The more things change...

Gaye Tuchman's book has arrived, and I have read through it once. It gave me the sense of deja vu. We have seen a version of this argument before.

In my last post, I mentioned the question whether the book would be helpful if next year is not 1910. (It will, about which more in a later post.) At least we can say that if next year is 1910 Thorstein Veblen will be glad to have a commrade in arms.

Veblen created one genre with which Tuchman's book can be identified in 1918 with his "memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men" entitled The Higher Learning in America. He worried nine decades ago that, "Plato's classic scheme of folly which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge" (57). He was bothered by "the incursion of business principles into university policy" (95).

Tuchman and Veblen are concerned about a strikingly similar list of issues, which are often even expressed in similar terminology. Here is a partial list:

• The influence of accountants
• "Auditing" and "Surveillance" by administrators
• The role of money in decision making
• The compromises student recruitment can entail
• Underpaid and understaffed faculties, while the university is spending large sums on real estate
• Presidents who are not contributing current research in their academic disciplines (!)
• Administrations who buff up appearances rather than making actual improvements
• The prominence of athletics and the salaries of coaches

There are important differences between the two books as well. For example Tuchman does not, as Veblen does,  include "undergraduate instruction" among the "extraneous activities" by which a university might allow itself to be distracted from its real work (12).  Also, the role of Tuchman's wannabe corporate managers is played in Veblen's book by the faculty of "lower" professional and technical schools (such as business, law, engineering, and divinity) who are interlopers in university governance, representing "the supercession of learning by worldly wisdom" (149).

Reading Tuchman's book alongside Veblen's from ninety-one years ago, at least we can say that the transformation of Wannabe U that is the focus of Tuchman's ethnography was probably at most a transformation from an older business-driven model to a newer one.

And Tuchman and Veblen agree that there is no way to take American institutions back to a time, if there was one, when commercial values did not influence them.