I kind of get Malesic's response to you, though. I don't think your response was nihilism, but it does show how referencing structures in a mode that we might call "realism" is a kind of reflex for many of us in response to a call that we find insufficiently critical of the forces and systems that we think are preventing what the caller wants to happen. The problem is that when we invoke realism-about-preexisting-structures too quickly and automatically, we sometimes miss stressing a strong affinity with the person we're reacting to--the scolding correction overrides the possibility of alignment and alliance. And we lose sight of the agency we have, and the agency that the objects of our concern have (students in this case) to make things better even within those constraints, even despite a bleak realism reveals to us. Can I call students to something other than a transactional view of a degree? Only rarely. Can I suggest to them that this should be the way it is, and wait for that to sink in when they look back on their experiences? Yes. Will that delayed reaction lead to something? We can only hope. That's sort of the point of a lot of social and cultural politics: you keep hammering at the powers that be on one hand while also trying to inhabit the world that is possible as much as you can so that if the time comes, lots of us will be ready to step through that door. The realistic-structural point only primes us to hammer at the powers that be; we lose sight of what it is we want if we should happen to break through.
This is a smart response. It reminds me of how Marx was so careful to make sure he didn't jump from the microeconomic to the macroeconomic too quickly. I am more in Warner's camp, in that I think institutions can be a bit self satisfied and are too quick to blame students without looking at the ways they themselves incentivize certain behavior. But I do think that, given the world we live in, someone still needs to stand up for the individual value of what they are learning in the classroom
When I was in high school we had a physics teacher that was famously a really really hard grader. Some years he gave no A's at all. The parents complained and a different alternate easier physics class was created. I took the harder one, along with six other kids, and most of our grade, including the ones who ended up with the highest GPA, took the easiest.
Neither my parents nor anyone around me suggested I might materially suffer from doing that, even though I did in fact get a B. They could have complained that the world cares too much about GPAs and they would've been right, but that would've sent me the message that I was doing something dangerous. Instead they were just like, those other parents are being ridiculous. I don't know. In raising my own daughter, I persist in holding structural forces at a remove. They are important, but at the same time, we all die. Going to college and getting a lot of Bs and taking some random classes (as I did) can indeed be a mistake, and it's a shame it's a mistake, but on a global level, it's also something that's historically been available only to a very small number of people. Getting a PhD can ruin your life, but pursuing mastery of a subject you love is a beautiful way of ruining your life!
I wouldn't have had an issue with the response had it not questioned my commitment to the those ideals or yoked me in with a nihilistic frame, but yes what you note here is a worry, though my worry tends to be more along the lines of there not actually being that many people who want to walk through the door once you break through. In a way I've been heartened by the response at West Virginia University this week, even though faculty/staff/students are getting steamrolled by the powers that be. It shows that when it comes down to it lots of people don't want that transactional ethos to be embraced at the institutional level.
I'm also sort of surprised and maybe a little chagrined to hear that given what and where you teach that students still internalize a transactional ethos. I'd think if there's places and occasions where it could be defied, you're in one of those spots, but it goes to who how pervasive it is, I guess.
My students do have that other ethos, but of course, that's partly because they're in my classes, and to be in my classes already means you're not thinking in a narrowly transactional way. But we do have many students who are. Though even then, I'm not sure they are personally, deeply, internally thinking that way: it is more that their families and surrounding ideologies are thinking them into a constricted transactional mindset, at the same time that the surrounding world is threatening everything that a non-transactional student might imagine themselves doing and being in their lives ahead.
This is very close to my experience. I see many students who don't necessarily want to take the transactional mindset, but feel like they be disadvantaged (often in some undefinable way that still feels real to them) if they drop their guard.
John, your response to Malesic's criticisms, or, perhaps, your simple engagement with the issues, remind me that this discussion is ages old.
In the early 2000s, Phi Beta Kappa ran a series of national symposiums through their affiliated associations asking them to discuss and report back on this resolution: "Phi Beta Kappa should remain gloriously useless." (I was, at the time, a council member for the Delaware Valley Association of PBK, and we hosted the Triennial where this was a central point of discussion.)
That was over two decades ago, and in the time since, numerous books have been written on the value of a liberal education--all were/are attempts to preserve the very things you and Malesic are arguing as valuable in the face of rising numbers of professional degrees that often devalue these more philosophical educational opportunities/classes.
What most concerns me, as a teacher for 30 years, is the manner in which college costs have taken on a "shock and awe" effect: The number of zeros, when all totaled up, shock us into the notion that a degree in Philosophy or English would be a strategic failure when facing a future filled with Stud. Loan payments of thousands of dollars a month .
