Professionalism, School organization, Systems, Teaching

Larry Cuban — Rockets Are Complicated but Schools Are Complex; Thoughts about Educational Exceptionalism

Posted on July 30, 2020July 21, 2020 by David Labaree

In this post, I want to explore a vivid image developed by Larry Cuban to characterize the peculiar nature of teaching and learning in schools. Scholars have frequently argued for a form of educational exceptionalism that sees schooling as a social structure that is distinctive from the normal patterns of bureaucratic organization that one sees in private companies and public agencies. Think of Karl Weick’s depiction of educational organization as “loosely coupled systems” and John Meyer’s depiction of them as “institutionalized organizations.” Scholars have also argued that teaching is an odd form of professional practice that doesn’t follow the norms of other professions. Think of David Cohen’s account of teaching as a “people-changing profession” and Dan Lortie’s account of the weak control that administrators exert over teaching.

Cuban has distilled these scholarly insights into a single salient distinction between organizational practices that are complicated vs. those that are complex. Rockets, he says, are complicated; schools are complex.

Sending a rocket to the moon is a fiendishly complicated endeavor, involving a lot of sophisticated calculation and planning. But it has the enormous advantage of being a determinate process. With enough intellectual and technical firepower, there is a solution that reliably works.

The same is not true of the process of schooling. The problems that make classrooms and school systems so difficult are not technical. They are social — depending on the complex interaction among a large number of individual and organizational actors. They are motivational — depending on the voluntary buy-in of all these actors. And they are normative — shaped by the conflicting purposes that these actors seek to impose of the practice of schooling.

Here’s how Cuban makes his case in the opening section of the final chapter in his 2013 book, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice.

Cuban Cover

The path of educational progress more closely resembles the flight of a butterfly than the flight of a bullet.

— Philip Jackson, 1968

Questions:

What’s the difference between sending a rocket to the moon and getting children to succeed in school?

What’s the difference between a surgeon extracting a brain tumor and judge and jury deciding guilt or innocence for a person accused of murder?

Answer:

Sending a rocket to the moon and extracting a brain tumor are complicated, while getting children to succeed in school and arriving at verdicts are complex, closer to the “flight of a butterfly than the flight of a bullet.”

According to multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners, complicated procedures like brain surgery and rocket launchings require engineer-designed blueprints, flowcharts breaking actions into step-by-step tasks, well-trained staff, and exquisite combinations of computer software running carefully calibrated equipment. Think, rocket landing on the moon in 1969, doctor-controlled robotic arms doing brain surgery, and the U.S. “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A complicated system assumes expert and rational leaders, top-down planning with a ”mission control” unit pursuing scrupulous implementation of policies in a clockwork-precise organization. Complicated systems use the most sophisticated math, technical, and engineering expertise in mapping out flowcharts to solve problems. Work is specified and delegated to particular units, and outcomes are monitored. Confidence in performance and predictable results is in the air the organization breathes.

Yet even those sophisticated systems fail from time to time; for example, the Challenger shuttle disaster, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Like complicated systems, complex systems such as legislatures, the courts, health-care, and schools are filled with hundreds of moving parts, but many of the parts are human, and these players have varied expertise and independence. Moreover, missing in such systems is a “mission control” that runs all these different parts within ever-changing political, economic, and societal surroundings. The result: constant adaptations and compromises in design and action.

Recall the U.S. president, Congress, lobbying groups, and scores of interest groups trying to pass a health-care reform bill into law during 2010 in the midst of a slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. Blueprints, technical experts, strategic plans, and savvy managers may be necessary but are insufficient to get complex systems with hundreds of reciprocal ties between people to operate effectively in constantly changing and unpredictable environments. These web-like, complex systems of interdependent units adapt continuously to turbulent surroundings. They are constantly changing just to maintain stability.

Hospitals, courts, and schools — even with their facades of command-and-control mechanisms, flowcharts, and policy manuals filled with detailed procedures-are constantly buffeted by unpredictable events and interrelated factors over which participants have no control. Picture a hospital emergency room; judges presiding over successive arraignments; and, yes, teachers teaching first-graders, algebra courses, and Advanced Placement U.S. history in the black boxes of classrooms.

These complex social systems have time and again foiled reform-driven policy makers’ efforts to get doctors, judges, lawyers, and teachers to change their routine practices in any substantial way. I now return to the central question of this book to connect the complexity of school systems to classroom practices: With so many major structural changes in US. public schools over the past century, why have classroom practices been largely stable with a modest blending of new and old teaching practices leaving contemporary classroom lessons familiar to earlier generations of school-goers?

To document the complexity of the K-12 school system, look at figure 6.1, a representation of the external political factors and organizational forces that frequently impinge, sometimes unexpectedly, on what occurs in classrooms. Such figures, of course, give the mistaken impression that these stakeholders are static when, in real life, they are constantly using policy talk drenched in reform rhetoric as they lobby school board members and interact with administrators, teachers, and each other producing tangled web of interdependent players in a complex system aimed at human improvement.

Cuban Fig 1

Now look at figure 6.2, which tries to capture the different factors again, not static but in dynamic tension with one another-within a classroom. In the helping profession of teaching, the interdependence of teachers and students and relationships with peers and other adults inside and outside the school community are but a few of the influences that come into play when teaching and learning occur.

Cuban Fig 2

Keep in mind the different levels of interaction and interdependence in these complex social systems. At one level is the mutual dependence of students and teachers in classroom interactions over content and skills during lessons in the black box. Next is the school level, where groups of students interact with adults who have reciprocal ties between themselves across many age-graded elementary and secondary classrooms. Parents and governmental agency adults also bring in concerns and resources that influence school wide relationships and routines. Then there is the district level, where decision makers use policy talk and take action in connecting those outside the organization and those inside who are expected to carry out decisions-the administrators and teachers who implement the policy. At the district level, community, state, and national economic, political, and social factors impinge on the community (e.g., immigration, economic recession, mayoral control of schools) and ripple through schools and classrooms.

This multitiered view of a complex system aimed at human improvement suggests the intricacies of overlapping and interacting levels comprising K-12 schooling. At each level, change and continuity are in dynamic, even tense, equilibrium-almost like running as fast as possible just to stay in the same place.

Writing

Simon Schama: Why I Write

Posted on July 27, 2020July 19, 2020 by David Labaree

This post is an essay that the historian Simon Schama wrote for the Financial Times in 2012. The subject is, “Why I Write. “

I find it a lovely meditation on the joy of appreciating good writing and the urge to try your own hand at it. Enjoy.

Simon Schama: Why I Write

Dickens’ abundance and Orwell’s asperity are equally inspiring

It was George Orwell’s golden-eyed toad that made me a writer. This was all the more surprising since I was getting sick of schoolteachers forever going on about Orwell the peerless master of the essay, the very model of limpid clarity; not a word wasted, the epitome of strong English prose style. My teenage heroes were elsewhere: the dithyrambic, mischievous Laurence Sterne; the mad mystic Herman Melville with his cetacean hulk of a book that was about everything; and above all, Charles Dickens, whom my father read out loud after supper and whose expansive, elastic manner seemed at the opposite pole from Orwell’s taut asperity. (I hadn’t yet read Orwell’s homage to Dickens; one of the most generous things he penned.)

It was the dancing riot of Dickens’ sentences; their bounding exuberance; the overstuffed abundance of names, places, happenings, the operatic manipulation of emotion, that made him seem to me if not the best then the heartiest writer of English prose there ever had been. I loved the frantic pulse of his writing, its tumbling energy, as swarming with creatures as the scamper of vermin through Miss Havisham’s bridal cake. I relished his painterly feel for life’s textures: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it, as big as full-grown snowflakes,” in the opening of Bleak House (1853).

I resented the inexplicable absence of Dickens from our school syllabus, dominated as it was in the late 1950s by the epitomes of “The Great Tradition”, laid down by the Cambridge don FR Leavis with a Talmudic sense of the permitted and the forbidden. We got plenty of the metaphysical poets; Eliots, both George and TS; scads of EM Forster and Joseph Conrad, but so much as mention the possibility of Dickens (with the exception of the mechanically polemical Hard Times) and you’d get the kind of treatment handed to Oliver Twist when he asked for more.

More is what I wanted, a prose that recapitulated life’s chaotic richness, a writing brave enough to risk collapse under the weight of its own vaulting ambitions. (I also loved James Joyce, who seemed to me the heir to Dickens word-inebriation). I’d had enough of Leavis’s beetle-browed prohibitions.

I didn’t know, then, Orwell’s great 1941 essay on Donald McGill and the art of saucy English seaside postcards, where the emperor of hard syntax undid his buttons a bit, even though you never quite lost the sense of a high mind doing a little slumming to convince himself he was truly Of the People. But I had read his manifesto, “Why I Write” (1946), and presumptuously recognised an affinity: a childhood of many solitary walks spent making up stories inside one’s own head, featuring, of course, oneself (in my case with a perfect shiksa blonde called Kay, doomed to perish from a wasting disease) as well as the sense that the gangly peculiar thing that was me had at least been allotted the gift of the gab both in speech and writing; that I could break into a run of them even when I finished next to last in the hundred yards dash.

Orwell’s four motives for writing still seem to me the most honest account of why long-form non-fiction writers do what they do, with “sheer egoism” at the top; next, “aesthetic enthusiasm” – the pleasure principle or sheer relish of sonority (“pleasure in the impact of one sound on another”); third, the “historical impulse” (the “desire to see things as they are”), and, finally, “political purpose”: the urge to persuade, a communiqué from our convictions.

To that list I would add that writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing.

The best essay writing since Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who invented the genre, is where this reanimation of experience is shaped by the purposeful urgencies of thought. It is not the thoughtless recycling of experience for its own sake, the fetishising of impulse, which these days is what mostly passes as “blog”; a word well suited to its swampy suck of self-indulgence.

At any rate, at 16 or 17 I was reconciled enough to Orwell to open a collection of his essays, at random, in a shop on London’s Charing Cross Road. The book fell open at this, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946): “Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something – some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature – has told him it is time to wake up …At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at any other time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.”

Immediately, this seemed to me (and still does) one of the most perfect things I have ever read, nearly a prose poem, exquisitely observed, a tour de force of cunning, ringing with exactly measured rhythms: that repetition of “before” in the first line. That simile – the Anglo-Catholic look – is genius in the shape of wit, and the art at its heart is the Orwellian overturning of stereotypes of beauty. A kissed frog may turn into a prince but never the warty toad, so the democratic Orwell naturally declares its chrysoberyl eyes the most beautiful of any living creature.

Only when Orwell is good and ready does he make it clear that his big subject in this essay is the immunity of nature from the tyranny of correct political discourse. It is, after all, 1946, life is heavily rationed, but what will become 1984 is beginning to stir like the toad in April. Nature is, in both senses, still free, gratis, “existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.” He concludes: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun …”

When I handed over my two shillings and sixpence for the essays, I knew both that I would never write anything that good, and that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to spend my life trying. The long-form essay has been pronounced dead, or at least moribund, many times. Who has the time; who can get in that deep? But, actually, it might be just the thing to fight against the dumbness of the 140-character rule. Which does not mean that long-form should be long-winded, nor declare from its beginning some grandly sententious purpose.

The great essayists are all virtuosi of opening sentences that pull you into the matter with a dead-on observed moment or an epigram: Orwell again, in “Marrakech” (1939), a single-sentence paragraph: “As the corpse went past, the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.” Or William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating” (c1826) with another insect-opener, the aspirate alliteration mimicking the scuttle, at once ominous and pathetic: “There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit …he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops – he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe.”

Or MFK Fisher (1908-1992), the greatest of all food writers since the man whose work she translated, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), and whose essay “Pity the Blind in Palate” (from The Art of Eating, 1954), begins: “Frederick the Great used to make his own coffee, with much to-do and fuss. For water, he used champagne. Then, to make the flavour stronger he stirred in powdered mustard.”

The flourish of the curtain-raisers put the reader on notice that a strong, memorable essay is, inevitably, something of a performance, its virtuosi never shy of doing the verbal fan-dance even when they pretended, like Orwell, to despise showiness. From William Hazlitt to Hunter S Thompson, Robert Hughes and David Foster Wallace, the strut of the ego is part of the pleasure.

Overdone, of course, this first-person singularity can become as alienating as being held hostage by the pub bore determined to recruit you to his obsessions. But the best essay-writing has always been self-consciously conversational and informal, the enemy of any “house style” template, so that to read it is to have the illusion of spending time with an old friend or making the acquaintance of an exciting new one. The delivery of informal “voice” is trickier than it might sound. Hazlitt, who wanted to overthrow the studiously epigram-loaded “high” manner of Dr Johnson, gave stern advice that true “familiar style” “utterly rejects not only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod allusions. It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw words together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail ourselves of the true idiom of the language.” (“On Familiar Style”, 1822).

The line between casual eloquence and self-conscious mateyness is dangerously thin but somehow those who have reinvented the form over the past half century – Tom Wolfe’s early journalism; Clive James’s television columns; Thompson’s gonzo writing on the campaign trail; Lester Bangs giving no quarter to the overinflated self-regard of rock stars; Hughes’s uppercuts to the art world; Christopher Hitchens’ political pugilism; Geoff Dyer’s essays on anything, but especially photography – have all managed it. Their respective styles are the enemy of the formulaic, the banal, the ponderous opinion-forming column. They are literary voices that come with actual people attached. As such, they reproduce another trait inaugurated by Montaigne, implied in the word he chose for this kind of writing: the essai, the open-ended “try” or experiment; something unbound by formal conventions (in his day, those of classical rhetoric). The self-propulsion of a ranging intelligence is the dynamo that drives a powerful essay; the headlong gallop of thought to a destination the reader can’t predict and which may not have occurred to the writer when he began. The sudden, unexpected twist is as much part of a great essayist’s technique as of a short story writer. Try reading Orwell’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947), which begins on a disingenuously academic note and then swerves away, off into sudden revelation, without slapping your forehead and exclaiming, “Of course, you cunning old bugger!”

