Harry Targ
(Since this dialogue was posted Indiana universities, and universities everywhere, have continued their projects of destroying rich, diverse educational programs that would help students respond to the major changes of the twenty-first century. Programs are canceled, cultural centers are shut down, faculty are fired, international students are intimidated or denied admission, non-violent student protesters are arrested and/or dismissed from school, and despite claims to the contrary, particular curricula are supported at the expense of intellectual diversity. This occurs as universities everywhere invest in real estate, engage in financial speculation, solicit military contractors, and skew the research agenda toward arms production and data centers and processes.)
What We Were Taught in the 1950s
Growing up in the 1950s there were a lot of ideas, facts,
historical narratives many of us never thought about. We were growing up during
the “golden age of US capitalism.” We thought that as we matured we would enjoy more and more of
the products that the society has to offer. These products were enticingly
portrayed on television commercials.
Our sex roles determined how we were to behave and what we might
expect of our activities. And each age cohort would experience the prerogatives
and would be expected to behave in particular ways as to study, work,
consumption, and sociability.
All would be good if we acted as expected. Only two threats had
the capacity to impair the inevitability of our quality of life; life
threatening diseases like polio or the spread of international communism. Until
the polio vaccine was developed we just had to be careful about our sociability
or outdoor habits. As to international communism we just needed to trust our
government, our military, and the vibrancy of our economic institutions.
While this narrative was one expected by the so-called middle
class, it was aspirational for those young people coming from the working
class. The Golden Age of Capitalism was well portrayed, if cynically, byJohn
Kenneth Galbraith, C. Wright Mills,
David Reisman, Paul Goodman, Vance Packard, Jules Henry, Theodore Roszak and
others.
Educational Institutions and Ideological Hegemony
It is obvious that the maintenance of any political or economic
order is based largely on the education of the young in such a way as to give
legitimacy to it. In the 1960s political scientists began to study what they
called “political socialization:” how and what people learn about the norms,
values, and procedures that govern the maintenance of society. Some studies
found that children begin to accept the virtues of political institutions, the
presidency, the courts, political parties, at very young ages. What they learn
about politics in the home is reinforced and developed in school systems.
Selective presentations of history and the arts is provided by
formal content and repeated rituals, such as the pledge to the flag,
competitive sports, routinized social life such as dances. In addition, as
theorists such as Jim Berlin have argued, the educational system not only
produces and reproduces citizenship, but it also reproduces workers, giving
young people appropriate skills in language an mathematics. Educational
theorists have pointed out that the character of education develops and changes
as the economy changes, from competitive to industrial, to monopoly capitalism.
In addition to adding “socialization” to the lexicon of analysis
political scientists began to write about “political culture,” or the values
and beliefs that dominate the thinking of most members of a society. Ideas
about the basic units of society, individuals or communities for example, the
relative importance in the society of cooperation or conflict, the role of
“human nature” or institutions as primary forces in shaping society. Perhaps
most basic in the United States is the relative acceptance of private property
or public goods as prime values.
In higher education, curricula reinforce and solidify the dominant
ideas of the political culture. Often, social science and humanities
disciplines reify standard paradigms about history, what is great art and
philosophy, and what values are beyond reproach. In the post-World War II in
the United States the dominant political culture was tinged with virulent
anticommunism, the demonic other. Ruling classes, powerful corporations, and
state institutions oversaw what was defined as legitimate educational content.
Meanwhile business schools and science and engineering programs
were training young people in the tools necessary to promote the political economy.
The humanities and social sciences grounded student learning in the acceptable
political culture while the fields, what we call STEM, trained these same
students in the tools of system maintenance. The former president of the
University of California, Clark Kerr, coined the term “multiversity” to
describe the functions of such institutions in the late twentieth century and
he made it clear that the multiversity was supposed to serve the national
security interests of the United States.
As Clark Kerr was leading the California university system young
people became increasingly engaged in struggles against racism and escalating
war in Vietnam. While these educational institutions became more repressive, as
with the shootings of students at Jackson State and Kent State Universities,
increased discourse on college campuses, sometimes initiated by faculty, was
critical of the dominant political culture and its normal functioning, that s
training workers for the economic machine. The university, to use a workplace
metaphor, became “contested terrain.” Some faculty and students began to
criticize the capitalist system, the war machine, the privatization of the
commons, and histories that seemed to endorse patriarchy and racism. From the
vantage point of those who rule, ideological hegemony had to be reimposed in
the educational system. As conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh once
proclaimed, “we,” that is conservatives, control all major institutions except
for the university.
