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When John Dewey came to teach philosophy at the University of Michigan in 1884, his appointment was part of a revolution in academic life that would decapitate the so-called classical curriculum and end what later historians of the Philosophy Department would call the “theological” phase of its history. But at Michigan and elsewhere in the developing American research universities, this would begin the long process of the empowerment of academic disciplines over their institutions. This empowerment would continue through the 20th century and bring both costs and benefits. Among the latter is the surprising degree of viewpoint diversity that actually exists in higher education today.
Dewey and his senior colleague at Michigan—and dissertation adviser at Johns Hopkins University—George Sylvester Morris would simply stop teaching the capstone course in the “classical curriculum.” The course, in “moral and intellectual philosophy,” had been taught since 1869 by a genial Michigan Methodist minister who had never attended college. There was no room for this course in the new “professional” philosophy curriculum of Morris and Dewey, which would be broadened and deepened according to their understanding of what the profession of philosophy required. Dewey would endorse and publicize this change among his professional peers when, as by then chair of philosophy himself, he would publish articles on the “new” curriculum in the then-pioneering professional journals The Ethical Record in 1889 and The Monist in 1890.
As Roger Geiger pointed out 40 years ago in To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940, a similar process was happening in every discipline in the American research universities: the founding of professional journals and associations, the development of graduate training, the growing expectation that faculty would hold the doctorate and be committed to both research and teaching. Although departments and disciplines had emerged only in the last two decades of the 19th century, by the early years of the 20th their authority over their “fields” and, indeed, research and curricular activities within them, had been solidified and ratified by a number of events and organizations. The result, as Geiger understood it, was that research universities grew in “patterned isolation” of their component parts.
As a result of this professionalization through “patterned isolation,” when an undergraduate today moves, sometimes on the same day, from chemistry to economics to English, what she encounters is not just different content but completely different ways of thinking about the world. The theoretical frameworks, research findings, teaching contents and methods are almost completely independent of one another—and, because of the power of the disciplines, relatively autonomous within the research-oriented universities and colleges themselves.
It has been this process that has produced economics departments that say nothing about Marxian economics—because the discipline doesn’t care about him—and philosophy departments committed to “analytical” philosophy that barely teach continental theory at all (pace to those who think faculty everywhere are reading and discussing Herbert Marcuse!) On the other hand, comparative literature departments do care about Marx and sociology departments do care and teach about continental theory, in both cases because their disciplines do. Whatever one may think of these choices intellectually, it is rare—if not nonexistent—that one department attacks another over such issues.
Students must take what is on offer, of course, but they have wide latitude in that choice and so substantial autonomy as well. Because of these two forms of relative autonomy—faculty from institutions and other disciplines, and students from faculty—no dean, no provost, no DEI program and certainly no president has been able to impose a hegemonic left-wing, or any-wing, view on the many units in a liberal arts college in a research university, for example.
The evidence for this disciplinary power and autonomy—and problematic relationship with home institutions—was identified as long ago as 1990 in Ernest Boyer’s path-breaking study “Scholarship Reconsidered.” More than 75 percent of faculty surveyed for that study ranked their disciplines first among things “very important” to them. Departments were next; the colleges and universities where they worked were last. Boyer used these results to discuss a real—and persisting—problem in higher education: the increasing division and disconnection of departments from one another. Precisely because of the power and autonomy of the disciplines, faculty were not talking together about intellectual or pedagogical issues. This is still a real problem in higher education, more important than complaints about the already-existing “viewpoint diversity.”
There were many stops on the path of this empowerment of disciplines and departments over colleges and universities and their concomitant increase of authority over faculty members, but the trend in the 20th century, at least on research-intensive campuses, was unmistakable. Key to this were the very important attempts to define, legitimize and ultimately rank colleges, universities and disciplines, all of which began surprisingly early in the century. When the Association of American Universities was organized in 1900, it was to regulate, authorize and legitimate graduate study in the new disciplines, and along the way to define both adequate doctoral-level training in the disciplines and the appropriate undergraduate preparation for such studies. But the AAU would also be involved in the broader effort to enhance the power of disciplines.
Important developments in the empowerment of the disciplines over the 20th century include:
- Disciplinary foundations: A whole raft of early attempts to define and rank institutions of higher education—by the AAU, the Carnegie Foundation, the General Education Board, etc.—failed. What survived was a kind of generic definition and list—without ranks—developed in a joint effort led by the American Council on Education starting in 1919. According to Frederick Rudolf’s classic Curriculum, this definition acknowledged the academic department as an “organizing principle” and “strengthened the role of subject specialists in defining the course of study,” by requiring that only institutions of higher education having at least eight doctoral degree–holding department chairs for 100 students should be listed as such.
