Following upon this redefinition of the aims of the university, the incentives and motivations of the faculty were brought increasingly into accord with new science’s imperative to create new knowledge: faculty training would emphasize the creation of original work, and tenure would be achieved through the publication of a corpus of such work and the approval of far-flung experts in a faculty member’s field who would attest to the originality and productivity of the work. A market in faculty hiring and recruitment was born. Faculty ceased to be committed to particular institutions, their missions, and even their students, and instead increasingly understood themselves to be members of a profession. Moral formation ceased to be a relevant criterion in one’s job description; such concerns were not only irrelevant to professional success but opposed to modern notions of liberty.
The university structure was reoriented to stress innovation and the creation of “new knowledge.” The guiding imperative of education became progress, not an education in liberty derived from a deep engagement with the past. One can valuably contrast the commitments of the seal designed at the time of the founding of the University of Texas with the mission statement devised in more recent years and found on the main web portal of the university.2 Articulated beneath a picture of the old seal—following the obligatory verbiage about a dedication to “excellence” in education—one finds a statement about the contemporary purpose. The current mission of the university is “the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge.” The stress in this updated mission statement is upon the research and scientific mission of the university, notably the aim of creating “new knowledge,” not “the cultivated mind that is guided by virtue.” One searches in vain for a modern rearticulation of the sentiments of the older motto; one finds, rather than the inculcation of virtue, only the emphasis upon research in the service of progress—particularly that progress that contributes to that centuries-old ambition to subject nature to human will. This change of emphasis is to be found in the updated mission statement of nearly every university in America.
As a practical effect, the insistence by students no longer to be required to take a sequential education in the liberal arts, in the belief that they should sooner begin study of something “practical,” aligns perfectly with the interest of faculty to focus on the “creation of new knowledge” and the concomitant focus on research and graduate students. Students and faculty alike mutually abandon a focus on the liberal arts, essentially out of the same imperative: service to the conception of freedom at the heart of the liberal order. Amid their freedom, students increasingly feel that they have no choice but to pursue the most practical major, eschewing subjects to which native curiosity might attract them in obeisance to the demands of the market. Unsurprisingly, the number of majors in the humanities continues to decline precipitously, and a growing number of schools are eliminating disciplines that are no longer attractive within the university marketplace.
Those best positioned to defend the role of the humanities at the heart of the liberal arts—members of the professoriate—on the one hand lament this collapse but blame it on administrators and “neoliberalism.” They fail to see how the treatment of the humanities is more deeply a reflection of the liberal order than a stance of resistance. The professoriate in the liberal arts has failed to contest, let alone resist, the dominant liberal trends because of a pervasive incapacity to correctly diagnose the source of the forces arrayed against the liberal arts.
LA TRAHISON DES HUMANISTES
Humanities and more humanistic social science faculty—predominantly progressive—sought instead to conform the liberal arts to dominant liberal subcurrents, mainly by turning against the very thing they studied, the “great books,” and calling for a stance of progressive interrogation of the object being studied. Conservative faculty largely opposed the campus left by demanding devotion to the study of the Great Books without recognizing that many of these books were the source of the very forces displacing the study of old books. Both sides allowed the liberal transformation of the academy to proceed unopposed.
The left’s answer was unexamined acquiescence. In response to these tectonic shifts, those who labored in the humanities began to question their place within the university. Their practitioners still studied the great texts, but the reason for doing so was increasingly in doubt.3 Did it make sense any longer to teach young people the challenging lessons of how to use freedom well, when the scientific world was soon to make those lessons unnecessary? Could an approach based on culture and tradition remain relevant in an age that valued, above all, innovation and progress? How could the humanities prove their worth in the eyes of administrators and the broader world?
These doubts within the humanities were a fertile seedbed for self-destructive tendencies. Inspired by Heideggerian theories that placed primacy on the liberation of the will, first poststructuralism and then postmodernism took root. These and other approaches, while apparently hostile to the rationalist claims of the sciences, were embraced out of the need to conform to the academic demands, set by the natural sciences, for “progressive” knowledge. Faculty could demonstrate their progressiveness by showing the backwardness of the texts; they could “create knowledge” by showing their superiority to the authors they studied; they could display their antitraditionalism by attacking the very books that were the basis of their discipline. Philosophies that preached “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” that aimed to expose the way texts were deeply informed by inegalitarian prejudices, and that even questioned the idea that texts contained a “teaching” as intended by the author, offered the humanities the possibility of proving themselves relevant in the terms set by the modern scientific approach.4 By adopting a jargon comprehensible only to “experts,” they could emulate the scientific priesthood, even if by doing so they betrayed the humanities’ original mandate to guide students through their cultural inheritance. Professors in the humanities showed their worth by destroying the thing they studied.5
In an effort to keep pace with their counterparts in STEM disciplines, the humanities became the most conspicuously liberative of the disciplines, even challenging (albeit fecklessly) the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise. Natural conditions—such as those inescapably linked to the biological facts of human sexuality—came to be regarded as “socially constructed.” Nature was no longer a standard in any sense, since it was now manipulable. Why accept any of the facts of biology when those “facts” could be altered, when identity itself is a matter of choice? If humans had any kind of “nature,” then the sole permanent feature that seemed acceptable was the centrality of will—the raw assertion of power over restraints or limits, and the endless possibilities of self-creation.
