Note to our readers: As we move on to the next phase of our writing partnership, we would like to thank you for joining us this past year at Old School, New School at The Chronicle. We firmly believe that more academics should write in public and use public venues to actively engage ideas and readers. We thank The Chronicle for hosting us and our editor, Jean Tamarin, for her amazing support and enthusiasm for our work. We would especially like to thank Lee Skallerup Bessette, Janni Aragon, Ana Dinescu, Vanessa Vaile, Cathy Davidson, Jason B. Jones, Billie Hara, Jessie Daniels, Alondra Nelson, Melonie Fullick, Steven Schwartz, Robert Herzog and so many others who have helped shape our ideas over the past year through their comments here on the blog, on Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail. We look forward to having you continue with us as we write the book that was inspired by these conversations.

The purpose of our conversation has not been to provide an overall analysis of higher education but to examine it from within, from our somewhat different points of view and from our respective positions inside higher education, especially in regard to our experiences of the changes that have been taking place during the past half century.

To do this, however, has required some sense of what is at stake in the crisis we face and how it has come to be at stake. It has required us to explore, in conversations with our readers, what needs to be included in the most general visions of education as these appear to us in the context of change. It has also required that we examine the constraints built into the debates on education and that we explore a number of problems that practitioners of education now face, in particular the question of the role of the humanities and sciences, the purposes of the major, and the reorganization of the university as a corporate entity geared to globalization and to that version of capitalism increasingly known as neoliberalism.

We have a vision of higher education that, for better or worse, informs what we say and that is bound to be controversial in the moral and political environment of an increasingly conservative, and we believe, reactionary era in our national history (though one that has many unfortunate precedents).

Our vision embodies several ideas: the human as an end rather than a means, human life as creative, the intrinsically social nature of the individual and therefore the intrinsically social nature of human life, and the necessity of reminding ourselves that inequality without limits is a condition of social decay—perhaps the most important one.

We also accept the ideal of a liberal constitutional democracy, but only on condition that social values inform the ideas of liberalism, constitutionalism, and democracy. To us, that means that a legitimate government is one that represents the body politic and its general will against power and against the dominance of particular wills. It means that a constitution guarantees the sort of justice that is both procedural and substantive and therefore is geared to greater equality in the material realm and equal opportunity in the social and cultural realms. It means that democracy requires an inclusive sense of society consistent with the idea of social justice. Finally, it means that debate is less important than mutually appreciative discussion, and therefore requires a wary eye toward moments when we allow our fear of the “other side” to dictate reactions that are irrationally extreme or that compromise core values.

We believe that education is part of life and continuous with it and that the core values of society, democracy, and constitutionally reinforced justice must be implicated in every instance of education. That means that no matter how technical a field, it cannot be taught free of the social values and problems that bring those values into play without damaging the society that is supposed to benefit from the teaching and application of technique and the knowledge that corresponds to it.

It also means that teaching and learning are intertwined and that a good teacher is a learner, both in her field and from her students. A good learner is one who can show how what one has learned is the result of resolutions of earlier problems in the course of coming to conclusions. For that to work, doubt must be given particular privilege in the university, and everything, every belief, must be subject to doubt and therefore to appreciation of the possibility of alternatives.

We have tried to persuade our readers that the humanities and social sciences are the core of a higher education, and that this should influence how science, math, and engineering are taught in our colleges and universities.

We do not deny that it is possible to work within the current changes taking place at our universities for a positive social and individual direction in education. But right now it is not possible to imagine what working within would look like and whether doing so might have positive or negative effects. That is the dilemma of any reformer, and so ours is perhaps a more radical view than is usually associated with the desire to reform from within.

On the other hand, we are already within the institution, and so our radical point of view is qualified from the start by an acceptance of the idea of higher education, by a fairly traditional view of educational values, and by the need to sustain the institutional aspect of higher education, even though the compromises involved may be self-defeating in the end. We do not mean to imply, when we refer to politics, that the university is a setting for promoting a greater politics, only that political interests, no less than material, social, and even cultural interests, play a crucial role in the ways in which the changes are devised and implemented.

