…every “merit pay” scheme demands that increases be determined by a committee within each department. That is, some colleagues are put in charge of determining which other colleagues have been “productive,” and thus compelled to adopt a model of business or corporate competition in their relations with each other.

The colleagues who have been left behind wind up hating the colleagues on the committee — everybody thinks he or she is as “meritorious” as the next person in these situations — and they wind up hating each other, and all hate the people who have been given the largest “merit raises.”

The effect, in short, is to turn what had been a “republic of scholars” into a group of mutually resentful individuals each of whom detests all the others. (William Dowling, “Rutgers after Lawrence”)

I don’t know you’re going to have a “republic of scholars” if we got rid of considerations that are strictly business, stopped fetishizing the sciences to unnatural degrees, and placed more of an emphasis on reading, writing and the liberal arts. In fact, I know exactly what you get and the problems are manifold. Those problems, again, trace back to pettiness. People would rather put each other down than do good for each other. And they find innumerable ways of putting each other down when there are issues of understanding involved.

2. The fight against big-time collegiate athletics is refreshing in that it forces one to account for what the academy does. We know it isn’t just to advance the sciences, although that’s important. We know it isn’t just to form young people into a certain sort of person, although that too is important.

It really is about that clichéd sentiment: the purpose of the university is to allow minds to think independently. Not an empty mind, but an open one. I remember ISI’s “Choosing the Right College” guide being snarky about this once upon a time: there were liberal professors who couldn’t tell you what education was (because, apparently, minds less than Socrates’ can solve this problem). It didn’t take me long to learn that the problems identity politics posed were not unique to the Left.

Of course there are certain goals and standards to be met. No one can tell you “aha! You are thinking independently” at some prescribed moment (well, some can, but they are teachers of the highest order). We do want some reasonable standards set for a body of knowledge that is to be obtained. I will give ISI credit here: distribution requirements are no substitute for a Core curriculum and comprehensive examinations. Whatever says “here’s what you need to know, go learn it” is a good thing given how short and chaotic university life is.

3. But it’s what the Core and comps say that’s truly important. The intangible purpose – the hope – of the university is why the university exists. It ultimately does invest in its students. Every university could be doing more for its students in a multitude of ways. When I read, say, about Yale versus other schools -

There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

- I immediately think how much better it would be if every school was just a little bit more like an Ivy, treating their students like they’re deserving, like they’re the future. And by students, I mean more than undergraduates.

Until the academy realizes that it is to be a solid, serious institution for the sake of those it admits, more than just the fight against big-time sports will be lost. The university as a whole is endangered. People really are willing to create places where others go play around with dangerous, experimental ideas. They may get mad at times about these places. They may want a bit of spectacle attached to them. It’s the university squandering the fact it exists that’s the fundamental problem. I noticed a friend involved in educational issues – she’s not formally affiliated with any school at the moment – never wasted a moment online in terms of learning herself or trying to teach something (her command of Shakespeare and Rousseau were something else). There are many like her. Would that universities as a whole adopt that seriousness of purpose. There are places that provide an education, and then there are educated people.

The store was also reorganized. Philosophy was back in a corner that it took me a little while to find. I realize fully that sales have always been hard to come by. I imagine most of us have put our private collections together through a combination of “needed it for class,” Amazon, university presses, used bookshops.

But it didn’t take long for it to dawn on me that if the basic titles aren’t in print, philosophy as a discipline is going to have some serious issues. For myself: how can I write on philosophy if my readers can’t get access to the primary sources?

2. Ah, but one can say the issue isn’t accessibility. We have the web, where most of these works are public domain. Anyone interested probably will take a class and have an anthology which will contain a number of works. And there are online book retailers selling many works very cheaply. Heck, the philosophy major has enjoyed a resurgence of sorts. What’s the problem?

The problem is that none of that, strictly speaking, is the accessibility anyone needs for study. I loved Barnes and Noble and Borders when I first found them, because the public libraries with which I am familiar, for the most part, are full of crap. Nearly everything there is mass-market fiction: we’re not talking Vonnegut. The store I went to today has philosophy shelves. The public library nearest me, last I checked, pretty much has a philosophy shelf.

