Here's an interesting essay from Stanley Fish. Given Bill's obsession with academic politics, this will help broaden his views. This is genuine debate. As opposed to pronouncements and personal attacks. Which is the politics of our time.
chronicle.com
ALL IN THE GAME
Aim Low
Confusing democratic values with academic ones can easily damage the quality of education
By STANLEY FISH
On more than one occasion I have had an experience many of you will recognize. A student you haven't seen in years rushes up to you and says, "Oh, Professor, I think so often of that class in 1985 (or was it 1885) when you said X and I was led by what you said to see Y and began on that very day to travel the path that has now taken me to success in profession Z. I can't thank you enough!"
You, however, are appalled, because you can't imagine yourself ever saying X (in fact you remember spending the entire semester saying anti-X) and you would never want anyone to exit from your class having learned Y (a lesson you have been preaching against for 20 years) and you believe that everyone would be better off if profession Z disappeared from the face of the earth. What, you might ask, did I do wrong?
The correct answer is quite likely, "nothing." It is the question that is wrong because it assumes that we are responsible for the effects of our teaching, whereas, in fact, we are responsible only for its appropriate performance. That is, we are responsible for the selection of texts, the preparation of a syllabus, the sequence of assignments and exams, the framing and grading of a term paper, and so on.
If, by the end of a semester, you have given your students an overview of the subject (as defined by the course's title and description in the catalog) and introduced them to the latest developments in the field and pointed them in the directions they might follow should they wish to inquire further, then you have done your job. What they subsequently do with what you have done is their business and not anything you should be either held to account for or praised for. (Charlton Heston once said to Laurence Olivier, "I've finally learned to ignore the bad reviews." "Fine," Olivier replied, "now learn to ignore the good ones.")
The question of what you are responsible for is also the question of what you should aim for, and what you should aim for is what you can aim for -- that is, what you can reasonably set out to do as opposed to what is simply not within your power to do.
You can reasonably set out to put your students in possession of a set of materials and equip them with a set of skills (interpretive, computational, laboratory, archival), and even perhaps (although this one is really iffy) instill in them the same love of the subject that inspires your pedagogical efforts. You won't always succeed in accomplishing these things -- even with the best of intentions and lesson plans there will always be inattentive or distracted students, frequently absent students, unprepared students, and on-another-planet students -- but at least you will have a fighting chance, given the fact that you've got them locked in a room with you for a few hours every week for four months.
You have little chance however (and that entirely a matter of serendipity) of determining what they will make of what you have offered them once the room is unlocked for the last time and they escape first into the space of someone else's obsession and then into the space of the wide, wide world.
And you have no chance at all (short of a discipleship that is itself suspect and dangerous), of determining what their behavior and values will be in those aspects of their lives that are not, in the strict sense of the word, academic. You might just make them into good researchers. You can't make them into good people, and you shouldn't try.
This is certainly not the view of the authors of a recent book, Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility (Jossey-Bass, 2003). A product of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the volume reports on a failure that I find heartening.
In 1987, Ernest Boyer, in his report on undergraduate education in America, concluded that what our colleges do best is produce "competence competence in meeting schedules, in gathering information, ... in mastering the details of a special field." The authors of this new study reaffirm "that by and large undergraduate education is not meeting the challenge of going beyond competence to commitment."
Commitment to what? The answer has already been given in the subtitle: commitment to moral and civic responsibility. "If a college education is to support the kind of learning graduates need to be involved and responsible citizens, they must go beyond the development of intellectual and technical skills and ... mastery of a scholarly domain. They should include the competence to act in the world and the judgment to do so wisely."
To this I would say, first, that whatever might be the meaning of "going beyond" the mastery of intellectual and scholarly skills, I would like to be confident (as the statement seems to be) that such a mastery is something our students routinely achieve and is therefore something we can now help them to go beyond.
Unfortunately, that is not the case, and one reason (although surely not the only one) that it is not is the success (even if limited) of the program this book urges on us, the program of promoting "moral and civic development" by inculcating in our students certain "capacities": "self-understanding or self knowledge; understanding of the relationship between the self and community; awareness of and willingness to take responsibility for the consequences of one's actions for others and society; informed and responsible involvement with relevant communities; pluralism; cultural awareness and respect; ability to understand the value of one's own and other cultures; appreciation of the global dimensions of many issues."
