I've blogged a lot lately about the nasty conformity of campus culture, and I've paid particular attention to how that conformity both maintains itself (through a combination of playground bullying, cliquish exclusivity, cultish pressure, and good-old fashioned emotional blackmail) and manages not to know itself (by creating a fashionable norm of left-leaning radicalism that carries with it the savor of independence by defining itself as a form of embattled resistance to established hegemony). What obsesses me about this phenomenon is not just how it works, though, but where it comes from. I'm convinced that the damage it is doing can't be stopped--or repaired--until we have a clear understanding of what brought the reigning mode of campus groupthink into being. And I'm continually impressed by the fact that no matter how many truly fine studies of the phenomenon are published, nothing really seems to change on campus.

This is in part because some of the studies take the form of elaborate pot shots (Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals comes to mind). Pot shot books preach to the converted and they alienate everyone else. It's also because some books--understandably--only deal with one isolated strand of a much larger and more pervasive problem (Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism? is a fine instance of a book that follows one thread in a complicated and variegated knot). More broadly, though, it's because we have not yet fully historicized (I know, junk English: sue me) the problem. Most histories of the politically correct campus begin with the sixties, where they locate the origins of a political attitude toward education in the era's extended unrest--in the civil rights movement, in anti-war protests--and where, consequently, they identify the creation of a newly radical professoriate (those who came of age then are in positions of academic power now--they are provosts and deans and "tenured radicals"). But these histories commit an elementary mistake, becoming so enamored of the sixties as the root of all contemporary campus evil that they forget that no historical moment ever produces something out of nothing; that even times of revolutionary change owe at least some of their energy to patterns and potentials that quietly, innocuously existed long before the period of transformation began.

So I've been on the lookout for things that might be read as part of a longer history of higher education's penchant for proselytizing. And recently, my hunt turned up this striking passage from Randall Jarrell's 1952 campus novel, Pictures from an Institution. Jarrell is describing a small, exclusive but undistinguished women's college several years after the close of World War II:

"Their education was, for a good many of the girls, what they themselves would have called a traumatic experience. Two of the psychologists of the school talked of education not simply as therapy but as shock therapy: 'The first thing I do with a freshman,' one of them said to [a professor], 'is to shake her out of her ignorant complacency.' [The professor] knew one of her freshmen, a cheerful scatterbrained girl who was neither cheerful nor scatterbrained about her; this girl said viciously, 'All she does is pry. She thinks I'm a bourgeois prejudice and she wants me to get rid of myself.' But he said nothing of this, and muttered under his breath, in German, 'God spare us our ignorant complacency.'

"If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you feel guilty. Just as ordinary animal awareness has been replaced in man by consciousness, so consciousness had been replaced, in most of the teachers of Benton, by social consciousness. They were successful in teaching most of their students to say in contrition, It was I, Lord, it was I; but they were not so successful in teaching them to consider this consciousness of guilt a summum bonum, one's final claim upon existence. Many a Benton girl went back to her nice home, married her rich husband, and carried a fox in her bosom for the rest of her life--and short of becoming a social worker, founding a Neo-Socialist party, and then killing herself and leaving her insurance to the United Nations, I do not know how she could have got rid of it.

"The demands American education could not meet--that it give a continent a college education--had forced this portion of it into regression: Benton was in its second childhood. It had sloughed off the awful protean burden of the past .... So, most of their burden flung off, the people of Benton went light and refreshed on their way, their broad smooth concrete Way; and when, soon, their legs got tired, they said to one another that it is the destiny of man to get tired.

"The people of Benton ... had not all been provincial to begin with, but they had made provincials of themselves, and called their province, now, the world. And it was a world in which almost nothing happened, a kind of steady state. Benton was a progressive college, so you would have supposed that this state would be a steady progression. So it had been, for a couple of decades; but later it had become a steady retrogression. Benton was much less progressive than it had been ten years before--but somehow this didn't bother people, didn't make them feel less progressive, didn't do anything to them. Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it? Benton was: the soldiers, as always, were better than the army in which they served, the superficial consenting nexus of their lives that was Benton.

Long, I know. If this blog were a class, I'd make you take ten minutes now to write down everything you notice about this passage, from interesting word choices to broader patterns. And then we'd put our heads together to come up with a collective reading of what this passage is up to and why it matters. But this blog isn't a class, so I'll just point a few things out. First, Jarrell is noticing in the fifties patterns that contemporary critics describe as definitively post-sixties: there is the concept of education as therapy, and the related concept of education as political enlightenment; there is the notion that college teaches social responsibility by inculcating guilt; there is the notion of the progressive school that is, in its unchanging attitudes, as static and stagnant as can be; there is the notion of the school that cannot recognize the deeply reactionary character of its static, all-purpose progressivism; there is the notion that the teaching of politics, especially the teaching of politics as a mode of rehabilitating the complacent consciences of students, arises to fill the void created by a curriculum that has abandoned the honest effort to teach about the past. Fascinating stuff, when you think about when it was written, and how prescient it was.

Fascinating too to see that Jarrell places the blame on what he sees as the doomed institutional character of college--and, more broadly, mass education. He may well be right. After all, he was writing about patterns that have been variously blamed on the sixties, on affirmative action, on postmodernism, and on multiculturalism back before any of these things existed. The implication is clear enough: contemporary historians have got it wrong. The sixties did not lay the groundwork for the repressive anti-intellectualism of today's oh so correct campus. That groundwork was laid long before the sixties, and has its origins not in a particular political agenda, but in the structure of American education itself. Food for thought and future blogs ....