Review: The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, by Upton Sinclair

The title of Upton Sinclair's 1923 book The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education promises a study of American education, but, as the author himself owns at the end of his book, limits itself to the still considerable subject of American higher education--the country's colleges and universities, which had him producing a second later volume dealing with the rest (The Goslings).

In approaching the subject of American higher education Sinclair's book is very strikingly a work of its time--the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution and the Red Scare, interwoven with the story of the Ludlow Massacre, and the Boston Police Strike, and the Abrams case, and the Great Steel Strike of 1919; of the then-ongoing fights over unionization, and the ownership and regulation of public utilities; of the personal exercise of power by people named Morgan, and Rockefeller, and Gould.

However, it is also the case that, to those evolved enough to not rush to dismiss what is merely old as outdated, and who can look beyond the superficialities of today's culture wars on which so much is lavished, much of what Sinclair discusses will seem exceedingly contemporary--the control of universities by businessmen, and the influence of alumni and politicians, generally to reactionary ends (and often venal ends, too, as they use their control of the institutions to fleece them for whatever they can get); the extent to which such institutions are less places of learning than "country clubs" for the children of the rich, vocational schools for persons encouraged to think of nothing but the salary their degree might get them, and factories for producing intellectual stultification and social and ideological indoctrination and conformity for the sake of perpetuating the worst that exists in society; the degradation and corruption of college presidents by the chase after donors' dollars; the unhealthful effects of the college fraternity and college athletics on college life; the extreme hypocrisy of administrators about free speech and academic freedom as they crush those things out of existence; the low pay and insecurity of the instructors that enables their bosses to treat them as if they gave up their rights as citizens in taking their jobs, and terrified to speak up about the way they are treated; the driving out of teachers and researchers of talent and integrity through innumerable forms of insult and injury as the careerist mediocrity rises into the administration, and even beyond; the resort to the shabbiest means to see that the unworthy children of wealthy alumni are admitted and passed, as equally shabby means, overt and covert, are employed to limit the numbers of deserving students from "successful minorities"; the foolishness on which colleges spend so much of their money (as with their wasteful "Collegiate Gothic" architecture); and much, much, much else.

Moreover, as is often the case with older books like this one, Sinclair treats his subject with an intellectual and moral clarity and a rhetorical force all too rare in our time--and rarely to be seen combined with such rigor of research as Sinclair displays as he successively surveys the records of one major university after another (the Columbia Sinclair himself experienced as a younger man, Harvard, Princeton, etc., etc.) in his short, punchy chapters, before he goes on to tackle, again in short and punchy chapters, the troubles that afflict the lot (and devoting a few chapters more to those he thinks are fighting the good fight against all the corruption he sees about him). All too rare, too, is his freedom from the prevailing pieties--like the insane elitism that stands foursquare for the existence of a hierarchy among educational institutions, and the intellectual superiority of those who inhabit the institutions at the top of the hierarchy to the rest, which we have seen so vehemently (and shamelessly) defended amid the scandals of recent years. It was particularly refreshing to see a writer who is by no means unintellectual, anti-intellectual or unlearned--who is, indeed, a great lover, critic and writer of literature and history--rather than bowing and scraping before the mindless Classicism, antiquarianism, formalism and "dust heap-raking" that so many take as the absolute awe-inspiring height of humanistic or social science scholarship challenge its primacy when so much matter crying out for attention. (Remarking the legacy of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, indeed, Sinclair laments that this "student of Princeton College . . . was studying . . . Greek, and imbecile theology, when he should have been studying economics, geography, and social engineering!")

The result is that while this book is an antidote to simple-minded nostalgia about any superiority of the past to the present with respect to what formal education provided, it is probably also the case that, even if it is about the 1920s and not the 2020s, reading it one is likely to learn more about the troubles of colleges today than they could from a library's worth of more contemporary books (just as they can learn more about contemporary publishing from Balzac's Lost Illusions than anything they are likely to see written about it today)--and I have every expectation that I will have many an occasion to return to this book later when, inevitably, addressing its concerns as the comparatively inane mainstream debates about education rage all around us in that manner Shakespeare summed up all too well:

a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.