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Features: J.S. Mill's idea of a university, and our own. A
n auto repair shop in which mechanics and owners could not
distinguish a wreck from a finely tuned car would soon go out of business.
A hospital where doctors, nurses, and administrators were unable to
recognize a healthy human being would present a grave menace to the public
health. A ship whose captain and crew lacked navigation skills and were
ignorant of their destination would spell doom for the cargo and passengers
entrusted to their care. Yet at universities and colleges throughout the land, parents and students pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support — liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being. To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate in their scholarship and courses doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission?
To be sure, universities and colleges put out plenty
of glossy pamphlets containing high-minded statements touting the benefits
of higher education. Aimed at prospective students, parents, and wealthy
alumni, these publications celebrate a commitment to fostering diversity,
developing an ethic of community service, and enhancing appreciation of
cultures around the world. University publications also proclaim that
graduates will have gained skills for success in an increasingly complex
and globalized marketplace. Seldom, however, do institutions of higher
education boast about how the curriculum cultivates the mind and refines
judgment. This is not because universities are shy about the hard work they
have put into curriculum design or because they have made a calculated
decision to lure students and alumni dollars by focusing on the sexier side
of the benefits conferred by higher education. It’s because
university curricula explicitly and effectively aimed at producing an
educated person rarely exist.1
Universities do provide a sort of structure for
undergraduate education. Indeed, it can take years for advisors to master
the intricacies of general curriculum requirements on the one hand and
specific criteria established by individual departments and proliferating
special majors and concentrations on the other. The Byzantine welter of
required courses, bypass options, and substitutions that students confront
may seem like an arbitrary and ramshackle construction. In large measure it
is. At the same time, our compassless curriculum gives expression to a
dominant intellectual opinion. And it reflects the gulf between the
requirements of liberal education and the express interests of parents,
donors, professors, and students.
The dominant opinion proclaims that no shared set of
ideas, no common body of knowledge, and no baseline set of values or
virtues marking an educated human being exist. To be sure, the overwhelming
majority of all American colleges adopt a general distribution requirement.2 Usually this
means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the
natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, with perhaps a
dollop of fine arts thrown in for good measure. And all students must
choose a major. Although departments of mathematics, engineering, and the
natural sciences maintain a sense of sequence and rigor, students in the
social sciences and humanities typically are required to take a smattering
of courses in their major, which usually involves a choice of introductory
classes and a potpourri of more specialized classes, topped off perhaps
with a thesis on a topic of the student’s choice. But this veneer of
structure provides students only the most superficial guidance. Or rather,
it sends students a loud and clear message: The experts themselves have no
knowledge worth passing along concerning the core knowledge and defining
qualities of an educated person.
Take two political science majors at almost any elite
college or university: It is quite possible for them to graduate without
ever having read the same book or studied the same materials. One student
may meet his general distribution requirements by taking classes in
geophysics and physiological psychology, the sociology of the urban poor
and introduction to economics, and the American novel and Japanese history
while concentrating on international relations inside political science and
writing a thesis on the dilemmas of transnational governance. Another
political science major may fulfill the university distribution
requirements by studying biology and astronomy, the sociology of the
American West and abnormal psychology, the feminist novel and history of
American film while concentrating in comparative politics and writing a
thesis on the challenge of integrating autonomous peoples in Canada and
Australia. Both students will have learned much of interest but little in
common. Yet the little in common they learn may be of lasting significance.
For both will absorb the implicit teaching of the university curriculum,
which is that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need
know.
The interests of the different groups involved in
producing, purchasing, and consuming higher education also create obstacles
to reforming the contemporary curriculum. University education is a
peculiar good. Generally speaking, and particularly at elite universities,
those who receive the service, the students, do not pay for it. Instead,
the cost of undergraduate education is borne by parents, wealthy donors,
and taxpayers through exemptions and government grants for faculty research
support. At America’s finest private universities, parents pay about
$50,000 a year to
put their children through college, or approximately $200,000 for a bachelor’s degree.