But all these tricks of the trade are beside the main point, which is that the essay be about something that matters. This distinguishes the essay from reportage. Its true modus operandi is to lead from the sharply observed particular moment to a bigger reflection on the human condition. Hazlitt’s spider, for example, takes us to a bleak recognition of our glee in the misfortune of others.

In one of his more breathtaking performances (which is saying something), David Foster Wallace, at a state fair, moves from looking hard at the prize pigs: “Swine have fur! I never thought of swine as having fur. I’ve actually never been up very close to swine, for olfactory reasons” to thinking, with Swiftian mercilessness, not just about what happens when the pigs are industrially processed, but how we contrive to deal with that routine slaughter. “I’m struck, amid the pig’s screams and wheezes, by the fact that these agricultural pros do not see their stock as pets or friends. They are just in the agribusiness of weight and meat …even at the fair their products continue to drool and smell and ingest their own excrement and scream, and the work goes on. I can imagine what they think of us, cooing at the swine: we fairgoers don’t have to deal with the business of breeding and feeding our meat; our meat simply materialises at the corn-dog stand, allowing us to separate our healthy appetites from fur and screams and rolling eyes. We tourists get to indulge our tender animal-rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon.” (“Ticket to the Fair”, 1994).

This passage does everything Montaigne would have wanted from his posterity: self-implication without literary narcissism; a moral illumination built from a physical experience. Like the best non-fiction long-form writing, it essays a piece of the meaning of what it’s like to live – or, in the case of Hitchens’ last magnificent writing, to die – in a human skin. Essay writing and reading is our resistance to the pygmy-fication of the language animal; our shrinkage into the brand, the sound bite, the business platitude; the solipsistic tweet. Essays are the last, heroic stand for the seriousness of prose entertainment; our best hope of liberating text from texting.

Academic writing, Rhetoric, Writing Class

Tilly: Why? Different Ways that People Give Reasons — and Lessons for Scholars

Posted on July 23, 2020July 17, 2020 by David Labaree

In this post, I explore the issue of the different ways in which people give reasons to each other. It draws on a lovely little book by sociologist Charles Tilly: Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons…and Why. One of the things that makes his account valuable is how it gives scholars a way of understanding the yawning chasm between how they explain things to other experts and how ordinary people explain things to each other.

Bridging this gap is difficult for scholars but it’s absolutely necessary, if our insights are going to gain acceptance in a broader audience. I’ll get to that part later on, but for now let’s explore the basic typology or reasons that Tilly lays out.

Tilly -- Why

Here’s a table of the different ways in which people give reasons for events, categorized according to whether they take a popular or expert form and whether they are formulaic or a really explanatory.

	Popular	Specialized/Expert
Formulas	Conventions	Codes
Cause-Effect Accounts	Stories	Technical Accounts

Formulas: giving reasons without providing a causal account.

Cause-effect accounts: the focus is on explaining why something happened.

Popular: generally accessible explanations that are used by the general public.

Specialized: reasons that are used by and accessible only to experts.

Conventions: Conventionally accepted reasons for whatever happened: traffic is terrible, it’s your turn, I’m clumsy, he’s smart, bad luck. They don’t pretend to be real explanations, but they’re sufficient for the social purposes at hand, which really don’t require such an explanation. Especially prominent with everyday events that are unremarkable.

Codes: Understanding events through an arcane code like law, church canons, bureaucratic regulations, scientific methodology, medical science. Not a real explanation; it just locates the issue as connected to a specialized domain and for the civilian that is sufficient: it’s the law, it’s God’s will, it’s regulation, it’s policy.

Stories: Narratives about cause and effect, with reasons, actors, morals, heroes, and villains. They are called upon to explain events that are more unusual, troubling, often carrying a normative element of praise or blame. This is the way regular people explain things. It’s the most accessible and effective way to explain things to the broadest audience.

Technical accounts: Expert efforts to establish some kind of valid and reliable explanation of cause and effect using specialized expertise. A medical explanation of disease, a social scientist’s explanation for why A (not C-Z) caused B.

All of these efforts to give reasons – popular and technical, formulas and explanations – exist in part to establish, maintain, reinforce, define, or deny relationships with other people. Formulas are a formalistic bow to the need to give reasons to others and preserve civil relations: sorry I’m late, couldn’t find parking. Nobody takes the reason too seriously but they appreciate the message of mild apology. Formulas frequently announce relations of inequality: I give you a formulaic response because I don’t consider it necessary to give you a real explanation given your lower status; it’s often just a brush off. Demanding explanations is a social move asking to be taken seriously and treated like an equal. Here’s how Tilly explains the relational element (recall: he’s a sociologist).

All four kinds of reasons commonly do relational work. The most invisible work simply confirms the relation between giver and receiver, for example as a penitent accepts a priest’s interpretation of her sins and the priest’s prescription for proper recompense to man and God in a code that has little or nothing to do with causes and effects. More visibly, reason giving often establishes relations, as in the case of an interviewer who explains the purpose of a survey when calling to ask about preferences in food, television, or politics. It sometimes negotiates relations, as when the author of a technical account displays professional credentials to make a claim on a listener’s respect and compliance. Finally, much reason giving repairs relations, as someone who has inflicted damage on someone else tells a story to show that the damage was inadvertent or unavoidable and therefore, despite appearances, does not reflect badly on the relationship between giver and receiver. The phrase “I’m sorry, but . . . ” often starts a story that does relational repairs. Both formulas and cause-effect accounts do relational work.

Formulas identify an appropriate correspondence between Y (the event, action, or outcome at hand) and X (its antecedent), but enter little or not at all into the causal chain connecting Y to X. Cause-effect accounts trace causal lines from X to Y—even if we observers find those causal lines absurd or incomprehensible. “Popular” reasons obviously vary from one public to another, for example as a function of religiosity and religious creed. Specialized reasons likewise vary strikingly from discipline to discipline; theologians elaborate both codes and technical accounts that differ deeply from those proposed by medical practitioners.

There’s a warning here for scholars and other experts. As Tilly puts it,

Sophisticated readers should guard against an easy and erroneous pair of assumptions: that popular reasons peddle inferior, ignorant, and excessively simplified versions of codes and technical accounts, and that truly sophisticated people therefore never resort to conventions or stories. We sophisticates easily make the mistake because we frequently have to translate our own codes or technical accounts into terms that people who work in other idioms will understand.

We take justified pride in our expert knowledge, and we rely on rigorous research methodologies to give our conclusions scientific credibility. So most of our reason-giving is directed at other experts, who can understand our theories and methods and appreciate their validity.

But when we have to communicate our findings to nonexperts, we run into a problem. We feel like we can’t explain results to civilians without dumbing down the discourse in a way that invalidates the rigorous methods involved in producing the results in the first place. As a result, we commonly find ourselves making a stand on the general credibility of our expertise. Trust me, I’m an expert; I know what I’m doing. One way of doing this is to blow away the civilian reader with a flurry of stats and tables and Greek letters and institutional affiliations and scholarly citations. Look at all this expert evidence, we say. This is why you need to listen to us.

Misuse of the “I’m the expert” approach is part of what has undermined public faith in science over the years. After all, experts gave us the bomb, the Vietnam War, and the plastic garbage patch in the Pacific. We need to be able to communicate more clearly and still credibly to nonexpert audiences, but that’s not easy.

The civilian approach is to tell stories. These stories are organized around actors and actions, motives and outcomes, and they usually come with a moral defined by a struggle between good guys and bad guys. The problem for serious academic research is that the story is more complex than that, and good and bad are difficult to discern. We do a disservice to the richness and complexity of our findings by oversimplifying them in this way.

But we scholars often slide into simplifying mode anyway, especially around issues we care about a lot and which are fraught with emotion and concerned with fairness. Think race, inequality, policing practices, immigration, climate change, war and peace. Evidence, methods, and reason don’t seem to be sufficient for these subjects, so we shift from scholarly explanation to political advocacy.

Being a political actor is good and necessary for any citizen, including a scholar, but the danger is in suggesting that your political position is a simple extension of your scientific research — e.g., saying “Research shows we should do this.” But research never tells us what we should do. At best it gives us solid information upon which to make choices about issues whose core concerns are normative, political. Recall Weber’s point in Science as a Vocation — that science can’t answer Tolstoy’s question, “What shall we do, and how shall we arrange our lives?”

It’s still possible, however, for scholars to connect with people who don’t understand the methods we use to develop our conclusions. We can find ways to tell compelling stories that will make an effective case for a particular understanding of events without recourse to either arcane methodologies or emotional appeals.

In my writing class, I found that one way to dig out the core story in your research is to try something called a fast-write. Sit down in front of the computer and spend no more than 10 minutes writing a paragraph about the central issues in your study. Be sure you do so without using any academic jargon, scholarly citations, theoretical references, or methodological procedures. Pretend you’re talking to an educated person, not a specialist in your field, who just asked you about your work over a glass of wine. Think about what got you interested in the subject in the first place, what you found most compelling among your findings, what you feel is the coolest thing you uncovered.

What you’ll find you’re writing is a story. It probably won’t have heroes and villains and a simple moral, but it will have a narrative that civilians can connect with. When you’ve done this you may well find that you have written the ideal opening paragraph for the written version of your study — where you lay out the big issues in the work before delving into the technical details that shore it up. You’ll be doing your technical readers a favor by framing the analysis this way up front, allowing them to see the significance in what follows.

Here’s an example of what I mean, the opening paragraphs of one of the classic texts in organizational theory, Karl Weick’s paper, “Educational Organizations as Loosely-Coupled Systems.”

Imagine that you’re either the referee, coach, player or spectator at an unconventional soccer match: the field for the game is round; there are several goals scattered haphazardly around the circular field; people can enter and leave the game whenever they want to; they can throw balls in whenever they want; they can say “that’s my goal” whenever they want to, as many times as they want to, and for as many goals as they want to; the entire game takes place on a sloped field; and the game is played as if it makes sense (March, personal communication).

If you now substitute in that example principals for referees, teachers for coaches, students for players, parents for spectators and schooling for soccer, you have an equally unconventional depiction of school organizations. The beauty of this depiction is that it captures a different set of realities within educational organizations than are caught when these same organizations are viewed through the tenets of bureaucratic theory.

Here, in a few simple words, Weick gives a quick window into the heart of his richly complex theory of schools as loosely-coupled systems. It’s accessible to anyone, and it evokes the larger implications of his story while at the same time luring the reader to plunge ahead into the analysis that follows. It simplifies without dumbing down. It compels without pulling out the emotional stops. It shows how good academic storytelling is both possible and necessary.

Inequality, Schooling, Social Programs

What Kids Miss When They Go Without School

Posted on July 20, 2020July 17, 2020 by David Labaree

This is an op-ed I published in the New York Daily News on Friday. It’s on the things we miss about schools when they close – a reminder about the nonacademic functions of school that are closer to our hearts than its academic functions.

What Kids Miss When They Go Without School

David F. Labaree

Often it’s only when an institution goes missing that we come to recognize its value. That seemed particularly this spring, when the Covid-19 pandemic closed schools around the world. Suddenly parents, children, officials, and citizens discovered just what they lost when the kids came home to stay. You could hear voices around the globe pleading, “When are schools going to open again?”

I’m not talking about the standard account of the value of schooling – the one that routinely appears in press, policy briefs, and the voluminous publications of the OECD. In this version, schooling is all about making sure that students learn the formal curriculum (math, science, language, and social studies) at a high level of achievement in order to turn them into productive contributors to economic growth. It’s a story of academic learning in service of human capital development.

This story is familiar, but it’s not what’s creating the demand by parents and students for schools to reopen as soon as possible. I haven’t heard people on the home front speak longingly about their desire to jump back into the academic production of human capital. So today I want to explore the other things that schools do for us. Here are a few, in no particular order.

Schools are a key place for children to get healthy meals. In the U.S., about 30 million students receive free or discounted lunch (and often breakfast) at school every day. It’s so common that researchers use the proportion of “students on free or reduced lunch” as a measure of the poverty rate in individual schools. When schools close, these children go hungry. In response to this problem, a number of closed school systems are continuing to prepare these meals for parents to pick up and take home with them.

Schools are the main source of child care for working parents. When schools close, someone needs to stay home to take care of the younger children. For parents with the kind of white collar jobs that allow them to work from home, this causes a major inconvenience as they try to juggle work and child care and online schooling. But for parents who can’t phone in their work, having to stay home with the kids is a huge sacrifice.

Schools are crucial for the health of children. In the absence of universal health care in the U.S., schools have served as a frail substitute. They require all students to have vaccinations. They provide health education. And they have school nurses who can check for student ailments and make referrals.

Schools are especially important for dealing with the mental health of young people. Teachers and school psychologists can identify mental illness and serve as prompts for getting students treatment. Special education programs identify developmental disabilities in students and devise individualized plans for treating them.

Schools serve as oases for children who are abused at home. Educators are required by law to look out for signs of mental or physical abuse and to report these cases to authorities. When schools close, these children are trapped in abusive settings at home, which gives the lie to the idea of sheltering in place. For many students, the true shelter is the school itself.

