Why the Worst Get on Top: The Case of Higher Education
Proposal for a Paper for the Manhattanville Hayek Conference
Mitchell Langbert
May 30, 2014
In “Why the Worst Get on Top,” Hayek argues that, because of
the unpredictability of social phenomena, the contradictory demands of interest
groups, and the need to adopt a comprehensive plan, socialism requires a coalition
of the worst. To lead the coalition, individuals rise to the top if they are willing
to sacrifice moral duty to what they interpret to be expedient, social-welfare-maximizing
decisions; assumption of leadership positions in a socialist state is of
interest only to those who lack a moral compass.
My claim is that American universities, both as
propagandists and as independent economic interests, play a part in this
process. The evolution of universities
in the United States has made them dependent on donations from large industrial
and financial organizations as well as from the state. American
universities therefore take on characteristics that are similar to public German
universities, but they also take on characteristics of allies to and
beneficiaries of corporate interests.
I can trace the flow of donations to universities in two
ways: through a listing of large donations since 1967 that the Chronicle of Higher Education (2014)
publishes and through an examination of the names of buildings at top-tier
universities. Universities often name buildings after large donors, and the
business careers of at least some of them can be traced. Then, I can content analyze quotations during
the 2008-2009 bailouts from academics working at the same institutions. I would look at quotations in the
second-largest-circulation newspaper, the New
York Times and quotations in one of the largest-circulation magazines, such
as eleventh-ranked Time or
first-ranked AARP The Magazine.
Universities and Propaganda
In the chapter that follows “Why the Worst Get to the Top,” “The End of Truth,” Hayek discusses the
importance of propaganda. Hayek argues
that totalitarian propaganda destroys morals because it undermines “respect for
truth,” (Hayek, 172). Universities play
a role in the production of propaganda. Readings (1996) points out that Wilhelm
von Humboldt, the inventor of the modern university, saw the German university
as bonded to the state: “The state protects the action of the University; the
University safeguards the thought of the state.” Academic freedom, in Humboldt’s view,
correlated with universities’ commitment to sustaining the state. Readings adds (Readings, p. 82), “The
capacity of the [German] University structure [during the Nazi era] to adapt
itself to Nazism should give us pause.”
Hayek points out that the symbiosis went further than Readings admits and
that the Nazi minister of justice said that all scientific theories must serve National
Socialism.
The Humboldtian university served as a model for the
American university in terms of the integration of research and teaching and
the claim of academic freedom, but the economic foundations of the American
university were different from those of the German university. America’s economy had not proceeded along the
syndicalist lines that had earlier proceeded in Germany and gave Germany, in
Hayek’s view, a militaristic culture.
Rather, universities in the United States grew out of free-standing
religious colleges. Their transformation
and growth was financed by leaders of business and finance. For instance, the first American university
designed along Humboldtian lines, Johns Hopkins, was endowed by a wealthy
Baltimore merchant, Johns Hopkins, who consulted about the university’s
structure with fellow Baltimorean George Peabody, one of the first important
American investment bankers. Their strategy meeting about the founding of Johns
Hopkins University occurred during one of Peabody’s rare trips home to
Baltimore from his firm’s London headquarters (Parker, 1995). By then, Peabody had made significant gifts to
Harvard and Yale, and he had endowed a Baltimore research library, the Peabody
Library, on which Johns Hopkins relied for the first several decades of its existence.
On June 27, 1901 the New York Times wrote that JP Morgan, Peabody’s
partner’s son, had made a one million dollar gift to Harvard Medical School for
the construction of three buildings. In accordance with the recommendation of
Carnegie Foundation-funded Abraham Flexner, Harvard modeled itself along the
same lines as Johns Hopkins Medical School--as an allopathic, Humboldtian
research institution.
Not to be outdone, the following year John D. Rockefeller
also donated one million dollars to Harvard Medical School. Carroll (2009) notes:
In 1903, Rockefeller founded the General Education Board
(GEB). In the succeeding decades, the GEB would become the dominant
philanthropic enterprise in early-twentieth-century American medical education.
It contributed over $94 million to American medical schools by the time of the
organization’s termination in 1960.
As well, Rockefeller endowed the University of Chicago and
appointed its first president. William Rainey Harper.
Joseph Wharton, an executive at Bethlehem Steel and a mining
entrepreneur, funded Wharton’s endowment so that there would be a basis for dissemination
of knowledge about the advantages of protectionism. There is no shortage of examples; virtually
all private major research universities have depended on donations from
corporate or financial donors, and they have been intimately integrated with
the Progressive model since its inception.
Walter Weyl, for example, one of the three founders, along with Walter
Lippmann and Herbert Croly, of the New
Republic Magazine, was one of the first Ph.D. graduates of the Wharton
School.
Scholars have pointed out that Progressivism reflected
specific industrial and financial interests.
Expertise in fields like economics was necessary to justify to the
public the formation of the Federal Reserve Bank (Kolko, 1963), while expertise
in psychology was necessary to facilitate control in large-scale corporations that
Progressivism encouraged (Baritz, 1974).
Croly (1915), in Progressive
Democracy, advocates scientific management, and in 1910 Harvard Business
School appointed Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of scientific
management, to its faculty.
My claim, then, is that American universities did not develop
according to a pure symbiosis between state and university characteristic of
the German university—a symbiosis that is consistent with Hayek’s claims—nor did
they develop along the lines of a countervailing model whereby universities
speak truth to corporate power in accordance with the claims of critics of the
post-modern university (D’souza, 1992).
Rather, the development of American universities has been consistent
with the history of Progressivism described by Kolko (1963), Sklar (1988), and Radosh
and Rothbard (1972), who see the development of Progressivism as a case of Olsonian
(1984) special interest pressure or capture. The
American university’s symbiosis with the American state is less direct than the
German university’s symbiosis with the German state, and one of its
characteristics is its left-wing opposition to right-wing conservatism, but it
remains a defender of sensitive corporate interests, such as banking and Wall
Street.
To illustrate my claims, I will review three sources of
information about American universities.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
(2014) publishes a list of major donations to universities since 1967. These are donations in excess of $25
million. I will tabulate the industry in
which each donor has worked. A large
share of the donors will be in finance.
Second, I will review the names of the buildings of 25 major
universities. I predict that a
significant percentage will bear the names of financial and business
leaders. Third, I will analyze comments
in the media from 2008 and 2009 from academics.
I predict that finance-and-industry donations to universities will
correlate with the tone and temper of academics ‘opinions about the
desirability of subsidization of industry.
Bibliography
Baritz, L. 1974. The Servants of Power: A History of the Use
of Social Science in American Industry. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Carroll, Katherine L. 2009. “Moderning the American Medical
School,” Internet file accessed on May 31, 2014 at http://www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/carroll.pdf
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