Two interventions in the latest round of the CCOA debate. Tangential to that line of argument, and so here, not there.

1. Phoebe writes, in the comments: "If the entire system were to change, and everyone just went to the nearest state school, rather than to a school tailored to needs or preferences of students like them, then maybe we could have a conversation about what College consists of, down to the specific texts."

I find it interesting that these arguments are always at elite liberal arts colleges or Ivy League schools, and never (one MOOC revolt aside) at places like Virginia, UNC, or my alma mater, Michigan. Conservatives at Michigan would complain about the University-mandated Race and Ethnicity requirement, but mine was fulfilled learning about the treatment of the Irish by the British in the early 20th century, so it was kind of a hollow complaint. The reason is, largely, that once a university passes a certain size, it becomes logistically impossible--and kind of silly--to assume the purpose of a university education is unitary. Education then requires many departments with many professors, and so by definition a large number of successful paths. The intricacy of major requirements was usually tied to the size of the department, if only because it became difficult to ensure what classes might be available the larger (and thus more irregular) the department gets; the ability to specialize increases with departmental size. (A department with 50 professors each teaching (say) a 2-1 where half of them get to teach a course based on their research is likely to produce some questionable-seeming courses even if the curriculum as a whole is conventional.) If the scenario Phoebe envisions were to come to pass, I would expect this would make a conversation about what college consists of, down to the specific texts, impossible (this, of course, supports Phoebe's overall point).

And, goodness, class size: I took exactly five classes with fewer than 40 students: two sections of Spanish (at about 30), my two senior seminars in philosophy and political science, and one We Need a 400-level Course to Get Our Philosophy Degree. Seminar-style pedagogy is barely possible with the Chicago-mandated Core course size of 19: it is impossible above 40. As a teacher, your aims and outcomes need to be radically different, not least because the students have different expectations. There were 400 people in my Intro to Political Theory, 45-60 for my course on Dante, a similar number for my course on the Russian novel, near 100 for my British history in the 20th century courses, 45-60 in every art history course I took. There's less discussion, more lecturing, more emphasis on getting students to do synthetic work in papers and exams to demonstrate they have done some learning on their own, and professors tend to be thrilled to get students in office hours who just want to talk about their subjects. Come to think of it, the perfect conservative university education may be hiding at big state schools, even right now.

2. Having taught the Core-iest of social science Core courses, and having received my education from Michigan in what was a (voluntarily chosen!) classics-oriented manner, I am willing to venture the opinion that the second is superior to the first. The reason is simple: repetition. Approximately one year of exposure to the classics and then a conventional university education in another subject will not (necessarily) leave a student in a noticeably better place. Students tend to grasp Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Marx, only at the point the course moves on to another figure, and so what remains is rarely coherent and situated in the right context. The eventual result is, depending on the level of reference you prefer, the character in Balzac's Lost Illusions who likes to quote Ciceronian maxims to prove how educated he is, though he long ago forgot the context for any of them, or Father Guido Sarducci's Five-Minute University; the persistence of people who read Aristotle long ago and are positive they remember what he said is astounding. Reading Shakespeare, or Milton, or Aristotle, or Locke only once will rarely make much of an impact: reading it a number of times in different circumstances will. So apart from an attempt to mandate not just introductory course selection, but all course options, it seems like this will fail; and even if all course options were mandated, it'd still require the will of the individual student to make it work.

Boy howdy:

Some describe conservative life in their liberal enclaves as akin to living “underground” or being in the “counterculture.” This romantic feeling of embattlement is fundamental to the undergraduate conservative’s identity. “I really have been able to fine-tune my arguments and my thoughts and my politics as a result of being around so many liberal people,” says one student. “I really sincerely feel that you become a much lazier thinker if you are part of the majority because you just aren’t challenged that much,” says another.

The latter half is generally true: for whatever reason, students who perceive themselves to be sledding against the majority write better papers. The first half is more problematic, especially given how widespread the culture of conservative victimhood is, and how paradoxical: "Those two contradictory cries—the left have overrun our campuses! the media overstate the student left’s strength!—sum up the overdeveloped sense of siege that has long animated conservatism." The very strong tendency is to read every thought, development or behavior through the ongoing and neverending battle. It's not just that the battle is ongoing, it's that it can never possibly end, and this view tends to warp exactly the sort of sustained reflection conservatism prides itself on; if one is on the team, one gets a hearing. Otherwise not. (For evidence, look at the furious energy expended on tearing down Wendell Berry after he expressed his favorable view of same-sex marriage--'he has betrayed our side the in battle therefore he must be wrong!' I never had use for Berry before, and don't now, but the energy devoted to undermining him is furious and unseemly.)

