A new Sickness or a Chronic Condition? Thoughts on Consumerism and Conformity in Higher Ed in the 90s and Today

Revisiting a Critique of the Academy from 1997

While following the ongoing discussion of plagiarism, data falsification, campus culture and ideological capture following the resignation of Harvard University President Claudine Gay, I was reminded of an assignment from my undergraduate years. In a required course on writing and composition, the instructor thought we might find the work more engaging if she designed a prompt concerning the college experience itself. We were tasked with writing responses to a then recent article in Harper’s magazine by University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson - “On the Uses of a Liberal Education.” Edmundson lamented a lack of passion for the material among his students, a fear of embarrassment in the presence of their peers - including a reticence to depart from safe, politically correct orthodoxy - an expectation that their education should be entertaining and a general malaise that caused him to doubt whether that generation of students would ever be able to tolerate the Socratic Method. All of these complaints are widespread today, but Edmundson wrote his article in 1997. If reconsidered through the lens of this late 90s lament, should we regard these problems as a new sickness, or a chronic condition?

A certain cluster of “old school” or “classical” liberals today frequently points to the 1990s as the paradigm to which they would like us to return. Edmundson’s complaints reveal as many similarities between the 90s and today as differences. The runaway identitarian fixations of “wokeness” appear new to many, but existed in version 1.0 of their current form in the 90s. A viewing of the mid 90s Jeremy Piven vehicle “PCU” reveals that most of the sacred cows of “woke” were already present in a less acute, less stringently enforced form. The film features comically exaggerated activists, militant vegans, farcical hyper-feminists and parody black liberationists.

[“Stop the penis party!”]

[“This, my borthers, is a white devil’s conspiracy.”]

[President Garcia-Thompson of the fictional Port Chester University. In another scene, she says to a colleague “I think Bisexual Asian Studies should have its own building. The question is, who goes? The Math Department or the hockey team? I think hockey. Call me about it.”]

These issues were prominent enough on campus when Edmundson wrote his article to warrant a film dedicated to satirizing them. The ideas themselves are not new. Edmundson despaired at his 1997 students’ unwillingness to appear on the wrong side of what was then known as “political correctness,” a remarkably similar complaint to those of today.

“What about the phenomenon called political correctness? Raising the standard of civility and tolerance in the university has been - who can deny it? - a very good thing. Yet this admirable impulse has expanded to the point where one is enjoined to speak well - and only well - of women, blacks, gays, the disabled, in fact of virtually everyone. And we can owe this expansion in many ways to the student culture. Students now do not wish to be criticized, not in any form. (The culture of consumption never criticizes them, at least not overtly).”¹

In addition to political orthodoxy, Edmundson criticized the character of social interaction - including classroom discussion - for what he perceived as a desire for everything to run smoothly, drawing a comparison to TV as a medium:

“The form of character that’s most appealing on TV is calmly self-interested though never greedy, attuned to the conventions, and ironic. Judicious timing is preferred to sudden self-assertion. The TV medium is inhospitable to inspiration, improvisation, failures, slipups. All must run perfectly.”²

Complaints abound regarding young people expecting a society without friction, of the extension of the concept of “harm” to routine social interactions and ordinary inconveniences. We tend to think of these complaints as fundamentally new, but these appear in Edmundson’s account in an earlier form. Those of my generation will recall our liberal use of “whatever,” our great universal purpose word. In 1997, Edmundson noticed something invisible to many others at the time, but clear enough in retrospect: in many cases, “whatever” had a specific social utility as a friction remover. It defused disagreement and tension by dismissing emotional attachment to the matter at hand.

“It struck me how rarely I see this kind of full-out feeling in students anymore. Strong emotional display is forbidden. When conflicts arise, it’s generally understood that one of the parties will say something sarcastically propitiating (“whatever” often does it) and slouch away.”³

Today this is handled more brutally - we simply aren’t allowed to disagree and remain in polite society. We become ______-phobes, _____-ists or perhaps “deplorables” depending on the nature of the violation. In the 90s, “whatever” dismissed disagreement, while today we simply aren’t to have it in the first place. There is a distinction, but the practical outcome is similar, and it is plain that the two approaches serve a similar social function - the abolition of social friction.

