The Harvard Salient	October 21, 1996
Cover Story

hat Harvard has gone too pre-professional is a complaint heard all too often these days. The masses of "three-suited, worsted-stocking" seniors filing by the career office is nowhere close to the romantic vision of awkward dons lost in thought. People point to the increasing popularity of concentrations which might lead on to careers in the professions, much to the chagrin of traditions such as history or classics. Learning is no longer pursued for its own sake; intellectual beauty is no longer admired on its own terms; the integrity of education has been compromised by a commercial, consumption-driven society.

Alas, you might ask, who destroyed liberal education at Harvard? The answer, I think, would have to be the middle class. Before the indiscriminate admission of the middle classes, the vast majority of Harvard men came from established families, flirted with books with elegant nonchalance, and went on to work, should they be so inclined, for people that they got to know at the Club. The ambitious young students from bourgeois families, however, were different. The accident of birth was not on their side, and they had to rely on the novel idea of merit to make their mark; for most of them the entry to the professions was a matter not of inclination, but of necessity.

In time, the number of middle-class students at Harvard grew very substantially, and the influences of the established families waned. But pre-professionalism, by which I mean a concentration on one's career prospects, is still spoken of with distaste even today. Whereas the cries against pre-professionalism used to come from the Right, nowadays they usually come from the Left. Apparently, a concern with one's future career (which, of course, means money, income and wealth) has tainted the purity of intellectual pursuit which liberal education is supposed to represent.

We all know liberal education is the education of free men. Nowadays, free men seem to mean independent-thinking people, unfettered by prejudices or material motives. But "free men," etymologically, meant men who were not slaves, men who very probably owned slaves. Only such free men could afford sophists to teach them the arcane arts which were completely useless in agriculture, and only they had the time to pursue such intellectual games while the slaves toiled away. And here, the use of "men" is strict and intentional. Women were not a part of this liberal education. Liberal education was meant for the leisure class; and thus it remained for a long time, at least until Thorstein Veblen's eponymous treatise. Liberal education's decidedly non-useful character was actually an honor badge of wealth. Its intellectual purity and want of immediate application were actually "an expression of a pecuniary culture." The liberally educated man found money contemptible, because he had it, and did not want or need to worry about it.

The liberally educated man did not care to enter the professions. The leisure class was beyond such things. As such, liberal education was necessarily privileged and exclusive. Because such an education was divorced from immediate application, society could not support more than a handful of such indolent people. Problems arose when the landed aristocracy began to crumble under the assault of democracy. After the two world wars, the flower of landed aristocracy everywhere had been either killed in the field or bankrupted. In America, which never had a real landed aristocracy in the first place, the GI Bill swept away any last resistance to the introduction of the democratic element into the institutions of higher learning.

From the perspective of the leisure class, democratization had two enormous effects. First, once the requirements of admission came to depend on merit and money, birth no longer counted very much. The aesthetic of graceful indolence had become replaced by an ethic of purposeful diligence, so the value-foundation of a leisured liberal education was shaken. Second, democratization extended higher education to the bourgeois middle class, hitherto barred from the ivory tower's august preserve. (The poor were never and still are not really allowed in.) The middle class does not have that much money and needs to worry about it constantly. The rationalism by which the bourgeoisie has done well dictates that it find something useful in education; the middle class must make education pay for itself. And in proportion as the cost of education rises, the requirement that education be productive is all that much greater.

In this process of "making education pay," of making it into something productive, economic, rational and useful, the liberal education of the leisure class became the employment certification of the middle class, and has thus lost some of its most beautiful qualities. Oscar Wilde declared, "All art is useless," and so was a liberal education of the leisure class; and like art, such a system had enormous aesthetic appeal. Although the liberally educated man probably did not go for intellectual pursuit as he did for the parties and carousing; theoretically at least, university could be justified merely on its spiritual richness. But with the middle class, education is supposed to yield a return; it is human capital, it is investment. Education thus became more competitive, less idealistic, and more goal-oriented. Liberal education &emdash; which is catholic in spirit, broad in scope and eclectic in origin &emdash; has broken down and become narrowed, specialized.

Such a collapse is sad, sad in the same way as when one has just finished reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, reminding us of the splendor of a bygone age. This sadness, though, is a price which I propose well worth paying insofar as we insist on a more democratic and expansive distribution of educational opportunities. One must remember that supporting the leisure class and their liberal education were masses of people, whose labor must produce enough surplus to compensate for the unproductivity of a privileged section. The beauty of the leisure class was accompanied everywhere and always by the ugliness and indigence of the lower classes. This is an inequality which our present morals will not tolerate. As education becomes more democratic and more expansive, it must perforce open its doors to people who do not have the luxury of a secured career and income. And in so doing, it must prepare to be more purposeful, more applicable and more productive, and more geared toward the professions.

Such a change has actually already slowly happened. What is considered liberal education today would probably not have been considered as such a hundred years ago. Such useful arts as engineering and economics would probably not have been allowed in these hallowed halls. The Chinese of the nineteenth century, who had their own version of an education of the leisure class, were scandalized that schools should teach mathematics and geometry, skills they thought worthy of only the accountant and the landscaper. We do not hear such doomsday alarms anymore.

Pre-professionalism has thus arrived, and is unlikely to go away. I do not seek to justify it: I cannot give reasons for the desire to live a comfortable life. There is no shame in wanting to improve one's material condition. Nor do I seek to reconcile it with liberal education; as things stand and as far as I can see, the two are irreconcilable. They belong to different ages, different world-views, and one must gain at the expense of the other. Pre-professionalism, I only propose, is an inevitable price of making education more accessible and more democratic.

y wonder is not over the fact that people should criticize pre-professionalism, just as I do not wonder if people should decide to criticize democracy. Such criticisms have had too long a history. I can understand a reactionary from the Right &emdash; such as Waugh &emdash; regretting the pre-professional democratization of Oxford. My puzzlement is that the new critics of the Left should swallow whole-hog the mythical idealization of liberal education without realizing the social ills which necessarily accompanied it, that they should be so oblivious to the economic exigencies of the lower and middle classes who see in education the hope of making their lives better. There was a time when the Left was more sensible; there was a time when Virginia Woolf recognized that, before one could pursue pleasures of the intellect, one must have money and a room of one's own.

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