Who Rules the Universities?

THE STORY MIGHT READ BETTER as a novel, opening as it does with a scene that Sinclair Lewis would have loved: the meeting of the University of California Board of Regents, fresh from mint juleps at San Francisco's Bohemian and Pacific Union Clubs, with at least 10 millionaires out of 24 discussing whether they should raise tuition by a total of $4 million for the 1971-72 academic year. The scene is jolly--the men are "radiant as ten suns." Lewis might have said--and the tuition increase in passed. These men, and two women, don't worry about students shelling out a little extra cash.

Or the book's beginning could have been in a Frank Capra film like "Meet John Doe" where powerful men in evening clothes sit around having brandy and cigars after dinner and listen to D.B. Norton--a Ronald Reagan figure if there ever was one, say: "There's been too much permissiveness in this country, too much loose talk. America needs an iron hand." To which the men, archetypal 1930s lounge lizards with beautifully cut moustaches and social registers in their back pockets, respond: "Hear, hear, quite right, D.B." and thump on the table in a hollow variant of old-time prep school enthusiasm. The movie's scene could just as easily have had California regents like Edward Carter, the president and co-owner of a department store chain, gasping with admiration at the words of Reagan, another regent at that meeting.

David Smith, a 23-year-old student in the California state system, doesn't continue in a novelistic way: the rest of his book is a small compendium of useful statistics, theories and occasionally tiresome abstract Marxism, most of it gleaned from the already bursting radical literature on education. And the book succeeds, despite its sacrifice of artistry for detached analysis, if only because Smith sets up the essential drama in his first chapters: the contrast between the former products of university education, the regents--Ivy Leaguers from a Scott Fitzgerald nightmare--and the present student proletariat, which must shape its collective skills and sell its mind, after graduation, to advanced capitalism.

Smith probably puts too much emphasis on direct ruling class control of universities through boards of trustees--understandably, since his own experience in California involves perhaps the most overtly interventionist group of overseers in the country. Despite Smith's disclaimer, "bourgeois" theorists are correct in saying that faculties and administrations now exercise more day-to-day control over universities than they ever have. But both sides of the argument miss the point: trustees, intimately tied to big business interests, don't have to draw up university budgets, take an active role in hiring and firing faculty, and bend curriculum to their interests. Faculty members and administrators, integrated ideologically into the defense of the trustees' concerns, can be given relatively free reign with no danger. At Harvard in 1972-73, the governing boads didn't have to step in to deny tenure to Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and other Marxists. The Economics senior faculty was more than happy to ax the dissenters itself.

When discussing history, however, Smith is on better ground. Since World War II and especially after the Soviet Sputnik launching in 1958, the government and big business foundations have poured money into selected schools. They have tailored their gifts to expansion of pure and applied science programs that train scientists for corporate research and development, mainly involving military contracts. Since 1945, only two per cent of state and corporate money has been given to social sciences, apparently in the belief that studying different political and social systems might make future technical workers too critical to heed thoughtlessly commands to maximize kill densities for Honeywell's latest "anti-personnel" weapon or Dow Chemical's napalm account.

BUT THE GAME PLAN has had mixed results, even while supplying corporations with needed educational labor, particularly in the oil, electrical and chemical industries. It has spawned "multiversities"--production-line colleges with lecture halls the size of Soldiers Field--and a new working class of students, mainly in the state schools and community colleges, whose future white-collar work strangely resembles what used to be considered demeaning manual labor. For students of the sixties and seventies, the lonely competitive present opens out on a future which is limited to powerless work in the lower or middle reaches of corporate or government hierarchy and a dull routine of working a key punch or a slide rule (even if one happens to understand Schopenhauer thanks to a college course).

It is true, as Smith implies, that the student protests of the sixties grew out of the often-unconscious recognition of their declining position. The intensity of protest at the most elite colleges--Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, Brandeis--arose from the especially high expectations and disillusionment among students at such schools. In America and Western Europe, students have always been prospective independent professionals: doctors, lawyers, professors, and engineers. All that ended with the consolidation of bureaucratic capitalism. Smith's analysis is shallow in predicting future revolutionary class consciousness among educated workers--his mistake stems, again, from his too-mechanistic Marxism.

THE ECONOMIC CRUNCH of the seventies--producing many college trained cab drivers and dishwashers-- has not encouraged educated workers and students to organize against capital, nor has their education given them more humanistic values than their less-educated blue collar counterparts. The threat of further downward mobility has thrown students back to a petit bourgeois outlook. At more exclusive colleges like Harvard, the "new mood on campus" stands as a polite metaphor for a new isolation and an increased competition for the few types of work that are still independent.

The state schools are also quiet, demonstrating the strong hold of the myth of upward mobility, even in a time of depression. Students might rather live a declining middle class life than admit to working class status--education may suggest the possibilities of a less suffocating type of life, but it also sets students off from other workers, leading them to believe they are better and smarter than ordinary people. The shabby prestige of working in an office--no matter how near the bottom or how repetitive the job--still exerts attraction that no "objective" economic analysis can explain. In trying to be hopeful, Smith makes the same mistake as Orwell in "The Road to Wigan Pier": the status-oriented students and white collar workers have far more to lose than their aitches.