364. Reversing the Great Shift in Higher Education

The shift within our universities, as I've explained in preceding posts, is from neutrality to advocacy, or, from a teleological view, from knowledge to goodness.  The enablers, as I will explain here, are Germans, scholars who were so expert and thorough that they captured the imagination of every young American scholar who in the nineteenth century came to them — and then, models of expertise and thoroughness, went home and captured the imagination of everybody building or expanding an American university.

In universities formed on that model the standard is competence within a field, with fields represented by departments — which, with the primacy of competence, might as well have been called compartments.  Examining, hiring, tenuring, promoting, and judging publications were pretty well walled off from the rest of the university.  If they weren't, there was constant pressure on administrators to treat them as if they were.

That compartmentalization, for all that it furthered the advancement of knowledge and the reputation of the university, hindered the solution of a recurring problem: bad department behavior — departments "getting away with things," as members of other departments might put it.

The correction of bad behavior depended, in the end, on the ability of the dean to break in and give orders.  Cease and desist.  That was never going to be easy, but when a department had a couple of Nobel winners, and had given the university a worldwide reputation, and enabled the university president to enjoy that reputation when he (male in those days) sat with other presidents, and solicited gifts from alumni, it was extremely hard.  So universities generally went along with the Germanic tide. 

Now we have departments sliding into advocacy of good causes — racial justice, gender equality, ethnic pride.  That's good behavior.  Good behavior out in the world, that is.  In a university it is bad, and we can't let any department get away with it.

So how do we deal with a famously good department?  With difficulty.  Its goodness is, in our Germanic university, sheltered behind the walls of expertise.  Who are you, inexpert dean, to tell us to change the way we teach?

Suppose the dean calls on a faculty council, maybe the faculty senate, for backup.  Have a debate, get this out in the open, lay the weight of its conclusion on the offending department.

I wish such a dean luck.  In the Germanic university the members of any university council will be too eager to get back to their research, the way you get ahead in a place like this, to give such a debate the time and energy it takes.  Besides, back the dean in this case and pretty soon he'll be on yours.  If he (or she) wants to spend time stiffing departments let him go after the ones hogging the budget and the grants.

If you remember a lingering pre-Germanic university the ease of correcting sheltered error there will occur to you.  It went with the ease of college-wide or university-wide debate.  Before my university became a research university it regularly held general-interest debates, with broad attendance and lively post mortems.  In the early days faculty preparation for them was so important that the library provided special rooms for it, the Philomathean and the Athenian.  It was the way you got ahead in a place like that.  It was also the way you, forced to defend your position, got tested and exposed.

Well, that would be one way to deal with our walled domains, going back to the grand debates of Greece and Rome that would force their lords to come out and defend themselves.  "Question: Is fiat lux the only acceptable fiat in a college of liberal arts?  Moderated by the chair of the philosophy department.  Open to audience participation."  A wonderful way, this Roman way, to solve our problem.  But we can't take it.  We're stuck in old, expert Germany and all we can do is find a way around, or through, the walls it built for us.

And there's a limit to the time we have.  If goodness advances very far into the upper administration knowledge will never have the defender it needs most, a clever and strong dean willing to fight for it.  Cleverness as seen maybe in a proposal to just have little debates, with a dean's agent sitting on promotion and tenure committees, on publication review panels, inside oral examinations, asking the old Socratic questions.  Strength as seen in backup by the provost and president.

The agents of the dean will have to be clever and strong too.  Clever enough to see that goodness never shows itself in universities in outright declaration but in tendencies, selection of subjects of study, questions asked, shadings of vocabulary.  Members of goodness-oriented departments can't be counted on to detect these things, or if they do, sound an alarm. 

Further, the agents will have to be clever enough to see through internal debate, and reject it, however lively it is, as a check on parochial standards.  There's nothing to prevent whole departments, even whole disciplines, from going wrong (that is, going good).  The frame for their debates will be wrong.

