Phrontisterion: Liberal Education et al

030519_Liberal Arts & Sciences... and STEM: An argument for the marriage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2XPF6rQ6fs&fbclid=IwAR25yNzl5JsrQi-yC_mhKkvm3RJZe8aq8ImHX3Buvy78M2waKFO7mT2BxhI

280118_Many university teaching faculty would not quarrel with the statement that there has always been too much credit/credence given to student assessment, which necessarily includes a review of teaching evaluations. Some institutions of higher learning in the Netherlands are now even requiring faculty to respond to specific questions from their student evaluations in writing, and to communicate their responses to the students in those classes.

But now the research is in. The link is from David Eubanks' article, who is assistant vice president for assessment and institutional effectiveness at Furman University.

Some highlights from the Chronicle of Higher Education's review:

"It turns out that the assessment program your college imposed on you was probably never going to improve anything. A new article by an assessment insider explains why this is so and suggests that assessors have known for sometime now that assessment does not work."
"The bad news (for assessment) is that getting to those meaningful conclusions [about student learning] requires a specific type of expertise and far more time and effort than are available to any assessment program."
"In addition to its critique of assessment, the article contains a couple of other noteworthy aspects. First, it’s clear that people in the assessment world have known for some time that their work was not producing results. It is also apparent that most of them assumed that the reason it did not work was not their fault. It was your [faculty's] fault."
"...Eubanks acknowledges that assessment inherently discounts faculty expertise."
"Because it’s fairly obvious that assessment has not caused (and probably will not cause) positive changes in student learning, and because it’s clear that this has been an open secret for a while, one wonders why academic administrators have been so acquiescent about assessment for so long."

Eubanks' article is entitled, "A Guide for the Perplexed," and begins here on page 4.

090615_"How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition. Seven ways to change how the public sees the humanities" -- From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

030615_Time for a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track

020615_Academic Freedom Under Siege --from HuffPost

030515_For students who have to do presentations... a good strategy for a better presentation and a better grade--dress the part! "Dressing Better Can Change The Way Your Brain Works."

190415_College is worth it if you have these six experiences

a professor who made them excited about learning

professors who cared about them as a person

a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams

worked on a long-term project

had a job or internship where they applied what they were learning

were extremely involved in extra-curricular activities

180415_Q: Should philosophy be on the national curriculum of every country? Yes! Because "The study of philosophy helps to foster intellectual freedom."

240215_Students desiring to enter into graduate programs do well to learn that there is a certain classism in the Academy, which is vastly more important than merit or hard work in creating a possible future as a university professor. "The Academy’s Dirty Secret. An astonishingly small number of elite universities produce an overwhelming number of America’s professors."

110215_"Professors Know About High-Tech Teaching Methods, but Few Use Them." The way this title is framed already suggests that it is not a good thing that professors do not use high-tech teaching methods. Similarly, the title presumes that high-tech teaching methods actually make a contribution to classroom teaching rather than distract from learning. Is this just careless writing, or is it biased journalism?

300115_"A New Faculty Challenge: Fending Off Abuse on Yik Yak." Another perspective on the shortcomings of technology in the classroom.

260115_"The Day the Purpose of College Changed." "On February 28, 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan spoke of "certain intellectual luxuries (e.g., philosophy, foreign languages, literature, history, art, music) that perhaps we could do without." Here's why liberal education has never recovered."

060115_In this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "What We Lose if We Lose the Canon," the author wants to remind us that the Canon Wars are important, not least because, by extension, when one ceases to distinguish between the great and the good in philosophy, or literature, or film, or personal relationships, or, frankly, in any area of human striving and endeavor, then our strivings become simply so much flutter and noisy activity.

In John Donne’s time, we read, writers were not much inclined to dispute Aristotle’s Poetics, but "they could question whether the unities of time and space, which limited the action in plays, or the rules of decorum, which dictated subject matter, had to be observed quite so rigorously. As literary quarrels go, this was a particularly good one, because it wasn’t really about technique but about the quality of ideas, about the relationship between knowledge and innovation, and not least about the value of originality."

241014_From the Chronicle of Higher Education: if we can get beyond the no-brain(er) title of the article, which is "Underemployment Hits Recent Graduates the Hardest," the data and argument of the article clearly show that Liberal Arts students fare better than most other college graduates in terms of Underemployment.

"PayScale’s measure of underemployment includes those who are underpaid, those who are not using their education or training, and those who work part time but want full-time work. Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, told The Chronicle in an email that while underemployment is a subjective term, PayScale’s definition is “as defensible as anyone’s.”"

Psychology

62.4

Criminal Justice

Business Management & Administration

57.6

Health Care Administration

54.5

General Studies

52.5

Sociology

52.1

English Language & Literature

51.5

Graphic Design

50.3

Liberal Arts

Education

49.5

Psychology

101014_Zen pencils meets Sir Ken Robinson--yielding a comic on education: link.

020914_A briefissime blurbette over university colleges in the Netherlands from RTL Nieuws.

010914_From the Chronicle of Higher Education about university music programs: "Needed: a Revolution in Musical Training."

240814_"It's a classic scene from Philosophy 101: A group of scared teenagers arrive for the first lecture, all carrying their used copies of Nietzsche. An inevitably male, white professor, obviously hoping to beat his students into intellectual submission on day one, begins the class with a bold declaration: "There is no God." The students who aren't on Facebook dutifully type this into their notes. They don't know it now, but this is the beginning of the end for them and God; after all, the raison d'être of the university is churning out militant secularists." From the Atlantic's "It Turns Out Colleges Aren't Actually Atheist Factories"...for those of you still looking forward to that scary first day of Introduction to Philosophy.

210814_Does the liberal arts education need defending? Apparently so. This, from the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Now Defending the Liberal Arts on Twitter: a Couple of Cartoons."

190714_If you are interested in how French universities handle undergraduate admissions, which includes problems that come of 1) students with interdisciplinary desires in an educational system that is primarily specialist driven; and 2) students inadequately prepared for university studies, see in Le Point.fr : Université - Anne Fraïsse : "L'inscription libre est un principe hypocrite."

170714_In this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Wanted, A Future for Philosophy, as one academic discipline among the other humanities disciplines, philosophy is called to task on the question of placement, i.e., jobs, for Ph.D.-phil graduates. Among the many points made in the course of their argument, one recurrent claim is that philosophers tend to produce research that is esoteric, impenetrable, and self-serving, with the conclusion that: "Because most philosophers work at public universities, a significant part of their research should be on issues relevant to the wider community. This is in keeping with our Socratic heritage." ...This seems about right.

060714_DAW and I regularly have students visit our home, both in the Netherlands and in France; and we have received some recent validation for this teaching strategy from a Chronicle of Higher Education article on a list of top 10 books on teaching. From the article:
"8. How College Works, by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs (Harvard, 2014). I have many fond memories of seminars or informal gatherings in the homes of my undergraduate professors. According to Chambliss and Takacs, such personal interactions with faculty members are key indicators of student satisfaction with the college experience. If you are looking for ammunition to lob at administrators who want to redesign your campus from the ground up, or to conscript you into the next strategic-planning process, hand them a copy of this book and walk away. Small changes, it argues, make more of a difference than expensive new programs."

050714_For those of you who envision, after undergraduate studies, going into graduate education: "A different reason to go to grad school. Why noncareer academia can be a good thing."

040714_An interesting conversation is ongoing in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning accreditation and academic freedom and research in secular versus religious institutions of higher education. On the one hand is The Great Accreditation Farce, which focuses on the very specific question of the accreditation of religious colleges: "I want to raise a different and, in my view, far more important objection to accreditation as codified and practiced now. By awarding accreditation to religious colleges, the process confers legitimacy on institutions that systematically undermine the most fundamental purposes of higher education." On the respondent hand, All Knowledge Starts Somewhere in Faith, the article's author makes the case that "Purely skeptical and unfettered inquiry is likely to simply chase itself in circles," which is to say that non-religious institutions, which start intellectual inquiry from any and every ground-zero, might tend, when the statistical dust settles, to resemble dogs chasing their tails in terms of meaningful research results, while research in the right kind of religious institution, because it is "Disciplined, rigorous, and self-critical inquiry grounded in a thoughtful understanding of one’s particularities can contribute to a vigorous and diverse intellectual marketplace."

There is a caveat in this conversation, however, which is that it is rather dismaying that the respondent’s conclusion then undermines his entire argument, showing itself to be better suited as the poster-child thesis for a ham-handed logic manual. He writes: “[Our Christian] College is emphatically open that we seek to be a voluntary community of like-minded scholars who, within the framework of the defining characteristics of our institution, have the academic freedom to teach and to pursue knowledge as persons of shared religious conviction. We publicize those characteristics explicitly.”

Really?! In an educational institution that seeks deliberately to create a congregation only of the like-minded who voluntarily share the same religious convictions, with all of those ducks of a feather flying together in the same direction, how meaningful is it really to talk about the academic freedom to teach and to do research? If we hire language teachers who all only speak English and who only want to speak English, how do we even begin to assess the quality of instruction in our German or French or Greek classes? What would research in such a blatantly blinderd institution look like?

240614_The idea of redesigning the Humanities Ph.D. is already implicit in many UCR projects as well as in the conceptualization of the undergraduate capstone. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Restructure the Humanities Ph.D."

