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Monday, May 29, 2006
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Haven’t yet read… …Excellence Without A Soul, but I’m reading and pondering its many reviews. Like the one in the Wall Street Journal, which rightly notes that Harry Lewis might have nodded even if only faintly in the direction of his clear predecessor, Allan Bloom, who twenty years ago also featured that winner of a word, “soul,” in the subtitle of The Closing of the American Mind (“How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”), and who made similar arguments about the vapidity of some of American higher education. The writer for the Wall Street Journal notes that, like Bloom, Lewis argues “universities should be about something. What makes an educated person? Unfortunately, too many professors and administrators, if they ever bother to think about it, would have difficulty answering the question beyond the pabulum found in most university brochures.” Longtime readers know that UD recommends Harvard head over to Annapolis and take a look at St. John's College’s curriculum if it wants to answer that question. Yet there are problems with Lewis’s pitch when he insists that college is about helping students to “sort out their lives.” “High ideals,” “moral authority,” “ what it means to be a good person” -- these are the attributes and inquiries Lewis excoriates Harvard for ignoring. It’s important to disentangle, it seems to me, the coercive moralities of fundamentalist left and right (political correctness; revealed religious correctness) from this soulful impulse. Serious university education is not about inculcating moral truths; it is about disciplined, detailed, and polemical presentations of valuable cultural artifacts. I’m not in the business of applying ointment to anyone’s soul, and I hope most of my students are able to study intellectuals who don’t think souls exist. |