William Deresiewicz in Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education in the US. The effects of academic capitalism--the corporatization of the university -- makes for depressing reading. In Australia the emphasis of the current Gillard Government, which used to talk about the 'education revolution', is on ‘training’ rather than education.
Deresiewicz's argument is not just about the cut backs on the humanities or liberal arts in the US due to the economic and political pressure pushing higher education toward the “practical,” narrowly conceived: the instrumental, the utilitarian,---ie., the professional, technical and vocational training. It about the effects of the casualizaiton of academic labour. Deresiewicz says that the grad students are:
doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.
If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap.
The changing structure of academic work in the corporatized academy--ie.,extent of casual labor--threatens both the system of tenure and shared governance—the principle that universities should be controlled by their faculties.Public institutions enroll about three-quarters of the nation’s college students, and public institutions are everywhere under financial attack--because of the deliberate defunding of public higher education.
Its another sign of the decline of the US.
Anthony T. Kronman's Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life argues that a renewal of secular humanism provides the solution to the crisis in the universities. US conservative intellectuals argue for the decline of the humanities as a respectable field of study, in books such as Allan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education.
Their critique holds that in an earlier era, the humanities were devoted to studying the highest achievements of Western civilization. But beginning in the 1960s, with the ascent of political radicals to positions of academic prominence, the humanities lost their way. Today, they cast aside the classics of literature, philosophy, and history to dote on the often exaggerated contributions of minorities, women, and Third World cultures. Conservatives say that left-leaning faculty have shown themselves hostile to the conservative charge that the humanities are in crisis. The general argument is that the natural sciences and the 'harder' social sciences, uninfected by relativism have surged ahead to become the dominant practices of the academy while the humanities are no more than a laughingstock. They argue that many humanities programs exist mainly to inculcate students in “political liberalism.
Kronman adds to by this arguing for a restoration of teaching 'the meaning of life'---by which he means the training of character, and nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together from the basis for living the best life one can. Kronman identifies science, technology and careerism as impediments to living a life with meaning and argues that a revitalized humanism” based on reading the great texts can contribute to the growth of the self --enoble us-- and would put the conventional pieties of our moral and political world in question. The humanities need to recover their older role as guides to the meaning of life even though this role has lost its credibility in the modern liberal academy.
Peter Berkowitz In this review of Kronman's text says that he understands the contemporary universities and their mission from the perspective of secular humanism, rather than from that of the liberal tradition and liberal education:
Partly as a result, he does not recognize the extent to which our universities and the liberal education to which they ought to be devoted are products of liberal democracy and ought to serve liberal and democratic ends., liberal education serves liberal and democratic ends by remaining true to its highest ideals, which means, among other things, protecting the classroom from politicization. Students must be free to read, discuss, and write without pressure to conform to the party line. Liberal education, however, is not closed to political thought. To the contrary, it welcomes conservative as well as progressive points of view. From such an education students learn lessons in toleration and moderation that will serve them, and the liberal democracies of which they are citizens, well.
So we can be taught to to be able to think for ourselves about the art of living and how we ought to live our lives.That's ethics isn't it. But we can learn to be autonomous in out thinking in other disciplines as well.
Update
What Kronman offers is a sophisticated account of a familiar conservative thesis, namely the decline of standards and erosion of the methods and ideals assumed to underwrite the humanities by their politicization and so they desire to rescue it from the increasingly alien authoritarian domain patrolled by the politically correct or postmodern thought police. "Theory" is the name for this and it refers to T that mélange of deconstruction, post-structuralism, feminism, race theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory that has animated the conversation about literature, humanities, cultural studies and philosophy for the past 35 years or so.
One of the subthemes running through Hardt and Negri's Empire is the style of the book, which is written from within the tradition of literary tradition. This was signified in the passages quoted in this post with its link to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis.
So let me quote a passage from Auerbach's classic text of literary criticism:
"Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development." (pp.443-444).
"...from his Turkish exile [in the early 1940s], Auerbach saw the downfall of Europe, and Germany in particular... he affirms the recuperative and redemptive human project for which, in its patient philological unfolding, his book is the emblem.... he understands that like a novelist, the scholar must reconstruct the history of his own time as part of a personal commitment to his field. Yet Auerbach specifically forswears the linear narrative style."
