Category Archives: academia

diversity arguments in education depend on learning as collaboration

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Why might you favor racial and gender diversity in education?

  1. As a matter of distributive justice. Places in colleges or universities convey political and economic advantage. Thus you may think they should be distributed equitably with regard to race and gender. To reach this conclusion, you may have to criticize other rationales for distributing places in college, such as arguments that grades and test scores reflect relevant merit or dessert.
  2. To obtain desirable social outcomes later. You may believe, for example, that we will be much better off as a society if we have plenty of Latino doctors, female police officers, and African American lawyers, which requires distributing places in college equitably.
  3. Because learning requires deliberation (or the construction of knowledge together), and deliberation requires diversity, and race and gender contribute valuable diversity of perspective.

Setting policy based on the first or second argument has been pretty much barred by the Supreme Court. These are also unpopular arguments because they appear to be zero-sum. If someone else’s kid deserves a place in college, that implies that my kid may have to give it up.

The third argument offers an appealing alternative. It presumes that colleges and universities are communities that engage their members (students, staff, and faculty) in producing knowledge together and in shaping common values.

I think the typical view of the liberal arts is quite different: the student learns skills or ideas from the material (e.g., from great books) and from the professor, who is also paid to create knowledge. Other students are basically competitors for the professor’s time, which is why student/faculty ratios are so often cited as measures of quality. Education is understood as modular: you learn ideas or skills from each course–actually from each reading or lecture. That is why there is so much enthusiasm now for online and “distance” learning, and it’s why students and families are OK with transferring from one college to another until they have accumulated enough credits to graduate.

The vast majority of college students do not get anything like a deliberative liberal  education. They sit in gigantic lecture classes, they commute to large and defuse public institutions where they are anonymous, they interrupt their college careers to work (picking up credits over time), and they study vocational fields. One conclusion might be that many more people need to be offered real liberal arts educations in diverse learning communities. But another conclusion might be that this is really an elite opportunity, and therefore the third argument for diversity (above) is irrelevant to most people. The demographic composition of the student body is not particularly helpful for an individual’s learning if that person studies accounting at the University of Phoenix or even chemistry in a big lecture class.

A liberal arts education based on deliberation and collaboration is expensive. Few Americans have experienced it, and its benefits are relatively intangible. So unless people come to understand learning as collective and deliberative, they aren’t going to pay for a residential liberal arts education (either through tuition or taxes). Nor will they accept the argument that learning requires diversity. A diversity agenda in higher ed will look like a mere matter of redistributing scarce resources. This is why the fundamental argument has to be about the collaborative nature of learning and of knowledge itself.

Rethinking the Humanities

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My chapter entitled “An Ethical Turn for the Humanities” has just been published in Rethinking the Humanities: Paths and Challenges, edited by Ricardo Gil Soeiro and Sofia Tavares. This volume originated in a Lisbon conference at which David Damrosch (Harvard Comp. Lit), Richard Wolin (History, CUNY Graduate Center), Cândido de Oliveira Martins (Catholic University of Portugal), José Pedro Serra (Lisbon), and António Sousa Ribeiro (Coimbra) presented papers that are now chapters. Rounding out the book are reprints of important recent essays by Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner, and Marjorie Perloff. My own chapter begins:

The original and fundamental purpose of the humanities is moral argumentation. Humanists are scholarly contributors to public discourse about matters of value. If there is a “crisis in the humanities” today, it arises from a general reluctance or inability to contribute to public ethical debate. The reasons for this reticence include widespread moral relativism or skepticism, envy of abstract theory, alienation from the public sphere, and a refusal to engage morally with stories, even though ethical interpretation of narrative is the characteristic contribution of the humanities.

Two recent developments are heartening and point to a revival. First, although philosophy in the English-speaking world was preoccupied for a generation with highly abstract and abstruse methodological questions, prominent Anglophone philosophers have lately resumed interpreting narratives and paying close attention to their literary qualities. Recent examples include Richard Rorty on Nabokov and Proust, Bernard Williams on the classical tragedies; Colin McGinn on Shakespeare; and Martha Nussbaum on many texts. Rorty recommended a “general turn against theory and toward narrative.”

