Evocations

Twenty-first Century Ponderings

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? 

Alexander Meiklejohn

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. 

Adam Smith Goes to College

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? 

Quote for the Day --

Ronald Grimes is an expert in Ritual Studies. He is also, of course, a guy. Here are some quotations from his book, Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man's Life (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995):

Teachers and students constitute a lineage. Though Academic paternity is even more questionable than biological paternity, it is nevertheless a powerful, sometimes nurturing force. In passing through the hallowed halls of academe, one gains fathers, mothers, children, sisters, and brothers. The brotherhood is not always kind. (p. 40) 

The educational process constitutes a ritualization of passage. Academic passage generates ancestors, spawns progenry, and consolidates cohorts. It constellates power and defines outsiders. So we do well not to minimize the impact of academic ritual in either its admirable or its contemptible forms. (p. 41)

Education is our society's most sustained effort at initiation. (p. 45)

Agree? Or? 

The Mind /Body Problem OR, Are You Losing Your Mind?

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?  

About Keeling and Associates, click here. 

What Does Rich Mean to You?

Of course, rich has many meanings -- financially secure and more, deeply textured and full, and related meanings. (Shound you wish, you could check out a dictionary definition here or the wikipedia entry here which is utterly goofy.) But in what is often one of my rhetorical strategies, those meanings are not where I am heading today. Instead, I am heading to Rich as a last name, of well known poet and thinker, Adrienne Rich, profiled here by Chicago's own Poetry Foundation. 

Among the topics that Rich addressed across her oeuvre (aka body of works) are motherhood, sexuality, feminism, and education. It is the latter that is relevant for us today. In 1973/74, for example, she wrote as essay entitled "The Woman Centered University", available here. In 1978, she wrote "Taking Women Students Seriously" parts of which are available here.

Here are some of her words from her essay "Claiming an Education," a 1977 piece, originally given as a Convocation address at Douglass College (altered by the addition in the brackets):

       Ths first thing I want to say to you who are students, is that you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education; you will do much better to think of yourselves as being here to claim one. One of the dictionary definitions of the verb "to claim" is: to take as the rightful owner; to assert in the face of possible contradiction." "To receive" is to come into possession of; to act as receptacle or container for; to accept as authoritative or true." The difference is that between acting and being acted-upon, and for women [and men] it can literally mean the difference between life and death. (Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979, p. 231; also available here) 

So: do you think that adding the "and men" is apt? Is this still relevant advice? 

I think it is relevant advice for all of us, though what makes it difficult for each of us to claim our education is shaped by our social circumstances. It is, as Rich pointed out decades ago, difficult to claim an education if one is at risk physically in some settings (is a late library night putting you at rick of rape, for example?)  -- or if one cannot afford education -- or if the presumptions of those around you are that you are not smart enough or capable enough to be educated? 

How might we better claim an education? Do you claim yours? How? 

Not Shimer, Not No How!

Ok, the phrase " Not nobody. Not nohow" somehow reaks of bad grammar Yes it does. The allusion, though, is to Wizard of Oz. Here's the quotation in its context (thanks to this site for the help) :

Dorothy: Your Majesty, if you were king, you wouldn't be afraid of anything? 
Cowardly Lion: Not nobody! Not nohow! 
Tin Woodsman: Not even a rhinoceros? 
Cowardly Lion: Imposerous! 
Dorothy: How about a hippopotamus? 
Cowardly Lion: Why, I'd thrash him from top to bottomus! 
Dorothy: Supposing you met an elephant? 
Cowardly Lion: I'd wrap him up in cellophane! 
Scarecrow: What if it were a brontosaurus? 
Cowardly Lion: I'd show him who was king of the forest! 

But, that is not the quotation I had in mind for today, one that dates to the very first year of this century. It comes from the Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2001, “A BATTLE PLAN FOR PROFESSORS TO RECAPTURE THE CURRICULUM” CHRONICLE 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 which are entrees and which the desserts” and “Dante’s definition of hell, where nothing connects to nothing.” (b7)

Do you agree? NOT Shimer, no how? 

Conflict: A Quotation for the Day

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)

Would you agree? 

Abraham Maslow's Footnotes

On page 51 of my edition of Religions, Values and Peak Experiences (Penguin, 1970) by Abraham Maslow, in the chapter entitled "Values in Education," there appears a set of footnotes that are among my favorite footnotes in the world. Admittedly, I love footnotes; I especially prefer them to end notes! (I get it; end notes are cheaper to print, but really? Here on the issue of the footnote, as a Shimerian recently said to me, is one of the values of interactive texts. I love that I can find notes -- one no longer distinguishes footnotes from end notes -- easily.) 

