DEMOCRACY AND THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Farewell Lecture, Jeff Seward, February 17, 2022
Hello, everybody. I really appreciate so many people showing up to send me off. I didn’t realize that my leaving Pacific was so popular. And hello to all of you tuning in via Zoom.
In thinking about what to talk about today, I remembered a speech I gave over 25 years ago when I was asked to speak at Commencement in 1996. The title of my speech, then, was “A Liberal Arts Foundation for Life.” What followed was a vigorous defense of the liberal arts, and today I want to elaborate on that defense and connect it up to current problems of democracy.
Back in 1996, I reminded the graduates that they had all read Plato’s Apology in their freshman seminar and had seen there Socrates’ famous line that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I imagined that as they faced their future after graduation, they were probably thinking, “Yeah, Socrates, forget about the unexamined life. What about the unemployed life? Why didn’t I major in plumbing or used car salesmanship? What was I thinking to major in philosophy or French or physics or, heaven forbid political science? Whatever is to become of me? How am I going to eat?”
I went on to try to reassure them that a liberal arts education is in fact the most practical education they could get. I still believe that. In a world where people change jobs and even careers multiple times during their adult lives and the jobs themselves constantly change, sometimes radically, the clearest waste of a college education would be to spend four years training for some very specific vocation or job. The greatest mistake people could make would be to wake up one day to find themselves over-trained and under-educated. What you need is to hone your ability to be a quick study, to get your bearings almost instantly in a new environment or in the midst of swirling uncertainties, to see more deeply than others below the surface of things, to look farther into the future, to reflect more keenly on your own experience. But that is exactly the sort of qualities that a broad liberal arts education is designed to instill, and it’s that commitment to liberal arts education that has made me deeply proud to be associated with Pacific for the last three decades.
But all too often in recent years, colleges and universities have tried to deemphasize their liberal arts focus to prospective parents and students and focus instead on how their curriculum prepares students for the job market. Pacific a few years ago, for example, deleted from its mission statement a description of itself as including an excellent undergraduate liberal arts college. Instead of proudly defending the value of a liberal arts education, it seemed to be trying to point external audiences away from the core idea of what Pacific has been.
An even more depressing example to me showed up in the Pacific magazine a couple of years ago. The article was titled, “The Cost and Value of College.” It had a very thoughtful and helpful survey of the real finances of a college education once you factor in financial aid and a good discussion of the financial payoff of a college education. Then came a section titled “Intangible Benefits.” Great, I thought—here comes the discussion of the practical and potentially transformative value of a liberal arts education. Instead, this is the whole account of the “intangible benefits” of a Pacific education:
“Of course, the decision to seek a college degree is more than a dollars and cents question. College is a place where many students learn for the first time how to live independently, manage their workloads effectively, and form new social and professional networks. They also often gain the intangible skills that employers consistently deem most valuable: work ethic, self-motivation, teamwork, and communication. These intangible benefits may be priceless.”
So, not a word about the transformative mission of a liberal arts education. The “intangible benefits” are all about becoming more attractive to a prospective employer. Not a word about personal growth, community leadership, responsible citizenship, intellectual curiosity, flexibility of mind, more thoughtful participation in the larger society. No, just the acquisition of “skills” that “employers consistently deem most valuable.” It reminds me of a comment on the student evaluations for one of my freshman seminars years ago. The student asked, “How is this course going to help me get a job?” If that’s all that we think a college education is about, then it has no role at all in improving our democracy.
Bob Dylan over 50 years ago had a line in a song: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” The point of a liberal arts education should be to provide students with a foundation of personal qualities that helps them recreate themselves over and over as their life unfolds and the world around them changes so that they can for the rest of their lives always be in the process of “being born.”
While preparing this talk, I came across a draft mission statement, not for the University as a whole, but just for the College of Arts and Sciences. What I like about it (beside the fact that I wrote it) is that it rejects the false dichotomy between the liberal arts and “practical” education. Here it is:
“The mission of the College of Arts and Sciences is to provide students with a sophisticated foundation for dealing with the complex challenges of contemporary life by combining a broad liberal arts education of exceptional quality with a systematic emphasis on preparing graduates for additional education, successful careers, civic responsibility, and life-long personal growth and development.”