We believe that the crisis of the moment has to do with the intervention into educational practice of those whose lives are conditioned by the special aspects of the economy and its market and productive practices, and by the biases that this has introduced into their decisions about evaluation, curriculum, organization, motivation, and the rest.

Perhaps most important, both of us are concerned with built-in inequalities in the university—class biases that play an important role in access and outcome for students, and gender and racial biases that play similar roles in student life and also show themselves to be problems within the institution of learning. The fact that education in the humanities and social sciences emphasizes the existence of these biases and discusses literature aimed at reducing them reinforces our belief that these are the fundamental disciplines in a rational educational program.

Thank you again, and we look forward to hearing from you. Mary can be reached via e-mail marylchurchill@gmail.com and on Twitter @mary_churchill. Mike can be reached at mikebloggist@gmail.com. Keep in touch!

Most of us would probably agree that engaging the public is good for some things and bad (or matters of indifference) for others. An example of a bad idea is the attempt to promote racism or fascism by faculty who claim to have arrived at their ideas rationally and according to some notion of the good of society. Should we reward such a project even though it seems to be an instance of engaging the public?

Once we try to define what we mean by the words “public” and “community” and what it means to “engage” them, we will most likely need to rethink what we believe about the obligations intellectuals have to society as a whole. For example, a common idea of a public may imply that differences of class, gender, race, and the like are of no account. That is, we engage the public when we speak across such differences and not for them or to them. Similarly, “community” may indicate entities impossible to identify and which may not even exist in the way suggested by the notion of “engaging” them. Even if we feel we know what we mean by a community, do we know who listens to and speaks for that community?

When we look at what might be meant by “engaging,” the liberal value of neutrality comes into focus. While I endorse this value in general, I must admit that it may make it difficult to distinguish between what does and does not satisfy those values initially taken to be reasons for “engaging the public and the community.”

I also believe it is utterly crucial to defend academic freedom and that its defense is increasingly difficult to maintain. But I cannot claim that without thinking of possible exceptions (for example, prohibiting yelling “fire” in a crowded auditorium), including social and political exceptions. While this requires a long and probably contentious discussion, I cannot imagine a person who would not endorse some exception, thereby raising doubts about the putative value of neutrality in engaging the public.

In any case, whether we want to protect academic freedom by rewarding what academics do in public is not the same as protecting their freedom to be public intellectuals. Both of those issues are key to understanding the problem of whether engaging the public or the community should be taken into consideration in tenure and promotion decisions. So one issue I am left with is the option of either tolerating participation in public discourse (by not punishing it under any circumstances) or rewarding it (by having it count toward tenure, promotion, numbers of classes assigned, choice of classes to teach, etc.).

Perhaps this attempt to delineate the complexity of the problem goes too far, but the fact remains: Academics are rarely rewarded for engaging in public discourse; instead, they are often punished.

If writing op-ed pieces for newspapers such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe is  considered public engagement, why isn’t that considered community engagement as well? Shouldn’t community engagement be part of public engagement?

From an institutional perspective, does community engagement require that campuses be active in their local “host” communities, or would communities in cities across the state, country, and around the world count? What are the goals of this engagement? What if your students are from the targeted community? Is the goal to benefit your students, faculty members, community, or a combination of the three?

For many institutions, the goal is engagement rather than impact.

When I Googled “Office of Community Engagement,” my first hits were higher-ed institutions. For example:

• “Community Engagement fosters, encourages, and promotes student, faculty, and staff involvement within local and global communities.“
• “The mission of the Office of Community Engagement is to facilitate the use of university resources to support existing partnerships and engage new partners to contribute to the educational, social, and economic progress of the community, region, and state.”
• “The Office of Community Engagement is focused on identifying strategic priorities, facilitating collaboration between college and community, challenging academic departments, and encouraging faculty to use their teaching and research in focused ways to serve a larger community.”

It is is pretty obvious that we use the term loosely.