The context of these notes, of course, is Maslow's attempt to distinguish (as he does in the case of religion as well) between educational institutions (which sometimes mitigate against education) and education per se. (If you do not know who Maslow is, here is one place to look.) So, here are the three footnotes, with a few comments. Perhaps it will drive you to read this book which appears to be about religion (and is) but is centrally about education(in all its complexities).

Footnote 1 says "Isn't is a pity that my daughter left school in her senior year just before she finished her education?" 

Footnote 2 says: Professor Pangloss would have been delighted by the fact that all human knowledge happens to fall apart into exactly the same three-credit slices, like the segments of a tangerine, and that they all happen to last for exactly the same number of class hours. 

Footnote 3 says  "No man can call himself educated who does not know the Iliad (or constitutional law, or chemistry, or descriptive geometry, etc., etc.)." For that matter, one college I went to refused to give a degree unless the student could swim. Another one required that I take freshman composition even though I had articles in press for publication. Faculty politics are silly enough to supply us with many more examples thsan we need.

So: footnote one requires me to ask: what does he mean by this? Out of context the answer is not obvious. In context, Maslow is trying to get us to ask why we assume that leaving school means the end of education. Might it be possible that leaving school immerses you in a different form of education? This, of course, is not a question unfamilair to us a decade plus into the twenty-first century, given arguments for the educational superiority of drop outs, for example. (Though, I, personally, do not think this is quite his point.) 

Footnote two, of course, points to some of the ludicrous (and serious) parts of the organization of higher education in Maslow's time (the book was written mid-twentieth century). And, yes, the state still has an interest in saying "this is what a credit hour is" and this is how long a course must meet to be a college level course. This emphasis can become silly as when some states calculate the difference between a B.A. and a B.S. by the number of classroom minutes required. On the other hand, of course, is the need for some comparability in the interest of students. Hmmmm. (If you are sure this is an exaggeration, click here for one example. Read carefully. I am not saying this is wrong; I am saying: hmmm.) 

Footnote 3 is, of course, about the rigidity of requirements and the ways curricula can be misconstrued as "merely" political in the sense of his use of the phrase "faculty politics." Of course, even then, the decision to require things in curricula was not always taken for intellectual reasons; even then, money followed enrollment for various reasons, at least in some contexts. And, sometimes requirements are enforced with no flexibility emerhging from an understanding of this particular student at this particular time. And yet, we know, that our best institutions create requirements for reasons other than those implied by Maslow here (and other than those endemic in the commodification of higher learning). Here, the key is what we mean by best. And, given Maslow's desire to udnerstand humanity not through the lens of our pathology or failures (a la psychoanalysis, for example) but through persons who exemplify what is most aspirational (best) about some of us, I think this is his message to us here: we must think through what is best in all of our educational work. 

Of course, these footnotes are out of context, so I do suggest a re-reading of the book. Having said that, Maslow does successfully raise the question of how we can ensure that what we know as educational institutions are truly about education, in its deepest as well as its more immediate sense. He demands his readers ask whether, in fact, our institutions impede or enhance what we might think of as "truly" educational. 

A great question for Shimer -- and for all of us, once again, decades after Maslow wrote these footnotes -- and after much intervening debate about the purpose and delivery of education. Today, too, bringing questions of value to bear on how we think of education is key -- and here, value is not merely about the value proposition (though that is important) or cost versus value versus price (though those are important as well) but about that other meaning of value -- implied crucially in Maslow's version of the "value of education." 

Your views? Are footnotes important? What is the value of -- and what are the values in -- education? 

For an interesting piece on Maslow, click here. For a bit on his views as linked to education, try here. 

Leadership

Jill Ker Conway, former president of Smith College, had this to say about being a college president. IT is, in my view, a very Shimerian point: that all parts of this community of criticism, generosity, inquiry and hope are transformed by what we accomplish together. 

 

We are all transformed by the institutions we lead and by the experience of. . decision-making, however large or small the span of authority. That role and the tasks that go with it require a degree of self-scrutiny that most of us, female or male, rarely undertake [whether student, faculty, administrator, staff or friend of higher education]. The person who sits at the point where many contending interests clash, and has to decide how to manage the conflict [difference] in a way that serves the greater public interest, is educated and changed by the experience. (Jill Ker Conway, A Woman’s Education, p. 125) 

 For more on Conway, click here. Or, here for a video.