Culture Wars in the Ivory Tower: Notes from the Mission Fields of Liberal Education

On September 11-12, 2015 a conference was held at Amsterdam University College (NL) entitled “Liberal Arts and Sciences and Core Texts in the European Context.” Just the language on the announcement was enough to make me wistful—it was like a breath of fresh pedagogical air blowing in from the homeland of liberal higher education, carrying along with it the fragrances of other, richer, liberal ideas about teaching and learning and knowledge – greater ideas grounded in greater texts.

            According to the AUC conference program, the European higher educational environment is in need of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

“Over the last century, European universities have evolved to become advanced research institutions, mainly offering academic training in specialized disciplines. The Bologna process that started in the late nineties encouraged European institutions of higher education to broaden their curricula and to commit to undergraduate education with increased vigor. One of the results of this development is that Europe is currently witnessing a proliferation of Liberal Arts and Sciences colleges and broad bachelor degrees. 

                  Within this approach to undergraduate education, courses that involve core texts – i.e. classic texts from philosophical, historical, literary or cultural traditions – are gaining significance. Core texts, involving “the best that has been written” meet the challenges of modern higher education in a unique way. They not only develop the student’s philosophical, analytical, literary, and general reading skills, but they also suspend the concerns of the moment while opening up new normative, literary, psychological, philosophical, or political horizons. Core texts have the potential to draw students out of their intellectual comfort zone, challenging their own beliefs and opinions. As such, these texts constitute an important part of a genuinely liberal education.”

The first presentation at this AUC conference was entitled, “The Spirit of Liberal Learning: A Reflection on the Cowan Method of Teaching the Liberal Arts,” a title that probably left more than one attendee initially scratching the proverbial pate. I was not in attendance at the conference, so I can only suppose that this panelist’s reflection was based at least partially on the work of Donald Cowan, professor of physics and past president of the University of Dallas (TX), whose ideas about education are concisely reflected in his short text, “Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age.” But any reflection “on the Cowan Method of Teaching the Liberal Arts” should certainly not have bypassed Dr. Louise Cowan, who was the Dean of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas (TX), the interdisciplinary graduate school alma mater for both this Phrontisterion philosopher and DAW.

            Caveat lector: The Reader will discover in this reflection a clear preference for the interdisciplinary humanities curriculum as the best corrector to the more mechanical (less “liberal”) examples of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LA&S) curricula normally on offer in undergraduate education, both in Europe and in America.

           

Donald and Louise Cowan were the intellectual and dynamic impetus behind the rather exceptional educational initiative embodied by the interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Dallas. As it says on the website for the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts:

“From the beginning this program has been deservedly called unique. No other university offers an interdisciplinary Ph.D. with a core curriculum in which students from the different fields within the humanities participate as a group. Each semester for three years all the students in the program share one of six core courses, each devoted to pivotal texts within Western civilization. Students belong to a true, cross-disciplinary intellectual community, using insights gained from the study of each other's disciplines to deepen their knowledge of their own.”

The Cowan vision of interdisciplinary humanities is akin to a great library full of books. But in this library the books would not necessarily have to be arranged according to subject, but instead, perhaps, according to a quasi anti-Dewey decimal system inspired by both the chrono-linear strands of historical thinking and imagery, and by the constellatory manner of ideas and values meeting at serendipitous crossroads in the ebb and flow of human experience. This interdisciplinary library would, perhaps, be oriented more like and would therefore be more truly similar in organization to the Synopticon volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World.

            Like the simile of this great library, teaching that is inspired by a vision of interdisciplinarity is, as well, characterized both by an attention to detail that is intense, particular, and focused, and yet also of enormous breadth and wonderfully rich in moral compass.