070614_If, as a result of a liberal arts education, we expect our students to have learned how to value ideas and goals different from those that define non-liberal arts educational institutions, perhaps we might consider redesigning our university admission processes in order that they also might solicit the kinds of responses, already right from the beginning, that will begin to take potential students to the threshold of some of those ideas and goals.
Read more about Bard College's experiment here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/06/the_bard_admissions_exam_four_essays_no_common_application.html

240514_There has been much discussion of late, in the U.S. at least, about a phenomenon called "trigger warnings." At issue is any material that, in the course of a lecture, reading, or classroom discussion, might possibly be construed as "offensive" or even "difficult" for some students to hear. While it is good and even excellent to be sensitive to people in general, because Life has traumatized all of us--with no exceptions, in our university classrooms there must be no quarter taken or given on this question. Either education must remain emotionally dispassionate and disinterested, and therefore open to all the questions relevant to Men in their world, or educational censorship wins, and teaching/learning is transformed into white-bread wiki informational sessions and kaffeeklatsch.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, here are two responses, and possible approaches, from U.S. educators. The first is from a professor of history: "My Syllabus, With Trigger Warnings," who opens his course syllabus with this irony-laced caveat: "This course will explore the main themes, trends, and dilemmas in the history of the United States. In accord with our college’s new policy on trigger warnings, I have affixed a cautionary note to each week’s topic. If the topic threatens to provoke feelings of trauma or panic in you, please inform me beforehand and I will excuse you from class. I’m looking forward to learning together in a safe environment!"

The second from an Assistant Professor of German Literature at Princeton-turned-psychiatrist, in "Treatment, Not Trigger Warnings." She writes: "As a psychiatrist, I nonetheless have to question whether trigger warnings [on syllabae] are in such students’ best interests. One of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD is avoidance, which can become the most impairing symptom of all. If someone has been so affected by an event in her life that reading a description of a rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses can trigger nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks, she is likely to be functionally impaired in areas of her life well beyond the classroom. The solution is not to help these students dig themselves further into a life of fear and avoidance by allowing them to keep away from upsetting material."

To study at a university is a choice, and no obligation--this point becomes all that much more relevant when students realize that, despite their capital outlay for a 4-year college education, employment is not guaranteed upon graduation. Once in the Hallowed Hallways, however, both teachers and students are implicated in a game that has rules. By nature, education is confrontation; so if you are in the classroom, be a player.

110514_For the students at UCR who are busy preparing their Capstone presentations... the capstone process is an unqualified educational good, no matter the tedium involved in developing your particular project. UCR is in the business of "selling" Liberal Arts in the Netherlands, which means that -- well, this article's author already tells us in his answer to the interviewer's question:

"A standard defense of a liberal arts education is that it prepares you to succeed in any number of domains because you gain the critical thinking skills to succeed in a range of disciplines. What do you think of this defense of liberal arts?

Well that's key. But you can’t just tell students to go study German literature or philosophy and then figure out how to transfer it once they graduate. That process needs to start earlier. If you're studying German literature, you should be able to explain to someone in computer science what's valuable about it. And the computer scientist should be able to do the same thing to the German literature student. I teach Great Books courses, and if students can't explain why Virginia Woolf or Baudelaire matters in terms relevant to their own lives, I don't think they understand the book. It gets back to that anti-specialization theme. I don't think there's anything “liberal” about specializing in philosophy compared to specializing in business. We don’t want specialists with just technical training. When you have a liberal education, you’re not just a technician. You’re able to move among fields. We don’t want you just to be an academic expert to please a professor. That’s just making believe you’re a mini-professor and you want to grow up to be a big professor."

Read the complete piece: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/theres-nothing-liberal-about-specializing-in-philosophy/361776/

090514_From "Should You Go to Grad School?," decision-making help in the form of a questionnaire.

"1. Are you considering a Ph.D. program in the humanities, such as literature or art history; an MFA in a literary art, such as poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction; or something else, such as an MFA in a visual, musical, or performing art; a Ph.D. in the quantitative social sciences, lab sciences, or mathematics; law school; medical school; divinity school; etc.?"

070514_Wouldn't it be nice to see more course sharing among liberal arts faculty? Courses where literature might also count for philosophy, or film for literature? From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "End the Protectionist Policies in the Liberal Arts."

130414_From a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the kinds of skills employers look for: "College Is Still for Creating Citizens."

"So what are the skills and competencies most highly regarded by employers? Recent studies by Northeastern University and the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that a large majority of employers are looking for college graduates with broadly applicable skills like oral and written communications, a capacity to think critically, solve complex problems, take responsibility, and innovate, as well as people who demonstrate ethical judgment and integrity. Specific industry experience ranks much lower."

040414_Does the following excerpt from the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Unsentimental Education" sound familiar?

“So, do the characters in Flaubert’s novel act in accordance with Kant’s categorical imperative?” I looked around the classroom of my freshman composition students and was greeted with blank stares.
Who actually read up to page 306?” Two hands went up, one only halfway. Others confessed that they had read only to page 147, or page 20, 72, 3. Some hadn’t even opened Sentimental Education. Why hadn’t they done the assigned reading?"

020414_From Diane Ravitch's piece, "Opt Your Child Out of State Testing: Don't Feed the Machine"--

"...The reason we have so much testing is because our policymakers don't trust teachers. If we trusted teachers, we would let them teach and trust them to do what is right for their students. The more we distrust teachers, the less appealing is teaching as a job or a profession."

010414_What Can You Do With a Humanities Ph.D., Anyway? The optimistic and enthusiastic tone cannot hide the fact that only about 20% of those with Humanities Ph.D.s in the U.S. get well-paying jobs. Two out of ten Ph.D.s getting jobs appropriate to their education does not seem like much of a cause for joyfulness...

"Recent studies suggest that these tragedies do not tell the whole story about humanities Ph.D.s. It is true that the plate tectonics of academia have been shifting since the 1970s, reducing the number of good jobs available in the field: “The profession has been significantly hollowed out by the twin phenomena of delayed retirements of tenure-track faculty and the continued ‘adjunctification’ of the academy,” Andrew Green, associate director at the Career Center at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. In the wake of these changes, there is no question that humanities doctorates have struggled with their employment prospects, but what is less widely known is between a fifth and a quarter of them go on to work in well-paying jobs in media, corporate America, non-profits, and government. Humanities Ph.D.s are all around us— and they are not serving coffee."

200314_As the various faculties and universities draw up strategies to attract more students to their campuses, they need to pay attention to what draws students in the first place to specific institutions of higher learning. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "ACE Report Reiterates Opposition to Proposed College-Ratings Plan"

"The American Council on Education, which has made no secret of its dislike for the Obama administration’s plan to create a new ratings system for colleges, has released a report offering new grounds for its opposition. Among them: findings from the recent Freshman Survey that show that students, particularly those from low-income homes, don’t rely heavily on ratings or rankings when choosing a college. The report, an issue brief titled “Rankings, Institutional Behavior, and College and University Choice: Framing the National Dialogue on Obama’s Ratings Plan,” also cites evidence noting that, for the many students enrolling in community colleges, location and affordability are the most important factors."

160314_The American version of financial aid for needy students + the idea of a gap year -- heaven forbid that less monied college-bound Americans should imitate their English counterparts, who get jobs ahead of time in order to EARN enough money for their gap year. Instead, young Americans have the option of simply going into DEBT for their futures before they even start on their educational journeys : "Tufts Will Now Fund Gap Years So Needy Teenagers Can Get Drunk Abroad."

070314_In a Chronicle of Higher Education forum called: #FutureEd, Thoughts from a MOOC on higher education, there is the following essay, which actually gives an entirely different argument for a MOOC as part of graduate education: "Breaking Down Barriers Between the Humanities and the Science."

080214_So how would a small, intensive Honors College like UCR score using these standards for evaluating effectiveness and rigor of teaching? Have a look... from the Chronicle of Higher Education: "A New Kind of Study Seeks to Quantify Educational Quality."

070214_FYI on MOOCS--flow chart: "MOOCs by the numbers: Where are we now?"

030214_From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "What's the Point of an Honors College, Anyway?" The conclusions of this author are as true for Roosevelt students in the Netherlands as they are for any Honors College in the US.

310114_In the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, the hook was: "Obama Questions Value of Art-History Degrees." But he actually does not question its value; he simply thinks that a degree in Art History will not be much of a moneymaker when compared, for example, with a degree carrying with it some knowledge/skills useful for manufacturing.

If we continue on to the comments however, we read that Obama was not necessarily working with correct numbers--

· "In 2010, 6.9% of Art History majors and 10.6% of manufacturing workers were unemployed. Median earnings were about the same."

· "The average salary of an art history major is $50,000 yr"

· "College educ manufact workers make about $72,000 a year on avg. But only about half of manu workers have college degrees."

For the broader picture, see this article: "This Is Irrefutable Evidence Of The Value Of A Humanities Education."

Perhaps at some point it would be nice to hear politicians, and others, have the more meaningful conversation, that while manufacturing jobs are nice, nothing is more useful to the life of men or to the life of the state than the pursuit of what is good, which means that we need to cherish those among us who understand what is beautiful.

290114_Fret not about grades & other assessments, oh! students of the world, teachers get performance assessment as well, and also DO NOT LIKE THEM WHEN THEY ARE NOT STELLAR!!!! The article in the Washington Post: Study finds that basically every single person hates performance reviews.

240114_In the following article you will find a defense, certainly, of the Liberal Arts education, but also a convincing argument in favor of the old-style core-curriculum approach to education. The question on everyone's mind, of course, is why we have to continue having this conversation. Majors in any specific or particular course of studies, such as chemistry, biology, history, philosophy, etc., is simply a mistake; our students need to be fusion thinkers (read: liberal arts majors) for the world that is waiting 'out there' for them beyond our hallowed halls, because whether we like it or not, Life is not just about money! "The Tyranny of the College Major. Colleges should require students to take more courses outside of their discipline."