That's worth picturing, though those in closer touch will have to tell me how accurate the picture is.  I see in it a test of deans' agents beyond anything you'll find in the movies.  The agents come in politely.  They see debate, all the way up to the highest journals.  They see peer review.  They see a flourishing program, with graduates finding jobs, and newcomers demanding more courses, promising better jobs.  And right away they face a curtain of language.  "These unfamiliar words are needed in our special study.  It's a technical vocabulary," says their guide.  To a casual or unclever agent the department will be off the hook.  Nobody in a Germanic university can object to a technical vocabulary.  It's the mark of special competence. 

But to the conscientious agent from Greece it will be a challenge.  "Maybe so, but let's look into it."  She (we can make the agent female now) digs into the vocabulary in the way of Socrates — or Ockham or a linguistic philosopher or an Oxford tutor.  She may return to the dean saying, "Yes, it's technical."  But she may return saying, "No, it's not technical; it's a tendentious jargon that conceals failure to examine assumptions and first principles."

 I obviously see a high probability of the latter but those closer may not.  Though the reader will have to trust his or her own eyesight here, everybody should see that there's nothing in the Germanic university to keep departments from going this far.  If they do their internal debate, no matter how high it goes, loses weight.  As does peer review.  Reviewers question only inside their own frame, which itself has gone untested.  The great frame-questioner is Socrates, who questions anything, recognizes no walls, and requires answers in plain language.  No jargon-answers, as from sophists, will do.  Peer reviewers here are not peers of Socrates.

If the Socratic model is too distant for us we Americans may look to Emerson.  His ideal, Man Thinking, is exactly the Socratic inquirer.   The whole world of thought is his province.  Try to wall him off and you're just a "thinker."  No matter how great a German you are, how expert and thorough, you, you mere thinker, must bow to Man Thinking, and submit to his questions.

So there she is, the dean's agent, clever and brave, appearing in your committees, listening in on your oral examinations, going through your publications, sniffing out goodness.  A perfect example of a thought policeman.  But only to the inattentive.  She's a freedom-of-thought policeman.  If you're not curbing thought, requiring that it be correct in your own good way, you have nothing to fear.  Open your publications to general criticism, take on destructive critics, place yourselves in the larger arena, prepare your graduate students to fight there, and you have nothing to fear.

 But what, then, will happen to goodness?  Nothing, if it is known.  And only open test and trial will let us know it, the goodness that can defend itself.  "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary," said Milton, famously.  "That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary."

Translate that classic of the academic enterprise — and of Western parliaments, and courts, and science — into advice for today's lovers of the good and you get, I think, something like this: "Knowledge comes first.  Here it's knowledge of the good. First you make sure you know the good.  If you believe that it can't defend itself you get out in the world and defend it, standing on the most reliable ground you can find, that determined by disinterested inquiry in universities."

You can see what will spoil this advice: professors, having assumed success in gaining knowledge of the good, pursuing it in universities.  That reduces their reliability and weakens the fight for good in the world.

330. Just What Trump Needs

Instruction from a philosophy professor, that's what Trump needs.  I'll bet he had plenty of them at Fordham.  He's just forgotten what he learned from them.  If so, here's a reminder, from a philosophy professor at Tufts University, Daniel Dennett:

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

(1) You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way."

(2) You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

(3) You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

(4) Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

318. Winning Trust in the Debate over Black Culture

It's the trust of the professor out in the public arena trying to talk about deficiencies in black culture that I'm worried about here — as at the end of my last post.  Let's make it the hardest case: he's male and white, in America a member of the tribe so distrusted, so justifiably distrusted, for so long.

Well, I hear my colleagues ask, what's wrong with the traditional academic way, speaking always in neutral (i.e., objective, scientific) language?  No color shading the nouns, no tendentiousness sliding into the verbs.  Not a hint of a distracting love for Socrates.  Do this so carefully that your audience, seeing that you're interested only in the truth, detaches you from your tribe and places you in the tribeless tribe.  Behold a professor!   A member of the tribe most worthy of each tribe's trust.

