We live in dangerous times on campus. Too many universities possess a view of education so warped as to not deserve the long-hallowed name of learning. It denies students’ full humanity, relegates faculty to narrowly specialized indoctrination and leaves our society culturally poorer in its destructive wake.
One needn’t look far for examples. We have Nicholas Meriwether — a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in southern Ohio. Meriwether faced attacks from school administrators for not using preferred pronouns in class as opposed to the biological ones that have defined sexual distinctions for millenniums. Only a court victory protected him.
Recently, Joshua Katz described the horrific treatment he received as a now-former faculty member at Princeton University. Like Meriwether, Katz refused to bend to present cultural orthodoxies. After some short-term victories, he has been dismissed from a school to which he dedicated a quarter century of teaching and scholarship. The university said it fired the professor over his inappropriate conduct with a female student. The row that sealed his fate? A confrontation over race.
The lesson from these instances is clear. Our attempts at a fulfilling education risk turning into mere exploits of narrow indoctrination. In doing so, these universities show how little they think of their faculty and their students. This soft bigotry of low expectations should not surprise us. For too long, we bought into the notion that students undertook education merely to become future workers. In this flawed vision, faculty must specialize and teach to prepare soon-to-be employees to fill their spots in the marketplace, and an overemphasis on education is placed on science, technology, engineering and math.
They set aside humanities and civics. Why? Neither discipline necessarily “prepares” one for a job. This view, however, does such a disservice to the student and the teacher. It reduces the student to a cog in the means of production. There is much to life beyond clocking in and out of a job.
True education, conversely, cultivates the entire person. It is soul-craft, not job training. The humanities show us how we should live and for what we should live. It does so through art and music, which teaches real from false beauty. Whatever sense of loveliness we possess, we need it honed and refined, instructing our eyes to see and our ears to hear. The humanities show us the how and the what of life through literature, stories that expose us to different times and reveal timeless truths about love, faith and friendship. Spend some time reading the perfect sentences (and cultural insight) of Jane Austen. See the complex depths of human nature explored by luminaries like William Shakespeare and Fyodor Dostoevsky. A student will know herself better if so exposed. And she will be better as a human being for it.
Civics recognizes our role as citizens. Politics is called a “dirty game,” a specialized cesspool of bureaucrats and special interests. To the degree that this is so, it has been warped into this sorry state due to our apathy and ignorance. But politics is noble. Its offices have been filled with good men and women — true to justice and the principles of our country. We give too little instruction to our students today in that history or on how to prepare for citizenship now.
America’s story is a great one. It tells how our principles of equality and liberty have overcome so much human error and evil. It is a tale of triumph, an exciting one not without its warnings. Students would love it, and see their continued part in it, if only they knew the real thing was there. Instead, our teaching focuses on the evils of the past, as if human perfection were easy and currently about to be reached. They learn from dry, dusty textbooks that obscure the adventure and the crisp thinking of a James Madison, an Abraham Lincoln or a Frederick Douglass. No wonder they find politics too dirty to play or too boring to participate in.
Finally, our universities slip training in humanity and citizenship back in. They cannot help themselves, since even college administrators are human. But we have a dearth of freethinking in these institutions when they do. We’re not just reading the wrong things. We seek comfortable cultural rigidity of thought, tied to the tyranny of the stormy present.
A truly thorough education takes the above documents and puts them in conversation. It pits Socrates against Thrasymachus and Lincoln versus Stephen Douglas. And, yes, it pits thoughtful speakers and writers on pressing issues of today. But a true educator sees in today’s debates the underlying kernel of permanence. A good teacher can take us back and forth between past and present, all with an eye on a better future. On that front, we have always discussed the differences in humanity that manifest in issues like sex, sexuality and race. Where age-appropriate, we should welcome their respectful discussion in the classroom. But we must not see ourselves as moral crusaders bringing on utopia, but as flawed human beings sitting at the feet of past masters, searching for the best way to move forward.
That is the world a university should encompass and represent. That is what Meriwether, Katz and their students needed and deserved. To the degree we have lost it, we should mourn. To the degree we can recover it, we must redouble our efforts in our quest to do so.
The alternative harms our dignity as human beings and as citizens — a state of being unworthy of the ideals of our great republic.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Adam Carrington is an assistant professor of politics at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
