The development of high technology appears essential to the state's and nation's economic vitality, and it calls immediately for the retraining and training of the work force. Certainly, higher ed will take part in high tech development, but should it join so heartily with business and government to the detriment perhaps of its singular mission as an institution offering the rest of society a detached view of itself? This is the sixth article in the economic development series sponsored by The Joyce Foundation; this article was also sponsored in part by the Illinois Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

MY VAGABOND journeys through the states these last couple of years often left me with the bemusing thought that I was traveling through fantasyland. Is there a Great Newswriter in the Sky producing identical stories in different capital cities without the benefit of a wire service? Is there a Master Planner somewhere writing development proposals for every state government? High tech is everywhere and is everywhere the same. In state after state the same plans and the same stories are offered as almost mythic panaceas to a variety of economic and political woes. The new glamour firms in electronics, computers, communications, robotics and genetic engineering are recruited with an ardour usually reserved for glandular and outsized athletes. These firms, which seem to be in infinite supply, promise everywhere to provide a cornucopia of jobs, markets and products, to rejuvenate ailing economies, to refund declining universities, to reemploy the unemployed and redundant, to offer vast satisfying opportunities to those new to the labor force, to produce environmental harmony as high tech displaces the smokestacks of low tech, and even to eliminate, through user friendliness, the last alienation and estrangement between people and their machines. The Silicon Valley, the Research Triangle and Route 128 are everywhere held up as models of economic development toward which all the states ought to aim. And everywhere high tech is putting higher education back into prominence as the key institution where personnel for the new industries are to be trained and where research will yield the products and processes of the new world aborning. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to imagine that universities might have a purpose other than serving the needs of high tech industry.

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Despite our national penchant for founding a New Jersualem or discovering a Passage to India, Americans take themselves to be a practical and hard-headed people. Yet, on the subject of high tech, a veritable rhetoric of the cybernetic sublime overtakes the calmest of minds and the most down-to-earth of our professionals, the engineers. I admire, I must admit, the audacity of it all, the sheer hucksterism, the renewed booster spirit, the evangelical fervor and enthusiasm with which this latest generation of machinery is promoted. And promoted everywhere: in states like Illinois where the technology and the opportunity have some congruence, and also in places like Rhode Island, a state for which I have special affection, but which has been dogged by a chronically depressed economy, by an isolating location between New York and Boston, and a weak system of public higher education undercut by private universities. But even in Rhode Island one discovers plans for a high technology research and training center, and the legislature has awarded a special appropriation of $2.5 million, a pittance really, to, in a fit of hyperbole, "fulfill high tech needs." Is this a plan or a talisman? I am not trying to play the skeleton at the feast. One must give these proposals their due. The industrial activities represented by high tech are among the more promising opportunities for economic development now available. The United States possesses, and legitimately seeks to enhance and protect, certain competitive advantages in international trade in computers, communications and other high tech fields. There are opportunities for expanded employment in these industries, though opportunities for an all too narrow slice of the population. But even if we grant this, and much more could be granted, it is still necessary to be skeptical about the high technology proposals. These proposals have not erupted in every statehouse and major newspaper as a result of spontaneous independent discoveries. In America the spontaneous is always planned. The campaign for "high tech" is not merely an attempt to make the economy more efficient and competitive, albeit with a generous public subsidy. High technology is part of an attempt to change the direction of American life, to restrucure American society. The offhand references to the needs of high tech industry for a benign human environment, less restrictive social legislation and less militant labor unions signal more than the class bias of the proposals. These demands, and the frenzied competition they set off among the states, can be read as demands for pastoral places for the upper middle class to work free from the intrusion of the poor and disadvantaged, the absence of even minimal government regulation and the elimination of trade unions.

