Profile

David Riesman: American Scholar David S. Webster ontemporary readers of David Riesman, especially those born after the end of World War II, may not realize Riesman's great renown among not only scholars and intellectuals, but also the educated general public during the 1950s. It was Riesman's Lonely Crowd (1950), of course, which he wrote in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, that made him famous. It sold a million copies by 1971 and more than 1.4 million copies by the end of 1995. That was over twice as many as those sold by any other work of sociology written by American and Canadian sociologists who were alive in 1995. It was translated into 15 languages. In 1954, Riesman became the first sociologist ever to grace the cover of

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Time. Ttle Lonely Crowd received numerous laudatory reviews. Intellectuals, in general, were more enthusiastic about it than were professional sociologists. Lionel Trilling wrote about it as follows: "David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd seems to me one of the most important books about America to have been published in recent times. And quite apart from the particularity of its subject, it is one of the most interesting books I have ever read." Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal edited a book of essays about Riesman's work only fifteen years after he began his career as a professor of social sciences in the College of the University of Chicago. (Before that, he had taught law at the University of Buffalo Law School.) In it, they called The Lonely

Crowd "one of the most significant and successful sociological publications of our time." With the publication of Individualism Reconsidered (1954), a collection of 30 essays he had published between 1947 and 1954, Riesman's star ascended even higher in the academic firmament. According to Trilling: "No American novel of recent years has been able to give me the sense of the actuality of our society that I get from Mr. Riesman's Hndividualism Reconsidered], nor has any novel been able to suggest, as these essays so brilliantly do, the excitement of contemplating our life in culture as an opportunity and a danger." Granville Hicks, the Marxist literary critic and biographer of John Reed, reviewing Individualism Reconsidered in the New Leader, praised it extravagantly: "What I am sure of, however, is that this culture of ours, even if it would vanish from the earth, would survive in men's minds as an example of what the human race can accomplish. Among the forces which have forged that conviction must be included the writings of David Riesman." Many other intellectuals, surveying Riesman's work up to then as a whole, were equally enthusiastic. John W. Aldridge, author of After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars and other works on modern fiction, wrote as follows: "The impact of David Riesman's work over the past several years has been such that any general discussion of his ideas at this time must appear superfluous."

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In On Higher Education Riesman traces his interest in higher education back to his youth--to, among other influences, his father's interest in medical education as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and his mother's "continuous efforts on behalf of her alma mater, Bryn Mawr." Nevertheless, he was well into middle age before he began to publish a substantial amount of material about higher education.

Riesman's Transition to Scholar Riesman's earliest writings, listed in "A Bibliography of David Riesman's Publications," are from 1939. From that year through 1944, ten of his twenty publications listed appeared in law reviews. The bibliography lists no items at all for 1945 and 1946. Starting in 1947, the proportion of his publications in law reviews sharply decreased, and the proportion of materials he published in social science outlets sharply increased. While he wrote for many social science publications, however, he seems not to have published very much about higher education, other than legal education, for a few more years. The Loneh' Crowd (1950) had very little to say about colleges and universities. Not until 1951, at the age of 42, did he publish what seem to have been his first two articles on higher education. One was on how English rugby developed into American college football: the other was about an interdisciplinary course on culture and personality that he was then involved in teaching at the College of the University of Chicago. For the next few years, he continued to publish mostly about the social sciences and very little about the field of higher education. The year 1956 marked a sharp turn towards the subject that would occupy him until now. In that year he published Constraint and Variety in American Education, based on three lectures, two of them on higher education, that he had delivered at the University of Nebraska. The watershed year in Riesman's development into a scholar of American higher education seems to be 1958. (In his preface to On Higher Education, Riesman wrote that "postsecondary education...has been the main arena for my research since 1954"). The year 1958 I call his watershed year: this is not incompatible with what Riesman wrote, considering the interval that inevitably elapsed between when Riesman began to concentrate his research on higher education and the dates when his writings were eventually published. In that year, at the age of 49, he published a long assessment of the interviews of academic social scientists from which Lazarsfeld and Thielens had

written The Academic Mind. He also published four articles and an essay review about higher education, plus a long review, in the American Sociological Revie,, of Philip Jacob's Changing Values in College:

An Exploratory Study of the Impact of College Teaching. From 1958 to 1968, a substantial portion of what he published was about American colleges and universities. Starting in 1968, the year in which he (and senior author Christopher Jencks) published The Academic Revolution. an even greater proportion of his work seems to have been about American higher education. It is not clear why Riesman, in the late 1950s, at the very height of his fame as a scholar of American culture and social character, chose--like the Victorian writer Mathew Arnold switching suddenly from writing poetry to writing prose--to change fields. George Keller has astutely observed, in personal correspondence, that despite Riesman's having changed fields in the 1950s from American culture and social character to American higher education, there was, nonetheless, much continuity in his work. In The Lonely Crowd, for example, Riesman described how the changing character, in recent years, of individual upper-middle-class men and women in large American cities from inner-directed to other-directed influenced the national character. Similarly, many of Riesman's books and articles about American higher education sought to explain how the rise of faculty hegemony from roughly 1865 to 1965, followed by the rise of student consumer power from roughly 1965 to 1980, influenced the overall character of colleges and universities.

On Higher Education In 1980, about a quarter century after Constraint and Variety appeared, Riesman published On Higher Education. In theory, the changes in the marketplace that caused colleges and universities to make all out efforts to attract and retain students should have enabled students to get a better education than in previous eras, when schools did not need them so badly and court them so ardently. However--and this is one of the main themes of the book--the fact that institutions were so hard up for students often led their faculty and administrators to offer students a mediocre education. In the 1970s, even more than before, many college and university faculty and administrators were inclined to make curricular decisions based more on what they thought would get students to enroll, and stay enrolled, than on what their students needed to learn. Some schools abolished all, or virtually all, re-

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quirements, fearing that any requirement might drive away some potential customers. Colleges and universities trying to secure a niche for themselves in the market frequently offered only marginal, rather than meaningful, differentiation. That is, they positioned themselves to offer an array of features that were only slightly different from those of other colleges, not wanting "to get too far out of line, to seem too outr~." Students, for their part, did not do nearly enough, Riesman argues, to take advantage of their considerable market power. In the late 1960s, hundreds of colleges and universities were overapplied enough to reject a substantial proportion of their applicants. By the late 1970s, however, most were accepting a very large majority of those who applied. Yet students often ignored the enormous number of colleges and universities available to them. Instead, they applied only to the "local college," or the local public college, or the nearest college sponsored by their religious sect. When they enrolled, Riesman thinks, students were much too passive consumers of their education, and they did not seek out the most intellectually stimulating courses, professors, and majors on their campuses. In the final chapters of On Higher Education, he suggests a host of remedies to enable students to make better choices about both institutions and particular features of the institutions they attend than they customarily do. On Higher Education differs from Riesman's other books on colleges and universities in several ways. First, it concentrates on students. Of the unholy trinity on all college campuses--faculty, administrators, and students--Riesman, throughout his career, has paid more attention to faculty than to either of the others. Second, it focuses less on individual college and university campuses and more on the broad infrastructure of American higher education. More than any of his other books, On Higher Education examines organizations transcending any particular campus, like the College Entrance Examination Board, the Educational Testing Service, the various regional accrediting associations, the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, and the United States Veterans Association. Third, almost from beginning to end it offers a chrestomathy of specific suggestions for how to reform colleges and universities. Riesman had written often about educational reform before, of course. As early as Constraint and VarieO; he devoted most of his preface to the 1958 edition to arguing that America needs a fearless consumer agency to publish frank,