Schools are domains for relative safety for students who live in dangerous neighborhoods. For many kids, who live in settings with gangs and drugs and crime, getting to and from school is the most treacherous part of the day. Once inside the walls of the school, they are relatively free of physical threats. Closing school doors to students puts them at risk.

Schools are environments that are often healthier than their own homes. Students in wealthy neighborhoods may look on schools in poor neighborhoods as relatively shabby and depressing, but for many children the buildings have a degree of heat, light, cleanliness, and safety that they can’t find at home. These schools may not have swimming pools and tennis courts, but they also don’t have rats and refuse.

Schools may be the only institutional setting for many kids in which the professional norm is to serve the best interests of the child. We know that students can be harmed by schools. All it takes is a bully or a disparaging judgment. The core of the educator’s job is to foster growth, spur interest, increase knowledge, enhance skill, and promote development. Being cut off from such an environment for a long period of time is a major loss for any student, rich or poor.

These are some aspects of schooling that we take for granted but don’t think about very much. For policymakers, these are side effects of the school’s academic mission, but for most families they are the main effect. And the various social support roles that schools play are particularly critical in a country like the United States, where the absence of a robust social welfare system means that schools stand as the primary alternative. School’s absence has made the heart grow fonder for it. We’ve all become aware of just how much schools do for us.

Labaree is a retired professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education whose books include “Someone Has to Fail” and “A Perfect Mess.”

Capitalism, History, Modernity, Religion, Theory

Blaustein: Searching for Consolation in Max Weber’s Work Ethic

Posted on July 16, 2020July 9, 2020 by David Labaree

Last summer I posted a classic lecture by the great German sociologist, Max Weber, “Science as a vocation.” Recently I ran across a terrific essay by George Blaustein about Weber’s vision of the modern world, drawing on this lecture and two other seminal works: the lecture “Politics as a Vocation” (delivered a year after the science lecture) and the seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Here’s a link to the original Blaustein essay on the New Republic website.

Like so many great theorists (Marx, Durkheim, Foucault, etc.), Weber was intensely interested in understanding the formation of modernity. How did the shift from premodern to modern come about? What prompted it? What are the central characteristics of modernity? What are the main forces that drive it? As Blaustein shows so adeptly, Weber’s take is a remarkably gloomy one. He sees the change as one of disenchantment, in which we lost the certitudes of faith and tradition and are left with a regime of soulless rationalism and relentless industry. Here’s how he put it in his science lecture:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations….

In his view, there is no turning back, no matter how much you feel you have lost, unless you are willing to surrender reason to faith. This he is not willing to do, but he understands why others might choose differently.

To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice‘ — that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him.

In The Protestant Ethic, he explores the Calvinist roots of the capitalist work ethic, in which the living saints worked hard in this world to demonstrate (especially to themselves) that they had been elected to eternal life in the next world. Instead of earning to spend on themselves, they reinvested their earnings in economic capital on earth and spiritual capital in heaven. But the ironic legacy of this noble quest is our own situation. in which we work in order to work, without purpose or hope. Here’s how he puts it in the famous words that close his book.

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

I hope you gain as much insight from this essay as I did.

Protestant Ethic

Searching for Consolation in Max Weber’s Work Ethic

George Blaustein/July 2, 2020

People worked hard long before there was a thing called the “work ethic,” much less a “Protestant work ethic.” The phrase itself emerged early in the twentieth century and has since congealed into a cliché. It is less a real thing than a story that people, and nations, tell themselves about themselves. I am from the United States but now live in Amsterdam; the Dutch often claim the mantle of an industrious, Apollonian Northern Europe, as distinct from a dissolute, Dionysian, imaginary South. Or the Dutch invoke the Protestant ethic with self-deprecating smugness: Alas, we are so productive. Both invocations are absurd. The modern Dutch, bless them, are at least as lazy as everyone else, and their enjoyments are vulgar and plentiful.

In the U.S., meanwhile, celebrations of the “work ethic” add insult to the injury of overwhelming precarity. As the pandemic loomed, it should have been obvious that the U.S. would particularly suffer. People go to work because they have no choice. Those who did not face immediate economic peril could experience quarantine as a kind of relief and then immediately feel a peculiar guilt for that very feeling of relief. Others, hooray, could sustain and perform their work ethic from home.

The German sociologist Max Weber was the first great theorist of the Protestant ethic. If all scholarship is autobiography, it brings an odd comfort to learn that he had himself suffered a nervous breakdown. Travel was his main strategy of recuperation, and it brought him to the Netherlands and to the U.S., among other places. The Hague was “bright and shiny,” he wrote in 1903. “Everyone is well-to-do, exceedingly ungraceful, and rather untastefully dressed.” He had dinner in a vegetarian restaurant. (“No drinks, no tips.”) Dutch architecture made him feel “like Gulliver when he returned from Brobdingnag.” America, by contrast, was Brobdingnag. Weber visited the U.S. for three months in 1904 and faced the lurid enormity of capitalism. Chicago, with its strikes, slaughterhouses, and multi-ethnic working class, seemed to him “like a man whose skin has been peeled off and whose intestines are seen at work.”

Weber theorized the rise of capitalism, the state and its relationship to violence, the role of “charisma” in politics. Again and again he returned, as we still do, to the vocation—the calling—as both a crushing predicament and a noble aspiration. He died 100 years ago, in a later wave of the Spanish flu. It is poignant to read him now, in our own era of pandemic and cataclysm. It might offer consolation. Or it might fail to console.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism emerged, in part, from that American journey. It first appeared in two parts, in 1904 and 1905, in a journal, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. A revised version appeared in 1920, shortly before his death. Race did not figure into his account of capitalism’s rise, though the American color line had confronted him vividly. In 1906 he would publish W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Negro Question in the United States” in the same journal, which he edited.

Modern invocations of the work ethic are usually misreadings: The Protestant Ethic was more lament than celebration. Weber sought to narrate the arrival of what had become a no-longer-questioned assumption: that our duty was to labor in a calling, even to labor for labor’s sake. He sought the origins of this attitude toward work and the meaning of life, of an ethic that saved money but somehow never enjoyed it, of a joyless and irrational rationality. He found the origins in Calvinism, specifically in what he called Calvinism’s “this-worldly asceticism.”

Weber’s argument was not that Calvinism caused capitalism; rather, The Protestant Ethic was a speculative psycho-historical excavation of capitalism’s emergence. The interpretation, like most of his interpretations, had twists that are not easy to summarize. It was, after all, really the failure of Calvinism—in the sense of the unmeetableness of Calvinism’s demands on an individual psyche and soul—that generated a proto-capitalist orientation to the world. The centerpiece of Calvin’s theology—the absolute, opaque sovereignty of God and our utter noncontrol over our own salvation—was, in Weber’s account, impossibly severe, unsustainable for the average person. The strictures of that dogma ended up creating a new kind of individual and a new kind of community: a community bound paradoxically together by their desperate anxiety about their individual salvation. Together and alone.

The germ of the capitalist “spirit” lay in the way Calvinists dealt with that predicament. They labored in their calling, for what else was there to do? To work for work’s sake was Calvinism’s solution to the problem of itself. Having foreclosed all other Christian comforts—a rosary, an indulgence, a ritual, a communion—Weber’s original Calvinists needed always to perform their own salvation, to themselves and to others, precisely because they could never be sure of it. No wonder they would come to see their material blessings as a sign that they were in fact blessed. And no wonder their unlucky descendants would internalize our economic miseries as somehow just.

Calvinism, in other words, was less capitalism’s cause than its ironic precondition. The things people did for desperate religious reasons gave way to a secular psychology. That secular psychology was no “freer” than the religious one; we had been emancipated into jobs. “The Puritans wanted to be men of the calling,” Weber wrote; “we, on the other hand, must be.” As a historical process—i.e., something happening over time—this process was gradual enough that the people participating in it did not really apprehend it as it happened. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden and into the world, the archangel Michael offers faith as a consolation within the worldliness that is humanity’s lot: The faithful, Michael promises Adam, “shal[l] possess / A Paradise within thee, happier by far.” Those lines appeared in 1674, more than a century after John Calvin’s death; for Weber, they were an inadvertent expression of the capitalist spirit’s historical unfolding. Only later still could the gloomy sociologist see, mirrored in that Puritan epic, our own dismal tendency to approach life itself as a task.

As a hypothesis, this one has a maddening unprovability. That is one reason it has endured. It does not really explain capitalism’s rise; it is structured around the “elective affinity” between Calvinist and capitalist asceticism. (Weber took the phrase from Goethe; part of the lore of Weber’s own inner drive is his childhood reading of all 42 volumes of Goethe.) But the argument depended on a caricature of Calvinism, not to mention a selective slice of “capitalism.” A Weberian analysis said little about, say, inequality, but it illuminated manners and mindsets. The spiritual germ of capitalism flowered in the minds of merchants and men of business, and in the paragons of success and frugal living. Benjamin Franklin, secular sermonizer of “The Way to Wealth,” was Weber’s patron saint of capitalism. Weber mocked the Franklinian attitude—indeed he drew his portrait of Franklin from a German satire, Der Amerikamüde (The Man Who Was Tired of America)—but at the same time fell for businessmen’s pious narratives of themselves.

For historians of capitalism, the book is inspiring but soon turns frustrating. Weberian interpretations tend to stand back from history’s contingencies and exploitations in order to find some churning and ultimately unstoppable process: “rationalization,” for instance, by which tradition gives way ironically but inexorably to modernity. Humans wanted things like wholeness, community, or salvation; but our efforts, systematized in ways our feeble consciousness can’t ever fully grasp, end up ushering in anomie, bureaucracy, or profit. The Weberian analysis then offers no relief from that process, only a fatalism without a teleology. The moral of the story, if there is a moral, is to reconcile yourself to the modernity that has been narrated and to find in the narrative itself something like an intellectual consolation, which is the only consolation that matters.

Still, the book’s melancholy resonates, if only aesthetically. At moments, it even stabs with a sharpness that Weber could not have foreseen: The “monstrous cosmos” of capitalism now “determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism,” he wrote in the book’s final pages, “and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.” Gothic images—ghosts and shadowy monsters—abound in what is, at times, a remarkably literary portrait. “The idea of the ‘duty in a calling’ haunts our lives like the ghost of once-held religious beliefs.”

The book’s most famous image is the “iron cage.” For Puritans, material concerns were supposed to lie lightly on one’s shoulders, “like a thin cloak which can be thrown off at any time” (Weber was quoting the English poet Richard Baxter), but for us moderns, “fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.” That morsel of sociological poetry was not in fact Weber’s but that of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, whose English translation in 1930 became the definitive version outside of Germany. Weber’s phrase was “stahlhartes Gehäuse”—a shell hard as steel. It describes not a room we can’t leave but a suit we can’t take off.

One wonders what Weber would make of our era’s quarantines. What is a Zoom meeting but another communal experience of intense loneliness? Weber’s portrait of Calvinist isolation might ring a bell. Working from home traps us ever more firmly in the ideology or mystique of a calling. We might then take refuge in a secondary ethic, what we might call the iron cage of “fulfillment.” It is built on the ruins of the work ethic or, just as plausibly, it is the work ethic’s ironic apotheosis: secular salvation through sourdough.

It brings a sardonic pleasure to puncture the mental and emotional habits of a service economy in Weberian terms. But it doesn’t last. The so-called work ethic is no longer a spiritual contagion but a medical one, especially in America. Weber’s interpretation now offers little illumination and even less consolation. It is not some inner ethic that brings, say, Amazon’s workers to the hideously named “fulfillment centers”; it is a balder cruelty.

The breakdown happened in 1898, when Weber was 34. “When he was overloaded with work,” his wife, Marianne, wrote in her biography of him, after his death, “an evil thing from the unconscious underground of life stretched out its claws toward him.” His father, a politician in the National Liberal Party, had died half a year earlier, mere weeks after a family standoff that remained unresolved. In the dispute, Max had defended his devoutly religious mother against his autocratic father. The guilt was severe. (The Protestant Ethic would lend itself too easily to a Freudian reading.) A psychiatrist diagnosed him with neurasthenia, then the modern medical label for depression, anxiety, panic, fatigue. The neurasthenic brain, befitting an industrial age, was figured as an exhausted steam engine. Marianne, elsewhere in her biography, described the condition as an uprising to be squashed: “Weber’s mind laboriously maintained its dominion over its rebellious vassals.”

As an undergraduate at the University of Heidelberg, Weber had studied law. His doctoral dissertation was on medieval trading companies. By his early thirties he was a full professor in economics and finance, in Freiburg and then back in Heidelberg. After his breakdown, he was released from teaching and eventually given a long leave of absence. He resigned his professorship in 1903, keeping only an honorary title for more than a decade. Weberian neurasthenia meant a life of travel; medical sojourns in Alpine clinics; and convalescent trips to France, Italy, and Austro-Hungary—extravagant settings for insomnia and a genuine inner turmoil. Money was not the problem. Marianne, a prolific scholar and a key but complex figure in the history of German feminism, would inherit money from the family’s linen factory.

Though only an honorary professor, with periods of profound study alternating with periods of depression, Weber loomed large in German academic life. In 1917, students in Munich invited the “myth of Heidelberg,” as he was known, to lecture about “the vocation of scholarship.” He did not mention his peculiar psychological and institutional trajectory in that lecture, now a classic, though one can glimpse it between the lines. “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (“Science as a Vocation”) and another lecture from a year and a half later, “Politik als Beruf” (“Politics as a Vocation”) are Weber’s best-known texts outside The Protestant Ethic. A new English translation by Damion Searls rescues them from the formal German (as translations sometimes must) and from the viscous English into which they’re usually rendered. It restores their vividness and eloquence as lectures.

