New York Intellect

By Thomas Bender

Knopf Press; 422 pp.; $25

What saves Thomas Bender's history of New York intellectuals is that it is not just a history. The chapters on colonial New York make mountains out of intellectual molehills, as Bender imbues small social clubs--with grandiose missions and Latin mottos--with meaning well beyond what they deserve.

We all know that things didn't get going, intellectually speaking, in the great metropolis until a century later. But Bender doesn't focus on these early years. Rather, he uses the colonial history to underline the central choice for New York intellectuals: whether to be isolated academics or cosmopolitan thinkers.

Bender illustrates the tension between the two options with short yet detailed biographies of key New York intellectuals. He follows career changes, from professor to magazine editor, government official to man about town.

Using these lives as a capacious data base, Bender claims that New York is America's only possible intellectual salvation. Only a large, bustling and--most important--creative metropolis can lure professors back to the People. Only New York City, he argues for 300-plus pages, can sully the pristine Ivory tower and in the process end higher education's self-satisfaction and utter irrelevence.

But what is the opposing historical force that leads intellectuals astray? College towns like Cambridge, whose populations fluctuate with the academic calendar. In fact, New York Intellect can be viewed as a history of the academization of intellectuals as much as anything else.

Occasionally, Bender drops his guard and lets loose with lines like this one from the prologue, which describes the writings of an 18th-century New Yorker, Adam Furguson:

"Though it is, of course, impossible, Furguson seems to have anticipated the academization of knowledge and art in our time...[like an] academic social science that can, as it recently did at Harvard University, explicitly dismiss scholarship that engages deeply felt issues in the common life in the public and accessible language of that life."

But Bender has little interest with college towns, which are ultimately dismissed as the 99-pound-weaklings of urban America. The heart of the book, rather, is a discussion of the three major schools in New York--the elite Columbia (founded in 1754 as Kings College), the alternative New York University (founded in 1831), and the public City College (founded in 1866)--and how each tried to balance the academy against the unavoidable democratic influences of the city around it.

As Bender follows Columbia's history, he tells a tale of how, in the late 1800s, higher education became more important to society but never capitulated to the code of the surrounding streets. Change would have meant a more open admissions policy and a more independent faculty, but Columbia resisted change. It's an incredible story, albeit a disheartening one.

In 1871 there were only 31 graduates from Columbia. Those few did become the city's elite--but with such a limited enrollment, New York could easily ignore Columbia.

Over the next few decades, Columbia became the school it is today, complete with a large uptown campus. But with an admissions process that discrimated against immigrant Jews and other lower-class New Yorkers, Columbia's student body did not represent the city's changing population. Under reactionary University president Nicholas Butler, Columbia had to become more wily.

"As the numbers of Jewish students increased, Columbia, in concert with other leading private universities, redifined academic prestige. Butler developed the notion of 'selective admission,' a concept that turned the old basis of prestige on its head. Now the sign of leadership was the number of qualified students turned away."