STEVEN MARCUS
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cislOn: to use institutions of education - and in particular higher educa–
tion - as a means for accelerating social change and mobility, redressing
injustices, promoting various equalities, and enforcing cultural relativism.
In other words, universities have become the contested sites on which
certain social ideals are being tested, tried out, or getting a dry run.
They are contested sites for several reasons. First, although the decision
(or group of decisions) seems to have been made, not everyone agrees
with it, nor is there adequately convincing concurrence on the appropri–
ateness of the means that have been enlisted to realize the worthy goals
that are at stake. Second, universities by historical tradition and, in some
degree, by necessity are not democratic institutions. Scientific problems
are not decided by votes; they are often not decided by entirely scientific
procedures either, but the social processes that govern the way in which
decisions are reached in communities of scientists are not by any stretch
of the imagination democratic. And in the social sciences and the hu–
manities, idiosyncratic mixtures of tradition, authority, personal persua–
siveness and charisma, along with external social and cultural pressures,
appear frequently to act as decisive influences in dealing with both intel–
lectual and scholarly issues.
Institutions of higher education tend, in the main, to be intellectual
aristocracies.
[n
their corrupt versions they become ossified and oli–
garchic. When they work well, they tend to be meritocratic and allow
talent to rise to the top, while reproducing at the same time many if not
most of the inequities of the social matrix in which the talented unevenly
begin as well, and out of which they also unevenly arise. The great
European systems of secondary education, for example, were created in
the wake of the French Revolution and functioned
to
enforce the larger
aims of the socially dominant middle and upper-middle classes or bour–
geoisie. Those systems offered to the sons of those classes an education
that would prepare them for leading positions in nineteenth-century so–
ciety - in the professions, politics, the civil service and other institutions
of social and cultural reproduction - while safely isolating them at the
same time from the different destinies laid out in advance for the major–
ity of those who were stationed or situated beneath them. In America,
our institutions of higher education functioned almost from the outset in
ways that were analogous to continental secondary education - but with
appreciable differences. American class society was always more perme–
able, fluid and loosely articulated than its European counterparts, and as
a result American colleges and universities were earlier and more easily
transformed into institutions that also promoted social and cultural
mobility than was the case in Europe. What we are seeing today, among
many other things, is a further evolution in that tendency, as universities
are becoming one of the most visible locations for the agencies of par-
