Category: Education

Where fun goes to die

It’s Saturday noon. Tens Hundreds of thousands of University students are highly inebriated and on their way to watching kickoffs.

But my thoughts turned earlier to the educational enterprise.

Several years ago Robert Zimmer was asked by an audience in China why the University of Chicago was associated with so many winners of the Nobel Prize — 90 in all, counting this month’s win by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler. Zimmer, the university’s president since 2006, answered that the key was a campus culture committed to “discourse, argument and lack of deference.”

…

[F]ree speech is what makes educational excellence possible. “It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” Louis Brandeis wrote 90 years ago in his famous concurrence in Whitney v. California.

It is also the function of free speech to allow people to say foolish things so that, through a process of questioning, challenge and revision, they may in time come to say smarter things.

If you can’t speak freely, you’ll quickly lose the ability to think clearly. Your ideas will be built on a pile of assumptions you’ve never examined for yourself and may thus be unable to defend from radical challenges. You will be unable to test an original thought for fear that it might be labeled an offensive one …

That is the real crux of Zimmer’s case for free speech: Not that it’s necessary for democracy (strictly speaking, it isn’t), but because it’s our salvation from intellectual mediocrity and social ossification. In a speech in July, he addressed the notion that unfettered free speech could set back the cause of “inclusion” because it risked upsetting members of a community.

“Inclusion into what?” Zimmer wondered. “An inferior and less challenging education? One that fails to prepare students for the challenge of different ideas and the evaluation of their own assumptions? A world in which their feelings take precedence over other matters that need to be confronted?”

These are not earth-shattering questions. But they are the right ones, and they lay bare the extent to which the softer nostrums of higher ed today shortchange the intended beneficiaries.

(Bret Stephens, profiling University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer, emphasis added)

But I’m not sure that Zimmer’s answer to the Chinese is complete. He’s standing on the shoulders of Robert Hutchins:

After the 1939 season, Hutchins abolished football at Chicago University. And he did it during Christmas break, while the students were off campus.  This decision (along with Hutchins eliminating fraternities and religious organizations from campus) caused a decrease in enrollment and financial backing.

Now to his credit, Chicago became one of the premier schools in the country ….

Well, yes, there’s that, I suppose. Where fun goes to die and future Nobel laureates go to do whatever magic it is that makes Nobel laureates.

But I was surprised to learn that the University pioneered women’s sports and is still involved in intercollegiate athletics, having been a charter member of a unique Division III conference (as once it helped found the Big Ten):

In 1987-88, Chicago became a charter member of a new and unique NCAA Division III conference, the University Athletic Association. Comprised of some of the nation’s leading research institutions, UAA members include Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Case Western Reserve University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, the University of Rochester, and Washington University in St. Louis.

The UAA provides its member institutions and student-athletes with some of the best athletic competition in the country, as evidenced by the fact that the UAA has sent 129 teams to NCAA postseason play and has produced 11 national champions in its 11-year history. Many student-athletes at UAA institutions are capable of competing at the NCAA Division I level, but choose the UAA experience because of the unique combination of academic, athletic, and travel opportunities the Association afford its members.

 

Mitch Daniels has deservedly gotten much attention for innovations to prepare Purdue for a changing environment, but I see no sign that his vision is as bold as dropping out of Division I to focus more on education.

Is it okay that I had fun poking around a bit, reminding myself that Division III isn’t incompatible with first-rate education, and writing this?

* * * * *

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

50th Reunion

I spent the weekend at my 50th high school reunion.

I’m at (something of) a loss for words to describe it, but that may be because I don’t want to do kiss-and-tell, and I don’t want to generalize (at least publicly) about the 26 or more precious individuals who came (out of a class of about 60, with at least 6 having died). But I can still reflect on it for an audience only one of whom, so far as I know, was there over the weekend.

There’s an unusual reason why my reunions are such a draw for me, though they’re at a campus some three hours away: for about 40% of us, including me, it was a boarding school. And I entered at age 14. It’s a major life landmark to get that much “distance” (geographically and emotionally) from parents at that age especially. Maybe college means that to you, but it’s probably less intense because you were older.

The 50th reunion, I think, is a draw because we’re all feeling our mortality. Where in the heck did 50 years go? How can 10% of our classmates be gone already? Does anyone know how Jane died? Cal? Randy? (We knew what took Rich, Gwen and Carol.) Most of us looked pretty healthy, but one of the really rowdy and athletic young men is crippled (his own word) as a result of accidents the bade well to kill him. But he’s glad to still be here. And we were glad he made it, too; his undiagnosed ADD made him pretty unforgettable.