Second, an “ethical turn” in literary studies mirrors the literary turn in philosophy. It has never been hard to find implicit moral judgments in literary criticism; and certain important moral topics (such as racism) have been close to the surface of criticism for 30 years. But it is a recent trend for literary critics to embrace the full range of moral issues and to defend explicit moral argumentation as a mode of criticism. In her influential 2006 book, The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson announces: “We must keep in mind that the question. How should I live? is the most basic one.” This bold premise associates her, she says, with the “general turn to ethics.”

The ethical turn in literature and the turn to narrative in ethics converge. These trends are desirable because valid moral reasoning depends upon the telling and interpretation of stories. In turn, stories are necessary because ethical reasoning is largely particularistic, not categorical. It is about particular people in particular situations, not about abstract concepts.

In this respect, ethical judgment is like aesthetic judgment. A large patch of red paint may contribute to the beauty of a painting by de Kooning, but it would utterly ruin a Van Eyck. Patches of red paint are not the right unit of aesthetic judgment; paintings are. Likewise, we can make valid moral judgments about overall situations described in narratives, but not about their qualities or aspects when taken out of context.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek sophists developed a pedagogy based on the telling and interpretation of rich, particularistic stories. In the hands of some Sophists, this style of discourse may have been a mere tool for persuading audiences of the speaker’s goals, reflecting doubt that there was any moral truth or any need to be morally responsible. But for others, notably Protagoras, a method of describing particular circumstances seemed the best way to ascertain the moral truth and to participate responsibly in the public deliberations of a republican city state.

Almost two thousand years later, in the little republics of Renaissance Italy, authors like Lorenzo Valla again defended the telling and interpretation of concrete stories as an alternative to scholastic theoretical philosophy. They again celebrated active engagement in public life (the vita activa) as an alternative to monastic contemplation. They revived the sophists’ pedagogy by emphasizing the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric—ancestors of philology and literary criticism) instead of the abstract, theoretical disciplines of philosophy and theology that had crowned the medieval educational system.

The first people to call themselves “humanists” were independent tutors who provided advanced undergraduates with instruction in grammar and rhetoric. They taught what they called the “studia humanitatis” on the side, while the university’s formal curriculum emphasized logic and theology. Parents paid for this “humanistic” instruction because they wanted their sons to learn eloquence to succeed at court or in the law. Humanist pedagogy consisted of reading and imitating ancient narrative authors, with attention to style and form, plot and character. Humanists like Thomas More, Erasmus, and Machiavelli also wrote books that we rightly classify as “philosophy.” But these texts were not treatises. They were literary works, self-conscious about character, context, voice, irony, and plot and meant for readers who understood such issues.

From the time of the Sophists and the Renaissance humanist to the present, defending the humanities as the best source of moral judgment has always required a critique of ambitious versions of moral theory (whether the theory of the time happens to come from Plato, from scholasticism, or from analytical philosophy). Moral theories are profoundly diverse and they yield a wide range of positions, from moral skepticism to Kantianism and utilitarianism. But all have one feature in common: abstraction. …

education and research for democracy need not be democratic

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Moving in the circles that I do, I often hear claims that education for democracy must be democratic–and that research that serves citizens must be conducted in collaboration with citizens. These views reflect some wisdom and experience, but they are not logical truths.

Many leaders have been deliberately prepared in disciplined, authoritarian educational settings to serve democracies. Consider, for example, how Martin Luther King Jr. portrayed his father:

Martin Luther King, Sr., is as strong in his will as he is in his body. He has a dynamic personality, and his very physical presence (weighing about 220 pounds) commands attention. He has always been a very strong and self-confident person … He never hesitates to tell the truth and speak his mind, however cutting it may be. This quality of frankness has often caused people to actually fear him. I have had young and old alike say to me, “I’m scared to death of your dad.” Indeed, he is stern at many points.

