Several readers responded to my invitation and shared their thoughts on Bob Connor's essay "Is Liberal Education Hypocritical?" I welcome your continued comments on this or other subjects discussed in LiberalArtsOnline.
--Kathleen S. Wise, Editor
Read comments from:
Thomas B. Pearson, Associate Director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion
Submit your own comments.
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Thomas B. Pearson
Associate Director
Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion
Wabash College
I agree with the history Bob Connor lays out here, and his diagnosis. But what in our training prepares us for this sort of "character education?" We're specialists in our disciplinary academic fields. We're no more qualified to "build character" than a cab driver, a hairdresser, or a bartender. One used to be able to make the argument that graduate study in one of the liberal arts -- reading, say Cicero, Kant, or Thoreau, gaining the wisdom of historical study or the great ideas of literature -- gave you the perspective to "form young men." But that's not what studying literature or history is about anymore. Certainly that's not what our graduate training is, although many are still expected to teach "the great ideas" in small liberal arts colleges. That's not what our research, training or expertise is about. Perhaps it should be. But it seems to me that our current model of faculty expertise is the university researcher's pursuit of knowledge, not the liberal arts' formation of character.
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Harvey Sarles
Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (CSCL)
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis)
The question of moral education is a tricky one, as the writer suggests. But it seems important in many senses. In fact, I don't think that our very presence in the classroom is non-moral or a-moral. Whatever we are and do, is very likely to be interpreted in "moral terms" by many, if not most students.
If, on the other hand, what we're talking about refers to the pronounced subject matter or curriculum or syllabus - and the teacher/professor acts as lecturer, removed and remote from any deep involvement in whatever subject - then I think we need a long discussion. We also need an analysis of what the Liberal Arts and the University are in these times, how and why.
If by morality, we are referring to moral subjects: be nice, act right, be a good person, honest, et al., I think we are entering the larger arena of what a university and the liberal arts are. I personally try to handle all this by attempting to teach as a dialogue - in the Socratic senses - and teach "myself," hopefully as a moral person.
In the context of dialogue, much of the subject is the persona of the teacher, how she or he is and thinks, and does in the presence of everyone's being. This is a very moral task: I call it "the sacred within the secular" because I ask them to "yield" something of themselves to their teacher: me. I try to be the kind of person who deserves their trust, and hope to inspire their futures. The idea of students-as-consumers undercuts this possibility a great deal. And this is part of the current dilemma. Teaching should not be a matter of the buyer beware. (Sarles: "Teaching as Dialogue": U. Press of America 1993)
The university (including, of course) the liberal arts became essentially an amoral place about 1974, with the publication particularly of Cohen and March: "Leadership and Ambiguity: the American College President," and since then many/most administrators have operated in its terms. We began ranking universities at about this time in what I refer to as "the Harvard Pyramid" and watch one another more than thinking about what a university or the liberal arts should be. We do as they do, and pay our faculty more if they get a job offer at a "better" place than ours. Morality wanders all over the place as we try to place high on U.S. News and World Reports of our rankings.
A thoughtful administrative colleague of mine referred to this time as an "abdication of administration." Being a moral teacher, a teacher of morality is not so easy in these current contexts. Being in the Liberal Arts and treated like a jerk (a reference to a colleague in our most "important" dept. in terms of how his students will earn lots of money, and ours won't), doesn't much help.
Certainly higher education has changed a great deal, particularly since the entrance of big money after Sputnik in the late 1950s. In my University of Minnesota, for example, Engineering took over most of the science depts. including math (except biology - which split between medicine and agriculture). And, in many ways, this was an early move toward the apparent amorality of these disciplines.
This left the Liberal Arts as the Social Sciences and the Humanities in some less important place, the lesser of the two cultures which Snow described very well in 1959. And the sciences and the liberal arts haven't talked much together since that time. This raises questions of whether the liberal arts are themselves moral in the sense of the meaning of the university: or are they just poor cousins?
Then administration became professional: lifetime work; rather than faculty moving in and out of administration. Most college/university presidents these days are primarily money raisers. And, it is important to note, there is hardly a distinguished president that we hear much about, in their numbers.
Last - for a while at least - the liberal arts changed a great deal during the 70s as we came "under law." We were able to be sued if we did not specify exactly what a course-to-come would be. The syllabus is already like a contract with the future: except that the future in which the students will live, is mostly foreclosed in the context of clearly mapped syllabus, which leaves little room for spontaneous expression, interaction, change, growth. I wonder how moral all this is.
Teaching morality is, for many of us, teaching ourselves as well as our pronounced subject matters. If we live and practice in a not-very-moral setting; well, that's much of the problem.
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David Pearce Snyder
Consulting Futurist
david@the-futurist.com
I believe it is widely accepted that the WWII veterans who dominated post-secondary student bodies between 1945 and 1955 led America’s newly secular colleges to abandon the ritualized vestiges of their religious roots. Worldly wise, war weary, mature men and women simply ignored requirements to attend weekly chapel, and the opportunities to participate in ethical dialogues with faculty. They also chose to eschew courses that addressed the "Big Questions;" students on the "GI Bill" were well past adolescence. By the time the flood of pragmatically-minded veterans receded from America’s campuses, many institutions of higher education – especially small liberal arts colleges – had been stripped of any significant formal moral/ethical dimension. The Baby Boomers filled this vacuum with a purposeful moral action agenda. But, once that agenda – free speech, civil rights, U.S. withdrawal from SE Asia, environmental protection, women’s liberation, etc. – was putatively achieved and the Boomers graduated, American higher education was left with neither an ethical dimension nor a moral agenda, which is how we find them today.
Surely, to attempt to apply a veneer of traditional moral-ethical content on contemporary liberal arts programs would be the height of hypocrisy. As [Connor’s] essay insightfully points out, what is missing is a modern "vocabulary, metaphors and exempla (real and imaginary) needed to think [these questions] through." I believe that IT offers two avenues for creating and engaging with such a vocabulary:
The next generation of computer games will incorporate both artificial intelligence and virtual personalities designed to engage players on broader emotional and intellectual planes, in which moral-ethical choices will be required and their consequences will be experienced.
Socrates is said to have lamented a teacher’s inability to follow students into adult life, to see which lessons proved to be helpful, and which lessons needed revising. Today, the Internet makes it possible for students and their teachers to maintain a continuity of relationship following graduation. While computer simulations will be able to provide young people with an infinity of "imaginary exempla," alumni would be reporting back moral dilemmas from the real world.
An ongoing dialogue between faculty and their former students as they progress through life would provide the means by which common, real life moral-ethical choices could be raised and discussed. A 2003 survey of U.S. employees by the Ethics Resource Center found that 22% of all U.S. workers had witnessed misconduct in the workplace, 2/3 of whom reported the misconduct to management. But only 43% of workers under 30 said they had reported the misconduct they had seen. This disparity in the rate of "reportage" suggests the existence of either a moral learning curve or an inter-generational culture shift. In either case, a continuing on-line dialogue involving current students and faculty, recent graduates and older alumni – engaging sophomoric idealism and naiveté with immediate real-world experience and old alums’ long-term perspectives – would provide a legitimate basis for evoking a consensual moral-ethical vocabulary for the new millennium.
It would also revivify the social legitimacy of liberal arts colleges.