“Governor,” a reporter asked, “what is an intellectual luxury?”
Reagan described a four-credit course at the University of California at Davis on organizing demonstrations. “I figure that carrying a picket sign is sort of like, oh, a lot of things you pick up naturally,” he said, “like learning how to swim by falling off the end of a dock.”
Whole academic programs in California and across the country he found similarly suspect. Taxpayers, he said, shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.”
That phrase quickly brought Reagan scorn. The following week the Los Angeles Times editorial page warned that his budget cuts and “tampering” with higher education threatened to create second-rate institutions.
“If a university is not a place where intellectual curiosity is to be encouraged, and subsidized,” the editors wrote, “then it is nothing.”
The Times was giving voice to the ideal of liberal education, in which college is a vehicle for intellectual development, for cultivating a flexible mind, and, no matter the focus of study, for fostering a broad set of knowledge and skills whose value is not always immediately apparent.
Reagan was staking out a competing vision. Learning for learning’s sake might be nice, but the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay for it. A higher education should prepare students for jobs.
Those two theories had long existed in uneasy equilibrium. On that day in 1967, the balance started to tip toward utility in ways not even Reagan may have anticipated.