Higher Education In America Analysis

Universities have long been heralded as indispensable founts of societal improvement. Blessed John Henry Newman, a nineteenth century Catholic cleric who founded Ireland’s largest university, University College Dublin, declared that “A university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society…It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them.” (177). In recognition of this role, Universities have long held a high place in society, commanding respect from and wielding influence over those in positions of power. So too have its faculty members …show more content…
While this secondary role of institutions has simply been accepted as normal by most in society, it has encountered opposition. One particularly vitriolic critic was the famous sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen. Addressing the topic of higher education in his aptly-titled book, The Higher Learning in America, written in 1918, Veblen renounced American universities for their business-like principles and monetarily-motivated administrations, which frivolously chased after prestige. These criticisms, however, were not entirely unbiased; coming from an underprivileged family and subjected to the unforgiving scrutiny of university administrators, Veblen’s thorough condemnation of the modern research university stemmed, at least in part, from personal grievances. Yet, Veblen did not decry all aspects of American universities; “purified of executive megalomania,” the reservedly-optimistic sociologist maintained that schools could return to task of pursuing and imparting unimpeded …show more content…
Born in 1857 to a pair Norwegian immigrants living in rural Wisconsin, Thorstein Veblen was reared by a family that was all too familiar with the harsh realities of socioeconomic inequality. Both sets of Veblen’s grandparents lost their farms in Norway—victims of bourgeois exploitation and cruel misfortune. Veblen’s father, leaving behind his unsuccessful family in Norway, immigrated to America, where he was graciously given forty acres of farmland by a family friend. In keeping with the Veblen family legacy, however, the land was seized by manipulative speculators who had discovered that immigrants in the “land of opportunity” made for easy targets— opportunity, it turned out, was impartial to the purity of one’s intentions in its zero-sum-game. In addition to economic hardships, Veblen was subjected to discrimination and harassment on account of his Norwegian heritage and language; biographer Joseph Dorfman notes is his book, Veblen’s America, that it was once declared in the Territorial Council of Wisconsin that “Negros were ‘more deserving of a vote and [the] privileges of freemen’ than Norwegians.” These many hardships, according to Dorfman, were “ground into the very substance of Thorstein Veblen’s thinking” and left the sociologist with an “outsider” mentality