Edward Said is dead.
A recent interview.
The debate Said launched about the relationship between the Western world and the East, and how the West sought to transform aspects of its imagination into power over the East through the process of Orientalism is still alive. Thus, our current Western understandings of Islam are structured by a history of racism, colonial interests and antipathy.
My intellectual relationship to Said's texts has less to do with his Palestinian writings, and more to do with his earlier texts on Orientalism. I sort of code Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis into Orientalism on the grounds that Huntington argues that the underlying problem for the West is Islam, not Islamic fundamentalism.
So I'm not that suprised by the conservative rejection of Said's work. It's pretty predictable, given that Said maintains that Orientalism is alive and entrenched in the culture of the Anglo-American liberal democracies. This enframes Islam as being responsible for bin Laden and other terrorists who hijack their religion whilst the sterotype of militant Islam is used as a justification for wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and for threatening wars against Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hence, this conservative reaction at Winds of Change. The link is courtesy of Bargarz.
Winds of Change is hostile to Said. The text says that:
"Said was not interested in advancing scholarship, but only anti-Western polemical screeds, being mostly content with hurling vitriolic and malicious invective against past and present Orientalists, such as Silvestre de Sacy and Bernard Lewis."
"...pursuing knowledge in a systematic, scientific manner is good scholarship. There is an excellent reason for this - the frontiers of human understanding are advanced only by modifying or discarding theories that fail to explain reality in favour of those that do. In other words, it takes a theory to beat a theory. In intellectual circles, this has become the obvious standard against which the quality of scholarship is held."
"...Said introduce a new way of thinking about the Arab world; nowhere did he provide an alternative, superior theory and framework that contained none of the alleged defects of Orientalist theories."
I say conservative because Winds of Change uses Popper to reject deconstruction (note the scare quotes) and the field of post-colonial studies (note the scare quotes again) without even considering whether the humanities work in a different way to the social sciences. Hence the humanities are reduced to a quasi-science without any attempt at providing a justification for the move. There is philosophical chasm here and it cannot be ignored or glossed over by gatekeeeping. The chasm needs to be addressed.
Keith Windschuttle is more aware of the philosophy involved in such a reductionist move. He sees the entry of the discourse of Orientalism into Australia through the art institution--Windschuttle mentions the Art Galley of NSW's exhibition Orientalism:- Delacroix to Klee. The exhibition was curated by an Australian scholar and a catalogue was produced that fits comfortably and easily into the literature on Orientalism and art.
So we can judge what Windschuttle has to say about the philosophical chasm. We will show that the chasm is not bridged at a philosophical level.
Windshuttle starts in a scholarly manner. He acknowledges that Edward Said looms large over the current cultural landscape due to Orientalism, and that he holds sway over the literary criticism of the nineteenth-century novel as a result of Culture and Imperialism. So he acknowledges that Said is an influential intellectual figure.
Windshuttle then says that in Orientalism Said makes three claims:
"The first is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands......His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe's self-image. It has less to do with the Orient than it does with our world. The construction of identity in every age and every society, Said maintains, involves establishing opposites and Others.....
Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. This happened primarily because of the essentialist nature of the enterprise, that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential qualities of Arab peoples and Islamic culture. These qualities were seen in uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce."
"Said's whole attempt to identify Oriental Studies as a cause of imperialism does not deserve to be taken seriously .... nowhere else does Said provide an analysis of the thoughts and reasons of the imperial decision-makers at the time they actually entered upon Europe?s Oriental adventures. At most, Said establishes that Orientalism provided the West with a command of Oriental languages and culture, plus a background mindset that convinced it of its cultural and technological advance over Islam. But these are far from sufficient causes of imperial conquest since they explain neither motives, opportunities, nor objectives...Apart from Foucault's grandiose hypothesis that knowledge always generates power, Said provides no support at all for his contention that colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, because he fails to cite evidence about the actual causal sequence that led to the annexation of any of the territories occupied by England or France in the nineteenth century."