Look, I am as staunch an advocate for the Liberal Arts as anyone. For almost two decades my "meet the teacher night" presentations have revolved around a description of the 10 goals of a Liberal Education laid out in Prof. William Cronon's essay, "Only Connect." It, James's "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and a few other essays are seminal in my own development as a teacher. But I have to agree with you...sitting down with students to watch "My Dinner with Andre"...? Really? Surely there's an entire thread of discussion about privilege that seems untouched in the disagreement, for good reason I suppose.
Thanks for all your million+ words in so many venues.
"overwhelming signals our culture and even our colleges send are that the most important aspect of college is the chance to earn a credential." Depressingly, this view is being promulgated at the highest level in Britain, with the Prime Minister railing against so-called low-quality degrees: "Sunak said the key message of the policy is: “you don’t have to go to university to succeed in life.” [I don't disagree with this bit, but read on] He added he was hoping to stop students “being taken advantage of with low-quality courses that don’t lead to a job that makes it worth it, leaving them financially worse off”. (From The Week)
A lot of his response essay reads to me as the stereotypical NYT moderate who is upset that some people wish to radically change a system which the thoughtful moderates feel only needs reformed - "It gets to the point where, in order to depict innocent individuals as maximally crushed by the system, liberals leave no room to see the system as reformable." This is, of course, another status quo position which will likely lead to little change. And leads me to wonder what his idea of reform would be and who should be doing the reforming. I keep coming back to this essay about "non-reformist reforms" and I think it's very valuable to understanding the dangers of "moderate reforms" https://jacobin.com/2021/07/andre-gorz-non-reformist-reforms-revolution-political-theory As you rightly say, encouraging individual students to seek out a liberal education will do little to change the college presidents' decisions to dismantle that based on shortsightedness and greed (as is happening at WVU and similarly at the college I attended).
I completely agree with his assertion that you can "protest and fight against what's happening at WVU", while also trying to get a good education. We must live the best we can in the moment while fighting to change the systems that hold us and others back. However, his arguments that you can check out books at WVU and you can still engage with professors at WVU are laughably weak. I am currently checking out books at my public library and reading them, and I am currently able to speak with professors on platforms like Substack and Twitter. If that were all it took to encourage a liberal education, I would expect everyone with access to internet and a public library system to be thriving from it. Based on my own experience, college was an integral part of my experience of learning to learn, and without the guidance of my professors, I would likely have taken much longer to reach the point I am at today where I can learn a huge amount on my own from the library.
Unfortunately, I can't read his original NYT piece, but based on the tone and framing of his Substack response, it is exactly like the kind of centrist argument I hear all the time that is perfectly calculated to be entirely reasonable to almost anyone reading and yet (or rather precisely because of this) says very little of meaning at all.
I really enjoyed the points you made about the purpose of college. I always thought, and told my friends-- who all vehemently disagreed with me, that college, regardless of your major, taught you three things: critical reading, critical writing, and critical thinking. Your major was simply the lens through which you read, wrote and thought. I used my college experience, not as a means to a job and a future profession-- I didn’t declare a major, until the registrar kept sending me letters stating that I wouldn’t be able to continue my studies without doing so, until the end of my Junior year. I then chose, anthropology, as it was a multi/inter disciplinary subject with endlessly fascinating opportunities. I took more credits than required, because in those days, you payed a flat fee per quarter, no matter how many or few courses you took. So I took advantage, often doubling my course load, so I could experience and explore a wide variety of topics. From a course on Nineteenth Century Russian History to an examination of Walt Disney movies, anything and everything was fair game in my mind for wanting to explore the world-- the wider world, from which I was very sheltered from growing up. College gave me the opportunity and the time and the space, to learn about people, the world, and most importantly myself and what I wanted my life to be. It gave me the ability and finally the comfort to be myself, to like myself, gave me lifelong friendships, and shameless plug, the topic of my debut picture book, released last week, A Walk Through the Redwoods, illustrated by Natalia Bruno. Of course, I’d be remiss in not stating that my college was based on a privileged experience. I was afforded free tuition because my parents were service-connected disabled military veterans, and in the state of California, that meant a free education at a state school. They did however, pay for the room and board, my four years, which was more than double the cost of tuition, and books, and living expenses. I did not have to worry, unlike so many of my other friends, who were on financial aid, or had student loans, etc. College could be what I wanted it to be. And though, I endlessly worried about a job after graduation, I thought it would eventually come. It didn’t really, but now almost twenty years removed from graduation, an MA in Anthropology under my belt, and a smattering of seemingly random jobs/career starts/fails, I wouldn’t change my college experience. And would wish everyone the opportunity and freedom to use college as years of experimentation and discovery.
I loved this piece; I'm especially gratefully for the very ending, which I've been thinking about all week. It is such a terrific (and terrifically memorable) way to end the piece.
