University is Good

I get tired, angry, disappointed, and frustrated whenever I hear the tired old saw that a university education is a waste.

It goes like this: Forget science and the liberal arts (especially the liberal arts/humanities). Focus on practical, rather than intellectual, skills, forget knowledge, and train everyone to make and fix things. Take up a trade or become a health-care worker.

This mantra has been around for decades, is nonsense at best, and damaging/untrue at worst. The most recent article"Revalorizing the Trades"  is by Camille Paglia in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A disclaimer is in order here.

I am not disparaging the trades/health fields or those who train and work in them. Trades and health workers are absolutely necessary. In many places, they are or will be in short supply. It's honest, interesting work, exactly what many people want, and the pay is good. But these vocations aren't for everyone, couldn't employ everybody, and would leave gaping holes in many other areas where we need people with a university education.

The argument for trades, especially, is so often based on incorrect assumptions. Paglia's article is no exception; she argues that "jobs, jobs, jobs" should be the primary concern for educators, but that there "is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks" (alternative to the professions, in this case).

First, I would argue that a university education is training for a job, but not directly and narrowly as Paglia and others recommend. The proof is in the pudding; graduates get and keep a range of jobs for which they are uniquely suited. That proof puts the lie to the other assumption -  that a liberal arts education (and university education across the board) doesn't lead to jobs, jobs, jobs.

A university education equals jobs.  It leads to good jobs, portable jobs, interesting jobs, well-paying jobs, prestigious jobs, flexible jobs, famous jobs, creative jobs, secure jobs, necessary jobs - just about any kind of job many people could want - a Google search proves the point. Rice University (among many others)  has a document showing the myths and realities about jobs for liberal arts grads - it includes a list of fields in which grads find work (most are not in the professions).

So what exactly is the problem?

The economy is one reason. University is expensive. Job loss is a huge concern right now.

Also, nurses, electricians, carpenters who train specifically for their jobs and then find them are fairly easy to track. Politicians and administrators can point to their successes much more easily, and the concept is simpler to grasp: electrical training = electrical-field job. Easy.

People with university degrees are much harder to track in the job market, and their career paths don't translate easily to flip-chart simplicity. History major =President of the United States (Kennedy).

It's harder to track the psychology major who, ten years later, has become a tv hockey producer, or the religious studies major who is now the director of business and policy for a major tv network. The liberal arts major who works for the defence department, is CEO of a huge company, an astronaut, policy manual writer for the UN, international coordinator for a major annual charity event.

If every interesting, important, and lucrative job had a direct educational path and an accrediting body, life would be simpler. Train for job X; get job X. But it doesn't always work that way.

Plus, a university education is a value-added endeavour. Graduates are more than trained employees. Graduates form the educated citizenry that allows democracy to flourish, keeps zealots in check, and the arts, science, law, medicine flourishing. They are trained to analyze, criticize, theorize, and question.

University graduates are not only employable, they are necessary to the efficient and progressive functioning of society. The biggest expense would be not to have enough of them.

Because the Lord Chamberlain Says So

If I were being criticized, I think I would rather it be for something vulgar, coarse, or tactless than for something inappropriate and unacceptable. I could be inappropriate by standing out in the crowd or unacceptable because I am the wrong height or age - hardly much fun or even my fault. But I could be tactless because I had just told off the person everyone loves to hate at work, or vulgar because I showed too much cleavage - things more worthy of criticism (and surely more fun).

Edward Skidelsky, in his article "Words That Think for Us" in Prospect (Nov.18/09), believes that the words"inappropriate" and "unacceptable" should be removed from the language. They are words of political correctness that reduce what was previously labelled as immoral behaviour to mere faux pas against social and professional convention.

We avoid moral judgement, "hoping to eliminate....intolerance,"  but may not be as successful as we would like to think:

But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.

According to Skidelsky, we just drive intolerance underground, where it rages against seeming "bureaucratic neutrality," which is his main reason for doing away with the words.

Skidelsky is right that one can raise an argument about what is indecent in a way that one cannot about what is inappropriate. Some of the older words of moral judgement are even defined by law which provides precedent for many such arguments. He is wrong, though, about the reason for the successful "career" of the newer words.

I disagree with Skidelsky's analysis about why we use the more politically correct words. He sees it as an attempt at tolerance, an avoidance of prickly morality. I see it as a power ploy, the cousin of 1984-type double speak.

"Inappropriate" and "unacceptable" should be thrown out, not because they neutralize, unlike older words of moral judgement, but because they are more vague and less defined. They are slippery and can define pretty much anything.

So it's not a liberal pluralist agenda to use these words; I see it, rather, as a conservative authoritarian agenda. Without the well-understood definitions of the older words of moral judgement, those in power in government, in business, anywhere really, can find anything inappropriate and unacceptable as it suits them. Skidelsky says it himself: the words invoke official power, without reference to the nuisance of argument.

Much is and has been at stake in the business of definition. Greek citizens could vote in the youth of democracy, but by definition women and slaves were not citizens. In Canada, the status (definition of who is aboriginal) of aboriginal peoples is established by parliament. Women are venerated and protected by law and religion, as long as they do not stray from the official definition of what a real woman is.