Moreover, the proposals for high technology are not exactly new. We are walking the furrows of ground plowed for the last two decades. These plans have been put forward by prognosticators and prophets who see in a new generation of machines another technological solution to what are in fact persistent political problems. Alvin Toffler first put us in "future shock," a disease we didn't know we had, in order to prepare us for the "The Third Wave." "Megatrends" differ from ordinary trends in that they can't be resisted or redirected and are, alas, benign in their consequences anyway. However, figures like Toffler and John Naisbitt are merely the manifestation in popular culture of a vision of a desirable future loosely shared by a variety of groups: the major engineering societies, leading corporations with global stakes in high tech, universities looking for substitutes for declining federal support, the military seeking to augment its share of the gross national product, and the State Department searching for new technological means to maintain an American hegemony. Educated elites in turn pick up the theme that our competitive failing results from a widespread scientific illiteracy and propose, as with the Sloan Foundation, a new definition of the liberal arts emphasizing mathematics, computer science and technological expertise. Anxious middle-class parents, eager to purchase a place for their children in the occupational structure, pack them off to computer camps or direct them even earlier toward Harvard via infant training at the personal home computer. The advertising of computer companies resurrects the oldest image of the literate man and weds him to the new computation devices: the priesthood of all believers, everyman a priest with his own Bible, becomes in the new rendition the priesthood of all computers, everyman a prophet with his own machine to keep him in control. A new Morrill Act has been proposed to resuscitate the land-grant tradition. This one would forge a new partnership between business, the state and the university, creating a national policy in which education is harnessed to "real economic needs" and learning is tied to a national strategy for economic growth. The "new Morrill Act" is a device whereby education can once again become a national priority and lay claim to increasing government resources because it is the key to revitalizing the private sector and the military.

Again, this is not, by indirection or innuendo, an argument against high technology. We probably need a good deal more of it than we are getting. Rather it is to question the proposals which isolate out one sector of the economy for special public favor, which invest inordinate hopes and educational resources in one particular arena, and which concentrate attention on the needs of one narrow segment of the population. If such high tech plans had been announced in the more politicized climate of the 1960s, they would have raised a spectre. The partnership now bravely envisioned would be quickly seen as a proposal on behalf of the military-industrial complex augmented by the collaboration of government and education: in potential, a vast new concentration of power. High technology would be seen as a code phrase for restoring the status quo ante after decades of liberal erosion of class prerogatives. It would be seen most of all as an attempt to restructure society along the lines demanded by the now homeless multinational corporation and to eradicate in the process the sometimes independence of education, the one institution that might occasionally march to a different drummer.

I begin this essay on a grim note — a note in which conspiracy is in the air and cabals of power are working in concert — not because I think high tech proposals are without merit (I can't repeat that enough) and certainly not because I think higher education is beyond reform. Quite the opposite. It is necessary to wring inflation out of the economy, to renew and refurbish the technological base of industry, to lower the rate of unemployment, to maintain a rate of economic growth adequate to absorb the dual career

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family into the employment market and to combat the divisive regionalism that lurks beneath the surface of national bonhomie. Likewise it is necessary to refinance higher education, to redirect educational efforts, to reform curricula and improve research and scholarly productivity. I just don't think that "high tech," which seems to be the only wheel in town, the only rising star to which everyone is pinning their hopes, is adequate to the tasks we face either in the economy or in education. More importantly, I think it is a class-based set of proposals of a particularly vicious kind which, unless augmented by other efforts at educational and economic development, will only harden and polarize already abrasive and destructive social divisions.

But there are larger political stakes in all these proposals. I assume, perhaps erroneously, that none of us wants to repeat the history of the last hundred years in the West. This is an exceedingly dangerous time, and there are alarming parallels between developments today and those that led out of the 19th century and into the worldwide wars that have dominated the 20th. We are witnessing the same frenetic search for international markets and colonies, the same free trade euphemisms behind which lurks the same protectionist enterprise, the same drives to remilitarize in defense of markets and resources and the same attempts to reform higher education in line with such national priorities. We just lack at the moment a Petr Kropotkin or anyone else to offer alternatives.

Under the circumstances it seems necessary to ask, at the least, just what high technology is going to do for the country and what, more importantly for this essay, it is going to do for higher education. While this is a melancholy undertaking, we might review something of the history of higher education, particularly in its modern phase, if only as prelude to a conclusion.

