The Chronicle of Higher Education for September 14, 2001 -- composed nad likely printed before what we have come to call 9/11 -- offered the following words as we entered the 21st century in an article entitled "A Battle Plan for Professors to Recapture the Curriculum" (page B7):
"As we enter the new century, society's agreement on what defines an educated person, what constitutes essential knowledge and common discourse, has essentially collapsed. As a result, universities in the United States have a problem in the area of curriculum that has been widely recognized. Curriculum means, literally, a running track, but, in recent years, it has been called 'a cafeteria with little indication of what are entrees and which the desserts' and 'Dante's definition of hell, where nothing connects to nothing." (B7)
Is this still apt?
Interesting phrase, battle plan. What do you make of the quotation?
If Shimer were a religion, and we had saints, one of ours would be Robert Maynard Hutchins. His name is even invoked in our mission statement. And yet, I am not sure many of us know who he was, or read his work. I had not done so in years until I came to know Shimer. And, now, I often find myself asking who today's Robert Maynard Hitchins might be. I even ask myself: is it possible for anyone to lead in higher education in the way he did? Does the commodification of learning -- and of colleges and universities -- or the economic situation or. . . . bode poorly for such leadership?
If you are unsure, then join the crowd.
But, if you do not know much about him, then he is worth exploring. If you click the link on his name above, you will come to the novel form of encyclopedia, perhaps apt given his historic relationship to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, we all call wikipedia. What is most interestng, perhaps, is that the depiction of the Hutchins Plan included there says it "survives at Shimer College in Chicago."
Here are a few teasers:
1. Because it is interestng, did you know his father was president of Berea College? I did not. And, it is pretty darn interesting, in my view, give the wonders of Berea.
2. As perhaps you know. in his role as head of the Ford Foundation, Hutchins was influential in the establishment of early entrants programs, including the one at Shimer, which continues to this day!
3. He wrote a terrific book entitled The University of Utopia, which I have not read. It strikes me I darn well better, given that one of the unofficial mottos of Shimer that I really like it "Shimer -- somewhere between Utopia and Reality."
4. If you have not read "The Great Conversation" you ought to. Click here for a version. Here's a quotation to reflect on:
"The conversation presented in this set is peculiar to
the West. We believe that everybody, Westerners and Easterners, should understand it, not because it is better than
anything the East can show, but because it is important
to understand the West. We hope that editors who un-
derstand the tradition of the East will do for that part of
the world what we have attempted for our own tradition
in Great Books of the Western World and the Syntopicon.
With that task accomplished for both the West and the
East, it should be possible to put together the common
elements in the traditions and to present Great Books of
the World. Few things could do as much to advance the
unity of mankind."
Hmmm. And what, then, is the great books of the "east" in our curriculum?
5. Finally, try this site where Don Levine strives to engage us all in a Hutchins-like great conversation. (Yes, he is one of the guys depicted -- Hutchins, that is.)
So: the question is: can one be a Shimerian without being a Hutchins devotee? Are you? Both? Or?
I have always loved this chap's surname. I just do. No good reason, just the sound of it. In any case, Alexander Meiklejohn was quoted as follows by Laurence Veysey in his book entitled The Emergence of the American University; the quotation comes from Meiklejohn's 1908 piece "College Education and the moral ideal). As he puts it, the aim of the American college
"Is not primarily to teach the forms of living, not primarily to give practice in the art of living, but rather to broaden and deepen insight into life itself, to open up hte riches of human experience, of literature, of nature, of art, of religion, of philosophy, of human relations, social, economic, political, to arouse a understanding and appreciation of these, so that life may be fuller and richer in content; in a word, the primary function of the American college is the arousing of interests. (Quoted by Veysey, pp. 210-211).
Who was Meiklejohn? A philosopher. A college president. And, the composer of these words. In various biographies, one will also find that he is also all about free speech. Try this one from Brown University where he once served as Dean.
As I sit in my office, on occasion, I think about what the "great books" have to say about education and its funding. Of course, this is in large measure because the matter of how we fund higher education -- and indeed, how Shimer funds its education -- or Shimer students do so -- is a matter of great concern. Both locally and nationally, and indeed internationally, the theme of afffordability is everywhere. Student debt crises -- and international debt crises -- abound. Like the horses of the apocalypse, the themes of access, accountability, and affordability are, perhaps, the shadows that put all else in relief. And all too often, affordability is the key.
Part of that conversation is about confusion about the relation of cost and value. Part of it is about the ways we provide financial aid. Part of it is about escalating costs of higher education associated (on the one hand) with the costs of employment benefits, debt management, and other real phenomena and (on the other hand) part of the rising cost has to do with the rise in amenities "demanded" by those looking for a college or university to attend. The fabled third hand, though, is the many ways we have shifted the financing of higher education from the public sphere (alongside a recognition if its public good) to private funding (whether the individual or private foundations). The percentage of college costs paid by state and local, not to mention federal, funds has declined in recent decades. Our tax dollars are not funding as high a percentage of higher education as they once did. It is complucated, true, but that is part of the story.