That’s not to say the library doesn’t have some virtues or some hidden gems. Rosen’s book on Plato’s Symposium is there. I could spend months with that. Last time I looked, he had tucked away in there a few pages interpreting Prometheus Bound.

Let’s say, though, I do as I was planning to the other day and write up a little something on Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides and Heraclitus. That would involve quoting heavily from “Four Seminars,” where Heidegger does his unconventional reading of Greek and argues they are both the same. Obviously, I can’t expect a bookstore or public library nowadays to have this on hand so someone can peruse it. However, that puts me in the ridiculous position of writing a more or less specialized secondary source which will be found far more easily than the primary source.

Do I have to start linking to primary sources when I write? If the shelves laid waste and thrown in the back of the store are an indication, yes, and we’re not talking about “Four Seminars” here. Where am I going to be able to link to those primary sources? 90% of the good translations with notes are for purchase only. What’s going to happen when a good copy of the Republic can’t be found immediately? We need our students to see things like the Cave for themselves: there are a million little details hiding that only the most detailed, over-exhaustive account could hope to convey the import of. It’s up to a serious student of philosophy to figure out for themselves what details they want to focus on.

3. Accessibility for the study of philosophy means quality and on demand. A translation of Plato from 1910 with no notes is not acceptable. I need the notes telling me about the Greek and the culture and I’ve been doing this for years. A student of philosophy needs to be able to access good primary sources fairly quickly, especially in this environment where the discussion is lively and thorough. You don’t read philosophy for class ultimately. You do it because there are serious people, past and present, who seem to have had serious thoughts and you want to think them through and see if they’re any good.

We’re going to need to figure something out. We can’t just insist everyone get a Kindle or buy Hackett editions. I suspect we’re going to have to dump a ton of quality primary sources online somehow. One other thing about philosophy: it may involve leisure, but it doesn’t exclude poverty. Poorer students, poorer people deserve the access to thinkers like Hume, Xenophon & Montesquieu, access people like Madison and Jefferson had. Asking them to learn Greek or French to make some sense of what’s online isn’t right. My feeling about all this: the business of academia has conspired with our populist, commercial tendencies to keep ideas which changed the world away from the people who most need the world to change.

1. Why higher education? It is alien from democracy as it may purposely create inequality. It is alien from Enlightenment as it is not always practical or even particularly glorious:

Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out. But, if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science, which, for more than a century, have thrown their radiance over our land!

It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it.

- Daniel Webster, “The Dartmouth College Case”

A slippery-slope argument does not defend the right to know adequately. Moreover: in what does the life of the mind truly consist? One can attempt to say man is a rational animal. Do we act rationally or even in a primal manner when we laugh? Laughter may emphasize the peculiarity of our condition. Unfortunately, not all men laugh. How exactly we can comment on the life of the mind without anything resembling adequate self-knowledge is an open question, if it is a question.

2. The medieval and modern universities have more in common than one might suppose at first glance. The medieval university was completely separated from the world. “Discretion” and “discrimination” were central to teaching and learning. There were standards which were supposedly found in being and thus should have informed who one was. If you failed to live up to the standard, that was a sign of your weakness, not the standard’s. Often your failure could be seen as a moral wrong or lack of virtue.

All of this assumes college to be central to the formation of character. It assumes that people needed to be taken away from their families and the order of the everyday and into a place where there would be truth. And the medieval university certainly claimed to have truth. The movement from “some questions are better than others” to “there are answers to be had” was immediate. One might characterize the notion there are only questions as a “great temptation,” as it seems a book read well can make one’s life better. Surely there must be answers.

The modern university is a massive, sprawling commercial enterprise. Learning can be done anywhere, at any time, in any mode. Perhaps an institution can offer courses in languages it can’t understand with instructors hired through another government about subjects it can only name. Naming itself might be all there is to education: is this not the complete opposite of the medieval university? Place and character are irrelevant. The base acquisition of wealth cannot be compared to the religious imperatives of the past.