It's a way that once worked pretty well — possibly only in an Arcadian university of my dreams, I'll admit — but well enough to persuade administrators of American universities to grant (in 1940) iron-clad tenure to professors.  Teachers aspiring to speak this way could be trusted not to speak in a political way, for a tribe (and certainly not for the communist tribe, the feared one).  They needed the freedom ("academic") necessary to inquire and speak their way.  Secure tenure, as a guarantee of that freedom, was justified.

If you were the inquirer out in the world you described your method, reported your findings, and, if nobody detected tribal preference in the words you used (still possibly in Arcady), your findings were credited.  No orator's music, no sophist's twist, no play for the rhetorician's compliment; just the philosopher's slow march toward the truth.  As for the marcher, his identity as white, or male, or European, went unnoticed or, if noticed, was taken to be irrelevant.

To keep this going some universities, like mine, placed a College or University representative on each department committee granting a graduate degree.  His ears were those of Socrates, listening for departures from the academic way.  And he had the power of veto.  Knowledge of that out in the world gained the graduate trust when he spoke there.

So there's a first explanation of the loss of trust: universities no longer enforce adherence to the academic way.  There's nobody now to stand up, as classics professor Paul Murphy did at the end of an oral examination in my department , and say, "If this is acceptable then everything I've learned about scholarship is wrong."  Either the German notion of unquestioned competence within each department has prevailed over the Anglo-Hellenic notion of one university-wide, freely questioning dialogue or, in the view I'm urging here, love has prevailed over accuracy.

I might more successfully urge such a view if I had said, "Politics has prevailed over accuracy."  Then I could count on the reputation of sociology departments as advocates of positions on the left.  Or summon up memories of feminists plugging their cause before a class, and defending those plugs (as prioritized advocacy) in journals.  It's hard not to do that.

But it's easier if you see politics, or the strongly argued politics of our day, as love.  I see those who now give their cause priority over the academic cause doing so in the name of a Higher Love.  It's a commitment to people, human beings, deserving human beings, a gender, a race, loved warmly, and deservingly.  What an attractive alternative to the love of cold truth!

Another explanation of the loss of trust is the postmodern improvement in our powers of detection.  The "armed vision" of the New Critics became doubly and triply armed in deconstruction, which found few cloaks of objectivity impenetrable.  It is much easier now to see, and explain to  another, what a writer or speaker is "really saying."  And, for readers of Michel Foucault, that will nearly always be something useful to the stronger tribe.

For readers of Stanley Fish trust will come even more slowly.  If language is "rhetoric all the way down" then it's politics all the way down.  It's tribe all the way down. 

A third explanation is related to our difficulty in passing judgment on any group at all (see Post 315).  It was easy to pass judgment in the thirties, as my parents did.  But that was before the revelations of the Holocaust, the horrors of the judgment the Nazis so easily passed.  I see this as the great divide of my life, and of my time, with free judgment on one side and reluctant judgment on the other.

The next generations missed out on this, but oh what I can put on the blackboard.  "See how it starts?  Singling out a group.  Stereotyping them.  Demeaning them. Everywhere in Europe.  A build-up.  Then a Hitler to tap into the steam, get outrageous judgments to pass, and the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau follow."  Remember, children, how it starts.

In the eighteenth century Christian love, with the help of affluence, made its breakthrough.  Care for the widow and orphan became care for the imprisoned, the enslaved, the mentally ill, and the incapacitated, as well as for the close ones.  The Age of Sensibility, but of rough categories.  Now love makes a leap.  Care for the lesser capacitated, the mentally fragile, the vulnerable, the marginal, the potentially oppressed, the incipiently persecuted.  The Age of Sensitivity, with finer categories.  Powering it is the vision of a slippery slope, with Auschwitz at the bottom.  The victims and their terrible victimizers.  You put yourself on it by demeaning, degrading, depreciating people different from you.  Categorizing them, even.  Categorization is discrimination.  That's how our great-grandparents started, and that's how we could start.  Catch yourself early.

