Writing forty years ago in The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith called on academics and intellectuals to seize the mantle of national leadership which at that time (he said) was in the hands of a bipartisan coalition of corporate managers, union officials, and machine politicians. Galbraith feared that these conventional leaders had defined the goals of the industrial system too narrowly in terms of production, consumption, and employment when in fact a much broader vision was needed to direct the goals of the new economy toward aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual interests such that the lives of the American people might be elevated above mere work and consumption. Noting their growing influence within the Democratic Party and the increasing activism of students and faculty, Galbraith concluded that the colleges and universities of the nation were well-positioned to exercise political leadership in the name of those humane ideals that were expressed in the academic curricula and research programs of the time.

While Galbraith sought to harness academic humanism to the purposes of liberal politics, campus radicals tried to do something similar to augment the influence of the “New Left.” In the Port Huron Statement, written in 1962, the founders of a new campus organization, Students for a Democratic Society, decried the loss of meaning and humane ideals in a consumer-driven economy. “The goal of man and society,” the students wrote, “should be human independence: a concern not with image but with finding a meaning in life that is