What of time? Ay, there’s the rub. The university implies something universal. No matter what is offered, when, it is a good. The problem with this logic is that some things are emphatically not good at a given time. If one is sick before a battle and does not participate, one might have been saved. The modern university’s attempts to be timely marginalize it in the face of know-how from commercial and military life. The medieval university’s complete neglect of anything timely probably led to the end of the medieval world itself.

3. Let us work with a simplified thought of Leo Strauss: perhaps philosophy is the quest for the whole. If so, philosophy may have to engage the competing claims of reason and revelation. This is a tension inasmuch we are wondering about how we live. It may seem reason trumps all, as we finally choose who we are. No less than Socrates, though, claims he knows nothing about teaching nobility directly. Perhaps there is a divine wisdom that allows for the choice we make. At the very least, we find it worthwhile to aspire to be certain people. Not everything about that process can be rational at first.

So now we conceive of college – a place where the liberal arts are taken seriously – as simply the reading of books. Maybe those books tell the truth, but we almost immediately see that as a whole, they contradict each other. Another simplified thought of Strauss: try to substitute the history of philosophy for the study of philosophy, and it is like substituting truth for a series of brilliant errors.

4. Does the truth make sense without opinion? For the hard sciences, absolutely. But if you’re trying to find things like “meaning” or “value,” or even trying to figure out what another age found meaning in or valued, you’ll have to make do with something complicated precisely because it seems intuitive and simplistic. “The used bookstore is one of the great gifts of civilization.” The purpose of college is “not to learn something, but to wake up so we want to learn something.” “Colleges are not social laboratories:” this applies to any university at any time, whether modern or medieval. “Philosophy exists in conversation.” The test of any institution of higher learning is whether it lets people read and talk to each other, whether the leisure Aristotle considered essential for thinking exists. That’s it. Try anything else and the university becomes inhumane. The question of human being needs to be something people address honestly, in their own ways. The medieval university skipped “human being” in order to attempt to access being directly. The modern has buried the question of being completely in order to make as much money from students as possible while declaring itself non-profit. “Colleges are not necessarily obsolete, though many are.”

That doesn’t mean I think good classes in the liberal arts are dumbed down. I tend to throw as much as I possibly can at my audience in these blog entries. But the blog is not a class, and even with the blog, I work through texts piece-by-piece. I don’t just get up there and lecture and expect people to follow everything as if they have complete mastery of the text already. Yeah, I know what I’m saying. I’m really saying that to expect people to do their homework well when it comes to the liberal arts is unreasonable.

The reason why it’s unreasonable is because we want students that have serious questions. We don’t want mastery of the material immediately. The way I think about the task of teaching is this, at the moment. Get a few basic passages into the students’ hands, along with background information and definitely some idea of how the text works. Read with them. Show them how you reason about the text and how you bring more (or in some cases, less) to it. Throw 50 million things at them now, but aim low and aim high. Low: make sure they can tell you where the important discussions are and what they roughly say. High: get them to articulate a question or thought that matters. I’m pretty sure we didn’t make a breakthrough when talking about prudence in Aristotle’s Ethics, that prudence is implied in how one does well what one does well (hence, one man/one art of the Republic leading to the guardians and the philosopher-king. Not just that the ruling art becomes someone else being able to kill others easily, but that excellent practitioners of other arts can explain what is done well, what isn’t, and judge accordingly). I wanted them to relate prudence to how they approach what they do well; the people I spoke to were very accomplished in particular ways. I know the talk I gave was pretty much forgotten as soon as I said it, and not because they didn’t pay attention. At some point, I’m up against the very nature of 18-19 year olds.

I don’t expect every student to get a serious question. In fact, I expect this “method” to fail almost as much as what I’m seeing now. It’ll probably fail for many of the same reasons, even. The difference is less in the “high” and more in the “low.” They need to be able to answer very basic things, like “Who is the intended audience of the text?” and “What is the surface teaching? How does it tend to get a bit more complex?” They need to articulate a few highlights and know some of the phrases and concepts that made it into later thought.