In other words, to prepare students to always be busy being born instead of busy dying.
Well, what has this got to do with “democracy”? After all, the title of this lecture is “Democracy and the Future of Higher Education.” Well, there was another paragraph in that 1996 commencement speech that I cut as I was delivering it because I thought I was taking up too much time. But it speaks directly to the value of liberal arts education for strengthening our democracy. It also reminds me that the problems in our democracy did not begin with Donald Trump or the Proud Boys. They have deep roots and were already all too visible in 1996. This is the paragraph I cut out back then:
“Nor are we only private persons. Life is also rooted in communities. If the 21st century will demand better and more creative workers, it will also, at least as urgently, demand better and more creative citizens. If the best of us retreat ever more completely into our purely private lives, the public square will become deserted, surrendered either to the fanatic or the self-interested at just the moment when the redesign of our public life is most desperately in need of the thoughtful and the public-spirited. Many of you have distinguished yourselves with your service to the Pacific community and the communities that surround us. That, too, is part of the liberal arts foundation, a sense of citizenship that carves out a substantial space in our lives for a selfless serving of the communities that sustain us all.”
That commitment to and capacity for thoughtful citizenship, community service, and constructive political leadership is not produced by a narrow focus on vocational preparation for the job market. It can be produced by deep engagement with a well-designed liberal arts education. Across the disciplines of the social sciences and the natural sciences in particular, there is a focus on gathering and sifting real evidence. What counts as evidence? What arguments are valid? What are the varied ways that different disciplines go about evaluating evidence and making claims about reality? What are the different perspectives even within disciplines that they bring to bear on the project of understanding social and natural reality? How can you distinguish real evidence and valid argument from delusions, fabrications, fallacies, rumors, conspiracy theories? How does serious investigation equip us to distinguish fact from fantasy and to challenge conventional wisdom? As for the arts and humanities, how do they open us up to new ways of expressing ourselves and new ways of looking at the world and the vast possibilities of human beings and the human spirit? How can all of this help us see the world in new and better ways without drifting off into rabbit holes of bigotry or conspiracy theories?
If I had my way, I would start having virtually every class on campus lead students through repeated explorations of popular culture and social media to contrast their often bizarre claims with reality-based evidence. Our students are avid consumers of media that is full of dangerous nonsense. Part of a liberal arts education should be building up our students’ defenses against evidence-free bullshit. No graduate of a university should be attracted to QAnon.
An ever larger proportion of our population is choosing to go to college and the great majority of community leaders of all kinds have college degrees. Colleges and universities have a deep obligation to help those students navigate increasingly problematic oceans of information and misinformation.
This is not the same thing as having the goal of producing ideological clones of ourselves. There are legitimate ways to be both conservative and progressive, and our goal should not be to turn the conservatives into progressives or vice versa. It is our mission to produce more thoughtful, more rational conservatives and more thoughtful, more rational progressives and to help both sides of that ideological divide to engage in a sympathetic appreciation of the virtues of the other side. We should be teaching our students and reminding ourselves that all methodologies, all theoretical perspectives are flawed. They are imperfect, highlighting and illuminating some things, obscuring or distorting other things. We must always remain open to new approaches. All perspectives that challenge old conventional wisdom must themselves remain open to evidence-based, good faith challenges themselves. It is precisely that open-mindedness to a pluralism of methodology and theory that should distinguish both professors and students in a liberal arts education.
I used to think differently. When I taught high school for a year in Boise, Idaho in the early 1970s, I thought of myself as some sort or other of a Marxist revolutionary, and I hoped to transform as many of my students as possible into like-minded revolutionaries. I only taught high school for one year, and my crop of young revolutionaries was embarrassingly meagre. This was brought home to me forcefully one day a couple of years later on the streets of Boise, when a former student came running up to me yelling, “Mr. Steward! Mr. Steward!” I thought, “Wow, I made such a deep impression on this guy that he can’t even remember my name.” But he went on, “You know, Mr. Steward, you had a tremendous impact on me and it really changed my life. You always told us to think for ourselves and lead our own lives and not let our parents or teachers or churches or social pressure force us to do things we didn’t really feel were true to ourselves.” “So, what have you been up to since high school?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “I went to college for a year at Boise State, but I hated it, so I dropped out.” “So, what are you doing now?” “Well, I got a job at McDonald’s and now I am an assistant manager, and I’ve got a whole career at McDonald’s ahead of me and someday maybe I’ll even own a franchise. And I really owe it all to you.”
