CHAPTER 1

The Schooling of America

A Consensus of Make-Believe

In the late 1940s, the federal government established a commission to puzzlethrough a dilemma that preoccupied the crafters of the national security statein the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the tendency of the atomic threatto induce either paralysis or panic. Presuming that the trauma inflicted by theidea of the bomb would prove no less disabling than the force from a detonation,Project East River (as the commission was named) encouraged citizen-survivorsto maintain an open-minded skepticism with regard to the otherwiseself-evident specter of annihilation. To use the phrase coined by Irving Janisin Air War and Emotional Stress (1951), civil defense depended on "emotionalinoculation," and the best way to inject this psychological booster shot wasthrough drills that served as dress rehearsals of the postnuclear apocalypse."As in combat training," the Project East River report argued, "every approachtoward realism in the training situations will be a gain inasmuch as it guaranteesgreater transfer of the learned responses to the situation of real danger."

By this logic, undergoing mock-ups of catastrophe would so inure personsto the real thing that in the event of a bona fide thermonuclear exchange,"learned response" would take over the panic reflex and "return" "the individualto rationality." In emphasizing potential scenarios and in habituatingcitizens to a condition of make-believe, the report gives to "realism" some novelconnotations. This is the realism of the behaviorist, for example, who imaginesthat reality is flexible enough to be reconditioned as the controlling agent seesfit. Alternatively it suggests the realism of the stage actor who, through sheerforce of will, subdues his own personality in the effort to suspend disbeliefin a script on which his very survival is now understood to depend. Finally, itsuggests the "simulation aesthetic," to use Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's term, thatwould come to dominate the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. That fledglingthink tank made its mark on postwar policy making by aggressively promoting"realism" on what Bruce Kuklick calls a "nonempirical basis."

In the writing of the history of post-1945 America, few things have invitedas much finger wagging as the effort to make the nuclear arsenal appear continuouswith conventional technologies of warfare. My point in revisiting thisparticular folly is to draw attention to the oblique but crucial role played in thepostwar regime of emotion management by the school system here representedby the professors who constituted Project East River—or, as its chartered bodywas otherwise known, Associated Universities, Inc. Under the aegis of civil defense,the architects of the national security state enlisted academics to importinto the body politic the counterintuitive "detachment" increasingly characteristicof postwar school culture. What the nation's educators were imagined to contributeto the public good was a social style rooted in the sort of make-believethat Project East River encouraged. The potential of this social style to effectalternative visions by inverting the terms of naive empiricism emerged as one ofthe chief dividends of the postwar college campus. It was also an enduring one,judging by Don DeLillo's choice to make a series of "simulated" disaster scenarios,orchestrated by the SIMUVAC lackeys who roam the streets of College-on-the-Hill,an integral subplot of White Noise (1985). Long before DeLillo satirizedthe college as a breeding ground for imaginary crisis management, postwarthinkers seized upon school culture's penchant for improvisational reality.

To say that the Cold War university collaborated in the project of emotionmanagement by way of its openness to conditionals is to run the risk of hollownessthat attaches to any general claim about that institution. As TheodoreCaplow and Reece McGee wrote in The Academic Marketplace (1958), "It is easyto agree that the purpose of a factory is production" but "not at all easy ... todetermine the fundamental purposes of a university" Yet as Caplow and McGee'sbook itself demonstrates, the resistance to specifying what the universitydid was accompanied throughout the postwar decade by a massive escalationin the industry dedicated to worrying that very purpose. Academics' discoveryof the problematic status of the university occasioned a discursive watershedin the 1950s, and the torrent of publications on this hitherto uncontroversialsubject routinely marshaled a self-distancing skepticism akin to the structureof disbelief in the Project East River report. Accustomed to a steady flow ofmonographs that take as their subject the university in crisis, we may scarcelyrealize that it was not ever thus. Self-criticism was not quite a novelty in schoolculture before 1950, but neither had it been the habitual distraction it wouldbecome during the Eisenhower era. One task in this chapter is to pursue theimplications of this autocritical gesture.

A related task is to articulate some of the less overt or official features of theacademic style that nurtured it, features that rarely earn much attention in culturalstudies of the academy even as they could be said to shape the experienceof the numerous people recruited to the professoriat as well as the experience ofthe countless students who pass through the academic fold. By style, I mean theextracurricular manifestations of conduct and attitude that make up the universityintellectuals' legacy across disciplinary and historical divides. Anothername for what I have in mind is what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, the "durable,transposable dispositions," from gestures to norms of interaction, that a socialgroup both forcefully and unknowingly reproduces across generations. Theessence of the academic habitus in Bourdieu's view is what he calls the "postureof the scholar feeling free to withdraw from the game in order to conceptualizeit" As outlined in an ethnographic project that extends from Reproduction inEducation, Society, and...