Anti-Climacus

LINK: Jacob Levy had an interesting post a while back, on the lack of good conservative commentary on higher education, that I've been turning around in my mind ever since. As a conservative who's deeply invested in higher education, I doubt whether there can be any distinctively 'conservative' commentary that doesn't lend itself to the excesses Levy identifies, or others of a similar kind.

I bring this up because I ran across a post of Rod Dreher's on higher education and student debt. Dreher's post is fine, for the most part: the kid being profiled is mad he has to get a job once he's done with college. I don't have a problem with criticizing someone who takes on debt and feels insulted that he needs to pay it off eventually, and this kid sounds particularly annoying.

Rod describes his experience:

"The truth is, it would have been very easy for me to end up like Ken. My dad kept it from happening. I wanted to go to Georgetown for my undergraduate education, but my father said he would not permit me to assume so much debt for an undergraduate degree. I thought he was unfair, blinkered, ill-informed, you name it ... but he left me no choice other than to apply to LSU and hope for a scholarship. I did get a scholarship, and thanks to that, and to some help from my folks, I graduated debt-free. I wanted to get degrees in political science and philosophy (which I ended up minoring in), but realized early on that they would qualify me only for graduate school or law school, neither of which I was interested in. So I found a major that would enable me to put my interest in both to some practical use."

And again, no real problem here: maybe Georgetown would have been horrendously expensive, and Dreher, utilizing his journalistic talents, has done quite well for himself. He didn't want to have to go to grad school, and so didn't put himself in the position where those would've been his options (I will gently suggest that a degree in government from Georgetown might have given him more career options that the ones he lists, however, with no disrespect meant to LSU as an institution).

But this leads to a very odd comments section, where a few people express the belief that a liberal arts education may just be a waste of time. E.g.:

"Spoken like a true acamdemic, teaching 4 days a week, showing up late, leaving early, lots of vacation and sabbaticals, getting serious coin.Unless you go teach at a place like NYU, where the professors farm out the actual class work to grduate students, many of whom barely speak English.

Practically and pointedly, this is exactly this kind of advice that lead to problems this knave now has.Colleges for too long have lived in a dream world. And with the prices they charge, such advice amounts to criminal fraud. If you're going to keep making college ridiculously expensive, you ought to at least get students pointed in the right direction for their future.

And be honest with them. Nobody gets paid in thank notes and atta boys. You have to earn a living. Telling people a liberal arts degree is wonderful is simply not being honest. I would rather my sons join the military, go civil service or apprentice at a good union job like electrician or plumber than waste money on a liberal arts degree."

Now, I'm by no means convinced this is a majority position, and many of the other commenters point out that there's nothing wrong with philosophy or what-have-you. But it's been my experience that the idea of incurring debt to be educated at the best place you get accepted meets a surprising amount of resistance in the broader conservative world.

Conservative commentary from within the academy will look something like any other critique from within. I would guess that Levy and I probably differ on a number of questions of politics, but might have the same general concerns about the academy: isn't the tenure system completely arbitrary sometimes? Don't departmental politics and hiring ruin the careers of a lot of good, young scholars? Why can't we retain a strong place for the humanities instead of emphasizing pre-professional degrees?. I am fairly confident this is true, because you're committing not just to having a job, but making that job a pretty central part of your identity. So something distinctively conservative would have to come from outside. But if you have to begin that discussion by justifying liberal arts education, or that institutions like, say, Princeton, or Georgetown, or Duke contribute something to higher education that is unique, valuable, and hard to replace, it will be very difficult to generate much worthwhile commentary.