This distinction between the “whatever” of yesterday and the social ostracism of today is one of coordination and institutional backing. The apathy underlying “whatever” as Edmundson described it was a product of youth culture at the time (and, Edmundson argues, of consumer culture), accompanied by the specter of appearing uncool should one fail to demonstrate sufficient ironic detachment. The fear of uncoolness, of embarrassment in view of others was the primary motivator behind the defacto conformity he noted. We might compare this fear of embarrassment, often fleeting, but still inconvenient, to “cancellation” as it exists today. Both are forms of social punishment, one much less severe. Cancellation has more far reaching consequences and implies a level of organization not present in the 90s. Again, a phenomenon with serious consequences today had its analogue in the alleged golden age. Instead of a less committed social exclusion or uncoolness, a persistent and self-reinforcing exclusion with ideological overtones now predominates, with the added peril of a neo-McCarthyist mindset in which self-styled “activists,” most identifying themselves as part of “the left” (many even as “Marxists”) somehow bypass the history of the movement they claim as their own by using an expanded definition of “harm” to justify denying the right to gainful employment, a core component of earlier iterations of what they claim to support.

Edmundson’s comments on conformity to political orthodoxy were not offered for their own sake, but in support of a larger argument about commercial forces influencing policy and life on campus. In 1997, Edmundson noted services offered by student life offices, a growing focus on campus sports and a drive to offer social events not related to the work of education. He argued, essentially, that the need to attract students was leading universities to prioritize everything but a commitment to serious study: “Before they arrive, we ply students with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. Once here, flattery and nonstop entertainment are available, if that’s what they want.”⁴ Edmundson made the case that the need to attract reliable tuition payers (students) combined with a youth culture developed against the backdrop of a consumer culture encouraging frictionless consumption and freedom from criticism and inconvenience led universities to become “a cross between summer camp and lotusland,” replete with “flattery and nonstop entertainment” as drivers for recruitment (sales) and as priorities that reached deep into the faculty and even the pedagogy of the day.

“At a certain point, professors stopped being usefully sensitive and became more like careful retailers who have it as a cardinal point of doctrine never to piss the customers off.”⁵

Again, Edmundson made this case in 1997, but if one were to erase all references to the year and update the youth culture characterizations from late Gen X/early Millennial ironic detachment/grunge to late Millennial/Zoomer woke virtue/Tiktok, few readers would have any idea the article is 27 years old. The problems of yesterday are the problems of today. Edmundson offered some possible remedies in 1997. He rejected traditionalist curriculum changes as futile, noting that the students of the day would read the content of such a curriculum as “...melodrama, with flat characters and predictable morals.”⁶ I would phrase this a little more provocatively: you can add more dimensions to your curriculum, but will they be visible to your one dimensional man? With curriculum changes inadequate, Edmundson settled on two points. The first was essentially a rolling back of “summer camp” and “lotusland;” ditch social events, student life offices, sports, counselors, all the highlights of the “luscious ads,” make it clear the academy is for serious students. The other was an appeal to individual exceptional students and teachers to hold the line and persevere despite the difficulties.

Understood as an extension of the consumer culture Edmumdson noted in the 90s, a great deal of the present condition of higher ed becomes intelligible. The product on offer is not education, but credentials, not research, but prestige, and the carrot provided to attract the customer (student) to this school rather than that one arrives in the form of “luscious ads,” extolling the comforts of “lotusland” and the easy comradery of “summer camp.” The metaphors applied in the 90s by Edmundson no longer hold the same bite they once did, as the processes he noted are now more organized, more central. If we trust Edmundson’s intuition that his students did not want to face criticism - and his belief that this was linked to the ambient consumer culture never overtly criticizing them - together with the notion that “whatever” served as a remover of social friction, we might conclude that today’s intellectual monoculture is likewise a response to consumer culture. If the rough edges of the 90s were sanded down through political correctness and ironic detachment (“whatever,” the denier of emotional investment) in service to ease of sales in an environment ruled by detached consumers looking for things to run smoothly, then what more logical progression could there be but to remove even the need for “whatever?” Edmundson remarked on the pressure to be seen as entertaining by students, driven in part by student evaluations, and the accompanying professional peril that could result:

“A sure result of the university’s widening elective leeway is to give students more power over their teachers. Those who don’t like you can simply avoid you. If the clientele dislikes you en masse, you can be left without students, period. ... I’ve seen older colleagues go through hot embarrassment at not having enough students sign up for their courses; they graded too hard, demanded too much, had beliefs too far out of keeping with the existing disposition. It takes only a few such instances to draw other members of the professoriat further into line.”⁷

Later: “A controversial teacher can send students hurrying to the deans and the counselors, claiming to have been offended. (‘Offensive’ is the preferred term of repugnance today, just as ‘enjoyable’ is the summit of praise.)”⁸

The professor in this regard is also a product and an advertisement for other products. Is the dominant ideology itself the same today? Go to college: look, our respected highly credentialed professor will teach only things you already know from the ambient media and institutional environment that produced you, and while you’re here you can socialize with other students who won’t contradict you in the context of a counselor rich safe space in which even your social and romantic interactions can be mediated to remove friction, if that’s what you want.

Many in the class in which this article was used as a prompt reacted quite negatively. Most perceived Edmundson’s critique as an attack on our generation (somewhat forgivable, perhaps, in light of the barrage of Boomer & Silent Generation attacks on Gen X that had been relentless for over a decade at that point), and in so doing missed Edmundson’s central argument - that it was the need to bend to market forces that was driving universities to cater to and further cultivate the negative behaviors he saw among students, who entered the system primed for a frictionless consumerist downward spiral by the general culture from which they had originated. Many of the essays written in response to the article focused on defending the attitudes of our generation, either arguing the merits of those attitudes, the inaccuracy of the characterization (i.e. denying the existence of the attitudes) or, ominously, acknowledgment of the characterization accompanied by pleas of victimhood intent on shifting the blame to Edmundson’s own generation. A few students who were not shipwrecked on the rocky shoals of generational conflict that always lie just offshore of Real Problem Island did correctly identify Edmundson’s position, but focused on defending exactly the “summer camp” and “lotusland” offerings the “luscious ads” had promised us. In other words, they understood that Edmundson was arguing that the university’s response to market forces and consumer culture was driving its decline more than the character of the students themselves; but because Edmundson suggested one possible solution was the rolling back of this response - the closure of student activities offices, the deflation (perhaps even elimination) of sports, social activities, etc. in order to attract only serious students - they rallied to the defense of the “fruits” of the decline, because they wanted them. They wanted “lotusland,” they did not want the rigorous and Socratic academy Edmundson called for. They defended frictionless consumerism - the order that they knew.

After undertaking a disorienting excavation of a seldom touched desk drawer, I emerged with the essay I wrote in response to Edmundson over 20 years ago. It is best characterized, in present day internet discourse terms, as a “doomer” perspective. I dismissed the generational chatter and identified the core argument. I agreed with the problems Edmundson identified. I even agreed that he was right in principle about the possible rollback of “summer camp” and “lotusland,” but argued that this rollback would fail, because the problem was beyond the scope of what any university could handle; it was deep in the general culture, linked to vast structural economic forces the university could not dislodge. No Edmundsonian rollback would alter the market forces that drove these developments in the first place. It would not prevent the academy from developing the same issues again. It would not change the nature of early and secondary education incoming students had already passed through. It was pissing into the wind; the only hope was for individual professors to cut through the noise in their individual classrooms, an unlikely prospect. In short, I was more insightful than I had a right to be at that age, and yet my response, perhaps noteworthy for its accuracy, would have been largely unhelpful to anyone making a serious effort to address the problems Edmundson identified. In retrospect, my late adolescent doomerism blunted the value of my insight, leaving it, despite its accuracy, with all the power of a slump-shouldered “whatever.” As with the general social utility of “whatever” at the time, attributing the decline to forces neither the students nor the university could contain, influence or counteract may have been technically accurate, but it also removed all friction from the argument by giving my fellow students permission to cling to the fruits of decline, because there was nothing they could do in any case. In effect, what I had done was make myself the cleverest person on the Titanic.