Of course, now they would be Zoom lectures, which would entirely break the spell. Picture him: bearded and severe, a facial scar still visible from his own college days in a dueling fraternity. He would see not a room full of students but rather his own face in a screen, looking back at him yet unable to make true eye contact. Neurasthenia would claw at him again.

Some lines from “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” even today, would have worked well in the graduation speeches that have been canceled because of the pandemic. Notably: “Nothing is humanly worth doing except what someone can do with passion.” Sounds nice! “Wissenschaft als Beruf” approached the confines of the calling in a more affirmative mode. Other parts of the speech, though—and even that inspirational line, in context—boast a bleak and bracing existentialism. My favorite moment is when Weber channeled Tolstoy on the meaningless of death (and life!) in a rationalized, disenchanted modernity. Since modern scholarship is now predicated on the nonfinality of truth, Weber said, and since any would-be scholar will absorb “merely a tiny fraction of all the new ideas that intellectual life continually produces,” and since “even those ideas are merely provisional, never definitive,” death can no longer mark a life’s harmonious conclusion. Death is now “simply pointless.” And the kicker: “And so too is life as such in our culture, which in its meaningless ‘progression’ stamps death with its own meaninglessness.” If only I had heard that from a graduation speaker.

Weber’s subject was the meaning of scholarship in a “disenchanted” world. “Disenchantment” is another one of Weber’s processes—twisted, born of unintended consequences, but nevertheless unstoppable. It meant a scholar could no longer find “proof of God’s providence in the anatomy of a louse.” Worse, the modern scholar was doomed to work in so dismal an institution as a university. “There are a lot of mediocrities in leading university positions,” said Weber about the bureaucratized university of his day, “safe mediocrities or partisan careerists” serving the powers that funded them. Still true.

So why do it? To be a scholar meant caring, as if it mattered, about a thing that objectively does not matter and caring as if “the fate of his very soul depends on whether he gets this specific conjecture exactly right about this particular point in this particular manuscript.” Scholarship was the good kind of calling, insofar as one could make one’s way to some kind of meaning, however provisional that meaning was, and however fleeting and inscrutable the spark of “inspiration.”

That part of the sermon is no longer quite so moving. Weber styled himself a tough-minded realist when it came to institutions, but our era’s exploitation of adjunct academic labor punctures the romance that Weber could nevertheless still inflate. Universities in an age of austerity do not support or reward scholarly inquiry as a self-justifying vocation. Scholars must act more and more like entrepreneurs, manufacturing and marketing our own “relevance.” For some university managers (as for many corporate CEOs), the coronavirus is as much an opportunity as a crisis, to further strip and “streamline” the university—to conjoin, cheaply, the incompatible ethics of efficiency and intellect. And we teachers are stuck in the gears: The digital technologies by which we persist in our Beruf will only further erode our professional stability. “Who but a blessed, tenured few,” the translation’s editors, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, ask, “could continue to believe that scholarship is a vocation?”

And yet as a sermon on teaching, Weber’s lecture still stirs me. Having given up on absolute claims about truth or beauty, and having given up on academic inquiry revealing the workings of God, he arrived at a religious truth about pedagogy that you can still hang a hat on:

If we understand our own subject (I am necessarily assuming we do), we can force, or at least help, an individual to reckon with the ultimate meaning of his own actions. This strikes me as no small matter, in terms of a student’s inner life too.

I want this to be true. On good days, teaching delivers what Weber called that “strange intoxication,” even on Zoom.

An enormous historical gulf divides the two vocation lectures, though they were delivered only 14 months apart. In November 1917, Weber didn’t even mention the war. When it broke out in 1914, he served for a year as a medical director in the reserve forces; he did not see combat but supported German aspiration to the status of Machtstaat and its claim to empire. The war dragged miserably on, but in late 1917 it was far from clear that Germany would lose. Tsarist Russia had collapsed, and the American entry into the war had not proved decisive. The defeat that Germany would experience in the coming months was then unimaginable.

Weber was a progressive nationalist, moving between social democracy and the political center. During the war, besides his essays on the sociology of religion, he wrote about German political futures and criticized military management, all while angling for some role in the affairs of state himself. As the tide turned, he argued for military retrenchment as the honorable course. A month after Germany’s surrender on November 11, 1918, he stood unsuccessfully for election to parliament with the new German Democratic Party, of which he was a founder.

In January 1919 he returned to a Munich gripped by socialist revolution. It was now the capital of the People’s State of Bavaria, which would be short-lived. Weber, for years, had dismissed both pacifism and revolution as naïve. Many in the room where he spoke supported the revolution that he so disdained, and many of them had seen industrial slaughter in the state’s trenches. Part of the lecture’s mystique is its timing: He stood at a podium in the eye of the storm.

“Politik als Beruf” would seem to speak to our times, from one era of calamity and revolution to another. It is about the modern state and its vast machineries. It is about statesmen and epigones, bureaucracy and its discontents, “leadership” and political breakdown. To that moment’s overwhelming historical flux, Weber brought, or tried to bring, the intellectual sturdiness of sociological categories, “essential” vocabularies that could in theory apply at any time.

He offered a now-famous definition of the state in general: “the state is the only human community that (successfully) claims a monopoly on legitimate physical violence for itself, within a certain geographical territory.… All other groups and individuals are granted the right to use physical violence only insofar as the state allows it.” This definition, powerfully tautological, was the sociological floor on which stood all of the battles over what we might want the state to be. Philosophically, it operated beneath all ideological or moral debates over rights, democracy, welfare. It countered liberalism’s fantasy of a social contract, because Weber’s state, both foundationally and when push came to shove, was not contractual but coercive.

It was a bracing demystification. Legitimacy had nothing to do with justice; it meant only that the people acquiesced to the state’s authority. Some regimes “legitimately” protected “rights,” while others “legitimately” trampled them. Why did we acquiesce? Weber identified three “pure” categories of acquiescence: We’re conditioned to it, by custom or tradition; or we’re devoted to a leader’s charisma; or we’ve been convinced that the state’s legitimacy is in fact just, that its laws are valid and its ministers competent. Real political life, Weber wryly said, was always a cocktail of these three categories of acquiescence, never mind what stories we might tell ourselves about why we go along with anything.

With that floor of a definition laid, varieties of statehood could now emerge. Every state was a configuration of power and bureaucratic machinery, and the many massive apparatuses that made it up had their own deep sociological genealogies, each with their own Weberian twists. So did the apparatuses that produced those people who felt called to politics. Weber’s sweep encompassed parliaments, monarchs, political parties, corporations, newspapers, universities (law schools especially), a professional civil service, militaries.

Any reader now will be tempted to decode our politicians in Weber’s terms. Trump: ostensibly from the world of business, which, in Weber’s scheme, would usually keep such a figure out of electoral politics (although Weber did note that “plutocratic leaders certainly can try to live ‘from’ politics,” to “exploit their political dominance for private economic gain”). Maybe we’d say that Trump hijacked the apparatus of the administrative state, already in a state of erosion, and that he grifts from that apparatus while wrecking it further. Or maybe Trump is returning American politics to the pre-professional, “amateur” spoils system of the nineteenth century. Or he is himself a grotesque amateur, brought to the fore by an already odious political party that somehow collapsed to victory. Or maybe Trump is an ersatz aristocrat, from inherited wealth, who only played a businessman on television. (Weber’s writings do not anticipate our hideous celebrity politics.) Or Trump is a would-be warlord, postmodern or atavistically neo-feudal, committed to stamping a personal brand on the formerly “professional” military. Or, or, or. All are true, in their way. Maybe Weber would see in Trump a moron on the order of Kaiser Wilhelm—an equally cogent analysis.

Do these decodings clarify the matter or complicate it? Do they help us at all? They deliver a rhetorical satisfaction, certainly, and maybe an intellectual consolation. Then what? “Politik als Beruf” leaves sociology behind and becomes a secular sermon about “leadership,” and here the spell begins to break. Weber sought political salvation, of a kind, in charisma. The word is now a cliché, but for him it had a specific charge. Politics, he told his listeners in so many words, was a postlapsarian business. It cannot save any souls, because violence and coercion are conceptually essential to politics. A disenchanted universe is still a fallen universe. What had emerged from the fall was the monstrous apparatus of the modern nation-state. It was there, with its attendant armies of professionals and hangers-on, it fed you or it starved you. It was a mountain that no one really built but that we all had to live on.

Politics for Weber was brutally Darwinian in the end: Some states succeeded, and others failed. His Germany did not deserve defeat any more than the Allies deserved victory. That same moral arbitrariness made him look with a kind of grudging respect at Britain and the U.S.—made him even congratulate America for graduating from political amateurism into professional power. Meanwhile, he belittled revolutionaries. Anyone who imagined they could escape power’s realities or usher in some fundamentally new arrangement of power, he mocked. “Let’s be honest with ourselves here,” he said to the revolutionists in Munich. A belief in a revolutionary cause, “as subjectively sincere as it may be, is almost always merely a moral ‘legitimation’ for the desire for power, revenge, booty, and benefits.” (He was recycling a straw-man argument he had made for several years.)

Politics for Weber was brutally Darwinian in the end: Some states succeeded, and others failed. But in that postlapsarian politics, there were still leaders to be found, men (always men) who could endure the psychological strain of leadership, who could cut it, who could make the Faustian bargain and emerge with their souls intact. (Weber, the reader of Goethe, was a closet romantic.) This was the good kind of charisma. “Politik als Beruf” is a text that would-be statesmen love to read, for it imparts a grandeur, a deeper moral necessity, to actions that are objectively immoral, coercive, and violent. A particular political order was noble, and maybe even good, to the extent that its apparatuses could bring to the fore leaders who straddled the ever-conflicting ethics of responsibility and conviction. In that sense, Weber’s state was not unlike Calvin’s church: imperfect, locked in a maddening covenant with an inscrutable universe, and yet the only thing we have. Charisma was the political analog to divine grace; Weber was narrating his own aspiration to be in that elect.

To be enchanted by this argument is to end up thinking in a particular way about history with a capital h and politics with a capital p. History was always a kind of test of the state: wars, economic calamities, pandemics. Such things arrived, like natural disasters. For all the twists and complexities of Weber’s sociology, this conception of History is superficial, and its prescription for Politics thin. He demystified the state only to remystify the statesman. It is an insider’s sermon, because politics was an insider’s game, and it is the state’s insiders who, nowadays, will thrill to it. Very well.

“The relationship between violence and the state is particularly close at present,” Weber said, early in his lecture. At present could mean this week, this decade, this century, this modernity. The lecture retains, no doubt, a curious power in times of calamity. I am inclined to call it a literary power. Weber held two things in profound narrative tension: We feel both the state’s glacial inevitability and the terror of its collapse. Without a bureaucrat’s “discipline and self-restraint, which is in the deepest sense ethical,” Weber said in passing, “the whole system would fall apart.” So too would it fall apart without a leader’s charisma. If this horror vacui was powerful, for Weber and his listeners, it was because in 1919 things would fall apart, or were falling apart, or had already fallen apart. The lecture contemplates that layered historical collapse with both dread and wonder.

A century on, Weber’s definition of the state is still, sometimes, a good tool to think with. The coronavirus lockdowns, for instance, laid bare the state’s essentially coercive function. In Europe, on balance, lockdowns have been accepted—acquiesced to—as a benevolent coercion, an expression of a trusted bureaucracy and a responsible leadership. In some American states, too. The lockdowns even generated their own (in Weberian terms) legitimating civic rituals. Fifteen months after “Politik als Beruf,” Weber himself would die of the flu that his lecture did not mention.

In the Netherlands, where I live and teach, the drama of that lecture, even in a pandemic, might fall on deaf ears. The peril and fragileness that Weber channeled can be hard to imagine in the low countries, which boasted an “intelligent lockdown” that needed no spectacular show of coercion. History, here, tends not to feel like an onrushing avalanche, or a panorama of sin and suffering, or a test we might fail, but rather a march of manageable problems, all of which seem—seem—solvable. This conception is a luxury.

As for the study of the U.S., which I suppose is my own meaningful or meaningless calling, Weber said, in 1917, that “it is often possible to see things in their purest form there.” In the century since his death, the transatlantic tables have turned, and American Studies often becomes the study of political breakdown. The vocabulary of failed statehood abounds in commentaries on America, from within and without, while American liberals look often to Germany’s Angela Merkel as the paragon of Weberian statesmanship. Step back from such commentaries, though, and American history will overwhelm even Weber’s bleak definition. America sits atop other kinds of violence, it accommodates a privatized violence, it outsources violence, it brings its wars back home.

I started this essay before the murder of George Floyd, and I am finishing it during the uprising that has followed in its wake. Weber’s definition of the state, ironically, can now fit with a political temperament more far radical than Weber’s own. The uprising has as its premise that the social contract, if it ever held, has long since been broken: The state’s veil is thus drawn back. The uprising then looks Weber’s definition in the eye: The monstrous state’s violence is unjust, therefore we do not accept it as legitimate.

I was looking in Weber for illumination, or consolation, or something. I haven’t found a rudder for the present, and I don’t know how to end. But the desire for consolation brought to my mind, of all things, the unconsoling diary of Franz Kafka. I read it years ago, and every once in a while its last lines will suddenly haunt me, like the opposite of a mantra, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Kafka died in 1924, more an outsider than an insider; his diary’s last entry reflects, in an elliptical or inscrutable way, on another disease—tuberculosis—and on another calling. “More and more fearful as I write. Every word,” he felt, was “twisted in the hands of the spirit” and became “a spear turned against the speaker.” He also looked for consolation. “The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help.” He then looked beyond it. “More than consolation is: You too have weapons.”