For that hefty price tag, parents understandably want a credential that
enables their sons and daughters to land good jobs and gain entrance to
valuable social networks. But what of the character and quality of their
children’s education? No less an observer of the American scene than
Tom Wolfe recalls an unplanned opening remark he made in 1988 to a group of graduating
Harvard seniors:
At most elite universities, student tuition rarely
covers more than two-thirds of the full cost of education. Much of the
other third comes from alumni through new gifts and investment earning on
endowment or old gifts. Alumni establish chairs, fund buildings, and
sponsor university-wide programs and initiatives. As with parents, alumni
interests do not necessarily coincide with the requirements of a liberal
education. Having made their mark in the world, alumni look at the
university suffused with warm remembrances of their carefree college days.
They may donate out of a commitment to basic research and liberal
education. They may also donate for a variety of other reasons: to give
back to the institution that helped launch their adult lives, to reconnect
with their youth, and, not always least, to provide a dramatic
demonstration to fellow alumni of their worldly success. Universities
aggressively encourage alumni to give large sums of money but frown upon
their playing a role in overseeing how the money is spent — for
professors and administrators are the experts.
The capacity of alumni who seek to ensure that their
donations are spent in accordance with their intentions, particularly if
their intention is to promote liberal education, is extremely limited. For
example, in 1995
Yale University was forced to return a 1991 gift of $20,000,000. Donor Lee Bass wanted to support the creation of a program
for undergraduate study in Western civilization. One would have thought
that such an undertaking would fit easily with Yale’s mission. But
during the four years that Yale held the Bass money, the faculty could not
come to agreement about the benefits of such a program or how to implement
it. Many members of the faculty regarded a program on Western civilization
to be so narrowly conceived or political in character as to infringe on
their right and responsibility to make curriculum decisions on academic
grounds. In addition, faculty complained loudly to the administration about
a request made by the donor, late in the controversy, to have a voice in
the approval of university decisions about how to fill professorships
created by his gift. For they are the experts.
This brings us to the impediment posed by professors
to the reform of the contemporary curriculum. In fact, whereas
parents’ and donors’ interests may fail to coincide with the
requirements of a liberal education, professors’ interests
increasingly diverge from those requirements. Because advancement in
today’s academy is closely tied to scholarly achievement and
publication record, it is in professors’ interests to teach narrowly
focused and highly specialized courses. Here, professors assign scholarship
that underpins their own approach, examine cutting-edge contributions to
the field, and perhaps review work that is critical of their way of doing
things. Such courses can be a valuable ingredient in an undergraduate
education. But generally and for the most part these courses, which often
represent a substantial portion of departmental offerings, serve to advance
professors’ research programs and to train professional scholars,
though few undergraduates will go on to be professors.
Finally, one must consider students’ interests.
On the one hand, often just having left their parents’ home but not
yet having become responsible for supporting themselves, students are as
fresh and open to learning as they will ever be. On the other hand, like
their parents, they are, with reason, credential conscious, keenly
interested in launching their careers and gaining access by means of their
college degree to the right people and the right networks. And they present
a classic case in which expressed preferences or interests and actual
interests are likely to differ. This is because the capacity to make an
informed decision about the structure and value of a liberal education
itself depends on a liberal education, or on a knowledge of the subjects
— history, literature, philosophy, natural science, ethics and
politics broadly understood, and religion — that have for at least 150 years been thought to stand
at its center. Many are the students at fine American colleges and
universities who have remarked wistfully in the days before graduation that
only now, as they prepare to depart, do they feel capable of choosing
wisely and cobbling together for themselves out of the hodgepodge of
university offerings a coherent slate of classes. But even those days may
be passing, as universities increasingly fail to give students more than a
dim intimation that a liberal education has a distinctive shape and a
coherent and cumulative content.4
Of course, if parents, alumni, professors, and
students are happy, why worry? So what if universities, for lack of a
standard, are unable to say whether their graduates are well-educated? A
college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable
social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a
certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and
getting along with peers. If universities continue to offer parents a good
return on investment, donors a pleasant place to practice philanthropy,
professors good research opportunities, and students a convivial four years
in which to get ready for their careers, why not leave well enough alone?
And supposing that some harm is inflicted on students through exposure to
foolish ideas and sloppy intellectual habits, the fact is that
undergraduate education lasts only four short years. How seriously in that
brief time can university education injure students? In any case, once they
leave campus, graduates will encounter the everyday world of work, spouses,
mortgages, and children. Won’t their new responsibilities, by
focusing their minds and disciplining their habits, overcome any lingering
bad effects of their educations?