Dr. Louise Cowan interviewed this pre-Phrontisterion student of the philosophical life in 1977 as part of the admittance process into the at-that-time young-ish Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts, the graduate school of Humanities at the University of Dallas. At that time all graduate students in the Liberal Arts studied Literature –it was Dr. Louise’s area of study (Southern Literature, e.g., Falkner, Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Alan Tate, Caroline Gordon); my other two choice areas were Philosophy and Theology. It was a successful first interview, obviously, because I was admitted to the PhD program, although I left the program with an MA after three semesters and moved on to other adventures in European universities. But it was an odd interview right from the beginning, following Dr. Louise’s observation that it was, in her experience, unusual for students to mix Literature, Philosophy, and Theology at UD. Southern Literature, Phenomenological Philosophy, and conservative Catholic Theology: I would only grasp well after the fact what could be so unusual about that interdisciplinary constellation.

Be that as it may, however, and leaving behind for the nonce the AUC conference ideas of Interdisciplinarity and Core Courses and Core Texts, the European incarnations of the LA&S model of undergraduate education seem, in the main, to resemble many of their North American counterparts, which means that either they do not address, or they address inadequately, the nature of interdisciplinarity in liberal education. This is to say that while the European models of LA&S education still focus on essential academic skills specific to the various academic disciplines of the Arts and the Sciences, as do the vast majority of all universities, the way in which curricula is presented in these LA&S models generally fail either to deliver or to adequately frame those academic skills within a philosophically expanded frame of liberal values. The go-to website for the general mission of LA&S programs in Europe is ECOLAS, the consortium of European Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

            The site topuniversities.com defines the liberal arts degree program as “interdisciplinary, covering topics with the humanities, as well as social, natural and formal sciences. […] In general, … the term refers to degree programs that aim to provide a broader spectrum of knowledge and skills.” By and large, however, the most common model for a LA&S education in undergraduate universities looks in structure a lot like academic warehousing, without any meaningful connection between the academic disciplines. It is as if one had the idea that, just because an institution gives office space to a philosopher among the scientists and social scientists, this proximity somehow implies an intellectual, or even simply an academic connection between the different academic players and their academic subjects. Nothing could be further from the truth, or from real practice.

            It is accurate to say, in general, that proponents of the LA&S model of undergraduate education, both American and their European counterparts (e.g., Erasmus University Rotterdam, University College Freiburg, University College Utrecht and University College Roosevelt), claim a certain degree of distinction for this undergraduate model by virtue of its curriculum being different from (read: broader than) the classical monodisciplinarity (UCR coinage) of the more traditional non-LA&S university programs. However, notwithstanding the regular occurrence of the concept of “interdisciplinarity” on their various websites, it is easy enough to discover that, by and large, traditional curricular monodisciplinarity has really only been replaced with some version of serial monodisciplinarity in these LA&S instantiations –the mechanical juxtaposition of otherwise traditionally insular academic disciplines, where possible subjects for study are simply housed together in one location.

            Reasonably, therefore, this all-too common version of the LA&S educational model is still often challenged to make its case to the European educational community at large, that its warehouse educational model in fact offers some prima fascia educational advantage in a world environment that is in dire need of true interdisciplinarity.

According to guidelines from the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (US), the undergraduate LA&S model is not inherently interdisciplinary, but simply multi-disciplinary. An LA&S program, therefore, does not guarantee any unifying thematic among the academic subjects unless some additional pedagogical mechanism is deliberately introduced into the curriculum to tease out intellectual links, and through their articulation, to integrate those links among and between the various academic disciplines (i.e., Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Formal Sciences). “Multidisciplinary activities draw upon insights from two or more disciplines. Unlike interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary activities, though, multidisciplinarity simply juxtaposes these insights and does not attempt to integrate them.”

            It follows, then, that an undergraduate LA&S program structured around the concept of serial monodisciplinarity is, pedagogically speaking, no more intrinsically advantageous than housing a classical philosopher among scientists and social scientists, or shopping at the local grocery story where one can buy any number of unrelated products, from canned foods to children’s toys.