Reversing the Opening Up of Higher Education to “Contesting”
Dominant Ideas
In the twenty-first century, efforts of the defenders of
capitalism have sought to reimpose the traditional political culture by
privatizing public schools. Not only are charter schools a profitable source of
investment, but they by virtue of their existence and curriculum reify the idea
of the market, private over public goods, opposition to teachers as workers and
teacher unions, and the elimination of the tradition of public education
entirely.
At the university level, traditional study of history and the arts
(with all their ideological contestation) are being defunded while colleges and
universities define science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as
the primary purpose for having education systems. And major funds for STEM
education and research come from huge corporations, particularly digital, drug,
and agricultural corporations, and the military. And in the spirit of Limbaugh,
the Koch brothers, the Association of Trustees and Administrators (ACTA), the
State Policy Network, and the Associated Legislative Executive Council (ALEC)
have worked with state legislatures to the early post-World II days when Kerr
spoke approvingly of the multiversity. In sum. education from kindergarten
through the university is increasingly designed to instill the ideology of the
dominant political culture and to create a twenty-first century work force to
serve the needs of monopoly/finance/global capitalism
But a variety factors from the 1960s on began to stimulate the exposure of the “golden age’ narrative
of American exceptionalism for all the ways it was limited and was a distortion
of reality. Educational institutions, expanding alternative media, and people
standing up and challenging the reality of their lives, became venues for
contesting unexamined assumptions. And in a relatively short order, young
people particularly began to raise a series of questions that were not part of
popular and educational discourse. By the 1960s more and more people began to
assume that “they,” (those with power) wanted us to think about certain things
and not about others. And the more and more people began to raise questions not
part of popular discourse, the more the legitimacy of the whole system past and
present was weakened.
And that spirit of challenge became institutionalized in a variety
of newer education programs in universities, not to insist on ideological
conformity but to encourage independent thinking. In higher education,
discourse around class, race, gender, war, the environment, and the economic
system spread. But now, independent
thought is being challenged by federal and state governments; sometimes to
cancel existing academic programs and other times to reward the creation of new
and celebratory programs.
Cancelling programs
In a late-night legislative session in Indiana, the Republican
majorities voted to cancel academic programs throughout public institutions in
the state that did not have certain numbers of majors. As the Chicago Tribune reported in a July 7 editorial: “there are 116 degree
programs disappearing from Indiana’s Big Ten flagship campus, and 222 across a
the Indiana University system from Indianapolis to Kokomo,” The editorial which
challenged the negative impacts on
higher education in the state reported that similar cuts will be occurring at
other public universities around the state, including Purdue University and they
indicated that they were “struck by how
much damage is being done to education in the humanities and the arts?’
In addition, the editorial pointed out that Hoosier students who
come from lower income families will not be able to study these subjects in
their home state, where tuition is more modest. And the official claims that
education should be more job oriented, the editorial suggests, cannot be
predicted for any reasonable period because even certain STEM fields might go
out of fashion or, in short order, may be in less demand. As the editorial
noted; “Indiana University-Bloomington should not be turned into a trade school…”The state…needs teachers, artists, musicians and poets, too. And it sure as heck needs people with
proficiency in languages and cultures other than English,”
Creating New Programs
Some time ago, the faculty and administration at Purdue
University discussed whether there should be a “civic literacy” requirement for
every student pursuing a bachelors’ degree. There were debates in the
University Senate and elsewhere about what “civic literacy”
meant, whether it was true that students were not receiving such materials in
their core requirements, and if the policy recommended by the Purdue
Administration and Board of Trustees was adopted would the requirement be
successful.
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-contradictions-facing-21st-century.html
As the article linked above by Targ and Morris suggests, the
idea of a “civic literacy” program in the recent past has its roots in conversations
in Koch Foundation institutions, not to dismiss political discourse but to
return it to the “golden age” of the 1950s before universities became venues
for discussion and debate about political issues.