230114_In a recent edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education there was an article on "How Liberal-Arts Majors Fare Over the Long Haul." The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently published a report, drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, that "examines the payoff of a liberal-arts degree over the course of a career." It comes as a no-brainer conclusion to anyone who has been hanging around universities for longer that 7 1/2 minutes, that "the liberal arts and sciences have traditionally been seen as laying “a foundation for future learning in the professions and in scholarly work,” said Ms. Schneider. The report, she said, shows that to be true."

Spoiler Alert: "While humanities and social-science majors started out near the bottom of all college graduates in terms of salary, the report says, older people who majored in those fields—many of whom also held graduate degrees—out-earned their peers who’d picked professional and pre-professional majors."

180114_On the question of Merit in the world of education. Most young people, or at least those whom I have had in my philosophy classes, favor the idea of a meritocracy in society (getting grades, jobs, opportunities, etc.), perhaps because they think that it is the best way to begin creating a just and fair-minded social distribution. It becomes interesting, therefore, when a bunch of college administrators are brought together to discuss university admissions policies, that definitions of Merit suddenly becomes very obscure and elusive.

Just to wet the appetite for the full article,"Want to Define Merit? Good Luck," which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"On Thursday enrollment officials here discussed the term around which the admissions world revolves. How colleges assess and reward merit shapes the socioeconomic and racial diversity of students at selective colleges. But what, exactly, is merit? Should colleges redefine it? If so, how? [...] Anyone who expected to learn the secret formula for doing so would have left disappointed.

Members of the audience were asked to think hard, however. At times the discussion sounded more like a philosophy class—a good one—than a gathering of admissions officials."

150114_A former colleague from MI (thank you, Betty Stolarek) posted this short video, created by the American Federation of Teachers, about how poverty in the U.S. figures, or should figure, into America's recent performance in the international rankings for education. While this may seem obvious to many, the only really obvious thing is that, apparently, no one in the U.S. Department of Education really wishes to address this question... otherwise there would be more appropriate decision-making about what is necessary for education to "happen" in the U.S.-- funding, professional development, assessment, etc.

130114_More thinking(?) about testing: "Standardized Achievement Tests: What Are They Good For? Hint: Not Cognitive Ability." The author concludes, with pert-near philosophical reflectiveness, "But me? I'm not convinced any of that should be the top priority of education. What about deep, meaningful learning that students will remember the rest of their lives? That connects the material to their own personal lives, and the lives of others? What about helping students learn about themselves, and their identity? Or helping them find their unique passions and inclinations, and cultivating that through engagement in personally meaningful projects?"

The no-brainer quality of this self-reflective questioning in the HuffPost is disturbing, in and of itself, because "stating the patently obvious as though it's newsworthy" suggests that a great many others who work in testing and education in America have not even arrived at this same level of 3rd-grade wondering.

060114_On the question of whether or not it is possible for instructors to be friends with their students--"Peut-on être amical avec ses élèves ? Hommage à Jean-Pierre Vernant." This author's reflection is based on Jean-Pierre Vernant's Tisser l’amitié in Entre mythe et politique, Le Seuil, 1996, which does not seem to have been translated into English.

In a word: yes, Vernant finds that a teacher/student friendship is possible. In a very loose and all-too summary English rendering, then -- "A professor is engaged in performance art [theater] when he enters into the classroom; but there are different ways of going about this... every type of social relationship ... implies an adhesive, which is friendship. This fundamental element is the sense of complicity, of an essential community around things that are of the utmost importance..."

"Un professeur fait du théâtre quand il arrive dans une classe. Mais il y a différentes manières de s’y prendre. [...] Il faut commencer par cesser d’être professeur pour pouvoir l’être. Cela signifie obligatoirement – à mon avis c’est une idée grecque- que toute relation sociale, avec une classe comme avec le groupe dans lequel on s’est engagé dans la Résistance, implique un ciment qui est l’amitié. Cet élément fondamental est le sentiment d’une complicité, d’une communauté essentielle sur les choses les plus importantes. Dans le rapport du professeur avec ses élèves, c’est le fait de partager une certaine idée de ce que doit être quelqu’un, d’avoir en commun une certaine forme de sensibilité, d’accueil à autrui, de s’accorder sur l’idée qu’être autre signifie aussi être semblable."

241213_A former student from the U.S., Damari, who currently lives and teaches in Korea, is participating in a website-project entitled, THE SURROUNDED PROJECT. According to the Homepage for this site: "this project [was started] to shed light on the positive inspirations in my life. I’ve always suffered from self doubt, thinking that every step that I took to do something, whether it be writing, art, a photo, etc., was simply not good enough which caused me to have a severely negative outlook on the concept of life. I realized that I have never taken the time out to stop what I was doing, reflect, and realize that so many people (friends, teachers, family, random run ins) have inspired me to do something, always making me feel positive after those inspirations became reality."

As teachers we well understand how very important the teacher/student relationship is to the transmission of culture, learning, and wisdom, to the generations that will follow us. We know, as well, that what we teach in our classrooms may not come to fruition in the minds of our students until many years later, just as we know that teachers very seldom, if ever, get to hear the stories about that "fruition" from our former students. I have just received as a Christmas gift one of those fruit-bearing moments... in the kind words Damari posted about his once-upon-a-time philosophy teacher....

"One of the most diligent, intelligent, and challenging individuals I’ve ever met. This man is not only just an inspiration to my life, but also to every student that encounters him (they just don’t want to admit it). I had the pleasure of enrolling in one of his classes my sophomore year of college when I decided to begin my journey into the realm of Philosophy. I will never forget the day when he introduced a snippet about epistemology as it related to a talk that our class had about religion. He always challenged us to think critically for ourselves and to develop our own sense of ethics, morals, and beliefs along with valid evidence to defend our reasons behind them when someone decides to ask us that million dollar question of “Why”?
He never forced us to denounce anything, or stated that our way of thinking was wrong in any way; he simply did his job as a professor and a philosopher, which was to challenge us. He really inspired me to stop making up excuses and to actually start doing “stuff.” No one is going to hand you anything, if you want to be successful, if you want be heard, you must start to actually do things that will get you there, and making excuses is not one of those things. I remember hearing this, especially my senior year when I took his Ethics class. After missing the maximum days allowed by his syllabus I received an email from him stating that I had missed the allowed days asked what was I going to do about it. I returned an email that began and ended with some lame excuse and also a request to withdraw from the course. HE IGNORED THE EMAIL! I worried all week, what was going on? I could not afford to fail this class my senior year; I was doing way too good GPA wise.
Monday morning came, I found him in his office deep in “thought” and squinting to see the words on his computer screen, as he usually does, and had a chat with him. He informed me that he didn’t answer because my emailed “pissed him off”. Instead of coming up with a solution I simply through in the towel. Long story short, we ended up agreeing on me handing in a paper which brought my grade up to a D. Sure it had an extremely negative impact on my grade, but not as bad as an F. More importantly I learned from that incident, not all professors are willing to take the time out and give you chance as this professor did and for this I thank him. I don’t just thank you for this professor, but I thank you for challenging and inspiring me to become a better person and philosopher. Thank You professor for never sugar coating things, sometimes people just need to hear the blatant truth."

191213_Seven Deadly Sins of Quantitative Political Analysis This link gives access to the much debated article by the retiring political scientist below, debated because we are invited to reconsider, even in political science, the over-arching but not always productive positivism that tends to dominant in the Humanities.

171213_There is an article in Inside Higher Ed in which a retiring professor of Political Science reflects on his career in the academe, which include among other things all the flukes and quirks of research and publishing in the Humanities (as opposed to the sciences and other positivist-oriented disciplines).

“I’d like to think I’m still doing research that is interesting, but once the work is written, it is out there on the web where anyone can find it, so why go through the agony of dumbing down the work for a major journal which will then hide it behind a paywall?” (One of Schrodt’s most influential articles, “Seven Deadly Sins of Contemporary Political Quantitative Analysis," has been publicly available online since he presented it to the American Political Science Association in 2010. Controversial in its criticism of the discipline's predominant methodology, the article is only now forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research. Schrodt said he doubted whether it ever would have been published without first gaining a following outside the journal system.)"

041213_There has been some squawking in the news recently about American students' performance on international tests. It would seem that this is all hype. Diane Ravitch reminds us that, "The U.S. has never been first in the world, nor even near the top, on international tests. Over the past half century, our students have typically scored at or near the median, or even in the bottom quartile." Click here for Keith Baker's original article on the subject, "Are International Tests Worth Anything?"

031213_Highlights from "A Liberal Decalogue: Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments of Teaching," posted by Brainpickings.org.

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

021213_There is much thinking currently, among students and teachers, that internships hold great promise for acting as the doorway to meaningful employment. Now there is this reflection from the Chronicle of Higher Education: For Interns, Experience Isn't Always the Best Teacher.

281113_"What Dido did, Satan saw & O’Keeffe painted," by Mark Bauerlein in the New Criterion.

In this excellently reasoned article (some excerpts below), Bauerlein suggests how "the humanities can come out on top in the education debate."