Among the issues that dominated the troubled 1960s — a political era stretching from the first of the civil rights sit-ins to the Vietnam peace accords — were the attempts to make the universities more porous and responsive to issues of equality and social justice, particularly for racial minorities, and to make the university less responsive to the needs of the national defense state, to the research and educational agenda of the federal government. It was a difficult line to walk. Those who attempted to walk it did so by emphasizing that originally universities had walls around them, walls that were both architectural and symbolic. They served to wall off the university from its surrounding community, to grant it special privilege and insulation from the undue influence of the larger community. Academic freedom, on this reading, was not an individual right of faculty members but a corporate right of the university to conduct its own affairs by its own lights, to pursue an intellectual agenda determined by its own scholarly priorities not by the short-run interests and needs of society. But as the walls held the society out, they also encircled the academic community and constituted a symbolic parentheses constraining academic life and granting it a special tone, rhythm and pertinence. The Vietnam war revealed that the walls had been decisively breached, and the university seemed little more than the servant of outside interests. With that in mind many attempted to reassert the independence and integrity of the

It seems necessary to ask just what high technology is going to do for the country and what it is going to do for higher education

university tradition, of its right to march to its own drummer and to an order of values determined by its several subject matters, not by the demands of the professions, business and the state, though it inevitably served those interests indirectly. At the same time it seemed perfectly consonant with the land-grant tradition to insist that space within the university ought to be available to all with the talents and interests to partake of it, that it ought not to be limited to those inscribed with the correct class background. There was a contradiction here, admittedly, and it is one that is unresolvable. It is precisely the ability to manage this contradiction — to defend the independence of the university tradition and still to make the institution responsive to fundamental values of the founding society — that is at the heart of university administration.

It takes, of course, a certain studied irrelevance to talk about walls encircling the U.S. public university since the Morrill Act of 1862, the founding legislation for most of them, had as its announced purpose the breeching of the walls of the traditional university. The legislation offered grants of land to each state for the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one college, where the leading object shall be ... to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such a manner as the legislatures of the states may respectively prescribe in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

As the distinguished British educator Eric Ashby has commented, the dismantling of "the walls around the campus" was and is "the great American contribution to higher education .... When President Van Heis of Wisconsin said the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state, he was putting into words one of those rare innovations in the history of the university. It is one that has already been vindicated by history. Other nations are now beginning to follow the American example."

While I agree with Professor Ashby's general assessment, it should also be emphasized that no sooner were the walls pulled down than they were put back up around the commonwealth of learning, around the liberal arts as the center of education: those arts aimed not at practical mastery but at the cultivation of virtue, character and the arts of living well. Such insulation not only protected the core of humane learning and prevented the university from being merged into the community, it also imposed a special and studied irrelevance to the core of university life. The founding legislation emphasized, as well, service of the university to individuals — farmers and mechanics — and to the industrial classes, what we would today call the working class.

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Late in the 19th century the walls of university life were driven down as the institution itself reached outward and the business and professional community reached inward. The university became infected, as Thorstein Veblen noted in The Higher Learning in America, with the spirit of business enterprise perhaps first and most continuously in the business of intercollegiate athletics. But business enterprise reached in, as Leland Stanford, John Rockefeller, Ezra Cornell and other tycoons supplied the capital needed to support expansion to allow the transformation of the college into a university to go forward. This was done principally in private education, but the expansion and transformation set the example for public universities as well. As the connections grew, business leaders replaced clergy on the boards of trustees of such universities. And, naturally, major contributors thought they should have a say about what was taught and on the social attitudes and philosophy of the faculty and student body. Early in this century a series of notorious firings of professors in major universities led to the founding of the American Association of University Professors by John Dewey, E. R. A. Seligman and Arthur Lovejoy. In that founding there was also a transformation, as academic freedom was changed from a right of the community to be different and distinctive to an individual right of the professor, based on the First Amendment, to say whatever he thinks.

