Recently, I wrote about the problem with defending the liberal arts: The professors themselves don’t do it & their way of life, as well as their way of making a living, is on the line! We should ask ourselves, is it even possible to stand up for those who do not stand up for themselves?
Now, I’m in a position to add to the story—the same Prof. Frey who occasioned that note has a new review in the WSJ in defense of the liberal arts, a review of a volume of essays in defense of the liberal arts. The first thing that struck me is the political context. Conservatives are considered non-existent—which makes sense for the most part—& the appeal is to liberals. How do you justify the liberal arts? Prof. Frey confesses she is very moved by the thought of going to prison:
[One writer] speaks movingly about his incarceration; Calvin University’s Prison Initiative, he tells us, offers a way in which “the liberal arts play a key role in the prisoner’s restoration to society.” In a similar vein, the testimony from students in the Odyssey Project, which brings “great works” courses in literature, philosophy, art, & history to low-income adults, 95% of them from communities of color, is compelling & inspirational. [Another writer] speaks movingly of her work with the Nyansa Classical Community, a program founded to bring classical learning & literature to young people of diverse backgrounds, especially from the African diaspora.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the discourse about the “developed” world & the “developing” world. You can condescend to the latter, but not the former. Also, there’s hope of activity in the latter, but not in the former. So also here, the poor & criminal are not beyond hope—but academia, the successful middle classes: Doomed. A further political point, to remind us of our way of life. Until the 1960s, the major audience for the liberal arts were what we today call, in a very sophisticated & morally demanding way, white males. The racists in “systemic racism,” the white in the “white supremacy,” to recall two other fashionable phrases. In a word, the “patriarchy;” if you like, you may say the liberal arts were all about “speaking truth to power.” These, of course, the post-patriarchal young white males are silently left out of the conversation. Our post-1960s world, it seems to me, has no use for them. They’ve learned their fate is to suffer from “disparate impact,” i.e. systemic discrimination in higher education, & they avoid the post-1960s liberal arts accordingly, since the ideology of higher education is predominant there. I said last time that the collapse of higher education is most clearly revealed to us in the destruction of the humanities; Prof. Frey admits that the professors themselves are part of the problem, but above all administrators:
In the final analysis, the place of the liberal arts in our universities will come down to what we think a university is for. But university administrators must always ask ourselves: In what sense is the education we offer meaningfully higher? This collection suggests that the liberal arts provide an education that meets the highest aspirations of the human person, an education aimed at human flourishing. It is difficult to put a price on that. What we need are administrators who are willing to offer the opportunity to aim higher; that so many are unwilling to do this in the name of “consumer” satisfaction is a testament to how far higher education has fallen.
Let me add what no liberal dares say, that the professors’ abandonment or betrayal of young men is the core of that problem.
So with the political context; now to the question of education. Prof. Frey confesses her sympathy with this statement of principle:
The goal of education should be to create liberated persons who seek to examine life in its fullness, to enjoy friendships with others, & to foster the health of their communities.
Some of these phrases are striking because incoherent: What does it mean to “create liberated persons?” What does the rhetoric suggest here—creation? Liberation? Personhood? Normal people don’t talk this way, but liberals do to an extent, they’re all about creativity & liberation; they don’t talk about personhood, though, & will never accept that way of thinking, even aside from its “pro-life” pedigree. You might think, leaving aside the rhetoric & the abstract language, that it’s a reference to the prisoners or the poor people mentioned above, but surely, that’s impossible. Education is aimed primarily at children & young adults, not the majority of the people, who are poor, or the small minority of criminals! Further, education is aimed at the naturally talented, since they can “examine” more things & they are better able to “foster the health of a community.” If ordinary people could do that, there would be no talk of “higher” education, since it would be the same for all Americans. Higher education is necessarily inegalitarian; but natural talent is not the same as the difference between the rich or poor or that between the popular & unpopular—the things that count in our democracy. Education introduces the inequality between those who can do math & most Americans, which is the necessary basis for Silicon Valley, but also corporate middle managements or the bureaucrats in the vast administrative state. But education for that reason needs to introduce other inequalities also, lest it cause the country to fall apart. The “research university” has invented techno-powers & thus made possible the wealth of America; but the answer to this shocking power has been the “Studies” university, feminism, ethnic minorities, &c., all the forms of vulgar moralism that have taken over the liberal arts. It was the internal incoherence of the liberal arts, which include both scientific & political studies, that led to the collapse of the university into the silly opportunism & listless defeatism we see today. When we consider education, we would be better advised to look to understand the catastrophe, since it’s not obvious that we’ve learned anything… When I read that pious & somewhat pompous statement of principle, I wonder whether any part of it fits with any other…
What are our conclusions? The liberal arts turn out to have almost no defenders within academia—now they’re looking for defenders outside. This admission of defeat may be our only moment of sobriety in this trying time. It would be flattering ourselves to claim an exodus has begun; better to say that in the general disarray, many people, though an infinitely small, poor minority, are trying to lead private investigations into our predicament, some of which promise to reveal to us what it means to be human. It is for the first time in our history also true that those who speak to women & those who speak to men have no longer any community or much awareness of each other; we again have different educations for the sexes, as we did before the coed 1960s, but even in this regard we have a strange situation—education for girls used to be backward looking, catching up with the boys, yet is now forward looking, whereas education for boys, which used to be Progressive, is now increasingly about returning to lost wisdom. Yet it is more obvious today than it was previously, in the 20th c., that education is a natural secret.
Speaking of which...
https://www.claremontindependent.com/post/the-end-of-political-philosophy-at-claremont-graduate-university?fbclid=IwAR3THeaN2q3cnnFxoBx1o-Zc-3fCAvwmQeFR5nFJ8Tij7vp49O1pyWrmapU