Ten years ago, one of our classmates was awarded alumnus of the year and I couldn’t remember him! There’s a good reason for that: he was there only 5 months, second semester senior year, and had to study constantly to compensate for his prior educational deficits. He didn’t even have time to run track, where he would have excelled.

In the world of evangelicalism, he’s our most famous classmate, but I didn’t know that, either, as I had left evangelicalism, at least equivocally, about the time he joined the little evangelical charity he turned into a huge evangelical charity. He’s the kind of guy of whom evangelicals might say “You know him?!“ Too bad the answer would need to be “sort of.”

The weekend brought testimonies of how the school changed us, including that former alum of the year. But the world has changed, too, and we’re in the middle of a continuing revolution in how devout Christians will be allowed to live in the culture. So Saturday night, some of us were huddled earnestly discussing how our grandchildren or great-grandchildren are going to survive the unfolding social revolution as Christians.

One of us, now retired from teaching, said “Classical education. Then Hillsdale, or St. Johns, or Thomas More.” I tend to agree, but would generalize: some place that has had the foresight, integrity, and private support to shun government money, and maybe even to scorn the accreditation martinets.” I could go on a little longer, too. Read The Benedict Option, and Shop Class as Soulcraft, and some of the delightful books of Joel Salatin, even — maybe this (which I’ve read) or this (which I haven’t). [UPDATE: Or anything by Wendell Berry, of course.]

I wish we’d had time to probe “why classical education” at greater depth. But I’m going to connect that to something a school leader said in my hearing Saturday morning. He is adamant about the name “Academy:”

“High school” is a made up category, born of the industrial revolution. And it’s going away.

I appreciate the vision that tacitly says “our mission is too distinctive to do exactly what other high schools are doing at the moment but with a little Jesus thrown in. The current ‘high school’ model isn’t even very healthy.” Classical education gives the tools for being a good person in any kind of society.

My alma mater is not a classical school, then or now, but with leadership like that, it has, I think, the integrity to make costly refusals of the unacceptable demands that I’m all but certain will be coming. The open question is whether the prosperous parents (who probably have big influence in the school’s leadership) will understand why the Academy cannot offer even one pinch of incense on the altar of Leviathan.

At a closing Alumni Chapel Sunday the Alumni Choir sang something that I’d never heard before:

We’re pilgrims on the journey
Of the narrow road
And those who’ve gone before us line the way
Cheering on the faithful, encouraging the weary
Their lives a stirring testament to God’s sustaining grace

Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses
Let us run the race not only for the prize
But as those who’ve gone before us
Let us leave to those behind us
The heritage of faithfulness passed on through godly lives

CHORUS:
Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful
May the fire of our devotion light their way
May the footprints that we leave
Lead them to believe
And the lives we live inspire them to obey

Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful

After all our hopes and dreams have come and gone
And our children sift through all we’ve left behind
May the clues that they discover and the memories they uncover
Become the light that leads them to the road we each must find

REPEAT CHORUS

Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful
Oh may all who come behind us find us faithful

(Find us Faithful, by Steve Green)

As we rehearsed it, I thought “This is kind of a thin gruel, middle-class-American version of why my Church has icons. ‘Those who’ve gone before us’ are the great cloud of witnesses of Hebrews 11. They’re not just stories. They had faces and bodies and can be pictured. They’re worshipping with us as we worship. They’re cheering us on. I appreciate the visible reminder.”

And many of them suffered, and entered into glory, for refusing to offer that pinch of incense.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think anything that bad awaits us in the U.S. during even my grandchildren’s lives. But we’ve gotten soft. It might not need to be threat of death to trigger apostasy. It seems to me that it’s very, very likely to reduce us from middle class to a kind of dhimmitude, but under secularism, not (yet) Islam.

I remember nothing about Fox’s Book of Martyrs, the only martyrology the Academy knew back in my day, except the feeling “those dirty, murderous Catholics!” I knew nothing of the pre-Protestant heroes of the faith, Catholic and Orthodox, whose martyrologies leave one not hating their killers, but marveling at their lives and courage and how they won glory.

I’ll try to be fair to evangelicalism at its best, which I caught many glimpses of this weekend, but they need to get to know the earlier martyrs. In fact, they need to get deeper into history generally; the Church did not disappear, or become contemptible, with Constantine and until Luther.

Ultimately, they need to get into the ark that is the Orthodox Church, but the troubles may be coming sooner than that’s plausible. May God find my old friends faithful anyway.

* * * * *

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

 

France & America

 

France and America are countries linked at birth and have always seen in each other funhouse-mirror visions of the other, and they have used the other to try to understand themselves. Writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in the 20th wanted France to be more like America; today, Gobry argues, America is turning into France, and in the wrong ways.