The professions and professional accrediting agencies also had a hand in the transformation of the universities. The professions desired the prestige of attachment to university life because of the special virtue associated with it, but they also sought to control the university and to bend it to professional purposes. The control over the curriculum demanded by accrediting agencies often ceded the intellectual tradition to professional societies and the interest groups behind them, while borrowing at the same time the mantle of difference and independence which had been the symbol of the university tradition. These professional connections and the growing spirit of business enterprise came about long before the faculty became experts at seeking grants and independent funding. However, the presence of the federal government and a war economy from the late 1930s forward cemented the configuration of the new university. The success of academicians, if not the academy, in the development not only of weaponry but the entire social and behavioral technology of warfare gave birth in the postwar years to what Clark Kerr described as the multiversity, an institution branching out and radiating into every nook and cranny of the society, offering expertise, intelligence and training in every conceivable sphere of activity: a university without walls and without restraint. The formation of the multiversity in the years after World War II occurred as campuses were gradually opened to the mass of the population. This opening proceeded less from a democratic instinct than from the needs of an expanding economy and the worldwide spread of American industry. In 1947 a presidential commission reported that because of advancing technology there was a rapidly growing need for college-trained professional workers in the distributive and service occupations. Universities undertook this training as programs, departments and majors proliferated, and, at the same time, technical and defense oriented research laboratories in both the social and natural sciences were moved from the federal government to the universities. All this was overlaid on the traditional forms of liberal education though that tradition became increasingly irrelevant, except in rhetoric, to the real purposes of the institution. Those subjects which defined the social and political purposes of education and therefore gave life to notions of virtue and character continued to be taught, of course; they simply ceased to have much to do with what the institution was all about.

The growing contradictions of the multiversity, contradictions between its narrowly professional objectives, its mission-oriented research and its foundations in the traditional disciplines, burst into the open during the 1960s. For a while it seemed the campuses were undergoing a revolution, though it was a "revolution with a taste in wine," as Norman Mailer described it at the time. Whether it was the wine or the music, the 1960s were heady, euphoric and disorienting days, at least for those on the Left. Normalcy returned rather quickly in tribute to just how heady those days were, but one ought not overlook the real gains that were made. The civil rights movement produced a, perhaps, irreversible change in the character of race relations and the status of black Americans, even if the economic gains of minorities have been overestimated. While the troubles on the campus did not exactly bring the war in Vietnam to an end, they did at least call attention to the deep involvement of the universities in the most questionable types of military and defense research, indeed to the alacrity with which the research establishment was willing to abandon all pretenses to a university tradition when it came to securing sources of funding. There were other gains. The best of the students, at least for a while, queued up to the most "irrelevant" of the disciplines. Certain areas of the traditional liberal arts enjoyed a season in the sun, and professional schools in law and journalism were embued with a sense of mission beyond the provision of the tools for individual success and social enhancement. While the decline in enrollment in engineering was to no one's benefit, the worsening position of engineering did lead such colleges to seek out connections with other regions of the university. Unfortunately, in this as in other things, the changes were temporary, for outbreaks of liberalism seem to be a function of unused capacity.

There were signs of trouble ahead at every turning point in campus politics, not least of all in the clarity, purity and tenacity of the faculty and student attitudes which fueled it. Norman Mailer again caught with precision and prophecy the moral and political weakness of the campus during the 1960s:

The Left was not ready, the Left was years away from a vision sufficiently complex to give life to the land, the Left had not yet learned to talk across the rugged individualsim of the more rugged in America, the Left was still too full of kicks and pot and the freakings of sodium amytol and orgy, the howls of electronics and LSD .... If the Left had to live through a species of political exile for four or eight or twelve good years, it might even be right. They might be forced to study what was alive in the American dream. For certain the world could not be saved by technology or government or genetics and much of the Left had that still to learn.

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Well, that lesson has to be learned by more than the Left, though the Left is in the exile Mailer wished for it. The attitudes which dominated the '60s persist only in popular culture and largely because they present fashionable marketing opportunities.

