LiberalArtsOnline Volume 5, Number 6
June 2005
Should colleges and universities carry some responsibility for developing character in their students? Or should they step back from such an undertaking to focus on disciplinary teaching? This month Bob Connor, president of the philanthropic Teagle Foundation, questions whether liberal education is hypocritical, particularly regarding its influence on students’ morals and ethics. How far do you believe the obligations of higher education institutions extend? We would like to explore this question more in future issues of LiberalArtsOnline. I invite you to share your views on this important subject.
--Kathleen S. Wise, Editor
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Is Liberal Education Hypocritical?
by W. Robert Connor
President, The Teagle Foundation
[This essay originally appeared February 24, 2005, on the Teagle Foundation website.]
Is liberal education, as currently practiced, hypocritical?
When, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, long-established American colleges and universities became secular, they usually retained some of the old language about what they hoped to achieve. To be sure, the goal of developing moral conduct turned into talk of "values clarification," and "vocation" lost its etymological tie to the idea that God actually called people to certain forms of work, and "character development" gave way to "growth of the whole person." But wherever "liberal education" was affirmed, some claim, it seems, had to be made about the ethical effects of that education.
But how were those effects to be achieved? Compelling students to practice a religion in whose tenets they might not believe was repugnant and, albeit slowly, abolished in all but religiously affiliated institutions. No one wanted to stand in loco parentis in supervising students’ social and sexual lives. Advisors had enough to do navigating students through the increasing complexities of the curriculum. College presidents confessed themselves unprepared, not to say incompetent, to teach the obligatory senior course in moral philosophy as their predecessors had. They had better things to do. And faculty? We had our research, our professional obligations to tend to, and besides, most of us were reluctant to lay claim to any kind of moral knowledge. Researchers in higher education report that "since 1989 faculty have become less interested in . . . students’ character" (G. Kuh "Does Environment Matter?" Journal of College and Character, 2 (2004) p.1, citing L. J. Sax, A. W. Astin, and others in The American College).
And, in recent years at least, students seem to have been searching not for "a meaningful philosophy of life" but "to be very well off financially." [Just look at "The One Graph You Have to See," also on Teagle’s website.] Why worry about character if what they want is money?
So, yes, liberal education in most secular institutions is hypocritical. It professes in one way or another to be concerned with character, but refuses to take the steps necessary to develop that character. It’s not as if we don’t know how to do it, as Kuh points out. We don’t want to do it, apart from legislating a course or two in "moral reasoning."
And rightly so. Developing someone else’s moral character is a tricky business. It easily morphs into advocacy, proselytizing, self-promotion, psychological games of various sorts, the imposition of assorted ideologies or orthodoxies, intolerance, even intimidation. No thanks. Better not to do it at all than to do it badly.
The best strategy for avoiding hypocrisy, then, may be to eliminate all claim to be concerned with character. Leave that to others. Our business is to get on with the work for which we were trained—the advancement of disciplinary knowledge.
There are, however, consequences to this strategy. Three come immediately to mind. One is that the questions and issues with the greatest capacity to energize students’ minds and engage their spirits get driven out of the classroom. Do students appear apathetic—unengaged? Maybe there’s a reason for it. If the energizing questions are banished, is it surprising that students are disengaged?
Second, in our zeal to avoid hypocrisy, we may break the implicit contract between higher education and society. American society, through philanthropy, tax breaks, and other forms of support and encouragement, continues to expect that colleges will produce graduates who contribute to the well-being of society. Every time there is another corporate scandal, citizens turn to see if colleges and universities behave as if integrity mattered.
Third, in late adolescence students need to engage with the Big Questions: What am I going to do with my life? What obligation do I have to others? What will really bring satisfaction? The questions are strongly in their minds. What’s missing is the vocabulary, metaphors, and exempla (real and imaginary) needed to think them through. If these questions are not explored in the curriculum, they go underground, get dealt with simplistically or in half-baked ways, or eventually get pushed aside and displaced by the enticing quest for wealth and status.
These thoughts were in my mind when a talk by Stanley Katz called my attention to John Stuart Mill’s Inaugural Address at the University of Saint Andrews in 1867. Translating Mill’s views from nineteenth-century Britain into contemporary America is not easy, but his main idea, I am convinced, is still right:
The proper business of a university [is] not to tell us from authority what we ought to believe, and make us accept that belief as a duty, but to . . . help us form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings, who seek for truth at all hazard, and demand to know all the difficulties, in order that they may be better qualified to find or recognize the most satisfactory mode of resolving them.
In that paragraph, I like best Mill’s pronouns. He uses we, not "I" and not "they." "We," in the first instance, is clearly the faculty, whose members themselves need the help of the university in forming their own belief. That "we," however, is unrestricted and ready to reach out to and encompass all members of the university. Students and faculty brought together in a first person plural. Imagine, then, a communitarian Mill!
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For more information on this topic, the author suggests two of his other essays:
• Moral Knowledge in the Modern University (Appearing in Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999)
• Greed is Not Enough (Founder’s Day speech, given at Duke University, October 3, 2002) (pdf)
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