For years I told this story as evidence of what a failure I had been as a high school teacher at instilling my students with my own progressive values. I don’t think about it that way anymore. These days I think of it as a success story. I had no right to try to turn my students into clones of my revolutionary self. But even though this student’s values didn’t correspond at all to mine, I had helped him escape paths that didn’t make sense to him and carve out a life he was excited about. I have the same feelings about my students at Pacific. I don’t know that I have converted many of them to my way of thinking about the world, but I hope and I believe that I have helped many of them to look at the world in fresh ways, to think about what they can find of value in ideological perspectives that they don’t particularly agree with, to pay more attention to what constitutes good evidence and good argument, to become more thoughtful and constructive versions of themselves rather than carbon copies of me. And I hope that will make them more constructive and creative citizens and leaders.
And that’s the contribution that liberal arts education can make to our democracy, to produce more and more citizens and leaders who are thoughtful, constructive, open-minded, and competent at sifting evidence in a way that helps them distinguish reality from nonsense.
John Stuart Mill in the early 1800s said something about political life that I think is still relevant to contemporary democracy:
“The grand difficulty in politics will for a long time be, how best to conciliate the two grand elements on which good government depends; to combine the greatest amount of advantage derived from the independent judgment of a specially instructed few, with the greatest degree of the security for rectitude of purpose derived from rendering those few responsible to the Many.”
Not everything in a democratic society needs to be or ought to be democratic. We don’t want medicine to be run by majority vote of the patients; we don’t want day to day environmental regulation to be determined by popular referendum; we don’t want courts to take a public opinion poll before arriving at judicial decisions, etc., etc. Even the most democratic democracy necessarily relies on the expertise of what Mill called the “specially instructed few.” One of the goals of a liberal arts education should be to instill in our students an informed respect for professional expertise while at the same time also instilling in them the necessity of evidence-based skepticism about the decisions of professional experts. This is a tricky balance but absolutely essential for achieving that combination that Mill talks about between deferring to the expertise of technical elites and at the same time holding them democratically accountable. A liberal arts education, rather than narrow professional preparation, is the best way to produce a growing army of citizens capable of achieving that sort of balance.
I don’t have any illusions that the problems of our democracy can be solved by colleges and universities alone. When I was in graduate school at MIT in the spring of 1970 when Nixon invaded Cambodia and students were killed at Kent State, almost every college and university in the country was shut down by student strikes. And I remember one of my political science professors, not an especially radical guy, saying, “Well, with all the universities shut down in protest against Nixon, he’ll almost certainly have to resign any day now.” As you may recall, that didn’t happen, and I think in fact it’s reasonable to suggest that the anti-war movement probably helped Nixon get reelected in 1972. Universities cannot by themselves dominate or transform the political culture of the country, but they ought to do what they can to make our national political culture more thoughtful and more reasonable.
There’s a paradox here, though. Colleges and universities can only play this role well if they maintain a commitment to free inquiry, respect for evidence, and independence from outside pressure to have someone else dictate curricula or dictate what can and cannot be taught in classrooms. College faculties are among those “specially instructed few” whose independent judgment needs to be respected even if it is legitimate to raise occasional questions about what they are doing. But there are many threats to that independence. Some universities have allowed themselves to be coopted by foreign governments, most notably the governments of Saudi Arabia and China, who have showered money on some institutions to create social science institutes that systematically avoid criticizing the Saudis or the Chinese. China scholars have had to grapple with very complex issues of censorship and self-censorship as they try to maintain access to research inside China for themselves and their students. Other universities have allowed private corporations to participate in the selection of faculty or even dictate selection of certain faculty in exchange for large-scale funding of economics or business programs.