Even when affordability is not the topic for discussion, finances remain centrally important to every institution of higher education. As I have been told (and of course know): higher education is a business. Well, not quite in Shimer's case: it is a not-for-profit institutions and most businesses are not. The sentiment is right, though, insofar as it means we must balance our books (and in this case I do not mean balancing Aristotle with Derrida or ensuring all of us read the work of women authors). Keeping our eye always on hte educational mission AND finances is the challenge.
And what does this have to do with great books? Here's one example.
(thanks to this site for the picture! I love a good beret.)
Adam Smith has not only gone to college but he has (like his friend Mr. Smith, played long ago by Jimmy Stewart) gone to Washington (and to many state capitals as well). Though born in 1723, and dead by 1790), his words seem oddly relevant today. All of the following quotations come from the copy of Adam Smith I acquired while teaching in Soc II at the University of Chicago many years ago. The underlining seems oddly apt. (The edition: from the U of C Press, edited and with an introduction by Edwin Cannan.) The sections -- Book V, Chapter 1, articles II and III.
"In every profession, the exertion of the greater part of those who exercise it, is always in proportion to the necessity they are under of making that exertion. . . The endowments of schools and colleges have necessarily diminished more or less the necessity of application in the teachers." (p. 283)
"Whatever forces a certain number of students to any college or university, independent of the merit or reputation of the teachers, tends more or less to diminish the necessity of that merit or reputation." (p. 285)
"The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the masters." (p. 287)
There is, of course, more, and these are, of course, taken out of context both in terms of the structure of the argument and the period of history (and thus the state of higher education). And yet, aspects of what Smith says seem quite relevant today. Or, at least there are echoes of these views out there about the relation of affordability to teaching to . . . . economics. Could this be in part because those who warrant the privatization of many goods in our social order have read Smith?
Years ago, I came upon a book entitled Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue, published by Trilogy Books in 1992, by Gail Griffin of Kalamazoo College. I have been thinking of it some in recent weeks, in part because I keep encountering the v-word. Vocation, I mean. Everywhere I look, it is an issue. There seem to be two meanings to it these days: vocation as in calling and vocation (often adjectival) as a synonym for work related. In the latter meaning, the term is often set over against the non-vocational, setting up the usual false binaries between meaning and work, intellectual and economic, and etc.
Griffin is taking up the other meaning in many ways (though to teach as a college professor implies both meanings perhaps, given the binary between teaching and research or scholarship). She takes up the gendering of these matters in various ways, including the ways teacher=female, scholar=male, for example. She also gave me one of my favorite quotations about the vocation of teaching, worth us all reflecting on -- especially given the ways Shimer focuses on teaching and learning, and perhaps even teaching as learning. Here are her words:
...teaching is about passing on the tools for survival. (p. 73)
Hmmm. I think this is about more than those tools we use to gain and use jobs, but they are also those (especially given the ongoing gendering of the labor market in the US and globally). And, of course, survival means more than that -- especially given the spate of news on violence, sexual assault and harassment, and related matters across the US, including on our campuses. Here are more of Griffin's words:
Teachers have always been the voices for culture, passing on accumulated knowledge. Academe thus amounts to oral history. If in thinking of oneself as a voice a teacher has in mind a sort of funnel or a megaphone through which culture spreads to the little pitchers with big ears -- then one's task is relatively simple. If, however, one sees oneself in a problematic ironic relation to that story as its narrator; if one cannot tell the story without disrupting it -- then in that case, one's vocation is at once more difficult, more dangerous, and much more interesting. (p. 181)
Survival and danger. Is that what it is all about?
Griffin ends the chapter from which this last quotation comes from with these words: "A vocation: a song in many voices." Is that what a Shimer education is all about?
For a discussion of MOOCs and the great books, there is nothing like a Shimer faculty member for thoughtful commentary. If you click here, you can read Adam Kotsko's views.
Before you do, though, if you do not know what MOOCs are, here is a bit of an update. The acronym stands for Massive Open Online Courses. And this despite the fact that they sound vaguely like mooing cows and they are almost the opposite of a sacred cow in higher education today. They are at the center of media -- and higher education -- debate about how to make higher education scaleable (read: open to huge numbers of people for as little money as possible), combining a sort of populism with a variety of forms of access to new forms of learning. The big examples right now are Coursera and EdX. For a video on what a MOOC is, click here.
