Liberal Arts and Sciences in a Changing Region (original) (raw)
The Institution in the Mind_Final.May15.2016.docx
There is no shortage of works in higher education ready to diagnose the problems of modern universities and colleges and to predict their demise. It is fair to say that no institution, outside of Congress, comes up for more criticism today than schools and the charges levelled against colleges are often quite severe. 1 Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, for example, in their provocatively titled work, Higher Education?:
The Task of the Liberal Arts in Troubled Times
Heterodox Academy Blog, 2020
As universities reconvene after a summer of protests around race and policing in America, many of us are questioning what our response in higher education should be. As citizens we contribute in many ways, but as scholars the most important contributions we can make to a nation in turmoil lie not in the actions or even the stands that we take but in slowing down and asking the right questions, often the questions that no one is asking, listening especially to the voices that the prevailing opinion within our own social bubble is inclined to scorn and to exclude, and creating constructive dialogue between diverse and even clashing perspectives. Our task is to be more helpfully relevant precisely by stepping back and being more deeply reflective.
The Post-Welfare State University
American Literary History, 2006
Throughout its history, the American university has been a makeshift institution, incorporating various models at hand and adapting to different social needs. Though one might trace its roots to the cloister of the medieval university, it developed according to the iconoclasm of Protestant sects, dotting the land through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with Congregationalist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist colleges and serving the need of producing literate ministers. Though the American university inherited the classical curriculum of Oxbridge, it adopted the model of central administration from the Scottish university, by which a president ruled, often as the only professor (aided by one or two tutors) in the early college and later ceding his teaching duties to captain the entire enterprise. Though it borrowed from the model of the German research university in the later nineteenth century, the US university expanded to include applied disciplines like agriculture and engineering and professional schools like medicine and law, shifting from the training of ministers to the training of engineers and professionals of the great Industrial Age. And though it has always adverted to high-minded pursuits, it has consistently negotiated with business, particularly from the late nineteenth century on, in the training it has offered its students, in the mission it has promised its constituents, in the practical use of the knowledge it has produced, and in the sources of its funding. 1 Sometimes, in accounts of the university, it seems as if the university has developed from a singular and continuous "idea," arising full-fledged from Cardinal Newman's Idea of the University (1852) or Kant's Conflict of the Faculties (1798). But, in the actual history of the American university, if there is a principle, it is adaptability. One can trace five moments punctuating the plot of the American university, the moments ceding to the next sometimes in a gradual evolution and sometimes in a precipitous shift. The first was the sectarian college, which was small, structured like a boarding school
One of the central ideas in a democracy is the greatness of the ordinary person. The Italian aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, called this in Democracy in America, "The natural grandeur of man" (de Tocqueville 14), and in the book, The Future of American Progressivism, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West write, "The most potent and fundamental strand in the American religion of possibility: Faith in the genius of ordinary men and women" (Unger & West, 11). America, as a democratic project, has employed this ideal, as one of its principal beliefs. Unger and West continue, "Faith in the capacity of ordinary people to solve practical problems has been one of the most striking characteristics of the [United States]" (Unger & West, 20). The libertarian historian, Charles Murray, agrees. In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, he argues that the squandering of the ordinary working class majority has been a driving force in the "coming apart" of American society. He argues that the majority working class has been left with economic instability and an uncertain future, while the corporate, educated, and creative elites are enjoying more wealth than ever before. Murray writes, "The poor didn't actually get poorer-the growth of in-kind benefits and earned-income tax credits more than made up the drop in pretax cash income-but they didn't improve their position much either. Real family income for families in the middle was flat. Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970 to 2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution" (Murray 50). Unger, too, believes that there is misused potential of ordinary citizens within the American project. The professor writes in The Left Alternative, that we need to engage the practical and the spiritual side of people in order "to make better use of everyone's dormant energies and to establish in the mind of the ordinary man and woman the idea and the experience of their own power" (Unger 95). The goal of democracy, therefore, is to tap into the greatness of the ordinary person's energies and provide them, collectively, with the agency to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives as part of a larger political body. There is consensus between the traditional and modern, the conservative and progressive, that there is untapped potential in the ordinary American. But the reasons and solutions philosophers, historians, and academics, conclude with, are diverse. For example, Murray concludes that the greatest reason for the increasing divisiveness between America's upper and lower classes, which is tearing the nation's fabric apart, is that there is no longer a shared sense of virtues. Murray argues that the nation's virtues were formed by the founding fathers and are: religiosity, industriousness, honesty and marriage. He argues these virtues laid the groundwork that contributed to the country's monumental growth and warns that the ruling upper class have suffered a "collapse of confidence in codes and honorable behaviour" (Murray 291). There are concerns, however, with Murray's argument. Murray, who is considered a white nationalist, 1 might be read as sympathizing and upholding periods in the nation's history (colonial and pre-civil rights) that were ruled and dominated by white European men. Cornel West writes in 1 Krantz, Laura, 'Bell Curve' author attacked by protesters at Middlebury College, Boston Globe, March 05, 2017.
Panel on "Dangerous Minds and the University"
My contribution to a discussion of my DANGEROUS MINDS book taking place at a conference on "The State of Political Philosophy in Canada" being held in Huntsville, Ontario on August 20th-21st, 2024.