This way of thinking about the university is common
and dangerously complacent. We would not be content to learn that our auto
repair shops cause no permanent damage to our cars, our hospitals are not
systematically making patients sicker, and our captains and crews are not
sinking their ships. So why should we be content to conclude that our
universities do no lasting harm to the country’s young men and women?
In fact, universities can cause lasting harm. In many cases, the mental habits
that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the
framework through which as adults they interpret experience, assign weight
to competing claims and values, and judge matters to be true or false and
fair or inequitable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental
habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for
both public and private life.
Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education
provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most
students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read
widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that
formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples
and cultures. And the nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy
presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public
interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the
claims of justice and the opportunities for — and limits to —
realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose
citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which
individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent,
and in which the nation’s foreign affairs are increasingly bound up
with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent
on citizens’ acquiring a liberal education.
In no small measure, the value of a liberal education
comes from a distinctive quality of mind and character that it encourages:
the ability to explore moral and political questions from a variety of
angles. This involves putting oneself in another’s shoes,
distinguishing the essential from the contingent, imagining the contingent
as other than it is, and reasoning rigorously without losing sight either
of what is or what ought to be.
John Stuart Mill was convinced that cultivation of the
virtue that in On Liberty he called “many-sidedness”5 is at the heart of a
liberal education. Mill defends this conviction most fully and forcefully
in a little known but remarkable work, originally entitled “Inaugural
Delivered to the University of St. Andrews on February 1st 1867.”6 Mill was 60, and the delivery of a formal address on liberal education was an
obligation that came with his election by students to the post of honorary
Lord Rector of the University, which he held from 1865 to 1868 (during which time he also served as an independent member
of Parliament). Although he never taught at or even attended a university,
Mill was among the best-educated men then alive, perhaps England’s
premier public intellectual, and certainly its leading student of modern
liberty. At the same time, he was intimately familiar with commerce and
foreign affairs, thanks to the more than 30 years he had spent working in the office of the
British East India Company. So he was well suited to take up the challenge
of exploring the contribution that a liberal education, well understood,
can make to the many dimensions of life in a free society.
Yet it is not Mill’s “Inaugural
Address” but Cardinal John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University that has come
to be regarded as the classic statement on the aims and benefits of a
liberal education. A collection of lectures delivered to Irish Catholic
laymen in Dublin between 1852 and 1858,
The Idea of a University certainly deserves the high regard in which it is held.
Still, its preeminence is surprising. Newman’s contention that
liberal education culminates in the acquisition of religious truth rests on
assumptions about knowledge and faith very different from those on which
most university education in America today rests. This does not undermine
the value of Newman’s analysis, least of all from the perspective of
a liberal education. But it does suggest that Mill’s short essay,
which both rests on assumptions about knowledge and faith shared by most
university education today and challenges the contemporary university
curriculum, has a distinctive contribution to make.
Like Newman’s mid-nineteenth-century discourses,
Mill’s essay from the same period requires some translation, some
separating of educational principle from particular conclusions about the
appropriate content of the university curriculum. For example, Mill
suggests that “the leading facts of ancient and modern history”
should not be taught at universities because if students have not mastered
the facts by the time they get to college, then it’s too late for
them to learn. For an age such as our own, in which universities do not
expect, much less require, students to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge
of history, Mill’s judgment will sound absurdly harsh. Yet his
underlying point, that historical knowledge is an essential component of a
liberal education and that it must be acquired in order to progress to
later and higher stages of understanding, does not depend on contingent
features of a Victorian English sensibility. Rather, it reflects a
compelling opinion about the enduring structure and abiding imperatives of
a liberal education.
II. Mill’s idea of a university
I
n the opening lines of his address, Mill calls attention to the
vastness of his topic and the need to combine learning and freshness of
mind in exploring it. Indeed, among the chief benefits that flow from
studying Mill’s address on liberal education is the lesson he
provides throughout in combining goods often thought to be mutually
exclusive. By stressing at the outset the wisdom of custom along with the
need for creativity and insisting on the riches of what has been said about
education in past ages and also the challenge of carrying the conversation
forward into the future, Mill highlights the dependence of liberal
education on both conserving and progressing.