The events of the 1960s, however, did severely weaken U.S. higher education. While the system remained fiscally sound throughout the '60s, even as new four-year and senior institutions were created and the community college system brought into existence, its financial base decayed throughout the '70s and the early years of this decade. Research support was gradually withdrawn by the federal government. It left because of the proliferation of independent research firms that grew up to siphon off the federal largesse and because the university proved to be less efficient, less reliable and more porous to disruption than research firms in the private sector. But state legislatures, now grown used to the federal government underwriting education, also failed to provide support commensurate with inflation, so that new building and maintenance grounded to a halt, and a faculty, which had abandoned vows of poverty during the good years, anxiously watched its status and its income eaten away. The decline in public support had something to do, of course, with the rupture in loyalties that were provoked by the Vietnam demonstrations and some bizarre students that accompanied them. But it also had something to do with the belief that higher education had joined the political process as one more interest group, whose interests in the public weal extended about as far as its own economic security. This change was as much demanded by universities as forced upon them by legislatures. All the appartus of bureaucracy once reserved for roads and sewers were applied to education: formula funding, student head counts, square footage calculation. For a while it was advantageous, particularly given a rising educational market. In the end a destructive bargain was struck: The university became judged on one side by its contribution to the economy — trained personnel and useful knowledge — and on the other by its conformity to the arithmetic of support. That calculus left no room any longer for thinking of the university as different from banks or corporations or athletic departments or economic development agencies. When notions of an educated citizenry, a democratic populace and a cultivated way of life evaporated as objects of education, the university was seen as merely another participant in the process of interest group politics and not an institution representing a public and indivisible interest with the general welfare.

Even worse, and far less remarked these days, the 1960s saw the erosion of the undercarriage of higher education: the real infrastructure of curricula, requirements, prerequisities and admission expectations which provided the ground upon which sound education can grow. The degeneration of educational practice was most visibly evidenced by grade inflation which turned student transcripts into measures of time spent rather than records of achievement. The degeneration was not limited to grade point averages, however. Curricula were modernized and fragmented, requirements eliminated or ignored, basic talents left uncultivated, basic disciplines untaught, courses added and dropped carelessly. Credit inflation — the conversion of the extracurricular into the curricular — now ranks with grade inflation as a new scandal, evidenced by the revelation that the student prank of electronically taking over the scoreboard during the Illinois-UCLA Rose Bowl game was undertaken for electrical engineering credit at Cal Tech. In much of the university the entire conception of an education has shifted, as Paul Goodman noted in the 1960s, from teaching the discipline to teaching the student. The university started to slip ineluctably into the quagmire of the high school and to adopt the same conception of the diploma as a birthright that has had much to do with the decline of secondary education. While universities are quick to point to the high schools as the educational culprit, they are less likely to examine their own culpability in the general decline of competence. Indeed, there is the confusion of success with competence as if diplomas, high salaries, mobility and warm climates were evidence of either real ability or a productive economy.

The point of this review is that the problems of higher education, as of the culture generally, go much deeper than and are not susceptable to cure by high technology. Indeed, what high technology principally offers is a new political coalition to shore up the otherwise declining support of higher education. But the terms on which this support is sought would further reduce the independence of the university, further confuse the values of the student, and further distort the aims of education rightly conceived: the creation of an enlightened and cultivated citizen.

William Morris once said that the most important product of the mine was the miner. The most important product of education is not knowledge, or service or education or a work force: It is the student. Everything a university does cultivates a student. Whitman once said: "I and mine do not convince by our arguments, we convince by our presence." What Whitman declares as principle, I take simply to be a fact. Education occurs in places other than classrooms. Universities teach as much by their presence, by the values they represent in every act. The deeper confusions in higher education simply are not touched by the solutions of high technology. But does high technology offer solutions to the wider array of social problems or to the rejuvenation of the U.S. economy?

Here, too, I think we can be skeptical. Skepticism was more apparent when the romance of high technology first appeared during the Vietnam war period. A series of prophetic voices in the mid '60s proclaimed a technological revolution to be realized through the marriage of computers and television, communications and information processing. The noisiest voice was that of Marshall McLuhan, but his visibility should not obscure a large supporting cast that included engineers, scientists, futurologists and artists. Aligned with these secular prophets were those who proclaimed a new stage of economic development: the post-industrial society, the information society, the post-modern society. Also there were the various commissions and study groups that prepared us for the future, for the 21st century. The development of this form of talk was not without precedent. At a similar moment in the 19th century a new generation of machines was heralded as the device