I kind of get Malesic's response to you, though. I don't think your response was nihilism, but it does show how referencing structures in a mode that we might call "realism" is a kind of reflex for many of us in response to a call that we find insufficiently critical of the forces and systems that we think are preventing what the caller wants to happen. The problem is that when we invoke realism-about-preexisting-structures too quickly and automatically, we sometimes miss stressing a strong affinity with the person we're reacting to--the scolding correction overrides the possibility of alignment and alliance. And we lose sight of the agency we have, and the agency that the objects of our concern have (students in this case) to make things better even within those constraints, even despite a bleak realism reveals to us. Can I call students to something other than a transactional view of a degree? Only rarely. Can I suggest to them that this should be the way it is, and wait for that to sink in when they look back on their experiences? Yes. Will that delayed reaction lead to something? We can only hope. That's sort of the point of a lot of social and cultural politics: you keep hammering at the powers that be on one hand while also trying to inhabit the world that is possible as much as you can so that if the time comes, lots of us will be ready to step through that door. The realistic-structural point only primes us to hammer at the powers that be; we lose sight of what it is we want if we should happen to break through.
This is a smart response. It reminds me of how Marx was so careful to make sure he didn't jump from the microeconomic to the macroeconomic too quickly. I am more in Warner's camp, in that I think institutions can be a bit self satisfied and are too quick to blame students without looking at the ways they themselves incentivize certain behavior. But I do think that, given the world we live in, someone still needs to stand up for the individual value of what they are learning in the classroom
When I was in high school we had a physics teacher that was famously a really really hard grader. Some years he gave no A's at all. The parents complained and a different alternate easier physics class was created. I took the harder one, along with six other kids, and most of our grade, including the ones who ended up with the highest GPA, took the easiest.
Neither my parents nor anyone around me suggested I might materially suffer from doing that, even though I did in fact get a B. They could have complained that the world cares too much about GPAs and they would've been right, but that would've sent me the message that I was doing something dangerous. Instead they were just like, those other parents are being ridiculous. I don't know. In raising my own daughter, I persist in holding structural forces at a remove. They are important, but at the same time, we all die. Going to college and getting a lot of Bs and taking some random classes (as I did) can indeed be a mistake, and it's a shame it's a mistake, but on a global level, it's also something that's historically been available only to a very small number of people. Getting a PhD can ruin your life, but pursuing mastery of a subject you love is a beautiful way of ruining your life!
I wouldn't have had an issue with the response had it not questioned my commitment to the those ideals or yoked me in with a nihilistic frame, but yes what you note here is a worry, though my worry tends to be more along the lines of there not actually being that many people who want to walk through the door once you break through. In a way I've been heartened by the response at West Virginia University this week, even though faculty/staff/students are getting steamrolled by the powers that be. It shows that when it comes down to it lots of people don't want that transactional ethos to be embraced at the institutional level.
I'm also sort of surprised and maybe a little chagrined to hear that given what and where you teach that students still internalize a transactional ethos. I'd think if there's places and occasions where it could be defied, you're in one of those spots, but it goes to who how pervasive it is, I guess.
My students do have that other ethos, but of course, that's partly because they're in my classes, and to be in my classes already means you're not thinking in a narrowly transactional way. But we do have many students who are. Though even then, I'm not sure they are personally, deeply, internally thinking that way: it is more that their families and surrounding ideologies are thinking them into a constricted transactional mindset, at the same time that the surrounding world is threatening everything that a non-transactional student might imagine themselves doing and being in their lives ahead.
This is very close to my experience. I see many students who don't necessarily want to take the transactional mindset, but feel like they be disadvantaged (often in some undefinable way that still feels real to them) if they drop their guard.
John, your response to Malesic's criticisms, or, perhaps, your simple engagement with the issues, remind me that this discussion is ages old.
In the early 2000s, Phi Beta Kappa ran a series of national symposiums through their affiliated associations asking them to discuss and report back on this resolution: "Phi Beta Kappa should remain gloriously useless." (I was, at the time, a council member for the Delaware Valley Association of PBK, and we hosted the Triennial where this was a central point of discussion.)
That was over two decades ago, and in the time since, numerous books have been written on the value of a liberal education--all were/are attempts to preserve the very things you and Malesic are arguing as valuable in the face of rising numbers of professional degrees that often devalue these more philosophical educational opportunities/classes.
What most concerns me, as a teacher for 30 years, is the manner in which college costs have taken on a "shock and awe" effect: The number of zeros, when all totaled up, shock us into the notion that a degree in Philosophy or English would be a strategic failure when facing a future filled with Stud. Loan payments of thousands of dollars a month .