George Blaustein @blauwsteen

George Blaustein teaches American studies and history at the University of Amsterdam.

Books, Higher Education, History of education, Professionalism

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools

Posted on July 13, 2020July 4, 2020 by David Labaree

This post is a review I wrote of Steven Conn’s book, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools, which will be coming out this summer in History of Education Quarterly. Here’s a link to the proofs. Conn Book Cover

Steven Conn. Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 288pp.

In this book, historian Steven Conn has produced a gleeful roast of the American business school. The whole story is in the title. It goes something like this: In the nineteenth century, proprietary business schools provided training for people (men) who wanted to go into business. Then 1881 saw the founding of the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, which was the first business school located in a university; others quickly followed. Two forces converged to create this new type of educational enterprise. Progressive reformers wanted to educate future business leaders who would manage corporations in the public interest instead of looting the public the way robber barons had done. And corporate executives wanted to enhance their status and distinguish themselves from mere businessmen by requiring a college degree in business for the top level positions. This was both a class distinction (commercial schools would be just fine for the regular Joe) and an effort to redefine business as a profession. As Conn aptly puts it, the driving force for both business employers and their prospective employees was “profession envy” (p. 37). After all, why should doctors and lawyers enjoy professional standing and not businessmen?

For reformers, the key contribution of B schools was to be a rigorous curriculum that would transform the business world. For the students who attended these schools, however, the courses they took were beside the point. They were looking for a pure credentialing effect, by acquiring a professional degree that would launch their careers in the top tiers of the business world. As Conn shows, the latter perspective won. He delights in recounting the repeated efforts by business associations and major foundations (especially Ford and Carnegie) to construct a serious curriculum for business schools. All of these reforms, he says, failed miserably. The business course of study retained a reputation for uncertain focus and academic mediocrity. The continuing judgment by outsiders was that “U.S. business education was terrible” (p. 76).

This is the “failure” in the book’s title. B schools never succeeded in doing what they promised as educational institutions. But, as he argues, this curricular failure did nothing to impede business schools’ organizational success. Students flocked to them in the search for the key to the executive suite and corporations used them to screen access to the top jobs. This became especially true in the 1960s, when business schools moved upscale by introducing graduate programs, of which the most spectacular success was the MBA. Nothing says professional like a graduate degree. And nothing gives academic credibility to a professional program like establishing a mandate for business professors to carry out academic research just like their peers in the more prestigious professional schools.

Conn says that instead of working effectively to improve the business world, B schools simply adopted the values of this world and dressed them up in professional garb. By the end of the twentieth century, corporations had shed any pretense of working in the public interest and instead asserted shareholder value as their primary goal. Business schools also jumped on this bandwagon. One result of this, the author notes, was to reinforce the rapacity of the new business ethos, sending an increasing share of business graduates into the realms of finance and consulting, where business is less a process of producing valuable goods and services than a game of monopoly played with other people’s money. His conclusion: “No other profession produces felons in quite such abundance” (p. 206).

Another result of this evolution in B schools was that they came to infect the universities that gave them a home. Business needed universities for status and credibility, and it thanked them by dragging them down to its own level. He charges that universities are increasingly governed liked private enterprises, with market-based incentives for colleges, departments, and individual faculty to produce income from tuition and research grants or else find themselves discarded like any other failed business or luckless worker. It’s like business schools have succeeded in redoing the university in their own image: “All the window dressing of academia without any of its substance” (p. 222).

That’s quite an indictment, but is it sufficient for conviction? I think not. One problem is that, from the very beginning, the reader gets the distinct feeling that the fix is in. The book opens with a scene in which the author’s colleagues in the history department come together for their monthly faculty meeting in a room filled with a random collection of threadbare couches and chairs. All of it came from the business school across campus when it bought new furniture. This scene is familiar to a lot of faculty in the less privileged departments on any campus, where the distinction between the top tier and the rest is all too apparent. In my school of education, we’re accustomed to our old, dingy barn of a building, all too aware of the elegant surroundings the business school enjoys in a brand new campus paid for by Phil Knight of swoosh fame.

But this entry point to the book signals a tone that tends to undermine the author’s argument throughout the book. It’s hard not to read this book as a polemic of resentment toward the nouveau riche — a humanist railing against the money-grubbers across campus who are despoiling the sanctity of academic life. This reading is not fair, since a lot of the author’s critique of business schools is correct; but it made me squirm a bit as I worked through the text. It also made the argument feel a little too inevitable. Read the title and the opening page and you already have a good idea of what is going to follow. Then you see that the first chapter is about the Wharton School and you just know where you’re headed. And sure enough, in the last chapter the author introduces Wharton’s most notorious graduate, Donald Trump. That second shoe took two hundred pages to drop, but the drop was inevitable.

In addition, by focusing relentlessly on the “sad history of American business schools,” Conn is unable to put this account within the larger context of the history of US higher education. For one thing, business didn’t introduce the market to higher ed; it was there from day one. Our current system emerged in the early nineteenth century, when a proliferation of undistinguished colleges popped up across the US, especially in small towns on the expanding frontier. These were private enterprises with corporate charters and no reliable source of funding from either church or state. They often emerged more as efforts to sell land (this is a college town so buy here) or plant the flag of a religious denomination than to advance higher learning. And they had to hustle to survive in a glutted market, so they became adept at mining student tuition and cultivating donors. Business schools are building on a long tradition of playing to the market. They just aren’t as concerned about covering their tracks as the rest of us.

David F. Labaree

Stanford University

Academic writing, Course Syllabus, Writing

Links to All of My Publications and Course Materials

Posted on July 9, 2020July 1, 2020 by David Labaree

For anyone who’s interested, today I’m posting below a list of all my publications and courses, including links to these works and to full course materials. Here’s a link to a Word document with this hyperlinked material, and here’s a link to my full CV including the former.

David F. Labaree

Links to Courses, Papers, Chapters, Magazine Articles, and Books

July 1, 2020

Lee L. Jacks Professor, Emeritus

Graduate School of Education E-mail: dlabaree@stanford.edu

485 Lasuen Mall Web: https://dlabaree.people.stanford.edu/

Stanford University Twitter: @Dlabaree

Stanford, CA 94305 Blog: https://davidlabaree.com/

RECENT COURSES TAUGHT: with links to full course materials

Doctoral Proseminar in Education

Academic Writing for Clarity and Grace

History of Higher Education

History of School Reform in the U.S.

School: What Is It Good For?

BOOKS:

Labaree, David F. (2017). A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Labaree, David F. (2007). Education, markets, and the public good: Selected works of David F. Labaree (in series: Routledge World Library of Educationalists). London: Routledge.

Labaree, David F. (2004). The trouble with ed schools. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Labaree, David F. (1997). How to succeed in school without really learning: The credentials race in American education. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Labaree, David F. (1988). The making of an American high school: The credentials market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press.

EDITED BOOK:

Tröhler, Daniel, Popkewitz, Thomas, & Labaree, David F. (Eds.). (2011). Schooling and the making of citizens in the long nineteenth century: Comparative visions. New York: Routledge.

MEDIA ARTICLES:

Labaree, David F. (2020). Doctoral dysfunction: Many doctoral students today are tending to fall into one of two disturbing categories: academic technician or justice warrior. Inside Higher Ed (June 18).

Labaree, David F. (2020). Two cheers for school bureaucracy. Phi Delta Kappan, 101:6 (March), 53-56.

Labaree, David F. (2020). Book review: Steven Conn. Nothing succeeds like failure: The sad history of American business schools. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. History of Education Quarterly,

Labaree, David F. (2020). Two cheers for school bureaucracy. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 10:1, 123-26

Labaree, David F. (2020). Try spreading your wings. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 10:1, 100-103. Response to comments on “We’re producing academic technicians and justice warriors.”

Labaree, David F. (2019). Pluck vs. luck: Meritocracy emphasises the power of the individual to overcome obstacles, but the real story is quite a different one. Aeon (December 4). https://aeon.co/essays/pluck-and-hard-work-or-luck-of-birth-two-stories-one-man

Labaree, David F. (2019). Book review: Research universities and the public good: Discovery for an uncertain future. By Jason Owen-Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. American Journal of Sociology, 125:2, 310-12.

Labaree, David F. (2019). Luck and pluck: Competing accounts of a life in the meritocracy. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 9:2, 295-302.

Labaree, David F. (2019). We’re producing academic technicians and justice warriors: A sermon on educational research, part 2. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 9:1, 123-26.

Labaree, David F. (2018). Gold among the dross. Academic research in the US is unplanned, exploitative and driven by a lust for glory. The result is the envy of the world. Aeon (December 18). https://aeon.co/essays/higher-education-in-the-us-is-driven-by-a-lust-for-glory

Labaree, David F. (2018). Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good. Phi Delta Kappan, 100:3 (November), 9-13. https://www.kappanonline.org/labaree-public-schools-private-gain-decline-american-commitment-public-good/

Labaree, David F. (2018). The exceptionalism of American higher education. Project Syndicate (May 17). https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/american-higher-education-exceptionalism-by-david-f-labaree-2018-05?linkId=51848748

Labaree, David F. (2018). The five-paragraph fetish. Aeon (February 15). https://aeon.co/essays/writing-essays-by-formula-teaches-students-how-to-not-think

Labaree, David F. (2017). Rags to riches: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. Aeon (October 11). https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-us-college-went-from-pitiful-to-powerful

Labaree, David F. (2017). Nobel prizes are great, but college football is why American universities dominate the globe. Op-ed in Quartz (October 7). https://qz.com/1095906/nobel-prizes-are-great-but-college-football-is-why-american-universities-dominate-the-globe/.

Labaree, David F. (2013). Why GSE? Why now? Stanford Educator (spring), 4-5.

Labaree, David F. (2012). Sermon on educational research. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2:1, 78-87.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Targeting teachers. Dissent (summer), 9-14.

Labaree, David F. (2000). Resisting educational standards. Phi Delta Kappan, 82:1 (September), 28-33.

Labaree, David F. (1999). The chronic failure of curriculum reform. Perspective article, Lessons of a Century series, Education Week 16:36 (May 19), pp. 42-44. Reprinted in Staff of Education Week (2000), Lessons of a century: A nation’s schools come of age (pp. 148-151). Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education.

Labaree, David F. (1999). Too easy a target: The trouble with ed schools and the implications for the university. Academe, 85:1 (January-February), 34-39.

Labaree, David F. (1998). Educational consumerism: Bad for schools. Op-ed column, Detroit News, February 26, p. 15A.

Labaree, David F. (1997). Are students “consumers”? The rise of public education as a private good. Commentary article in Education Week 17:3 (September 17), pp. 48, 38.

Labaree, David F. (1994). An unlovely legacy: The disabling impact of the market on American teacher education. Phi Delta Kappan, 75:8 (April), 591-595.

Labaree, David F. (1989). The American high school has failed its missions. MSU Alumni Bulletin, 7:1 (Fall), 14-17; reprinted in MASB Journal (Michigan Association of School Boards), 50 (November), 10-12.

Labaree, David F. (1983). Schools: Some caveats on promoting. Op-ed, Philadelphia Inquirer (May 17).

REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES:

Labaree, David F. (2020). How schools came to democratize merit, formalize achievement, and naturalize privilege: The case of the United States. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 10:1, 29-41.

Labaree, David F. (2017). Perils of the professionalized historian. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 7:1, 95-6.

Labaree, David F. (2016). An affair to remember: America’s brief fling with the university as a public good. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50: 1, 20-36.

Labaree, David F. (2014). College – What is it good for? Education and Culture, 30: 1, 3-15.

Labaree, David F. (2014). Let’s measure what no one teaches: PISA, NCLB, and the shrinking aims of education. Teachers College Record, 116: 090303, 14 pages.

Labaree, David F. (2013). A system without a plan: Emergence of an American system of higher education in the twentieth century. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 3:1, 46-59.

Labaree, David F. (2012). School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44:2, 143-163.

Labaree, David F. (2012). Sermon on educational research. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2:1, 78-87.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Do no harm. Teacher Education and Practice, 24:4, 434-439.

Labaree, David F. (2011). The lure of statistics for educational researchers. Educational Theory, 61:6, 621-631.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Consuming the public school. Educational Theory,61: 4, 381-394.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Understanding the rise of American higher education: How complexity breeds autonomy (translated into Chinese). Peking University Education Review, 8:3, 24-39.

Labaree, David F. (2010). What schools can’t do. Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie, 16:1, 12-18.

Labaree, David F. (2009). Teach For America and teacher ed: Heads they win, tails we lose. Journal of Teacher Education, 61:1-2, 48-55.

Labaree, David F. (2009). Participant in moderated discussion of the film 2 Million Minutes. Comparative Education Review, 53:1, 113-137.

Labaree, David F. (2008). The winning ways of a losing strategy: Educationalizing social problems in the U.S. Educational Theory, 58:4 (November), 447-460.

Labaree, David F. (2008). The dysfunctional pursuit of relevance in educational research. Educational Researcher, 37:7 (October), 421-23.

Labaree, David F. (2006). Mutual subversion: A short history of the liberal and the professional in American higher education. History of Education Quarterly, 46:1 (Spring), 1-15.

Labaree, David F. (2006). Innovation, nostalgia, and the politics of educational change. Educational Administration Quarterly, 42:1 (February), 157-164.

