363. Higher Education: The Great Shift (3)

In earlier posts in this sequence the problem for the old professor in the History Department was to find the right response to the young professor in the African-American Studies Department marching in the same robes he was wearing, and, oh my, carrying the same title he carried, displaying his name and courses in the same catalog, and, God help him, having an office in the same building covered with the same ivy.  Those things all signified to the world the professor's reliability as a source of knowledge.  Now here was this fellow from African-American Studies signaling equal reliability.

His was the hot way to see the shift in priorities in our universities, from knowledge to goodness, and it would be heated more by his vision of goodness taking over department after department as the Great Shift proceeded, reducing reliability.  The cool way would have been to see an "ought" acquiring the status of an "is."  With all the rights and privileges.  And without the work, the hard, nearly fruitless work, that analytic philosophers had put into it. 

Hot or cold though, the outside world can't dismiss these objections, or laugh at them ("Horrors, my pure institution is being polluted by goodness"), or ask that they end ("Come on, marcher, accept the peace that you see, acknowledge the Great Shift, and get on with your work").  Though any colleague can doubt what the marcher sees in African-American Studies, advocacy, no colleague can doubt what he believes about advocacy, that it makes knowledge less reliable.

And, not yet pointed out in this sequence of posts, knowledge has to be reliable if we're to solve our problems.  The world goes to the university with its problems.  Advocacy is an impediment in solving them.  Objectivity (see my note if you question the word) is necessary, and clears the way to their solution, the best solution.

The belief in objectivity is established in Western schools and supported, though intuitively and more slowly, outside them.  In the School of Hard Knocks we learn that to solve a practical problem we've got to start with realistic pictures of what's making the problem and what's keeping us from solving it.  Unrealistic pictures lead to bad solutions and painful knocks. 

That lesson has been driven home so deeply that you'd think we'd never forget it.  But we do forget it.  And here's where the "good" comes in.  It's so attractive, and the "bad" so repellent," that when either one appears, in a large enough and dramatic enough frame, it just drives down the importance of realistic pictures.

The pinch comes when a realistic picture causes harm.  Good people are wounded by it.  It's bad to harm good people.  People who do so are bad people.  A problem solver has to choose between doing harm, and appearing to be a bad person, and solving the problem.

Unfortunately the example I want to cite, recommended by its urgency, is the problem of poor performance by blacks in our schools.   It cries for solution.  But the solving leaves a field full of wounded, entered as soon as you start to explore conjectures —as problem-solvers must.  Explore the conjecture that something in black culture is an obstacle to the education of blacks, though, or to the aspirations necessary to their education, and you wound.  Bring in the black family and you wound more.  Mention absentee fathers, still more.  In just stating the problem, treating black aspiration and performance as a problem, you wound.

Knowers ignore wounds to others.  Strivers for good can't ignore them, because they're immediately and palpably bad. The consequences of a shift from knowing to striving in our universities leap out at us: solutions to problems become less reliable.  In the case before us we white strivers know, as immediately and surely as any strivers ever knew, where the wounding takes place: in the hearts of people we have wounded, again and again.  Put us in a university and we have to ignore that.  Put us in a university where the priority has shifted from knowing to striving and we don't have to ignore it.

The shift to good may be well justified (and I have shown how in Post 356) but we do, under the standards of knowing left to us, have to recognize the cost of the shift: that professors in the university lose their advantage in gaining the most reliable knowledge and their university loses its position as prime helper to the world in solving its problems.

Note: If you believe that "objective" makes too strong a claim you may substitute "impartial" or "disinterested."  Intention to earn the compliment in those words will accomplish all that's necessary here.