As the serious study of education encourages a liberal
mind, so too does it require one:
Liberal education concerns “the culture which
each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in
order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising,
the level of improvement which has been attained.” Professional
education is something different. The professions belong under the
superintendence of the university, but they are not part of, and must not
be allowed to displace, “education properly so-called,” or that
cultivation of the mind and transmission of knowledge on which further
progress depends. Mill does not mean to denigrate the professions or to
deny that there is a vital moral dimension to the practice of law,
medicine, and business. The question is the most effective manner in which
higher education can contribute to making professionals moral: “Men
are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or
manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will
make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.” In other
words, the cultivation that they bring to professional schools from their
liberal education goes a long way to determining whether professionals
practice their trade sensibly and decently.
Nor should a university, Mill argues, be concerned
with elementary instruction. Students ought to acquire the basics before
arriving so that universities can concentrate on providing students with a
“comprehensive and connected view” of the fields of human
knowledge, “the crown and consummation of a liberal education.”
Yet he acknowledges that universities must adjust to realities. When, as in
mid-nineteenth-century Scotland, high schools fail to perform their part,
universities have no choice but to play a remedial role. At the same time,
universities must sometimes break with tradition, as those in Scotland led
the way in doing by incorporating in their curricula the study of natural
science and the systematic study of morality. In deciding what to include
in the curriculum and how to establish priorities, universities should
focus on their role in “human cultivation at large,” or the
making of an educated person. It is to this task that Mill devotes the
remainder of his address.
The content of the higher education curriculum was
hotly debated in Mill’s time, and the liberal education he championed
represented a serious correction of traditional university education. The
controversy was over whether general education should be classical and
literary or scientific. This was a continuation of the early modern quarrel
over whether the university should focus on the ancients or the moderns,
immortalized in Jonathan Swift’s A Full
and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday, between the Ancient and
the Modern Books in St. James’s Library (1704). In Mill’s view, the
quarrel had a clear and compelling solution: Teach both.
But wasn’t study of classical languages a
tedious and consuming undertaking? Mill was acutely aware of the sterile
manner in which universities taught Greek and Latin, concentrating on rote
memorization, mechanical translation, and mindless verse composition. At
the same time, having learned both languages before he was ten, he insisted
that the teaching of the classics at the university level could be made
considerably more efficient, creating room to study the natural sciences,
and considerably more educational by concentrating on the content of
classical writings. Of course, dividing the curriculum between literary
studies and science meant that students would be unable to specialize in
either. But from Mill’s point of view, this was a salutary
consequence. He regarded specialization, the learning of more and more
about a single subject, as a potential enemy of liberal education. If
practiced prematurely, it dwarfs individual minds and threatens human
progress. In contrast, liberal education aims to teach students a
subject’s “leading truths” and “great
features.” Such knowledge does not make students masters of a field
or discipline, but it does enable them to recognize the masters and form
intelligent judgments about expert opinion. It also fits them for study of
“government and civil society,” which Mill considers “the
most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human mind.”
Mill would confine literary study at the university to
classical languages and literatures. This is not because he doubted that
knowledge of foreign languages and literatures in general was valuable.
Indeed, he observed a half-century before Wittgenstein that such knowledge
is intrinsically valuable because it prevents the confusion of words with
objects and facts and enables us to understand other peoples by
understanding the terms through which they interpret the world. But a
university must establish priorities. Although students should know modern
languages, they learn them best, Mill insists, out of school through a few
months living abroad among native speakers. Accordingly, liberal education
should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the
Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the
one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the
most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of
Asia, “so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to
enable us to understand them”). On the other hand, their writings are
rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both
challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human
excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent
“the perfection of good sense.” Moreover, the complex logical
structure of the grammar of classic languages disciplines the mind. And
classical authors do not embroider. In their writings, “every word is
what it should be and where it should be.” Yet to rely entirely on
the classics, he is keen to point out, is to miss an important dimension of
humanity. They lack that appreciation, which
characterizes modern poetry, of the mind as “brooding and
self-conscious.” Nevertheless, Mill concludes that like the learning
of modern foreign languages, so too the study of modern literature can and
should be undertaken outside the university.