I once worked at a small college in rural New England that had a remarkable soccer field. It had been constructed by the college’s Facilities Department, all in-house, of sustainable and organic materials. It was rigorously maintained (occasionally to the detriment of more mundane but also more necessary tasks such as ice removal from walkways in the winter, meaning part of the price for that magnificent field came in the form of slip and fall lawsuits, but that’s another story), tightly secured and featured prominently in promotional material for the college. The soccer team did not practice there. It was used perhaps once a month, sometimes not even that, and usually for games in which the college’s team was not even involved. It was not a place students could simply show up and use. Another employee at the college who had been there significantly longer than I had referred to the field as the college president’s new carpet. Its role was to look nice, not to be used, and a wise employee would be well advised not to spill any proverbial punch that might lead to a stain. In short, it was above all a marketing tool; a picturesque vista for the “luscious ads.” The trends pointed out by Edmundson in 1997 have continued and accelerated. The students of today are more dependent on - or think they’re more dependent on - the fruits of consumerist decline than were the students of the 90s, and yet the problem is not new.

Given the similarities between the 90s and today, the position of the “old school” and “classical” liberals that a return to the values of the 90s can save us appears worse than inadequate; a temporary return to a higher point on the same slippery slope is hardly a solution. Taken as a chronic condition rather than a new sickness, the situation in the academy gains a new dimension. If we regard consumer culture and market incentives as the chief drivers of this malaise (and I think we should), then it is necessary to confront plagiarism, data falsification, credentialism and the professor and graduate-as-product on those terms, rather than on the assumption that there is a specific type of scholarship to blame. There is no question that one of the things the academy produces is ideology, but that’s just it - the ideology, in the context of the consumerist university, is a product as much or more than it is thought or scholarship in the traditional sense. Those who focus on the interrogation of “wokeness,” CRT, DEI, etc. through an attempt to follow a trail of scholarly influence back to an original source may well produce interesting work, but will that work actually address the larger issue if the answer lies not in the history of scholarship, but in the increasingly precarious economic situation of higher ed, and the consumer culture that new students still pass through before they arrive on campus? The largest problem confronting the academy may be more mundane than it is sinister, more dangerous than it is compelling, precisely because it is mundane. Is Claudine Gay herself really the problem with the system, or is the problem that the system was already geared to produce Claudine Gays?

Edmundson considered the reluctance of students in 1997 to confront or criticize capitalism part of the same phenomenon as their reluctance to criticize political correctness:

“What they will not generally do, though, is indict the current system. They won’t talk about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery. That would be getting too loud, too brash.”⁹

