By Jeffrey Bilbro
Sunday, May 12, 2024
Every few years another seismic tremor roils American
educational institutions: DEI and critical race theory, transgender bathroom
use and sports participation and library books, ChatGPT and AI tools, and now
protests over the war in Gaza. The ferocity that characterizes these disputes
is sometimes seen as the result of increasing political polarization, and
that’s no doubt part of the story. But the underlying cause of such fierce and
incommensurable disagreements is that America’s secular schools have increasingly
set
aside transcendent questions about human purpose and responsibility.
This claim may seem counterintuitive given common
intuitions that see religion as a source of conflict, but in the absence of a
shared, robust understanding of human purpose, the educational enterprise will
inevitably founder. As the varied
and often conflicting moral claims advanced by Gaza-war protesters
indicate, as the inconsistent
and often draconian actions of college administrators suggest, the
divorce between knowledge and its ends isn’t sustainable.
American schools used to be able to function without explicit theological
missions because there was a largely shared moral and religious consensus
within the communities they served. Needless to say, that’s no longer the case.
Alasdair MacIntyre opens his classic After Virtue with
a parable that illuminates why our culture’s moral disputes are both intense
and irresolvable. MacIntyre invites readers to imagine some sort of
civilizational collapse that causes scientific learning to be forgotten.
Generations later, people seek to revive the natural sciences from the
fragments that remain—half-burnt books, stray equipment, recalled theorems. But
the whole that would make sense of them is forgotten: “In such a culture men
would use expressions such as ‘neutrino’, ‘mass’, ‘specific gravity’, ‘atomic
weight’ in systemic and often interrelated ways which would resemble in lesser
or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had been used in earlier
times before scientific knowledge had been so largely lost. But many of the beliefs
presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there
would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their
application which would appear very surprising to us.” Something very much like
this, MacIntyre argues, is what has happened to our culture’s moral reasoning.
And matters haven’t improved in the 40-plus years since he wrote this book.
We still possess a “simulacra of morality.” We still have
heated debates about right and wrong. But because of the “conceptual
incommensurability” among our rival fragments, moral arguments devolve into
“pure assertion and counter-assertion,” and mutual understanding—much less
genuine persuasion—rarely occurs. MacIntyre’s account of this kind of
build-your-own bricolage morality, one that takes bits and pieces from various
traditions and sources, aptly describes the protester slogans and
counterslogans, the staged congressional testimonies and feckless administrator
press releases, and the moral grandstanding on social media that denounces
various video clips and screenshots. Everyone wants to lay claim to the moral
high ground, but there’s no agreement on where that high ground might be found.
These disputes become particularly heated at colleges and
universities because the task of educating people necessarily entails
assumptions about the nature and proper end of persons. Such fruitless moral
posturing illustrates why we can’t educate students without addressing, at
least implicitly, the question that forms the title of one of Wendell Berry’s
books: “What are people for?” Historically, the first European universities
were founded on the assumption that the highest human ends were religious, and
the curriculum was oriented
toward theology, the queen of the sciences. Similar convictions shaped
America’s first universities. As America gradually became more religiously
pluralistic, private and public universities articulated human ends in terms of
citizenship and republican government. Remnants of both these purposes remain
at various institutions, but the default purpose of education is now, as Berry puts it,
“the mass production of producers and consumers.”
In the service of this objective, universities have
largely bracketed transcendent questions; such debates prove too divisive among
their many constituents. MacIntyre narrates the
gradual process by which academic inquiry slowly “fragmented into a series of
independent, specialized, and professional activities whose results could, so
it seemed, find no place as parts in any whole.” In a similar vein, Berry remarks that
rather than a coherent tree of knowledge, the “modern university … more and
more resembles a loose collection of lopped branches waving about randomly in
the air.” This moral chaos is the natural result, MacIntyre concludes, of
relegating “moral and theological truth” to “the realm of privatized
belief.”
Even while universities use more immediate ends like
career preparation or the pursuit of knowledge to hold together their disparate
parts, students and faculty sense these are insufficient to undergird and
direct their educational endeavors; they expect—and universities have encouraged
them to expect—that these institutions will speak with moral authority.
Seven years ago, after a parade of antisemitic white supremacists marched
through the University of Virginia campus, professor Chad Wellmon wrote an essay
for the Chronicle of Higher Education that tried to make sense of
why “the contemporary university, at least in its local form in
Charlottesville, seems institutionally incapable of moral clarity.” Part of the
answer, as Wellmon notes, is that universities are too many things. On the one
hand there are the incompatible ideals: Universities are bastions of free
inquiry, welcoming communities, and loci for the transmission of culture. And
on the other hand, there is the sprawling reality that Clark Kerr calls “multiversities.”
