As you say, the development of American higher education has room for many narratives, and the one featuring Puritanism is an interesting one for the ways in which competing values remain incompatible. But I wonder if there is not another basic contradition in what colleges and universities are asked to do in America: on the one hand we want educated people to know the history and culture of all the disciplines (broadly defined) so that what is best can be passed on to the next generation; but on the other hand, we want graduates who are able to question and critique that store of received knowledge so that we might produce new knowledge and come to new understandings of how we have arrived where we are and where we ought to go. One vector is self-congratulatory, the other critical. But we don't like to be wrong, and we certainly don't like to be told what to do even if it's the right thing.
Despite the outrageously escalating costs of higher education, we have managed to educate many, many people who in previous decades might not have gone to college. New voices have produced new narratives and new texts that rightly challenge the received order. I'm thinking now of The 1619 Project and the reactionary response to that text and to Hannah-Jones herself. I don't know how long American universities can be underfunded and still sustain the vital role of producing new knowledge, but it seems that legislatures are unwilling or unable to take a long view. And the unfortunate result is that potentially new voices will be left unheard and unheaded. We're in a sorry state, but it's not a new one.
I'm reminded of an old essay by W. H. Auden which he wrote as a preface to Henry James's, The American Scene, because it seems to capture the prevailing attitude in America these days and may help to explain why we're screwed. He approaches his subject by comparing European assumptions with American ones, and in this binary Auden says that the European supposition is "that virtue is prior to liberty; i.e., what matters most is that people should think and act rightly; of course it is preferable that they should do so consciously of their own free will, but if they cannot or will not, they must be made to, the majority by the spiritual pressure of education and tradition, the minority by physical coercion, for liberty to act wrongly is not liberty but license. The antagonistic presupposition, which is not peculiar to America...but for which this country has come, symbolically, to stand, is that liberty is prior to virute, i.e., liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virute and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one."
These days it seems that we want the impossible: a "world-class" education that merely confirms our own prejudices. And that is not an education at all.
Your Auden reference is fantastic, Walter. Thank you. I suppose I still favor the American prioritization of liberty over virtue (it's the Emersonian in me). But you're right that the more one uses liberty as a pretext for intransigence, the more difficult it is to reconcile that view with education. I was fortunate to have teachers who allowed me to object, stridently, to some of what I was taught, and it was only in that exchange that I truly changed. I'm not certain what kind of student I would have been in the current environment.
Yes, the title is rather ham-handed (I'm bad at writing good titles). Not to be difficult, but who do you imagine as "we"? I'm not sure there is a we any longer, if there ever was?
We as humans. We certainly don't need more credentialing, which seems to be the major function of the University these days. Hopefully the formerly substantial functions of truth keeping and seeking will prevail.
Overall I think higher education is a greater good. I do think they've lost their way a bit, not politically, economically. They've priced the average Joe and Jane out. Yes, I always hear how states have reduced their financial support greatly, that's a given. But public universities have increased their tuition prices some 10 times past the rate of inflation. I'm just not sure why there was no accountability there. (Note: Taking out multiple loans is not a financial aid plan.)
I saw so many blue collar kids in college transport themselves from perhaps a life of working in a sawmill -- many which are now extinct -- to good, solid mid-level and upper level jobs. They accessed college with low tuition rates and the ability to pay all this tuition with a summer's worth of work. That shouldn't have been taken away.
I agree, Tim. These aren't the first culture wars, but the political dynamics seem different to me. Do you think it's possible to focus on affordability and accessibility and let the political stuff sort itself out?
I always hope what you wrote, focus on affordability and accessibility and let the political stuff sort itself out. Unfortunately, that's flipped.
It's really all about the cost. When one's money is reduced -- state reduction of funds -- they needed a better plan than just jack up tuition. When I've been laid off, things changed: quit eating out, only discount movies or library DVD's, no new clothes, reduce driving and trips. Simple really. Those things returned when I got another job.
It's difficult for the public to take colleges' cries of woe when they build Taj Mahal rec centers and pay many administrators six figures.
Instead, colleges should opt to reduce admin pay, fewer fancy things and get the average Jane and Joe into school. I'm guessing that ship has sailed, however.
Focusing on politics and safe spaces should be secondary, not primary, in my opinion.
Thanks. An image about how if even Quakerism had tracked west we would have fewer universities is my case. Quakering helped me enter the workforce after high-school despite being a voracious liberal arts journeyman adept. I was satisfied with starting from the lush American nothing from scratch,almost. Picture me, accepted to the great books programs at St John's and I would have instead gone to religious conclave of free Berea craft college in KY. No pain in saying this I have managed to write short novels in tents in Oregon. But in disivesting my attention from the spectral attn of God, I can see that universities provide the practical matter that american pragmaticism recommends: sorry that was my geek talking , wWJames and Peirce called themselves pragmaticists to distinguish from English pragmatism, universities give their profs something rather than the nothing that is stripmalls. The good food in the cafeteria it would be for me if I was teaching. And it would help us all to respect the wisdom of people who can stay there teaching when if the simple history of the country, surface noise creaky wheel history was to write our future, every minority is a significant minority Now, so that universities should serve a smaller Tribe than the idea of citizens. More to say about this in the context of Ken Kesey and Hawthorne, but which will underline your history of where we are now. Thank you for this throughline to the present. From a religious compatriot of Anne Hutchinson, I approve your gist your message.
