It is no secret that U.S. higher education is in something of a crisis. On the heels of a Gallup poll which found that a mere 36% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, a national survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that not even one-third of Americans think “colleges are doing an excellent or very good job of leveling the playing field for success in society.”[1] Whatever one thinks of these survey results, most striking about the Chronicle of Higher Education’s survey is the wide variety of things colleges are expected to be able to achieve, and concomitantly the wide variety of things colleges are expected to be. The survey’s questions and responses suggest that colleges should give graduates access to better jobs than they would otherwise have, provide a broad set of Americans with opportunities for “success,” contribute to the nation’s civic and economic fortunes, expose students to meaningful socioeconomic and racial diversity, and even help students figure out who they are and who they want to be. Put simply, this survey captures three different conceptions of the aims and goods of the university: individual pursuit of goodness and truth, facilitation of society-benefiting scientific advance, and broad social uplift.
Of course, debates about the purpose and proper function of the university are not new, and they have exercised the minds of many key figures in American intellectual history. Indeed, the tensions exemplified by this tradition of discourse are thrown into relief in the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). His engagement with the vision of education promoted by Booker T. Washington, and his critique of that vision in The Souls of Black Folk, constitute a substantive reflection on the aims of American higher education.
Du Bois’ two broad lines of critique against Washington—what I call his “pragmatic” and “intrinsic” critiques—illuminate the tensions which have attended American reflection on higher education for a century and a half. In short, in his pragmatic critique of Washington, Du Bois argues that Washington’s project, which, according to Du Bois, entails the diversion of resources away from institutions of higher education, is impossible without colleges. But there are hints elsewhere in Du Bois’ work that colleges exist for another purpose: the enabling of intellectual elites to pursue the Transcendentals–the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Washington Through Du Bois’ Eyes
Du Bois devotes a chapter in The Souls of Black Folk to discussing Washington’s proposed program of Black social and economic advancement in the context of the recent history of Black leadership. Du Bois begins with two themes of present concern: money and education. Du Bois claims that Washington was the first person to “indissolubly link” a program of industrial education with “an honorable alliance with the best of the southerners.”[2] To carry out this program, Du Bois claims, Washington had to do two things. First, he had to gain the sympathy and cooperation of the white south, and second, he had to gain standing in the north. He succeeded at both.
By the writing of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois had come to think this project entirely wrongheaded. Black America needed another Frederick Douglass, not a Booker T. Washington. Du Bois identifies Douglass with a period of “self-development.” Douglass’s ultimate ideal was “freedom and assimilation,” and the means by which he sought to attain this ideal was political self-assertion. As Du Bois put it, “Douglass in his old age still stood bravely for the ideals of his early manhood,—ultimate assimilation through self-assertion and on no other terms.”[3]
Contrasting with Douglass’s program of political equality through self-assertion, Du Bois suggests that Washington sought a compromise between the North, the South, and African Americans. Du Bois further claims that this represents what he calls “the old attitude of adjustment and submission” to American racism. What made Washington’s program unique, however, was that he combined this old disposition of submission with an attempt to capitalize on the industrialization of the South. Washington preached “a gospel of Work and Money.”[4]
“There are hints elsewhere in Du Bois’ work that colleges exist for another purpose: the enabling of intellectual elites to pursue the Transcendentals–the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.”
A sense for Washington’s project can be gained from a brief look at his Atlanta Exposition Address, which gained him national acclaim and the initial sympathy of Du Bois. To his audience of mostly white Southerners, Washington proposes that Black Americans focus on economic rather than educational advancement and cease direct advocacy for social equality, and he asks white Southerners in his audience to partner with Black Southerners for the attainment of these ends.[5] Thinking of those who advocated for a more direct approach, which Du Bois himself would come to favor, Washington argued that Black Americans must focus upon the fundamentals of living rather than the higher aspirations of culture: “the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands… [we] shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful.”[6]
After speaking to those ostensibly of his own race, Washington then asks the white audience to employ the African Americans already in the South and do business with them rather than hiring foreign, immigrant labor. He recalls to their minds the faithful and hard work that African Americans provided under slavery and asks that they cooperate with African Americans, saying that Black Americans “will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields and run your factories.”[7] He promises that they will be “patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful.”[8] Thus, disclaiming the “the agitation of questions of social equality” as “the extremist folly,” Washington believed that only Black economic power could provide the foundation for social equality, for “no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.”[9] Washington does state that there will come a time when racial animosity will be “blotted out,” absolute justice will reign, and all classes will submit to the mandates of the law. In sum, then, Washington combines a mollifying posture toward white Americans and economic pragmatism with an end goal of ultimate assimilation and equality.