I assume this portrait was a bit euphemistic, because the elder King was very much alive to read it. “Daddy King” was not one for engaging children as equals in democratic discussions, yet he set MLK Jr. on a path to genuine democratic leadership.

I am inclined to think that the Venn diagram for democratic education looks like this (below). “Education for democracy” is any practice that increases the odds that children will turn into active, ethical, and effective members of communities. “Education that is democratic” is any pedagogy that emphasizes students’ voice in choosing topics, debating issues, and making things together. The two circles overlap in practices like “Action Civics,” which have been frequently found effective. But there can be good education for democracy that isn’t democratic (see “Daddy King,” above), and some democratic education doesn’t produce good citizens. That can be because it isn’t sufficiently political or because it simply isn’t good–kids waste their time.

Likewise, I think the Venn diagram for research looks like this (below). “Knowledge of value to citizens” means knowledge that we can use to improve the world. For example, a cure for cancer would be excellent, but it would not be useful for citizens unless it gave us something to do. Meanwhile, “knowledge produced collaboratively by citizens” includes the fruits of practices such as Participatory Action Research, Community Based Participatory Research, Popular Education, etc. Professors may be central players in this work, but they act as peers of fellow citizens.

Again, knowledge of value to citizens need not be produced collaboratively by citizens. Game theory, for example, has yielded many insights about how small groups work most effectively. Citizens should learn from game theory even though they did not co-produce it. Meanwhile, some knowledge produced collaboratively by citizens is not useful to citizens, because the results are incorrect, or partial, or too narrow and instrumental.

I happen to love the overlapping parts of these two Venn diagrams. At CIRCLE, we are completing a year-long and very ambitious evaluation of YouthBuild USA that we conducted with YouthBuild alumni as our co-investigators. My favorite educational programs use democratic pedagogies. But I do not assume that the circles above coincide, so that democratic education and research are always and exclusively valuable for citizens.

Rather, the core reason for my preference is ethical and pertains to means, not ends. I would rather treat children democratically (unless that actively harms their life prospects) because I think they deserve such treatment in the present. Likewise, I would rather treat a community partner as a co-investigator than a research subject because we are moral equals in the Kingdom of Ends. But I think the empirical questions–whether and when democratic processes yield good democratic outcomes–deserve more critical attention.

the state of the classics in 2050

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(Washington, DC) In a fairly recent New York Review of Books essay, Mary Beard asks, “Do the Classics have a Future?” Borrowing a bit from her piece, I predict that the study of Greek and Latin will remain vital in the mid-21st century. Classics will not be a musty or ethnocentric discipline but will continue to have strategic centrality in the humanities as a whole. Yet the field will look quite different from the “classics” of 1900.

The study of classics is not valuable primarily because the ancient Greeks and Romans were interesting or admirable. Rather, the classical civilizations had enormous and lasting impact on subsequent cultures, even when the people who have come under their influence have resisted and resented it.

The impact of Greece and Rome was by no means limited to the “West,” whatever that may mean. In any country that is Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or (by no means least) Muslim, Greek sources have foundational importance. Those countries cover much of the five continents. Northern India also entered an important conversation with Hellenic civilization before the time of Alexander the Great. Add the Buddhist and Hindu countries to those previously mentioned, and most of the world shows Greek influence. Nor have the classics become less influential in recent years. From recent American poet laureates to Iranian Ayotallahs, serious readers of the Greeks and/or Romans remain very much alive. If one misses their classical referents, one cannot fully understand them.

In order to understand Greco-Roman civilization in any depth you need the ancient languages: not only a passing understanding of their grammars and vocabularies but significant experience in reading the original texts.

For almost 2,000 years, ending in the mid-1900s, privileged Europeans and European-influenced men around the world mastered Greek and/or Latin as a basic marks of education and class status. They did not merely translate from those languages but learned to write and speak in them. Three reasons explain the extraordinary investment in classical education.