As with classical languages and literatures, Mill
gives the natural sciences a place of honor in a liberal education, both
because of their content and because of the intellectual discipline they
foster. While it is not to be expected that many will achieve mastery of
the laws to which the physical world is subject, students should acquire
the basics that will enable them to distinguish those who are competent to
provide the public advice on scientific and technological matters. In
addition, science provides “a training and disciplining process, to
fit the intellect for the proper work of a human being.” This is
because “the processes by which truth is attained, reasoning and
observation, have been carried to their greatest known perfection in the
physical sciences.” Mill would not scant the study either of
empirical science or mathematics and logic. He would also include in the
curriculum an introduction to what he regarded as a young and imperfect
science, physiology, because of its usefulness in making decisions about
public sanitary measures and personal hygiene and because its subject, the
physical nature of man, sheds more light on social and political life than
any of the other physical sciences. He would also include psychology, which
overlaps with physiology and explores the laws of human nature. The great
philosophical controversies to which psychology gives rise, Mill maintains,
in no way disqualify it as a subject fit for study at the university. To
the contrary: “it is a part of liberal education to know that such
controversies exist, and, in a general way, what has been said on both
sides of them.”
The literary and scientific studies that form the
foundation of a liberal education should culminate in “that which it
is the chief of all the ends of intellectual education to qualify us for
— the exercise of thought on the great interests of mankind as moral
and social beings — ethics and politics, in the largest sense.”
These great subjects have “a direct bearing on the duties of
citizenship.” Students should begin with the close and familiar, the
major civil and political institutions of their own country, and then move
outward in their studies to the civil and political institutions of other
countries. Then they should learn about the laws of social life,
particularly political economy, which deals with “the sources and
conditions of wealth and material prosperity for aggregate bodies of human
beings”; jurisprudence, or the philosophical, moral, and
institutional foundations of law; and the law of nations, which “is
not properly law, but a part of ethics: a set of moral rules, accepted as
authoritative by civilized states.” The principal readings on ethics
and politics should be drawn from both contemporary authorities and what
today we would call the great books, but only “on condition that
these great thinkers are not read passively, as masters to be followed, but
actively, as supplying materials and incentives to thought.” Here
too, Mill stresses, liberal education can only provide an introduction. But
the well-crafted introduction to ethics and politics in the largest sense
confers a benefit “of the highest value by awakening an interest in
the subjects, by conquering the first difficulties, and inuring the mind to
the kind of exertion which the studies require, by implanting a desire to
make further progress, and directing the student to the best tracks and the
best helps.”
The “inevitable limitations of what schools and
universities can do” comes into focus in considering the place of
morality and religion in the university curriculum. It is not the place of
schools in general and universities in particular, Mill holds, to provide
the principal instruction in these matters:
In teaching the history of morals and religion,
professors must resist the powerful temptation to proselytize for their
favorite moral and religious — or immoral and irreligious —
doctrines:
In fact, tensions inherent in liberal education do
present a stiff challenge for educators. A liberal education reflects and
reinforces a modern, liberal, and enlightened sensibility, and it does
serve democracy based on equality in freedom. Faculty, Mill suggests,
should be self-aware and candid about these presuppositions of the
education they provide. At the same time, liberal education as he conceives
it is particularly well-equipped to resist the descent into didactic or
dogmatic education provided that it heeds its own imperatives to appreciate
what modernity owes tradition, the knowledge of diversity and common
humanity acquired through study of the classics, and the dependence of
freedom on studying the history of rival and incompatible teachings on
ethics, politics, and religion.
Although professors must never compel their students
to embrace one or another side in the great historical debates about how
human beings should organize their private and public lives, they cannot
help but make judgments about truth and falsity in teaching the history of
moral and religious ideas:
But the encouraging of a “skeptical
eclecticism” is more of a danger inherent in liberal education than
Mill allows. Passing from the examination of one system of morals and
religion embraced by its proponents as the whole truth to another and then
on to another and another can be disorienting. Professors must be able to
place ideas in context without reducing them to their context, which
requires knowledge of both and a sense of proportion. Indifference,
hastiness, or haughtiness — to name a few of the vices to which
professors may be prone — at the head of a class on the history of
morality and religion risks engendering in students a moral relativism that
treats all ideas as equally valid or a nihilism that holds all claims about
justice and the human good to be equally false. Thus does the abuse of
liberal education produce the opposite of a liberal spirit.
