The Modern University and the Life of the Mind

An encounter with Terence McKenna

The late Terence McKenna is best known as an ethnobotanist and a theorist of psychedelic experience, so he’s not exactly typical TGS material. But Nikita Petrov, my creative director and a man with his own interest in psychedelics, brought a clip of McKenna’s to my attention that does involve some issues that crop up here pretty regularly: the state of American higher ed.

As you’ll see below, McKenna had a pretty radical critique of American universities and a theory as to why they often fall short of their own stated ideals. He’s certainly right about some aspects of the problem. When universities become mere training facilities for the job market, they lose their more vital function as institutions where the big, difficult questions can be pursued in rigorous, more-or-less unconstrained ways.

But despite McKenna’s pessimism, and that of critics of higher ed on the left and the right—and even that of my own—we have to recognize that our universities are still incredibly valuable places. There are, as I say below, “pockets of exquisite devotion to the life of the mind” dotting every campus. It’s not all indoctrination all the time. Even if it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, in seminar rooms and lecture halls, young minds are opening to the world. That may sound trite, but it happens to be true. And as long as it is true, the university will remain a place worth fighting for.

(The context of the McKenna clip is a talk about the early internet, by the way. You can listen to the whole thing here.)

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NIKITA PETROV: Okay, so I'm going to play this clip. This is Terence McKenna talking about a bunch of different things. This is a snippet from a longer thing. And, if I remember correctly, it's sort of parenthetically that he's talking about what in his view has happened to higher public education in America. And so I want to just play the clip for you and see if you have something to say about what he says and if you have your own view on all of that, since you've been in this field for so long,

TERENCE MCKENNA [pre-recorded audio]: You see part of the illusion of the political history of the past 40 years was the illusion that we were all Presbyterians, we all ate white bread and we all lived in the suburbs and we all were white folks. And now the society is fragmenting, you're right. There are people who can't read by the millions in this society. Meanwhile, other people are reaching for informational technologies so powerful that they can barely be conceived of.

And this is the consequence of political mismanagement. I mean, I think the American union is flying to pieces because the notion of polity was betrayed in the 1960s. And that since the middle of the 1960s, this has been a police state of some sort. You see, after World War II, and they kicked Hitler's ass and all that, then everybody came back full of idealism, to raise families, to build America. They'd been through the New Deal. There was a modicum of social responsibility and consciousness hammered into the middle class.

Everybody came back, and then the American political system went haywire, basically because we lost our nerve. My generation—I'm 48, I went to the University of California at Berkeley in 1965—my generation was the beneficiary of the idea that you should give a universal education to everybody. And they discovered that if you do that, if you take everybody and make them read Plato and John Stewart Mill and Voltaire and Hobbes, as we did, that you can't rule such people. They take it too seriously. They become ungovernable. They pour into the streets screaming about their rights.

And so, in the aftermath of the suppression of the counterculture of the ‘60s, it was decided that the goal of universal public education and the building of a population intelligent enough to run a democracy, that would all be abandoned and the universities would be turned into trade schools and people would be given MBAs and incorporated into the corporate state. But no more John Stuart Mill, no more of that. And the consequences of this have been to create a historyless and illiterate lower middle class, where before the lower middle class was the pool of our intellectual creativity. That's where John Steinbeck came from and Henry Miller and all of the people who drove the evolution of cultural values.

And, you know, we could talk endlessly about what went wrong in the ‘60s or why we were turned into a police state. That now the impulse of those kinds of repressive states is to forestall change. And change has been forestalled in America to the point where now, when it comes, it's going to be explosive, uncontrollable, revolutionary. We will be lucky to get through this political cycle ahead of us without having to hang some of these people.

NIKITA PETROV: This was taped in 1994, I should have mentioned.

GLENN LOURY: Well, yeah, I knew when he said he was 48 years old and he'd been in college in the ‘60s that he was 20, 25 years old. I mean, it sounds a little conspiratorial, a little too precious, a little too, you know, “We are the pure ones who once were in touch with the actual humanistic study of the thing. And now they've all gone crass and commercial.”

I don't like this making a kind of personification out of forces that are perhaps very impersonal, even if the condition that he describes of a mass of buffoons who are being pushed this way and that by large forces is correct. I mean, I think there's merit in the sense of things are pretty fucked up. The idea that “they” are doing it in order to keep “us” from something, that strikes me as apocalyptic talk.

I know this talk, because my brother-in-law—my sister died, sadly, last year, or actually earlier this year—and my brother (I think of him as a brother), I'm gonna call him a conspiracy theorist. He's better than just a flat out conspiracy theorist, but he tends to gravitate toward these overarching, totalistic, they are controlling, these forces, and I don't trust that. That feels sort of apocalyptic and kind of cult-like ways of thinking. I don't like to think like that.

I don't think the description is correct, frankly, that people don't read Hobbes and Voltaire and Mill. It's true, though, that the lower-middle-class masses on the whole are not familiar with those books. I wonder how familiar the lower middle classes ever were with those books. But that's an empirical question about where do intellectuals come from. I'm not denying it, but I remain to be convinced.

NIKITA PETROV: Is there any merit to what he's saying about the change of the universities? Have you seen a change in what is taught?

