"Liberal" Education

In a Chronicle of Higher Education article published about a month ago, a pair of authors from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) opined that Republicans might "Save the Humanities". They observed that about 200 new tenure-track faculty positions have recently been created, focused on what they call "civic education". These new jobs would increase Humanities employment by about 10%, they say. But there's apparently some anxiety and confusion that the impetus for this growth seems to be coming from "a political party intensely critical of higher education." I'm not sure I agree that Republicans hate education, as the authors seem to be suggesting (or maybe they're suggesting that people think so?). I think it's more accurate to say there are a lot of people who are very unhappy with the priorities expressed by American colleges and universities lately, in both their rhetoric and their actions.

The authors claimed the faculty they interviewed, who have taken some of these new "civic education" jobs, are excited about building academic communities where "students can come together to unapologetically experience the joy of learning". The implication seems to be that until now, students had been required to apologize for the things they were interested in learning about. But there was another statement that interested me a bit more. The authors mentioned "a desire to rebuild the core knowledge they see as the backbone of civic education" that included basic elements of classical liberalism and Enlightenment thought. They quoted a historian who had joined the effort because "students don't typically learn about 'very basic events like the French Revolution' because scholars consider them 'passé from a research perspective'." Although I think ideological pressure is an issue, I want to focus for a moment on this gap between what the academy currently values in research and what we are teaching our students.

I understand and sympathize with historians or English faculty who want to pursue research that is not informed by the "cultural and linguistic turn" or that has been left in "professional isolation and neglect" by the focus on a postmodern worldview. I haven't experienced this, partly because I don't entirely reject these postmodern critiques of previous paradigms; but also I suspect, partly because I haven't worked at a "high" enough level. I don't think there was anybody at my university, for example, who would have told me I could not research and write about 18th and 19th-century transatlantic secular radicals, even though this is not something anyone at my institution was really interested in. But I can imagine a department where I might have been told that such a project was not suitably embracing of diversity, since it is mostly about white men and a few women pursuing Enlightenment ideals and rejecting religion. I've been lucky that I haven't found myself in a situation where I had to say, "I'm doing it anyway" or "I quit". But even without that conflict, my research interests only lightly find their way into the content I teach.

Students should learn about the French Revolution and similar topics not because they are or are not hot areas of current research, but because they're important foundations on which to build a coherent understanding of the world we live in and how it developed. I have to say that, as uncomfortable as I am with the AEI, to whatever extent students are losing access to content that helps them understand our civic institutions due to ideology, that's a problem. However, this can be a slippery slope. Often, having accepted that premise, we are expected to look on uncritically as a bunch of equally ideological revisionist claims are made, trying to return us to a status-quo-ante understanding of patriotic, great-man history before the postmodern challenge.

Maybe part of the problem is an assumption that someone or some group "owns" the humanities. In my old university, I think there was a sense that most of the humanities faculty were lefties. But in another time and place, I remember feeling like the people running a Foundation for Economic Education summer seminar I attended while an undergrad believed they were the protectors of Western Liberalism. And even that dichotomy only covers the West. What about other cultures? Does the idea that Confucianism stabilized the Chinese empire for two millennia have nothing to teach us?

I do find it a bit interesting that the Great Books and similar projects are often considered conservative projects. Partly, I think this is due to the way the left has abandoned the idea of understanding the foundations of western culture as a DWEM (Dead White European Male) project. But appreciating the past and trying to preserve parts of it that might still be valuable IS a conservative act, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. And of course, that old-fashioned sense was not just for Conservatives to use, but for everyone. Is there a good reason why only Republicans should be allowed to learn from the past, while only Democrats get to look to the future? Isn't it time to get out of our bubbles (maybe even to admit that neither of these "teams" is internally consistent in its beliefs or really acts on most of what they profess?) and embrace ideas that make sense?

People need and want to understand the cultural, political, and social history of our society, partly so they can engage in civic life. If, as these two authors claim to hope, some of these institutions can "articulate their programs as a renaissance rather than a reaction", we may make some progress toward that goal. Even if students join these programs with an expectation of what they're going to find (or what they're going to be able to avoid), maybe they'll be surprised and exposed to ideas that challenge their preconceptions. Isn't that what "Liberal" education is supposed to do?