"The defenders [of the humanities] misconstrue their audience. They think that support for the humanities will stand on the anticipation of a job skill, a civic sense, or moral self-improvement, but these future benefits are insufficient to youths worried about debt, politicians about revenue, and employers about workplace needs. No, students enroll and politicians fund and donors donate for a different reason, because they care about the humanities themselves, and they care about them because they’ve had a compelling exposure to a specific work. They may admit the moral, practical, and civic effects of humanities coursework, but that level of commitment can’t compete with other pressures such as manufacturers in a state telling the governor and college presidents that they need more grads with industrial skills. Whenever they do override those pressures, their devotion springs from an experience that lingers. People back the humanities with their feet and pocketbooks because they savored Monet’s seascapes, got a thrill when Frederick Douglass resolves to fight Mr. Covey, and relax after work with Kind of Blue or Don Giovanni. They had an 11th Grade English teacher who made Elizabeth Bennet and Henry V come alive, or they recall a month in Rome amid the Pantheon, St. Peter’s, the Trevi Fountain, and Apollo and Daphne as a high-point of their college days.
[...]
To attract the undergraduate who focuses narrowly on career and the CEO with $10 million to give, advocates should realize, don’t wax righteous or pragmatic about the humanities as a bloc or as an instrument. Rather, show them vivid images of architecture in Washington, D.C.; recount Captain Ahab on the quarter-deck enlisting the crew in his obsession, or Dido’s reaction once she learns her beloved Aeneas has slipped away in the night, or Satan in the Garden eyeing Adam and Eve, tormented by their innocence and plotting their ruin; stage the avid sadism of Regan and Goneril or the banter of Algernon and Ernest; or run the final scene when the Tramp, just out of prison, turns to face the blind flower girl, now cured, who clasps his hand, grimaces at the sight of him, and mutters, “Yes, I now can see.” These are the materials of inspiration, and they are the highest card the humanists can play."

211113_According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the educational "revolution" that led to the development of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), was intended to help "those without access to higher education in developing countries..." On an aside: I'm not quite sure my colleagues in development studies would much appreciate this particular word choice. Anyway, as with so many other educational reforms (George Bush's "No Child Left Behind," comes to mind, which to many was only a slightly veiled attempt to kill the humanities [history, civics, languages, music, & art] in American schools, or to state the obvious with some degree of political correctness--to prioritize (financially) only the maths and sciences), the MOOCs, as well, must have been designed by the lame of brain in the educational community. Instead of reaching their target, i.e., those without or with only very minimal access to higher education in developing countries, MOOCs are succeeding in largely reaching only the privileged learner --“80 percent of MOOC students come from the wealthiest and most well educated 6 percent of the population.” Bravo, educational reformers, for yet another stunning display of lack of insight!

071113_"Why So Many Of America's Teachers Are Leaving The Profession," with a review of John Owens' book, Confessions of a Bad Teacher. An excerpt: "Many non-teachers claim that teaching is an easy life with long vacations. However, as Owens shares his daily routine it is a job way past full time hours, "I spent virtually every waking hour -- 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. -- all week long on my teacher duties. Lessons, backup lessons, tutoring students during lunch and after school, PowerPoints, grading, inputting data, inputting more data, meeting with parents, observing experienced teachers to learn their techniques, meeting with my bosses, updating databases, writing reports, and trying to get help from someone for the struggling students in my classes." All teachers are familiar with the many hours required to keep lessons, grades and life engaging and organized."

051113_Is it true that the Sciences can't get along with the Humanities? Why? We may see the world through different lenses, but aren't we on the same page as far as our intellectual mission is concerned? Is it perhaps true that the academic family is terminally dysfunctional? From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Wedge Driving Academe's Two Families Apart."

171013_Continuing to think about the "free" MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)--from the Chronicle of Higher Education. "In the second of a series of papers challenging optimistic assumptions about massive open online courses, a coalition of faculty-advocacy organizations asserts that online instruction “isn’t saving money—and may actually be costing students and colleges more,” but that “snappy slogans, massive amounts of corporate money, and a great deal of wishful thinking have created a bandwagon mentality that is hard to resist.”
The paper, “The ‘Promises’ of Online Higher Education: Reducing Costs,” was released by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, whose backers include a number of faculty unions."

131013_The tide is turning on the question of Freedom of Speech for university faculty members. Read: The Chronicle of Higher Education.

101013_From the Centre for Humanities [gw.cfh@uu.nl] at Utrecht University to Students of UCR [the link to their site is problematic, so try this link]:

Redrafting Perpetual Peace is an initiative convened by the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht, and it is part of a wider Perpetual Peace Project in association with the Syracuse University Humanities Centre. The initiative invites to re-think Immanuel Kant’s six basic conditions for perpetual peace between the states from a contemporary perspective, and consists of 6 academic articles and short films that are published online at http://redraftingperpetualpeace.org.

The contributors to the Redrafting Perpetual Peace project were asked to take six Preliminary Articles of I. Kant – the main conditions for perpetual peace – and critically reflect on them, taking into account the economic, social and political realities of today. The articles were re-drafted by renown scholars from different academic fields: Gregg Lambert, Patrick Hanafin, Louis Kriesberg, Adam Gearey, Paul Patton and William C. Banks. These revised articles are to be engaged with and alongside a series of six short films Towards Perpetual Peace: Academics, Art and Activism, directed by Janina Pigaht, Artist in Residence at the Centre for the Humanities. N. Pigaht interviews Karen Armstrong, Catherine Hall, Kevin Bales and Jolle Demmers on the idea of Peace, what can be considered peaceful initiatives, and what does it mean to be a peaceful academic.

We would be grateful if you could distribute this information among your students and encourage them to visit the website as well as to engage in re-thinking the idea of peace through the online forum.

Kant's six articles:

1. "No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War"
2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation"
3. "Standing Armies (miles perpetuus) Shall in Time Be Totally Abolished"

4. "National Debts Shall Not Be Contracted with a View to the External Friction of States"

5. "No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State"
6. "No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment of Assassins (percussores), Poisoners (venefici), Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason (perduellio) in the Opposing State"
Links to further reading: Die Zeit (16.5.1980 Nr. 21)

Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) (English)

Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf (German)

070913_Teachers do Matter. "What nobler employment," says Cicero, "or more valuable to the state than that of the person who instructs the rising generation." The author of this article begins by reminding us what most of us know: "No class, school, or education system can be better than the quality of the teaching within it. Most adults can easily remember the teachers that have mattered in their lives, while all children understand this concept with the fierce immediacy of going to school tomorrow with either a heavy heart or one filled with the joy of great learning."
   But then comes the very interesting bombshell -- that despite the importance of good teachers, according to a recent study (by Varkey GEMS), neither the Americans nor the Dutch nor the British "necessarily want [their] children to become those teachers."

270913_A predictable trend in U.S. universities has been to cut services in order to save money on overhead. And while this may sound necessary and even praiseworthy, in fact the single essential service universities work at cutting the most is the service of teaching -- the reason why students go to universities in the first place. This cut usually takes the form of replacing full-time tenured faculty with part-time, low-payed, uninsured teaching adjuncts. From the perspective of university administrators, who also support teaching cuts in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), apparently definitive grist for the mill took the form of a recent study and article that seemed to indicate that adjunct faculty are also better at class-room teaching than tenured, full-time professors. For a more contextualized reading, see The Atlantic's: Are Tenured Professors Really Worse Teachers? A Lit Review. The conclusion of the author is that "The answer is complicated. But research shows that by replacing [tenured professors] with low-paid adjuncts, colleges could be hurting students.[...] Poorly paid, part-time faculty are poor substitutes for full-time professors."
   A second caveat from this author is that the study suggests a very real difference between a university professor whose primary area of focus is teaching, and a university professor whose principal interest is doing research and publishing. This is a bit of a no-brainer for university professors who, by and large, recognize the difference; but it is good to remind university administrators of the obvious every once in a while. So this author concludes: "To review, what does the study tell us? If colleges pay their professors a middle-class wage to teach year-in and year-out, they might just do a better job of it than faculty who focus on research and publishing."
   For another angle on the question of adjuncts, read in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The Adjunct Crisis and the Free Market.

260913_Another argument against Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this time by the coterie of America's Catholic universities, which, according to the article, are in a position to "reassert the belief that education is a moral enterprise that develops human dignity and promotes social justice. MOOCs not only fail to accomplish those goals; they undermine them." Far too seldom do we hear this type of refreshing language -- education as a moral enterprise.

250913_What is the purpose behind testing in education? Is the problem linked to the fact of testing, or to the content of testing, both, neither, a little of both but only when it rains on a Wednesday? Does America really have a toxic testing culture? Is there really a 'wrong' in making distinctions between individuals based on educational performance? Are there any areas of human experience where distinctions based on performance are not made: education, sports, work, military, relationships, friendships????
     I can't help but think that this writer misses the point of education. Her contention is that education's [Our] "ultimate goal is to help children live up to their potential to become happy adults who make positive contributions to society." I beg to differ. The general goal of education is to educate in determined areas of content, which means that assessment of some sort should be a part of the education process; it also seems obvious, and naive to ignore, that the manner in which these areas of content are determined by the specific culture will remain problematic and negotiable. On the other hand, the specific goal of education in disciplines like philosophy is to ask the bigger, more philosophical questions. For the most part, though, disciplines like philosophy are excluded from U.S. school curricula. So, do the math.

240913_When a Nation defunds subjects like Social Studies, one predictable consequence is that participation in democracy declines. Students who have not been taught to value the whys and wherefores of the democratic process will not tend to become adult participants in that process. Read more in The Atlantic's Bring Back Social Studies.The amount of time public-school kids spend learning about government and civics is shrinking.
     "The most obvious and well-reported casualties of the last decade in program-slashing educational policy include traditional elective courses like art, music, and physical education. But these are not the only subjects being squeezed out or eliminated entirely from many public K-12 curriculums."