Ironically, while postmodernism has posed itself as the great opponent of rationalist scientism, it shares the same basic impulse: both rose to dominance in the university in conformity with the modern definition of freedom. In the humanities, this belief today takes the form of radical emancipatory theory focused on destroying all forms of hierarchy, tradition, and authority, liberating the individual through the tools of research and progress. A special focus of the modern academy is sexual autonomy, a pursuit that reveals how closely it ultimately sides with a scientific project aimed at mastering all aspects of nature, including human reproduction.6 The humanities and social sciences also focus on identity politics and redressing past injustices to specific groups, under the “multicultural” and “diversity” banners that ironically contribute to a campus monoculture. The groups that are deemed worthy of strenuous efforts to redress grievances are identified for features relating to their bodies—race, gender, sexual identity—while “communities of work and culture,” including cohesive ethnic and class groupings, receive scant attention. Thus while students’ groups grounded in racial or sexual identity demand justice so that they can fully join modern liberal society, cohesive ethnic groups resistant to lib
eral expressive individualism like Kurds or Hmong, persecuted religious minorities such as Copts, nonurban nonelites such as leaders in the 4-H, and the rural poor can expect little attention from today’s campus liberals.7
As Wilson Carey McWilliams has noted,
Notably, the groups that [liberal reformers] recognize are all defined by biology. In liberal theory, where our “nature” means our bodies, these are “natural” groups opposed to “artificial” bonds like communities of work and culture. This does not mean that liberalism values these “natural” groups. Quite the contrary: since liberal political society reflects the effort to overcome or master nature, liberalism argues that “merely natural” differences ought not to be held against us. We ought not to be held back by qualities we did not choose and that do not reflect our individual efforts and abilities. [Reformers] recognize women, racial minorities, and the young only in order to free individuals from “suspect classifications.”
Class and culture are different. People are part of ethnic communities or the working class because they chose not to pursue individual success and assimilation into the dominant, middle-class culture, or because they were unable to succeed. Liberal theory values individuals who go their own way, and by the same token, it esteems those who succeed in that quest more highly than individuals who do not. Ethnicity and class, consequently, are marks of shame in liberal theory, and whatever discrimination people suffer is, in some sense, their “own fault.” We may feel compassion for the failures, but they have no just cause for equal representation, unlike individuals who suffer discrimination for “no fault of their own.”8
Yet while contemporary emphases in the humanities are consistent with the aspiration for autonomy that underlies the modern scientific venture, this conformity has not lent the humanities much long-term viability. In the absence of strongly articulated grounds for studying the liberal arts, in distinction to the modern project of autonomy and mastery, students and administrators are voting with their feet and pocketbooks to support the areas that show more promise for mastering nature. It is a sign of the success of the vision of autonomy advanced by the main players in today’s humanities that their disciplines are shrinking and even disappearing, while STEM and economic pursuits grow. In the absence of a persuasive counternarrative, students, parents, and administrators understand that the best route to achieving the liberal conception of freedom is not in the humanities but elsewhere.
Today the liberal arts have exceedingly few defenders. The children of the left cultural warriors of the 1980s are no longer concerned with a more representative and inclusive canon. They are more interested in advancing the cause of egalitarian autonomy, now arrayed against the older liberal norms of academic freedom and free speech in the name of what some call “academic justice” and greater campus representation. While a rallying point is the cry for greater diversity, the ongoing project of “diversification” in fact creates greater ideological homogeneity on nearly every campus. Under the guise of differences in race, an exploding number of genders, and a variety of sexual orientations, the only substantive worldview advanced is that of advanced liberalism: the ascent of the autonomous individual backed by the power and support of the state and its growing control over institutions, including schools and universities.
