquiry (Chicago, 1964), 46.
[61] W. Norton Grubb, David Gardner Chair in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, personal e-mail (Nov 2009).
[62] Robert Rhoads, Professor of Higher Education and Organizational Change, University of California, Los Angeles, endorsement on the back cover of my book, Gateway to Opportunity.
[63] V. P. Franklin, University of California Presidential Chair, Distinguished Professor of History and Education, University of California, Riverside, endorsement on the back cover of my book, Gateway to Opportunity.
[64] J. M. Beach, A Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States (Sterling, VA, 2010).
[65] David Deutsche, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes - and Its Implications (New York, 1997), 325-26.
[66] Ibid., 325.
[67] Lisa Anderson, quoted in Cole, The Great American University, 446.
[68] Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 62.
[69] Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 99-100.