Is the assumption plausible? No. We return to the philosophical chams mentioned above. Said is concerned with meaning not explanation. He is constructing the interpretive meaning of a diverse range of texts into a particular discourse---what Windshuttle calls a background mindset---not citing evidence for the actual casual sequence. This is history as the interpretation of texts and not history as a postivist social science. There's the chasm.
Windschuttle says Said's second claim has just as little to recommend it. He says:
"The notion that Western culture has needed an ?Other? to define its own identity derives from the structuralist version of Freudian theory that became prominent in France in the 1960s...This is a central concept of Said?s thesis but, unfortunately, it leads him into a direct contradiction with one of his core methodological dicta: his rejection of essentialism. In the afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he ... says [his] own approach is ?explicitly anti-essentialist.? It is difficult, though, to reconcile this assertion with the way he characterizes Western identity. He argues that, from its origins, the West?s self-concept was defined by its opposition to Asia...the claim that every culture needs to be defined by an Other... is not an historical statement at all, but an epistemological assumption derived from structuralist theory... Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes from their own heritage... Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years."
We encounter another philosophical divide. Said is not working with a a self-identity of a self-contained thing. He is working with a revised--non essentialist---Hegelian relational identity, in which identity comes through the ongoing development of relationships. The classic example is Hegel's old Master/Slave dialectic in the Phenomeology of Spirit. Wha this means is that the West defines itself in relation to Islam; ie., to what it is not. There is a long historical and mostly antagonistic relationship between Western nations and Islamic ones. Windshuttle is assuming the former analytic-empiricist conception of identity is the only conception of identity. Hence he is displacing continental philosophy from Hegel to Foucault, rather than engaging with it.
Windshuttle says that the third component of Said's thesis, the allegedly false essentialism of Orientalism not only contradicts his own methodological assumptions, but is a curious argument in itself. Windschuttle is making two points here. He says that it is a curious argument because going "back to the origins of a culture to examine its founding principles is hardly something to be condemned." True. But origins is not the only pathway since there is also the structural relationship between the West and Islam as civilizations. Maybe we can redescribe this origins/stucture conflict in terms of needing to work with the historical development of the relationship between the West and Islam and the Oriental discourse.
On the second methodological point Windschuttle says that:
"Said would be right to complain were Western ideas about Islamic peoples confined solely to stereotypes derived from their founding texts and early history. But it is simply untrue that the whole body of Oriental scholarship has made this kind of mistake....Anyone who takes the trouble to read the one book he favors, [Maxime Rodinson?s] Islam and Capitalism, will find it actually tells a different story... A large section of the book is a debate with, and critique of, those Western economists and their Muslim allies who do not, in fact, see the Arabs as having an inherent incapacity for trade, but instead regard these societies as capable of adopting capitalist commerce and industry. He discusses in some detail the work of six economic commentators who expressed views of this kind between the 1910s and the 1950s. Though Rodinson agrees there are many observers who share the assumptions identified by Said, and though his main aim is to see Islam adopt socialism, the evidence of his book is a clear refutation of Said's sweeping generalization about Orientalist economics. "
Now I have not read this section of Orientalism for a long time. But I read the effect of Rodinson's Islam and Capitalism differently to Windschuttle. I interpret Rodinson's text differently, in the sense that this text creats a rupture with the discourse of Orientalism---it transgresses the limits of this discourse by recovering the diverse voices that were contrary to the discourse of Orientalism. The power/knowledge regime of Orientalism creates resistance and different readings --it is not monolithic as Windschuttle assumes. That the field has always included a multiplicity of issues coming under the jurisdiction of many general disciplines does not negate the existence of a particular discourse of Orientalism.
What I have tried to show is the failure of a philosophical engagement across a philosophical chasm. It is an old and familiar story: both sides on either side shouting past each other. None of this is to suggest that one side is right and the other wrong: it is to show the lack of engagement at the level of assumptions: one that basically derives from Windschuttle's embrace of David Stove; his empiricist conception of the accumulation of knowledge based on bits of empirical data to counter the relativism of truth; and his disdain and contempt for a "subjective" hermeneutics.
And, in the last part of his article, Windschuttle does not go on to engage at a philosophical level. Instead he turns his attention to attacking Said's politics. But he has another go at Said herein relation to Culture and Imperialism for those interested.