In other words, they need to be put in a position to revisit the text, not attempt outright mastery in a few weeks. You can’t teach when you think you know it all, because even if you do know it all, you’ve forgotten how you got where you are. The distinction between knowledge and self-knowledge could not be clearer.

So you want to get a PhD in the humanities

The main point of parody is the student, not the bitter and cynical professor. The student thinks she’s all that from having written one two “A” papers, despite getting a C in other coursework. She thinks she can write a dissertation on a general theme. She knows the name of a scholar or two, and that’s… it.

I can safely tell you that there are students like this who are getting straight A’s and are actually competent in their field who still have no business going to grad school right away. The childishness underlying their motivation is simply not acceptable, and they don’t have enough general knowledge to warrant putting them in front of a class of any sort. There is a certain worldliness necessary for teaching, and it used to not be an issue, because overgrown babies couldn’t simply rack up straight A’s. Our system now has no way of discriminating between people of a certain maturity and kids who can jump hurdles mindlessly. It’s a serious problem at certain grad schools; in other schools, the students are too worldy, too professional, not hungry enough for knowledge.

Generally speaking, my reaction to this sort of thing is *groan.* Don’t get me wrong, there are some teachers who can use this effectively, and it doesn’t come off in those rare cases as cheesy or an attempt to overstate the importance of one’s class. But those teachers are few and far between, and especially with the cultural/gender studies approaches, there’s an ideology at times. The idea, to state it very roughly, is that you can use the same tools for “deconstructing” literature to critically analyze media. Hence (and again, I’m speaking crudely), if you know how myths or folktales work – if you know they have a structure that may have some psychological bearing – you can now go to the news and see how all the reporting about the military, for example, is jingoism and nationalism of the worst sort.

I’m not going to go off on a tangent about how it’s wrong for professors to have an opinion informed by methods of analysis. Lord knows that I have plenty of biases myself, and the politics of all students have to be challenged by any professor that’s decent (any professor that’s decent, of course, will be challenging their own views as much as possible). The whole point of the university is to raise and start answering serious questions, difficult questions. The point of an education is not to make money, and anyone who does research will tell you that while we strive for new knowledge, it also depends on chance for acquisition.

It’s those last two thoughts, that this is not about making money or even creating new knowledge necessarily, which lead me far away from recommending people have every student in a course of theirs blog. Your course is not about getting attention from the whole world. You, as a professor, have the right to want attention. You know something and should share it, and truth be told, people should be eager to hear what you have to say. But your classes are a different story. Good students need to be away from the computer, unless they know exactly what they’re doing here and why. The best students get struck with the sort of numbness Meno describes to Socrates, where they can’t speak because they’ve reached an impasse. The ideas which make the world run don’t add up and never will. There are complications to every human endeavor. Giving your students some privacy so they can develop insight into those complications is far more important than demanding they answer your questions in the comments of a blog ripped from an exam.

I kinda feel sorry for the author of this article. There has to be this pretense of objectivity, this sense that there’s a real inquiry going on:

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.

It’s the reporter’s job to report, and here the report has to take the thesis seriously. Or should it? Maybe the whole field of figuring out “why students cheat” is full of crap, and maybe this is the worst article ever written since it can’t simply see that a student brazen enough to do this -

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

- is going to keep up the appearance that they don’t understand right from wrong. They can sense gullibility they can take advantage of a mile away. I would encourage anyone who thinks that the Internet and file-sharing have dulled this student’s sense of “what belongs to who” to try and take one quote from a paper that student wrote honestly, or a lyric or sample that student made, or whatnot. The fact that student would instantly be trying to gut the person who stole from him makes my case.

In fact, I can’t emphasize “gut” enough. Rutgers-Camden is where I went to school, and sure enough, it shows up as an example in the article of everything that’s wrong:

Sarah Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, N.J., said many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.

“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night.”

Yup, that’s undergrad all over again. People cheating left and right, and other students making excuses instead of admitting that most schools in America contain people who, in any country with less opportunity, would be rotting in prison somewhere.

