…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.

When I look back, I’m embarrassed at how uptight and socially awkward I was [in high school]. I know that a lot of creative adults look back and say, “Oh, I was such a nerd!” almost like a badge of pride. It’s just that I have a feeling I was a little dorkier than most.

You can already tell why I felt the need to give this post more attention. More than most places online, tumblr features a number of kids who are upfront about their identity, the “fact” they don’t fit in, are not terribly aware (awareness takes a LOT of experience) but at times really suspicious & hostile. I know it’s important to focus on the fact some really, really bad social habits can be learned at a younger age. I go to a university where quite a few people think they’re awesome being social because they talked to someone who wasn’t part of their immediate family once. The kinds of awkwardness religious fundamentalism can create may be a different set of issues, but I’m not so sure nowadays. One of the things that stunned me about my little old conservative university was how much the cliquish, small-group dynamic had in common with stories from Oberlin and Reed.

Anyway. The author comments further:

It’s hard for me to tell if I didn’t really fit in with much of my graduating class or if I habitually pre-excluded myself before others could reject me, to my own detriment. Facebook tends to support the former interpretation, confirming that the people I’d written off continue to do shit that’s of little interest to me. As for the latter, it’s like, I met up with my friends Tyler and Danielle, both of whom went to my high school. It was so enjoyable to talk to them, and I regretfully thought about all the people I might have been friends with in high school if I had been brave enough to try.

I don’t feel like I’m all that much older than a high school student—I’m 23—but the people in my graduating class have grown in different directions. The conventional wisdom that weird-ish kids grow up to do cool shit turned out to be pretty true, like how Tyler is a boy genius who wrote for the NYT already at like, 21, and Danielle makes hand-painted bike helmets.

What’s neat is how perception is changing, even at 23. It seems like Facebook confirms that yes, most people in high school were losers. And that our author’s friends are awesome. So that’s it, right? We’re done here! Everybody on tumblr can go back to rejoice in being weird, knowing that success will follow.

But it’s obviously not that simple. There are people who she could have met if she’d been “brave enough to try.” We know Facebook isn’t going to contain any of the really interesting things people do. I don’t post status updates like “writing on whether Nietzsche has a conception of Christian epistemology that he rejects,” and yet that’s what I’ve been up to today. People have “grown in different directions.” When you realize “hey, I’m 23,” you also realize “hey, I can definitely be surprised.” This leads to some advice that’s pretty good:

Being awkward around people is really painful at first, cause you can often tell when someone is judging you, but you can outgrow it through trial and error, basically, and then social interactions can be painless and even fun.

This is solid advice. I don’t usually go this direction because I think people have to bring something to social interactions – real curiosity about a person, a willingness to learn, knowledge of their own that they won’t bully someone with. In fact, it’s helpful to be reminded that kids feel like they’re being judged all the time. After all, they’re aware of the judging they’re doing on a continual basis. More on how we can create a less “defensive” world later. For now, I think I’d better learn to be less awkward around people myself.

Even if the students know the basics, there are traps. It isn’t like they can immediately relate to the material personally. In most cases, they just learned it a week ago. Are they really supposed to have the mastery you’ve acquired over years? And school goes on forever nowadays. A conversation with students where you think you’ve hit the wavelength is many times their knowing how to say one sensible-sounding thing in the midst of you saying 99 things that go over their head. They can read the psychological cues you give. It’s not clear when you’re connecting with them in the classroom.

I still insist most teachers are wasting an opportunity. You can’t open all minds, but you can still open some minds and sustain the ones being battered by pressures all around. Everyone tells young people nowadays to do everything, and the worst part is that they’re actually making good on that advice despite hours upon hours in front of video games and texting. There’s no realization on the part of students of the question “Why is learning important?” because we’ve reduced education to cliches. Work hard, get the grades, get success…. oh wait, the cliches are completely empty. How are we going to complete the list? Tell them they’re going to pay taxes for unsustainable, unrealistic budgets with no hope of being changed? Tell them that their merit will be rewarded in systems marked by nepotism, corruption, waste and false promises? Should we tell them that what we really want is for them to go into massive amounts of debt so they can sustain our fanciful notions of financial options that never lose money?