Labaree, David F. (2005). Life on the margins. Journal of Teacher Education, 56:3 (May/June), 186-191).

Labaree, David F. (2005). Progressivism, schools, and schools of education: An American romance. Paedagogica Historica, 41:1&2 (February), 275-288.

Labaree, David F. (2003). The peculiar problems of preparing and becoming educational researchers. Educational Researcher, 32:4 (May), 13-22.

Labaree, David F. (2000). On the nature of teaching and teacher education: Difficult practices that look easy. Journal of Teacher Education, 51:3 (May), 68-73.

Labaree, David F. (1998). Educational researchers: Living with a lesser form of knowledge. Educational Researcher, 27:8 (November), 4-12. Reprinted in Day, C. et al. (Eds.), The life and work of teachers: International perspectives in changing times (pp. 55-75). London: Falmer Press.

Labaree, David F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34:1 (Spring), 39-81.

Labaree, David F. (1996). The trouble with ed schools. Educational Foundations, 10:3 (Summer), 27-45.

Labaree, David F., & Pallas, A. M. (1996). Dire straits: The narrow vision of the Holmes Group. Rejoinder: The Holmes Group’s Mystifying Response. Educational Researcher, 25:5 (June/July), 25-28, 31-32, 47.

Labaree, David F. (1995). A disabling vision: Rhetoric and reality in Tomorrow’s Schools of Education. Teachers College Record, 97:2 (Winter), 166-205.

Labaree, David F. (1992). Power, knowledge, and the rationalization of teaching: A genealogy of the movement to professionalize teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 62:2 (Summer), 123-154.

Labaree, David F. (1992). Doing good, doing science: The Holmes Group reports and the rhetorics of educational reform. Teachers College Record, 93:4 (Summer), 628-640.

Labaree, David F. (1991). Does the subject matter? Dewey, democracy, and the history of curriculum. History of Education Quarterly, 31:4 (Winter), 513-521.

Labaree, David F. (1990). A kinder and gentler report: Turning Points and the Carnegie tradition. Journal of Education Policy 5:3, 249-264.

Labaree, David F. (1990). From comprehensive high school to community college: Politics, markets, and the evolution of educational opportunity. In Corwin, R. G. (Ed.), Research on Sociology of Education and Socialization, 9, 203-240. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.

Labaree, David F. (1987). Politics, markets and the compromised curriculum. Harvard Educational Review 57:4 (November), 483-494.

Labaree, David F. (1986). Parens patriae: The private roots of public policy toward children. History of Education Quarterly, 26:1 (Spring), 111-116.

Labaree, David F. (1986). Curriculum, credentials, and the middle class: A case study of a nineteenth century high school. Sociology of Education, 59:1 (January), 42-57.

Labaree, David F. (1984). Academic excellence in an early U.S. high school. Social Problems, 31:5 (June), 558-567.

Labaree, David F. (1984). Setting the standard: Alternative policies for student promotion. Harvard Educational Review, 54:1 (February), 67-87.

BOOK CHAPTERS:

Labaree, David F. (2017). Futures of the field of education. In Geoff Whitty & John Furlong (Eds.), Knowledge and the study of education: An international exploration (pp. 277-283). Oxford, UK: Symposium Books.

Labaree, David F. (2016). Learning to love the bomb: The Cold War brings the best of times to American higher education. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Discourses of change and changes in discourse (pp. 101-117). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2014). Schooling in the United States: Historical analyses. In D.C. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational theory and philosophy (pp. 740-43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Labaree, David F. (2013). Balancing access and advantage in the history of American schooling. In Rolf Becker, Patrick Bühler, & Thomas Bühler (Eds.), Bildungsungleichheit und Gerechtigkeit: Wissenschaftliche und Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen (pp. 101-114). Bern: Haupt Verlag.

Labaree, David F. (2013). Targeting teachers. In Michael B. Katz & Mike Rose (Eds.), Public education under siege (pp. 30-39). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Labaree, David F. (2013). The power of the parochial in shaping the American system of higher education. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: The importance and effects of institutional spaces (pp. 31-46). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2011). When is school an answer to what social problems? Lessons from the early American republic. In Daniel Tröhler & Ragnhild Barbu (Eds.), Educational systems in historical, cultural and sociological perspectives (pp. 77-90). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Adventures in scholarship. In Wayne Urban (Ed.), Leaders in the historical study of American education (pp. 193-204). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Citizens and consumers: Changing visions of virtue and opportunity in U.S. education, 1841-1954. In Daniel Tröhler, Thomas Popkewitz, and David F. Labaree (Eds.), Schooling and the making of citizens in the long nineteenth century (pp. 168-183). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Labaree, David F. (2011). The lure of statistics for educational researchers. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Ethics and esthetics of statistics (pp. 13-25). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2010). How Dewey lost: The victory of David Snedden and social efficiency in the reform of American education. In Daniel Tröhler, Thomas Schlag, and Fritz Osterwalder (Eds.), Pragmatism and modernities (pp. 163-188). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Labaree, David F. (2009). Educational formalism and the language of goals in American education, educational reform, and educational history. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Proofs, arguments, and other reasonings (pp. 41-60). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2008). Limits on the impact of educational reform: The case of progressivism and U.S. schools, 1900-1950. In Claudia Crotti & Fritz Osterwalder (Eds.), Das Jahrhundert der Schulreformen: Internationale und nationale Perspektiven, 1900-1950 (pp. 105-133). Berne: Haupt.

Labaree, David F. (2008). An uneasy relationship: The history of teacher education in the university. In Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, Feiman Nemser, Sharon, & McIntyre, D. John (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education: Enduring issues in changing contexts, 3^rd ed. (pp. 290-306). Washington, DC: Association of Teacher Educators.

Labaree, David F. (2006). Progressisme, écoles, et education school: Une romance américaine. In Hofstetter, Rita & Schneuwly, Bernard (Eds.), Passion, fusion, tension: New education and educational sciences (pp. 305-324). Bern: Peter Lang. (Translation of 2005 paper in Paedagogica Historica.)

Labaree, David F. (2004). The ed school’s romance with progressivism. In Ravitch, Diane (Ed.), Brookings papers on education policy, 2004 (pp. 89-129). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Labaree, David F. (2000). No exit: Public education as an inescapably public good. In Cuban, L., & Shipps, D. (Eds.), Reconstructing the common good in education: Coping with intractable American dilemmas (pp. 110-129). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Translated into Japanese and published in Hidenori Fujita (Ed.), (2000), Education, Knowledge, Power (pp. 110-138). Translated into Italian and published in Punti Critici, 7 (November), 115-143.

Gitlin, A., & Labaree, David F. (1996). Historical notes on the barriers to the professionalization of American teachers: The influence of markets and patriarchy. In Hargreaves, A., & Goodson, I. (Eds.), Teachers’ Professional Lives (pp. 88-108).

Philadelphia: Falmer Press.

Labaree, David F. (1995). Why do schools cooperate with reformers? The case of the teacher professionalization movement. In Petrie, H. G. (Ed.), Professionalization, Partnership and Power: Building Professional Development Schools (pp. 93-109). Albany: SUNY Press.

Labaree, David F. (1995). The lowly status of teacher education in the U.S.: The impact of markets and the implications for reform. In Shimihara, N. K., & Holowinsky, I. Z. (Eds.), Teacher Education in Industrialized Nations: Issues in Changing Social Contexts (pp. 41-85). New York: Garland Publishing.

Labaree, David F. (1989). Career ladders and the early public high school teacher: A study of inequality and opportunity. In Warren, D. (Ed.), American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work (pp. 157-189). New York: Macmillan.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS:

Labaree, David F. (2003). The future of schools of education. The Navigator, 3:1 (fall), p. 7. Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.

Labaree, David F. (2003). Comment on paper by John Bishop. In Ravitch, Diane (Ed.), Brookings Papers on Education Policy, 2003 (pp. 204-208). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Labaree, David F. (1995). Foreword. In Brown, D. K., Degrees of control: A sociology of educational expansion and occupational credentialism (pp. ix-xvi). New York: Teachers College Press.

MONOGRAPHS:

Labaree, David F. (1983). Setting the Standard: The Characteristics and Consequences of Alternative Student Promotional Policies. Philadelphia: Citizens Committee on Public Education in Philadelphia.

Labaree, David F. (1983). The people’s college: A sociological analysis of Philadelphia’s Central High School, 1838-1939. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Higher Education, Inequality, Meritocracy

Markovits: Schooling in the Age of Human Capital

Posted on July 6, 2020July 5, 2020 by David Labaree

Today I’m posting a wonderful new essay by Daniel Markovits about the social consequences of the new meritocracy, which was just published in the latest issue of Hedgehog Review. Here’s a link to the original. As you may recall, last fall I posted a piece about his book, The Meritocracy Trap.

In this essay, Markovits extends his analysis of the role that universities play in fostering a new and particularly dangerous kind of wealth inequality — one based on the returns on human capital instead of the returns on economic capital. For all of history until the late 20th century, wealth meant ownership of land, stocks, bonds, businesses, or piles of gold. The income it produced came to you simply for being the owner, whether or not you accumulated the wealth yourself. One of the pleasures of being rich was the luxury of remaining idle.

But the meritocracy has established a new path to wealth — based on the university-credentialed skills you accumulate early in your life and then cash in for a high paying job as an executive or professional. Like the average wage earner, you work for a living and only retain the income if you keep working. Unlike the average worker, however, you earn an extraordinary amount of money. Markovits estimates that in the 1960s, between a sixth and a third of the people in the top one percent in income earned this from their own labor; now the proportion is two-thirds. The meritocrats are the new rich. And universities are the route to attaining these riches.

At one level, this is a fairer system by far than the old one based on simple inheritance and coupon clipping. These people work for a living, and they work hard — longer hours than most people in the work force. They can only attain their lucrative positions by proving their worth in the educational system, crowned by college and professional degrees. These are the people who get the best grades and the best test scores and who qualify for entrance into and graduation from the best universities. This provides the new form of inequality with a thick veneer of meritocratic legitimacy.

As Markovits points out below, however, the problem is that the entire meritocratic enterprise is not directed toward identifying and certifying excellence but instead toward creating degrees of superiority.

Excellence is a threshold concept, not a rank concept. It applies as soon as a certain level of ability or accomplishment is reached, and while it can make sense to say that one person is, in some respect, more excellent than another, this does not eliminate (or even undermine) the other’s excellence. Moreover, excellence is a substantive rather than purely formal ideal. Excellence requires not just capacity or achievement, but rather capacity and achievement realized at something worthwhile.

The university produced degrees do not certify excellence but instead define the degree-holder’s position in line for the very best jobs. They are positional goods, whose value is in qualifying you for a spot as close to the front of the queue as possible. Thus all of the familiar metrics for showing where you are in line: SAT, LSAT, US News college rank, college admission rate. Since everyone knows this is how the game is played, everyone wants and needs to get the diploma that grants the highest degree of superiority in the race for position. Being really qualified for the job is meaningless if your degree doesn’t get you access to it. As a result, Markovits notes, you can never get enough education to ensure your success in the meritocratic rat race.

“The value to me of my education,” the economist Fred Hirsch once observed, “depends not only on how much I have but also on how much the man ahead of me in the job line has.”³² This remains so, moreover, regardless of how much education the person ahead of me and I both possess. Every meritocratic success therefore necessarily breeds a flip side of failure—the investments made by the rich exclude the rest, and also those among the rich who don’t quite keep up. This means that while the rich get sated on most goods (there is only so much caviar a person can eat), they cannot get sated on schooling.

Parents with lots of human capital have a huge advantage in guiding their children through educational system, but this only breeds insecurity. They know that they’re competing with other families with the same advantages and that only a few will gain a place in the front of the line where the most lucrative positions are allocated. Excellence is attainable, but superiority is endlessly elusive.

I hope you find this article as illuminating as I do.

Businessman running on hamster wheel

Schooling in the Age of Human Capital

Metrics do not and, in fact, cannot measure any intelligible conception of excellence at all.

Daniel Markovits

The recent “Varsity Blues” scandal brought corruption at American universities into the public eye. Rich people bought fraudulent test scores and bribed school officials in order to get their children into top colleges. Public outrage spread beyond the scandal’s criminal face, to the legacy preferences by which universities legally favor the privileged children of their own graduates. After all, the actions in the Varsity Blues case became criminal only because the universities themselves failed to capture the proceeds of their own corruption. The outrage was natural and warranted. There is literally nothing to say in favor of a system that allows the rich to circumvent the meritocratic competition that governs college admissions for everyone else. But the outrage also distracts from and even disguises a broader and deeper corruption in American education, which arises not from betraying meritocratic ideals but, rather, from pursuing them. Meritocracy itself casts a dark shadow over education, biasing decisions about who gets it, distorting the institutions that deliver it, and corrupting the very idea of educational excellence.The methods of meritocratic schooling drive the corruption forward. Scores on the SAT (formally called the Scholastic Assessment Test), grade point averages (GPAs), and college rankings—the metrics that organize and even tyrannize meritocratic education in the United States today—are manifestly absurd. It’s not just that SAT scores, GPAs, and rankings are culturally biased or that they lack predictive validity. These familiar complaints have a point, but they all proceed from the fanciful belief that merit may be measured and that meritocracy, if properly administered, supports opportunity for all and thereby makes unequal outcomes okay. The familiar objections argue only that the metrics are poorly designed and so miss their meritocratic marks. In some instances, as when SAT scores are criticized for poorly predicting college GPAs, the criticisms simply prefer one measure over another. But the real root of the trouble with SATs, GPAs, and rankings is deeper and different: These metrics do not and, in fact, cannot measure any intelligible conception of excellence at all. And really appreciating this objection requires stepping outside meritocracy’s conventional imaginative frame.

