A Confession of Faith: Notes Toward a New Humanism (original) (raw)

Death of the Soul: Critical Essays on the University

Authored By Thomas S. Martin Thomas Martin’s collection of essays, both satirical and pointed, are gathered from his dissident campus newsletter The Examined Life, founded with the purpose of critiquing the life of the secular university at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). The Medieval foundations of the university much preceded today’s universities which, by becoming secular, have cut off their roots. Although created as one body which recognizes and accepts man’s natural rights aimed at the common good, it has become a multi-bodied, ever progressive, forward-looking creation, bound to the beat of the ideology that there is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. It is important to remember that word “university” houses an idea that comes from the Latin universum, which in turn grew from the neuter of universus, the base from which the word ‘universe’ evolved, meaning the whole body of things and phenomena observed or postulated. A university, therefore, allows for the democracy of the dead rather than merely the oligarchy of the living who just happen to be walking around. When our intellectual ancestors are given an equal voice in the formation of the minds of students, those students have the potential to be moved by principles, be virtuous and maybe, even be wise. Also available in e-book format for Apple and Kindle.

The Rhetoric of Religion Within the "Ruins of the University"

Abstract The objective of the article is to legitimise studies concerned with religion within a radically changed perspective on the university. It is argued that if studies concerning religion are located in an interactional philosophy of meaning instead of continuing in an objectivistic philosophy of meaning, they participate naturally in disciplinary conversations conducted in a university set upon social engagement. Both the fields of religion and the university have been approached from the theoretical perspective of rhetoric. The first part of the article explores the 'symbolic construction of social reality', and functions as a theoretical point of departure on which the argumentation of the following two sections, entitled 'From a "Uni"-versity to a "Multi"-versity' and 'The study of Religion in the university of dissensus', elaborates. It is indicated that the demise o fa unifying principle emanating from the modern university requires a shift from constative structures of meaning to performative structures of meaning, enabling the university to be yet another locus in a heterogeneous society where discourses of knowledge can be produced and exchanged. The final section argues that if the rhetoricity of religious discourses is recognised and acknowledged, the field of study not only expands, but the university of dissensus becomes the appropriate site for this exchange of knowledge.

History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University

Education as Civic Engagement, 2012

Much of our talk about the university centers on "the idea of the university." The idea of the university has a formidable history in the humanities, from its classical expression in Kant's Conflict of the Faculties (1798) and Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University (1854) up to contemporary revisions such as Bill Readings' University in Ruins (1996) and Jacques Derrida's "The University without Condition" (2002). This lineage-what I'll call "ideadiscourse"-is a quintessential humanistic domain and, especially for those of us in literary studies, it tends to govern our analyses ofthe university. For instance, assessing the state of the university, Hillis Miller adduces: Something drastic is happening to the university. The university is losing its idea, the guiding mission that has sustained it since the early nineteenth century when, in Germany, the modern research university was invented. Newman's The Idea of the University [sic] expounded for English readers both this concept of the university and, among other things, the place of literary study in such a university .... The new university that is coming into being lacks such a supervising concept. In place of the university governed by an idea is rapidly being put what Bill Readings calls the university of "excellence" ... [which] names an empty tautology. (45)

The Idea of the University

Springer briefs in education, 2022

This chapter explores some of the key issues that have beset English universities in the twenty first century with a summary of some key areas in Ricoeur's early philosophy and interventions in the 1960s. Comparisons and contrasts are made from the 1960s with current debates about free speech on campus in England: complaints from 2017 to 2022 from outside the university about both more and less free speech have multiplied, whilst there has been increasingly less discussion inside the university about how to converse well. Equality, diversity and inclusion are policy labels that are in conflict with Prevent, the UK's counterterror programme targeted at 'extremist' ideas that are nonetheless lawful. Keywords EDI • Habermas • Hallaq • Prevent • 'Woke' 2.1 The University as Marketplace In his 1968 preface to Conceptions de l'université (Designing the University), Paul Ricoeur quoted with approval Karl Jaspers' assertion that the university must be a place where teachers and their students can search for the truth together without constraint (Ricoeur 1968a, 10); but Ricoeur wondered if this idea was becoming problematic. He further mused that even if we decided this idea was not being upheld in good faith by European governments, it would still be necessary to retain the university, in order for us to be able to interrogate the possibility of free thought. He was optimistic that everyone should have access to university to discuss ideas openly. Fifty years on we are compelled to ask whether the university is still recognisable as a place for ideas and varieties of truth: 'the pursuit of truth,' Abdal Hakim Murad reflects, 'now seems set at the margins, thanks to the monetizing of the academy, or because of hyper specialisation and weak interdisciplinarity, or because of the ambient post-modernising culture in which the pursuit of truth is simply dismissed as a fool's errand' (Murad 2020, 237). There are many instructive contrasts between Ricoeur's dually idealistic and pragmatic understanding of the liberal university campus in 1968, and its realities in

Humanists and the Public University

The financial crisis of 2008 plunged much of the world's economy into recession. Having bailed out the bankers, politicians across the world and political spectrum embraced austerity programs that have had devastating effects on many publicly funded programs. Higher education has been particularly subject to significant cuts in funding, most dramatically in England, where the university teaching grant for the arts, humanities, and social sciences has been entirely removed, and the grant for all other areas has been reduced by 80 percent. The disinvestment from and restructuring of the publicly funded university may take many locally specific forms, but it is a transnational phenomenon that stretches across the Americas, Europe, Russia and its former colonies, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Australasia. 1 How do we name and characterize this process? There is no shortage of terms used to describe the nature of the contemporary public universitymanagerial, corporate, business, marketized, privatized, postacademic. Taken together, these terms can be understood to reference a general process of neoliberal restructuring that is credited with transforming almost all domains of social, cultural, political, and economic life across much of the world. 2 The intellectual genealogies of neoliberalism broadly conceived stretch back to the 1940s, its economic policies as well as the broader practices of marketization to the structural adjustment programs of the 1970s, and their political mobilization by the new right during the 1980s. Neoliberalism promotes a consumerist view of education that resignifies it as a private investment instead of a public good. It repositions the university as a business whose primary purpose is to drive economic growth and whose activities are expected to be profitable. As such, its mission is increasingly oriented toward servicing a private sector whose 1 a b s t r ac t The precarity of the humanities today is symptomatic of the broader reassessment of the value and utility of the public university. This helps explain the prevalent role of humanists in the recent struggles for public education, but it now also demands from humanists a new level of institutional engagement and reflexivity about the conditions of their labor. R e p r e s e n tat i o n s 116. Fall 2011