This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





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)

Sunday, March 20, 2005

SPRING CLEANING

A professor at the University of Colorado, smarting under the Churchill whip, comes to a conclusion UD came to a long while back (see UD, 2/8/04): “[T]here is no place for the personal political positions of faculty in the classroom. It tends to make for poor teaching.”

Philip Rieff, regarded by most leftists as a reactionary whackjob, has long argued this, and it makes UD lighthearted, on this first day of spring, that the professor from CU, who describes himself as “one of those refugee leftists, stashed away in academia, and regarded by many conservatives as all that's wrong with universities today,” finds common ground with Rieff. (Rieff’s ideas about the “triumph of the therapeutic” - and Christopher Lasch’s elaboration of them - have strongly influenced UD.) He does so because he has actually stopped and thought about the distinctive thing that a university is:

I'm an academic not because it's a good place for me to practice my leftist politics or indoctrinate my students to my cause. Rather, I'm here because I was a lousy leftist. I could never commit to a cause that I inevitably saw as riddled with internal contradictions. As a young activist, I was far more interested in the complexities and contradictions inherent in political positions than in the "rightness" or the "wrongness" of those positions themselves. I was drawn to academia not because it was a haven for my political beliefs, but because it encouraged me to subject the world to rigorous scrutiny, enabling me to challenge anyone's political position when such a challenge was warranted.

Here we have an eloquent version of Arnold’s idea of the particular critical capacity you’re supposed to gain from exposure to university education: an ability to "see the object as in itself it really is." True critical thought, as Michael Bryson points out in a discussion of Matthew Arnold, “strips away political agendas. …Criticism's primary quality is … disinterestedness. [Criticism must] keep ‘aloof from what is called the practical view of things’ by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a ‘free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches.’ It [resolutely avoids] political polemics of the sort which dominate criticism in the late 20th century: ‘Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims.’ The law of criticism's being is "the idea of a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."




There’s an important temporal claim embedded in the CU professor’s description of what university faculties do:

To expect [university faculty] to both question the taken-for-granted world of our students (this being what we are trained to do) and then provide them with a forum for reorganizing their views around ready-made ideological positions is to cheapen and ultimately contradict what we are here to do.

(This, by the way, is why pre-shrunk programs like women’s and ethnic studies are undergoing scrutiny. They tend to cheat students of a real education.)

Note the implicit narrative of critical thought here: Before any position taking, one needs to acquire a ground of knowledge, as well as an understanding of legitimate modes of intellectual argumentation. Even more importantly, you must somehow acquire the attitude of patient disinterestness that allows for mental flexibility, for the possibility of changes in your ways of thinking. “The very basis for beliefs themselves [is] challenged at the most basic level” at a serious university, says the CU professor [UD would have rewritten that sentence to find a way to avoid the repetition of “basis“ and “basic”…] The university’s function is not to rush the student toward conclusions but “rather to develop critical inquiries of the knowledge upon which political positions are based in the first place.” Free critical thought at a serious university, in other words, is prior to, and at best a possible foundation for, practical position-taking.

This is why Tim Oakes (he does have a name), old leftie that he is, concludes his opinion piece by describing universities as “inherently conservative institutions in which the inertia of critical scrutiny serves as a drag against the bold and radical changes desired by political movements.”