Explanation offered:

"where, indeed, the main current of campus conservatism did seem to be Catholic monarchism merged with Austrian economics - a phenomenon for which I would still appreciate an explanation"

American university student conservatism tends towards these highly incompatible extremes because American university students are 18-22 year olds who wish to rebel against the status quo, and for whom moderate left-liberalism can constitute a status quo no less than religious fundamentalism or small-town conservatism. Some kids go in for Neitzsche and critical theory, some go in for in-your-face atheism, some go for drugs, some go for Catholic monarchism merged with Austrain economics. The fact that they're incompatible makes the act of rebellion that much more rebellious.

But, like all adopted college personas, the extremes mostly fade over time. Worry more about the 25 year-old who still holds to both.

Just a thought: it's always seemed strange to me the unwillingness of people who lived through the 60s to let them go, in much the same way that conservatives who lived through the academic culture wars of the late 80s and early 90s never let them go. The world always must be interpreted through the framework of those times, regardless of whether they inform the world as it exists now: this seems especially true of academia, where it was sometimes hard to get my colleagues at Princeton to believe there was no academia-wide conspiracy against conservatives, and that standard paradigms and 'theory' in its various permutations are out--no one in international relations works in terms of realist-v-liberal, and Catherine MacKinnon and Alan Bloom are equally irrelevant. In attributing these to anything in particular, I've tended to assume it was the effect of older people remembering their youth in all its vibrancy, and forgetting that youth was 30--or 50--years ago.

But I do wonder: perhaps there's something in the nature of contemporary American conservatism that makes this much more likely: conservatism has dedicated itself so much to remembering that it has forgotten how to forget. Yes, there are things of great importance that fall out of cultural memory even though they continue to have an impact. There are also many things of the moment whose impact is vastly overstated and really do cease to have any motive force. The trend is to conservative thought is to remember everything, and so vastly overstate the influence that past trends have on present trends; it makes it difficult for anything to be novel because it assigns some intellectual patrimony to everything, even when it is unclear on how those things are to be linked.

Thus people who defend, say, the hook-up culture must be picking up on trends from the 60s and 70s, because they have to be picking up on trends from somewhere (one wonders whether two people might independently arrive at the same thought, a Newton and Leibniz of social thought). But this also attenuates the real work of linking these trends, because vague cultural influences supercede acknowledged ones: the question is not whose work is being cited, and what arguments are being lifted in large part if without citation: it is what geist is being channeled, which allows influences and trends to be as vast and multifarious as need be (an excellent example being the size of the part of the country that subscribes to quote-unquote traditional sexual morality: a majority or minority, depending on who is asking).

One additional note about the same-sex parenting study, a partial agreement with Will Saletan on this question: apparently a good deal of criticism has been directed not just at the study but at the study's funders, including the Witherspoon Institute. As it happens, I know a number of the people at the Institute, and similarly know a number of people involved with Opus Dei at various levels. I disagree with them on a number of political, philosophical and religious questions, but the conspiracy-minded can look elsewhere: they are pretty much exactly the same as everyone else. If there's anything salutary about the study and the related conservative approach to academia, it's the idea that the methods of normal academic inquiry are the proper way to go about settling questions of the empirical effects of social change. That the study is flawed in this regard is an argument against its conclusions, but not the effort to look for patterns in the data.

Pure bunk about the value of reading:

Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully attended to. ...

If reading is the key to self-mastery, fiction is the master key. Those like Hanson and Hitchens, who invite disagreement, are good too. But fiction demands that you either identify with the characters’ decisions or distance yourself from them, and this has a powerful effect. In doing so you shape your own moral experience. Although it may seem to be far removed from the center of the culture right now, fiction remains the best form of reading — the single best way to achieve all of reading’s goods.

In this there are at least three major problems. First, it presumes that 'reading fiction' is identical to 'close reading of a text.' Not all texts benefit from or are capable of receiving this type of close reading, nor do readers always approach texts in this way (nor is it always smart to do so--Dickens may have been paid by the word, but that doesn't mean you should read them all). The hidden intervening term in this discussion, as in so many others about reading, is that of course the texts involved a Classics or Great Books and so worthy of close attention.