A Transparent Absurdity

Colleges and universities quantify applicants’ merits using SAT scores and GPAs. But as a measure of anything that is itself worthwhile—of any meaningful achievement or genuine human excellence—an SAT score or a GPA is not so much imprecise and incomplete, or biased and unfair, as simply nonsensical. Even if individual questions on the test identify real skills, and even if grades on individual assignments or courses reflect real accomplishments, the sums and averages that compose overall SAT scores and GPAs fail to track any credible concept of ability or accomplishment. What sense does it make to treat a person who uses language exceptionally vividly and creatively but cannot identify the core facts in a descriptive passage as possessing, overall, average linguistic aptitude or accomplishment? It is more absurd still to treat someone who reads and writes fantastically well but is terrible at mathematics as, in any way, an ordinary or middling student. But SAT scores and GPAs push inexorably toward both conclusions. Again, even if one sets aside doubts about whether individual skills can be measured by multiple-choice questions or whether particular course work can be accurately graded, these metrics create literally mindless averages—totally without grounding in any conception of how to aggregate skills or accomplishments into an all-things-considered sum, or even any argument that the these things are commensurable or that aggregating them is intelligible.

Applicants, for their parts, measure colleges and universities by rankings, including most prominently those published by US News & World Report. These rankings are, if anything, even less intelligible than the metrics used to evaluate applicants. For colleges, for example, the rankings aggregate many factors: graduation and retention rates (both in fact and as compared to US News’s expectations), an idiosyncratic measure of “social mobility,” class size, faculty salaries, faculty education, student-faculty ratio, share of faculty who are full-time, expert opinion, academic spending per student, student standardized test scores, student rank in high school class, and alumni giving.¹ Once again, even supposing that these factors reflect particular educational excellences and that the data US News gathers measure the factors, the aggregate that it builds by combining them, using weights specified to within one-tenth of one percent, remains incoherent. Berea College, for example, enrolls students who skew more toward first-generation college graduates than Princeton University, and in this way adds more to the education of each student (especially compared to her likely alternatives), but it has a less renowned, scholarly, and highly paid faculty. What possible conception of “excellence” can underwrite an all-things-considered judgment of which is “better”? US News boasts that “our methodology is the product of years of research.”² But the basic question of what this research is studying—of what excellence this method of deciding which colleges and universities are “best” could conceivably measure, or whether any such excellence is even intelligible—remains entirely unaddressed.

In spite of their patent absurdities, the metrics deployed by both sides of the college admissions complex dominate how students and colleges are matched: Schools use test scores and grades to decide whom to admit, and applicants use rankings to decide where to enroll. The five top-ranked law schools, for example, enroll roughly two-thirds of applicants with Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores in the ninety-ninth percentile.³ And although law schools hold precise recruitment data close, one can reasonably estimate that of the roughly 2,000 people admitted to the top five law schools each year, no more than five (which is to say effectively none) attend a law school outside the top ten.⁴ Law school is likely an extreme case. But instead of being outlandish, it lies at the end of a continuum and emphasizes patterns that repeat themselves (less acutely) across American higher education. Metrics that are literally nonsense drive an incredibly efficient two-way matching system.

When a transparent absurdity dominates a prominent social field, something profound lies beneath. And the metrics that tyrannize university life rise out of deep waters indeed. Elites increasingly owe their income and status not to inherited physical or financial capital but to their own skill, or human capital, acquired through intensive and even extravagant training. Colleges and universities provide the training that builds human capital, and going to college (and to the right college) therefore substantially determines who gets ahead. The practices that match students and colleges must answer the need to legitimate the inequalities this human capitalism produces, by justifying advantage on meritocratic grounds. Even when they are nonsense, numbers provide legitimacy in a scientific age. The numbers that tyrannize university life in America today, and the deformations that education suffers as a result, are therefore the inevitable pathologies of schooling in an age of human capitalism.

The Superordinate Working Class

In 2018, the average CEO of an S&P 500 company took home about $14.5 million in total compensation,⁵ and in a recent year, the five highest-paid employees of the S&P 1500 firms (7,500 workers overall) captured total pay equal to nearly 10 percent of the S&P 1500’s collective profits.⁶ In finance, twenty-five hedge fund managers took home more than $100 million in 2016,⁷ for example, while the average portfolio manager at a mid-sized hedge fund was reported to have made more than $2 million in 2014.⁸ The Office of the New York State Comptroller reported in 2018 that the average securities industry worker in New York City made more than $400,000.⁹Meanwhile, the most profitable law firm in America yields profits per partner in excess of $5 million per year, and more than seventy firms generate more than $1 million per partner annually.¹⁰ Anecdotes accumulate to become data. Taken together, employees at the vice-presidential level or higher at S&P 1500 companies, professional finance workers, top management consultants, top lawyers, and specialist medical doctors account for more than half of the richest 1 percent of households in the United States.¹¹

These and other similar jobs enable a substantial subset of the most elaborately educated people to capture enormous incomes by mixing their accumulated human capital with their contemporaneous labor. This group now composes a superordinate working class. A cautious accounting attributes over half of the 1 percent’s income to these and other kinds of labor,¹² while my own more complete estimate puts the share above two-thirds.¹³ Moreover—and notwithstanding capital’s rising domination over ordinary workers—roughly three-quarters of the increase in the top 1 percent’s share of national income overall stems from the rise of this superordinate working class, in particular a shift of income away from middle-class workers and in favor of elite ones. The result is a society in which the greatest source of wealth, income, and status (including for the mass affluent) is the skill and training—the human capital—of free workers.

The rise of human capitalism has transformed the colleges and universities that create human capital. Two facets of the transformation matter especially. First, education has acquired an importance it never had before. Until only a few generations ago, education and the skills it produces had little economic value. Even generously calculated, the top 0.1 and the top 1 percent of the income distribution in 1960 derived only about one-sixth and one-third of their incomes, respectively, from labor, which is to say by working their own human capital.¹⁴ Moreover, schools and universities did not dominate production of such human capital as there was; both blue- and white-collar workers received substantial workplace training, throughout their careers. In Detroit, for example, young men might quit childhood jobs on their eighteenth birthdays and present themselves to a Big Three automaker, to take up unionized, lifetime jobs that would (if they were capable and hard working) eventually make them into tool-and-die-makers, earning the equivalent of nearly $100,000 per year—all with no more than a high school education.¹⁵ And in New York, a college graduate joining junior management at IBM could expect to spend four years (or 10 percent of his career) in full-time, fully paid workplace training as he ascended the corporate ladder.¹⁶ Small wonder, then, that the college wage premium was modest at midcentury, and that the graduate-school wage premium (captured above what was earned by workers with just a bachelor’s degree) was more modest still.¹⁷ Elite schools and colleges, in this system, were sites of social prestige rather than economic production. Education had little direct economic payoff; rather, it followed, and merely marked, hierarchies that were established and sustained on other grounds. The critics of the old order were clear eyed about this. Kingman Brewster—the president who did more than anyone to modernize Yale University—called the college he inherited “a finishing school on Long Island Sound.”¹⁸

But today, education has become itself a source of income, status, and power for a meritocratic elite whose wealth consists, principally, in its own human capital. The college wage premium has risen dramatically, so that the present discounted value of a bachelor’s degree (net of tuition) is nearly three times greater today than in 1965.¹⁹ The postgraduate wage premium has risen more steeply still, and the median worker with a postgraduate degree now makes well over twice the wage of the median worker with a high school diploma only, and about 1.5 times the wage of the median worker with a four-year degree only. College and postcollege degrees also protect against unemployment, so that the effects of education on lifetime earnings are more dramatic still. Just one in seventy-five workers who have never finished high school, just one in forty workers with a high school education only, and just one in six workers with a bachelor’s degree enjoy lifetime earnings equal only to those of the median professional school graduate.²⁰

Graduates of the top colleges and universities capture yet higher incomes, enjoying more than double the income boost of an average four-year degree, with even greater gains at the very top. The highest-paid 10 percent of Harvard College graduates make an average salary of $250,000 just six years out,²¹ while a recent study of Harvard Law School graduates ten years out reported a median annual income (among male graduates) of nearly $400,000.²² Overall, graduates of top-ten law schools make on average a quarter more than graduates of schools ranked eleventh to twentieth, and a half more than graduates of schools ranked twenty-first to one-hundredth;²³ and 96 percent of the partners at the $5 million-a-year law firm graduated from a top-ten law school.²⁴ More broadly, a recent survey reports—incredibly—that nearly 50 percent of America’s corporate leaders, 60 percent of its financial leaders, and 50 percent of its highest government officials attended only twelve universities.²⁵ This makes elite education one of the best investments money can buy. Purely economic rates of return have been estimated at 13 to 14 percent for college and as high as 30 percent for law school, or more than double the rate of return provided by the stock market.²⁶ Meanwhile, the educational alternatives to college have all but disappeared. According to a recent study, the average US firm invests less than 2 percent of its payroll budget on training.²⁷

A second transformation follows from the first. Education, especially at top-tier colleges and universities, is now distributed in very different ways from before. Colleges, especially elite ones, have never welcomed poor or even middle-class people in large numbers. But once those schools chose students based on effectively immutable criteria—breeding, race, gender—so that while college was exclusive, it was nevertheless (at least among those who qualified) effectively nonrivalrous and not competitive. Even the very top schools routinely accepted perhaps a third of their applicants, and some took much greater shares still.²⁸ As recently as 1995, the University of Chicago admitted 71 percent of those who applied. These rates naturally produced an application process that appears almost preposterously casual today. A midcentury graduate of Yale Law School, for example, recollects that when he met the dean of admissions at a college fair, he was told, based only on their conversation, “You’ll get in if you apply.” An easy confidence suffused the very language of going to college, as the sons of wealthy families did not apply widely but rather “put themselves down for” whatever colleges their fathers had attended. The game was rigged, and the stakes were small.

But today, education is parceled out through an enormous competition that becomes most intense at the very top. Even as poor and even middle-class children have virtually no chance at succeeding, rich children (no matter how privileged) have no guarantee of success. Colleges today—especially the top ones—are therefore both extremely exclusive and ruthlessly competitive. In a recent year, for example, children who had at least one parent with a graduate degree had, statistically, a 150 times greater chance of achieving the Ivy League median on their verbal SAT than children neither of whose parents had graduated high school.²⁹ Small wonder, then, that the Ivy Plus colleges now enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half.³⁰ This makes these schools more economically exclusive than even notorious bastions of the old aristocracy such as Oxford and Cambridge. At the same time, while being born to privilege is nearly a necessary condition for admission to a really elite American university, it is far from sufficient. Last year, the University of Chicago admitted just six percent of applicants, and Stanford fewer than five percent.

These admissions rates mean that any significant failure—any visible blot on a record—effectively excludes an applicant. Rich families respond to this fact by investing almost unimaginable resources in getting their children perfect records. Prestigious private preschools in New York City now charge $30,000 per year to educate four-and-five-year-olds, and they still get ten or twenty applications for every space. These schools feed into elite elementary schools, which feed into elite high schools that charge $50,000 per year (and, on account of their endowments, spend even more). Rich families supplement all this schooling with private tutors who can charge over $1,000 per hour. If a typical household from the richest 1 percent took the difference between the money devoted to educating its children and what is spent on a typical middle-class education, and invested these sums in the S&P 500 to give to the rich children as bequests on the deaths of their parents, this would amount to a traditional inheritance of more than $10 million per child.³¹ This meritocratic inheritance effectively excludes working- and middle-class children from elite education, income, and status.

These expenditures are almost as inevitable as they are exorbitant. When one set of institutions dominates the production of wealth and status in a society, the privileged few set out to monopolize places, and the pressure to gain admission becomes enormous. Human capitalism, moreover, makes schooling a positional good. “The value to me of my education,” the economist Fred Hirsch once observed, “depends not only on how much I have but also on how much the man ahead of me in the job line has.”³² This remains so, moreover, regardless of how much education the person ahead of me and I both possess. Every meritocratic success therefore necessarily breeds a flip side of failure—the investments made by the rich exclude the rest, and also those among the rich who don’t quite keep up. This means that while the rich get sated on most goods (there is only so much caviar a person can eat), they cannot get sated on schooling. Finally, rather than pick schools based on family tradition, applicants make deliberate choices about where to apply, and almost always attend the highest-ranked school that admits them, as when effectively nobody admitted to a top-five law school attends a school outside the top ten.

In these ways, human capitalism creates an educational competition in which the stakes are immense and everyone competes for the same few top prizes. Whereas aristocracies perpetuated elites by birthright, meritocratic inequality establishes school and especially college admissions committees as de facto social planners, choosing the next generation of meritocrats. Education becomes a powerful mechanism for structural exclusion—the dominant dynastic technology of our enormously unequal age. This places extreme pressure on the schools, and especially admissions committees, which must decide which people to privilege, using what criteria, and to what ends.

Bohr’s Lucky Horseshoe

What happens to schools when the degrees they grant grow so valuable that the demand for them outstrips their supply, and when admissions decisions make or break applicants’ life plans and determine who gets ahead in society? How have schools and colleges responded to their admissions decisions’ raised stakes? And what has the rise of human capital, its dominant role in wealth (even among the rich), done to the nature of education itself—to education’s aims, and to the standards by which it determines success? Measurement, and the tyranny of numbers, turns out to play a central part in the answer to all these questions—and for reasons not just shallow but deep. The manifestly absurd metrics that dominate university life are direct consequences of the role that schooling plays in our present economic and social order.