Skidelsky's example of the Lord Chamberlain makes the point perfectly. The Lord Chamberlain may find your jeans tasteless, crass, vulgar, inappropriate, and/or unacceptable attire for the Queen's garden party. The point is not the adjective he uses; the point is that in his official capacity, the Lord Chamberlain may find anything he (or the Queen) chooses as inappropriate or unacceptable for any reason at all.

Edward Skidelsky is a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University. His book Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

I would like to invite Edward Skidelsky to my soiree.




(flower photo credit)

Is There a Book in this Class?

After the culture wars, the deconstruction, and the arguments about texts and authors, the Great Books are still there and still defensible.  

W.A.Pannapacker, in his article "Confessions of a Middlebrow" in The Chronicle Review (Oct 5/09), defends the middlebrow culture that gave rise to Adler and Hutchins' (University of Chicago) Great Books in 1952. The Harvard Classics (Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf of 51 books), an earlier expression of the same drive for knowledge, appeared in 1909.

According to Pannapacker, the Great  Books were popular because they "were expressions of hope for many people who had historically not had access to higher education." People wanted to better themselves, and knowledge held the key.

Pannapacker acknowledges the issues surrounding the canon and the idea of "greatness:"

By the end of the 1980s—when I was an undergraduate—it had become clear to seemingly everyone in authority that the notion of "Greatness" was a tool of illegitimate power; Adler and Hutchins were racist and sexist in their choices of texts; their valorization of the "Western World" made them complicit with imperialism and worse.

Regardless, Pannapacker and others believe there is still a place for the Great Books. They speak to an earlier time when the intellectual life was more highly valued:

What has been lost, according to Jacoby, is a culture of intellectual effort. We are increasingly ignorant, but we do not know enough to be properly ashamed...The rejection of the Great Books signifies a declining belief in the value of anything without a direct practical application, combined with the triumph of a passive entertainment—as anyone who teaches college students can probably affirm.

We need a resurgence of the intellectual life; we need to wrest education away from those who are proudly ignorant and feel no shame about it. As Pannapacker notes: "The Great Books had a narrower conception of "greatness" than we might like today, but their foundational ideals were radically egalitarian and proudly intellectual."

We could do worse than to teach "Arnold's vision of culture as 'the best that has been thought and known in the world'."

W.A. Pannapacker is associate professor of English at Hope College; he is the author of Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship.

I would like to invite W.A. Pannapacker to my soiree.

L'Art of Economics

In Karen Horn's article "The Serendipity of Genius" in Standpoint, she discusses the circumstances and situations of economists who became Nobel laureates.

The article is based on Horn's recent book Roads to Wisdom: Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009).

Horn sees several common influences on the intellect, choices, and future theoretical pursuits of fledgling economists: "they were attracted by its questions," but only identified the field as a choice when they "saw it in class;" family background; worldviews; events; the serendipity of the muse; and individual character.

The final influence strikes me especially - the value of a university/liberal arts education. Vernon Smith (Nobel prize for Economics 2002)

was fascinated to discover at college that the topics that had been debated at the dinner table were actually "things you could study, that it needn't be only a matter of opinion. You could actually base your opinions on analysis, on investigation, on some kind of understanding about how society and how the economy work."

The growing trend to de-value the humanities and a liberal arts education has and will have far-reaching negative consequences. In all areas of human endeavour, we need the understanding that comes from knowing about humanity, its traditions, and its history. Similarly, Horn sees the need for economics:

Economics must also again be understood as an encompassing social science, deeply ploughing the rich common ground with philosophy, sociology, politics and history.

Skills training just won't cut it!

I would like to invite Karen Horn to my soiree.

Old Philosophy in Best-Selling Bottles

Santiago Montenegro is an economist and a 2008 visiting fellow at the University of Miami's Center for Hemispheric Policy.

His most recent book is Crisis Mundial, proteccion e industrializacion (2007)

In his recent article "Innovation and Philosophy" in Project Syndicate , Montenegro discusses the many trendy books on innovation. He is frustrated because the information in them is a re-hash of older philosophy. Many of the leading experts writing about innovation seem not to even be aware of the roots of what they write about or the demands of scientific method pressing against their ideas. As Montenegro notes:

No book on innovation that I have read makes the connection between innovation and the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science. This is unfortunate, because the theories of innovation may be subject to all the questions, conjectures, and answers that these disciplines have developed with respect to scientific knowledge.

I have found that the readers of books on innovation and proponents of innovation are even less aware of what they are talking about than are the authors. Adopting innovation means (as with adopting any pop theory without the background knowledge) that it can never be questioned; rather, it's a top-down assertion.

As Montenegro shows:

Once a plausible hypothesis is formulated, it must be tested against all existing theories and against all available experience and information. It has to be subject to open criticism from all directions, and only if it survives these tests and criticisms may it be adopted as tentative and conjectural new knowledge. Science and knowledge are made up not of winners, but of survivors of continuous and systematic efforts to refute. Theories are never certain and must always be prepared for an uncertain future. Or, as Karl Popper put it, truth is never definitive and error is always probable.

Hooray liberal arts education! Hooray for science education! If we need any prodding at all to value university, one reason might just be to protect ourselves from all the self-professed gurus who process old ideas into misunderstood pap.

I would like to invite Santiago Montenegro to my soiree.