John Sexton, Gordon Gee, Huck Finn's King and Duke; The American University as an Empty Husk

Gordon Gee

John Sexton

The King & the Duke entertain Huck and Jim

"The university moves in this corporate direction and then somehow expects the students to believe that they exist in this Utopian, non-economic world of education."
--Lisa Duggan, Professor, NYU from The New Yorker Sept 9.

There has always been a tension between the world of ideas, the spiritual world and the world of money. 
 In a long article in this weeks New Yorker, Rachel Aviv profiles John Sexton, president of NYU, and a clear picture emerges of a huckster, a soft shoe vaudevillian, who hugs people, rubs his students' shoulders, needs to be loved, while he spends university dollars prodigiously, sets up campuses in Abu Dhabi, throws no repayment loans and  mortgage supports around to attract what he considers star professors, while students drop out of NYU with great regularity because they cannot afford the rising tuition and costs--now around $68,000 a year.

Sexton likes phrases like, "The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle class," and "idea capitals" and, "We--humankind--find ourselves at an inflection point, a critical threshold," and we can "magnetize the talent class," and it all sounds like an artist standing in front of his canvas, at the gallery, explaining to his fans, "This is not just a black dot on a white canvas--this is an invitation to a spiritual awakening."

Academia has, for the past 50 years at least, been a place where professors made careers by shoveling a very thick bog of bull manure. But now, in light of financial considerations it looks less benign. Universities have become epicenters of national cynicism, justly so.

It was one thing when you told people a college education was good for them, and it was an investment of 4 years time during your late teens and early twenties, when you had the time, and you'd probably be happy you spent four years working on yourself.  But when the costs soared, and students were sold on four years acquiring enough debt to insure they could not buy a house until their mid forties, and when the universities shot the moon on their football teams and income from sales of team logos and ran weekly entertainment extravaganzas called football and basketball , well then the nasty dark edge of capitalism started to peek through those medieval robes and it didn't take four years of college to see through the steady drizzle of bull droppings to know where the stink was coming from.

Gordon Gee, former president of Ohio State, then Brown, then Vanderbilt, then back to Ohio State, was once asked whether he would fire the head football coach and he replied, "I was hoping he wouldn't fire me."

Of course, the joke was not really that funny--most of the big college football coaches have more power, make far more money  than the presidents of their colleges.  The football coach is not supposed to be the reason people go to college, or at least that was once true--it's not so clear that's still the case, in America. The spectacle of Joe Paterno DE-sanctification, does nothing to change that assessment.

So, our universities have been corrupted by big time sport and the money it brings in, corrupted by departments of feminist studies and gay and gender studies and by departments of anthropology where professors speak utter nonsense about cultural relativism, where The Spirit Moves Me And I Fall Down is presented uncritically as a sacred text, by professors at Harvard who try to launch themselves into the Rap music market under the cover of doing research and launching a new mode of communication, by allowing professors to use their university titles and offices to launch themselves on lucrative consulting careers, spending 2 days on campus and 5 traveling to "consulting" jobs or other boondoggles. 

European academies, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, great German universities look across the Atlantic, at our packed, delirious  college football stadiums like some latter day Nuremberg rallies, at our infatuation with March Madness, and they ask:  "These are universities?"

Well, actually, no. They stopped being that a long time ago. 

This is all so reminiscent of the tale of the spider wasp:


 David Attenborough narrates an astonishing DVD, Life in the Undergrowth, about insects. One sequence begins, innocently enough, without any portent of the dark things to come, Attenborough's soothing, proper British voice carrying you along, as he describes the adaptation of a certain larva which attaches itself to the underbelly of a spider. 

In the beginning, it all seems innocent enough, as the spider weaves its lustrous web,oblivious to its papoose, riding along. But, as things progress, the spider becomes disoriented, is no longer able to weave, owing to a neurotoxin released into it's circulation by the larva, which grows larger and larger, gradually sucking the vital fluids from inside the spider until all that is left is an empty husk of what was once a spider, and then the larva discards the spider husk and transforms itself into a wasp.
                            --From The Phantom Speaks 2010

That is what American university is now--the empty husk. The spider wasp of avarice has hollowed it, burst through and flown away.