The Campus Goose-Step, Today

Reading Upton Sinclair's book on American higher education, The Goose-Step, I was overwhelmed by how the characterization of American higher education aligned so much with the condition of that institution a century on. Indeed, just about every one of the flaws, problems, betrayals of that institution he detailed are very much with us in one form or another--

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 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.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

However, we live in a different world now, one which has given the diseases he discussed an additional century in which to metastasize along with so many others in society at large. Today, after all, far more young people go to college than did in his day, from a far wider variety of backgrounds--a fact which has not incidentally made the scramble for admission to the more prestigious places far more vicious, and those who "succeed" in it the more stupidly snobbish, all while there have been distinct economic and social consequences to so many children of middling and poor parents getting a rich man's education at the rich man's prices charged in the American system. At the same time the corporatization, financialization, militarization of life has had its reflection here, taking it far beyond anything Sinclair imagined.

The result is that were Sinclair writing a latterday Goose-Step I am sure he would write of the standardized testing business and the "college admissions industry" and rackets like those of a certain Rick Singer. He would write of the vast industry grown up around the making, collection, securitization(!) of a mass of student loans approaching the $2 trillion mark as government retreats from its support of higher education--and of students selling their blood for money with which to buy books, and of the graduates so crushed by their debt that they must defer starting "real life" for many years. He would write of the proportions to which college endowments have grown (Harvard's alone is now over $50 billion) and the market they have created for "wealth management" (so notorious and so important that Thomas Piketty used it as a significant point of reference in Capital in the Twenty-First Century), creating another veritable industry in itself. He would write of the academic-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex and the sports-industrial complex of which college athletics are indubitably a part, and of the way in which in line with the neoliberal mentality treating the shareholder value-maximizing business as the epitome of a well-run operation colleges have been run like businesses, while other colleges actually are businesses--as we see with the big for-profit college sector that represents yet another industry.

I think that he would write, too, of the idiotic Cult of the Good School and its associated foolish hierarchy remote from any real world concern and ever-influenced by a profoundly corrupt "college ranking" process, of the assault on the humanities and the vacuity and corruption of the cult of STEM, of the underemployment of college graduates far from being limited to possessors of "worthless" degrees. He would write of the explosion in the usage of adjunct labor and the explosion of the salaries of university presidents and star coaches. He would write of the cynical (and in light of what has been discussed here, also venal) drivel of those in the commentariat and the policy elite who have preached sending more people to college as the solution to the country's economic and social problems as a substitute for real action to keep the country economically viable and help its working people, just like all the other Ponzi scheme-like aspirationalist dreck of which it is a part (perhaps citing Pestalozzi's fable about pikes placating the fish aggrieved at their eating them with the promise that every year two fish would be given the chance to grow into pikes themselves). I suspect Sinclair would also have something to say of the postmodern turn in academics--and because at the time he was still a genuine leftist rather than what the politically illiterate today think is a leftist be rather uncomplimentary about it.

Of course, that I can say all this reflects how many a journalist and scholar and appointed investigator has examined these various issues--and in many cases devoted a whole book to them. However, if anyone has distilled those collected findings all into one book like Sinclair did with the problems of American higher education in his day, let alone brought to bear on the facts a social vision to compare with his in its breadth and depth and critical stance, the feat has entirely escaped me--all as I think it the more likely that it would because, just as Sinclair did not issue his Dead Hand books through the major publishers, such a work would probably not make it through the gauntlet one has to run to reach the public with a Big Five imprint on it in our time, with all that unfortunately implies for anyone's chances of hearing about it.