210913_What do you do when you live in a state that wishes to ensure that Knowledge does not get passed down to students, your children, during their public school Education? Some might find themselves in this situation and like it, or not. See this Mother Jones article on the process of selecting school textbooks in Texas, which because of its market size, will affect how textbooks are written for many, many other school districts across the nation: "WATCH: These Global-Warming-Denying Creationists Want to Rewrite Science Textbooks. Religious conservatives in Texas are fighting to infuse textbooks with their agenda—and it won't just affect public school students in the Lone Star State. If social conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education have their way, the science textbooks used in the state's public schools will be rewritten to promote an anti-abortion agenda, cast doubt on evolution, and sow skepticism about global warming."

170913_If the following is entirely true then we are in a heap of hurt as people, and educators more than most: "In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn't the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we're rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe." Read more: Most Depressing Brain Finding Ever.

080913_Yet another reflection about reading lists for college students -- "Why are American universities shying away from the classics?" which wonders why universities seem to believe that students could not find value in reading "classics" in world literature, which are classic precisely because they address the types of questions that transcend culture, race & class, and seem to arrive at a narrative vision that is quintessentially human.

060813_What’s Wrong With Philosophy? An article that speaks to the place, or not, of women in academic philosophy, but that also discerns between "doing" philosophy, as a big idea, and doing philosophy in the classroom - two entirely different arenas of performance!
     Thanks for the reference, Tajha!

050913_What books should all first year college students read? "It's no secret that high school doesn't always adequately prepare students for college, emotionally or academically. Our solution, obviously, is to read more books. 300 American colleges seem to agree, as they've begun assigning a single book for their students to read before entering, regardless of their major." Here is one list, and it is not bad.

040913_It looks like researchers in the humanities (and esp. the digital humanities) are evolving along the lines of our colleagues in the social sciences: "humanities scholars are going to be chasing down bigger topics by working in packs,' and that academic culture will accept new forms of scholarship, particularly work that reaches across institutional lines and seeks to connect with the public."For more, read here in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

040913_bis_Remember this bit from 260713_When education meets the internet world... Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)? I suggested at that point that the issue was not pedagogy and/or online teaching, but that universities were seeking to use MOOCs to begin bypassing the financial burdens of operating an institution of higher education.Today the Chronicle of Higher Education seemed to confirm that line of reasoning with a story about a Princeton sociologist: "Mitchell Duneier once was a MOOC star. But today he's more like a conscientious objector. Worried that the massive open online courses might lead legislators to cut state-university budgets, the Princeton University sociology professor has pulled out of the movement—at least for now."

020813_Simon Schama: “when you’re a historian, you really oughtn’t to be knocking on the doors of power; your job is to keep the powerful awake at night.”
      Read more by Schama in "If I ruled the world. History is a tragic muse for rulers—we should teach more of it."

270813_Is Stanley Fish really what is wrong with the Humanities?
     According to the author of this recent essay in the New Republic, "Fish’s importance resides mainly in that he is an exemplar of recent academic trends. He chiefly represents himself—he does that quite well—but he may also represent something of the postmodern academic life: its self-satisfaction, its self-promotion, its glibness. If the humanities are in trouble today, humanists like Fish are one of the reasons."
   How can one not read a critique of Fish when it contains the following statement: "In the early 1990s, he wrote a widely circulated essay called “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos.” He pondered why academics prefer ugly cars such as Volvos to handsome cars. The choice of Volvos, he explained, reflects the general orientation of academics, which is self-abasement. The coin of the academic realm is suffering and oppression—the more the better. Academics revel in unlovely cars, uncomfortable conferences, and crummy offices. Fish reduced his observations to an aphorism, which he formulated back in 1964: “Academics like to eat shit, and in a pinch, they don’t care whose shit they eat.”

230813_When I was a young boy I thought the two best jobs to have when I got big would be either to become a pastor or a teacher. Every morning as the 10-year old me walked to school I went right by the pastor's house, and I always marveled that a fellow who only worked on Sundays could afford to buy a house. I also marveled that it seemed generally to also be true that the pastor's kids were always the meanest in the school...
     As for teachers -- great job! 7:30 to 3:00; evenings and weekends free; long Christmas holidays; 3 months in the summer... what was not to like? So, following my neo-primitivist instincts I became a teacher. And it became the great mystery of my life that my 10-year old understanding of a teacher's life could be so utterly wrong -- and that my teacher's life could be so utterly time-consuming!
     Check out this graph for a real-time glimpse at the time-life of the teacher... "When you look at the time teachers actually spend working, you can see that it's not a cakewalk — at all. The next time your city or state wants to cut back on teacher salaries or hammer their pensions, here's something to show around to folks before they make a decision."

190813_An excerpt from a nicely reasoned piece arguing that the study of the Humanities is essential to us in our world, not for the form (critical thinking skills, communication skills, etc.), but rather for the content (what we should be doing to fill the days of our lives)!

"But the humanities are not about success. They're about questioning success — and every important social value. Socrates taught us this and we shouldn't forget it. Sure, someone who studies literature or philosophy is learning to think clearly and write well. But those skills are means to an end. That end, as Plato said, is learning how to live one's life. “This discussion is not about any chance question,” Plato's Socrates says in “The Republic,” “but about the way one should live.”

      That's what's at the heart of the humanities — informed, thoughtful dialogue about the way we ought to conduct life. This dialogue honors no pieties: All positions are debatable; all values are up for discussion."

Read more: http://triblive.com/opinion/featuredcommentary/4501281-74/humanities-success-students#ixzz2cNsjy1Qx (Thank you, Tom, for finding this article).

080813_Reflection #1. What would a government plot to make a stupid (read: intellectually disabled) America look like? For a fairly thorough run-down of the institutional euthanasia of critical thinking in America's schools, and therefore also in her universities, read "A warning to college profs from a high school teacher," written by a retiring/ed school history teacher.

080813_Reflection #2. What happens when the humanists begin thinking beyond the "humanities" in order to consider other, non-human forms of "life"? Can there really be a meaningful philosophy of vegetal or robotic life?

"Theoretical work in the humanities has been branching out for several years now (if you’ll pardon the arborial pun), striving to go beyond the traditional human subject in order to account for other types of existence and experience, including animals and autonomous machines. A new field has emerged, loosely labeled “the posthumanities,” which attempts to fill in the millennia-long blind spots caused by our own narcissism." Read further, and make sure to read the comments -- they are priceless!

070813_So how is it that "religionists" get to help choose Biology textbooks in the Lone Star state? "Creationists Get Influential Positions in Texas Science Textbook Review." When Jefferson drafted for Virginia a (1779) bill for the disestablishment of religion, or Freedom of Religion, he was thinking to protect from state influence a Man's right to have religious opinions. How is it then tolerable that, in the space of 200+ years, that "right" has been turned upon its head, and that religious opinion is in fact being "re-established" in public school Science classrooms through private and personal initiative?
   The time is ripe in America for another Jefferson to rise up again with another bill, an inverted bill, for the re-disestablishment of religion -- in order to protect from private religious influence a State's right to teach science freely in American public schools.

An excerpt from Jefferson's Bill: "WE, the General Assembly of Virginia, do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."

The site on Jefferson also has links to the complete bill that was passed in Virginia.

310713_OK... so this author uses the confused term, "English Literature," when he actually means, "Philosophy," and he thinks he is talking about The Ideal English Major when he is actually talking about philosophically intuitive folks who are also readers of fine books. The proof is that this professor of English uses a philosopher (Heidegger) to make his point! All that notwithstanding, this author's heart is in the right place on the question at hand-- which is why we read books!

300713_The Texas GOP on Knowledge-Based Education – "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

NB- At least it becomes possible,when narrow-scoped (read religious) interest groups publicly state their agendas, for We the People to combat this type of witlessness!

260713_When education meets the internet world... this article sees a wreck waiting to happen with the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). The argument has some, although little to do with the actual educational value of the super-classroom model, which, when highly motivated students are removed from the equation, remains more than dubious (90% rate of failure or incompletion). This author also clearly resents the offensive colonial framing of this "North American" Trojan-horse type gift of education to the more unfortunate peoples of the world. Personally, but also in agreement with the author of this article, my resistance to this super-classroom style of education is political in nature -- I clearly see, unfortunately, this Data Delivery System (because it is not teaching) as the inevitable future of the academy in the U.S., because it conforms to the capitalist love of the cost-benefit analysis. This D.D.S. is not about education in any meaningful sense of that term; it is about corporate institutions (i.e., universities) making more profit with less outlay, less overhead, and less effort. What is lost in this analysis, of course, is that there is also less real or meaningful educational gain!

250713_The disposable academic. Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time_from The Economist.

210713_The Humanist Vocation_"The job of the humanities [is] to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, 'the dark vast forest.'”

190713_Education is what makes us fully human_Alain de Botton.

160713_Who Prepares Humanities Ph.D.'s for a Nonacademic Search? Students find little help from their departments, and even less from their advisers.

120713_Watering the Roots of Knowledge Through Collaborative Learning. Rethinking what we do in our classrooms....

050713_What has been going right in the Humanities, according to the recent Harvard study? Earning potential, et al.

030713_Is there a battle in the Humanities? A growing lack of interest? No. Not according to the numbers!

