The Burden of New York's Intellectuals

New York Intellect

By Thomas Bender

Knopf Press; 422 pp.; $25

What saves Thomas Bender's history of New York intellectuals is that it is not just a history. The chapters on colonial New York make mountains out of intellectual molehills, as Bender imbues small social clubs--with grandiose missions and Latin mottos--with meaning well beyond what they deserve.

We all know that things didn't get going, intellectually speaking, in the great metropolis until a century later. But Bender doesn't focus on these early years. Rather, he uses the colonial history to underline the central choice for New York intellectuals: whether to be isolated academics or cosmopolitan thinkers.

Bender illustrates the tension between the two options with short yet detailed biographies of key New York intellectuals. He follows career changes, from professor to magazine editor, government official to man about town.

Using these lives as a capacious data base, Bender claims that New York is America's only possible intellectual salvation. Only a large, bustling and--most important--creative metropolis can lure professors back to the People. Only New York City, he argues for 300-plus pages, can sully the pristine Ivory tower and in the process end higher education's self-satisfaction and utter irrelevence.

But what is the opposing historical force that leads intellectuals astray? College towns like Cambridge, whose populations fluctuate with the academic calendar. In fact, New York Intellect can be viewed as a history of the academization of intellectuals as much as anything else.

Occasionally, Bender drops his guard and lets loose with lines like this one from the prologue, which describes the writings of an 18th-century New Yorker, Adam Furguson:

"Though it is, of course, impossible, Furguson seems to have anticipated the academization of knowledge and art in our time...[like an] academic social science that can, as it recently did at Harvard University, explicitly dismiss scholarship that engages deeply felt issues in the common life in the public and accessible language of that life."

But Bender has little interest with college towns, which are ultimately dismissed as the 99-pound-weaklings of urban America. The heart of the book, rather, is a discussion of the three major schools in New York--the elite Columbia (founded in 1754 as Kings College), the alternative New York University (founded in 1831), and the public City College (founded in 1866)--and how each tried to balance the academy against the unavoidable democratic influences of the city around it.

As Bender follows Columbia's history, he tells a tale of how, in the late 1800s, higher education became more important to society but never capitulated to the code of the surrounding streets. Change would have meant a more open admissions policy and a more independent faculty, but Columbia resisted change. It's an incredible story, albeit a disheartening one.

In 1871 there were only 31 graduates from Columbia. Those few did become the city's elite--but with such a limited enrollment, New York could easily ignore Columbia.

Over the next few decades, Columbia became the school it is today, complete with a large uptown campus. But with an admissions process that discrimated against immigrant Jews and other lower-class New Yorkers, Columbia's student body did not represent the city's changing population. Under reactionary University president Nicholas Butler, Columbia had to become more wily.

"As the numbers of Jewish students increased, Columbia, in concert with other leading private universities, redifined academic prestige. Butler developed the notion of 'selective admission,' a concept that turned the old basis of prestige on its head. Now the sign of leadership was the number of qualified students turned away."

Columbia's grappling with a socially changing America is not just a story of Jewish quotas, a topic which has become a fad of late. Rather, it tackles larger questions of knowledge and power. Butler is not a singularly bad figure; however, he strove to make City College a better school so that immigrants wouldn't be denied a decent education, just denied a Columbia education.

Butler, who gave his name to Columbia's library, wanted to preserve a certain educational prestige in his University. He was one of the first administrators to recognize that a school would be judged by the networks it spawned--and thus it seemed natural that, with its prime New York City location, Columbia should be America's premier school.

Selective admissions--which made education off-limits to some people, even if they were financially qualified--is only one of the New York creations which radically altered the way knowledge is dispensed.

Instead of making education inaccessible, another New York bred intellectual technique made information available to the public, but strictly on the intellectuals' terms. The notion of the intellectual-as-expert is ultimately a cynical one, which seeks to mold popular thought. The scheme was first practiced by Walter Lippman for The New Republic, and his inheritors on that magazine remain true to Lippman's model of insider journalism by making frequent guest appearances on Washington-based talk shows.

Through it all, Bender's history is gripping because it is replete with good guys and bad guys, good universities and bad universities and, ultimately, good democrats and bad aristocrats.

Bender, a professor of American history at NYU, has a point to make about the way a class of intellectuals have monopolized ideas. In his view, New York is the only city in the globe that has had to grapple with issues like democratic culture. That is because other cities are either without culture, or too small to mount significant opposition to the intellectual factories known as universities. Bender shows that each New Yorker who rose to prominence had to reconcile abstract ideas with the events of world, had to make expertise and democracy walk hand in hand.

There are major gaps in Bender's discussion, however, notably on the Harlem Renaissance--covered in three pages--and jazz, which doesn't appear in a lengthy chapter on New York arts and music. Nevertheless, Bender generates enough confidence to be taken serious when he critiques modern academia or modern New York City--and in his conclusion he doesn't like the way either of these social institutions is evolving.

Because of fundraising successes like Harvard's own recent $350 million campaign, universities have the money to lure intellectuals to their campuses. And in the process, ideas about society are becoming less accessible to the layman. Metropolitan intellect, Bender argues, is at the same time growing more and more irrelevent.

"Political discourse in the city has been reduced to a mayoral monologue, while the emphasis in the city's cultural life has shifted away from the production of art and ideas to their consumption as fashion. Such an elevation of cultural consumption has profound implications for the meaning of a city as a center of intellectual and artistic life. It threatens to turn the metropolis into a museum of its own culture."

Putting aside his pessimism, one can admire Bender for trying to defy his own sociological categorization. In New York Intellect, Bender is a historian who is relevent today, and an academic whose writing is clear and accessible to a lay audience.