Book Review: The Marketplace of Ideas

While attending a football game at the Big House and painting the Rock are some of the most remembered traditions at U-M, one ritual typically goes unnoticed: class registration appointments on Wolverine Access. They seem to be the equivalent of Black Friday for American consumers. Schemes with friends to “reserve” classes for each other, negotiating waitlist requirements, and perusing Rate My Professors to find the easiest professor seem all too familiar for students in Ann Arbor. And usually, Michigan students exert this strenuous effort for one reason: to fulfill distribution requirements. With a senior needing three humanities credits to graduate or a freshman needing to fulfill his race and ethnicity requirement, U-M’s undergraduate program is focused on fairly stringent course guidelines that sometimes cause widespread angst. Questions over the purposes and benefits of the distribution system inevitably remain.   

Louis Menand attempts to provide answers to some of these questions in The Marketplace of Ideas, a new book that explores the foundations within the American educational system and highlighting its tribulations and challenges in the 21^st century. Part of the “Issues of Our Time” series that is edited by now-infamous Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, the book takes a holistic approach in approaching some of the pressing educational questions of our time, which include the apparent ideological homogenization of most college professors, the purposes of Ph.D. programs that last almost a decade and the battles between academic departments to obtain more courses in the general education curriculum.

The Marketplace of Ideas is ultimately concerned with documenting the history behind American academia, starting with Harvard President Charles William Eliot creating the first elective course in 1899. The consistent theme that has enveloped American higher education has ironically been adaptation. Priorities surrounding the true purpose of university academics have dramatically shifted. Universities expanded to train future government scientists and bureaucrats in order to counter the growing Soviet threat from 1945 to 1975; conversely, universities emphasized the need for a diverse community to embrace multiculturalism and difference (some would call relativism) from 1975 to today. And with the current trend towards an emphasis on interdisciplinary courses, it appears that the American university is headed in a different direction, one where professors wish to start tearing down the walls that divide departments within higher education. Menand actually claims that their efforts actually ratify existing arrangements, which contradict professors’ interest in promoting these courses.

One of the more interesting topics in the book is Menand’s discussion of ideological homogenization within higher education. Citing research from George Mason and Harvard Universities, he reveals that American professors do tend to favor liberal causes, as 62.2 percent considered themselves as liberal compared to 19.7 percent who are conservative. His explanation of these statistics, however, is one of his more contentious arguments. Discarding historical arguments such as conservative-minded students tending to reject professional academia by entering the private sector upon graduation, he claims that the structure of doctorate programs (virtually a requirement to become a professor) cater to specific students. A select breed of students is ultimately willing to dedicate eight or nine years of their post-undergraduate career towards achieving a Ph.D., as the majority of candidates quit in the middle of a doctoral program. Therefore, Menand claims that the ideological gap is curtailed, with left-leaning students simply willing to invest their time and resources to obtain a Ph.D.; the system itself “self-selects” these left-leaning candidates.   

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