My friend Sam Goldman has put together an impressive forum on freedom for a new publication, Fusion. Important writers on political matters like Daniel McCarthy & Yuval Levin are part of it, alongside other successful thinktank people & journalists. Well worth your time! I want to attract attention to the one part of that forum where I can reasonably claim to know what I’m talking about, Prof. Jennifer Frey’s extraordinarily gentle defense of the liberal arts.
She acknowledges the major political difficulty. On the one hand, liberals control higher education & are not generous or merciful in their dominion. On the other, America is a commercial republic, people want success at the job, that’s mostly why they go to college, & they usually reject professorial authority to tell them for the sake of what great good we all have to work. To quote:
At a recent talk that I gave on liberal learning, an alarming number of members of the audience thought it must mean the teaching of progressive doctrine to impressionable young minds. This assumption is not completely off-base. It is a fact that professors have too often treated the classroom as a space of left-wing activism rather than a space of searching inquiry into the truth. In reaction to this, some conservatives have pushed back by using liberal education for explicitly conservative political ends. & it is a fact that young conservatives are too often silenced, bullied, or in more subtle forms ostracized on our campuses.
…We are in a strange state where we retain the language of higher & liberal education, but we no longer recognize that its true meaning presumes a distinction between two different states of mind: work & leisure…
The gentle lady quietly suggests Americans have an overwhelming agreement in ignoring or debasing the liberal arts: Students reject the moral authority of the professors, who themselves agree with the students! But obviously, this major agreement is not pleasing to the gentle among us, nor is it celebrated as a rare moment of unity in American life…
Of course, education is the core regime institution that intelligent, ambitious Americans are dependent on, & therefore the most important political fact in America is the transformation of the university. The gentle lady objects to the reduction of the university to the “research university” that produces “value-free knowledge,” but she cannot in a brief essay give a causal account of the change, but only point to the major clue: The destruction of the humanities. The humanities are seen as irrelevant from the point of view of positivist science which produces useful knowledge; & as impossible from the point of view of activists whose revolutionary ideology denies the possibility of trans-historical knowledge. These two dominant opinions are also two opposite, mutually irreconcilable reasons to dismiss the humanities as obsolete, & that can help us understand what’s wrong with education today.
There is much to say about the problem, but it can be stated briefly thus:
Even humanists have lost, or stopped believing in, the value of liberal learning as an education in freedom.
Since the essay quotes Allan Bloom, I would like to remind you that Bloom is the only “public intellectual” to mount a public defense of the liberal arts or humanities. We must return to that defense in The Closing of The American Mind, examine its successes & American failure to take that bestseller to heart. Only now is it possible for conservatives to rethink educational projects from Bloom’s point of view.
"Only public intellectual to mount a public defense..." A puzzling, perhaps unintentional, formulation. For if you're serious about it, I guess that means John Agresto hasn't had the hit-counts or sales numbers to count as a public intellectual? Or Peter Lawler either? If they don't count, surely Zena Hitz, William Deresiewicz, and Anthony Kronman can't...that is, in the "public" sense of "public intellectual"...and Bari Weiss/Jonathan Haidt are apparently too little of intellectuals?
Asking, not saying.
Or to go to the decades before the time of Bloom (and Dinesh D'Souza--who had a big essay in the Atlantic on liberal ed around '91 or so), to a number of essays/works on liberal education by Strauss, Arendt, Trilling, and the "Great-Bookie" himself, Mortimer Adler, the last of which sold-plenty-of-his-titles-to-middle-brow-readers--these don't count either?
In general on this topic, see our friend and sometime contributor Flagg Taylor, those episodes of his Enduring Interest podcast series which are on Liberal Education. https://enduringinterest.podbean.com/ Most of these podcasts were done a year or so ago, and one features our Pavlos discussing Eva Brann. I particularly recommend that one and the one with the Zuckerts on the two Strauss essays.
BTW, if you want to read one Extra Annoying Yet All-Too-Typical piece by a progressivist academic this month, I recommend the essay Frey attacks, that by Louis Menand, "What's So Great about Great Books Courses." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates
It begins okay, with a decent review of the GB movement, but by its end, it is utterly infuriating in its smug dismissal of GB ed and any notion of virtue-ed, and its smug refusal to face how bad things have actually gotten. Cheap shots galore begin about midway, including the misrepresentation of attacks on scientism as ones on science. Frey herself isn't entirely fair in a few of the ways she attacks Menand, but that's probably because she got infuriated by Menand like I did. An irrelevant condescending Boomer/progressivist dogmatic relativist, who has mastered the art of seeming reasonable for a half an essay to the half-attentive, before beginning to reveal his actual narrow-mindedness and nastiness.