(Editor’s note on each of the articles I’m about to excerpt)

1

As of the most recent count, the French government spends an eye-watering 57 percent of the country’s GDP every year, with the crazy taxes that go along with that. The country ranks a paltry 72nd on the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, behind such free-market champions as Kazakhstan and Malaysia.

…

An administrative-law professor of mine once quipped, “In terms of administrative law, the French Revolution never happened.” By this, he meant that all one sees in the French law is just a long, uninterrupted power grab by the central government. The aristocracy and the Church had to go not because they were inegalitarian, but because they doled out status by birth or, what’s worse, by God, which challenged the State’s monopoly on status-conferring.

…

To speak generally, what a typical Frenchman wants out of life is some status granted, directly or indirectly, by the government. The government’s job, then, is to find some way to distribute status and economic rent in a way that keeps the social peace while preserving its own power and paying off the losers.

Hence civil-service laws, whereby civil servants cannot be fired and are paid by the state until death.In France, to be a bureaucrat is not a job, it is a status.Under Brussels-mandated austerity rules, French civil servants have barely had a pay raise in five years, and they have mostly taken it lying down — but everyone knows they would strike or even riot if something was done to threaten their status.

(America’s Francification, Part Deux)

2

If there’s one way in which America and France differ from each other, it’s in the role of religion. America famously stands out among Western nations for its religiosity, and France for its rigidly enforced secularism.

But the picture is more complicated than that. France has many religious people, andAmerica has a strongly secular contingent, which tends to occupy the country’s elite perches.The Christian sociologistPeter Berger famously quipped that if the most religious country on earth is India, and the most secular is Sweden, then America “is a nation of Indians run by Swedes.”

…

But the ground has begun to shift. Americans are less and less religious — or at least, less and less churched. As Ross Douthat has pointed out in his invaluable book A Nation of Heretics, Americans are not turning into Christopher Hitchens–style militant atheists; they believe in God, in spirituality, in the numinous, in numbers at least as large as ever. What they are rejecting however, is institutional forms of religion, whether Protestant or Catholic, whether black or white. They are therefore rejecting Christian orthodoxy, with significant cultural consequences.

In terms of politics, however, this may end up being a distinction without a difference. After all, as the secularist creed proclaims, it doesn’t matter what people believe in their hearts of hearts, so long as they leave it there.(That this creed is hypocritical, since secularists have no problem bringing their own metaphysical commitments to politics, is another matter.)

(America’s Francification, Part Trois: Secularism, emphasis added)

3

Paris is to France what the Boston-Washington Corridor and Silicon Valley are to America: Giant magnets that pull young brains out of the heartland:

If you’re drowning in college debt and the economic future looks bleak for all but the most successful, it becomes almost a matter of survival to jump on the meritocratic hamster wheel and run as hard as you can.

Men and women who would have become regional elites in a previous generation now all congregate around New York and Washington, playing their national games instead of enriching their local communities.

(Washington Wealth and the American Desert? Not Yet, But It’s on the Horizon)

4

America has a strange bipartisan blind spot. The Left’s social liberalism and the Right’s libertarian tendencies combine to make the family the great forgotten institution in American politics. Republican officeholders can talk a good game about “family values” and, sometimes, social issues related to the family, but when it comes to policies aimed at materially supporting and strengthening families, one hears crickets. But the family is the basic unit of society, and if supporting the family isn’t conservative, then that word is meaningless.

By contrast, family policy is an ancient commitment of the French political class, shared broadly across almost every political divide, for over a century, through regime changes and constitutional crises. There are quibbles around the edges, but there is broad agreement on the idea that strengthening the family is one of the pillars of government policy.

None of the objections on the right to pro-family policy hold water. The libertarian Right argues that pro-family policy is “social engineering,” but this is nonsense. The idea that tax policy, for example, should take into account only the individual as the most basic economic unit is an a priori metaphysical stance that is no more or less “social engineering” than structuring policy around the family, which after all was considered the basic economic unit for the great bulk of human history. What’s more, in practice, pro-family policy would only — though far from sufficiently — act as a pushback against the decades of effectively anti-family social engineering pursued by the Left.

Every one of the ills I’ve been writing about in this series is connected to the atomization of American society, which has been perhaps the main driver of the country’s deleterious turn over the past few years. In the face of runaway divorce and illegitimacy rates and declining birth rates, the decline of the American family is not merely one problem among many, it is a national emergency. In this context, policy tools such as marriage incentives and child tax credits are not luxuries, but bare minimums.

(America’s Francification: La Fin)

* * * * *

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.