Wellmon remarks that the University of Virginia encompasses “a health center, a
federal contractor, a sports franchise, an event venue, and, almost
incidentally, a university devoted to education and knowledge.” One could also
add a hedge fund and a security apparatus. Given these varied and competing
identities, it’s not surprising that Wellmon concludes, “Universities cannot
impart comprehensive visions of the good. They cannot provide ultimate moral
ends. Their goods are proximate.”
Wellmon argues that so long as we acknowledge these
limits and rely on some alternative source of moral authority in our own
private lives, these proximate goods of scholarship and disciplined knowledge
remain viable. Yet as suggested by the recurring moral crises that sweep
through universities, the incoherent bricolage of social justice, career
training, and therapeutic self-help can’t sustain and orient education.
Education’s proximate goods are only intelligible when they remain in the
service of ultimate goods.
Yet I think MacIntyre is right to find paradoxical
grounds for hope in the series of moral crises that have revealed the
incoherence of modern educational institutions. Insofar as the defenders of the
academic status quo—the acquisition and discovery of specialized, fragmented,
and value-neutral skills or information most relevant to career
preparation—have “responded with stuttering ineptitudes” to the stresses
confronting their institutions, there is a real opportunity for colleges that
stand in a coherent moral tradition to offer an alternative. MacIntyre terms
this alternative “traditioned inquiry,” in which teachers and students pursue
the work of education as participants within a particular moral or religious
tradition. A community with a shared backdrop of moral and theological
commitments can carry out intense but coherent prudential debates regarding the
ends that knowledge should serve.
I teach at a Christian liberal arts college that
aspires—imperfectly, of course; it’s an institution populated by fallen
persons—to carry on such inquiry. When I teach our first-year writing course,
we consider rhetoric not just as the art of persuasion, but as the art of
persuading another of truth. Quintilian’s famous adage, that rhetoric is the
good man speaking well, names this inherent connection between a writer’s
character and purpose and the effectiveness of the argument being made. If you
bracket all questions about the former, you end up with sophistry. Similarly,
in my environmental ethics course this spring, we approach fraught questions
through our shared affirmation of the biblical narrative. This doesn’t neatly
resolve difficult issues of what we owe other creatures, and it doesn’t mean we
read only Christian authors. In our class discussions of Peter Singer, Martha
Nussbaum, George Monbiot, or Robin Wall Kimmerer, we allow these authors to put
our tradition to the test and expose its shortcomings, but we do so as
participants in and adherents of the Christian moral tradition.
At a panel
discussion last fall to mark the release of a book I co-edited, The
Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education, one of the audience
members asked whether liberal arts education can survive if we don’t take
religion seriously. Roosevelt Montás, a faculty member at Columbia who served
for a decade as the director of its core curriculum program, replied that while
it depends on how religion is defined, “I do think that liberal education
necessarily involves a question of ultimate values.” While he and other
panelists noted the possibilities for such education to occur in pluralistic,
non-confessional institutions, that window of opportunity seems to be
narrowing.
Situating education within an explicit religious
tradition isn’t a panacea for navigating our culture’s bricolage morality. Many
religious colleges struggle to maintain their missional commitments in the face
of politicized
criticism. And many more religious colleges allow rifts
to open between their public confessions of faith and their de facto
educational culture and practice. But if the aspiration to “traditioned
inquiry” isn’t a sufficient condition for healthy educational institutions,
it’s at least a necessary condition.
In a recent essay on the
challenges of fostering hard conversations in this cultural context, Leah
Libresco Sargeant describes how irresolvable moral disagreements poison
educational institutions: “A culture that can’t ultimately settle ideological
disagreements can’t run a school worthy of the name.” Sargeant goes on to
clarify this point: “A school can’t be run by delicate détente, suspending
judgment on every issue that prompts division. But it also can’t be run by
picking winners and losers, where the outvoted losers feel like what they’ve
risked and lost is their children.” As much as I mourn the loss of America’s
remarkable tradition of public education, at both the K-12 and university
levels, it’s becoming harder to imagine how these institutions can continue to
function downstream from our culture’s moral fragmentation.
Elite private colleges and big state schools will stagger
on. They have too much money to fade easily. But their moral authority will
continue to erode, and more and more people may turn to smaller institutions
with clear missions. When small colleges are in the news, it tends to be
because they are downsizing or closing their doors. But micro colleges are
also springing
up around the country. In the same way the tragic dysfunctions of K-12
public schools are fueling the
incredible growth of classical schools, many of which are explicitly religious,
the moral decadence of prominent universities may generate a parallel
wave of interest in religious, liberal arts colleges, colleges oriented toward
an explicit vision of human purpose. These institutions will still be sites of
intense and necessary debate, but they can offer a context in which
disagreements might promote learning and moral clarity. Many American
universities can apparently no longer provide such contexts.
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