“By 1910,” Veysey wrote, “the structure of the American university had assumed its stable 20th-century form.” With his characteristic ambivalence and irony, Veysey attributed this success, in part, to the blandness of American intellectual life.
Where utility, research, and culture had once wielded the sharp edge of reform energy, they had become by the early 1900s notably soft and blurry. After securing space for electives and practical subjects, “utility” morphed first into “efficiency” and then into empty sounds: “A catch phrase had become substituted for what, in the 60’s and 70’s of the preceding century, had been an idea.” Research became dominant within graduate schools and remade the expectations for faculty, but it also suffered from conceptual bleed: At one point Harvard’s athletic director described the gym as a laboratory and said he wanted “to be considered a scientific man.” Culture lived on in undergraduate humanities classrooms, but even its most articulate proponents relied on “strongly felt but necessarily vague generalizations.”
Once those competing ideals lost their edge, plenty of university presidents and professors, even those who had once been strong partisans of one branch of reform over the others, began to blend them all together into the same speeches and essays, sometimes in consecutive sentences or clauses, without sensing any incongruity or conflict. We are all familiar with this kind of bland incoherence on the part of university administrators, which has become almost a requirement for the job. We often regard it, not incorrectly, as a sign that academic leaders do not have clear ideas about the purpose of their institutions. Yet Veysey, despite his criticism, also allowed that it had certain virtues, one of the most important of which was that it provided a “protective facade” for the university to put on in public.
In fact, it was academic administrators, of all people, who became the unlikely and somewhat ironic heroes of Veysey’s story. The competing ideals of utility, research, and culture not only advanced different internal goals for the purpose of the university but also implied different external orientations toward society. The utilitarians wanted some kind of alignment between universities and American society, while the pure researchers and the proponents of culture stood at various distances apart. The perhaps unwitting genius of the modern university’s administrators was to create an organization in which those groups could coexist and to represent the sometimes unpopular goals of those groups in a way that appeared noncontroversial. The administrators’ loyalty was not to ideas or to principles but to the university as an institution, which they felt it was their duty to protect.
