Tag Archives: higher education

American Higher Education Will Not be Defeated

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Active Listening in the Classroom Heather Syrett.

As for academics as “condescending elites:” Give me a break.

The Trump Administration’s efforts to revisit the tired but durable American pattern of attacking Harvard and other American universities is brutal, and frankly embarrassing for the rest of the world to witness. Our massive private and state systems are the envy of the world.  The cuts in research dollars and many universities will do harm. But the effort to ruin higher education will not succeed. Fortunately, American instructors have some immunity to this kind of political hate.

Why a man with a slippery grasp on reality has decided that Harvard University in particular represents the antichrist is both nonsensical and incredibly mean-spirited. After all, it is one of the world’s great universities. Moreover, the standard analytical point too many others carelessly make is that Harvard and other institutions represent a liberal “elite.”  Tell Skip Gates he is an elitist and get ready to be set straight.

As the conventional logic goes, the rest of America is resentful of what the conservatives William F. Buckley and George Will have called the “condescension” of academics.  In this familiar fantasy, academia misuses its privileged position to bend the young minds toward secular and collectivist ways of thinking.  Who knew that the effectively fragmented academic world was so unified in its efforts? Give me a break.

     Banned Books    ALA/PBS/American Experience

In one form of another this uniquely American complaint is older than the republic, carried in the Puritanism and the anti-intellectualism of  early settlers. In addition to the endemic racism fostered by the first Americans, this additional and deeply embedded incapacity remains as a blind spot that makes reading, advanced learning and education suspicious experiences.

It has always been with us. Key thinkers like historian Richard Hofstadter have pointed out a kind of bedrock stance against intellectuals mostly on the political right and, by extension, millions of Americans. Even so, the nation’s educators have tried to shed light on the dark celebration of ignorance on subjects ranging from the age of the planet to intricacies of human sociology. Red states are trying to impose curriculum guidelines at various levels mandating courses in civics. Astonishingly, Florida’s political leaders even question the legitimacy of the social sciences.

Speaking broadly, knowledge workers labor under a cloud of suspicion fed by a culture that celebrates making and promoting more than knowing. But in truth, we could use more students of the human condition and perhaps fewer devoted to the finer points of selling stuff.

Though the damage of cancelled grants to institutions and students has been devastating, the hapless functionaries of this administration will loose this battle, as the Puritans, Know-Nothings, nativists, William F. Buckley, McCarthyites, Moral Majority members and Christian nationalists did in earlier American spasms of retribution against American educators.

As for academics as condescending elites: I’ve studied with some of the most brilliant people in my own field, none of whom could begin to match the arrogance of the expense account workers who feed the nation’s bloated consumer culture. An assistant professor at most institutions is probably going to make less than a licensed worker in the building trades. If we really want to experience elites at work and play, stay a night or two in New York or Chicago and have meals in their bloated expense-account restaurants. Attending an academic conference in one of these cities was like visiting a posh land of a privileged class of managers and executives. Like hundreds of other academics momentarily dispatched  to a convention along the unfamiliar Dubai of Chicago’s lakefront, I was lucky to have my public college cover half of my expenses for one three-day conference.

Source Williams College

Though Donald Trump would like  to change it, education in the U.S. is decentralized, with states and local districts holding most of the power of control. To be sure, attainment levels in K-12 American public education often compare unfavorably with other peer nations:  a legacy of distractions from market-totems like smartphones, as well as ingrained suspicions about books, curriculum and the narratives of modern history. But the nation’s crown jewels remain in the 5000-plus colleges and universities, who generally retain a degree of autonomy to develop programs and degrees mostly as they see fit, within broad accreditation guidelines. This process is duplicated in the academic freedoms of individual faculty members to teach and develop research using their expertise and years of graduate school. To the nation’s eternal credit, the authoritarianism of this administration cannot easily reach into most university classrooms. For the most part, academics will continue to profess their subjects in accordance with their professional expertise and using the standards of their disciplines: a strength I was reminded of after teaching for a year within an uncomfortably tight pecking order within a British University.

The American protection of an instructor’s classroom is as it should be, since the nation is momentarily misguided by an administration headed by a figure who generally does not read, makes up fantasies in lieu of evidence he cannot understand, and at times disappears behind a word clouds of near-total incoherence.

red bar

Can We Salvage the Humanities?

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For most of us who have gained richness in our lives through direct access to music, live performance, and academic study, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total and devastating.

Though there can be no single measure of the negative effects of the pandemic on our social and intellectual intelligence, the mind reels at what the final tally will be. We are mostly missing what was once the vast array of classroom opportunities, plays, concerts, and travel that survive only in the form of video facsimiles. Of course, the first task through this pandemic is to save lives and keep individuals healthy. Even against the myopia of many slow thinkers in government, that remains true. But for those Americans whose lives were on track to be given greater meaning through live performance, academic study, and direct mentoring, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total.

The humanities—fields of inquiry ranging from history to languages to literature and the arts—thrive when open and eager minds can share the same space. It’s our birthright to be with others. For students this means being in the presence of a wonderful instructor in any field that creates insight about what is possible and what’s at stake within human communities. The humanities remind us where we have been and where aspirations made visible can still take us.

For an educator, the pinnacle of this form is perhaps the seminar: a small room shared by 10 or 12 students and an instructor, all beginning the voyage of a shared conversation about the work of a groundbreaking creator of ideas.  We may never be more connected to thoughts that matter than as a participant discussing a writer or creative force bursting with revelatory insights. There may be ways to electronically approximate a meeting of minds. But most are often more performative than enlightening. Communication works better when folks share the same space and time.

It is especially heartbreaking to imagine all of the events, meetings, lectures and performances that have not happened in the last year.  In the United States alone this list would surely be in the millions. Scale down to one organization like a modest-sized college, and it would be in the thousands.

The effects of this cultural shutdown are beginning to be evident and especially costly for the humanities. Enrollments in the nation’s community colleges has dropped at the very moment when non-college adults are at risk for chronic unemployment. More disturbingly, stretched parents are having second thoughts about spending money on any undergraduate curriculum that offers a palette of experiences larger than is required to do a single job. Their concerns are abetted by nearsighted reporting in our media, with headlines like “College Majors With The Lowest Unemployment” or “College Majors With The Worst Return On Investment.”

The pandemic-hastened conversion of a student’s education into vocational training for an employment category is now fully underway, as schools and universities close programs in writing, philosophy, performance studies, history, foreign languages, music, dance, theater, journalism and rhetoric. Never mind that they have missed the more subtle point that a degree in history or philosophy may cultivate wonderful skills needed for innovative work. Writer Julie Schumacher reminds us what her English students can accomplish: “Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express.”

I doubt if any of us who have spent time discussing Aristotle’s pragmatism or Suzanne Langer’s insights on presentational art thought that we were wasting our student’s time. Indeed, for reasons I have mentioned before, reading Langer—a philosopher writing in the 1950s—would make any contemporary television journalist a little bit smarter. And Aristotle’s refutation of Plato’s suspicions about public opinion still gives us a clear rationale for striving to protect democratic norms.  In these times, with electoral losers brooding over dark ways to return to power, this should be a primary concern.  Indeed, we can’t afford to not have the humanities, which collectively help us imagine what a great society can ethically achieve.