I have, I have. There's a book. In my course on free inquiry, we teach this book, The Closing of the American Mind. I'm sorry. I forget the author's name at the moment. It'll come to me. Alan Bloom. This is from the ‘80s, where he's lamenting. A less grand statement of the same thesis as William Deresiewicz. He's a guy that's got a book called Excellent Sheep, where he talks about the universities as being factories producing MBAs and whatnot and not really educating people to be agents of critical evaluation of social developments and thinking for themselves, informed by the great books, but able to think for themselves, where all, says Deresiewicz, the universities have become factories of a sort. So I know that sentiment.

Would I agree? Yeah. I mean, he hasn't experienced Title IX, the regulations on sexual inappropriate behavior and whatnot. He hasn't experienced cancel culture where people are not allowed to speak when they have contrary ideas or all of this right-thinking genuflecting that people do when they have to signal that they're all on the right side of history. So I think the state of universities is something to be concerned about. That's why the University of Austin, this new thing that people are talking about... Bari Weiss, what's happened to journalism. Matt Taibbi. So, sure.

Why are you asking me this?

NIKITA PETROV: Well, I listen to Terence McKenna every once in a while, and I've heard him mention this idea. This is parenthetical to his overall range of topics. But because I don't know, I have no idea what the American universities used to be like. And what I know about what they are now is also sort of hearsay. I observe from very far. So I didn't necessarily want McKenna's view to be at center, here.

Okay, so we won't make it about him.

NIKITA PETROV: I've heard two different critiques of how the university system has changed in the last several decades, one from the left, one from the right. From the left, it's like, it's become too commercialized. The students are customers, so they need to be given what they have paid for. They need to be kept comfortable and happy.

Yeah, that's Daniel Bessner.

NIKITA PETROV: So they are not being challenged and so forth. And then, from the right, the notion I've heard is all of these revolutionaries that didn't happen in the ‘60s went into academia and became professors and started preaching their lefty ideas. And here we have all this Neo-Marxism and whatnot. Maybe these two things are happening at the same time. Maybe one of them is not happening at all. But I wanted just to have your view of how the universities have changed and whether you have any ideas for why they've changed in that way.

It's not something I have a whole lot to say about Nikita. I think both claims have a lot of truth to them. I think it is that the class of ‘60s and ‘70s revolutionaries became academics equipped with a kind of postmodern critical sensibility and distrusting of capitalism, of American empire, of so-called white supremacy. This is a latter-day manifestation of it.

And they now do man the heights of the anthropology departments and the sociology departments and the African American studies departments and the history departments. This is David Kaiser, the guy that I've been talking with. And in fact, he could be another person that I could talk with every two or three months. David is a retired historian. He's of my generation, a white guy. We talked about the racial wealth gap a little bit at the newsletter. He's an American historian, but he had also international relations history of American-European affairs. He's a thoughtful guy and, he laments what's happened.

So that certainly has happened, that criticism from the right of the radical Marxian influence. I hate to even throw these words around, because they're cliches. But I think there's merit to the criticism from the left that these are coddled, you know, gotta get the dormitory environment and what's on the menu at the cafeteria and the swimming facilities, and all this kind of consumerist middle, upper middle class... But what's happened to the universities, I think it's gotta be big forces as well that are afoot, and that I don't really claim to understand.

I mean, one response I might have is to talk about my own experience within the university as a teacher. Because, on the outside, a lot of the critics of what's happening in the university are certainly correct that we've kind of lost our way and the passion for knowing and learning and so on. But there are pockets of exquisite devotion to the life of the mind. And I think I'm fortunate to be able to experience that in my own classes.

I just give one example from this semester's course on race and inequality, where I've been holding forth as an anti-wokester. I've been holding forth against Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and so forth. I have their readings on the list, but I try to rebut them vigorously. And I've been pushing my line, the line that you hear me and John McWhorter talking about all the time at The Glenn Show. And I'm looking for pushback. And when their papers come in, sometimes the pushback is really very thoughtful, and I engage in back and forth with them in responding to the papers.

That was at midterm. Now we're at the final papers, and I ask each one of them, these are 34 students, to have a conversation with me about what they propose to do in their final papers. And I find that they are all over the place, interesting. They want to raise questions. They want to delve deeper. They're creative. They're thoughtful. I could give examples. I mean, we're talking about police-black community relations and whatnot. And one kid wants to look at the relationship between anti-racism as applied in college admissions and anti-racism as it would work out in who gets sent to jail. And if we're concerned about racial disproportion in who goes to the colleges, and we want to have affirmative action, would it make any sense whatsoever to have any kind of intervention in the criminal justice system that was oriented toward promoting racial balance? And he realizes that it would not make sense. And then he wants to know why.

What are the ethical intuitions that vary as between these two different venues, higher education admissions on the one hand and lower education—that is, prison admissions—on the other? Where we're prepared to tolerate racial disparity without intervention on the one hand, the latter, but not in the former leads to various kind of interesting philosophical things. I just give one example, but I'm just saying it's not as if we're not having that discussion in the university, or people are not being challenged in the university to pursue these ideas in depth. I'm doing it with my own students in my own classes.