That last one is at least a possible academic topic; any number of disciplinary issues now look different in an era of globalization, and it is important to understand and analyze that difference. The rest, however, is a mishmash of self-help platitudes, vulgar multiculturalism (is there any other kind?) and a soft-core version of '60s radicalism complete with the injunction (although not in song) to "love one another right now."
It is at once too vague and too left-by-the-numbers and too ambitious, at least as a program for an institution with its own purposes and values. It is those purposes and values -- as identified in this book: "intellectual integrity, concern for truth, and academic freedom" -- that are put on the back burner when, for example, respect for the other takes precedence over learning what, precisely, the other is.
Respect for the other may or may not be a moral imperative -- you can get quite an argument going on that one -- but it is certainly not an academic imperative, and if it is made one, academic imperatives are likely to be slighted. The authors complain that students' "impatience to complete their professional or vocational training ... can make it difficult to interest them in broader goals of intellectual and personal development." Mine is the opposite fear, that the emphasis on broader goals and especially on the therapeutic goal of "personal development" can make it difficult to interest students in the disciplinary training it is our job to provide. (This has spectacularly been the case in the teaching of writing, where the twin emphasis on personal development and the appreciation of other cultures, especially those that have been marginalized and/or oppressed, has been an all-out disaster because very few students have actually been taught to write.)
But my main objection to moral and civic education in our colleges and universities is not that it is a bad idea (which it surely is), but that it's an unworkable idea.
There are just too many intervening variables, too many uncontrolled factors that mediate the relationship between what goes on in a classroom and the shape of what is finally a life. Evidence of a kind comes from the list of 12 institutions offered by the authors of Educating Citizens as models of what they would propose for everyone. Four are religiously based, three identified strongly with a single ethnic group, one a branch of the military, one a prestigious private university, one a small liberal-arts college, and two state universities.
The thesis is that these institutions "treat their students' moral and civic development as central to their mission" and thereby produce a culture in which a concern with community and social justice is widely shared. It is a thesis I would be inclined to credit in advance of any evidence with respect to 8 of the 12 where a certain homogeneity of culture is the advertised point of the enterprise and the students who enter that culture can be said to have self-selected. This is not the life they are led to; it is the life they already lead, and their college experience reinforces moral and civic choices they have made before matriculating.
The claim that good and moral citizens can be fashioned by a curriculum must stand and fall with the performances of those institutions that are not sectarian or ethnic-identified, or very, very small.
I taught for almost 14 years at one of them -- Duke University -- and while Duke is a first-rate institution with many virtues, I saw no evidence whatsoever that its graduates emerged with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility as they rushed off to enter top-10 law schools, medical schools, and business schools.
And in the case of another of the hallowed 12, the claim to be able to induce moral behavior is given the lie by the mere mention of the name -- the United States Air Force Academy, touted in the book as an exemplary instance of the "virtues approach." Of course one scandal is hardly enough to discredit the grand and ambitious agenda put forward in Educating Citizens, and it must be said that some of our most prominent educators and educational philosophers are among those who support that agenda.
Even Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, is on board and has written an essay with the predictable and melancholy title "Universities and the Decline of Civic Responsibility." I say "even" Derek Bok because his most recent publication, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, suggests that he should be on the other side, my side. In that book Bok explains that commercial values and academic values are not the same and that the confusion of the two "can easily damage the quality of education."
What I have been saying, and what Bok should see, is that democratic values and academic values are not the same and that the confusion of the two can easily damage the quality of education. The readers who applaud Bok's arguments will probably reject mine; for while academics are always happy to be warned against the incursions of capitalism, they are unlikely either to welcome or heed a warning against the incursions of virtue.
Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes a monthly column for the Career Network on campus politics and academic careers. His most recent book is How Milton Works (Harvard University Press, 2001). You can find an archive of his previous columns here.
chronicle.com
Section: Career Network
Volume 49, Issue 36, Page C5 |