This article actually manages to get worse:

Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

So what do people do where there are Eastern concepts? Does someone in Japan make a comic book, say, and then spread the money he makes to everyone else in Japan, because he believes they made it too? It took the Enlightenment to say there was an author, and his work is attributable to him? How the hell is this Blum person employed anywhere? I’m in the wrong field: I should get into anthropology. I would be pointing out shiny objects to fellow anthropologists and they would drool with excitement. Maybe I could even get them to give me their credit cards.

I should say that the article does end on somewhat of a high note. I’m not for throwing everyone accused of cheating or plagiarism somewhere isolated to rot. I think there’s a really powerful argument to be made that in some cases, we take what we think is plagiarism way too seriously. People will get hammered for incorrect attribution even when they’re clearly not trying to steal ideas and claim them as their own. And I don’t know how “intellectual property” is compatible with the finest literature in existence; allusion can be attacked as a theft of someone’s ideas, if this “logic” is taken too far. The existence of two extremes – a heavy-handed moralism that sees everyone as a potential plagiarist and a mushy sentimentalism that can’t see people as moral actors to begin with – tells me that a lot more people need to get out of the house. One’s sense of ethics always needs to be tested by reality. So it is somewhat refreshing to see the article return to reality:

Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.

And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation’s evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.

Doesn’t surprise me. Socrates yells at Athens in the Cleitophon for teaching everything except justice. For some strange reason, that critique holds true for us today.

I always do lots of personal journal writing when traveling. It’s out of character with most of my journal entries. Most of what I jot down are notes on books or poems with occasional rants. Sometimes there are drafts of blog posts. So I guess I can label tomorrow – when I get on a plane and fly far away from Texas – “emo day.” Getting anything read in the airport – that’s a joke, even though the books will be open around me.

But I know it will do me no good to sit and write an entry or two about how I’m not where I want to be in life, especially when I have the blog. One could say the blog’s purpose is to cultivate more interest in political philosophy, but that wouldn’t strictly speaking be correct. I run the blog: the blog attempts to demonstrate a sense of responsibility to the public for being purposefully unproductive. And yes, one day, when I’m teaching and writing for scholarly publications and advising students formally, that too is unproductive, or should be unproductive, in the best sense. Open minds are utterly useless, not making money or advancing utility, only a threat to any and all political orders, and worst of all cultivating ambiguity about knowledge itself. In seeking to know, open minds do sometimes question the value of knowledge, for the sake of knowing why they want to know.

You can see why this is a waste, as obnoxious as it is, to write in the journal for myself. It would just sit there as a form of venting. But bringing it forth publicly puts a lot of people on the spot, and should put people on the spot. It’s a disgrace that nearly every academic/scholarly publication is obsessed with things like university revenues or compliance with federal law like Title IX. That stuff’s important, sure, but if your work is on Rilke, shouldn’t you be writing about Rilke at least once in a while instead of immersing oneself in the corporate culture of the university?

It gets worse when the so-called educated take to punditry full time. I love good punditry: if you can show me newer ways of thinking about issues, along with a set of arguments and cited sources to explore, that’s absolutely wonderful. But most pundits are interested in having an opinion on every single thing, whether they have a good opinion or not. I confess, I’m guilty of this. But note that in blogging, one has to opine very often just to get a little bit of an audience, and that fragmentary/incomplete opinions are acceptable. If I was writing once or twice a week only on a very narrow set of topics, and could trust my employer to bring me an audience, I’d have a responsibility for making sure I wasn’t just watching the news and spouting off.

So far, I can sit smug and justified: my targets have been of a fatted, lazy sort. But it is not so easy to dismiss the profit motive of the educated, nor their emphasis on utility. You can’t just proclaim yourself an “open mind,” you have to work at that. And that work can’t be from mooching off of others: you must produce, for your own and their benefit, and find your leisure justly. There’s no such thing as having a responsibility as a scholar when no one cares what you had to say in the first place: I never should have started blogging, since no one asked to hear me.