A quick search of “Office of Public Engagement” brought me to the White House. The first higher-ed institution I encountered yielded the following:

• “What is Public Engagement? At the University of X, it’s the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility;address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.“

In these statements, “engaging with the community” implies a social-justice mission that focuses on serving those who are in need and makes the assumption that our students and faculty members are not from or part of that community. “Engaging with the public,” on the other hand, seems like we mean business and that we are aware that this will affect our students and faculty in profound ways.

If we want to take community engagement seriously, we need to think about impact. It can’t just be a list of programs illustrating that we “engaged” with and “served” the community. If community engagement does not contribute to the public good, then why are we doing it? And why doesn’t every institution have an office of public engagement? Does the Office of Community Engagement exist merely to appease the host community and to smooth town-gown relationships? Perhaps it is there to  make up for the fact that your students riot and destroy the city during Red Sox season.

What if we brought community and public engagement together and rewarded faculty for doing both? Not just as a token appreciation but where it counts, as points towards tenure.

What if we got serious about engagement and required impact—from our entire community, not just from our students?

Mike: I have to admit that I’m not comfortable saying that there is an anti-intellectual tendency in American life. Intellectuals have always been a minority, and their work has always appealed primarily to specialists. So claiming that some present condition is due in part to such a tendency doesn’t quite get to the most general obstacles to critical thinking, creativity, and the like. Randy Martin’s recent book, Under New Management, provides a slightly less pessimistic account of changes in higher education than what you seem to be saying, though I must admit that I am torn.

Denying the political dimensions of higher education is impossible, on both a practical and theoretical level. Life is political. Life is a series of power struggles and imbalances. Education does not occur outside of life, and higher education does not exist in a vacuum. Knowledge and power are intimately linked, and if institutions of higher education are also centers of knowledge, they are also centers of power. If academic inquiry is focused on knowledge, it is at the center of power struggles and true politics—not just party politics or policy debates but struggles for power. Who we educate and how we educate them affects who has knowledge and who gets to define knowledge.

What is the message when institutions state that there is no place for politics on our campuses? We are not implying that our institutions have found a way to exist outside of politics. Instead, we are saying that only a certain type of politics is acceptable. What do those politics look like, and where will they take academic institutions? Will a narrow definition of politics foster creativity, innovation, new ideas, and new solutions?

Contingent faculty members are at the center of the supposed elimination of politics from our institutions. The struggles of contingent faculty on our campuses are not just about salary and benefits (although these are incredibly important, and I’m not denying that). When contingent faculty members change what they teach and how they teach because they feel that their job security is threatened, as a society, we are losing.

The fact that more than 70 percent of our courses are taught by contingent faculty means that most of our courses and students are being taught by disempowered teachers. Therefore, students are less likely to be taught to resist, to talk back, and to try to make change happen. Contingent faculty members who refuse to back down are taking big risks, particularly in today’s environment, where the “student as customer” paradigm dominates so many administrator-faculty conversations. Even when administrators support these instructors, they often stand alone in their support and are likely to alienate themselves in defending these faculty members. As our teachers increasingly enter more contingent and precarious work situations, this phenomenon is on the rise.

Who loses? Our teachers, our students, and ultimately, society. Most people fear change—not just conservatives, but also liberals. But what we need now are folks who are willing to take risks, willing to fight for change, willing to create a vision for tomorrow. When we do not support and protect these folks, we stagnate. Innovative thinkers and teachers, like writers and artists, move us forward. When our institutions become hostile toward innovative thinking and new ideas, they—and the people who produce them—don’t disappear. They go elsewhere. The best thoughts are not happening on our campuses, they are happening elsewhere.

Where has innovative thinking gone? Where do you find innovation?

One part of defending the humanities has to do with the idea of critical thinking: that is, the sort of critical thinking that is both grounded in the humanist disciplines and crucial for any discussion of the “civil society” we have in mind when we speak of the  “liberal constitutional democracy” that underlies most prominent theories of justice. Those who are uncomfortable with such a concept often defend their discomfort by disparaging politics and those who cannot dissociate political participation from their sense of what is fair and right—beyond the simple questions of power and whether society should be modeled on one or another utopia or dystopia.