            There are, however, curricular mechanisms to help overcome structural insularity among academic disciplines and to encourage institutional interdisciplinarity in undergraduate LA&S teaching schemes. Among these curricular “fixes” could be 1) for an institution to employ faculty who have themselves received their education and training in an interdisciplinary LA&S program; 2) for an institution to encourage interdisciplinarity during the process of course/curricular creation, and in faculty interaction and intellectual cooperation, which might look like the establishment of a core curriculum or, as in the case of Bard College, a First-Year Seminar in The Language and Thinking Program; or 3) for an institution to implement some kind of capstone concept (or in the case of Bard College, a pre-enrollment seminar) in order for the student to be encouraged to reflect upon, not the specific discipline-specific content actually learned and studied during the undergraduate education, but rather on the conceptual (hence interdisciplinary and liberal) link between the various academic disciplines in the undergraduate LA&S learning experience. It should be noted that many of these curricular mechanisms are essentially band-aid fixes, however, each of which has some strengths, but also significant learning-outcomes based weaknesses.

To conclude with our metaphor of learning and shopping: there is no inherent or necessary link between the various subjects/items the student/shopper may ultimately select, either to study in LA&S or to purchase in the store. Most incarnations of the LA&S idea are simply a warehousing of a bunch of different products in the same building and under one roof: when one enters such a storehouse, one walks down one aisle to find cereal products, another for meats, another for beverages. When applied to education, this analogy looks like faculty corridors filled with academics—scientists housed with scientists, social scientists with social sciences, and the various humanities folks scattered hither and yon.

            The curricular juxtaposition of courses in the LA&S model is multidisciplinarity, that is to say, functionally, a serial monodisciplinarity, which does not equate to interdisciplinarity. True interdisciplinarity among academic subjects implies the establishment of some kind of meaningful intellectual connection between and among the various disciplines of the academy—as it were: a Great Conversation following out its various strands among the academic disciplines. And while the interdisciplinary curriculum clearly represents the very best embodiment of the LA&S model for undergraduate education, there is certainly no doubt that the Liberal Arts & Sciences model of education is a very big curricular idea, and worthy; and European institutions seeking to discover a more thoughtful and thought-provoking curriculum for undergraduate education should definitely commit to the LA&S model if they are interested in creating future citizens of Europe who will at least have some degree of formal experience and competence in how to think globally about themselves in history.

One of the great dark clouds that lingers heavy-handedly over the Ivory Tower, threatening regularly to bring in with it rocky weather, has to do with the question of Academic Research. This is, in essence, a culture war in the academy. And the indisputable winners in the perception contest are the sciences and social sciences, (irony follows:) which are obviously of much more value not only to the Academy, but to the world, than philosophy (and other humanities), as evidenced by that fact that the sciences are regularly funded and solicited by the Hoity-Toity of industry, the private sector, and beyond. For the most part, humanities gets funded to whatever degree it can disguise itself (or its research methods) as one of the sciences, but it is generally perceived to be an “also ran” in the race for academic recognition and funding.

RESEARCH –Ubi desinit philosophus, ibi incipit medicus.

Once upon a time this Latin adage held sway in the academy: “Where the philosopher stops, there commences the physician.” It comes down to us from an original Aristotelian sentiment via the Latinized philosophers of the Middle Ages & Renaissance, landing with a plop in the mouth of the alchemist Doctor Faustus, a character translated through the Northern Humanist world of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Those were the days of the academy when the classical perception of the humanist philosopher, perhaps like the psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, was at work gnawing on the bone of an idea with her nose in a book, alone in her shabby digs, or haunting used-book stores in search of general resources, or even (heaven forefend…), when driven by necessity, searching through the university library databases—a philosopher-detective sifting through the diverse worlds of the historians, the linguists & literati, the religious minds of the East and the West, the philosophers, critics, and scholars of any ilk, to discover who had left their scent on that bone. The quality of the published thinking that resulted from such a winding chase was directly linked to the breadth and depth of the education, the erudition, as well as to the intuition and luck of the scholar.

            Now, although one would not normally suspect the STANFORD HUMANITIES CENTER of being given to mawkish nostalgia, they continue to follow along this traditional path of defining research in the Humanities as often involving “an individual professor researching in a library in order to write a book. The books that result from this study are part of an ongoing dialogue about the meaning and possibilities of human existence that reaches back to ancient times and looks forward to our common future.”