Du Bois’ Critique of Washington
Du Bois breaks down Washington’s program into three main planks, organized in terms of what Washington advocates Black Americans “give up.” First among these is political power, second is the insistence on civil rights by means of self-assertion, and third is “the higher education of Negro youth.”[10] In contrast to these three aims, Washington, according to Du Bois, wants African Americans to concentrate all their energies on “industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.”[11] Du Bois tries to show that there is a paradox at the heart of each of Washington’s aims. It is impossible for property rights to be secured without suffrage, for example. Self-respect and thrift are enjoined for Black Americans, but so also is submission to civic inferiority, and it is not feasible that any group of people should maintain self-respect in the face of the utter lack of broader societal recognition. It is in Du Bois’ criticism of Washington’s third means, namely, putting off or forswearing altogether higher education, that we arrive at the place where Du Bois’ vision of the good of a university and Washington’s vision of black American progress conflict.
Du Bois’ Positive Visions: Pragmatic and Intrinsic Goods of the University
Du Bois argues that Washington’s program of common school and industrial training would not function if it were not for individuals who were educated at colleges or universities. It is in this argument that we find the first articulation of the “pragmatic vision” of the university. Washington’s relentless focus on such industrial training has contributed to the diminution of funding for such colleges, leading to a situation in which not even the sites of industrial education can be staffed. Thus, Du Bois identifies the university or the college as a sine qua non of even the sort of industrial project that Washington advances, much less a more ambitious project of racial economic and social uplift.
Du Bois clearly had the sense that the university was necessary for the economic advancement of Black Americans. Later in The Souls of Black Folk, he writes that “the common school” should be founded “on the university and the industrial school on the common school.”[12] Du Bois anticipates that many of the college educated would become teachers in common and technical schools, having themselves trained by college-educated teachers. In this way, the university is understood as the apex of an ecosystem: the “highest” rise to the top and then return to serve those at the bottom, equipping all with the basic skills necessary to navigate a complex labor market, some with the skill-set to become artisans, and a gifted few with the possibility of attending college themselves.
This pragmatic vision of college-educated men training up a generation of Black Southerners so as to help them escape poverty sits somewhat uneasily with Du Bois’ own recounting of the difficulties he encountered during his time as a teacher. A Fisk student at the time, Du Bois struggled to find teaching work and faced real difficulties given the circumstances of rural Southern education. His school was one room, but not charming. The benches lacked backs and even legs, and the students could attend only irregularly—they were needed in the fields.[13] Everyone in Du Bois’ “little world” had a “half-awakened common consciousness” of the existence of the Veil, which “hung between [them] and Opportunity.”[14] Some of his students, awakened by education, yearned for more, but those whose fates are known to him when he returns are farming, some with success, lazing about, or dead, all still separated from the world by the Veil.
Although Du Bois clearly thinks that the educational ecosystem he has described, with universities, common schools, and industrial schools, is necessary if Black Americans are to be given real economic and social Opportunity (notice his capitalization of the term), he does not think that education should aim at wealth. He bemoans that the attainment of wealth is even the ideal of public schooling; public schooling should aim rather at the pursuit of the transcendentals: “Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.”[15]
“Du Bois clearly had the sense that the university was necessary for the economic advancement of Black Americans.”
It is here that we begin to get a sense for Du Bois’ conception of the intrinsic goods of higher education. He describes in glowing terms the quality and content of the education provided by Atlanta University:
In a half-dozen classrooms they gather then,—here to follow the love song of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there to wander among men and nations,—and elsewhere other well-worn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no time-saving devices,—simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is today laid before the freedman’s sons by Atlanta University.[16]
Notice again Du Bois’ invocation of the transcendentals as the end of education. Du Bois’ ideal university dismisses “progress”: his university neither utilizes new educational methods nor aims at the training of technically proficient workers for an industrialized labor market. It hews to what in Du Bois’ view are time-tested means of arriving at Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—ends truly worthy of a human life. He connects the medieval educational model based on the trivium and quadrivium to the sciences of the ancients. The connection between the knowledge of the pharaohs and that of the Greeks, and chiefly Plato, is particularly striking, given that this connection is a key dimension of how the Greeks presented their own intellectual tradition. Finally, in Du Bois’ account of the intrinsic goods of college, he suggests colleges are good not because of what they do for the economy, but only and ever because their one true goal is nothing less than facilitating students’ discovery of the meaning of life: “The true college will ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”[17]
But in like manner to the tension in Du Bois’ pragmatic account of education, in which the university educated play a crucial role in elevating those without Opportunity and yet fail in many cases, we are here again met with a real tension. In his description of Atlanta University’s excellence with respect to various other universities of the highest caliber—Harvard, Leipzig, Yale, and Columbia—Du Bois writes that his students possess “the determination to realize for men both black and white the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice.”[18] Whereas above, Du Bois claims college aims at discovering the end of life, here, it aims at opening up the “broadest possibilities” of opportunity.