The second is with this idea that the purpose of reading fiction is to provide ethical education, that the point of a novel is the decisions made by the characters which one must react to. And the great books do pose important, relevant ethical questions to us all, for example: What do I do if the nominal leader of my war party attempts to take the female prisoner I would like to rape so he can rape her instead? How do I best react when the woman I was in love with sends a famous poet to guide me through hell? What are the proper ways to act if I would like to be a knight even though there's no knighting activity for me to take part in? etc. This is not to deny that the ethical aspect of any of these works or others might not be worthwhile, but it's a strangely utilitarian view of the importance of literature. In this sense, it's not unlike the view that the value of the food one eats is not in how it tastes, but in its ability to provide the correct balance of nutrients.

Third, it is improperly dismissive of the value of postmodern ways of reading. As I have found, and as Zadie Smith suggests in her essay "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov" (where, n.b., she comes out on Nabokov's side in the end), the ideal combination for a reader is somewhere in the middle--a text that has stability and permanence in its form, but one which does not lean too heavily on the all-seeing, all-knowing Author. If there's one thing I have always found implausible about Strauss' "Persecution and the Art of Writing," it's the idea that the author can control his meaning so well that all the 'mistakes' are intentional and there are no other mistakes. Postmodern ways of reading are a useful reminder that language is a tool, and like any other tool it can be used better or worse.

It's useful to point out, I think, the perpetual tension between the pragmatism of the average CCOA and his idealism towards the Great Books, in much the same way that I pointed out that CCOAs tend to want greater authority in the educational system but deny that the sciences provide any useful model of what that might be like. But I do often wonder what role it is the Great Books are supposed to play: names are often dropped, but useful examples never given. I worry that all too often, great figures are pulled in to basically endorse the conventional values of American conservatism, with too little attention given to whether the fit is any good:

Johnson’s book is dogged in its efforts to turn Socrates into a twenty-first-century compassionate conservative, and to this end it frequently courts breezy anachronism. On women, we are told that Socrates “liked to think of them leading responsible and fulfilled lives, but he had no objection to their confining themselves to looking after their husbands and children, if that is what they wished.” On slavery, Johnson speculates that “perhaps there is a missing dialogue” in which Socrates condemns it. And on war? Socrates “fought heroically for Athens in his day, but he thought war was usually unwise and the struggle to the death with Sparta suicidal for Greece… ” Johnson then contradicts himself, claiming that Socrates “neither supported nor condemned the Peloponnesian war.” Johnson’s knowledge of his subject wobbles here. (Socrates is light on scholarship: Johnson cites only Gregory Vlastos and Karl Popper, though he recommends a few other books, such as Nickolas Pappas’s excellent introduction to the Republic.) In the Menexenus, Socrates blames Athens’s struggle with Sparta for the decline of Greece, but he never criticizes wars against barbarians. His feelings are probably due to his pro-Sparta sympathies, rather than a sense that war as such is a bad idea. (Socrates’s habit of going barefoot and lightly clad even in winter was an emulation of Spartan custom.)

If you're reading Plato and not, on some level, unsettled, then something has gone wrong.

In an effort to keep the ball rolling on the Auden paper, I want to return to something I posted here about what makes a text interesting to teach. I said "Canonical figures are interesting for teaching purposes when they... propose answers that are obviously wrong, but wrong in an illuminating way." This seems obvious to me, but I've found that there are few things more difficult to convince undergrads of than that a failed argument is often more interesting than a successful one.

Anecdote: I taught a course themed around theories of law and justice. The course was introductory, intended to present students with some major works of political theory that touched on interesting topics. In addition to lecturing on the major steps of particular arguments, I would sometimes take the occasion to model how they ought to go about reading a text. On one occasion, I was walking them through Hobbes' chapter on civil law in Leviathan. Hobbes, I noted, makes two arguments in that chapter that appear slightly different and which, read in a certain light, appear to contradict each other. The tension and contradiction were, I thought, illuminating. My students thought otherwise: if there was a fatal objection to the argument, why bother with it?

I was inclined at the time to think of this experience as a pedagogical failure on my part. Now I tend to see it as a rupture between two different kinds of learning: one in which material is to be received and assimilated as true, and one in which the truth or falsity of any particular argument is beside the point. These are, in another way, the two cultures of academia. A correct argument requires no further work. A wrong argument, if wrong in an illuminating way, can open up new aspects to a problem that have not yet been considered. Those new aspects lead naturally to further arguments, which is the nature of research. I suspect those of us who have gone into grad school have all had that kind of experience--a book or argument whose wrongness required some new argument as a response.

Now there remains the question of whether the 'received and assimilated' model is somehow lesser or just different. I would note, though, that even if one thinks it lesser, that cuts against both liberalism and conservatism: if the problem is a lack of further questioning, the ideological orientation of that material is irrelevant to what is problematic in that attitude. But I'll have to think on this more.