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through which the past would be abolished and a new world created. In the wake of the Civil War, in the long depression that dominated the period 1873-1893, the new devices of electricity seemed to be the means by which not only a new economy but indeed a new social order would be fashioned. The telephone and the electric generator promised the capacity to wed together the myth and the powerhouse; the dynamo and the virgin; the promise of peace, harmony and culture with the drive to power, profit and productivity. This rhetoric of an electrical sublime was resuscitated and given new vigor in the 1960s. It was now a cybernetic sublime, a new era of electronics, communications and computers. The

A destructive bargain was struck: The university became judged on one side by its contribution to the economy and on the other by its conformity to the arithmetic of support

new generation or machines promised a new direction in American life — beyond the devastations of the past and present into a brighter lit world of a global village on spaceship earth: an era of economic power, ecological balance and social justice. If all of this sounds suspiciously like a religious faith, or a complex system of beliefs, the judgment should not be resisted. As Henry Adams pointed out at the turn of the century, the objects that inspire awe among us are the machines we make, which seem to be merely the bounty of nature. Our world fairs are shrines not to the arts and intellect but to technology. We have placed faith less in divine intervention in human affairs than in technological intervention. The search for technological solutions to complex political problems, even to problems of character and spirit, leads is as well to export these solutions elsewhere with confidence and equanimity and then to wonder what went wrong. We should not forget our attempt in the 1960s to electrify the DMZ and to light Vietnamese villages with a new version of REA, and even to create a Mekong Delta Authority to do for southeast Asia what TVA presumably did for the undeveloped world within our country. The point is simply this: The current romance with high technology, insofar as it exceeds rational expectation, is but an extension of prophecy that resurfaced in the 1960s. It is part of the American religion of technology.

But there was a parallel development in the 1960s, namely a shift in the intellectual underpinnings of American thought from Left to Right. Recent developments in education and politics have not come about automatically or inexorably but are the result of steady intellectual work, work that responded not only to liberal policies of the 1960s and the Vietnam war, but to the entire climate of ideas that dominated that political epoch. I am speaking, of course, of the rise of neoconservatism. Its emergence can be precisely dated to the founding of the journal The Public Interest in 1965. While it is easy to identify neoconservatism with specific issues — affirmative action, the resurgence of the Cold War and anti-Soviet sentiments, the reaction to the women's movement — it is important to see it in a wider context. Neoconservatism has pasted together issues and positions across a broad front. The pages of The Public Interest and other neoconservative journals contain essays on a wide variety of issues: the environment, crime, welfare, education, technology, the political parties, population, natural resources.

Neoconservatism has become the decisive political ideology. Not only has it provided the intellectual underpinnings of Reaganism, but it has allowed conservatism to escape being merely the soured wine of religious fundamentalism and to articulate a sense of a future that could embrace the deep contradictions and antinomies of American life. The attitudes toward high technology and education within neoconservatism are more than a mere nativism; they are part of a vision which attempts to capture and preserve what is useful and complex in American culture, to consolidate the gains of the recent past and to project those gains into a future as an adaptation to the conditions of modern politics and the economy. Its achievement should not be underrated even while its weaknesses are noted. America is still badly divided by interest groups. The fissures on both sides of the political spectrum are sharp and deep, and there is hardly a consensus on anything. Nonetheless, neoconservatism has allowed a center to form, however weak and temporary, that contains these fissures and produces a broad social program that provides an ideological base and direction to U.S. politics and institutions.

Beyond its response to 1960s movements surrounding Vietnam and civil rights, neoconservatism has attempted to deal with the vexing economic problems which the war revealed or decisively exacerbated: an inflation that resulted in significant part from fighting a war without declaring it and financing a war without legislating it; an economy which was insufficiently militarized for the tasks assigned it, so tuned to current consumption that it could not save enough to finance its continued growth and modernization, and so dependent upon oil that only a continued U.S. international hegemony could stabilize energy costs; and a level of inefficiency in basic industries that reached scandalous proportions.