210613_If you want to get a Ph.D. in the liberal arts, and if university teaching is not an option (job market = zilch), what are your choices? See this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
         Keep in mind, though, that even if teaching jobs are scarce, the peoples of the world desperately need us -- they need those of us who think about and value Thinking, Rational Discourse, Ideas, Beauty, the Good Life, the Life of the Mind, and all those fine things we study and teach in the liberal arts. If we, liberalart-asaures [which is a special type of dino-saure], do not become involved as citizens in and of our world, then the world will be left in the hands of those "others" who show up to do the work of democracy.
        Perhaps that is why the face of the world is angry, and flushed, and frustrated.

180613_Professor Raphael Enthoven provides here the corrigé (the appropriate line of argument) for Question S1 in the philosophy BAC exam -- Is it possible to act morally without being interested in politics? His argument has three principal points. The original text is in French.

Politics is the natural extension of moral action [La politique est le prolongement naturel de l'action morale].
Politics is an art of compromise, which comes into obvious contradiction (sometimes) with any type of absolute (read: religious) moral philosophy [La politique est un art du compromis qui entre en contradiction (parfois) frontale avec une morale qu'on voudrait absolue].
Is it not unrealistic and politically dangerous to make politics submit to any type of moral philosophy that pretends to be the "only" moral philosophy? [N'est-il pas irréaliste et politiquement dangereux de soumettre la politique à une morale qui se prendrait pour "la" morale ?]

170613_To successfully complete the baccalaureate degree in France (roughly equivalent to the US High School degree + 1 or 2, or to the UK GCE A level school-leaving qualification), students must pass an examination in philosophy. The philosophy questions are weighted according to the major course of studies -- e.g., Series L questions for students of literature; Series S questions for students in the sciences; and Series ES questions for students in the social sciences or economics.

Try your hand... Choose ONE question -- you have 4 hours!

Série L (littéraire) coefficient 7, il fallait choisir entre :

Le langage n'est-il qu'un outil ? [Is language simply a tool?]
La science se limite-t-elle à constater les faits ? [Does science limit itself to observing facts?]
Expliquer un texte de René Descartes extrait de "Lettre à Elisabeth" [Interpret and analyze a text extract from René Descartes' "Letter to Elisabeth."]

Série S (scientifique) coefficient 3 :

Peut-on agir moralement sans s'intéresser à la politique ? [Is it possible to act morally without being interested in politics?]
Le travail permet-il de prendre conscience de soi ? [Does work help us to become aware of ourselves?]
Expliquer un texte de Henri Bergson extrait de "La pensée et le mouvant". [Interpret and analyze a text extract from Henri Bergson's "Thought and Movement."]

Série ES (économique et social) coefficient 4 :

Que devons-nous à l'Etat ? [What is our obligation to the State?]

Interprète-t-on à défaut de connaître [Are we really engaged in interpreting instead of knowing?]

Expliquer un texte d'Anselme extrait "De la concorde" [Interpret and analyze a text extract from Anselm's "On Agreement."]

June_2013_For the 5-part video of the Kagan lecture published by Yale News, go here.

The downloaded text that follows appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 June 2013, on page 4. Go here for the downloadable pdf.

June 2013

Ave atque vale

by Donald Kagan

Upon his retirement from Yale, Donald Kagan considers the future of liberal education in this farewell speech.

Editors’ Note: Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University and recipient of the National Humanities Medal (2002), retired in May. In forty-four years at the University, Professor Kagan has served in such varied capacities as Dean of Yale College, Master of Timothy Dwight College, and Director of Athletics. He has been a prolific author as well as a celebrated teacher; his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is widely considered to be among the twentieth century’s greatest works of classical scholarship. The following essay on liberal education is a revised version of the valedictory lecture he delivered on April 25 to a capacity audience in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, New Haven, Connecticut.

My subject is liberal education, and today more than ever the term requires definition, especially as to the questions: What is a liberal education and what it is for? From Cicero’s artes liberales, to the attempts at common curricula in more recent times, to the chaotic cafeteria that passes for a curriculum in most American universities today, the concept has suffered from vagueness, confusion, and contradiction. From the beginning, the champions of a liberal education have thought of it as seeking at least four kinds of goals. One was as an end in itself, or at least as a way of achieving that contemplative life that Aristotle thought was the greatest happiness. Knowledge and the acts of acquiring and considering it were the ends of this education and good in themselves. A second was as a means of shaping the character, the style, the taste of a person—to make him good and better able to fit in well with and take his place in the society of others like him. A third was to prepare him for a useful career in the world, one appropriate to his status as a free man. For Cicero and Quintilian, this meant a career as an orator that would allow a man to protect the private interests of himself and his friends in the law courts and to advance the public interest in the assemblies, senate, and magistracies. The fourth was to contribute to the individual citizen’s freedom in ancient society. Servants were ignorant and parochial, so free men must be learned and cosmopolitan; servants were ruled by others, so free men must take part in their own government; servants specialized to become competent at some specific and limited task, so free men must know something of everything and understand general principles without yielding to the narrowness of expertise. The Romans’ recommended course of study was literature, history, philosophy, and rhetoric.

It was once common to think of the medieval university as very different, as a place that focused on learning for its own sake. But the medieval universities, whatever their commitment to learning for its own sake, were institutions that trained their students for professional careers. Graduates in the liberal arts were awarded a certificate that was a license to teach others what they had learned and to make a living that way. For some, the study of liberal arts was preliminary to professional study in medicine, theology, or law and was part of the road to important positions in church and state.

The seven liberal arts of the Middle Ages consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The discovery and absorption of Aristotle’s works in the twelfth century quickly led to the triumph of logic and dialectic over the other arts. They were the glamour subjects of the time, believed both to be the best means for training and disciplining the mind and to provide the best tools for successful careers in both church and state. The dominant view of knowledge and truth was that they both already existed. They needed only to be learned, organized, and harmonized. There was nothing still to be discovered; knowledge and truth had only to be systematized and explained. An ambitious scholar could hope to achieve some semblance of universal knowledge. This was good in itself, for to the medieval men God was the source of all truth and to comprehend it was to come closer to divinity. They also placed great value on the practical rewards of their liberal education, and rightly so, for their logical, dialectical, mathematical, and rhetorical studies were the best available training for the clerks, notaries, lawyers, canons, and managers so badly needed in the high Middle Ages.

That was not quite enough for the humanists of the Renaissance, who made a conscious effort to return to the ideas and values of the classical age. As Christians they continued to study the Church Fathers but rejected the commentaries of the medieval schoolmen and went directly to the sources themselves, applying the powerful new tools of philological analysis. Their greatest innovation and delight, however, was the study of classical texts by the pagan authors whose focus on the secular world and elevation of the importance of mankind powerfully appealed to them. Their idea of a liberal education, the studia humanitatis, continued to include grammar and rhetoric from the old curriculum, but added the study of a canon of classical authors writing poetry, history, treatises on politics, and moral philosophy.

They thought these studies delightful in themselves but also essential for achieving the goals of a liberal education: to become wise and to speak eloquently. The emphasis was on use and action. The beneficiary of a humanistic liberal education was meant to know what is good so that he could practice virtue. Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier set forth the ideal of the well-rounded man who united in his person a knowledge of language, literature, and history with athletic, military, and musical skills, all framed by good manners and good moral character. These qualities were thought to be desirable in themselves, but they would also be most useful to a man making his way in the courts of Renaissance Italy.

The civic humanists looked to the liberal education of the humanists to train good men for public service, for leadership in cultural and political life. Such humanists as Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Poggio Bracciolini served as chancellors of Florence and used their skills and abilities to defend it against aggression. They also found time to write histories of their city meant to celebrate its virtues and win for it the devotion of its citizens, a no less important contribution to its survival and flourishing.

Pietro Paolo Vergerio, another of the Italian humanists close to the Florentine circle, summarized the group’s idea neatly:

We call those studies liberal which are worthy of a free man; those studies by which we attain and practice virtue and wisdom; that education which calls forth, trains, and develops those highest gifts of body and mind which ennoble men and which are rightly judged to rank next in dignity to virtue only, for to a vulgar temper, gain and pleasure are the one aim of existence, to a lofty nature, moral worth and fame.

For the Italian humanists, freedom meant putting aside concern for gain and instead devoting oneself to the training of mind, body, and spirit for the sake of higher things. No more than the ancients did the Humanists think that liberal education should be remote from the responsibilities and rewards of the secular life of mankind. Their study should lead to a knowledge of virtue, but that knowledge should also lead to virtuous action in the public interest, and such action should bring fame as its reward.

The idea of liberal education came to America by way of the English colleges and universities, where the approach of the Renaissance humanists gained favor only in the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, the study of a broad range of classical texts on a variety of subjects had no institutional home.

In Georgian England, however, the humanists’ education took hold. But the English version of a humanistic liberal education showed little interest in the hard training that turned philology into a keen and powerful tool for the critical examination of primary sources and the discovery of truth. Nor was it meant as preparation for an active life of public service. It was an education of one of Castiglione’s courtiers rather than one of the civic humanists’ chancellors. The result was an education that suited English society in the eighteenth century, one where the landed aristocracy was still powerful and where connections and favor were very important. A liberal education was one suitable to a free man, who, it was assumed, was well-born and rich enough to afford it. It was to be a training aimed at gaining command of arts that were “liberal,” “such as fit for Gentlemen and Scholars,” as a contemporary dictionary put it, and not those that were servile—“Mechanick Trades and Handicrafts” suited for “meaner People.” It was not an education meant to prepare its recipients for a career or some specific function but an education for gentlemen. The goal was to produce a well-rounded man who would feel comfortable and be accepted in the best circles of society and so get on in the world. It placed special emphasis on preparing young men to make the kind of educated conversation required in polite society.

