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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, June 19, 2004

RETURN TO C*NTES d’HOFFMAN: Morality and the University


In recent posts [see 6/16 and 6/17], UD, in her calm, deliberative way, showered with contempt the Revolutionary Guards of the contemporary American university - puritanical feminists, tightass trustees, and the like - who stand always at the ready to crush people like University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman for bringing the supreme university ethos of analytical disinterestedness to certain hot-button issues (often involving sex and violence) that anti-intellectuals and emotivists just wanna get all self-righteous about and then everybody shut up please.

When knee-jerk, everybody shut up, self-congratulatory emotivism starts to infect the university, you get phenomena like Pomona’s Saint Kerri Dunn [see UD, 3/18/, 3/19/ 3/21], who has just entered a plea of not guilty and soon goes on trial.

University emotivists, like the Colorado trustee, typically invoke “decency” in their diatribes - as in, no decent person would ever question, you know, the sanctity of the second amendment, or the evil of torture in wartime under any circumstance, or the superiority of heterosexual marriage. Though attached to universities, such people, oddly enough, loathe the foundation of serious thought, which involves, as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago rightly put it recently, a particular delimited type of amorality.

Now, just as the term “anti-humanist” (as Terry Eagleton once pointed out) does not designate a person who thinks you should drown kittens, so “amoral” in this context does not mean Leopold and Loeb. It means someone able to suspend her routine moral reactions to things in order to examine with dispassion, clarity, and freshness all aspects of the world, physical and metaphysical.




There’s a simple test by which you can measure your own ability in this regard: Does the name “Peter Singer” make you rabid? Are you right now fashioning an incendiary device to throw at Princeton University for allowing this abomination to exist? If so, try taking the test again later.




Today’s New York Times features a brief discussion of morality and the university, citing observers who argue that since the university above all is a place of free, unprejudiced (to the extent humanly possible), and focused intellectual inquiry, the best universities will “make little effort to provide [students] with moral guidance.”

The problem with many lesser universities and university programs founded on moral fundamentalisms of the left or the right (Women’s Studies, most schools of education, overtly religious colleges) is that they tend not to be able to yield significant knowledge, or to cultivate in their students the - temporary or permanent - liberation from inherited truths that would allow their students to call themselves educated. Going to college to have your insufficiently articulated - and almost always self-flattering - certainties deepened is not going to college.

Nor do you wriggle out the problem, as Stanley Fish correctly notes, by attaching to the university feel-good language about the cultivation of citizenship - as in the title of a recent book that the NYT writer cites: Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility. This sort of tome is asking for Bluto Blutarsky to pee on it.