It really feels like the revisiting the 1960s all over again with this conservatism. Windschuttle has gone back to there to find the tools to fight the academic left and more particularly the poststructuralist enemy who killed history and are now engaged in a total critique and indictment of Western culture.
I lost yesterday's posts due to the recent server changes at Movable Type----what their tech support crew say is the migrations of all ARTEMIS-based accounts to the new network operations. They went down old pathways.
I'm annoyed. I had spend hours on the net searching for material on philosophy in public life. So this post is a quick and dirty one; a cut and past job based on quotes in the light of these considerations about the fate of the humanities mentioned on public opinion. Greater depth and breadth on the humanities can be found here.
The first step is a link to this talk by Martha Nussabum, the American moral philosopher.
Given the current devastation of the humanities in Australia I find Nussbaum's remarks in defence of the humanities of interest. She says:
"I shall conclude with a more general fear: that the illumination and understanding that the humanities have given, and still give, to our undergraduates and our culture may gradually be lost. When administrators, parents, and students focus narrowly on the bottom line, it is difficult to see the relevance of literature and philosophy. These look like useless frills, distractions from the real business of education, which is all too often seen as preparation for a job."
This is certainly how the humanities are actually seen by the utilitarians in the government bureaucracies in Australia. Despite the lip service paid to their importance as trhe 'soul of the nation' the humanities are viewed as distractions from, or cultural ornamentations to, the business of real life which is making money and gaining power. Nussbaum's fear is a reality in Australia: the humanities' knowledge and understanding are being lost.
Nussbaum then questions the utilitarian approach. She says:
"The utilitarian approach to the humanities did enormous damage in Thatcher's Britain, where universities were asked to justify their humanities programs by showing that they contributed to economic growth. I recall an especially sad document in which the classics faculty at the University of Birmingham argued that they should not be cut because the department produced efficient managers for industry. Once one reaches this point, true though the instrumental claim may be, the game is usually lost."
One hears this kind of economic argument all the time in the humanities' disciplines in Australia. Doing various undergraduate courses give's graduates practical skills for jobs (reasoning/research) through mastering the course material. The game has been lost with that emphasis on technique as it implies that the humanities have no content. They are fluff and they cover their fluff by trying to be hard edged with a bit of technique, such as critical reasoning. Few are fooled by the move. It is commonly seen as desperation stuff.
Can we give a different account? Can we retrace our steps to escape this dead end of a wasteland? Nussbaum suggests so. What she sketches is worthy of consideration.
The first move Nussbaum makes is to displace the neo-liberal utilitarian conception of the humanities. This conception holds that the humanities are only viable if they are involved in, and contribute to, wealth creation. If they cannot contribute then they should be allowed to wither.
In response Nussbaum says that:
"American colleges and universities have never held a narrow, utilitarian conception of education. One thing we really can be proud of is that we (both left and right) have stuck to the idea that college education is a general preparation for citizenship and life. It is not difficult to see that the humanities provide essential ingredients for citizenship: clarity of mind, knowledge of the world, an expansive and subtle imagination. Many administrators and boards of trustees understand the importance of the humanities, and so far our institutions of higher education have not been eviscerated as have some in Europe. But we need to be vigilant."
We should add that the humanities have been eviscerated in Australia. They will only survive under a neo-liberal mode of governance if they transform themselves into creative industries.
The old idea of education for citizenship is not something that carries much weight in Australia. The old idea of the citizen has given way to the consumer with the freedom to choose in the global marketplace. Many are unable to go beyond the horizons of the market to make contact with citizenship and liberal democracy. The market has become the touchstone for everything. There is nothing else but the free market.
But it is possible to give 'education for citizenship' new content. Nussbaum's pathway is to do this by connecting the humanities to the world of public policy. She says:
"One thing my development work has shown me is that public policy made without the influence of the humanities is likely to be cramped and crude. The cultivation of the imagination that comes with the study of literature, the cultivation of ethical sensibility that comes with the study of philosophy and religion--these are essential equipment for citizens and policymakers in a world increasingly united and driven by the profit motive."
