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| Duke parent 2004 | Sep 23 2008, 05:18 AM |
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On the degradation of the academic dogma (originally posted June 12, 2008) The lamentable conduct of the Duke faculty and the Duke administration these past two years saddens me. But it does not surprise me. For at least the past hundred years, men of great learning and perspicacity have been writing a long obituary of the higher learning in America. Few of these men would likely gag at the modern stink, as the symptoms of disease and decline they described in their own day were already pronounced. Among the most eloquent of these curmudgeons was Albert Jay Nock (see my avatar). In 1931, Nock delivered the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, published the following year as The Theory of Education in The United States. At the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, Nock reminded his audience of how alien the university of the first half of the 20th Century would have been to Jefferson, whose plan for public education in the State of Virginia Nock ably summarized as follows: -------- Every child in the State should be taught reading, writing and common arithmetic; the old-fashioned primary-school course in the three Rs. Each year the best pupil in each primary school should be sent to the grammar schools, of which there were to be twenty, conveniently located in various parts of the State; they were to be kept there for one or two years, and then dismissed, except “the best genius of the whole,” who should be continued for the full term of six years. “By this means,” wrote Mr. Jefferson, “twenty of the best geniuses shall be raked from the rubbish annually.” I venture to call your attention to these rather forceful words, as showing how far this great believer in equality was from anything like acceptance of our official assumption that everybody is educable. But this is not all. At the end of six years the best ten out of the twenty should be sent to William and Mary College, and the rest turned adrift. Mr. Jefferson’s plan appears selective with a vengeance in our eyes, accustomed as they are to the spectacle of immense hordes of inert and ineducable persons slipping effortlessly through our secondary schools, colleges, universities, on ways that seem greased for their especial benefit. -------- Jefferson’s plan never stood a chance, not least because the author of the Declaration of Independence had himself delivered the immortal dictum that “All men are created equal . . . ,” which despite his intention to apply it to matters political proved irresistible to inveterate partisans of equality and overheated enemies of elitism in all fields of human conduct. As the 18th Century gave way to the 19th, as America became the destination of huddled masses from around the world, as the industrial revolution kicked into high gear, the traditional classical curriculum continued giving ground to “practical studies.” The Morrill Act of 1862, which jump-started the land-grant universities that today are spread across the fruited plain, provided funds to be used by each State for “the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” Emblematic of these new universities was Cornell, whose motto to this day remains Ezra Cornell’s “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” (a notion, by the way, justly impugned by Matthew Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy). By Nock’s time, Greek and Latin were in full retreat. To accommodate swelling enrollments, the universities continued diluting the curriculum in many other ways. Perhaps surprising to those not familiar with these developments, even academic subjects that today are presumed to be core components of the traditional liberal arts established themselves quite recently--despite animadversions from far-sighted and incisive critics such as Nock himself. Here, for example, is Nock on what today is often the most popular major on campus--namely, English: -------- I therefore say only that there are a great many such courses [in English], whereas forty years ago no such thing was known. Why should this be so? Forty years ago, our English-speaking students learned English quite informally; it was our own tongue, we were bred to a native idiomatic use of it, such a use as none but a native can ever possibly acquire. To say that English was not taught in our higher institutions means merely that everybody taught it. No matter what the stated subject under discussion might be, if we expressed ourselves inaccurately, loosely, unidiomatically, we heard about it at once and on the spot, and in terms that forcibly suggested a greater carefulness in the future. As for English literature, it was our literature, our concern with it was proprietary, everything in it was open to us, and the critical judgment, the standards of taste and discrimination that we applied to it, were such as had been bred in us by our long acquaintance with the literatures of Greece and Rome. No one dreamed of teaching English literature; indeed, I do not see how it can be effectively taught in any formal fashion . . . . Why, then, is it that “courses in English” should hold so large a place in the newest type of institutional organization? They do so for a very simple reason. Under the conditions that we have been describing, great masses of ineducable people come into our institutions. They must be kept there, and most nominally be busy with something or other as a pro forma justification for keeping them. . . . One thing they [the ineducable] can do, albeit after a very poor fashion, is to read; that is to say, they can make their way more or less uncertainly down a printed page; and therefore “courses in English” have come into their present extraordinary vogue. -------- Fast forward seventy-five years. Imagine what Nock would say about “courses in English” today. Shakespeare, Milton, and even Dickens have yielded to surveys of pop culture and, mirabile dictu, to blather about movies. And even these exercises in low-wattage inanity bow humbly to those ne plus ultra haunts of the ignorant, the bumptious, and the indolent that go by the