accurate reports advising students and prospective students about colleges and universities, much like the reports that Consumers Union published about commodities. The last chapter of The Academic Revolution describes how major research universities might improve the quality of their doctoral education. The Perpetual Dream describes in detail innovative undergraduate curriculums on six campuses and pays some attention to curricular reforms at dozens of other schools. On Higher Education, however, casts a much wider net. It considers not just doctoral education at major research universities, as does the final chapter of The Academic Revolution, and not merely undergraduate curricular reforms, as does The Perpetual Dream. Rather, it examines, in considerable detail, a wide variety of reforms that would improve many different aspects of higher education. These include high school guidance counseling; college academic advising; making college catalogs more accurate; ending the outrageous things that some colleges, desperate for money, do to enroll international students; and a great many others. Riesman, adhering to his policy of recommending changes at what he calls the "retail," not the "wholesale," level, is a most thoughtful, careful academic reformer. Many of the major figures who have urged reform in American higher education have issued clarion calls for sweeping changes without concerning themselves very much about the nuts and bolts of how these changes could be made. One thinks of Veblen's The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men; Flexner's Universities: American, English, German; Robert M. Hutchins' Higher Learning in America: and a slew of books published, in recent years, by academic conservatives, of which one of the first and probably the best known is Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed DemocraQ' and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. On Higher Education differs from all these critiques of American universities by not only pointing to what Riesman considers wrong but also providing detailed plans about how the reforms he advocates can be accomplished. It was not, however, reviewed as favorably as were most of Riesman's other books. The American Journal of Sociolog3; Contemporao' Sociolog3; and Social Forces do not even seem to have reviewed it. Those who were assigned to review On Higher Education were generally not as well known as the major scholars who had often r e v i e w e d Riesman's previous books.

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In a famous passage in The Lonely Crowd, Riesman and his collaborators wrote about the children's book Tootle the Engine. Tootle, a young engine, has been taught at engine school to ~'always stay on the track no matter what" (Lonely Crowd, p. 108). Nevertheless, "one day [he] discovers the delight of going off the tracks and finding flowers in the field" (Lonely Crowd, p. 108). Riesman, as a scholar, enjoys the delights to be found off the well-worn track, just as Tootle the Engine did. He is an astonishingly wide-ranging writer. In his and Reuel Denney's "Football in America," in a discussion of how English rugby evolved into American college football, they veer off the beaten path for a useful discussion of how Anatolian peasants view modern sports (hldividualism Reconsidered, p. 244). In On Higher Education, in a passage about how students can transform themselves into, in effect, an adversary culture at their institutions, and make an education for themselves very much at odds with what their institution offers, Riesman again ranges exceptionally widely. He writes, in quick succession, about such adversary cultures as the French bohemians of the early nineteenth century, as described in Crsar Grafia's Bohemian versus Bourgeois, who despised the values of the bourgeoisie while needing their patronage; the famous New York City Armory show of 1913 which introduced European avant-garde painting to America; Harvard undergraduates, c. 1930. who "went around quoting T. S. Eliot's Waste Land to one another at a time when American literature was hardly taught at Harvard College" (p. 310). Then he discusses the European refugees who brought Central Europe's avant-garde culture to America and psychoanalysis to American medical schools. Like Freud--about whom Riesman has published several essays--with his patients, Riesman often arrives at his most useful insights when he proceeds not by straightforward exposition but by free association. In short, Riesman's rambling round a theme is not a fault but, for him, a great strength. To criticize On Higher Education as "a kind of ramble" is like criticizing The Sound and the Fury and Ulysses and the film Rashomon for not having plots that move resolutely forward from beginning to end. David Riesman is the finest scholar of American higher education who ever lived, which is not that remarkable. After all, someone has to be the finest scholar of American higher education who ever lived. What is remarkable, though, is that Riesman is so far ahead of whoever might be in second place. Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset have written

