To restore the liberal arts, those of us who teach should begin by thinking about students. Almost all of them have serious questions about major issues, and all of them are looking for answers. What is right? What is love? What do I owe others? What do others owe me? In too many places these are not questions for examination but issues for indoctrination. Instead of guiding young men and women by encouraging them to read history, biography, philosophy and literature, we’d rather debunk the past, deconstruct the authors and dethrone our finest minds and statesmen.
The essay is not novel or shocking. I merely note that he describes himself as a former college president. Looking him up on Wikipedia, his Ph.D is from 1974.
My hypothesis is that over the past 15 years in academia, a lot of true intellectuals have aged out of the system. The successor generations cannot really think independently. They are in the habit of using mental shortcuts and bumper-sticker phrases.
Obviously, not every young scholar in the social sciences and humanities is a mindless conformist. And not every old scholar who retired over the pas 15 years is a model of careful reflection. But I think that the generalization applies well enough to account for the rapid deterioration in the quality of American higher education.
I recently humored myself at the hand-wringing I have seen over incestuousness but not a mention of looking outside,of academia. I imagine if they could take all MIT grads they would.
Wait, there is evidence of a rapid deterioration in the quality of higher education? What is it?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
What is the evidence that higher education was good quality to begin with?
You would think that higher standards for getting in to a liberal arts PhD program would mean that scholarship would be better, not worse.
Liberal Arts originally meant the skills that a free man in ancient Greece would need. Traditionally these were Grammar,Rhetoric,Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy There does need to be a reassement of what skills a person needs to function in modern America.
While you may be right, the retiring generation of scholars and intellectuals are the ones who taught and selected the current generation of scholars. Why did they fail so badly at transmitting the ability to think critically? Especially when previous generations did fine at raising up a new batch of thinkers.
Was the raw material coming from high school too low quality? Did all the critical thinkers go into the sciences? Were there too many good students, such that the now-retiring scholars were able to select sycophants rather than students who would challenge them?
Above: “The successor generations cannot really think independently.”
I propose that the abilities of people have not changed, but the incentives have.
It is easily known that college departments of the humanities push leftist theory and propaganda. This remains attractive to people who don’t think independently and want a packaged theory of how the world works. Independent thinkers likely will avoid this.
The few independent thinkers who participate find themselves in a hostile environment. There is no gain in opposing the orthodoxy. They produce what is required and get out with their degree.
The institutions are rotten and attract the wrong people. Like government.
Like Dan Klein said, if the government is so awful, how come it doesn’t feel that way for most people? (http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/PdfPapers/IfGovtVill.pdf)
The jerks are the bosses and people in “civil society” who ordinary folks contend with. Not bureaucrats et al., because most people work FOR someone; they don’t have someone working for THEM.
I used to be all-in for libertarianism, until I got out of school and dealt with the working world. I fear independent contractor status far more than some blowhard at the Dept. of Fish & Game, or busybody IRS agents. I don’t make enough for the latter to pay any attention to me.
Why would you be getting independent contractor status?
What you may be describing is a theory of voter market failure. The government takes about half. There isn’t enough left for anybody else to come close. Why doesn’t it “feel” that way.
“if the government is so awful, how come it doesn’t feel that way for most people?”
“I fear independent contractor status far more than some blowhard at the Dept. of Fish & Game, or busybody IRS agents.”
I lived in China for a little while. It’s a place brimming with economic opportunity, and if your main goals are to make a good income and enjoy a nice, ordinary life, you can do that. If you’re willing to sort of go with the flow when it comes to politics and just generally keep your head down, you can make good money, buy nice stuff, go on foreign vacations, leave money to your kids, all the good stuff.
It’s not like the 60s when you had $#!@ well better show up for the rally with your Little Red Book or trouble would find you. I’m fairly convinced the average American could spend a long time there without feeling like the government was oppressing them, aside from gun ownership and access to Western media through the Great Firewall. To a Chinese person, neither of those have the same import. “This government doesn’t feel oppressive to me” doesn’t prove much.
Now, in the US there’s certainly a lot more freedom of speech, organization, that sort of thing. We’re not equivalent. But, if you do something that happens to draw the gaze of a federal prosecutor, you might as well be in China, given that there’s a 95% you’ll be convicted or plead guilty to get a 6-month sentence instead of taking your chances in court against a 40-year one.
If some government official decides to seize your property, they can do so surprisingly easily, and while you have better-defined due-process rights to get it back than Chinese citizens do, you can still easily spend tens of thousands on lawyers doing so, none of which you’ll get back.
It probably won’t happen to you, but who knows. Have you seen the movie Brazil? It came out in the mid-80s, and watching it thirty years later, it feels to me like we’ve only gotten closer to it. At the rate things are going, in another few decades, it might look like a best-case scenario.
After Obamacare settled in, we started getting all the “HR” e-mails,making sure,anyone who could be labeled part time was. Obviously I knew the cause and effect but how many people blame the “firm” for how they “feel?”
It seems to me that the decline of the Liberal Arts is at least correlated with the blind hostility of intellectuals to Christianity. You cannot comprehend Western history, philosophy, literature, etc. without at least an open mind to Christianity. In the past, the intellectuals would challenge the Church and later the Protestant sects as well, but they did not deny Christianity as a driving force in Western civilization, nor seek to banish those who believed. These days they seek to ostracize any who speak peaceably of Christianity.
I have heard you remark this several times, but I don’t think it’s exactly right. I’m an engineering PhD student in a big liberal west-coast university.
My opinion is that all the serious work that comes out of universities these days is in applied sciences and engineering, and these departments have very high standards—in some cases moreso than in the past, when measurement was more difficult and so theory was elegant and interesting but often incorrect. Nearly all of the other grad students in my department are from other countries, and none of them have the sort of PC attitude that American universities are supposed to have. The undergrads in our classes, too, are all serious and respectful. All of our professors are no-nonsense immigrants who would be utterly perplexed if someone brought up “dynamics of power” or something.
I think, basically, that only lazy and self-absorbed undergrads—the children of wealthy white parents mainly—are taking a lot of liberal arts courses, because these departments teach nothing useful, and revealed preference suggests everyone knows it. Even people who want to go to law school are taking computer science and stats classes, now, to be more interesting and to do something that sets them apart. I’d say that journalists have a vastly exaggerated view of what goes on, because journalists like the liberal arts. hence the atlantic cover this month. Also, the liberal arts and social “science” departments are at a disadvantage, because their “research” is based largely on the creative manipulation of of language—turning nouns into verbs like “othering” and so on—so they do not get to compete with asians. I am not asian.
In short, I think our universities are fine, because people can choose and they aren’t stupid. As long as departments can still pick smart and obsessive immigrants with interesting ideas to replace the old guard, they will do so. As long as undergrads can choose their classes, they will shift into useful ones that teach a lot of material with relatively less work. As long as the capital fund depends heavily on donations, the new buildings will all be for sciences and engineering and health, because that’s what the common sense of effective, high-earning people suggests are good things to look into.