There was no fixed canon of authors on which one was examined at school or university. Their main contribution to the current idea of liberal education was to give their students the opportunity to make the right sort of friends. “Friendship,” as one schoolmaster put it, “is known to heighten our joys, and to soften our cares,” but no less important, “by the attachments which it forms . . . is often the means of advancing a man’s fortunes in this world.”

Such an education prized sociability above the solitude of hard study. It took a dim view of solitary study aimed at acquiring knowledge for its own sake, which was called pedantry, a terrible term of abuse at that time. Pedants were thought to be fussy, self-absorbed, engaged in the study of knowledge that was useless. We find fathers writing to warn their sons at the university against the dangers of working too hard and becoming pedants, ruining their health, and damaging their social life. Education was meant to shape character and manners much more than intellect.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century the number of undergraduates entering the universities grew rapidly. Though the new generation came from the same social class as its predecessors, its members thought and acted differently, for the world had changed. The long years of war against France, the arrival of the radical ideas of the French Revolution, the vogue of romantic individualism, and the revival of serious interest in religion that came in their wake unsettled the easy-going society of eighteenth-century England and its emphasis on polite behavior. The pressure of war made the government take at least a few steps toward filling important posts on the basis of competence instead of connections. The response of the university faculties was to revive a medieval device that had fallen into disuse—competitive examinations.

These examinations had the desired effect, absorbing the time and energy of the undergraduates and turning their minds away from dangerous channels. They also enhanced respect for the universities and the teachers in them. The idleness of the eighteenth century was replaced by hard teaching and learning. For most students, a liberal education came to mean the careful study of a limited list of Latin and Greek classics, with emphasis on mastery of the ancient languages, but it was now justified on a new basis. This kind of learning, it was said, cultivated and strengthened the intellectual faculties. Commissions investigating Oxford and Cambridge in the 1850s concluded that “It is the sole business of the University to train the powers of the mind.”

This new definition, the defined curriculum, and the examination system that connected them greatly improved both the performance and the self-confidence of university faculties. Before long, however, they came under attack from two new directions. The growth of industry and democracy led to a demand for a more practical schooling that would be “useful” in ways that the Oxbridge liberal education was not. It would train its students for particular vocations, on the one hand, and it would provide the expertise the new kind of leaders needed in the modern world, on the other. At the same time, critics in the mid-nineteenth century complained of the loss of the old values of liberal education undermined by the limited classical curriculum, the sentence-parsing and fact-cramming imposed by the examinations. Liberal education, they insisted, must not be narrow, pedantic, one-sided—in short, illiberal. It must be more than merely useful in a pragmatic sense; it must train the character and the whole man, not merely the mind. But the restless, tumultuous, industrial society of the nineteenth century, increasingly lacking agreement and a common core of values, needed leaders trained in more than style and manners. Such leaders must understand the magnitude of the new problems: “by an effort of speculative imagination, based on a solid understanding of the meaning of industrialism in the context of world history, [they] would be able to give the turbulent society a proper sense of its character and its mission, directing it towards the realization of its uncommon potential.” Liberal education must become general education, including languages, literature, history, and the natural sciences. In the words of one writer, “A man of the highest education ought to know something of everything, and everything of something.”

The answer of some was “universal knowledge.” They urged a broadening of the field of learning to include all that was known and an attempt to synthesize and integrate the information collected by discovering the philosophical principles that underlay it all. As one Victorian put it, “The summit of a liberal education . . . is Philosophy—meaning by Philosophy the sustained effort . . . to frame a complete and reasoned synthesis of the facts of the universe.”

The new universal education remained intellectual and academic, not practical and professional. It aimed at broad understanding rather than special expertise, but its champions insisted that although it was not purely useful, it was nonetheless useful. Cardinal Newman was the most famous proponent of the new program, but he resisted the idea of usefulness entirely. “That alone is liberal knowledge,” he said, “which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed in any art, in order to present itself to our contemplations. The most ordinary pursuits have this specific character, if they are self-sufficient and complete; the highest lose it, when they minister to something beyond them.” Newman was an intellectual, an academic, and an Aristotelian and he defended the ancient idea of the value of learning and knowledge for their own sake at a time when the tide was running against it, as it usually does.

The result was the same one that awaited Canute. In the last decades of the century, Newman’s idea of knowledge for its own sake and the whole concept of universal knowledge for the purpose of philosophical understanding were swept away by a great tidal wave from across the channel, whose chief source was Germany. All the educational ideas we had considered to this point had this in common: They regarded knowledge as something that existed already. There was little thought of discovering anything true that had not previously been known.

By the nineteenth century, however, the power of natural science and the scientific method to discover new knowledge had become so obvious that it could no longer be prevented from influencing universities. At its core was the German idea of academic freedom, a freedom to investigate new questions and old in new ways, with a bold willingness to challenge accepted opinion unhampered by traditions from the past. Originality and discovery became the prime values. The idea of the university as a museum, a repository of learning, gave way to the notion that it should be dynamic, a place where knowledge was discovered and generated.

Scientific method and the new values were not confined to the natural sciences but were applied to the old humanistic studies, as well. The new methods and the new zeal for research invigorated the study of history, literature, and theology. The Classics, symbol of the old order and chief target of reformers, flourished more than most disciplines, making great progress in the technical fields of linguistics and philology, broadening the limits of their studies to include all the humanistic disciplines and even the new social science of anthropology. The content and meaning of classical texts became more important than the construal and composition of the classical languages.

These gains, however, exacted a price. The new knowledge required specialization—hard, narrow training at the expense of broad, general education for the purpose of philosophical understanding aimed at by the advocates of “universal knowledge.” Champions of the new order, therefore, changed the definition of liberal education. An Oxford classical philologist put it this way: It is “the essence of a liberal education that it should stand in constant relation to the advance of knowledge. Research and discovery are the processes by which truth is directly acquired; education is the preparation of the mind for its reception, and the creation of a truth-loving habit.” He believed that knowledge obtained by rigorous research would produce truth and that only truth could lead to morality. Research, therefore would provide a new basis for morality. Useful knowledge, good examples, and wisdom were not to be sought in the past but in the future. That required the application of scientific method to all subjects, which, in turn, demanded specialization. New knowledge, moreover, did not fit neatly into the small number of old packages that made up the traditional university organization. Science and social science kept creating new fields and subfields, all of which had equal claim to attention and a place in a liberal education, since all employed the correct method and all claimed to produce new knowledge and truth. No one could or dared to rank subjects according to an idea of their intrinsic value or their usefulness. Practitioners in each field came to have more in common with their fellow investigators in other universities than with their colleagues in other fields at their own. Both they and their students became more professional in their allegiance and in their attitudes. Preparation for and advancement in a career became the chief concern of both. The distinction between a liberal and a professional education became ever more vague. These developments seem to me to have been the forces that have shaped our own universities and remain dominant today.

I have rehearsed this inadequate capsule history of the idea of a liberal education because I think it may be a useful basis for examining the status of liberal education today and for considering what directions it might need to take in the future. I am struck by the fact that every claim ever made on behalf of liberal education is still being made at some college or university at least some of the time; at some places and some times all the benefits are claimed at the same time.

In evaluating the performance of major American universities in meeting the various goals of liberal education sought over the centuries, I came to conclusions that surprise me. It seems to me that the education provided at a typical liberal arts college today comes closest to achieving the goals sought by English gentlemen in the eighteenth century. To be sure, success in that world did not require any particular set of studies or any specialization. If it had done so, I am sure the training then would have contained some equivalent of our modern departmental major. In most other respects, our curricula today—with their lack of any collection of works or even subjects studied in common, the absence of agreement on any particular method of training the mind, the lack of a culminating examination testing the acquisition of a fixed body of knowledge, the emphasis on well-roundedness (defined only as the opposite of narrowness and achieved by taking a few courses in some specified number of different fields)—fit the model nicely. If we examine the full reality rather than only the formal curriculum, the similarities seem even greater. I submit that in America today the most important social distinction, one almost as significant as the old one between gentle and simple, is whether or not one has a college education. Within the favored group, finer distinctions place a liberal education, as opposed to a vocational or merely professional one, at the top of the social pyramid. Graduates of the better liberal arts colleges are most likely to marry the most desired partners and hold the best positions and appointments in business, their professions, and government. That this is true and widely understood is shown by the fact that each year there are great numbers of applicants for every place in the freshman classes of such colleges at a cost of perhaps $60,000 each year, a phenomenon otherwise inexplicable. Apart from any pre-professional training they may obtain, successful applicants gain about the same advantages as those sought by young Englishmen from their somewhat less formal eighteenth-century education. They sharpen useful skills in writing and speaking, they pick up enough of subjects thought interesting in their circle and the style of discussing them to permit agreeable and acceptable conversation. They learn the style and manner, political opinions and prejudices to make them comfortable in a similarly educated society. They have excellent opportunities to make friends who may be advantageous to them in later life. This education, of course, is purely secular. There is, moreover, no attempt to shape good character, for the better universities lead the country in the direction of a kind of relativism, even nihilism. The message that seems to get through is: “Do your own thing, and demand that everyone else in the world behave according to the strictest possible moral code (as it is currently understood in the halls of the most favored colleges).” No doubt, the absence of religion and the failure to shape character would disappoint an eighteenth-century gentlemen, but in other respects I think he would not be dismayed by what is called a liberal education today.