In many ways, MOOCs are part of the "free" movement -- and the open movement -- both of which focus on linking access to education to the use of technology to the notion that these social goods ought be made as widely available as possible. In some ways they are utterly new -- and in other ways, their path was cleared by earlier efforts at on-line education in both the not for profit and the profit arenas of higher education. Some think the predecessors are large lectures with teaching assistants leading discussions (click here for that view); others connect this to earlier experiments in on line education. (See in this regard, Taylor Walsh's Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses published by Princeton in 2011, well before the first MOOC. For an interview with Walsh, click here. And no, it is not the same Taylor Walsh as the character in a not very high end television show.) And, of course, on line courses are not -- and never were -- the original form of distance or dispersed education.
For readers who are not Shimerians, perhaps, the notion of Great Books may need some clarification as well. Yes, the phrase has a specific meaning (linked to such names as Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins and to institutions like Columbia University, University of Chicago and Shimer), which links to a historical movement to identify and render accessible through the high tech of the era (a multi-volume encyclopedia) works of enduring historical significance. The movement was thus populist in some ways and linked to elite universities and colleges in others.
So: today, MOOCs and great books? Great MOOCs? Here we are at the cusp of what some see as the changing nature of higher education. Read Adam's views -- and share your own please.
Today's quotation for the day reminds us that educational institutions sometimes embody (pun intended) the Western split of mind and body (or perhaps even fact and value) and at other times challenge those binaries.
"The separation of mind and body is a central idea in much of Western philosophy, and it has become the basis for many of hte policies and organizational models of education. This idea may be for some a reassuring existential construction or a pleasant and relatively low-risk form of self-aggrandizement that helps us feel justified in claiming some superiority over other creatures or distancing ourselves from the relentlessly corporal facts of human life. Regardless, it is complete fiction. " (Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, We're Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education, New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 71).
What does this mean about reorganizing higher education for the 21st century?
Great neologism, right? It is not my own, of course, but it has a delightful ring to it. It comes from a book I just finished entitled Being Wrong, authored by Kathryn Schulz. The subtitle is Adventures in the Margins of Error. It has been out for a while, and there is a lot of buzz about it. And, to be honest, I enjoyed the read.
So: wrong is joining other words that nudge us along by seeming so wrong to attach to the best of liberal education -- bewilderment, dead, glee, wrong. Really? Thoughtfulness seems obvious. It even seems right. It belongs. But wrong? Really? It seems so wrong. (Say that aloud in the right tone of voice.) And yet, it seems so right. (Even Bill Clinton agrees. Click here.)
Schulz's book is persuasive and thought-provoking. Wrong is important -- and not just as something to be avoided. It is something from which we learn. Something we need. Something that defines us. All of us. It is, she argues, part of what makes us human. (And thus more than animals in some sense.) She draws on all sorts of intellectual -- and personal -- examples to push us along. And her comments draw on authors from Aristotle to . . . . well, you know.
So, connections to liberal education? To Shimer? There seem to me several.
First, on neologisms per se. I like them -- they remind me that language grows and changes. Yes, there are rules (grammar; my own obsession with the correct use of apostrophes) but yes, things change. English is a living language. Hack no longer is principally a word for a kind of carriage. Nor, did I, in my youth, know what to google meant. [Well, there was a song from well before my time about googly eyes, but. . . . you know my point.) Neologisms build on the past and somehow link that to the new, the future. In some senses, that is what liberal education is about -- connecting us to history, but doing so in a way that imagines (and allows us to build) a future that is both like that past and challenges it. Neologisms, in some sense, face both directions -- to tradition and to invention, as do neologisms. So, too, I would argue, does the best of liberal education and the best of Shimer.
More directly, though -- how are being wrong and being educated, liberal education and Shimer connected? Let me quote from Shultz as I move to a second set of connections for us by offering a few quotations from the book. (My citatons are to the kindle edition).
The feeling of knowing something is incredibly convincing and inordinately satisfying, but it is not a very good way to gauge the accuracy of our knowledge. (kindle location 1103)
How can we square this feeling of rightness with the very real possibility that we are wrong? This is a question that haunts all of wrongology, not just errors of memory. (kindle location 1171)
By discussing confabulators and literature, memory loss and neurological dysfunction, conversion and lying, this author nudges us along to be thoughtful about ourselves -- and yes, to my mind, the role of being wrong in higher education as about cognitive, social, and emotional processes. Are we more error prone when we follow the masses? When we trust a source? Can higher education be groupthink? Or is its role to disrupt groupthink? Is error blindness a moral problem? How do we move beyond the conviction that we cannot possibly be wrong? (And how do we avoid the view that we are always wrong?) Is certainty toxic? Or is uncertainty toxic?
