March 12, 2020 45
from eight thousand students to 52,000
students (Princeton’s endowment is $26
billion, and the law only applies to en-
dowments over $500,000 per student).
While some might feel that changes of
this scale would alter the character of
the institution, much the same was said
when the old pastoral training grounds
of the northeast first became modern
research universities—and when those
same institutions began to admit women
and more people of color. One Prince-
ton undergraduate in 1942 claimed that
“the Negroes are not improved by their
admission to a group with relatively high
standards, but the group is corrupted to
the lower level of the new members.”
An alumnus in 1969 said, “Let’s be
frank. Girls are being sent to Princeton
less to educate them than to pacify, pla-
cate, and amuse the boys who are now
there.” A more ambitious College for
All bill might apply demands concern-
ing student-to- endowment radios to all
federal funding, forcing colleges and
universities, whether public or private,
to stop hoarding resources if they want
public support.
Unfortunately, if recent attempts at
reform are any guide, a more likely out-
come is not a diminishment of higher
education’s role in producing inequal-
ity but the enshrinement of a way of
thinking that will increase the forces
that have brought on the adjunct crisis:
“accountability.” For a fearful example
of what this can look like, one need
only consider the United Kingdom,
which from Margaret Thatcher to Tony
Blair to David Cameron raised tuition,
lowered the academic quality of its uni-
versities, and further ratcheted up the
demands on teachers by quantifying
every element of education in the most
reductive ways possible, whether the
total number of times other scholars cite
an article or the measurable economic
impact of research. In 2013 Obama pro-
moted an approach to accountability
that would have set the United States
down a similar path, proposing to rank
American colleges “on who’s offering
the best value so that students and tax-
payers get a bigger bang for their buck,”
with the chief metric being “how well
do... graduates do in the workforce?”
Sanders and Warren have done much
to put forward policies that insist on the
wide-reaching public goods offered by
higher education, proposing to cancel
virtually all student debt along with
eliminating tuition at public institu-
tions. But while Sanders and Warren
have described higher education as a
“right” and “basic need,” both have oth-
erwise struggled to find a language with
which to defend these proposals. Even
Sanders, in an otherwise forceful state-
ment accompanying the latest version
of his College for All Act, offered little
more than the market- oriented argu-
ment that “when our young people are
competing with workers from around
the world, we have got to have the best
educated workforce possible.” War-
ren, similarly, often resorts to financial
rhetoric, saying, “We need to make an
investment in our future, and the best
way to do that is to make an investment
in the public education of our children.”
The political theorist Wendy Brown,
in Undoing the Demos, offers a model
of the kind of rhetoric that would go
much further to argue for higher educa-
tion as a necessary public good. After
World War II, she writes, “extending
liberal arts education from the elite to
the many was nothing short of a radical
democratic event”; a new offer of college
to all should not hinge on economic re-
sults but on the promise to bring about
“an order in which the masses would be
educated for freedom.” If these words
anticipate the revolution in public lan-
guage that we need in order to advance
toward social democracy for both teach-
ers and students, Christopher New-
field, in The Great Mistake, provides ahelpfully detailed vision for how to get
there. Market-oriented thinking has fa-
tally undermined the grounds on which
public investment in higher education
can be defended, he argues. Champions
of an egalitarian university—publicly
minded unions, mobilized students, or
enlightened administrators—must show
through every reform how higher educa-
tion already does or can be brought to
serve the public good, by, for instance,
shedding outside contracts with self-
interested businesses, reducing tuition
and debt to provide broad-based oppor-
tunity, or pushing back against racial
and gender inequalities.
Sanders’s and Warren’s proposals
point in this direction, and while the
barriers to success in the event that
either enters the White House will re-
main enormous—the US Senate not
least among them—one has to hope
that if their plans were to approach pas-
sage, the cancellation of student debt
and the elimination of tuition at public
institutions would be combined with
an additional set of policies, and a new
political language, that would not only
reduce students’ financial exigencies
but also bring equity to the academic
workplace and radically lessen the way
higher education drives inequality in
the US. This can only be achieved by
building movements, not simply mak-
ing plans, and in this respect Sanders
clearly has an advantage. If something
like this vision succeeded, the univer-
sity would become neither an engine
of inequality nor a growth machine
for human capital; it would represent
a foundation for an economically and
culturally progressive egalitarian de-
mocracy—achieved as much through
the efforts of teachers, students, and
staff as through the passage of any par-
ticular law or the election of any politi-
cal leader. If the adjunct crisis can be
not just mitigated but solved, this is
how it will happen. QLETTERS
WHEN DID
RECONSTRUCTION END?
To the Editors:
I read with interest James Oakes’s review “An
Unfinished Revolution” [NYR, December 5,
2019]. I noticed a minor factual error that ap-
pears so often in the literature that I thought
it worth correcting. Oakes writes, “Upon tak-
ing office, Hayes ordered the removal of the
last federal troops from the Southern states.”
President Hayes did not order the removal
of federal troops from Southern states.
Rather he ordered the troops occupying the
statehouses in South Carolina to return to
their barracks. Troops remained in South-
ern states for years after Hayes took office.
For example, the online data set “Mapping
Occupation: Force, Freedom and the Army
in Reconstruction” ( mappingoccupation
.org) lists 150 army troops stationed in
Charleston, South Carolina, in March 1879,
two years after Hayes took office.
Certainly the author’s broader point that
Hayes’s election to the presidency marked
a major change in the role played by federal
troops in the South is both correct and im-
portant to make.
Jesse Kass
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of South Carolina
Columbia, South CarolinaJames Oakes replies:Professor Kass is quite right. All that
happened in 1877 was the shift of a small
number of federal troops from the state-
house in South Carolina to their nearby
barracks, but the absolute number of troops
in the Southern states remained unchanged
and quite small. This fact became especially
clear in 2015 with the publication of the
“Mapping Occupation” website to which
Kass refers. He is also right that nearly all
historians of Reconstruction, as well as the
PBS documentary Reconstruction: America
After the Civil War, make this mistake.
The insignificance of the troop numbers
raises a concern I’ve long felt about the
conventional use of 1877 as the year Recon-
struction ended; 1875, the year Republicans
lost control of the House of Representatives
to the Democrats, strikes me as a better
date for the effective end of federal Recon-
struction policy. But in the Southern states,
Reconstruction in many ways continued as
long as blacks could vote and hold office,
which is why another reasonable date for
the end of Reconstruction might be 1890,when the Mississippi Plan inaugurated the
sweeping policy of disfranchisement that
eventually engulfed most of the South. With
good reason William Archibald Dunning
described disfranchisement as “the undoing
of Reconstruction.” Either date—1875 or
1890—would probably be better than 1877,
when, as Kass indicates, not much of any-
thing actually^ happened.CORRECTIONIn Ursula Lindsey’s “‘This Land Is Mine’”
[NYR, February 27], fighting broke out be-
tween Israel and the armies of neighboring
Arab states after the founding of the Israeli
state in 1948, not after the UN passed a
resolution in 1947 calling for the end of the
British mandate in Palestine and the cre-
ation of an Israeli and a Palestinian state.Letters to the Editor: [email protected]. All other
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