Liberal education requires professors to make
evaluative judgments in the classroom because they are essential to the
teaching of the great systems of ideas about how human beings should
organize their private and public lives. However, these judgments must be
put in the service of forming students capable of fashioning their own
judgments:
Liberal education is the civic education, or education
for citizenship, proper to liberal democracy because it aims to form a
human being fit for freedom:
But liberal education aims at more than civic
education, in part because in a free society citizenship is not the only,
or in many cases the highest, sphere in which individuals reasonably hope
to flourish. Liberal education also prepares students for, though it does
not provide, what Mill calls aesthetic education, or “the culture
which comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education
of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful.” Indeed, at
the end of his address, Mill exhorts the students of St. Andrews to
appreciate the deepest and most enduring benefits of a liberal education:
III. Liberal education and Mill’s
The central importance to Mill’s idea of a
liberal education of drawing truth from rival systems of opinions and goods
reflects the spirit of the larger liberalism to which his voluminous
writings are devoted. For example, in Principles
of Political Economy (1848), he seeks to give both the free
market and government intervention their due. In On Liberty, he shows how the formation
and flourishing of free individuals depend on the discipline of virtue,
education, the family, and civil society. In Considerations
on Representative Government (1862), he emphasizes the need
both for a party of order, whose main tasks are to maintain the basic
framework within which political life takes place and to conserve what
society has achieved, and a party of progress, whose guiding purpose is to
implement more fully a free society’s promise of liberty and equality
under the law. In The Subjection of Women (1869), he makes an impassioned case for the formal equality of women
while respecting differences between the sexes. And in his Essays on Religion (1874), which Mill chose to have
published posthumously, he seeks to give expression to a religious
sensibility that respects the power as well as the limits of reason.7
But nowhere does he more forcefully demonstrate the
practical and theoretical necessity of combining presumed contraries than
in his tributes to the progressive rationalist Jeremy Bentham (1838) and the conservative
romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840), which Mill published while editor of the London and West Minster Review.8 To appreciate the
audacity of his contention that both the thought of Bentham and the thought
of Coleridge are essential, imagine a contemporary progressive intellectual
declaring in a left-of-center journal that, say, both John Rawls and Allan Bloom are
indispensable thinkers of our age.
In Mill’s judgment, Bentham’s progressive
rationalism was blind to the intricacies of human affairs. But in part
because of that blindness, Bentham was able to focus his intellectual
energies, expose much nonsense in the common language used to discuss
morals and politics, and bring to light inefficiencies and injustices in
the organization of social and political life. At the same time,
Coleridge’s conservative romanticism, Mill contended, was blind to
the positive features of modern society and to the advantages of modern
systematic empirical inquiry. But, again, in part because of that
blindness, Coleridge could concentrate on discerning the wisdom embodied in
traditional practices and on making vivid the shared values and social
bonds on which political life, even liberal and democratic political life,
depended. Through his appreciation of their strengths and weaknesses, Mill
aims to demonstrate the necessity of the progressive and conservative
minds, and the superiority to both of the liberal mind.
In his tribute to Coleridge, Mill observes that the
manner in which Bentham and Coleridge each supplied an essential
perspective lacking in the other illustrated “the importance, in the
present imperfect state of mental and social science, of antagonist modes
of thought.” Lest one think that Mill wrote in the expectation that
anytime soon such need would diminish, he instead looks forward to when it
“will one day be felt” that antagonist modes of thought
“are as necessary to one another in speculation, as mutually checking
powers are in a political constitution.” In fact, this necessity is
enduring, and for good reason. It is not grounded in “indifference
between one opinion and another,” but rather in the irreducible
diversity of knowledge’s sources and the abiding process of comparing
and contesting ideas by which truth comes to light.
Twenty-five years before he delivered his St. Andrews
address and sketched the liberal education that can be seen as a
fortification against it, Mill warned in his tribute to Coleridge of
“the besetting danger” to which moral and political
understanding was subject:
For Mill, the virtues cultivated by a liberal
education sustained a higher form of toleration. Of course the political
toleration involved in suffering the expression of an opinion one knows to
be false or foolish is indispensable to liberty of thought and discussion
in a free society. But respecting a person’s right to be wrong is not
the only form of toleration. Respecting a person’s right to be right
about truths one is inclined to find awkward or disconcerting is imperative
to the flourishing of thought and discussion in a free society. A liberal
education transforms this imperative into a pleasure.