Other definitions and objectives are, I think, less well served. The search for general, universal knowledge and for the philosophical principles on which it may be based has long since been abandoned. In truth, I think it never had much hope or support. Nor do I think that most modern attempts at liberal education encourage the pursuit of learning and knowledge as an end in itself. I doubt that many students were ever deeply impressed by that goal, but when there was general agreement that there was a core of knowledge worth learning, one that all educated people could share, and one, therefore, that could readily serve as the basis for serious discussion of important questions and thereby, perhaps, yield wisdom, there was a far greater chance of success than there is today.

It might be thought, at least, that those values produced by the study of the natural sciences, of research, and of scientific method flourish in today’s version of liberal education; I mean the rigorous training of the mind, the inculcation of a “truth-loving habit,” and the universal triumph of the scientific method. I am inclined to think otherwise. In liberal arts colleges today, the study of mathematics and the natural sciences is separated from other studies in important ways. The study of the hard sciences is committed to rigorous training of the mind in a single method, the scientific one. Teachers of science continue to believe in the cumulative and progressive character of knowledge and in the possibility of moving toward truth. Students who major in these subjects are likely to acquire the method and to share these beliefs. Though teachers and students are interested in the practical uses of science, I think many of them come to value learning and knowledge as good in themselves. But only a minority of students in liberal arts colleges major in mathematics or natural science. In some programs, students who do not major in these subjects are required to study neither; in others, there is a minimal requirement that rarely achieves the desired goals.

But hasn’t the scientific method made its way into other disciplines, and can’t its benefits be obtained through them? Where the attempt has been made most seriously, in the social sciences, it has been a failure. It is increasingly obvious that trying to deal with human beings, creatures of independent will and purpose, as if they were objects like atoms, molecules, cells, and tissues, produces unsatisfactory results. The social sciences, far from producing a progressive narrowing of differences and a growing agreement on a common body of knowledge and of principles capable of explanation and prediction, like the natural sciences, has seen each generation undermine the beliefs of its predecessors rather than building on and refining them. What we see is a war of methodologies within and between fields. In fact, the fundamental idea of the whole enterprise, the attempt to remove values from the consideration of human behavior and simply to apply the scientific method, now seems most implausible.

To me, however, the greatest shortcoming of most attempts at liberal education today, with their individualized, unfocused, and scattered curricula, is their failure to enhance the students’ understanding of their role as free citizens of a free society and the responsibilities it entails. Every successful civilization must possess a means for passing on its basic values to each generation. When it no longer does so, its days are numbered. The danger is particularly great in a society such as our own, the freest the world has known, whose special character is to encourage doubt and questioning even of its own values and assumptions. Such questioning has always been and still remains a distinctive, admirable, and salutary part of our education and way of life. So long as there was a shared belief in the personal and social morality taught by the Judeo-Christian tradition and so long as there was a belief in the excellence of the tradition and institutions of Western Civilization and of this nation, so long as these values were communicated in the schools, such questioning was also safe. Our tradition of free critical inquiry counteracted the tendency for received moral and civic teachings from becoming ethnocentric complacency and intolerance and prevented a proper patriotism from degenerating into arrogant chauvinism. When students came to college they found their values and prejudices challenged by the books they read, by their fellow-students from other places and backgrounds, and by their teachers.

I suggest to you that the situation is far different today. Whatever the formal religious attachments of our students may be, I find that a firm belief in the traditional values and the ability to understand and the willingness to defend them are rare. Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values. The admirable, even the uniquely good elements are taken for granted as if they were universally available, had always existed, and required no special effort to preserve. All shortcomings, however, are quickly noticed and harshly condemned. Our society is judged not against the experience of human societies in other times and places, but against the Kingdom of Heaven. There is great danger in this, because our society, no less than others now and in the past, requires the allegiance and devotion of its members if it is to defend itself and make progress toward a better life.

Traditional beliefs, however, are not replaced by a different set of values resting on different traditions. Instead, I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but also the world was born yesterday, a feeling that they are attached to the society in which they live only incidentally and accidentally. Having little or no sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that nothing is possible. They are inclined to see other people’s values as mere prejudices, one no better than another, while viewing their own as entirely valid, for they see themselves as autonomous entities entitled to be free from interference by society and from obligation to it.

Because of the cultural vacuum in their earlier education and because of the informal education they receive from the communications media, which both shape and reflect the larger society, today’s liberal arts students come to college, it seems to me, bearing a sort of relativism verging on nihilism, a kind of individualism that is really isolation from community. The education they receive in college these days, I believe, is more likely to reinforce this condition than to change it. In this way, too, it fails in its liberating function, in its responsibility to shape free men and women. Earlier generations who came to college with traditional beliefs rooted in the past had them challenged by hard questioning and the requirement to consider alternatives and were thereby unnerved, and thereby liberated, by the need to make reasoned choices. The students of today and tomorrow deserve the same opportunity. They, too, must be freed from the tyranny that comes from the accident of being born at a particular time in a particular place, but that liberation can only come from a return to the belief that we may have something to learn from the past. The challenge to the relativism, nihilism, and privatism of the present can best be presented by a careful and respectful examination of earlier ideas, ideas that have not been rejected by the current generation but are simply unknown to them. When they have been allowed to consider the alternatives, they, too, can enjoy the freedom of making an informed and reasoned choice.

The liberal education needed for the students of today and tomorrow, I suggest, should include a common core of studies for all its students. That would have many advantages, for it would create an intellectual communion among students and teachers that does not now exist and would encourage the idea that learning and knowledge are good things in themselves. It would also affirm that some questions are of fundamental importance to everyone, regardless of his origins and personal plans, that we must all think about our values, responsibilities, and our relationships with one another and with the society in which we live. The core I would propose would include the study of the literature, philosophy, and history (in which I include the history of the arts and sciences) of our culture from its origins. It would be a study that tries to meet the past on its own terms, examining it critically but also respectfully, always keeping alive the possibility that the past may contain wisdom that can be useful to us today. It would be a study that was consciously and deliberately moral and civic in its purposes, eager to examine the values discussed, private and public, personal and political. Such an education would show the modern student times and worlds where the common understanding was quite different from his own—where it was believed that man has capacities and a nature that are different from those of the other animals, that his nature is gregarious and that his flourishing requires an ordered beneficent society, that his nature can reach its highest perfection only by living a good life in a well-ordered society. It would reveal that a good society requires citizens who understand and share its values, which includes examining it and them critically, and accept their own connection with it and dependence on it, that there must be mutual respect among citizens and common effort by them both for their own flourishing and for its survival. Students enjoying such an education would encounter the idea that freedom is essential to the good and happy life of human beings but that freedom cannot exist without good laws and respect for them.

Aristotle rightly observed that, in matters other than scientific, people learn best not by precept but by example. Let me conclude, therefore, by making it clear that the colleges who claim to offer a liberal education today and tomorrow must make their commitment to freedom clear by their actions. To a university, even more than to other institutions in a free society, the right of free speech, the free exchange of ideas, the presentation of a variety of opinions, especially of unpopular points of view, the freedom to move about and make use of public facilities without interference, are vital. Discussion, argument, and persuasion are the devices appropriate to the life of the mind, not selective exclusion, suppression, obstruction, and intimidation. Yet in my time our colleges and universities have often seen speakers shouted down or prevented from speaking, buildings forcibly occupied and access to them denied, different modes of intimidation employed with much success. Most of the time the perpetrators have gone unpunished in any significant way. These assaults typically have come from just one section of opinion, and they have been very successful. Over the years few advocates of views that challenge the campus consensus have been invited, and fewer still, sometimes victims of such behavior, have come. Colleges and universities that permit such attacks on freedom and take no firm and effective action to deter and punish those who carry them out sabotage the most basic educational freedoms. Yet to defend those freedoms is the first obligation of anyone who claims to engage in liberal education.

Ever less can students benefit from different opinions and approaches offered by their teachers, for faculty members with atypical views grow ever rarer on the campus. For some years now I have been asking students to name professors who seem not to share the views common among the faculty. There are some seven hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but the largest number ever named in these inquiries was ten to fifteen. This year the highest number I heard came to three. This has no small significance for the chance at a liberal education, for the opportunity not only to put uncomfortable questions to the teacher, but also to challenge him on the authority of one of his peers is vital to that end. That is how things were early in my career. In the critical fields of history and government there were a few teachers who did not conform to the standard opinions, but they had a great effect, for the students regarded them so well as teachers that they filled their classes in great numbers and challenged other teachers with their ideas.

Once, my late student and friend Alvin Bernstein was teaching a course in the history of Western civilization the same semester that Allan Bloom was teaching his famous course in political philosophy. Al was discussing Plato’s Republic when the subject of some of Socrates’ less pleasant recommendations came to hand. A student objected that Al’s presentation was incorrect, that Plato did not mean for these to be taken at face value, that there was a deeper, ironical, in fact opposite meaning to the dialogue that was not for the ordinary reader but for the more intelligent and worthy people. Al asked, “Who told you that?” “Professor Bloom,” the student answered. “Ah,” said Al without missing a beat. “That is what he told you, but his deeper ironic meaning is not for the ordinary reader but for the more intelligent and worthy people.”

Alas, few faculties have great teachers like Bernstein or Bloom in any number, but colleges must work hard to acquire and keep such talented teachers with such diverse opinions if there is to be any hope for a truly liberal education.

Donald Kagan is Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University.

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