This disparagement of politics and of those who take society seriously as a shared project is characteristic of certain currents of the “right,” but not necessarily of conservatism as such. It is important to recognize that there is a logical connection between this disparagement and attempts to describe “republican virtues” according to an extreme individualism, to assert a morality whose primary function is to distinguish the good “us” from the bad “them,” to define “freedom” as “freedom to own.” Perhaps most important, it can be seen in the attempts to demonstrate that the very notions of society and government are essentially “totalitarian.”

Such an attitude easily shades into a dread of “change,” hence the misuse—by those who identify themselves with today’s radical right—of the label “conservative.” This is not a fear of change as such; it is a fear of the sort of change that encourages rethinking basic assumptions about the social world and moral principles.

When the humanities operate within the frame of reference of a general challenge to ideological thinking, they open the door to the sort of doubt and rethinking essential to a politics that, unlike certain libertarian currents and even mainstream conservatism, does not decide against society in advance. In this respect, the humanities not only make room for acknowledging the political dimension of what otherwise appears to be consensual and/or rational; they also allow for the possibility of the sort of reasonableness that John Rawls had in mind when he spoke of the need to take account of our shared experience when we try to formulate morally decent principles of right and justice.

That sort of reasonableness is not only socially conscious; it is also predicated on the willingness to acknowledge society. This society is not the aggregate we now call “population,” but the formative features of shared experience and collective needs irreducible to individual experiences. Society, our life together, is constantly changing. Politics is the most obvious active form of our recognition of society. The humanities bring to the forefront of thought the existence of society, disclosing the necessity to recognize the politics that comes with collective life.

Mary: Faculty members and administrators often talk over and around one another. When it comes to discussions about the crisis in the humanities and ultimately, the crisis in higher education, many faculty members take a theoretical approach to the issues. On one level, those arguments are very appealing. But they rarely have the power to translate into practical, on-the-ground changes that can be immediately implemented at our institutions.

Perhaps I am too pragmatic, or perhaps I am just frustrated. I have sat through too many faculty senate meetings and department discussions that debate the finer points of theory and mission without ever coming close to a hint of strategy and implementation. There is a great need for people in our institutions who can translate theoretical ideals into actual practices. Many faculty members are fantastic at espousing theory, and just as many administrators are incredible at implementing programs and policies, but it is as if these two groups operate on parallel tracks that never meet.

We need more difficult dialogues: between administrators and faculties; between folks in the professional schools and the liberal arts; and between those who hold competing views about the role that higher education plays in society. Although Stanley Fish argues that academic inquiry should be the sole reason for higher education’s existence, he’s unrealistic and out of touch with today’s reality. The competing goals of vocational training, social justice, and personal development will continue to exist at our institutions. To move forward, we need to find a way to bring competing views together.

Mike: One of the most important problems facing defenders of the humanities is the biased nature of the current debate, with its constant references to the monetary value of majors, standards, and the need for the United States to be “competitive” in the world. I’ve suggested that there is another problem, namely that the defense of the humanities has been weakened by a failure of many faculty in those disciplines to recognize the ideological aspects of the debate and to acknowledge, no matter how painful that might be, that educational policy is always intensely and irrevocably political. It seems to me that this is a fact that must not only be addressed but worked through, no matter how one might want to focus on humanistic principles that seem to be different from what politics requires.

To move forward, as you say, Mary, is certainly crucial. But the future is not as open as one might want it to be, and this must be squarely faced. That reality is already visible in the trajectory defined by the corporate model, the marginalization of the humanities, and the growing power of administration and external influences on the academy.

Mary: It is obvious that our options are not unlimited. However, the competing ideas put forth by Grayling and Fish, for example, represent two very different strange, but romanticized views built upon models that most likely never existed within higher education. It is as if they both wish to return to a way that never was.