I’m not saying you should go to your students and hammer them with activism. Far from it. This world sucks, and to a large degree, they’re actually innocent. We need them to take the material seriously for its own sake and find the wisdom we are continually failing to find. The best lecture I attended recently was on Rousseau and concerned his rhetoric in the Social Contract. He seems to push the notion of the “general will” as if it has no complications, but a close look at what he says shows he has reservations about human nature to consent unproblematically to good laws. By “recently,” I mean that lecture was some months ago. I remember it partly because Rousseau’s voice was presented as serious, dealing artfully with difficult problems that marked his day. Not every student can respond to material like that, but that’s why we have institutionalized learning. The chances of getting a response increase considerably when there are a bunch of different classes, different teachers, different subjects they’re taking. It isn’t the worst thing to be ambitious as a teacher. The worst thing is to reduce repeated attempts to monotony.

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.

Scott Adams’ “How to Get a Real Education” contains quite a bit of advice that’s pretty good for the campus I’m on right now. But the campus I’m on right now is a strange place. The undergraduates are almost always studying; the academic workload for many classes would cause me to fail, even now; there’s virtually nothing to do off-campus if one doesn’t have a car. Most of Adams’ advice boils down to “take the initiative and do something, take risks.”  But I’ve been at different schools where every other student is trying to run a business while taking courses while dating a steady girlfriend while helping the homeless… you get the idea. There’s something really important about college being a time where it is, for the most part, you and the books alone. Obviously that can be taken to an extreme, as I think it is by many students here. But as I tell the undergraduates at times: “This is the only time in your life where people care that you learn something. After this, if you want to read a book, people will look at you strangely. Why aren’t you doing something to further your career? Why aren’t you making more money? Why aren’t you married? This is the one time where you are encouraged to work with difficult ideas, to be so much more than our limited imaginations. We need you to be more than merely successful; we need you to understand, appreciate, and become independent in the highest sense.”

I didn’t want to go to the school-planned events. I wanted to sit and talk  in comfort and catch up with a variety of things. So I went over a friend’s, also an alumnus of the school, whom I hadn’t seen in a few weeks. I didn’t expect it to be a gathering of any sort. I just wanted to touch base on a few things and ask how things were going.

Several Guinness’s and some Fra Angelico later, I was not only rather relaxed, but very glad I had gotten to meet at least two new people, catch up with my friend, drop a few jokes that weren’t bad, and most importantly hear some serious conversation about the role of will and reason in Catholic theology. You can’t imagine how thrilled that last made me. One of things I was muttering to myself while watching hordes of underclassmen wear the “Groundhog” official t-shirt is that this is the wrong way to celebrate the birth of any university. Groundhog started unofficially, with people  getting blasted in the woods to “celebrate.” It had to be made official because things got out of hand. I’m not saying unofficial is “wrong,” and I certainly have no particular objection to inebriation.

But I am saying that a university’s most precious possession is precisely what it doesn’t possess any longer. I was thinking to myself all day “hey, wouldn’t it be great to get alumni on campus to just talk to underclassmen about their experiences?” Too often, we load this with an agenda of our own. We want our most successful graduates to talk, as if an education didn’t do something more important for those unsuccessful. Perhaps it steeled them against the obstacles life throws, prepares them for greater challenges and greater success. Heck, maybe all people have something to contribute about the worth of an education, a perspective to share. Maybe that perspective is important, because the crucial thing lacking among students and many faculty is experience.

