Donald Trump did not come from nowhere, and James Chandler shows just how deep in history the roots of the Trumpian phenomenon are. The Know-Nothings of our time are not the first. He quotes Barthes on the subject of wrestling, in which, as Barthes writes, “the public. . . abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences; what matters is not what [the public] thinks but what it sees.” Mario Vargas Llosa, in his La civilización del espectáculo, describes the way in which spectacle has become the dominant feature of culture more broadly, and in this lies the answer to the question of how the public can have been taken in by the Trumpian phenomenon. Vargas Llosa writes, the civilization of spectacle is “a world in which the first place on the table of values is entertainment and where to have a good time and to escape boredom is the universal passion.”
The assault on higher education has been just such a spectacle—a spectacle intended to entertain, in the absence of facts, a public that is amused by battles against dark powers that are made to represent some of the public’s accumulated resentments. That the aim of the assault on higher education, especially “elite” higher education, is political spectacle is made clear by its utter detachment from—indeed, conflict with—what the Trump administration and its supporters claim as some of their principal underlying policy goals, to say nothing of the relevant facts:
Reduce taxes on business and wealthier individuals
Reduce government regulation of business
Assure that American businesses dominate in international trade
Reduce the size of government by ceding many of its functions to the private sector
Let markets determine economic priorities
The administration has sought to increase substantially the taxes on the endowments of wealthier colleges and universities, thus reducing funds available for, among other things, student financial aid.
The administration seeks to intervene deeply in the management of the university’s business of education, including matters affecting what is taught, by whom it is taught, and to whom it is taught. It aims to use accreditation to control the character of the educational enterprise broadly.
Higher education has been one of the most successful businesses the United States has ever engaged in. World markets made this abundantly clear, as people from all over the world rushed to study here in numbers greatly exceeding those traveling to study elsewhere. As a result, higher education became one of the country’s strongest service exports and thus a major contributor to trade surplus. The administration has sought to reduce substantially the number of foreign students admitted to the country with the resulting adverse effects on the balance of trade. Furthermore, the funds generated by foreign students in effect constitute a subsidy to domestic students.
The science and engineering produced in the United States has been the envy of the world and has contributed overwhelmingly to the country’s economic strength. Unlike other developed countries, the United States created a system in which research in science and engineering—done in the national interest—has been carried on in universities rather than in government laboratories. Studies have made clear that universities do not recover from the government the full cost of this research. Yet the administration has sought to reduce substantially government’s contribution to the scientific enterprise and thus undermine the nongovernmental institutions working its behalf. It is made to sound as if the government simply gives money to universities out of the goodness of its heart, and universities proceed to waste it, whereas these funds are in fact contractually regulated and thoroughly audited fees for service. The term “overhead” is used to suggest that universities simply add on an undefined slush fund to the cost of research, whereas any business of any size must know how to recover the indirect costs related to the production of its products. These indirect costs in universities are based on actual expenditures incurred and are exhaustively audited by government agencies.
The markets have spoken. American higher education has been the envy of the world and a source of enormous strength for the nation. And yet the administration seeks to undermine precisely what markets have made clear. If there was ever a business that the government should stay out of it is higher education.
In the administration’s assault on higher education we are certainly witnessing a spectacle aimed at a distracted public, beset by boredom and keen on entertainment as an antidote. Alas, however, it may not be spectacle without thought. To be sure, the public is not encouraged to think—quite the contrary. The scary part is the the inventors of the spectacle have thought and continue to think long and hard about it.
Don Michael Randel is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Chicago, a prominent American musicologist, and the fifth, now retired, president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He has previously served as the twelfth president of the University of Chicago.