The decline of tenure is another major threat to the ability of colleges and universities to provide the sort of liberal education I am defending. It is now the case that nearly 70 percent of faculty across the country are not permanent faculty members. They are graduate students, one-year contract faculty, or, worse, adjunct faculty hired to teach one or two courses for starvation wages. Such part-time or temporary faculty can’t possibly have the attachment to their institutions or the opportunity or motivation to be mentors to their students. Too often, faculty are being thought of as interchangeable, low-level technicians for delivering information modules to students seen as consumers who are simply purchasing credits at the lowest price and lowest workload they can find. This contempt for the special expertise that scholars bring to the classroom and to the whole educational enterprise makes it very unlikely that institutions relying so heavily on insecure part-timers can ever offer an educational experience of the sort I am defending. Pacific is and should be very proud of the fact that the overwhelming majority of its curriculum is delivered by full-time Ph.D.s who see students repeatedly during their four years here and take advising and mentoring seriously as part of their commitment to a liberal arts education.
The decline of tenure also radically undermines the role of faculty members in university governance. Without tenure, challenges to the university administration can be career-ending. Without strong faculty involvement in university governance, faculty are in a very weak position to resist assaults on the liberal arts ideal in designing curriculum, starting up new programs, or deemphasizing old ones. As a result, you get some very alarming developments. For example, in the University of Wisconsin system, one of the country’s most respected public systems, one campus moved forward on a proposal to drop 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences—including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish—while adding programs with “clear career pathways.”
This is part of what I think is the biggest threat to the ability of higher education to play a constructive role in preserving our democracy. It is the idea that teachers at all levels should have little or no role in determining curriculum, that “parents” or legislatures should preempt faculty and make those decisions according to public opinion or political pressures.
The Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia recently damaged his campaign by saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The successful Republican candidate immediately jumped on this sacrilege and got himself elected. Across the country there are demands that parents be allowed to intervene directly into classrooms to veto books and curriculum, especially things that might teach students about the history of slavery, segregation and racism. My favorite is a bill in the Florida legislature that would outlaw any curriculum that causes “discomfort” among students because of their race. If teaching about the history of racism in America doesn’t cause white students “discomfort,” what in the world is being taught? I am deeply grateful for the way that my education in a wide variety of colleges and universities constantly caused me “discomfort” that provoked me to question conventional wisdom and open me up to new perspectives. Good education is surely about constantly provoking “discomfort” in students. That’s how you help them constantly to be busy being born, not busy dying.
Other legislation being considered would force teachers to justify in writing every piece of instructional material they use in class or even to install cameras in every classroom that parents can constantly monitor to see if anything they object to is happening. Similar initiatives crop up at the university level from time to time as conservative activists encourage students to monitor professors and expose them if they are teaching radical things. This creates an intolerable atmosphere for faculty, especially insecure part-timers. This sort of assault is a mortal threat to the necessary independence of faculty members.
Schools are not supposed to be simply extensions of the family or of the job market. They are community institutions that should expose students to the variety of perspectives alive in the larger world. That inevitably means that they will sometimes challenge the perspectives that students have been exposed to in their homes or in their churches and lead them to have questions that would never have occurred to them in those more narrow environments. That’s a good thing, not an evil thing, but it’s almost impossible if teachers have parents of all sorts of ideological and religious perspectives looking over their shoulders every minute and raising a storm if they disagree with anything.
It should be remembered that the Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution in schools in the 1920s was justified on the grounds that the majority had a right to dictate school content. William Jennings Bryan, who joined the prosecution of a high school biology teacher for teaching evolution in the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial,” had been a progressive hero for much of his political life for defending the common man against wealthy and powerful elites. While he strongly objected to the theory of evolution due to his fundamentalist Christian beliefs, his main argument in favor of the anti-evolution law was grounded in an appeal to his notions of democracy. As he put it, “Teachers in public schools must teach what the taxpayers want taught. The hand that rules the pay check rules the school. The essence of democracy is found in the right of the people to have what they want. There is more virtue in the people themselves than can be found anywhere else.” Ultimately, the question wasn’t whether or not evolutionary theory was correct, but only whether a majority of the public wanted it or not. Taken to this logical extreme, no professional expertise in any field is safe. Everything would be subject to majority rule, whether the majority has any competence to decide or not. This sort of doctrine completely obliterates the balance between expertise and accountability that John Stuart Mill described.