  • Originally, it was practical. Latin long remained a living language, widely understood, and a convenient medium of international exchange in science as well as religion.
  • People believed in the special merit of the classical languages because the Christian Bible and liturgy had been conveyed in Greek and Latin and because pagan Greece and Rome were held in high regard.
  • Even when those first two reasons for a classical education had faded, it still offered a way of marking out people of intelligence and social advantage across the European-dominated world. Any difficult discipline would have worked for this third purpose, but people naturally settled on the classical languages because their curriculum was already well established and esteemed.

Since all three reasons have faded and a classical education no longer marks the ruling class, it is unrealistic to imagine that large numbers of people will ever again learn Greek and Latin. That means that our understanding of culture subsequent to the Fall of Rome is threatened.

Fortunately, not many people must master any particular field for that field to be understood. Knowledge is specialized, and the important question is not whether everyone knows everything, but whether the specialists share what they know both with professional collaborators in other fields and with laypeople.

We collectively must understand China and the biology of viruses, but that does not mean that most Americans must know Chinese or virology. Likewise, we need classicists, but we do not need everyone to study the classics. There should always be a strong cadre of professional classicists distributed around schools and universities so that they can influence interdisciplinary research and debates.

In 2050, most educated people will know far less about the classical languages and cultures than their predecessors did in 1950. That will not be lamentable, because they will know things that no one understood in 1950. They will continue to have some basic background in Greco-Roman civilization and will know how to find out more from increasingly sophisticated reference tools.

Professional classicists will be rare but not extinct. They will know more than has ever been known before about Greco-Roman civilization. After all, scholarship is cumulative, and classical scholarship draws on other fields across the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences. Although classicists will be rare, they will be in high demand, because the global impact of the Greeks and Romans make them crucial topics of study. And because classics is an interdisciplinary field covering more than a millennium of history, society, and culture, it will seem broad and integrative in ways that many other fields are not.

Florida Gulf Coast University sets a standard for service

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One of the winners of the 2011 Higher Education Civic Engagement Awards from the Washington Center for Internships was Florida Gulf Coast University. I served on the selection committee and recently had occasion to reread FGCU’s proposal. Their work deserves national attention. (By the way, the awards had nothing to do with internships; it’s just that the Washington Center chose to give a national prize for civic engagement.)

FGCU enrolls more than 11,000 students who each pay $5,352 in tuition, about 10 percent of the sticker price of an Ivy League education. The college requires all students to conduct 80 hours of community service and to take a semester-long course on the “environmental, social, ethical, historical, scientific, economic, and political influences” on sustainability in Southwest Florida. Thus all students have an academic basis for work that involves local environmental issues. Many of the 200 community agencies that are partners of the University emphasize those issues.

In addition, 40% of all undergraduates are Arts and Sciences majors, and they all gave to take a course on the Foundations of Civic Engagement, which includes reading assignments, community service projects, and a pre/post self-assessment of students’ “understanding of civic engagement.”

The Honors program also offers courses that combine community service with relevant research. In its proposal, FGCU cited impressive examples (such as students working with migrant farmworkers in an organizing campaign against the tomato industry) and statistics, such as its annual 132,451 total hours of student service-learning.

FGCU was founded in 1997, so it had the opportunity to create a coherent, campus-wide program oriented toward service with an environmental theme. It would be much harder for an established institution to shift the whole curriculum in that direction.

Although I am a civic engagement specialist, I don’t believe that every student must perform community service or conduct community-based research. Taking Shakespeare seminars is also good. I would argue that the kinds of courses FGCU provides are examples of purposeful, challenging, collaborative experiences that advance a larger cause (in this case, civic environmentalism) and that engage both mind and spirit. The same could be said of directing a film or working in a biology lab. But we can’t just leave it to students to find their own ways to such challenging experiences. FGCU should be applauded for creating a coherent structure, on a large scale, at a low cost.