Yes, it is true that the corporate model is going to be with us for a while, and the next model will not be a precorporate version of higher ed but rather some yet-to-be-determined model of the future. The models that seem to be promising are those that are networked, collaborative, and built on consortiums and partnerships that bring together institutions, community and private partners, and public regulatory bodies. In theory, each of those represent bodies with competing interests. In reality, each has something to contribute and something to gain from their collaborative efforts.

In my mind, moving forward will require us to move from theory to practice. I agree with Nigel Thrift, who states the following with regards to the recent bout of higher-ed bashing: “Any critique needs to be accompanied by at least some notion of what the writer would do instead.” I would push that even further by stating that not only do we need new ideas, but we also need a plan for action that goes beyond critique and debate.

The problems with the current attempts to defend the humanities are clear: (1) The opposition seems to be uncompromising in its attempt to institute a core curriculum devoted to strict monetary values, themselves no longer economically rational; (2) the defense is weakened by a sense of having to justify the humanities according to commercial practices and methods of evaluation that are not consistent with the sort of education we need; and (3) there is a willingness to accept a marginalization of the humanities and social sciences to a status that cannot stand up in the long run to the imposition of commercial policies and methods of evaluation.

We have to recognize, once again, that the notion of a “core education” is identical with the thought of the humanities and social sciences, for the simple reason that those are the disciplines that take the idea of a society of common needs and resources seriously, and that project a view of human life that is consistent with our best ideas about morality, decency, and the possibility of living together in a sustainable future.

This is the core that embodies the sort of critical thinking we most need in the face of domestic reaction and corporate globalization, the sort of critical thinking that brings us back to basic moral and practical problems and undergirds them with the institutional support that is necessary if they are to play the role that needs to be reaffirmed and continually defended in our society.

The brutality of right-wing and neoliberal projects is now apparent beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt. For better or for worse, with all the warts so often mentioned as reasons to discount the role of the humanities, the sort of critical thinking now essential for a viable democratic society needs to be defended far more directly and in more detail than it has been, at least in the popular and professional media. The issues are undoubtedly complex and vexing, and it is always tempting to give in to power in the hope that the powerful will move from their pronounced absolutist position to something more flexible and responsive to societal needs. But there is, at present, no reason to assume that they will do so, and this suggests what is difficult for many academics to admit, namely the necessity of a politics that goes along with the reasoned defense of the humanities and social sciences as essential to a decent, liberal, constitutional democracy.

There are, of course, precedents for intellectuals engaging in politics relevant to such ends, though they are, for understandable though unfortunate, reasons, few and far between. Perhaps we can start by re-acquainting ourselves with the critical literature on ideology, civil society, and democracy, the history and philosophy of the idea of higher education, and the history of the ascendance and effects of neoliberal ideology. When The New York Times once noted that commercial values have, for the first time in history, virtually taken over American culture, it was sounding an alarm and not merely making an observation.

How should we respond to the challenge posed by this sudden emergence, by historical standards, of a right that is, as visibly as ever, reactionary across the board? What can be done to reinstate the idea of “education” in discussions of education, and what sort of politics is necessary for such a reinstatement?

If the purpose of higher education is to create engaged, critical thinkers, then we have failed. If the purpose of higher education is to create economically productive workers, then we have also failed. Can we create a model that simultaneously meets the demands of democracy and capitalism? Or is education, like health care, doomed to sit at the uncomfortable crossroads between our political dreams and our economic realities?

If our institutions and our governments are obsessed with higher education’s bottom line, with growing revenues rather than growing engagement, then we must be honest with ourselves and admit to providing a private good that reserves critical thinking for the elite and workforce development for the rest. Although I am a strong advocate for fiscal responsibility, the move from fiscal responsibility to increased revenue generation is a dangerous one for nonprofits, taking institutions well beyond a goal of responsibility and into one of institutional greed.

What type of intellectual community is created by institutions and governments that evaluate higher education on its ability to meet the demands of the market? Does market-driven higher education even need an intellectual community? Isn’t it almost certain that an intellectual community just gets in the way of matching course outcomes to an employer’s immediate needs? Do we alter our conceptions of intellectual communities, or do we refine the goals of higher education?