That which is measured becomes important. But at the same time, that which is important must be measured—and on a scale that allows for the sort of confident and exact judgments and comparisons that numbers yield. In a technocratic age—suspicious (for good reasons as well as bad) of humanist, interpretive, and therefore discretionary judgments about value—the demand for certainty and precision becomes irresistible when the stakes get high enough. The rise of human capitalism therefore makes it essential to construct metrics that schools and colleges might use to assess human capital and to compare the people who possess it, in order to determine whose human capital should receive additional investments.

The problem becomes more pressing still because education is lumped into standardized units called degrees, so that schools (especially the most exclusive ones, which have no part-time students or “honors colleges”) cannot hedge their bets by offering applicants varying quantities or qualities of training, but must instead make a binary choice to accept or to reject, full stop. The metrics that admissions offices use must therefore be able to aggregate across dimensions of skill and ability, in order to construct a single, all-things-considered measure of ability and accomplishment capable of supporting a “yes” or a “no.” This task becomes especially demanding in a world that has rejected the unity of the virtues and insists instead that people and institutions may excel in some ways even as they fail in others. GPAs and standardized test scores, especially on the SAT, as well as university rankings as provided by US News & World Report, provide the required metrics—comprehensive and complete orderings that can make fine distinctions that all who accept the metrics must agree on. Averages, scores, and rankings operate as prices do in economic markets, corralling judgments made unruly by normative pluralism and fragmentation into a single, public, shared measure of value.

These metrics—especially the SAT—are of course themselves disputed, sometimes vigorously. Certainly, they rest on arbitrary assumptions, and precision comes only at the cost of simply ignoring anything intractable, no matter how important. Nevertheless, even challenges to particular measures of human capital often accept the general approach that lies behind them all, and therefore give away the evaluative game—as (once again) when the SAT is criticized for lacking much power to predict GPAs. And even when they are contested, metrics like the GPA and SAT suppress ambiguities that they cannot eliminate, by pushing contestation into the background, far away from the individual cases and the evaluation of particular applicants. We may disagree about the validity of the SAT, and indeed harbor doubts about the test’s value, but we will nevertheless all agree on who has the highest score. In this sense, GPAs and SATs are like Niels Bohr’s lucky horseshoe—they work even if you don’t believe in them. In a world in which people cannot possibly agree on any underlying account of virtue or success, but literally everything turns on how success is measured, numerical scores allow admissions committees to legitimate their choices of whom to admit.

The early meritocrats understood this. At Harvard, James Bryant Conant, president from 1933 to 1953, introduced the SAT into college admissions with the specific purpose of identifying deserving applicants from outside the aristocratic elite. (James Tobin, who would serve on President John F. Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers and win a Nobel Prize, was an early success story.³³) Yale came to meritocracy later, but (perhaps for this very reason) embraced the logic of numbers-based meritocratic evaluation more openly and explicitly. Kingman Brewster, president from 1963 to 1977, called himself an “intellectual investment banker” and encouraged his admissions office to compose Yale’s class with the aim of admitting the students who would maximize the human capital that his investments would build. R. Inslee “Inky” Clark, Brewster’s dean of undergraduate admissions from 1963 to 1969, called his selection process “talent searching” and equated talent with “who will benefit most from studying at Yale.” The new administration, moreover, deployed test scores and GPAs not just affirmatively, to find overlooked talent, but also negatively, to break the old aristocratic elite’s monopoly over places at top colleges. Clark called the old, breeding-based elite “ingrown,” and aggressively turned Yale against aristocratic prep schools. In 1968, for example, when Harvard still accepted 46 percent of applicants from Choate and Princeton took 57 percent, Yale accepted only 18 percent.³⁴

The meritocrats aimed by these means to build a new leadership class. The old guard recognized the threat and resisted, both privately and even publicly. Brewster’s predecessor had scorned Harvard’s meritocratic admissions, which he said would favor the “beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual.” When Brewster’s revolution was presented to the Yale Corporation, one member objected, “You’re talking about Jews and public-school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public-school graduates here.” And William F. Buckley lamented that Brewster’s Yale would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High…[over]…Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.” Just so, the meritocrats replied.³⁵

They added that their meritocratic approach to building an elite—because numbers measure ability and, just as important, block overt and direct appeals to breeding—would launder the hierarchy that it produced. Prior inequalities—especially aristocratic ones—were prejudicial, malign, and offensive. But meritocracy purports to be wholesome: backed by objective numbers, open to all comers, and resolutely focused on earned advantage. Indeed, meritocracy aspires to redeem the very idea of inequality—to make unequal outcomes compatible with equal opportunities, and to render hierarchy acceptable to a democratic age. In this way, the early meritocrats combined stark criticism of the present with a profound optimism about the future.

The Soldier, the Artist, and the Financier

The meritocrats’ optimism fell, if not at once, then soon. And it fell at hurdles erected by their own reliance on numbers. The metrics that the meritocrats constructed, and that now dominate education, turned out to be not just absurd but destructive.

To begin with, numerical metrics of accomplishment naturally inflame ruthlessly single-minded competition. There is no general way to rank learning, or creativity, or achievement—merit—directly. There is no way to say, all things considered, who has better skills, wider knowledge, or deeper understanding, much less who has accomplished more overall. People value different things for different reasons. We disagree with one another about what is most valuable: the entrepreneur’s resourcefulness, the doctor’s caring, the writer’s insight, or the statesperson’s wisdom. Moreover, each of us is unsure, in our own judgments, about how best to balance these values when they conflict—unsure, to pick a famous example, about whether to pursue a life of politics or of reflection, to pursue the executory or the deliberative virtues. The agreement and repose needed to sustain a stable direct ranking simply can’t be had. This is not all bad: Ineliminable uncertainties about value diffuse and therefore dampen our competition to achieve. The soldier and the artist simply do not compete with each other, and neither competes with the financier.

By contrast, numerical metrics—again including especially GPAs and SAT scores—aggregate across incommensurables to produce a single, complete ranking of merit. Indeed, producing this ranking is part of such metrics’ point—the thing that makes them useful to admissions offices. But now, competition whose natural state is disorganized and diffuse becomes highly organized and narrowly focused. Aspiring businesspeople, doctors, writers, and statespeople all will benefit, in reaching their professional goals, from high SAT scores and GPAs, and, accordingly, they all compete to join the top ranks. The numbers on which admissions offices rely to validate their selections therefore create competition and hierarchy where the incommensurability of value once made rank unintelligible. SATs and GPAs do to human capital what prices earlier did to physical or financial capital—they make it possible to say, all things considered, who has more, who is richest. Unreasoning accumulation and open inequality follow inexorably.

The competition that the numerical metrics create, moreover, aims at foolish and indeed fruitless ambitions. SAT scores and GPAs, once again, do not measure any intelligible excellences, and high scores and averages therefore have no value in themselves. At best, pursuing them wastes effort and attention and almost surely deforms schooling, by diverting effort and attention from the many genuine excellences that education can produce. This is even more vividly true on the side of colleges and universities, with respect to the wasteful and even destructive contortions they put themselves through in pursuit of higher US News rankings.

The numbers-based distortions induced by students’ pursuit of higher test scores and institutions’ pursuit of higher rankings both may be given a natural framing in terms of the distinction between excellence and superiority. Excellence is a threshold concept, not a rank concept. It applies as soon as a certain level of ability or accomplishment is reached, and while it can make sense to say that one person is, in some respect, more excellent than another, this does not eliminate (or even undermine) the other’s excellence. Moreover, excellence is a substantive rather than purely formal ideal. Excellence requires not just capacity or achievement, but rather capacity and achievement realized at something worthwhile. It is a moral error to speak of excellence in corruption, wickedness, or depravity. Superiority, on the other hand, is opposite in both respects. It is a rank—rather than a threshold—concept, and one person’s superior accomplishment undoes rather than just exceeds the superiority of those whom she surpasses. In addition, superiority is purely formal rather than substantive. It makes perfect sense to speak in terms of superiority at activities that are worthless or even harmful.

When the numbers that rule over the processes that match students and schools under human capitalism subject education to domination by a single and profoundly mistaken conception of merit, they depose excellence, installing in its place a merciless quest for superiority. Human capitalism distorts schooling in much the same way that financialization distorts for-profit sectors of the real economy. Once, firms committed to particular products (General Motors to cars, IBM to computers) might view profits as a happy side-effect of running their businesses well. But in finance, whose only product is profit, the distinction between success and profitability becomes literally unintelligible, and financialization therefore subjects the broader economy to a tyranny of profit. Similarly, flourishing schools and universities will view their reputations and status as salutary side-effects of one or another form of academic excellence. But human capitalism shuts schools off from these conceptions of excellence and enslaves them to the pursuit of superiority. Schooling in an age of human capitalism thus becomes subjected to a tyranny of SATs, GPAs, and college rankings.

All these consequences, moreover, are neither accidents nor the result of individual vices: the shallowness of applicants or the vanity of universities. Rather, a social and economic hierarchy based on human capital creates a pitiless competition for access to the meritocratic education that builds human capital. Working- and middle-class children lack the resources to compete in the educational race and so are excluded not just from income and status but from meaningful opportunity. Rich children, meanwhile, are run ragged in a competition to achieve an intrinsically meaningless superiority that devours even those whom it appears to favor. And the colleges and universities that provide training, and administer the competition, are deformed in ways that betray any plausible conceptions of academic excellence. The Varsity Blues scandal exposed this corruption alongside the frauds that conventional responses emphasized. Why would intelligent and otherwise prudent people—one of the culprits was cochair of a major global law firm—pursue such a ham-fisted scheme other than from a desperate fear of losing meritocratic caste? No one escapes the meritocracy trap.

The only way out—for schools as well as for students—involves structural reforms that extend well beyond education, to reach economic and social inequalities writ large. But although reforms cannot end with schools, colleges, and universities, they might begin there. In particular, the familiar hope that making standardized tests less biased and more accurate and making rankings more comprehensive—that is, perfecting meritocracy—might more effectively launder social and economic inequalities without diminishing them is simply a fantasy. Colleges and universities, in particular, cannot redeem their educational souls while retaining their exclusivity. Instead, elite schools must become, simply, less elite.

If it mattered less where people got educated, applicants could pursue different paths for different reasons. And schools and colleges, freed from the burden of allocating life chances, could abandon their craving for superiority and instead pursue scholarly insight, practical innovation, community engagement, and a thousand other incommensurable virtues. Along the way, by freeing themselves from superiority’s jealous grasp, universities might redeem the very idea of excellence.

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 22.2 (Summer 2020). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

Race, Rhetoric, Writing

Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Posted on July 2, 2020June 25, 2020 by David Labaree

I’m reposting today one of the greatest speeches ever given, from that master of rhetoric, Frederick Douglass, which I originally posted last year about this time. It demonstrates the power of language to make arguments and change hearts. In a time like ours, when rhetoric is used to promote the worst social ills, it’s gratifying to see what it can do in the right hands and for the right cause. And in the midst of the current movement to improve Black lives and to protest police misconduct, it seems appropriate to revisit these words.

What’s most remarkable about this remarkable address is how he manages both to announce his faith in the American project and to denounce the way it betrayed African-Americans.

Below I’ve highlighted some of the most powerful sections of the speech, which is astonishingly quotable. But I want to stress here the brilliant structure of the argument. It’s divided into thirds.

The first section is a hymn of praise to the principles of liberty that infuse the American republic. It’s the kind of speech people expect on Independence Day, and it lulls the audience into a state of contentment.

Then he takes a shockingly sudden turn, from praising the republic to denouncing it in the most powerful terms. Picture how stunned his audience would have been to hear him, in the middle of the speech:

This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

After excoriating his country and his audience like this at great length and to great effect, he returns at the end of the speech to a strong defense of the US constitution as grounded not in slavery but liberty:

In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing [slavery]; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.

And he closes with this powerful statement of hope:

Revel in the language, the message, and the messenger.

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

Frederick Douglass

July 5, 1852

Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens:

He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.

The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.

Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.

As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.

The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present ruler.

Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.

Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.

These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.

Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.

On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. “Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history — the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day — cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness.

The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime.

The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.

How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!

Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.

Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interest — a nation’s jubilee.

Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.

I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait — perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans, if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead;
Act, act in the living present,
Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men shout — “We have Washington to our father.” — Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft-interred with their bones.

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our DOCTORS OF DIVINITY. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming “hand-bills,” headed CASH FOR NEGROES. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.

The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.

In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror.

Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave-markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.

Is this the land your Fathers loved,
The freedom which they toiled to win?
Is this the earth whereon they moved?
Are these the graves they slumber in?

But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, our lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics, enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, dependent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side, is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, hear only his accusers!

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe, having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise, and cumin” — abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! — And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.”

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation — a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared — men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend (Rev. R. R. Raymond) on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.

One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in England towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating, and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and restored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high religious question. It was demanded, in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and Burchells and the Knibbs, were alike famous for their piety, and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable, instead of a hostile position towards that movement. Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties), is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation — a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic.

Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your fathers stooped, basely stooped

To palter with us in a double sense:
And keep the word of promise to the ear,
But break it to the heart.

And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length — nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour.

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people. I hold that every American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this right, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the Constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the Constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion.

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other. The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered fights again
Restore.

God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end.
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.

God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant’s presence cower;
But all to manhood’s stature tower,
By equal birth!
That hour will come, to each, to all,
And from his prison-house, the thrall
Go forth.

Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive —
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate’er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.

Source: Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 188-206.