Randolph S. Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919, edited with an introduction by Carl Resek (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1964) (From "The Idea of a University": "[T]he American university has become a financial corporation, strictly analogous, in it motives and responses, to the corporation which is concerned in the production of industrial commodities. Trustees who are business men, who hold positions as directors or executives in large financial or industrial corporations, carry over into the management of the university the attitudes and sensitivities learned in the corporate world. The university produces learning instead of steel or rubber, but the nature of the academic community has become less and less potent in ensuring for the academic workman a status materially different from that of any other kind of employee." "As directors in this corporation of learning, trustees seem to regard themselves primarily as guardians of invested capital. They manage as a sacred trust the various bequests, gifts, endowments which have been made to the university by men and women of the same orthodoxies as themselves. Their obligation is to see that the quality of the commodity which the university produces is such as to seem reputable to the class which they represents. And in order to maintain the flow of capital ad the general credit of the institution they must keep the stock above par. In the minds apparently of the trustees, and of the executives and professors who work with them, the reputation of a university is comparable to the standing of a corporation's securities on the street, the newspapers taking the place of he stock exchange. . . . When your stock is depressed by an alarming rumor, it is irrelevant whether the rumor is true or not. The mischief lies in what people think, not in the actual facts. And for this purpose newspaper chatter is authoritative, Your object then becomes not to discover the truth but to combat the rumor. If the fall in your stock is due to a suspicion of the value of your commodity, you renew your efforts to convince the public of its soundness. If it is due to an offending employee, you dismiss the employee. Having removed the cause of the prejudice, you then expect your securities to resume their former level." Id. at 152, 152-153. "... One is often amazed at the callousness of university trustees towards the indignation that follows these arbitrary dismissals of professors. But this corporate attitude naturally discounts the opinions of the non-investing public. It is not the discontent of idealists that matters, but the vague complaints from parents that their sons are being taught irreligion and sedition within the university, complaints from business men that a professor is tainted with economic heresy, indignation of prominent alumni at the connection of the university's name with unpopular movements. Theses are the attitudes that depress the credit of the university in the investing world, and these are the attitudes that carry weight, therefore, with the university president and the trustees.Vested interests presumably receive dividends in the form of orthodox graduates. Whatever interferes with the supply of such a revenue is therefore a serious assault on the stability of the corporation." "In any such system of ideas, the professor becomes inevitably a mere employee of a company which has a standing to maintain in the corporate world. His intellectual freedom is extremely precarious, because a chance remark, or any public activity, may bring him that newspaper censure which causes the grave damage the university is likely to incur in the minds of the significant classes." Id. at 154. One wonders what Bourne would say were he around in this era of super-corporatization of universities, an era where more and more universities do see themselves as primarily engaged in business rather than education. Certainly don't see education as their primary business, and have little interest in providing their customers (though still designated "students") with an intellectual education. And, where academic freedom is either absent or viewed as a nuisance. From "A War Diary": "The kind of war which we are conducting is an enterprise which the American government does not have to carry on with the hearty co-operation of the American people but only with their acquiescence. Ant that acquiescence seems sufficient to float an indefinitely protracted war for vague or even largely uncomprehended and unaccepted purposes." Id. at , 36, 36.).
Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State U. Press, 1984) ("Viewed in light of the war, his earlier nonpragmatic prescriptions for youth seem dreamy, paper thin, of a piece with a romantic era, too fragile for the real world. And yet, here in 1917, Bourne, although certainly chastened and less romantic, was still clinging to a sustaining faith in the essential rightness of his own personality. He was sill pitting the individual personality against the crowd. Even in his attacks on pragmatism, he relied upon the trust that he and the other irreconcilables were right. ..." "The, too, historians who emphasize Bourne;s disillusionment, particularly those who pigeonhole Bourne as alienated, play a dirty trick on him. Today few can swallow [Woodrow] Wilson's lofty idealism or the confident predictions of Dewey and the American liberal community. Yet because Bourne could not, because he was in a tiny minority, [Christopher] Lasch labels him alienated, making the rest of us to feel slightly sorry for the young man's stubborn refusal to become another liberal visionary. Presumably, those like Bourne who could not believe that war could advance much of anything, let alone international democracy, are alienated, while those today who see Wilson's idealism as an extravagance, and a dangerous one at that, are insightful, sophisticated historians." Id. at 226-227.).