This approach to higher education, as opposed to merely
engaging in draconian cuts in existing educational programs, seeks to mold and
shape higher education in more system-affirming
ways. For example Ryna Guinn (Inside Higher Education,
July 8, 2025) reported that the Trump Administration will fund colleges and
universities that prepare K-12 seminars celebrating the 250th year celebration of the
Declaration of Independence.
Guinn quoted from the Federal Register that:
“Priority will be given to applicants from institutions of higher education that have established independent academic units dedicated to civic thought…These institutes
should demonstrate a sustained commitment to robust civic discourse.” The
article identified centers at 13 public universities in eight states that
critics have called “conservative centers.” Guinn quoted from the Department of Education
about the grants for preparing these
short courses: “Citizens must understand why our free-market democracy
is a highly evolved system of cooperation made robust by our constitutional
republic, and how it functions tos secure the blessings of liberty for all Americans.”
Cancelling and Replacing Programs in Higher Education; Why?
While most academics (even those in STEM fields) believe that higher education could and
should be a space for discussion and debate, whether evaluating hypotheses
about the physical universe or social arrangements, it is clear that political
and economic elites are determined to return the educational process to
propaganda, blind celebration of dominant institutions that they control, and
the period in the 1950s when education and culture was shaped by the desire to
promote American exceptionalism. The campaign to cancel or replace educational
programs are designed to eliminate at least six topics critical to society.
First, educational programs seek to eradicate any discussion of the
existence of economic and social classes in the United States (and other
countries). Any discussion of class differences would entail examining readily
available data on the extraordinary economic inequality in the society; an
inequality that features a small number of elites who control most of the
wealth in the country and vast majorities of people who barely survive.
Second, narratives of American history are favored that deny the horrific
and enduring consequences of slavery and the racism against all “foreigners,” which
misreads a major element of conflict between states, and individuals, and ignores racist tools as they shape US
politics today.
Third, while not unique to the United States, gender inequalities pervade
the society that require serious discussion of identities and how they have
been used to impair freedoms.
Fourth, libraries of books have underscored narratives that the United
States has sought global hegemony, at least since the onset of the industrial
revolution. US strivings for power and control are not unique in world history.
As a result reigning mythologies, that legitimize this drive for hegemony is
the proposition that “war is inevitable.” This proposition is a powerful
intellectual tool that rationalizes enormous expenditures for war and
interventions everywhere.
Fifth, a central feature of public ideologies, at least since the end of
World War Two is the idea that unbridled development of all kinds will improve
the human condition. And central to the economic growth model is the assumption
that nature can be used (and abused) to
facilitate growth. In other words, the devastation of the
environment, is either, from this point
of view, necessary or is not a reality.
Sixth, to the extent that historic narratives of the American
experience recognize problems, such as slavery, these problems do not have any
connection with the economic system, capitalism. Central to cancelling programs
or creating others requires the celebration of the “free enterprise system.”
Conclusion
Scholars, politicians, economic elites, citizens, and students may
disagree about the role, significance, and history of higher education.
Criticisms might be raised about various existing programs. But it is clear
that there are two basic models of education that surfaced in the twentieth
century and are the source of struggles
today.
One model, the ‘socialization model,” assumes that the prime
purpose of education is to inculcate and train the young to carry on economic
and political institutions as they have been in the past. This includes training
the young to endorse and support the legitimacy of political and economic
elites, and to assume that what has existed should continue.
The other model, the “contested terrain model,” assumes that a
central role of education is to encourage discussion and debate and where
relevant to challenge orthodoxies: political, economic, social. And, this model
assumes that it is the challenges and contestations that help create new
thinking and social and economic improvement.
In the end, the attacks on higher education are one significant
manifestation of attacks on human survival by an economic and political elite
who oppose change.
MORE ON WHAT THEY WANT US TO THINK
Dan Morris (note: I am writing these remarks as a private
citizen and not as a representative of my current employer, Purdue University)
Harry…thank you for sharing your blog essay with me and allowing
me to add my comments. The first part of
your piece is a thoughtful quasi-biographical reflection on how folks coming up
in America in the 50s were sold a bill of goods that most white middle class
people adhered to, even as there was already a good deal of disquiet. For example, when Mildred asks the
leather-clad biker played by Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), "Hey Johnny,
what are you rebelling against?", he answers "Whaddaya got?"
