Links
Archives
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
|
Blurb Without a Content After lunch with a student yesterday, UD trudged in the already hellish heat to her local Borders and bought Harry Lewis's Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. She has now read twenty-seven pages. It's not looking good. Start with the blurbs on the crimson and gold back cover. Many of les blurbistes agree that Harry Lewis is "brave" and courageous." Under no circumstances is the writing of a book by a tenured American professor an act of bravery. Whenever UD reads that an artist who has done something anti-bourgeois, or a tenured professor who has written something shocking, is "brave," she wants to hurl. Harvard professors like Andrei Shleifer can defraud the United States government and cost Harvard tens of millions in fines and themselves have to pay millions in fines and not only retain their tenure but retain their named chairs. Publishing a book, even a book critical of Harvard, cannot be a brave act if there aren't any remotely conceivable negative consequences. This use of the word "courageous" is of course meant to give the vaguely perusing Borders customer a reason to buy Lewis's book -- the drama of the word conveys an exciting interior. ... Yet if the peruser were to look with a little more care at the content of some of the blurbs, she'd know better (UD knew better, but bought the book because she's got this blog about universities...). Here's one from The Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, President Emeritus, University of Notre Dame -- a classic of its kind: This is a study of higher education, that asks some very important questions and gives some rather clear answers. One may agree or disagree with the presentation, but it is certainly worth the time to study it. Let's overlook the incorrect use of the comma after "education," and move on to the guts of the matter... except there aren't any guts... because naughty Ted has agreed to write a blurb about a book he hasn’t read. What to do? Vast existential generality is the only open path. “This is a study of higher education.” Ja, ja, that’s why I’m standing in the Higher Education section. The book asks some very important questions and gives some rather clear answers. Not clear, mind you, but, rather clear… “One may agree or disagree” is sheer Sartreian nothingness… Copping a blurb from the head of Notre Dame because your subtitle has the word “soul” in it is the sort of cynical marketing gesture for which Lewis spends most of the book excoriating Harvard. And about that “soul.” In a secular culture, in a secular book, this is a weasel-word. Rather like a blurb from a Major Catholic Person, it purchases you, cheaply, a patina of piety. Perhaps because he’s not a religious man, and perhaps because he doesn’t want his book shelved in the Pat Robertson section, Lewis will maintain throughout his book (I skimmed ahead) a Victorian, muscularly moral sort of argument -- not at all a religious one. But Lewis wants that soul, and he wants that Reverend, because he wants his book to give off gravitas rays. Which is a little skeezy. As to content: "I have almost never heard discussions among professors," Lewis complains, "about making students better people." Throughout, Lewis assumes that I'm teaching morality rather than a certain content. He thinks there's something wrong with the fact that "Professors are hired as scholars and teachers, not as mentors of values and ideals to the young and confused." His own confused formulation - mentors of values? - points to the problem at the heart of his book. Teaching is not morality coaching; and indeed a good bit of what we teach is actively subversive of goodness as Lewis conceives it. Lewis's goodness is work for the public good, the work of the world. His ideal university is a place where our professors sweeten our civic feelings so that we may all become variants of George F. Kennan. He worries about "the lessening of concern for students' hearts and souls in favor of almost exclusive interest in their minds." But this is precisely the glory of the great secular American university, which is interested in mental clarity, not the tossing off of hearts and souls like so many valentines. |