A version of this notion is also behind the frequent conservative complaints that higher education is too dominated by liberals and progressives. The suggestion is that institutions should strive to have ideological diversity just as much as racial or gender diversity. I happen to have some sympathy for this. Over the last couple of years, I have become a fan of such anti-Trump conservatives as David Frum, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, George Will, William Kristol, Charlie Sykes, Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, and others even though I don’t share their conservative views on most questions. But they all believe in reality and real evidence. I think it would be healthy and interesting if we had qualified academics on campus who did solid research based on legitimate evidence with conservative views like these.
But to suggest that faculties should closely reflect the ideological views of the public at large makes no sense. If we reflected large portions of public opinion and especially what passes for conservatism today in much of the Republican Party, for example, that would mean we should have creationists in the Biology Department or people who claim climate change is a hoax in the Environmental Studies program. We can’t have people in the Sociology Department who deny that racism exists in the US or that white people suffer from racial discrimination more than black people do. We shouldn’t have people in the Psychology Department who follow Charles Murray in claiming that black people are genetically inferior to white people in intelligence. We can’t have people who claim that Biden was elected as a result of massive voter fraud in the Politics and Government Department. We can’t have people teaching comparative religion who believe that all non-Christians are going to hell or that the earth is only 6,000 years old because the Bible tells us so.
At Boise State University, one of my many alma maters, there’s a professor, a political science professor I’m embarrassed to say, who recently said in a public lecture, “Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.” He apparently has tenure, so it’s not clear that he can be eliminated from the Boise State faculty, but there’s no question in my mind that, if a candidate for a faculty position in the social sciences at Pacific, said such things during his on-campus visit, there should be no question of vetoing his candidacy no matter how stellar his academic credentials might otherwise be.
If large segments of the public believe in nonsense or bigotry or conspiracy theories, that is no good argument for having those views reflected on the faculty of colleges and universities. This again is a completely misguided notion of “democracy” in higher education. It is absolutely essential that faculties have the power to protect their academic independence and intellectual integrity against that sort of ideological diversity.
There is every reason to favor institutions and practices that give the general public and their political representatives some say in education and some ability to monitor what goes on in schools at every level. But that should never mean that non-academic publics should be allowed to micromanage the classroom or override the professional judgment of professional educators.
So I am left with a paradox. I believe strongly that higher education has an important role to play in rescuing our democracy from its assorted current pathologies, but at the same time it will never be able to help rescue democracy if some forms of misguided democratic impulses destroy the professional independence of college and university faculties.
I’d like to finish on a personal note. My 32 years at Pacific have been something of a liberal arts education for me. My way of always being busy being born was to teach over 40 different courses at Pacific, many of them in areas where I had no real previous preparation. But plunging into the literature of topics as diverse as women in politics, religion in politics, modern dictatorship, the politics of nuclear weapons, conservatism and its critics, socialism and its critics, have kept me intellectually alive and constantly thinking of new connections between widely different subjects. And teaching over 20 times in our first year seminar meant that some of my best friends at Pacific were outside my department—philosophers, historians, anthropologists, economists. At a larger institution, I would never have had experiences like that.
Some of my favorite classes to teach at Pacific have been political philosophy classes. In those classes I often emphasized communitarian ideas, especially the notion that membership in healthy communities is essential for the full flowering of individuals and their human capacities. I think of myself as a communitarian. But some years back I realized that this vision is really hard to realize in communities as large as the United States or other modern nation states. It is really only a reasonable ideal for smaller communities, especially ones grounded in face-to-face relationships. And then I realized that I was very lucky to actually belong to such a community, and that community was Pacific University. One of Aristotle’s ideals in talking about community is that citizens should be active and good at governing and also good at being governed. I have held a number of positions at Pacific in university governance, and I enjoyed that very much, but I have also enjoyed just being a constructive foot soldier and being governed in my department by Jules Boykoff, in my School of Social Sciences by JayeCee Whitehead, in the College of Arts and Sciences by Sarah Phillips, etc. I have also always been very proud to be a professor to so many sincere, good-hearted, conscientious, and intelligent students and very proud to be a member of a faculty full of brilliant, conscientious, and decent human beings, many of whom are in the audience today. I have learned many things from all of you and enjoyed your collegial company immensely. You have given me a rich and wonderful life here, and I thank you all.