            A similar notion of research in the Humanities is evident in UCLA’s Undergraduate Research Center – Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, where one reads that

Research in the humanities can take a variety of forms; it might include studying language, literature, philosophy, religion, culture, and many other disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. The study of the humanities is often described as the study of the human experience.

                  Researchers may interpret texts, films, artworks, music, language, cultural practices, and many other topics and questions.

At the website of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison one may also read that

The main mission of the Institute for Research in the Humanities is to foster research in the humanities by creating a stimulating, interdisciplinary community in which fellows can pursue their work, share it with other fellows and members of the campus, and benefit from intensive discussion with scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, fields, interests, and perspectives. We also promote greater understanding of the humanities on campus and build bridges between the humanities and the arts, social sciences, and sciences. Working closely with the Center for the Humanities and other campus centers and institutes, we encourage innovative, broad-ranging, and collaborative research in and thinking about the humanities for the twenty-first century.

In these different “centers” for the humanities in North America, which continue to represent the most traditional aspects of the liberal A&S model of undergraduate education, it is still possible to discover the older tradition of the humanist scholar from the artes liberales. Within the European context of humanities in the LA&S, however, this type of scholar seems to be ever-more relegated to a closet for species long extinct; and theory or theoretical knowledge—thinking—is stringently subjugated to the financial constraints and practical demands and expectations of predominately empirical, i.e., positivist, research traditions and methods of discovery. The halcyon days of theoretical research, when humanities scholars pursued their solitary visions through the highways and byways of erudition and scholarship within the confines of the Ivory Tower, are rapidly fading away in the schematized environment of European universities who yield the field and the day to “practical” research goals and a highly “scientized” vision of University.

            Now in trying to determine what scientism is, and whether it represents a worthwhile and therefore positive advancement in the academy, Thomas Burnett traces the history of this idea on the site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and concludes in favor of philosopher Tom Sorell’s (University of Warwick) rather precise albeit uncomplimentary definition of this phenomenon: “Scientism is a matter of putting too high a value on natural science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture.”

            But for confirmation of the European academy’s commitment to scientism, one need only look for common characterizations of what it means to do academic research to discover that positivist research completely eclipses theoretical research. The website of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), for example, which is the prime funding organization in the Netherlands for academic research, stipulates that the product of research has a value, and is measurable—quantifiable by the usefulness of that product “outside of academia and/or in other scientific disciplines.” The NWO website goes on to suggest as viable examples of humanities research projects, those that might “contribute to solutions for societal and scientific challenges like integration, the ageing population, healthcare, and security.” These potentially fundable “humanities” projects, of course, are not humanities at all, but rather social science or even perhaps science projects in drag.

            It goes without saying that with such a positivist research vision and scheme, the imagination strains to conceive how the NWO applicant could invent some such practical application for more liberal research, whose titles might range from "Nietzsche and his Zarathustra: A Western Poet's Transformation of an Eastern Priest and Prophet," and "Nietzsche's Zarathustra: The Misreading of a Hero," to "Hermeneia. An Anatomy of History and Ab-wesenheit." The tone has been set; and it is patently obvious that these latterly named titles do not constitute academic research in this positivist academy.

Excursus in the guise of a response to the academy of positivist scholarship.

            Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a philosopher and scientist, and most scholars are of the opinion that he established the methodological foundations for scientia broadly conceived. Correctly so. It is in fact for this rather singular feat that he was eventually placed (twice!) on the index of the Catholic Church (in the Condemnations of 1210 and reiterated in 1270) – not to be read on pain of excommunication!