That connection between ethical sensibility and public policy is rarely made in Australia, despite all the recent talk about social capital, society and happiness. Presumably those who volunteer in civil society do so because they have ethical sensitivity to the plight and suffering of others; the volunteers want to make things better in some way. Hence their conduct embodies a practical philosophy of care and consideration.
Such a philosophy is what Nussbaum calls a practical and compassionate philosophy, one that is committed to the good of human beings and seeks that good through reasoning and argument. This is the Graeco-Roman conception of a life-transforming philosophy, or philosophy as a way of life that has been lost in the Australian academy.
Nussbaum illustrates this conception of philosophy with a couple of quotes. The following remark by Seneca is quoted by Nussbaum in another talk on philosophy and public life. In making these remarks Seneca is rejecting a conception of philosophy that has retreated the academy and has become little more than academic logic chopping:
"There is no time for playing around. You have been retained as counsel for the unhappy. You have promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned the sick, the needy, to those whose heads are under the poised axe. Where are you deflecting your attention? What are you doing?"(Ep. 48,8).
Nussbaum says that the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition holds, with remarkable unanimity, that philosophy has a practical task of ensuring flourishing human life. If it fails to perform this task, in its research and in its teaching, it will be rightly dismissed as "empty" and trivial. She then quotes Epicurus, who says:
"Empty is that philosophical argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in medicine, unless it casts out the illness of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out suffering from the soul."
Nussbaum notes that the major writers of the Stoic traditionCicero, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aureliuswere both public philosophers and involved in political life. There is no memory of this conception of philosophy in the Australian academy. Moreover, Cicero, Seneca and Aurelius are never mentioned by the cultural conservatives who say that education is reading the great books of the western philosophical tradition. The conservatives offer a very selective reading of the philosophical canon.
Nussbaum then connects this Graeco-Roman philosophical tradition to contemporary life. She says that:
One source of [these philosopher's] appeal for later audiences is the fact that these are people who are really enmeshed in practical politics, whose ruminations on human dignity, on anger and on the vicissitudes of life are not just academic, but also profoundly practical. Both Seneca and Cicero tell us that philosophy has something to offer our lives, and they bring philosophy into contact with the affairs of life.
Now this is a long way from how we practice philosophy today in Australia. This conception of philosophy as a way of life that is enmeshed in practical politics is rarely mentioned by our philosophy academics. Yet it is a conception that involves education for Socratic citizenship. Socrates is remembered, of course, by the academics but te tradition of Socratic reasoning being linked to citizenship has been broken backed in a modernist philosophy.
Nussbaum recovers this Socratic political tradition. She says that Socratic citizenship means a person:
"... who can take charge of his or her own thought about the most important matters, conducting a critical scrutiny of received beliefs and becoming aware of how and whether they cohere, and how they may be defended."
What might that mean? Endless criticism of everything? Being a gadfly in liberal democracy by challenging the government's policy in immigration and its treatment of refugees or the war with Iraq? No, it is something much deeper. What we have from this reasoned criticism by a practical aand compassionate philssophy embodied in the volunteer groups in civil society is an ethical reason that is capable of a serious and deep scrutiny of the ends of human life. It questions the utilitarian assumption of the policy makers and their economic advisors that wealth creation is the goal of human life.
Nussbaum give this ethical reason depth by connecting it to public affairs. She makes the connection by turning to Aristotle and recovering one of his key arguments. She says that Aristotle held that:
"....a certain level of material well being -- while not an end in itself -- is nonetheless a necessary condition of the performance of those activities that are important as ends in a human life. One cannot think well if one is hungry. One cannot act justly if one is denied the rights and privileges of citizenship. One cannot be generous if one has nothing to give. One cannot maintain friendships if one is enslaved or imprisoned."
The implication that is drawn from this that a flourishing human life is the goal of human conduct. If the aim of politics is to provide all citizens with what they need in order to be capable of living a flourishing human life, then we citizens should design our institutions and public laws with this aim in mind. It is a flourishing life not wealth creation per se that our eyes should be on.
This then ties in with this;and it it connects with contemporary concerns about rethinking what we mean by development; It opens up into enabling broad civic involvement in economic and public policy making---opens up into democracy.