Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and
Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
By Anthony T. Kronman
(Yale, $27.50, 320 pages)
How many English majors does it take to make a cinnamon dolce
latte? (That’s actually the set-up and the punch line.) If
current trends continue, java junkies will have to rely not on
tragically tattooed English majors but on high school drop-outs and
illegal immigrants to mix our ridiculously expensive frappacinos
and caramel macchiatos.
With university costs topping $50,000 a year and the cost of
food, fuel, insurance, and pretty much everything else rising,
majoring in the Humanities seems to make little economic sense.
Which is why universities in the US and the UK have seen dramatic
decreases in the number of students majoring in English,
philosophy, fine arts, classics and history. (The Humanities still
thrive in the rarified air of the Ivy League and Oxbridge where
money is not generally an issue, but these few schools are the
exceptions.)
Indeed the Humanities are a tough sell in the best of times, and
God knows it is tough to pay off those student loans on a barista’s
wages. Today, business savvy students are demanding more bang for
their buck, which translates into specialized training, not
education.
It is not just the new crop of students who think so. Recently
in the UK, an Education Minister drew flak when he called some
history professors “ornaments” and suggested their departments did
not deserve state funding.
Rising costs, however, cannot completely explain the decline of
the Humanities. There must be other factors at work.
The decline of the American university has been a perennially
popular subject for editorialists since Henry Adams’ day. Nearly 75
years ago, Albert Jay Nock complained that universities were
offering training, not education, for the obvious reason that
“education is a flat liability,” and a “subversive influence.” Nock
noted that, “circumstances have enabled our society to get along
rather prosperously, though by no means creditably, without thought
and without regard for thought, proceeding merely by a series of
improvisations; hence it has always instinctively resented thought,
as likely to interfere with what it was doing.”
As early as 1987, Allan Bloom’s surprise bestseller, The
Closing of the American Mind, alleged that universities had
“extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good
life.” In subsequent decades Dinesh D’Souza and Roger Kimball have
taken up the subject.
Now a self-described non-partisan academic has seen the fading
light. Yale law professor Anthony T. Kronman’s Education’s End:
Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of
Life attempts to explain why the Humanities have been
relegated to second-class status somewhere above Physical Ed, but
below HVAC repair, and what this may mean for our civilization.
AT ONE TIME the purpose of a university education was to give
future leaders an opportunity — before they shouldered the dull
burdens of civic responsibility — to explore the purpose and value
of life. By instilling a strong sense of history, of reason, of
logic, of the best of what has been thought and said, a background
in the Humanities would prepare a young scholar for whatever may
lie ahead.
This, at least, had been the belief going back to Plato’s
Republic.
Like Nock, Bloom believed the university should provide the
student with four years of freedom, “a space between the
intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary
professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.”
More important, the college years were “civilization’s only chance
to get to him.” (Somehow I doubt Tom Wolfe would agree.)
The Humanities also served a primary existential purpose, which
was to counterbalance “the defects of a democratic order” (Bloom’s
phrase), and to fill “a void by pointing to the human ends which
the ideals of liberty and equal rights are unable to prescribe,”
adds James Pierson in the New Criterion.
The Sixties Generation broke with this four-thousand-year
tradition. If the bugbears of early 20th Century radicals were the
consumer-driven economy and the thoughtless pursuit of material
comfort, then the Baby Boomers’ bete noire was Western
Civilization and all it entailed.
From then on, social change, rather than concerns about work and
consumption, would be paramount on college campuses. Such change
would not come from the government or the people, but from the
university, since the university was uniquely situated to tackle
moral issues. After all where else could one find so many smart,
morally superior persons? First, however, the university, and its
Humanities departments (the propagandizer of the elitist, racist,
sexist, imperial tradition of Western culture) must change and
adapt.
In the subsequent 40 years the radicals and their political
agenda have triumphed unopposed on the college campus, so much so
that today’s student is compelled to conform to an intolerant
progressive doctrine if he hopes to receive his sheepskin. Students
are now told that there is a single right answer and, like
the Sphinx, only he, the professor, possesses it.
Inevitably this atmosphere of conformity and groupthink results
in a sterile learning environment, where dialogue and debate are
limited for fear of uttering the wrong sentiment and facing
disciplinary action.
A RADICAL FREE MARKETER might say that the Humanities deserve their
fate since they proved unable to compete in both the marketplace
and the marketplace of ideas. However it wasn’t the marketplace
that killed the Humanities, says Kronman. Rather, it was the
one-two punch of political correctness and research
specialization.
Of these, political correctness and its offspring diversity,
multiculturalism and constructivism (which gave us such wonders as
“rainforest math” and “African math”) have done the most damage.
With more women than men on college campuses, and near majorities
of foreign students, to say nothing of the distinctive viewpoints,
experiences and traditions they bring, political correctness is
seen as an “instrument of corrective justice” — payback for the
sins of all of the Dead White Males that created the racist,
patriarchic and imperial West.
Not only are the ideas and institutions of the West and the
works that embody them no more valuable than those of other
non-Western civilizations, but professors find it difficult to
teach Western Civilization courses when they loathe its chief
representatives. Lost in this political quagmire is the question of
how we can hope to understand or appreciate or compare and contrast
ourselves to other cultures if we are wholly ignorant of our
own?
The final blow to the Humanities has come in the form of the
modern research ideal, an idea that honors and rewards original
scholarship, specialization, and incremental thinking, and whereby
academics “choose an inch or two of the garden to cultivate,” and
which the Greeks and the renaissance scholars knew was the
antithesis of true learning.
Kronman reminds us that specialization is anathema to the broad
study of the “great conversation” that has been going on throughout
the history of Western Civilization. When he focuses on original
discoveries, Kronman argues, “a scholar does not aim to stand where
his ancestors did. His goal is not to join but supersede them and
his success is measured not by the proximity of his thoughts to
theirs, but by the distance between them — by how far he has
progressed beyond his ancestors’ inferior state of knowledge,” all
of which leads him to pretentious philosophical departures like
deconstruction, where one misses the big picture by focusing on the
minutiae. As Pauline Kael’s reminded, “Taking it apart is far less
important than trying to see it whole.”
Despite the obvious doom and gloom Kronman sees reason for
optimism. Political correctness has had a 40-year run and at long
last seems to be on the wane. A few universities are even dusting
off their Great Books courses.
And then there is obstinate human nature. The instinct to find
an ultimate meaning remains as powerful as ever, it has just been
directed away from its proper home in the universities toward
fundamentalist religion, New Age spiritualism, and Barack Obama’s
campaign.
It’s time to bring the eternal questions home. Can I get a “Yes
we can?”
Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor to The
American Spectator online.