            Now while Aristotle definitely argued that the empirical sciences were certainly the most authoritative means of gaining knowledge about particulars, i.e., the physical stuff of the world (Metaphysics 981b13) –at this point quantifying and qualifying colleagues in the sciences and social sciences should be paying attention—he concluded that none of these materially or empirically grounded sciences would lead to wisdom or discernment—(sophia) latin = sapientia, and that the knowledge of speculative or theoretical wisdom was of higher worth than the knowledge of observable ‘facts’.  So Aristotle held that scientia must be framed by sapientia in order to have the highest value for men (981a24-25), arguing that “knowledge (εἰδέναι) and understanding (ἐπαΐειν) belong to art (τέχνῃ = in the sense of ‘speculative thinking’) rather than to experience (empiricism), and we suppose artists (speculative thinkers) to be wiser than men of experience (material scientists) (which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge).”         
            Aristotle’s philosophical reasoning is the source both for the ‘artes’ concept behind the artes liberales, and for the liberales bit as well. This art or tekne of understanding, which (spoiler alert) Aristotle defines as the philosophy of first causes and the very highest of the sciences, does not derive its status from quantifying and qualifying data or information (simple empiricism), but rather from thinking specifically about all knowledge as it is framed by the intelligible world that surrounds it (Wissenschaft broadly conceived). Ecce philosophia, as some variation on Nietzsche could have said but never did.

Step I. Metaphysics 981a30-981b2 & 981b13. Aristotle reasons in favor of “arts & sciences” understanding, liberally. As a method of discovery, empiricism (positivism) is limited; it does not have the ‘artful’ quality necessary to lead one to understanding or wisdom. Loosely translated, this means that Science needs Philosophy (speculation of a theoretical nature) in order to produce comprehension that has value. (Translation by David Ross)

“If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.) But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not. For men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the 'why' and the cause.”  

“Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the 'why' of anything-e.g., why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.”

Step II. 981b30-982a1 & 982b10. Theoretical kinds of knowledge have more of the nature of understanding than productive kinds of knowledge. So, while knowledge that is intended to create or produce something, such as data, formulae, houses, et al, is obviously enormously useful, it is a mistake to measure the value of knowledge strictly, or even primarily, in terms of its practical utility.

“…all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive.”

ὁ μὲν ἔμπειρος τῶν ὁποιανοῦν ἐχόντων αἴσθησιν εἶναι δοκεῖ (30)

σοφώτερος, ὁ δὲ τεχνίτης τῶν ἐμπείρων, χειροτέχνου δὲ ἀρ‑

(982a.) χιτέκτων, αἱ δὲ θεωρητικαὶ τῶν ποιητικῶν μᾶλλον.

"That [the type of knowledge we are looking for] is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.”

Ὅτι δ’ οὐ ποιητική, δῆλον καὶ ἐκ τῶν πρώτων φιλοσοφη‑

σάντων· διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαυμάζειν οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ νῦν καὶ

τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν,

Conclusion. Aristotle clearly affirms that the highest form of understanding derives from a cross-fertilizing idea of knowledge, where practical knowledge is inseparably wed to theoretical understanding, and indeed, where the practical derives its essential value from the theoretical. This is precisely the vision that has served as the historical foundation for the academic tradition of the liberal Arts & Sciences. Many of the missteps and moral dilemmas created by the application and mis-application of scientific knowledge, especially in more recent history, could perhaps have been avoided if the knowledge gleaned by scientists had also been tempered by the understanding of philosophers, if scientific knowledge in the Ivory Tower had not been systemically unharnessed from the premise of thinking—from what Aristotle would call, philosophical understanding. I have argued elsewhere that knowledge, by which I meant knowledge obtained empirically, is a “neutral quantity,” but that “the applications of all knowledge… are never neutral.” Hence our various missteps and dilemmas.

            Instead of simply teaching insular academic skills under the cover of LA&S, the best interdisciplinary models for the LA&S curriculum, such as the Cowan Method of Teaching the Liberal Arts, provide for an education that includes not only academically essential and discipline specific skills, but which also teaches those skills in terms of a philosophically enriched environment and a values-oriented intellectual core. Who knows… perhaps the NWO could adopt a new criterion in its assessment of the value of research: What would Aristotle think of this scientific project?

Further Reading:

·      On what it means to be educated… David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS

·      The Nuremberg Code: “The judgment by the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg laid down 10 standards to which physicians must conform when carrying out experiments on human subjects in a new code that is now accepted worldwide.”

·      Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (NY: Crown Publishers, 2001)

·      R. J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors. Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (NY: Basic Books, 1986)