News Update: Louisiana Congressman Demands that Universities Stop Being Universities

I just finished co-authoring an essay (for an anthology) in which my co-authors and I argue that teaching the humanistic disciplines, and more broadly ensuring that higher education isn’t all about “getting a good job,” is critical for a society that hopes to escape what Max Weber called “the Iron Cage.”


And then, today, I read this: a congressman from Louisiana, Jeff Landry, opposes a new LGBT studies program at the University of Louisiana atLafayette (ULL) because the program "offers nothing for direct employment prospects" and the university ought to “allocate its resources on programs that will help college students increase their hiring viability and earning capacity.”

Not only does this statement betray a dangerously reductionist view of higher education, but it applies this reductionist view in a very selective way, specifically singling out one of the few remaining social groups (the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community) that it is still legitimate in some circles to target for discrimination and social marginalization. In short, Landry invokes a bad argument rooted in a destructive view of higher education in order to play into and reinforce the homophobic prejudices of his constituency.

Since I’ve said plenty on this blog about discrimination against sexual minorities, I don’t want to dwell on that dimension of Landry’s remarks here. Rather, I want to dwell on why it is so dangerous to reduce higher education to “hiring viability and earning capacity.”

Now let me say that these goals—being employable at a decent wage—should be part of what higher education offers. But the university loses a crucial element of what higher education is about if these vocational goals become such a priority that they claim the lion’s share of the university’s resources, eviscerating programs which expand the horizons of students, which challenge their prejudices, which inspire reflection on the values of society and lead them to think deeply about what is really important to them in their own lives.

This is where Max Weber’s metaphor of “the Iron Cage” comes into play. Weber worried that in the modern world, our exponential increase in technological skill (and the justifiable admiration of it) leads to a kind of artificial and dangerous elevation of one sort of rationality—means-end rationality or instrumental rationality—over other sorts.

Most significantly, we lose sight of the importance of deliberating thoughtfully, both as communities and as individuals, over which ends we should be pursuing. The ability to determine how to most efficiently achieve our ends is very important. But this ability can be invoked by a genocidal ruler to more effectively exterminate an undesired population. Or it can be invoked to direct human resources and human lives to the production of widgets whose main value is their usefulness in producing widgets.

Something like the latter is what Weber takes to be the Iron Cage that threatens to trap modern people. There is a real danger in the modern world of “efficiency”—cleverness in promoting effective means to achieved one’s ends—taking on such a life of its own that it becomes the ultimate end and aim of society. People spend their lives navigating institutions and bureaucracies whose rules are all about efficiency. But efficiency towards achieving what? The answer, sadly, is often nothing beyond efficiency itself. A is valued because it's useful for achieving B, whose value lies in its usefulness in achieving C, whose value lies in its usefulness for achieving D, which is valuable because of how useful it is for achieving A through C.

Efficiency is about reasoning well about the best means of attaining one’s ends. If it becomes the end in its own right, then it’s a hollow end.

There are different ways such hollowness can manifest. Money, of course, is valuable—but only as a means to an end. It’s what you can buy with money that makes money valuable, and so you need to think about what life goals really matter to you, and how much money you need to achieve those goals (and how much time spent making money would be a distraction from achieving those goals).

For some people, however, making money becomes their end. They just focus on making more and more money as if that is what life were about--hiring viability and earning capacity. But money doesn’t fulfill us. It can’t, because its value is wholly parasitic on the value of the ends that money can help us achieve. As an end in its own right, then, it is utterly hollow.

But as society becomes more and more caught up in efficiency, institutions start treating efficiency as the end and goal of life. Rules are established to maximize efficiency. People focus on navigating the rules. We are directed towards organizing our lives around achieving the means to attain our goals, but have no goal beyond achieving these means—or at least have given up on critically reflecting on our goals and values. The aim is to get a good job that pays well, regardless of whether the work is intrinsically satisfying, and regardless of whether the time and resources required to earn a living eat up so much of one’s life that one has nothing left for actually living.

Our spare time is taken up with surrogates for meaningful life projects--watching TV shows and movies about people pursuing meaningful life projects, or playing video games in which you are challenged to achieve artificial goals that have no reality outside the game. And so the question of which goals will really satisfy, really enrich us individually and collectively, is forever put off or ignored. The time we're not spending being useful at work--vacations and weekends--becomes seen as a way to "recharge our batteries" so that we can return to being useful. But useful for what? Instead of offering an answer, we are encouraged to consume commercial good, filling our closets with more clothes than we can wear, since this is useful in stimulating the economy so that there will be more jobs, so that we will be able to make enough money to buy more stuff.

In short, we become trapped in a system of efficiency run amok, and have lost the ability to sit down and think about what really matters to us and why—and which ultimate goals society as a whole should be pursuing and why.

Universities have always been as much about these deeper questions. Yes, we need to develop our capacity for instrumental thinking—for technical and practical know-how that will help us to better realize our ends. But such technical know-how, without critical reflection and deliberation about the goals or ends we should pursue, becomes like an engine detached from any steering mechanism. Universities have always been about both improving our “engines” and about giving us the resources to steer wisely towards a meaningful goal.

In the modern era, we are not in danger of losing sight of the importance of efficiency, of technical know-how, of the ability to reason out the best means for achieving a goal. What we are in danger of losing sight of is the crucial importance of reflecting and deliberating wisely about where we should be heading, both in our own lives and collectively.

If we don’t develop the latter, we will just blindly live out goals and values that have been handed to us uncritically, more often than not by the mechanistic demands of a society focused on efficiency.

Landry’s words are operating here (at least in part) as a gear in the efficiency machine, demanding more efficiency from ULL in the attainment of the goal of college graduates able to efficiently navigate the business world, with the ultimate social goal of a nation that can efficiently achieve efficiency.

Were the University of Louisiana-Lafayette to bow to Rep. Landry’s scathing critique of their priorities, they would be abdicating the priorities that can help our nation realize wisdom rather than mere efficiency. In short, they would be abdicating their purpose as an institution of higher education.