The Degradation of the Academic Dogma should be remembered for its title alone. But Robert Nisbet’s 1971 classic, in its 50th anniversary year, has much to teach us about the plight of the contemporary American university. Nisbet (1913-1996), who was a prominent communitarian social theorist, helps us see that our quandaries about issues such as funding, bureaucracy, social activism, and faculty workload often have much deeper sources in the university’s social structure, in its role in history, and in longstanding confusions about its purpose. He shows us that we need to think fundamentally about the university as an institution in order to address our specific concerns most fruitfully.
Nisbet argued that what he called “academic capitalism” — the systemwide ramifications of the university’s sprawling new focus on externally funded organized research — had degraded the university after World War II. “For the first time in Western history,” he wrote, “professors and scholars” became “entrepreneurs in incessant search for new sources of capital.”
This was a pioneering claim. Today, Nisbet looks like a seer — many of the trends he described have only intensified. Public trust in universities has declined; the ranks of administrators have swelled; the pressure on individual professors to win external grants has risen. Decades before the advent of on-campus lazy rivers, Nisbet wrote that one outgrowth of academic capitalism was that “dormitories not seldom resembled luxury hotels.” He even predicted a “taxpayers, tuition-payers’ revolt.”
Nisbet published Degradation after spending some 40 years at the University of California during the period of its extraordinary growth into the nine-campus system often seen as a model by educators around the world. (Merced was added later.) A native Californian, he earned all his degrees at UC Berkeley and then served on its faculty in social institutions and sociology before becoming the founding dean of the College of Letters and Science at the new UC campus in Riverside in the early 1950s. He held that position for a decade, then spent another nine years on the Riverside faculty.
For Nisbet, capitalism was not defined by a quest for personal profit. Drawing on Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Nisbet argued that status and power were major motivators of capitalists, whether businessmen or “the research titan[s] who began in the late 1940s to govern the American university campus.” These titans flouted traditional university standards of community and authority by setting up their own research shops and raising money to run them without reference to other elements of the university.