The marriage, then, of high tech and high ed is not to be analyzed or judged merely as a temporary expedient to solve this problem or that. It is not merely a way of dealing with inflation or ending unemployment or revitalizing the economy. Neither is it merely a temporary justification for refunding the American university or securing a new basis of research support or providing adequate facilities so that students can major in engineering or business or whatever else they may wish. Beyond these obvious and reasonable goals, the high tech-high ed merger is part of the larger neoconservative proposal for a new way of life, one which repudiates the recent past in order to prevision a new phase of American capitalism. As the decade of the 1830s signalled a move from merchant to industrial capitalism and the 1870s a move from industrial to monopoly capitalism, so we move now in the 1980s into a series of proposals for the revitalizing of capitalism via high technology: an era of state or multinational capitalism.

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As presented by and to universities, the high tech solution masks its more conservative assumptions. It is presented, advertised and sold as a total solution when it is at the very best merely a partial one. Moreover, it is a technical solution that disguises a political one. It proposes to solve basic social contradictions via the development of technology, but it does not contain solutions to the fundamental problems of either higher education or the economy. This is not an argument against proceeding with the development of high technology, but it is a plea not to put all our eggs in one basket, all our hopes in one development.

It is assumed, for example, that the growth of high technology industry will lead to a rapid expansion of professional and technical occupations that require considerable education in computer-related areas and that high technology will require upgraded skills because workers will be using computers and other technical equipment. However, as a recent report in MIT's publication, Technology Review, put it, "these assumptions are dead wrong." There are not going to be enough "high tech" jobs to replace jobs lost because of declining industries. While employment for engineers and computer specialists will grow almost three times as fast as employment overall, these occupations will generate only about 7 percent of all new jobs during the rest of this decade. Employment for computer systems analysts will increase by over 100 percent between 1978 and 1990 and still add only 200,000 new jobs to the work force. The great expansion in jobs in the years ahead will be in low skill and low paid areas, while many other jobs will be downgraded in the skills required because of automation. Further, vast numbers of those in the middle levels of employment will have their jobs absorbed into the computing capacity of the new machines. In short, the growth of high technology is not an answer to American employment problems nor an enhancement of the conditions of work of most. Skilled jobs will continue to be scarce and will continue to be exported to countries of the Pacific rim. The tendency toward a two-tier level of employment will increase: a relatively few high paid executives, engineers and scientists and an increasingly proletarianized work force. This merely recapitulates the recent history of the effect of technology on employment and, as the Technology Review piece concludes, should "revise educational priorities and place greater emphasis on a strong general education rather than a narrow specialized one." The high tech solution is simply irrelevant to the vast majority of American workers, particularly the currently unemployed. The campaign for a narrowly based high tech policy is a campaign that benefits one particular class. There is perhaps nothing wrong with

The high tech solution is simply irrelevant to the vast majority of American workers, particularly the currently unemployed

that, but what is questionable is the assumption that the cost of scientific and technological development, costs which ought to properly be borne by the corporate community, should be put on the public budgets of individual states when the resources produced — knowledge, talent, ideas, individuals — are mobile and free to migrate wherever conditions are more benign in or out of the country.

The second questionable assumption of high tech policy, and one that merely complements the employment assumption, is that traditional U.S. industries of steel and automobiles, for example, are dead, that they were killed by high labor costs and that there is no reviving them. Given this verdict, there seem to be no viable options other than an evacuation of traditional manufacturing and a complete move into the newer, more glamourous high tech industries which have lower labor costs, based on robotics or other labor saving devices. Although wages may be lower for laborers, high tech firms offer employment to scientists, engineers and the white collar class generally at good salaries. Again, this scenario virtually ignores the majority of the working population. It also conveniently places blame for the failure of American industry on the American worker, thereby justifying a policy of reducing wages and wage labor while increasing administrative costs and salaries. But basic U.S. industries have been afflicted by chronically bad management and high tech firms, if I read the papers correctly, are not immune to the same disease. The higher cost of much U.S. industry derives not only from frequent overpayment to wage labor, but from bloated administrative salaries, bloated in both absolute terms and as a multiple of what is paid ordinary workers. Even worse, bloated administrative salaries and other perquisites have insulated management from the actual demands of the market and the actual performance of products. When such markets were protected, little trouble occurred, but at the first hint of competition such firms were unable to adjust their administrative cost structure or management practices.