As you say, the development of American higher education has room for many narratives, and the one featuring Puritanism is an interesting one for the ways in which competing values remain incompatible. But I wonder if there is not another basic contradition in what colleges and universities are asked to do in America: on the one hand we want educated people to know the history and culture of all the disciplines (broadly defined) so that what is best can be passed on to the next generation; but on the other hand, we want graduates who are able to question and critique that store of received knowledge so that we might produce new knowledge and come to new understandings of how we have arrived where we are and where we ought to go. One vector is self-congratulatory, the other critical. But we don't like to be wrong, and we certainly don't like to be told what to do even if it's the right thing.
Despite the outrageously escalating costs of higher education, we have managed to educate many, many people who in previous decades might not have gone to college. New voices have produced new narratives and new texts that rightly challenge the received order. I'm thinking now of The 1619 Project and the reactionary response to that text and to Hannah-Jones herself. I don't know how long American universities can be underfunded and still sustain the vital role of producing new knowledge, but it seems that legislatures are unwilling or unable to take a long view. And the unfortunate result is that potentially new voices will be left unheard and unheaded. We're in a sorry state, but it's not a new one.
I'm reminded of an old essay by W. H. Auden which he wrote as a preface to Henry James's, The American Scene, because it seems to capture the prevailing attitude in America these days and may help to explain why we're screwed. He approaches his subject by comparing European assumptions with American ones, and in this binary Auden says that the European supposition is "that virtue is prior to liberty; i.e., what matters most is that people should think and act rightly; of course it is preferable that they should do so consciously of their own free will, but if they cannot or will not, they must be made to, the majority by the spiritual pressure of education and tradition, the minority by physical coercion, for liberty to act wrongly is not liberty but license. The antagonistic presupposition, which is not peculiar to America...but for which this country has come, symbolically, to stand, is that liberty is prior to virute, i.e., liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virute and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one."
These days it seems that we want the impossible: a "world-class" education that merely confirms our own prejudices. And that is not an education at all.
Your Auden reference is fantastic, Walter. Thank you. I suppose I still favor the American prioritization of liberty over virtue (it's the Emersonian in me). But you're right that the more one uses liberty as a pretext for intransigence, the more difficult it is to reconcile that view with education. I was fortunate to have teachers who allowed me to object, stridently, to some of what I was taught, and it was only in that exchange that I truly changed. I'm not certain what kind of student I would have been in the current environment.
🔥🔥🔥❤️❤️
Good or bad is hard to say, but I don't think the current version of the university suits who we want to be in the future.
Yes, the title is rather ham-handed (I'm bad at writing good titles). Not to be difficult, but who do you imagine as "we"? I'm not sure there is a we any longer, if there ever was?
We as humans. We certainly don't need more credentialing, which seems to be the major function of the University these days. Hopefully the formerly substantial functions of truth keeping and seeking will prevail.
Overall I think higher education is a greater good. I do think they've lost their way a bit, not politically, economically. They've priced the average Joe and Jane out. Yes, I always hear how states have reduced their financial support greatly, that's a given. But public universities have increased their tuition prices some 10 times past the rate of inflation. I'm just not sure why there was no accountability there. (Note: Taking out multiple loans is not a financial aid plan.)
I saw so many blue collar kids in college transport themselves from perhaps a life of working in a sawmill -- many which are now extinct -- to good, solid mid-level and upper level jobs. They accessed college with low tuition rates and the ability to pay all this tuition with a summer's worth of work. That shouldn't have been taken away.
I agree, Tim. These aren't the first culture wars, but the political dynamics seem different to me. Do you think it's possible to focus on affordability and accessibility and let the political stuff sort itself out?
I always hope what you wrote, focus on affordability and accessibility and let the political stuff sort itself out. Unfortunately, that's flipped.
It's really all about the cost. When one's money is reduced -- state reduction of funds -- they needed a better plan than just jack up tuition. When I've been laid off, things changed: quit eating out, only discount movies or library DVD's, no new clothes, reduce driving and trips. Simple really. Those things returned when I got another job.
It's difficult for the public to take colleges' cries of woe when they build Taj Mahal rec centers and pay many administrators six figures.
Instead, colleges should opt to reduce admin pay, fewer fancy things and get the average Jane and Joe into school. I'm guessing that ship has sailed, however.
Focusing on politics and safe spaces should be secondary, not primary, in my opinion.
Thanks. An image about how if even Quakerism had tracked west we would have fewer universities is my case. Quakering helped me enter the workforce after high-school despite being a voracious liberal arts journeyman adept. I was satisfied with starting from the lush American nothing from scratch,almost. Picture me, accepted to the great books programs at St John's and I would have instead gone to religious conclave of free Berea craft college in KY. No pain in saying this I have managed to write short novels in tents in Oregon. But in disivesting my attention from the spectral attn of God, I can see that universities provide the practical matter that american pragmaticism recommends: sorry that was my geek talking , wWJames and Peirce called themselves pragmaticists to distinguish from English pragmatism, universities give their profs something rather than the nothing that is stripmalls. The good food in the cafeteria it would be for me if I was teaching. And it would help us all to respect the wisdom of people who can stay there teaching when if the simple history of the country, surface noise creaky wheel history was to write our future, every minority is a significant minority Now, so that universities should serve a smaller Tribe than the idea of citizens. More to say about this in the context of Ken Kesey and Hawthorne, but which will underline your history of where we are now. Thank you for this throughline to the present. From a religious compatriot of Anne Hutchinson, I approve your gist your message.
I do, indeed, worry about universities serving an ever smaller tribe.
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