Although the seeds of major social change were sown in the 1950s —
especially in the area of civil rights — the second half of the 1960s and the
early years of the 1970s must be understood as a watershed moment for
fundamental challenges to the status quo in higher education. Teachers and
students disputed basic assumptions about their enterprise: Who is funding the research and to what ends?
Why are we reading these texts and not others? Why are we imagining history in
this way? Who is excluded from the
master narratives? Can teaching and learning liberate rather than indoctrinate?
Why are most faculty members white men? Such questions took hold of the academy
and real change took place, even at conservative midwestern universities, where
Black Studies, for example, now found a significant presence on campus and
interdisciplinary programs, such as American Studies, really did partake in the
"contested domain" aspects of higher education that Harry Targ speaks
of in his blog essay.
In American Studies, for example, classic texts in the “myth and
symbol” school spoke of America as a “Virgin Land” (Henry Nash Smith, 1950) and
the role of Puritans as an “Errand in the Wilderness” (Perry Miller, 1956). By
the time I began teaching in American Studies at a conservative midwestern
state university in the 1990s, such approaches clashed with new critical models
put forward by emerging scholars such as Patricia Limerick who in Legacy of
Conquest (1987) offers views on the American West as a place that
challenges the myth of “rugged individualism.” Rather than “virgin land,” the
American West for Limerick was a contested,
multicultural terrain. Far from the myth of the American West as “settled” by
freedom-loving individual whites seeking to flee the shackles of an expanding
Federal government and a greedy corporate business environment back East, Limerick reveals that the interests of the
state and big business funded the infrastructure that made conquest possible.
When I arrived in the early 1990s, our conservative midwestern
state university continued to hire new American Studies faculty. These faculty
taught the work of foundational scholars such as Frederick Jackson Turner, as
well as Smith and Miller, but were also fascinated by scholarship authored by
New Americanists such as Limerick, Jane Tompkins, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and
Donald Pease. American Studies at that time admitted a diverse cohort of
graduate students and offered thematic, team-taught seminars led by faculty
from different disciplines. For example, I had the pleasure of teaching Huck
Finn with a gifted, Missouri-trained historian, Susan Curtis. In our
seminar, we not only read Twain’s novel, but essays ranging from T.S. Eliot’s
archetypal interpretation of the Mississippi River in “The Boy and the River:
Without Beginning or End” (1950) to Fishkin’s “Was Huck Black?” (1993). The
interdisciplinary environment encouraged a stimulating culture of debate and
multi-perspectivism. In the years of its heyday (roughly from the 1960s to
2015), American Studies produced successful graduates. Teachers learned as much
as their students about how to think across disciplines, periods, and genres.
The robust version of the American Studies program I am describing
above has come to a screeching halt at our home institution and everyone is the
poorer for it. When I say, "everyone is poorer for it," I think here of
one female American Studies graduate student with a literature focus who
received her master’s degree from the program in 1997. She is now featured in
Purdue advertisements at half time of football games because, upon graduation
from American Studies, she became a famous Air Force fighter pilot who,
according to a College of Liberal Arts website, “was one of the first pilots in
the air with the mission of protecting the nation’s capital” on September 11,
2001. Indoctrinating “woke” critics of
American exceptionalism was never the point of the program or how any of us
taught.
I think about the fate of the American Studies program at our
university in the context of the current call for universities to engage in
civics education. As Harry Targ reports, in a recent article in Inside
Higher Education, Ryan Quinn notes that the “federal government is funding
educational seminars about the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.