Rick Scott wants to defund anthropology and abolish tenure.
How does this class help me get a job?
Ideological diversity, yes, but not …, …, …
Pacific magazine article, “The Cost and Value of College”: A very thoughtful and helpful survey of the real finances of a college education and its financial payoff. Then comes a section titled “Intangible Benefits.” Great, I thought, finally a description of the transformative experience of a liberal arts education, creating a thoughtful, open-minded “educated person” capable of seeing things from a variety of perspectives, having been exposed to challenging ideas and experiences from the past and the present, an argument for the “practicality” of a liberal arts education in meeting the challenges of personal and public life, citizenship, etc. Instead, this is the whole account of “intangible benefits” of a Pacific education:
That he not busy being born is busy dying
PARADOX: Higher education has an important role to play in preserving American democracy, but some forms of democracy playing out now threaten the ability of higher education to play that role. So higher education may help to save democracy, but democracy may destroy higher education’s ability to do that.
ALTERNATIVE MISSION STATEMENT:
“The mission of the College of Arts and Sciences is to provide students with a sophisticated foundation for dealing with the complex challenges of contemporary life by combining a broad liberal arts education of exceptional quality with a systematic emphasis on preparing graduates for additional education, successful careers, civic responsibility, and life-long personal growth and development.”
University of Austin at Texas—Wesleyan President op-ed https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/13/college-university-higher-education-521182
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/70-years-of-chicken-little-stories-about-higher-education/ar-AARil27
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/boise-state-professor-keep-women-out-of-medicine-engineering-and-law/ar-AARiWEX
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1951/11/the-attack-on-yale/306724/?utm_source=msn (review by McGeorge Bundy of God and Man at Yale)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/opinion/republicans-democracy-minority-rule.html Edsall polarization article
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/opinion/covid-biden-trump-polarization.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/glenn-youngkin-tip-line-pranksters_n_61f0f6c0e4b0061af257cbfd
http://tnholler.com/2022/01/mcminn-county-bans-maus-pulitzer-prize-winning-holocaust-book/
https://www.chronicle.com/article/academic-freedom-is-on-the-ropes?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_3655317_nl_Academe-Today_date_20220207&cid=at&source=&sourceid=
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-purpose-of-a-university-isnt-truth-its-inquiry?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_3690610_nl_Academe-Today_date_20220211&cid=at&source=&sourceid=&cid2=gen_login_refresh Truth vs. critical inquiry
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/big-brother-is-headed-for-the-cla...
We Need a Less Moralistic Humanities
Sometimes it’s OK to side with the devil.
ANDREA UCINI FOR THE CHRONICLE
By Nicolas Langlitz
JANUARY 19, 2022
“In this spirit, a refurbished ivory tower could educate possibilists. In an essay called “The Task of the Humanities,” the literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has proposed that the humanities abandon the goal of moral betterment (as if their faculty members could claim moral superiority over people in other walks of life) and serve what Luhmann held as the function of academic research: increasing complexity, in the case of social research through second-order observations that open up alternative points of view. This would confront students and colleagues with facts that are inconvenient for their party opinion, as Max Weber put it. This vision of science and scholarship as a vocation does not aim at providing moral orientation, but an opportunity to experiment with heterodox views.”
Pacific magazine article, “The Cost and Value of College”: A very thoughtful and helpful survey of the real finances of a college education and its financial payoff. Then comes a section titled “Intangible Benefits.” Great, I thought, finally a description of the transformative experience of a liberal arts education, creating a thoughtful, open-minded “educated person” capable of seeing things from a variety of perspectives, having been exposed to challenging ideas and experiences from the past and the present, an argument for the “practicality” of a liberal arts education in meeting the challenges of personal and public life, citizenship, etc. Instead, this is the whole account of “intangible benefits” of a Pacific education:
“Of course, the decision to seek a college degree is more than a dollars and cents question. College is a place where many students learn for the first ime how to live independently, manage their workloads effectively, and form new social and professional networks. They also often gain the intangible skills that employers consistently deem most valuable: work ethic, self-motivation, teamwork, and communication. These intangible benefits may be priceless.”