Look, I am as staunch an advocate for the Liberal Arts as anyone. For almost two decades my "meet the teacher night" presentations have revolved around a description of the 10 goals of a Liberal Education laid out in Prof. William Cronon's essay, "Only Connect." It, James's "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and a few other essays are seminal in my own development as a teacher. But I have to agree with you...sitting down with students to watch "My Dinner with Andre"...? Really? Surely there's an entire thread of discussion about privilege that seems untouched in the disagreement, for good reason I suppose.
Thanks for all your million+ words in so many venues.
If you're interested, here's the link to an article about "gloriously useless" : https://phibetakappa.uncg.edu/gloriously_useless_rouner.html
"overwhelming signals our culture and even our colleges send are that the most important aspect of college is the chance to earn a credential." Depressingly, this view is being promulgated at the highest level in Britain, with the Prime Minister railing against so-called low-quality degrees: "Sunak said the key message of the policy is: “you don’t have to go to university to succeed in life.” [I don't disagree with this bit, but read on] He added he was hoping to stop students “being taken advantage of with low-quality courses that don’t lead to a job that makes it worth it, leaving them financially worse off”. (From The Week)
A lot of his response essay reads to me as the stereotypical NYT moderate who is upset that some people wish to radically change a system which the thoughtful moderates feel only needs reformed - "It gets to the point where, in order to depict innocent individuals as maximally crushed by the system, liberals leave no room to see the system as reformable." This is, of course, another status quo position which will likely lead to little change. And leads me to wonder what his idea of reform would be and who should be doing the reforming. I keep coming back to this essay about "non-reformist reforms" and I think it's very valuable to understanding the dangers of "moderate reforms" https://jacobin.com/2021/07/andre-gorz-non-reformist-reforms-revolution-political-theory As you rightly say, encouraging individual students to seek out a liberal education will do little to change the college presidents' decisions to dismantle that based on shortsightedness and greed (as is happening at WVU and similarly at the college I attended).
I completely agree with his assertion that you can "protest and fight against what's happening at WVU", while also trying to get a good education. We must live the best we can in the moment while fighting to change the systems that hold us and others back. However, his arguments that you can check out books at WVU and you can still engage with professors at WVU are laughably weak. I am currently checking out books at my public library and reading them, and I am currently able to speak with professors on platforms like Substack and Twitter. If that were all it took to encourage a liberal education, I would expect everyone with access to internet and a public library system to be thriving from it. Based on my own experience, college was an integral part of my experience of learning to learn, and without the guidance of my professors, I would likely have taken much longer to reach the point I am at today where I can learn a huge amount on my own from the library.
Unfortunately, I can't read his original NYT piece, but based on the tone and framing of his Substack response, it is exactly like the kind of centrist argument I hear all the time that is perfectly calculated to be entirely reasonable to almost anyone reading and yet (or rather precisely because of this) says very little of meaning at all.
I really enjoyed the points you made about the purpose of college. I always thought, and told my friends-- who all vehemently disagreed with me, that college, regardless of your major, taught you three things: critical reading, critical writing, and critical thinking. Your major was simply the lens through which you read, wrote and thought. I used my college experience, not as a means to a job and a future profession-- I didn’t declare a major, until the registrar kept sending me letters stating that I wouldn’t be able to continue my studies without doing so, until the end of my Junior year. I then chose, anthropology, as it was a multi/inter disciplinary subject with endlessly fascinating opportunities. I took more credits than required, because in those days, you payed a flat fee per quarter, no matter how many or few courses you took. So I took advantage, often doubling my course load, so I could experience and explore a wide variety of topics. From a course on Nineteenth Century Russian History to an examination of Walt Disney movies, anything and everything was fair game in my mind for wanting to explore the world-- the wider world, from which I was very sheltered from growing up. College gave me the opportunity and the time and the space, to learn about people, the world, and most importantly myself and what I wanted my life to be. It gave me the ability and finally the comfort to be myself, to like myself, gave me lifelong friendships, and shameless plug, the topic of my debut picture book, released last week, A Walk Through the Redwoods, illustrated by Natalia Bruno. Of course, I’d be remiss in not stating that my college was based on a privileged experience. I was afforded free tuition because my parents were service-connected disabled military veterans, and in the state of California, that meant a free education at a state school. They did however, pay for the room and board, my four years, which was more than double the cost of tuition, and books, and living expenses. I did not have to worry, unlike so many of my other friends, who were on financial aid, or had student loans, etc. College could be what I wanted it to be. And though, I endlessly worried about a job after graduation, I thought it would eventually come. It didn’t really, but now almost twenty years removed from graduation, an MA in Anthropology under my belt, and a smattering of seemingly random jobs/career starts/fails, I wouldn’t change my college experience. And would wish everyone the opportunity and freedom to use college as years of experimentation and discovery.
I loved this piece; I'm especially gratefully for the very ending, which I've been thinking about all week. It is such a terrific (and terrifically memorable) way to end the piece.