- Concentrations and majors in the disciplines: Another factor contributing to the growing power of departmentally defined disciplines was the spread of the idea of a major or concentration beginning in the decade of 1910. This idea originated in the AAU in part as a way to end the alleged chaos of the elective system. Importantly, it permitted the disciplines— through collegiate departments—to define what a “major” meant. In many cases, this definition was based on ideas about adequate preparation for graduate study in the discipline that had been held in the AAU from the beginning. The widespread “major and distribution” system is, in fact, a tribute to disciplinary power.
- Rankings of disciplines and not institutions: The ranking of departments and colleges began remarkably early with the work of Raymond M. Hughes in 1925; Hughes surveyed faculty and academic leaders to produce rankings of top academic departments nationally. For those interested in the rank of an institution, it was the average rank of the departments. Such opinion-based surveys of departments were, as David S. Webster has written, characteristic of all such ranking schemes for much of the rest of the century, including the enormous 1982 ranking of departments by the National Research Council. (Interestingly, the unique thing about early U.S. News rankings was that they were of whole institutions and not just departments, although U.S. News added that practice by the 1990s.)
- Disciplinary peer review: As Melinda Baldwin has written, scientific peer review in journals emerged for a variety of reasons during the Cold War, but especially after a congressional investigation into the awarding of grants by staff at the National Science Foundation. The conclusion of Congress was the idea that the opinions of peer experts—and not just staff generalists— should determine awards. It was an easy analogy to apply this same procedure for reviews for tenure and promotion. The use of such “external” letters spread rapidly and, by the early 21st century, more than 90 percent of research-intensive universities were requiring them in all reviews for tenure and some for promotion. In many cases these “voices from the field” determined the outcome of the process.
- Strategic reviews—by the disciplines: Already by 1995, program review of university departments was widespread, and this process, too, included external reviewers from the relevant disciplinary departments. This meant that the important items in such a review were the self-study produced by the department and the external review report prepared by reviewers in the discipline, who usually were proposed by the departments themselves. Unsurprisingly, the process was rife with the potential to fuel internal competition, as disciplines pursued new resources from the university against one another in order to maintain or achieve high(er) department rankings.
For all of these reasons, development through the patterned isolation of disciplines is still the rule on university campuses. On the one hand, it has been exactly this process that has resulted in powerful and useful research-focused disciplines “undisciplined” by any kind of hegemonic intellectual viewpoint being imposed on universities, at least among those that hold or aspire to research-intensive stature. On the other hand, almost all incentives for a successful academic career are based in the disciplines, and this means there is little incentive to contribute to the broader college or university—and, almost inevitably, teaching and service are downplayed.
Minimal intellectual interaction across disciplines still exists on campuses. It is the rare instructor who opens the term with what it means to think like an economist, cognitive psychologist, computer scientist or historian, to say nothing of comparing those worldviews with some others on the campus and encouraging students to make use of them. Countless reform proposals from top-ranked universities have recognized the need to make these differences clear in the curriculum, but most of these have failed precisely because they have been seen to intrude on disciplinary prerogatives or positions.
As a result, no one is telling undergraduates—or anyone else, including the general public—how to make sense of the actually existing viewpoint diversity on campus. And this leads to the remarkably cynical—but not naïve—position that students are willing to “believe anything” for one semester because the main worldview will shift the next. Whatever the merits of teaching students to disagree with or question different worldviews, that is a secondary challenge, ironically. The primary challenge is to help them understand that there are different and often clashing views of the world on offer, and that those theories, stylized facts and research-based conclusions offer a prospect both somewhat intimidating but also truly exciting: an understanding of contending views of the world that can be achieved nowhere else.
The current ham-handed approaches of federal and state governments and foundations to fund increased viewpoint diversity will do nothing for this problem because they fail to understand it in the first place. And they drive research-active faculty in the disciplines away from thinking about the solution—which must, after all, be local. In this historical context, the rational strategy is for discipline-oriented faculty to hunker down on the assumption that “this too shall pass,” like so many other external interferences in the past. But discipline-based faculty members are actually allies in the project of viewpoint diversity—because they live it in their own work. Building new programs without them misunderstands the problem—and the possibility—completely.