So, nothing about the transformative mission of a liberal arts education. The “intangible benefits” are all about becoming more attractive to a prospective employer. Not a word about personal growth, responsible citizenship, more thoughtful participation in the larger communities. No, just the acquisition of “skills” that “employers consistently deem most valuable.”
Higher ed right crucial for democracy in teaching elites and citizens open-minded respect for evidence and humility about competing perspectives.
Higher ed threatened by democracy if parents and legislators start demanding control of curriculum
The threat from democracy imposing right-wing restrictions
Saudi Arabia, China sponsored programs
Corporate chairs
Ideological diversity would be nice but much mainstream conservative thought cannot be justified in academic terms—climate change denial, evolution denial, racism denial, Biden election denial, Trumpism
Ideological dogmatism also always a potential on the left as well—Marxists, feminists, LGBQT, Critical Race Theory, etc. Activism and scholarship a difficult mix, predetermined conclusions always illegitimate. Openness to new evidence and respect for competing methodological and theoretical perspectives always essential.
Purpose of higher education is not just the accumulation of skills or knowledge but more importantly transformative, the creation of an educated person able to think outside the box, etc. We also are trying to produce thoughtful, open-minded citizens and leaders (and not just clones of ourselves). Concern over language about “what should a Pacific graduate be or believe?” Dropping of liberal arts language from mission statement. See my commencement address.
Dylan quote: If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
Danger of too narrow a focus on vocational or professional education, extra tough at Pacific with so many appropriately professional-oriented graduate programs. Can lead to self-centered focus with no development of broader, public-spirited citizenship.
We should be defending and promoting a liberal arts orientation instead of apologizing for it or implying that we are overcoming it.
Higher education training to respect facts and appreciate the value of diverse perspectives essential for democracy.
But democracy can also be a threat to higher education. Need for a separation of academics and politics (in conventional electoral, legislative sense).
We are something like medieval monasteries. The faculty are the monks. The students are lay people sojourning temporarily to go back out to the world with a more spiritual and ethical understanding of their place in the world.
Abolition of anthropology, art history, history altogether in some state institutions deeply worrying. As we start a search for a new president, we should be wary of candidates like the fireman who had abolished most liberal arts majors in favor of building enrollments through remote education.
“Mr. Stewart! Mr. Stewart” Boise asst. manager McDonald’s
All methodologies are flawed, good at some things, bad at others. All theoretical perspectives are imperfect, highlighting and illuminating some things, obscuring or distorting other things.
Clifford Geertz quote about just getting better at bedeviling each other with deeper questions. Each new insight expands the size of what we do not know. Modernization theory, dependency theory, eclecticism.
Therefore, open-mindedness to a pluralism of methodology and theory and openness to new approaches. All challenging perspectives must themselves be open to evidence-based, good faith challenges.
Bob and I at APSA “meat market”—narrow empiricism of so many candidates, not even able to give an interesting answer to design of US survey. HUM 100? Deer in the headlights. That turned out to be the best question. Jules dived right in and soccer, poetry, radio show, activism.
Ideological diversity, yes, but that can’t mean openness to reality-denying nonsense. All but one Republic candidate (Huntsman) a few cycles back refused to say they believe in evolution. No creationists in the biology department. No climate change deniers in the enviro program. No racism deniers in sociology and no devotees of Charles Murray. No Biden election deniers or “legitimate political discourse” idiots in POLS. No Biblical literalists who deny the validity of literary and historical criticism of the Bible. See moron at Boise State.
No ideologues of left or right whose conclusions precede their investigations. But David Brooks, Ross Douthat, George Will, Michael Oakeshott, etc.
Milton Friedman, anti-discrimination laws of the 1950s indistinguishable from Nazi Nuremberg laws. Racism just a preference like jazz singers vs. opera singers.
Virginia candidate: “Parents should not be in control of education.” Common sense but caused huge backlash. Reminiscent William Jennings Bryan who didn’t oppose teaching evolution because it was incorrect but because parents didn’t want it. Violation of democracy.
