[Photo: credit: Campus facility (UA023.005), Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina.]
Like the child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, someone (Lawrence Biemiller) is admitting that the great wave of Modernist buildings on academic campuses—constructed from the 1960s until very recently—has not been a success. We may think of universities as places of ivy-covered brick walls and quaint quads, but the fact is that for decades, universities chose to construct stark “form follows function” buildings admired by architects, but rarely by students.
Here at North Carolina State University, Harrelson Hall, built in 1962, was torn down in 2016. Even the NC State website describes Harrelson as “a circular freak of a building that flummoxed students with its spiral ramps, windowless classrooms and ductwork that whooshed like a subway tunnel.”
Harrelson was over 50 years old when it was taken down, but I frequently walk by a newer construction, the Ricks Hall Addition, built in 2009. It is Modernist—a rectangular box connected on the second floor to the 1922 Ricks Hall, which boasts Ionic columns. The only similarity I can see to the original building is the color of the brick. I see nothing pleasing about it.
Frédéric Bastiat was a classical liberal who lived in France from 1801 to 1850. (For more information about Bastiat, see a previous post). His writing—which was rediscovered by American libertarians in the 1940s after years of disdain and neglect—is witty and insightful. It provides fables that help teach economics, such as his “Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, Etc..” which carries protectionism to absurd lengths: Candlemakers petition the government to command people to cover their windows and stop letting in sunlight (thus “protecting” them from sunlight), because the sun is ruining the candle business.[1]
Bastiat was as harsh on French education as he was on protectionism. He split with classical liberals who accepted publicly provided education; he didn’t think the government should be involved in teaching.
But that is not what is extraordinary about his educational views. Rather, he challenged the French secondary-school curriculum because it revered the classical civilizations of antiquity. To Bastiat, the Greeks (both Athenians and Spartans) and Romans were violent, military, and disdainful of work—not worth the study that was slavishly given them. This is extraordinary because respect for antiquity permeated the views of educated Europeans. Among French educators, there were some intellectual disagreements along the lines of whether Athens or Sparta was “better,” but studying classical civilizations was the bread and butter of proper education.
Land-grant colleges are state schools founded to teach “agricultural and mechanical arts.” Today, many are among the nation’s largest research universities. In this post I’ll share some thoughts about how they came about.
Let’s begin with conventional wisdom. Land-grant colleges “emerged from an idealistic concern for the adaptation of existing educational resources to a changing society . . . .” [1] Oddly, this somewhat grandiose explanation for the land-grants comes from John Simon, a historian who deftly investigated the politics behind the 1862 act that authorized such schools. He also recognized that the typical American didn’t have much truck with higher education in the mid-nineteenth century. One agricultural school was called the “Farmers’ High School” because the title “Farmers’ College” would sound too fancy.
The American university system is remarkably durable, even though Its failings are clearly visible. Colleges and universities roll on, with the only sign of weakness a so-far modest decline in attendance. This is in spite of mounting costs; scandals like admission bribing and cheating; equally scandalous student debt; high drop-out rates; grade inflation; etc.
In February 2018, I wrote an article about whether universities will face a “crackup” or if they have the stability to keep going as they have. I proposed that we might learn something from other institutions that persist over time, such as the European Catholic Church, especially in the medieval period (500-1500). (This was not an original idea but I haven’t seen it developed by others.)
Like universities, the Catholic Church was a complex body with many components. While it had a single head, the pope, it also had parish churches, charitable hospitals, cathedral schools, monasteries, convents, and bishoprics, all scattered widely geographically, as are our universities and their components.
Wouldn’t it be rewarding to sit back and read a comprehensive history of the United States written by a historian who has thought long and carefully about how America became what it is? Someone who could guide you through its triumphs and tragedies and show how they are linked? Surely the time spent would be worth as much as hours devoted to the latest biography by David McCullough or Ron Chernow: it would give you a sense of the full story.
Now you can do just that. Wilfred M. McClay has written Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.[1] It’s meant to be used as a textbook in homes, private schools, and charter schools—places where the dictates of public textbook commissions and education-school ideologies don’t hold sway. But it’s also written for “readers, young and old.”
The Wall Street Journal has described Land of Hope as a “counterpoint” to A People’s History. That popular history by the late Howard Zinn recounts the story of the United States as a country in which power dominates over the oppressed. Zinn wanted to tell the story of the victims—the Arawak Indians in Hispaniola, for example, rather than Columbus, the European intruder who “discovered” them.