What if, instead, we became obsessed with public engagement and critical thinking? (Some of you will say that we are obsessed with critical thinking, but I see the phrase more as a sound bite and a buzzword than a true obsession.) What if programs were evaluated on the basis of whether they uphold democratic ideals rather than exceed fiscal targets?

Perhaps we cannot afford to focus on public engagement and democratic ideals. Perhaps our president’s goal of remaining competitive is driven by our current economic reality rather than a vision for the future. There is an urgency to create more jobs today, and that often trumps creating a better society for tomorrow.

If that’s the case, and I believe it is, then we need to do both, and we need people who are willing to bring the realities of capitalism and the ideals of democracy together to create a shared vision for the future of higher education.

I will end with a particularly telling quote from Iain Pears:

Such people should not now be delivering lectures about saving the humanities: they had their chance to do so, and they blew it. It is time they stood aside.

Inspired by:

• Private Virtues? Iain Pears, Future Thoughts, June 17, 2011
• Intellectuals and Democracy. Mark Klingwell, Academic Matters, May 2011
• Live and Learn: Why We Have College. Louis Menand, The New Yorker, June 6, 2011

Mike: In the debate over the New College of the Humanities, what is often missed is that the so-called attempt to “protect” the humanities is more fundamentally designed to protect other fields from anything that raises questions about the increasingly narrow and short-term ways in which those fields are defined –as essentially oriented to markets in products and jobs. To me, this seems to be what is involved in the most prominent attempts to preserve the humanities by isolating them, and by freeing the other, so-called practical, fields from socially critical reason. So, although I agree that the problem of how to preserve the humanities is important to engage, it is also important to look at the problem of how to protect the market-oriented fields from losing their sense of a connection to society.

Mary: Interestingly enough, the humanities are often attacked for their lack of connection to the “real world,” with real world being code for the job market.  The counter to this attack is usually a conservative move to protect the humanities from the volatility of that market. Market-driven curriculum construction is problematic on so many levels and rather than get into that discussion right now, I’d rather focus on the issue of public engagement. Stanley Fish has recently written on the Triumph of the Humanities, with a look at how the humanities have been “colonizing” other fields within academia. Personally, I can’t really laud a triumph that stays within the academy as a true victory. My fear is that Grayling’s model and others like it create even fewer opportunities for creating bridges between academia and a broader community. Higher education needs to be relevant and connected to the real world. In a knowledge-based society, that relevancy does not necessarily translate into the need for higher education to be market-driven.

Mike: There is an additional issue that the Grayling project raises, and it has to do with how we ought to frame the project. If we see it as nothing more than an instance of academic entrepreneurship, than we are correct to explore the suspicions that rightly apply to self-interested actions. If, on the other hand, we see the proposal as sincere and unconnected to self-interest, then doubt does not belong to suspicion but to a critical view of what underlies Grayling’s proposal and others like it.

In either case, possible negative consequences, say of the sort Eagleton and so many others have listed, need to be considered, but in the second case, which treats the proposal as a “reform,” we need not only to consider options but to think about what idea of “reform” underlies the peculiarities of Grayling’s proposal:  for example, that the market is a proper frame, that equality is important but not the crucial value for thinking about the future of higher education, and that educational reform should be aimed at ensuring that the disciplines do not interfere with one another.

For us in the U. S., it may turn out that the Grayling project is a diversion. We are not likely to see examples of it here. But the idea of separating the humanities and the social sciences and the desire to protect the non-humanist fields remain two of the most obvious bases for thinking about educational policy today. If there is value to discussing the Grayling project, it is because of what it teaches us about how those who control the resources of higher education are likely to respond to the problems they see posed by the cost of liberal arts and the value that markets are thought to attribute to those majors.

Mary: If we have come to the point where the sole purpose of education in our society is in preparing students to sell themselves on the marketplace, then we have failed.