This, to me, looks like the deepest source of distrust.  It feeds fear in the dominated, the minority, the black, and fear in the dominator, the majority, the white, a fear of being victimized, and a fear of victimizing.  And now we have the means to justify those fears earlier than ever before.  The most objective-sounding professor, reporting facts that depreciate a minority group, that make it appear deficient, could be putting us on that slope.

296. Can Professors Now Defend Tenure?

Soon-to-be Presidential candidate Scott Walker of Wisconsin and leaders of the Republican-held legislature are proposing changes to the tenure rules for college professors there that has quickly provoked "hundreds of faculty members to sign a letter opposing the changes" (NYT, 6-5-15).

There's apparently a national debate coming and before my still-active colleagues get into it I'd like to show what Walker and his friends in the  legislature could hit them with.

But first some recollections.  I became a college teacher at a time (1948) when many of my older colleagues were fresh from — or more accurately, wearied by — the fight to get tenure established, as it was in 1940 in a joint statement by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities.  This, the famous "1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure," accepted by administrators, legislatures, and courts, nailed down what we have now.

What needs remembering here is the primacy of academic freedom.  It came first in the statement, and it justified tenure.  Tenure was "a means to certain ends," the first of which was "freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities."  Economic security and the attraction of able people were secondary.

The ground we in the AAUP stood on when we argued in public — as with a legislator — was the common good.  And the common good "depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition."  The search is not free if you have religious trustees ready to fire you if you teach the wrong thing about God.

"But suppose you teach communism.  Is that in the common good?"

"Yes, because we teach communism without advocating it.  We give knowledge of communism.  We college professors are not advocates of anything.  We are searchers — disinterested, impartial searchers — for truth.  And presenters of results."

That's the way the argument went and that, after a lot of tiring repetition (it started in 1934), is what won it.  Professors had to be secure in their jobs or they couldn't serve the common good in their peculiar, truth-seeking way.  Against the possibility that it might be a truth-imposing way, an imposition of my truth — my philosophy, my politics, my group's politics —  you as an administrator or legislator had their promise: we are not advocates.

Now for what you have to keep in mind as you argue with Scott Walker and the Republicans.  The two statements below appeared in 1990 in College English, the teacher's journal with the largest circulation.

"[For equality and democracy] the teacher must recognize that he or she must influence (perhaps manipulate is the more accurate word) students' values through charisma or power — he or she must accept the role as manipulator.  Therefore it is of course reasonable to try to inculcate into our students the conviction that the dominant order is repressive." 

"I would argue that political commitment — especially feminist commitment — is a legitimate classroom strategy and rhetorical imperative.  The feminist agenda offers a goal toward our students' conversions to emancipatory critical action." (Lead article, April, 1990.)

Were these statements (uncontested in the journal, as far as I can find) a sign of what would be accepted in our universities?  If Wikipedia, easily accessible to Walker and his legislators, is to be trusted they are.  Wikipedia will tell him that feminist pedagogy, "a form of critical pedagogy," challenges "the view that education is a neutral cognitive process,...that knowledge and teaching methods can be value free." He will find that "the standpoint of a feminist teacher is of the political nature" and that the aim of " feminist analyses [is] to inform and reform teachers’ and students’ ways of acting in and on the world." 

So, by what's laid out under feminist pedagogy or critical pedagogy (worth your checking) either Wikipedia can't be trusted or what English departments accepted 25 years ago is pretty well still accepted.  And Scott Walker can make an issue of that. "Professors," he can say, "no longer have special support for their specially secure position."  

Coming down from that high ground we once argued on does not mean that there is no other good ground.  One might even argue that the common good is better served by a teacher's service to a higher cause, like social justice, though seen by others at the time as just his or her truth. 

That's possible ground, but it's no place to stand when you're arguing with Scott Walker.  A ground on which you would lose fewer points would be the need for economic security.  Legislators will understand that but it's so widely shared in the world of employment that there professors will just have to fight it out like everybody else.  Get ready for this, from the streets:  "Right on, Scott.  Talk about special!  Those people never get laid off.  Who the hell are they?"