How does this square with the anti-capitalist rhetoric frequently cited by current critics of the academy as part of today’s inviolate orthodoxy? How did this shift from political correctness plus capitalism in the 90s to “woke” (i.e. political correctness 2.0) plus anti-capitalism today occur? Some would likely present this change as evidence of a break with the 90s model, a sign that the current situation is not a continuation, but something else; I do not believe this is the case. The anti-capitalism embedded in the current campus orthodoxy is a flavor, a topping on an entirely different dish. In the early 2000s, my girlfriend bought a glass at a store called Urban Outfitters. She knew I was studying Russian history at the time and thought it would be a cute gift. It was a plain glass with a hammer and sickle on it in black and red, with a russian phrase below: “коммунизм продаёт!” She didn’t know what the phrase meant, she merely thought it would be a way to show support for my studies, and my long term goal - a tenured position as a professor of history. (Later abandoned for largely financial reasons, but thank god I never had to hear any DSA-style snap-clapping following a land acknowledgment). Once she gave me the glass, I translated the phrase for her - “Communism sells.” Given that I was studying the breakup of the Soviet Union and the privatization of its assets at the time, this was arguably the most appropriate gift anyone could have given to encourage me. What better way to characterize the sale of state assets during the Soviet collapse that marked the transition from late gulag state capitalism maybe pointing toward socialism to oligarch-mafia capitalism pointing mostly toward itself than the notion that communism, or more specifically the assets constructed by it, sells as reliably as any other asset, even in cases when the “asset” is functioning merely as a fashionable brand. In the context of youth culture and consumer culture at the time, it represented exactly what I believe the current campus anti-capitalism does: a brand to signify a social pose being sold. This, I believe, is the connecting tissue between Edmundson’s 90s “whatever” consumer culture on campus and today’s unifying campus narrative - a shift in brand far more than a shift in content. The current campus orthodoxy’s alleged anti-capitalism is not more of a rebellion than anything Edmundson noted. In the era of corporate ESG (environmental, social and governance), anti-capitalism isn’t anti-capitalist; it’s “communism sells,” a consumerist brand. It is what some have called “woke capital.” More than that, it’s a brand produced in part as a product by the university system itself, hence the unusual coalition of religious conservatives, paleoconservatives, old style liberals, libertarians and old labor Marxists who oppose it. It is a stifled capitalism without free enterprise utilizing anti-capitalism expressed through consumerism to stitch together the tottering institution of higher ed as it limps along under a growing student debt bubble. No wonder everyone’s frantically paging James Burnham; whatever this is, it’s certainly some form of managerialism.

What Next? Is it Curable?

I have seen four approaches so far in the fight against the academy’s decline, two of which appear to regard the current sickness as curable and two of which do not. Critics of the academy do exist within it; the author of “Woke Racism,” John McWhorter of Columbia University, and Tyler Austin Harper of Bates College are two of the more prominent examples. Whether they believe the academy can be reformed solely through critique from within (perhaps it can, if the critics are numerous enough) is uncertain, but that is the primary method both employ. This is arguably similar to the bleak conclusion of my original response to Edmundson - that the only remaining hope was for individual professors to triumph in their individual classrooms - although my impression is that McWhorter and Harper are more optimistic. They don’t appear to regard internal pressure as the only remaining option, likely to fail - they seem to think it could become very effective and succeed. I hope they’re right.

Activist and Manhattan Institute figure Christopher Rufo represents a reformist approach that also sees the issue as solvable within the current university system. His efforts with the New College of Florida appear to have involved a reform of the curriculum in a more traditionalist mold accompanied by a rolling back of “woke” administrative practices. Rufo also appears to believe that intervention - perhaps by the state - is necessary or at least desirable, perhaps not universally, but in many cases, as indicated by his cooperation with Florida governor Ron DeSantis. This seems to reflect an understanding that the forces at play are not simply products of the university environment. While I am no expert on Rufo’s position - I am speaking based on those statements and interviews involving him that I happen to have seen - in the context of Edmundson’s observations I would guess that Rufo understands that restoring a more traditional curriculum is by itself no solution, hence his courting of authorities outside the academy to intervene and provide support. Rufo’s more traditional curriculum runs the risk of encountering exactly the problem Edmundson predicted; the culture as a whole has not prepared students to study that curriculum from the perspective Rufo likely expects. Perhaps he realizes this and intends to lose some students in the hope that he may also influence the larger culture enough over time to benefit future generations, or perhaps he believes the curriculum itself will be sufficient. In either case, he seems to be attempting to organize a push against the consumerist culture noted by Edmundson (and the accompanying market incentives) without a clear plan or intent to actually influence those incentives, beyond the potential for intervention by outside authorities, itself limited to the purview of whichever authorities they happen to be. It’s reasonable to criticize Rufo, and certainly there are many who do (although most of them appear to be motivated solely by political tribalism), but attempting to establish a counterweight against prevailing cultural and economic pressure isn’t a crazy idea, and frankly I don’t blame him for trying, despite that his particular approach appears to confront only the politics and ideology at play, not so much the professional and commercial environment in which they operate.

