“The professors are the enemy,” President Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger in 1972, more than a decade before J. D. Vance was born. “Write that on the blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.” Still, Kissinger, like a number of Nixon’s advisers, was himself an academic. And Nixon had declared a war on cancer, which was waged mainly in government-funded research labs at universities. Inside universities, the tide of the New Left, rising since the early nineteen-sixties, had begun to recede. A shift in student interest into business careers was under way. It wasn’t as if peace reigned between universities and the federal government, but full-scale conflict seemed inconceivable: the two sides needed each other.
Knowing what we know now, the postwar years look different, as if a trap was being laid: universities, especially élite universities, were subject to recurrent animosity from the political right, even as they were becoming ever more dependent on the federal government. In Delmore Schwartz’s 1937 short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the main character imagines himself in a theatre, watching a movie of the courtship that preceded his parents’ horrible marriage. “I stood up in the theatre and shouted: ‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it,’ ” he says. Would it even be possible to feel regret while replaying the establishment of research agencies, the arrival of federal scholarships and loans for college students, the government’s efforts to eliminate discrimination on campuses, and the universities’ role in inventing lifesaving drugs and launching the technology industry? You’d have to be awfully coldhearted to see these developments as potentially problematic, and hardly anybody in higher education did.
When I was a little boy, my grandfather, a pediatrician in the blue-collar town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, sometimes drove me to Princeton. We’d stand on Nassau Street and drink in the magnificence of the campus, as if it stood for everything great, and also distant, in the world. Today, Princeton is even more magnificent, with beautiful modern buildings scattered among the Colonial and Gothic ones, and elegant stores lining the street across from the campus. Compared with the time of my early visits, Princeton is far more prosperous. After decades of successful fund-raising and other forms of institutional overachievement, the university has an annual budget of more than three billion dollars, and an endowment of more than thirty-five billion dollars. It’s also at once far more open (it’s no longer the province of white Protestant men) and far more closed (it accepts less than five per cent of its undergraduate applicants). Officially, Princeton costs more than ninety thousand dollars a year; students from families with incomes of up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars pay no tuition. Still, the student body comes overwhelmingly from the upper middle class or higher, with the top one per cent heavily represented.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, a legal scholar who, for the past dozen years, has been the president of Princeton, is well aware of these contradictions. “You have institutions that are élite, that can’t let everybody in. We feel pressure for excellence and democratization,” Eisgruber said. “It’s O.K., but it makes things hard. We want to do research of unsurpassed quality, and be open to people from all backgrounds. We make a point of bringing in community-college and military transfers. There’s a tension between these visions. I don’t have a good answer for it.” Early in his presidency, he said, he had put a great deal of time to working on Princeton’s mission statement, a short version of which is carved into a granite circle embedded on the ground in the heart of the campus: “Princeton in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” The sincerity of the statement doesn’t entirely dispel its cognitive dissonance.
Princeton’s trajectory is typical of the leading private universities. Collectively, they have vastly expanded their reputations and their geographic reach. The Ivy League is now, arguably, the Ivy League of Black America, the Ivy League of star squash players from Pakistan, and the Ivy League of ambitious young conservatives. Many of its students wind up going into high-paying private-sector jobs, especially in technology, finance, and consulting. The over-all picture, at least from the outside, is of fantastically rich and powerful institutions that, while insisting on their moral superiority, hand out tickets to futures of private wealth and prominence, which go mostly to the children of families from the top of the income distribution. Michael Young, the British sociologist who popularized the term “meritocracy” back in 1958, did so to warn that a formal system of selection by the education system would eventually become the object of violent populist rage. Young’s peculiar, and also prescient, dystopian novel “The Rise of the Meritocracy” ends with a murderous uprising against the meritocrats in 2033.