What I got to hear tonight is what mattered to people who are out in the world and working for what they feel matters. As you know, this blog has virtually no posts devoted to theology. It’s not that it doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s just that it means that much more to others who went to an institution that is educating me. Some people have openly called me a philosopher. That may be my title, but I don’t think an institution needs to be philosophic in the least to show respect and appreciation for their alumni, to let the fruits of its efforts speak and be heard.

I’ve been talking to a number of freshmen. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to create a proper learning environment. We’re doing, as a university, a very poor job of explaining the basic significance of the texts we make them read. The more thoughtful, better readers can grasp the peculiarities. A very good student picked up on how Dante is changing all throughout Inferno. He’s being made harder, moving from some sort of sentimentality into an awareness of the larger problems. But I can safely tell you that observation will be for naught if we don’t discuss things like the historical significance of Dante. For example, we could say he looks back to the classical world in order to bring some notion of politics into a time which has virtually no concern for such a thing. We could say a bit more about the significant number of people who took serious risks merely writing to bring about the world we have today, for better and for worse.

Quite a few are doing the work and they want to know the relevance of what they’re doing. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to stop making them think school is merely jumping through hoops and instead give them a bit more of a narrative they can use to teach each other. I realize now I’ve made this critique before: Why the Liberal Arts? I’m making it a bit more urgently now that I’m seeing good students burning out because of work I myself would not do.

I’m also wondering how hard it would be to create a more active sort of career services. One that worked to sell our undergraduates’ merits to employers, as opposed to placing emphasis on the undergraduate doing everything. I’m not blaming any school in particular for this. It’s just strange to me that all our rhetoric about the future doesn’t result in any real recruitment, any attempt to create opportunities for others. Rather, we’re all in a sort of defensive mode, worried about the fact there are other people, worried about the fact they might want something. Our educational crisis is ultimately a political crisis. We can’t explain the significance of the liberal arts because everything has to be personal. That people fought and died for ideas, for causes, is beyond our ken, even as the books are staring us in the face.

The High-School Picture [or: Why Tumblr is Worse for Students than most other Social Media] →

All social media can encourage some terrible habits that discourage studying and make people actively hate learning anything. All of you know this: you can spend hours trying to get the right song for your Myspace profile or taking pics of yourself. You’ll spend tons of time messaging girls on Facebook in the hope of some response. Twitter becomes an excuse just to go some place to tweet about it.

But yeah, Tumblr might be the worst of the bunch, given the habits I’ve seen here. Typically, to produce content on the Internet, one has to read something or consider what is worth talking about.

Tumblr’s main strength – the ease of content-production – is a fatal flaw. From 14-18 years of age (at least), you kids need to be reading, not reblogging the same photo of Megan Fox every single day. You need to be reading above and beyond classwork, not just barely doing your assignments.

Why am I placing such an emphasis on reading? Go look at Myspace profiles of people 30 and older. Note how most people are into the same bands they were into during their high school years. Note how most of them haven’t read a book in years, and if they have, it probably wasn’t Hemingway or Steven Pinker. Ask yourself: how did people get this way?

It’s really simple when you think about it: after college, that’s it. Your ability to talk with your friends dwindles down to nothing, life is work and making money. Not only is the time you have reserved for friends pretty much “going to the bar” or “going to church,” but your time to learn anything is radically diminished. And no one cares if you make progress teaching yourself: your job is to make money. That’s adulthood, taking care of yourself so that way no one else has to take care of you.

If that seems a really shallow conception of maturity, it is. And that’s why reading is so critical – it isn’t just that, at your age, you can read about the careers you want and excite your imagination. It isn’t just that you can relate to the innumerable people over the ages who were hurt by love (cf. “If I can stop one heart from breaking”). It isn’t just that reading better things on the Internet will make you a better student and make school that much easier.

No, it’s also that the only way to break the immature conceptions that dominate life nowadays is to bring serious opinions to bear on them. Serious opinions can’t be had in 140 characters or less. The only way you’re going to be a generation that transforms the world for the better is if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t read, you don’t have a chance of doing that.

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.