In the reform is not possible corner, one tendency is probably best personified in former Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian, whose experience in that institution has led him to remark “burn it all down.” He is now involved with the University of Austin, an attempt to establish a higher ed institution not captured by the dominant ideology. He is, however, also arguably one of the aforementioned “old school” liberals. As such, burning it all down and replacing it with a new academy may be less promising than Boghossian believes, in that it is questionable whether the new academy will be just as vulnerable as the old to the processes that brought us to this point. With no attempt to produce a countervailing force against that process, as Rufo seems to want to do, Boghossian may be banking on the ability of his brand of Socratic scholarship to fend off decline on its academic merits alone, but it’s not as if there weren’t Boghossians in the academy all along; their presence did not stop the decline in the first place. A little more interesting are attempts to establish new institutions that aren’t even universities; controversial internet intellectual Justin Murphy’s “Other Life” conducts “indiethinkers” - an effort to get independent scholars, writers, vloggers, etc. to collaborate and build independent platforms for their projects, including scholarly research, outside of the academy. In the same vein, former Occidental College professor Thaddeus Russell has Renegade University, an online platform offering an extremely eclectic mix of classes. The primary issue with these alternative institutions is, of course, that they lack the credentialing capacity of the academy - at least for now. Odds are few employers will be interested to know how many Renegade University classes an applicant has attended, but it is also the lack of a credentialing function that allows these projects to avoid the pressures that have made the academy what it now is. In the event that faith in the credentials evaporates entirely (if the plagiarism and more importantly the data falsification continues, this might actually be possible on a big enough scale to be relevant), these alternative platforms could become important to more than the subculture of independent thinkers they currently serve.

Back to the Agora?

The most prolific unpublished philosopher I know - my father, himself a refugee from the world of higher ed - once told me that Plato’s greatest mistake had nothing to do with his ontology; it was the creation of the academy itself. The concerns of Edmundson were not responsible for my father’s retreat from the academy, although it is probable they were present in an embryonic form even then, but the institution itself, by virtue of its status as an institution, was subject to incentives and social imperatives that could be influenced by other institutions or by changes in the general culture. Here we again encounter the simultaneous limitation and advantage for the non-university alternative institutions already mentioned, the Other Lives and Renegade Universities of the world, whose lack of credentialing function also frees them from the pressures incumbent on credential producers. There’s a touch of historical irony here; Plato’s original academy wasn’t a degree mill. There were no corporate HR departments to decree that X degree was required for Y position; aristocrats (usually, although Plato’s academy was open to all) would study with Plato because he was a known smart person whose lessons were known to improve the mental acuity of his students in addition to being interesting in and of themselves. The status of the students wasn’t dependent on a credential issued by the academy, it predated the student’s education and would exist regardless of attendance or non-attendance. Only two types of students were really possible - those who were genuinely interested, and those who expected to be able to better perform functions they were already going to have to perform anyway. In modern terms, they already had the job. The education was useful, but not required. In this sense the non-university alternatives noted here are the most like the original academy, precisely because they lack a credentialing capacity, the very thing now central to the academy of today. Are alternatives to the current university system actually just a reset? Perhaps. Whatever the fate of the current academy, education in the larger, non-credentialing sense is clearly moving back to the Agora. Even if “summer camp” and “lotusland” endure and the credentialing function remains the primary instrument for status production despite its increasingly obvious hollowness, genuine curiosity exists outside of “woke” orthodoxy, the whims of the higher ed market and whatever future ideology those whims might advance later. A stunning variety of alternative institutions are being formed, and figures like McWhorter and Harper show that while the situation in the academy is certainly grim, there are holdouts digging in who will likely outlast the current paradigm and may be able to drive change from within. The potential for collaboration both in fighting for existing institutions and in creating new ones is unprecedented. If only there was a central place where a collection, or “stack” if you will, of independent publications to which self-motivated students and thinkers might “subscribe,” it would be an ideal place to conduct a public debate and any number of experiments in alternative education. It’s not over yet.

1. Edmundson, Mark, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1997, p.47

2. Ibid. p.41

3. Ibid. p.41

4. Ibid. p.46

5. Ibid. p.48

6. Ibid. p.49

7. Ibid. p.45

8. Ibid. p.45

9. Ibid. p.42