Applying institutions get a leg up if they have what are often criticized as
conservative centers.” I emphatically
support civics education at the university level. I want to see civics
education implemented with the depth and rigor that characterized the qualities
of teaching and learning that we experienced in the American Studies program in
its heyday. Such a program requires resources, yes, but just as important is
faculty development of the civics curriculum. Faculty from areas including
history, English, sociology, politics, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and
the visual and performing arts should be tasked with developing a set of
courses in civics education. The program should include the flexibility for
faculty to co-teach classes with experts outside of their own fields. Civics
classes should be designed as seminars and should be supported by interdisciplinary
graduate programs to create the energy and viewpoint diversity that young scholars
bring to a program. Civics education also requires administrators to support
critical inquiry and who trust that faculty will design and implement a
meaningful program. By “meaningful program,” I refer to one that requires students
to analyze civic culture by bringing to bear how historical contexts influence
the meaning and purpose of “foundational texts” over time. Students should develop
close reading skills with a sensitivity to how a variety of readers will
interpret texts differently and also how many readers will want to read texts
other than those deemed "foundational" (as well as reading "foundational"
texts through new eyes).
My main point is that a real civics education cannot limit itself
to asking students to take a test upon graduation that reveals familiarity with
basic facts about U.S. government and that assumes the way the U.S government
is designed is inherently the foolproof way to imagine a civil society. Unfortunately,
the test model has been the main approach to civics education at our university
in recent years. While it is true that you have to start somewhere, and knowing
the set-up of the U.S. government is a starting point, it is not a sign of
intellectual engagement to present facts about government without offering
students a comparative approach to how societies are designed and without
allowing students the time, space, and resources in classroom settings to read
about and discuss the history of civic life in America.
Civics should be taught fairly and with intellectual integrity. One
might start by debating the merits of the statement that "our free-market
democracy is a highly evolved system of cooperation made robust by our
constitutional republic, and [that] it functions to secure the blessings of
liberty for all Americans.” Has our country ever challenged "constitutional"
principles? Is liberty being secured "for all Americans."
Defining what we mean by “Americans” would be worthy of discussion. As was the case with American Studies, civics
needs to be taught in an interdisciplinary, comparative context. A course in
foundational texts is worthwhile, but it must ask questions about which are the
foundational texts, what was the context in which they were written and
selected as foundational, and how have they been interpreted over time by a
variety of readers. Alongside obvious choices such as The Federalist Papers,
The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, and Common
Sense, I would include writings by authors including Jonathan Edwards, Ben
Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony,
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, John Steinbeck,
Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King, and James Baldwin.
I would highly recommend a
full course on how the Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution from Marbury
v. Madison to Trump v. United States. Stops along the way would include
decisions such as Dred Scott, the Cherokee case decided during the presidency
of Andrew Jackson, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States and Citizens
United v. Federal Election Commission. In addressing Brown v. Board of
Education, I would include the history of how that case from 1954 was resisted
by citizens at the state and local level to the point that President Eisenhower
needed to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce that watershed ruling.
I would look into how resistance to Brown v Board led to the closing of all public
schools in states such as Virginia, and trace the relationship between reaction
to Brown v. Board and the charter school movement. Are American schools less
segregated now than they were in 1953? Why or why not? We could also analyze
how and why the court limited FDR's New Deal agenda, especially in the first
term.
As noted above, it is crucial for students to learn about civics
in a comparative context. Israel, England, Saudi Arabia, and New Zealand do not
have one official written constitution. The majority of countries do adhere to
a written constitution, but the nature of these constitutions varies in terms
of scope and depth as does the amendment process. How constitutions are amended
is a critical aspect distinguishing them. One Social Studies website notes:
The U.S. Constitution has a notoriously rigid
amendment process, requiring significant consensus, which has resulted in only
27 amendments since its inception. In contrast, more flexible systems, such as
India’s, allow amendments through a variety of procedures, depending on the
portion of the constitution being altered. This flexibility enables adjustments
to socio-political changes while maintaining core principles. Many have had
many constitutions as the culture evolves. https://socialstudieshelp.com/ap-government-and-politics/how-constitutions-differ-around-the-world/Why
doedsr/
Rigidity or flexibility in amendment procedures affects how
readily a constitution can evolve with societal changes.
In Making
Our Democracy Work: A Judge’s View, former Associate Supreme Court Justice
Stephen Breyer argues that “the Court should interpret words, whether in the
Constitution or a state, using traditional legal tools, such as text, history,
tradition, precedent, and, particularly, purposes and related consequences, to
help make the law effective” (xiv). Following Breyer, I would argue that for a
civic education to be as effective as the law, students must also be trained in
the pluralistic interpretive methods that Justice Breyer recommends for those
who sit on the nation’s highest court.