But the blindspot to the needs of reindustrialization derive from a deeper assumption about the "post-industrial" or "information society," namely that we are to become a software economy rather than an industrial one. In some versions we are to process French banking data, write computer routines, make programs for satellite broadcasting and generally take in one another's washing. However, the manufacture of the washing machines, computers and other hardware of the new economy will be left to other countries, principally to Japan and other nations of the Pacific rim. A software economy, one that exports all the basic trades and crafts, will be, I believe, a cultural disaster. More to the point, such an economy assumes the permanent existence of a large, growing, surplus population living on enforced leisure or the work-welfare leftovers of an upper middle-class work force.

There are, then, intrinsic limitations to high technology solutions to our economic and educational problems. Moreover the problems of both education and the economy are broadly cultural rather than narrowly economic. They derive from what the neoconservative writer Daniel Bell has called the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Higher education would have a more salutory role in dealing with these contradictions if it put forward general strategies of reindustrialization that

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went beyond projections of narrow and class-based interests. No high tech policy will be effective that does not lead to an overhaul of management practices and that does not include a general plan for reindustrialization rather than merely favor growth of a few selected glamour industries. While the word reindustrialization evokes the image of Felix Rohartyn's plans for bailing out failing and uncompetitive firms, it need not include that. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that public investment in industry in both Europe and Japan is the margin by which many of our basic industries are losing ground. I am not here arguing for such public investment, though I think it deserves more consideration, but for some strategy of reindustrialization that does more than abandon basic industries, basic workers and their basic skills, particularly if it is to be underwritten by public monies channeled through universities or elsewhere.

Finally, both the society and education would benefit from a less utilitarian and longer term approach to higher education. In the midst of the Depression, Walter Lippmann, surely a man of affairs, gave some unsolicited advice about the "role of scholars in a troubled world." Admist such troubles the scholar feels he should be doing something about them or at least be saying something that will help others do something about them. "The world needs ideas; how can he sit silently in his study and with a good conscience go on with his thinking when there is so much that urgently needs to be done?" But it is precisely this strategy of staying in the study that he recommends. This view, he concludes, will seem to many a mere elegy to a fugitive and cloistered virtue:

Yet I doubt whether the student can do a greater work for his nation in this grave moment of its history than to detach himself from its preoccupations, refusing to let himself be absorbed by distractions about which, as a scholar, he can do almost nothing. For this is not the last crisis in human affairs. The world will go on somehow and more crises will follow. It will go on best, however, if among us there are men who have stood apart, refused to be anxious or too much concerned, who were cool and inquiring, had their eyes on a longer past and a longer future.

Lippmann's defense of the university tradition in the midst of a grave economic crisis is an essentially conservative one. It was later matched by a defender of capitalism, conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter. In his defense, which I here twist, Schumpeter ruefully acknowledged the tendency of capitalism to absorb and destroy — to "creatively destroy" — the institutional framework which guarantees its continuance: in mythological terms, to eat its children as it banishes its parents. Capitalism, in his view, could only be successful within a protecting framework made from noncapitalist material. Without protection by noncapitalist institutions, many of which, like the university, were essentially medieval in origin, capitalism is "politically helpless" and even unable to care for its own interests. The tendency of capitalist institutions to live solely at the horizon of this quarter's profits or next year's opportunity costs and to absorb all other institutions into the principles of the market ate away both psychologically and institutionally the resources upon which the system is raised. Therefore, the encapsulating framework of noncapitalist habits of thought and life were indispensable for the tenacity, creativity and prudence necessary to keep a capitalist society functioning effectively.

The advice and admonition of Lippmann and Schumpeter remain sound in relation to our current debate. Everything a university can do about high technology can be done by technical institutes and research firms. The function for which there is no alternative institution is the scholarly one. That function includes the ability to stand apart, to be cool and inquiring and to take a longer view of the past and the future. This is the core of university life and the core of its teaching. It is the one indispensable gift the university has for society and for students who need to witness precisely this way of being. And it is the one reason, beyond the trained personnel and useful knowledge, that continues to justify both public support and confidence.

James W. Carey is dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a former fellow of the National Endowment of the Humanities in science, technology and human values.

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