154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Friday, June 29, 2012

 

6

 

154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Americans have to talk about cool because they can't talk about goodness.  "We're better than you."  That's ugly and dangerous.  "Better," coming from Americans in the Balkans, means "more rational, less credulous," and when a Serb or a Croat finds out that 31% of Americans believe in astrology and that 43% believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so" (Gallup, 2007) their tongues are stopped.  Looking at rumor-charged Balkan killers and saying, "Change, be more like us," is not an option."

Claims about what's cool in your country, though, are comparatively safe.  "Sure, there are a lot of Americans believing those things but they're not considered cool, not by educated Americans."

What do you mean, "not by educated Americans"?  More than 30% of Americans over 25 hold bachelor's degrees (2012 Census Bureau).  You must have plenty of educated people believing unbelievable things.

OK, by educated I have to mean, "having learned to be careful about belief," and not "having acquired a lot of knowledge."  The latter can certainly get you all kinds of degrees — professional ones, mainly — but in America (I'll risk it) it won't make you cool.  I mean not as long as traditional philosophy is thought of as cool.

And by "traditional" you mean?

Of the tradition that descends from Plato's Socrates, the careful step-by-step testing that lets limited human beings establish reliable beliefs, the testing that eventually gave us the scientific method — though from Plato's starting points he could never get to what we call science.

What percentage of people in any country are going to be careful enough to meet Socrates' standards?

The number doesn't matter.  As long as those standards are thought cool by people — heck, 2% — that the others think are cool a nation won't wander too far into dangerous belief, that is, careless belief about things that matter, things you go to war over. 

And that 2%, those are professors, I take it.

You take it wrong, though you can expect to find professors, trained academics, to be prominent among those who are careful about belief.  Anybody, schooled or unschooled, can be in the 2%.  Faulkner's barber, Hawkshaw, was in the 2% of careful people in that town of his that did the lynching.  "Get the facts, boys, get the facts."

"Facts, hell!" they said.  "You're a fine white man."

Then the leader, McLendon, the officer, the one who had commanded troops in France: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  He's the one they look up to and they join his mob, leaving Hawkshaw standing.  No prof ever defended the academic tradition more firmly, or more futilely. 

And the lesson for Balkan people?  You're not equating them with Southern racists, are you?

No, but I'm pointing to a comparable need.  Hawkshaw needed some standing in Jefferson.  A coterie, some cool fellows in the drinking places, some fear of their wit from behind the pool cues, somebody to give skepticism a better name.  They don't have to be scholars, they don't have to speak good English.  All they have to have, if they know they have some backing, is a voice.  "McLendon, you're out of your fucking mind."  That might have been enough.

I see.  And if in the Balkans a voice, with some backing, had said, "General Strugar, you're out of your fucking mind," that might have been enough.

Might have, but words like that too easily lead to fights.  Better the teacher's words, the composition teacher going over McLendon's sentence: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  Pronoun reference, Jack.  What do you have in mind each time you use "it"? 

These comp teachers are bears on reference.  Noun reference. "Does this word refer to something in the reader's world, not just your world? Something he or she can check on, and call true or false or something in between.  Assume checking.  Assume Socrates."

Slavov Zizek couldn't assume that if he taught composition. "The truth we are dealing with here is not an 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  He has to assume concession.

How should those of us with a stake in the old academic tradition respond to Zizek?  We know that his position can't be reconciled with ours.  We doubt that the continental tradition that tolerates and even encourages his position can be reconciled with ours.  Indeed, if we listen to Martha Nussbaum, we'll doubt that reconciliation is possible.  She found the portrait of philosophy in Astra Taylor's documentary, concentrating on figures (like Zizek) outside the strict discipline of philosophy, a "betrayal" of our tradition (see

http://www.thepointmag.com/2010/reviews/inheriting-socrates ).

 So, you hear Zizek's voice: "Truth...measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  Do you pass by indifferently?  So much noise?

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It will depend on where you are.  If you're in a student drinking place that's not noise.  It could be the future.  Raise a warning flag.  "Fire danger: high."  If the drinking place is in a Balkan capital, sound the alarm.  The woods are burning.