works of the highest quality about American colleges and universities. However, Hofstadter devoted, and Lipset has devoted, only a small portion of his output to American higher education. Laurence Veysey has written works of the highest quality about American higher education, yet his is a relatively small oeuvre, and the contribution to the study of American higher education for which he will be remembered will likely be only one book, The Emergence of the American University. In contrast, most of Riesman's writing, over a period of some forty-five years, has been about American higher education, and the quantity of his output is as breathtaking as its quality. His work has received the highest praise. Clark Kerr has written somewhere that The Academic Revolution is not only the best book ever written about higher education, but also the best book about it that would ever be written, Elsewhere, Kerr and his co-author Marian L. Gade have written that Riesman "'knows more about higher education, and shares it more willingly, than anyone else." What is perhaps most remarkable about Riesman's achievement as a scholar of higher education is his immense range--in, among other areas, the topics he covers, the number of disciplines in which he is at home, and the number and variety of sources from which he draws. Many or most distinguished scholars of American higher education have concentrated, in most of their work, on one aspect of it. One thinks, for example, of Alexander Astin, Kenneth Feldman, Ernest Pascarella, and Patrick Terenzini focusing on the impact of college on "traditional" undergraduates: K. Patricia Cross on "'nontraditional" students: Joan Stark on the undergraduate curriculum: and Bruce Kimball on liberal education. Riesman. by contrast, has written about American colleges and universities both in the past and the present: about students, faculty, administrators, and trustees; and about an immense variety of institutions, including research universities; liberal arts colleges: historically black colleges and universities; Catholic institutions: fundamentalist colleges and universities: women's colleges: "'streetcar" colleges: and community colleges. He has also brought to bear, in his writings about American colleges and universities, a staggering variety of disciplinary perspectives. As George Keller has pointed out, "most of the prominent scholars of higher education have been emigrrs from other social studies." Most of them write about higher education from the perspective of the discipline in which they were trained. Riesman, however, is familiar not only

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with sociology--a discipline, by the way, in which he holds no degree--but with important scholarship in all the other major social sciences: anthropology, economics, history, political science, and psychology. He is also, of course, very well versed in legal education, and he moves with ease through some disciplines in the humanities, especially music and both "serious '~ and popular fiction. A third area in which his range is astonishingly wide is the types of sources he uses. It has been debated for decades whether distinguished scholars more often rely upon the publications of other distinguished scholars or of ordinary, run of the mill ones. Ortega y Gasset famously wrote that experimental science "has progressed thanks in great part.., to the intellectually commonplace man." The Cole brothers, in a study of academic physicists ~ citation practices, concluded that distinguished physicists cited mostly the publications of other distinguished physicists. Riesman, the consummate polymath, employs all kinds of sources, from the works of the most distinguished scholars to the most hard to locate, ephemeral materials. He frequently cites major social scientists, of course. Some of those whose work he refers to most frequently, in his work on higher education, are Alexander Astin, Howard S. Becker, Daniel Bell, Bur-

ton Clark, Everett C. Hughes, Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, and Thorstein Veblen. He also copiously cites the work of ordinary scholars and uses numerous published compilations of statistical data. More than all or almost all other scholars of American higher education, he also draws frequently from all kinds of ephemeral materials, including unpublished statistical data, articles in student newspapers and other student publications, and unpublished correspondence. If Riesman had never published a single word about American higher education, he still would have made an immense contribution to our knowledge of colleges and universities through his enormous correspondence with not only the great and near great figures in American higher education but also legions of ordinary men and women. It is difficult to think of many scholars who have dominated any field for as long as Riesman has dominated his field. Samuel Eliot Morison on U.S. naval history and Robert Merton on the sociology of science are among the very few who come to mind. David S. Webster is associate professor of higher education at Oklahoma State Univetwi~'. Stillwatet: He is the author of the introduction to the Transaction edition of David Riesman's On Higher Education: The Academic En-

terprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism.

Transaction Publishers and Society M a g a z i n e mourn the loss of our friend, colleague, and author

GEORGE L. MOSSE September 20, 1918 - January 22, 1999 AUTHOROF Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis o f National Socialisnz Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe: 1918-1945 The Impact o f Western Nationalisms (co-edited with Jehuda Reinharz) "Fascism involves longing for a leader, camaraderie and a revolution of the Right, a mass movement linked to myth and symbol; appeals to the mystical side of human nature....There is no possibility whatsoever of an American fascisnz. We have made it quite clear that fascism could not work unless it could annex already present traditions. If there are no traditions that can lead into fascism, there can be no fascism at the end either. I said fascism must come ht unified countries. America is a regional counto,, one of more or less coherent ethnic groups that would be almost impossible to un~,. As such, the United States lacks the first and most elementary prerequisite for fascism: an integrated nationalism. '" --George L. Mosse, from Nazisnz

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