Our Journey, Day 69

As I've been working on my reviews of the chapters of How to Read a Book and have begun reading the first couple of volumes of the Great Books series, one of the themes that has surprised me a bit has been just how critical Adler and his collaborators were, all the way back in the late 1940s. The first volume, authored by University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins and called The Great Conversation, includes quite a long and detailed critique of John Dewey. Hutchins gives Dewey credit for sincerely wanting to improve education through connecting it with real-world vocational experience. But he says Dewey's followers perverted that vision and turned it into mere vocational training. Partly, he suggests, this was because Dewey wasn't explicit enough in describing how his vision could be practically implemented.

This reminded me of the discussions that I have been hearing at BSU. Although the shoe is very slow to drop, I suspect one of the things the upper administration has been considering is a merger of Bemidji State University and Northern Technical College. NTC is apparently in the black while BSU is deeply in the red. NTC's enrollment is up, while BSU's is down. As the magic eightball might say, "Signs Point to Yes". And even if they don't try a merger, administration is clearly infatuated with programs that "pay for themselves" with grants or business partnerships. They have gone so far as to suggest that the Master Academic Plan ought to be altered to make it more amenable to vocational training outcomes valued by regional employers.

This seems to be exactly the type of thing Hutchins and Adler saw coming in the late 1940s. This was a period when the national government was first implementing the GI Bill for soldiers returning from World War II. At the end of the previous war, demobilization had thrust hundreds of thousands back into the domestic workforce simultaneously, with very poor results. The GI Bill was partly oriented around educating returning soldiers, but it was even more about smoothing the transition back to a peacetime economy. Millions of soldiers were paid unemployment benefits; some for up to a year. then millions more were diverted into Higher Ed. This was clearly a benefit to the GIs who got a college education they wouldn't have, otherwise. And it was followed by a Korean GI Bill (my father went to college on that one, first of his family), and then the baby boom began swelling college and university enrollment for the last couple of generations. Higher Ed capacity expanded to meet this demand.

Some of the contraction we're seeing now may be due to the end of this demographic bubble. The assumption (or the hope) seems to be that demand for Higher Ed has now expanded so much that a larger percentage of the population now wants to get a college degree, so the system will be okay. This argument seemed to be holding on, until COVID. Now things may be different. But in addition to potential students re-evaluating their life goals and making unexpected decisions, I think Higher Ed has this unresolved identity crisis that these authors identified in the late 40s. Humanities teachers and some administrators talk about the value of a Liberal Education, often along the lines Hutchins and Adler elaborate. A broadly-educated populace, able to think critically, is a necessary foundation for the survival of a a democracy. People who can't think fall prey to demagogues, which is the path to tyranny. But although universities like BSU preach about "Lib Ed", their practice favors vocational training. That's where "student demand" seems to be, so that's the path to increased enrollment and financial viability.

The idea that Higher Ed was not going to save us was one of the main themes of the Great Books program. It's not a subtext, it's right out in the open. Adult education was a centerpiece, both with the Great Books discussion groups and with the way the authors wrote these essays at the beginning of the set, for use by regular people. Adler and Hutchins repeatedly talk about bypassing the ivory tower of academia and making the ideas at the foundation of western civilization available to everyone. Reassuring people that they could understand important texts. Suggesting that people entering the middle class of the mid-twentieth-century, who for the first time had a bit of leisure, should invest it wisely rather than waste it on idle pass-times such as TV. They also said it was the responsibility of educators to make important material interesting, so that people who didn't have to, would choose to learn it. This seems to be exactly the situation I now find myself in.