names of deconstructionism and lit-crit. Only in America, that riot of democracy, could a person still be deemed educated while talking rot about a “subject” that in the first instance needed to slap on the rouge in order to gain admittance to the salon. Nock died in 1945, not too early for a cultivated man taking the pulse of the higher learning. For with the advent of the Cold War, the federal government became the great enabler of the rout. In boosting the ranks of the aspiring, the GI Bill ineluctably swelled those of the time-servers as well, and the colleges and universities happily accommodated the unwashed with ever new courses in increasingly inappropriate topics. After Sputnik, the feds picked up the pace, throwing megabucks at the universities and encouraging them to establish ever more institutes and programs to address the pressing social issues of the day. The human condition, about which writers in the great tradition of the liberal arts had delivered themselves in the very classics that Nock and his compadres among the “saving remnant” revered, devolved into a nest of “problems” that demanded “solutions”—solutions, not surprisingly it was averred, that could be advanced primarily by the ready and copious application of government monies--and the training of cadres of engaged academics who would show the physical scientists and the engineers that the right stuff could be found in their ranks as well as in those charged with putting a man on the moon. Government money comes, of course, with government controls and restrictions, typically advanced first as recommendations, exhortations, or admonitions. When in doubt, and fearing the loss of funds upon which so many now depended for the continued production and promulgation of so much not worth knowing, the universities beefed up their administrations, creating new deans of affirmative action, provosts of diversity, vice-presidents of governmental relations—and sundry other apparatchiks for activities and “areas” that could only further divert the higher learning from its traditional mission of transmitting the precious heritage of our civilization to the young—and occasionally adding to that heritage through the efforts of teachers more in love with learning than with themselves or the opinions of their students. Those of us who came of age in the ‘60s pretty much know “the rest of the story.” Many of us, sad to say, are debased products of the debased universities to which we still reflexively make annual donations. Some of us draw our paychecks from these institutions that misrepresent themselves daily to so many students, who themselves naturally lack the culture to distinguish the meretricious from the real deal. Scholars of the old stamp can still be found on campus, but their numbers decline with each passing year. At any rate, they rarely mistake themselves for soldiers in the defense of the higher learning; after all, a polemical bent rarely consorts with the temperament that drew them to their fields of study in the first place. Their busy-body juniors, though, are another story altogether. Poorly schooled from the get-go and often hostile to venerable understandings of what it means to be educated, they readily fly to the ramparts, foisting their political nostrums and jejune “agendas” on both deferential students ill-equipped to parse the pish-posh and diffident administrators themselves recruited from the ranks of the new ignoranti. What, then, is to be done? Not much, I’m afraid. I concur with the sentiments recently elaborated by Alan Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education (FIRE), and co-author ten years ago with Harvey Silverglate of that blockbuster, The Shadow University: the Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (which, incidentally, in its exposure of the “water buffalo” incident at the U. of Pennsylvania brought “fame” if not fortune to the lovable Larry Moneta). In the May 2008 issue of The New Criterion, Kors concludes his “On the Sadness of Higher Education” (available on the website of the Wall Street Journal here) with this cri de coeur: -------- One still can protect a few individuals and keep a hint of pluralism alive by means of honest exposure, shame and ridicule, but this is work—vital and moral, and an end in itself—that affects only the margins. The sad bottom line is that there are no incentives for administrators to offer a different product, such as a niche of high-quality education, equal treatment, liberty and merit. Parents invest understandably in the value of degrees, not in the quality of curriculum and faculty. A model of higher education that offered a prestigious degree, high admissions standards, a superb and rigorous education, a faculty that was truly and usefully intellectually pluralistic, and a climate of individual rights and responsibilities (joined with rights of voluntary association) would, I believe, sweep the field. No one can afford to build a great university to offer that model, however. For obvious structural and institutional reasons, no one is going to "seize" a major university for such an experiment, though the vision of what could be accomplished by one great alternate model is mesmerizing. Until then, we only can work to protect the innocent, expose what the media are willing to expose, and await a generational shift in administrators and the professoriate. Such a shift, alas, not only is not on the horizon, but also recedes ever further from view given the bigotry against intellectual difference and pluralism, the incentives for conformity, the disincentives for courage and independence of mind, and the willingness, indeed eagerness, of society to subsidize those who have contempt for the very culture and values that make both that subsidy and that tolerance of derision and condescension possible. The academic world that I entered is gone. I teach for my students, whom I love, and I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success. --------- To bear witness in our time to the travesty that has become the modern university is a duty hardly to be taken lightly. 
Edited by Duke parent 2004, Sep 25 2008, 03:25 PM.
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
9:01 AM Dec 6