The children of the right’s cultural warriors have also largely abandoned interest in the role of formative books as the central contribution for cultivating self-government. Instead, today’s “conservatives” are more likely to dismiss the role of the liberal arts not only as a lost cause, but not even worth the fight anymore.9 Instead, reflecting priorities of the modern marketplace, they are more inclined to call for greater emphasis on STEM and economic fields—those fields that have gained prominence because of the victory of ideas in many of the “Great Books” that successfully proposed that old books might no longer be studied. Conservative political leaders like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida disdain the liberal arts for not leading to high-paying jobs—and find unexpected support from President Obama, who criticized art history on the same grounds.
LIBERAL ARTS AGAINST LIBERALISM?
Contemporary circumstances have only accelerated the demise of the liberal arts. In the absence of forceful articulations of the reason for their existence on today’s campuses, a combination of demands for “usefulness” and “relevance,” along with the reality of shrinking budgets, is going to make the humanities increasingly a smaller part of the university. They will persist in some form as a “boutique” showcase, an ornament that indicates respect for high learning, but the trajectory of the humanities continues to be toward a smaller role in the modern university.
While few of today’s professors of the humanities are able to articulate grounds for protest, I would think the humanities of old would be able to muster a powerful argument against this tendency. Its warning would be simple, recalling its oldest lessons: at the end of the path of liberation lies enslavement. Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited. For both of these reasons, we cannot be truly free in the modern sense. We can never attain satiation, and will be eternally driven by our desires rather than satisfied by their attainment. And in our pursuit of the satisfaction of our limitless desires, we will very quickly exhaust the planet. Our destiny, should we enter fully down this path toward our complete liberation, is one in which we will be more governed by necessity than ever before. We will be governed not by our own capacity for self-rule but rather by circumstance, particularly the circumstances resulting from scarcity, devastation, and chaos.
Our commitment to a future of liberation from nature and necessity is illusory—it is the faith-based philosophy of our time. Religion is often accused of being incapable of drawing the right conclusions from evidence, but it seems to me that we have in plain view the greatest leap of faith in our time—namely, the response of the leadership of our nation and our institutions of higher learning to this very economic crisis that otherwise is used to justify a further displacing of the liberal arts in the name of economic viability. The crisis was itself precipitated by inattentiveness to the lessons of the traditional liberal arts, which in turn is today invoked as reason for its further neglect. The economic crisis, as everyone now knows, was the result of the idea that one could consume without limits, that a new kind of economics, combined with a liberatory politics, now allowed us to live beyond our means. The wanting of something was warrant for the taking of the thing. Our appetite justified consumption. Our want was sufficient for our satiation. The result was not merely literal obesity but moral obesity—a lack of self-governance of our appetites ultimately forced us on a starvation diet.
At our institutions of higher learning, a multitude of panels and conferences were organized on the economic crisis, bemoaning such things as the absence of oversight, lax regulatory regime, failures of public and private entities to exercise diligence in dispensing credit or expanding complex financial products. Yet one searches in vain for a university president or college leader—especially at the elite echelon—acknowledging that there was deep culpability on the part of their own institutions for our failure and our students’ as well. After all, it was the leading graduates of the elite institutions of the nation who occupied places of esteem in top financial and political institutions throughout the land who were responsible for precipitating the economic crisis. Graduates of elite institutions occupied places of power and influence in the national economic order. Leaders of such educational institutions readily take credit for Rhodes and Fulbright scholars. What of those graduates who helped foster an environment of avarice and schemes of the get-rich-quick? Are we so assured that they did not learn exceedingly well the lessons that they learned in college?
If a renaissance is to come, it must be from a reconstituted education in the liberal arts. While a great patchwork of liberal arts colleges remains, most libe
ral arts institutions have been deeply shaped by presuppositions of the “new science.” Hiring and promotion are made increasingly in accordance with demands of research productivity. Increasingly faculty members have been overwhelmingly trained at leading research institutions at which priorities of that new science dominate—priorities that many professors have internalized, even if those priorities do not mesh well in the liberal arts settings they occupy. As a result, many of these institutions incoherently aspire to elite status by aping the research universities, with many even going so far as to change their names from “College” to “University.”10
Yet their reconstitution is not wholly out of reach. As “palimpsests,” the older traditions persist. When we think of “liberal arts” more concretely, we rightly picture a numerous variety of institutions, most (at least once) religiously affiliated and variously situated. Most were formed with some relationship to the communities in which they were formed—whether their religious traditions, attention to the sorts of career prospects that the local economy would sustain, close connection to the “elders” of the locality, or strong identification with place and the likelihood of a student body drawn from nearby. Most sought a liberal education not that fully liberated its students from place and the “ancestral” but that in fact educated them deeply in the tradition from which they came, deepening their knowledge of the sources of their beliefs, confirming—not confronting—their faith, and seeking to return them to the communities from which they were drawn, where it was expected they would contribute to its future well-being and continuity.
Why Liberalism Failed Page 12