Category Archives: academia

universities as economic anchors

Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard, and their colleagues at Community-Wealth.org have argued for some time that we need economic institutions that are anchored in communities. It doesn’t matter so much whether they are public or private, non-profit or for-profit. What matters is that they cannot move, so that they have to invest in their communities (or at least minimize their damage).

From that perspective, one of the most significant facts about colleges and universities is that they are economic enterprises that cannot move. They collectively do tens of billions of dollars of business. Their impact can either be helpful or harmful, and their students and faculty have some influence on how they behave. Thus the discussion of universities and democracy must broaden beyond education and research to include economic issues. A great guide is Gar Alperovitz, Steve Dubb, and Ted Howard, “The Next Wave: Building University Engagement for the 21st Century,” The Good Society, vol. 17, no. 2 (2008), pp. 69-75, available in PDF. They end with some interesting policy recommendations, including an urban extension service and a new federal initiative in ten pilot cities.

critical thinking about “critical thinking”

Here are three interestingly complementary comments. The first is from the moderate-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks:

    A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

    The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

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people who flop at Oxford

Reading Ingrid Rowland’s very enjoyable and insightful biography of Giordano Bruno, a parallel occurred to me:

In 1583, in mortal danger from the Inquisition, a European exile comes to Oxford University in search of a professorship. He has wild and evocative ideas, writes brilliantly, but has not organized his thought into a consecutive or comprehensible system. He is equally adept at fiction, poetry, philosophy, and magic. He disdains the mainstream mode of philosophy (Arisoteleanism) and refuses to use the standard method of analysis (syllogistic logic). He hates the vulgar crowd but has egalitarian and libertarian theoretical ideas. English dons seem to him provincial, naive, and ill-mannered; he dispenses backhanded compliments about their distinguished academic garb while privately noting that they know more about beer than true philosophy. They find him laughable–passionate, irascible, nonsensical, and almost impossible to understand because he insists on pronouncing Latin like Italian. (Whereas they pronounce it like Elizabethan English.)

In 1934, a young philosopher comes to Oxford in search of a teaching job and a refuge from Nazi Germany. He has radical but somewhat inchoate ideas. He largely shuns the logical positivism and empiricism that are mainstream at Oxford and dabbles in phenomenology, music, sociology, and other disciplines. He writes beautifully and allusively but also elusively. He is a Marxist with very refined aesthetic principles. Oxford academics find him “a bit of a comic figure” (A.J Ayer), partly on account of his “anxiety.” He finds them naive. “It is quite impossible to convey my real philosophical interests to the English, and I have to reduce my work to a childish level.”

Giordano Bruno, Theodor Adorno: two guys who got “job talks” at Oxford that never panned out.

where were our business schools?

There’s some blogospheric talk about the failure of economics (the academic discipline) to predict, explain, or help to remedy the current financial crisis. Economists are being blamed for using mathematically complex but empirically ungrounded models instead of studying things that matter. They have, for example, little to say about whether it’s wise to inject public money into banks during liquidity crises.

Economics probably is excessively theoretical and too enamored of complicated math instead of observation and application. But at least economics contributes powerful methods and theoretical models, some of which turn out to be useful (or at least provocative) across the social sciences. For instance, even though Don Green has shown that game theory is incompatible with empirical facts, it remains a powerful and insightful conceptual scheme. So it wouldn’t be the worst thing if economics departments were irrelevant in times of crisis–as long as they were great centers of theoretical inquiry.

The most obvious place where professors should study public issues related to business is not the econ. department–it’s the business school. Businesses can pay for their own training. Yet we subsidize business schools and provide a whole structure of benefits and protections, such as tenure, for their faculty. Why? I can only think of three rationales:

1. To equip disadvantaged students with skills that make them more competitive in the job market;

2. To give their graduates some kind of ethical orientation or concern with the public interest; and

3. To provide citizens, policymakers, and consumers (overlapping groups) with reliable and independent–and sometimes critical–insights about business.

I’m not sure how well business schools are doing with #1 or #2. They certainly seem to have failed with #3. Last year, if business school professors were having serious discussions and conducting research on the roots of today’s crisis, they failed to share the results in a timely or prominent way.

ideological diversity on campuses

On one of my recent visits to a college campus, I met a bunch of students who began by telling me all the excellent ways they are involved in civic and political affairs. One young woman mentioned some hospital volunteering and research overseas. A couple of others said (among other things) that they worked for Democratic candidates. The conversation then turned political and very anti-Republican, with students saying that it was important to vote because the GOP had practically ruined the country over the last eight years.

I noticed some quiet people at the table. I intervened and asked them to speak freely. It turned out that the hospital volunteer was also the president of the Young Republicans on campus. Apparently, she hadn’t wanted to mention that role when we introduced ourselves.

Once, at the University of Maryland, a senior who was working on a scholarship essay “came out to me” as a conservative. A conservative thesis seemed to fit his essay best, as I observed; but he thought he’d better not own up to such ideas. He said I was the first professor to whom he had admitted his conservative leanings.

I don’t think these stories support the right-wing charge that academia has been captured by lefties. If we can generalize from them at all, I think they show our polarization. We have liberal campuses and conservative campuses just as we have liberal zip codes and conservative zip codes. People sort themselves. What we lack are mixed places.

I’m as progressive as the next person, but I think we are losing valuable educational opportunities this way. I used to find that many of Maryland’s best students, who came to me for help with their applications for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, had never encountered conservative ideas. This made them rather naive debaters. A liberal today who cares about homelessness–for example–ought to be very familiar with the thesis that the government worsens homelessness through rent control (which reduces the supply of housing), or that homeless people need spiritual help from “faith-based” organizations. Maybe these ideas are wrong, but they should not be new to college graduates who care about homelessness.