And a third set of reasons we may find this book of interest? Well, the book is profoundly interdisciplinary (or is it multidisciplinary? Transdisciplinary? Antidisciplinary?) In any case, it draws from a variety of intellectual arenas (and life arenas) to think through a topic (and indeed, make an argument) from a variety of angles. As it does so it addresses the complex relationships between being wrong -- moral error, factual error, dramatic changes in our belief systems, etcetera -- and various epistemologies and metaphysics. How do we know? And in what ways do we learn? Is this about multiperspectivalism -- or is it an admision that most of the things we are most interested in are not divided up into the kinds of arenas that academia uses to demarcate intellectual arenas? Hmm. Might she be right as she writes about being wrong? (She cites Montaigne. How can she be wrong?)
Finally, just a personal bit: I find it hard to be wrong. Do you? There are moments when I have been so wrong -- in various ways -- as to been challenged in a very fundamental way. And not just when the theories of religion's disappearance I learned in college and graduate school turned out to be utterly wrong. Because I have, on occasion, been utterly wrong. Have you? Is that part of what it means to be educated?
And yet, as the author of this book notes about many of us, I too enjoy the paradoxical experience of being wrong sometimes -- when it comes to optical illusions, for example. As she puts it: "emotionally, illusions are the gateway drug to humility" (kindle location 1027). Hmmm.
For some of the press on the book, though collected by the book's own website, click here. And for a video that is kind of fun, here. To buy it from indiebook.com try here. Or, try this site for some video that is not TED. Or try this bloggishness from a site with one of the best names I have seen in a while -- the accidental theologist. Or this, from an even more wonderful blog, overweening generalist, whose mission seems oh so Shimerish.
At the start of the 2012/2013 academic year, the Dean of Shimer College, Barbara Stone, focused on the ways busy-ness shapes us in her convocation talk. It was a delightful, wry, and deeply important talk. It reminded listeners to ask the following question about higher education: are we better off if we "get through it" more quickly? It reminded us to ask about the value of pausing, of slowness, even, perhaps, of dawdling. I return to those themes today, because I am in need of a reminder that busy-ness is not everything. In fact, it is not much, in the great scheme of things. And, perhaps more importantly, education is a process embedded in time.
A mentor of mine, Peggy Williams, Emerita President of Ithaca College and Lyndon State College, sent me a book some years ago which speaks to this theme. The book is entitled In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. The author, Carl Honore, writes about slow food, slow cities, and, what surprised me at the time I first read it, slow education. While many of us are familiar with the first of these, a movement that began in Italy and now has "chapters" across the globe, the section on slow education may be less familiar. And yet, it is so obvious once one thinks about it. There is, in fact, a slow movement in many arenas of life, resisting the ways speeding up seems so obviously crucial to all of who we are. Why is becoming educated in less time better than taking more time? Why are we rushing? What happens to how we learn if we take our time?
While the slow education movement seems to focus a bit on kids, the possibilities are much wider. For example, we often meausre the efficacy of colleges and universities by focusing on what percentage complete in 4 years. Of course, this is really about seeing if colleges and universities are fulfilling their promises to enable completion in that time. Having said that, as we face economic challenges, some universities are approaching the future with an eye to the 3 year undergraduate degree. Is a speedier degree a better degree?
Thought about another way, the word pause is relevant. In this case, the fear of "gap years" and the fear of stepping out of school may be as relevant as the need to pause and consider one's reading and writing, problem solving and dialogue as one pursues a college degree. Here are some words of wisdom from Sharon Parks, The Critical Years: Young Adults and
the Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1986):
The modern academy had its
genesis in the contemplative monastic tradition, but we have in large measure
lost the essence of our heritage through our inattention to the power of pause.
Though pause is essential to insight, the structure of the academy offers
little time for contemplation. Congested urban campuses, lockstep class
schedules, mass-feeding dining halls, crowded dormitories with little private space,
interminable committee meetings and office appointments, competition for
grades, pressures for ‘excellence’ in research and teaching evaluated by the
requisite amount of publication – all conspire to erode the quality of
contemplation essential to the achievement of wisdom. Though the academy
engenders a good deal of conscious conflict, it often fails to allow the pause
so necessary to the gestation of new images and insight. . . (pp. 145-146)
Words like slow and pause, as for me the word Shimer, remind us that thinking well is not always about thinking now, this moment, immediately, and as quickly as possible. It is also about stopping and reflecting.
PS: If you are in Chicago, here is the local slow food convivium. And, if you are in education, here is a website that Carl Honore recommends on the topic of slow education.
PPS After this was written, but before it was published, a blog on Inside Higher Education published this on a related topic. Great minds. . . Great blogs. . . Great schools. . . .
Here is a provocative quotation from Sharon Parks' book The Critical Years: Young Adults and the
Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1986):
In higher education, the moment
of ‘conscious conflict’ is the celebration of a primary strength. When serving
at its best, the college or university ‘pulls together a livable tension of
restless opposites.’ The academy has a particular responsibility and a unique
capacity to serve as a center of conflict.” (p. 141)