There is a further complication to Du Bois’ picture, what he calls “the rule of inequality.” It cannot be forgotten that “of the million black youth some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that the true training meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans…”[19] Given this, Du Bois argues that the university-educated should be “missionaries” of culture to those who lack such an education. Presumably, he hopes this will elevate everyone participating in this system to the highest level of intellectual attainment of which they are capable. Thus, the system of education Du Bois propounds includes within it a theory of human capacity which holds that not all are equally educable; Du Bois nevertheless thinks that the university plays a crucial role in the social uplift of those not educable to university standards by virtue of the services that the university-educated render as missionaries of culture to those beyond the academy.
Du Bois does attempt to synthesize his intrinsic and pragmatic accounts of the end of education. He writes as follows:
The final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for the truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth; by founding the common school on the university and the industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus a system not a distortion, bringing a birth not an abortion.[20]
In this, Du Bois’ clearest attempt to synthesize the two accounts we have to this point been describing, the university, he says, should produce men, which is to say, fully grown adults, in possession of their faculties, capable of self-mastery, pursuing the transcendentals, and cognizant of the glory being human. The workers will be educated in the common schools or industrial schools, both of which participate in the system of schools modeled on the university, and will thereby be raised to their full stature as well. In keeping with the aforementioned rule of inequality, this stature will differ from the stature of one who is capable of university education, but it will be a glory to the person who works with his hands nonetheless. Still, Du Bois seems to take it for granted that, for example, modeling the common school on the university and the industrial school on the common school will produce the social results he wishes to produce—even if they are not capable of learning what universities teach, manual laborers can nevertheless be educated in a manner modeled on the education fit for intellectual elites. Such a thing the ancient figures Du Bois so admires never considered.
“The final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.”
Du Bois anticipates that this will contribute to Black American ascension above the Veil, each according to his capacity. But it is not at all obvious, given his commitments about human inequality concerning innate capacities, that what helps the intellectually capable ascend to the heights of the transcendentals will necessarily be the appropriate model for him who would become a master craftsman. And even if that is the appropriate model for becoming a master craftsman, since Du Bois thinks that attainment of the transcendentals is what lifts one above the Veil, it is not clear how the majority of men will be so lifted, since the majority of men will never be capable of that kind of intellectual attainment.[21]
There is a further difficulty. Du Bois is confident that classical education will produce the kind of person who pursues truth, goodness, and beauty; he also expects that an educational system hierarchically organized with the classical university at the top will produce certain social goods. But his own writing seems to suggest that common school education taught by those in the university does not necessarily produce such results. How, then, does Du Bois think the successful synthesis of his two visions of the university will be achieved?
Perhaps, when pressed along these lines, Du Bois would concede that there is an unresolved tension in his thought. In keeping with his softened posture later in life toward Washington’s project, perhaps Du Bois might be willing to grant that what was needed to bring coherence to his educational model was a synthesis of his project with Washington’s. Wrong to disparage “the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home,” perhaps Washington nevertheless recognized that for those not capable of personal communion with Marcus Aurelius above the Veil, it would be sufficient to maximize their economic prospects by emphasizing industrial education. If Du Bois were to grant this picture, he would be able to preserve his vision of the role of the intellectual elites with respect to those who were not intellectual elites—emissaries of culture and providers of visions of what might be—without expecting the university to produce an educational model fit for all.
Onsi Aaron Kamel is a PhD student at Princeton University and Editor-at-Large at Ad Fontes. He holds master’s degrees from both the University of Chicago and Princeton Theological Seminary in theology, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago. His academic writing has been published in The Scottish Journal of Theology, and his popular writing has been published in First Things, Mere Orthodoxy, and elsewhere. He lives in Princeton with his wife Elaina and their three children.
“What the Public Really Thinks About Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-the-public-really-thinks-about-higher-education, accessed 18 October 2023; Gallup Inc, “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply,” Gallup.com, July 11, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx, accessed 18 October 2023. ↑
William E. B. Du Bois and Terri Hume Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Henry Louis Gates, 1st ed, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 34. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 39. ↑
DuBois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 40. ↑
Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 168. ↑
Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 168. ↑
Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 169. ↑
Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 169. ↑
Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 170. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 40. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 40. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 61. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 48-49. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 50. A fuller discussion of the Veil is not possible in this context, but it is a crucial concept for Du Bois, describing the alienated separation of Black Americans from the broader white world but also from themselves. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 57. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 58. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 58-59. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 59. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 59. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 60. ↑
Du Bois and Oliver, The Souls of Black Folk, 61. ↑