Comments on: Playing the Odds

By: Oona Houlihan

Oona Houlihan — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 19:55:13 +0000

The problem is what is a “better person”? Those hooligans that ran secret prison torture camps in Europe after 9/11 that came from US higher education from an institution that believes it only recruits the “best and brightest” (the CIA amongst others)? Is this the genteel elite? “… the study of history can teach empathy …” Only to those who might one day be in need of it. The US traditionally sees itself as invincible and thus its elites, q.v. the export of “democracy” to e.g. Iraq, have no notion of empathy as other, smaller and less equipped, communities have. But even inside – the US with its world-wide record in prison population should seriously consider if the “soft underbelly” in its higher education is not actually a thick layer of mold.

By: CCPhysicist

CCPhysicist — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 14:42:41 +0000

I’ve always felt that this is a false dichotomy. The liberal arts (narrowly construed to leave out math and some of the sciences) provide “career-ready skills”. An engineer works with clients who are usually regular citizens (city council, business owners, developers) or for a boss who is often not an engineer. Writing and presentation skills, as well as social knowledge, are critical at that level. Similarly, a doctor has to relate to patients, not just other doctors.

Maybe faculty from the “other side” need to go to alumni meetings for the engineering or medical college and see what those folks say after 10 or 20 years on the job and build that into their thinking about how to improve the quality of the people who graduate from their university.

By: thm

thm — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 16:10:44 +0000

One argument for disciplinarity in the context of a non-instrumental approach to education is that the act of delving deeply into a subject matter is itself an intellectual skill, one which we expect liberally-educated adults to posses, and one which one learns by doing. This does not address whether our contemporary set of disciplines is optimal in any way, as long as there is some set of disciplines within which a student can delve deeply.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 13:46:36 +0000

In reply to DavidS. Oh! Thank you. That's a typo. I will fix it.

By: DavidS

DavidS — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 13:35:56 +0000

Like many of your essays, this is very good, but too complex to give a quick reply to. Instead, I’ll just point out a confusing typo.

“[I]f you’re a moral philosopher … you really need to think … that the disciplined study of moral philosophy provides systematic insights into morality and ethics. And if it does, it should seem like a big leap to suggest that such insight should allow those who have it to practice morality better than those who have not.”

You mean “shouldn’t seem”, right? I can imagine that the study of moral philosophy could make the field seem less useful (experts on quantum mechanics, or Goedel’s theorem, generally view their subjects as less practical than new age authors do), but I don’t think that is what you are arguing.

By: Mark S.

Mark S. — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 12:18:33 +0000

Tim,

Great post and lots to think on. I have two comments, one small, one larger (and a question).

First, I don’t think we need to have whiggish interpretations of our discipline to a) defend it and b) justify citations practices. We could either be a) keeping traditions of thought alive or b) finding ways to describe an every-changing world. The first should be self-explanatory. For the second, since the world is always changing around us, it could be argued that previous knowledge is not being built upon (and therefore less useful then current knowledge) but instead it no longer helps us to describe/understand/explain current experience. Therefore we need to cite previous traditions and scholarship to show how we apply it to these new situations. Progress doesn’t really apply here no?

Secondly, I would love to see how you would design curriculum that has “much less regularity, predictability and structure”. It seems that you are saying that classes need to be taught (broader curriculum developed?) so that they are not meant to produce Historians, Political Scientists, Philosophers, etc. While a small percentage may go onto to become these things, undergraduate education needs to be about something else. My questions is how can we get there and what does it look like to NOT have classes and curriculum developed around a discipline? How do we take away regularity and structure and still (possibly?) keep rigor?

BTW, I ask not because I don’t think it is possible but instead to pick your brain on this.

By: CarlD

CarlD — Sun, 27 Jul 2014 18:06:59 +0000

I like very much how you’ve located a big chunk of the problem in (sometimes defensive) disciplinary siloing and a general bunker mentality (austerity again). I regularly wonder how colleagues who demonize the business school without actually talking to anyone over there, or being curious about what they’re up to, then think they’ve got the keys to the big picture. To me the wisdom bus we want to throw ourselves and the students in front of is the making connections bus – connections to other people, other practices and priorities, other data sets, and so on. That’s where we’re not just a tech school, whether it be for business or engineering or history. I do think that if we could get clear about this, we could improve the odds of students getting hit by that bus by doing cross-disciplinary, integrative studies more intentionally. But, who will teach the teachers?

By: In the provinces

In the provinces — Sun, 27 Jul 2014 16:59:03 +0000

Part, I think, of what you want to see in a liberal arts education is achieved in the act of good teaching. Professors who visibly love their subject, who display enthusiasm in talking about it, writing about, discussing it, are demonstrating to students that there are other values in life than purely instrumental ones, such as earning a living–not that earning a living is any way to be despised, of course. Scientists can demonstrate such an attitude, too, and the very best do so. But it’s harder for them, because the intellectual gap between the classes they teach undergraduates and the scientific research they do is noticeably greater than that between the undergraduate curriculum in the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and scholarship in these disciplines on the other.

By: Leon Conrad

Leon Conrad — Sun, 27 Jul 2014 09:37:04 +0000

Thanks for posting one of the more thoughtful and insightful pieces about the Liberal Arts approach to education – it’s my contention that if humanities and STEM faculties saw the common basis of their approaches and built jointly on those; if educational practice became more integrated, it would be – by definition – integrative. It would help a person integrate the practical and the theoretical, the objective and the subjective, the personal and the social, to transcend these and more dichotomies. If educational practice consciously strove towards finding ways of exploring ways of balancing conflicting views, through dialectical enquiry, then the practice would be more likely to achieve what you state the aim of any education worth its name should be – an education that ‘increase[s] the probabilities that our students will not just know specific things and have specific skills but achieve wisdoms that they otherwise could not have found.’
The question remains – how do we achieve this in practice? It’s a question I engage with actively in my own work as an educationalist and educator (liberalisbooks.com; odysseygrids.com) – and in which I find the most fulfillment, but I’m painfully aware I can’t have all the answers and would love to hear from others who are walking the same path, to share ideas and learn from each others’ experience and practice.

By: mch

mch — Sat, 26 Jul 2014 08:24:36 +0000

To this insightful, important essay, let me add: scale. “The” liberal arts always imagines itself in some face-to-face community. In just the last two days, I have had three conversations immediately relevant to my point. One with my hairdresser, with whom I discussed (she actually raised the topic) the new museum space in town (she had visited it; I still have not, though my husband practically lives there). One with the two young men (yes, men) who clean our house every week (they are suspicious of Occupy, disappointed in Obama, sweetly defensive of their maybe mildly racist parents); one with a student working here this summer as a research assistant — a full scholarship student (white, Scottish-surname, from CA — go figure) — who was absorbed in a NYR of Books until I interrupted him in the library with my hello.
Hell, I’ve had ten conversations, at least, in the last few days (when I’m not writing or tending my garden — the activities I chiefly define my summer by — I do get out), were I to include every conversation with this or that person I know casually.
Let me use the lovely young men who come to clean. They cleave to me — I am a nice professor lady, after all — as I cleave to them — they are these lovely, smart, hardworking, and imaginative young men, whose thoughts about the world I am eager to hear. (The teacher in me self-censors: don’t interject, just listen; reply in a way that respects their views but suggests, perhaps, a different way of thinking…. What games of self-censorship are they playing, I wonder?)
None of my experiences unusual, I think, in or out of academia — on a certain scale, one small enough that not too many intermediaries intervene. But a scale that also presupposes worlds beyond, and is longing for them.