Ultimately, I can’t argue against the cynicism which drives so many, which makes them want chains they can decorate with flowers later. There’s something satisfying in believing there’s a way we’ve established that works if you join the order it prescribes. To a degree, I’ll defend that establishment, that order. But that it dictates for many what should be the life of the mind is the cruelest joke of all. There’s almost no acknowledgment that making money and being useful are means, not ends in themselves. To conceive of oneself as having a public responsibility is a sense of justice very different from “I provide for myself, therefore I’m just.” The latter isn’t justice, properly speaking: it’s private satisfaction. And it’s a satisfaction I look forward to having, but on my own terms, with a success that others can share in.

There are lots of professors who rant about cultural studies because of what happens to the rest of the liberal arts. Not only do students take fewer courses in Shakespeare, for example, but new hires in the department increasingly lack competence with the material that makes one a scholar in the first place.

There are, of course, a host of other intelligent comments one can make. Perhaps the market for scholarship is distorted. Thus a whole journal no one will read except a few other academics, and which has no lasting value, has been produced. Or that academia should generally strive to be immune from hype, and to be this immersed in a pop star’s ego is a problem.

One thing is for certain – comments like this one from the interview cause me to gape:

Durbin: I think Britney Spears was the last pop star, not Gaga. If anything, Spears’ highly publicized descent represented the final fall into the void, a victim of the system. Britney and her shaved head wielding an umbrella at the paparazzi became a “monster”– Gaga, on the other hand, is the pop star resurrected as a meta-pop star. Gaga said to an interviewer at CNN: “I am whoever you perceive me to be.” She reflects back the things society projects onto pop stars. By drawing attention to her self-conscious performance of fame, she gives power to her audience.

I think the less of that interview I read, the better. Forget cultural studies – it is academic pedantry, the want to be able to comment on every single thing, that created this monstrosity.

I suppose I should tell you what it was like here 7 years ago. There were lots of people that were into the Society of St. Pius X; at one group I was a part of, any time anything went wrong, we were encouraged by the other members to pray in order to fix problems. The sort of work I do in politics, of course, was looked at with suspicion by quite a few, because I didn’t quite sign on to the idea that Plato and Aristotle were logically completed by Thomas Aquinas. I need not tell you that the religious conservatism was complemented by a set of beliefs one would call “paleo-con,” and I can’t say I disagree with some of those beliefs on a political level.

In some ways, I might be seeing the future of conservatism here, and given that conservatism is more connected to the past than the present, the future is appreciably different from what generated it. These kids take their parents’ principles to logical extremes, but they don’t have the same spirit as their parents. They can’t afford to, literally: jobs aren’t just scarce nowadays, but for those dedicated to the liberal arts or their religion, they’ve been increasingly scarce for some time. The security one needs to be conservative in the same way as their parents isn’t there.

But that doesn’t mean the people I’m meeting are particularly liberal. To speak of campus as a bubble isn’t quite right. It is a bubble, but it’s also a series of bubbles: if the children of very conservative families are any indication, it looks like the factionalization within religious conservatism (and of course political conservatism) is increasing to unheard of levels. The sharp disagreements aren’t arising to the surface as much because people are staying in their bubbles within a bubble. But forget trying to bring us all together as “we’re all Americans;” I don’t even think you could get the Catholics on this campus to agree about the universal nature of Catholicism generally.

None of this is to say anything bad is happening here, or that I’m being treated poorly. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t report what I think I’m witnessing. A lot of people here think that this place works as a community simply – everyone’s polite and welcoming and seemingly open. It’s not that simple, not at all. Aristotle strongly implies in Book 1 of the Politics that the city (polis) is the natural limit of the household; without the polis, the household becomes a tyranny – one member thinks his duty acquisition, and starts seeing the other members as instruments of acquisition. It’s not a stretch to say that the fundamental problem of all modern political ideology – right and left – is that we don’t have a sense of what is properly public. We rant at the government because we don’t really know how to deal with each other, and don’t want to.