IV. Reforming the twenty-first-century
M
ill’s
nineteenth-century analysis of liberal
education is relevant to the twenty-first-century university not for the
specific curriculum he proposes but because of the larger principles he
outlines and the greater goods he clarifies. His analysis suggests several
lessons. First, a liberal education aims to liberate the mind by furnishing
it with literary, historical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge and
by cultivating its capacity to question and answer on its own. Second, a
liberal education must, in significant measure, provide not a smorgasbord
of offerings but a shared content, because knowledge is cumulative and
ideas have a history. Third, a liberal education must adapt to local
realities, providing the elementary instruction, the stepping stones to
higher stages of understanding, where grade school and high school
education fail to perform their jobs. Fourth, the aim of a liberal
education is not to achieve mastery in any one subject but an understanding
of what mastery entails in the several main fields of human learning and an
appreciation of the interconnections among the fields. Fifth, liberal
education is not an alternative to specialization, but rather a sound
preparation for it. Sixth, a liberal education culminates in the study of
ethics, politics, and religion, studies which naturally begin with the near
and familiar, extend to include the faraway and foreign, and reach their
peak in the exploration, simultaneously sympathetic and critical, of the
history of great debates about justice, faith, and reason. Seventh, all of
this will be for naught if teaching is guided by the partisan or dogmatic
spirit, so professors must be cultivated who will bring to the classroom
the spirit of free and informed inquiry.
What might a four-year curriculum for a liberal
education, devised in accordance with these lessons, look like? No doubt a
variety of reasonable answers is possible, particularly in a nation as
large and diverse as the United States, in which students can choose among
private research universities, small liberal arts colleges, state
universities of many sizes and descriptions, and religious colleges. And
owing to differences in aptitude and interest, a liberal education will not
be for everybody. Nevertheless, some elements are simple and
straightforward and will be common to all colleges and universities that
wish to provide students a liberal education worthy of the name. For
starters, in view of the sorry state of high school and grade school
education in the country,9 the curriculum will need to contain a large remedial
element. In view of the need created by our advanced economy for depth or
specialization, the curriculum will continue to require students to choose
a major to concentrate in during their last two years. Most importantly, in
view of the need for breadth, or knowledge of the civilization of which one
is a part and of other civilizations, the curriculum should have a solid
core.
As with the other parts of the curriculum, the
structure and content of the core will be subject to legitimate dispute and
reasoned compromise. Also, as with the rest of the curriculum, the core
must strike a balance between the realities of education in America and the
enduring imperatives of liberal education. It should not revolve around any
single one of the main models for a core curriculum — general
distribution requirements, great books, survey courses, or the modes of
inquiry approach — but should partake of elements of all four.10 And it should not
suppose that there is one right path or a single correct syllabus for the
courses it contains. But faculty should fashion common core courses whose purpose is to awaken interest, sharpen critical
thinking, and provide students with a shared store of essential knowledge
and fundamental questions.
As it happens, crafting a core consistent with the
demands of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with
today’s university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher
education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all
students to take a semester course surveying Greek and Roman history, one
surveying modern European history, and one surveying American history. It
would require all students to take a semester course in great works of
European literature and one in American literature. It would require all
students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would
require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language by
carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the
language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of
study or four semester courses. It would require all students to take a
semester course in the principles of American government, one in general
economics, and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require
all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. And it would require all students to take a semester course of their
choice in the history, literature, or religion of a non-Western
civilization.
Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal
education. Still, students who met its requirements would also have
acquired a common intellectual foundation that would enhance their
understanding of whatever specialization they chose, improve their ability
to debate politics responsibly, and enrich their appreciation of the
delightful and dangerous world in which they live.
It is a mark of the clutter of our current curriculum
and the confusion that it spreads that these requirements will strike many
faculty and administrators, and perhaps also students, as so onerous as to
be a nonstarter for a serious discussion about curricular reform. Yet
assuming four courses a semester and 32 to graduate, such a core could be completed in the
first two years of undergraduate study. Students who met the foreign
language requirement through high school study would have time left over in
their first two years for four elective courses. Moreover, the core would
still allow students during their junior and senior years to choose their
own major, devote ten courses to it, and take six additional elective
courses. And for students majoring in the natural sciences, where it is
necessary to take a strict and lengthy sequence of courses, options should
be available to enroll in introductory and lower level courses in
one’s major during freshman and sophomore year and complete the core
during junior and senior year.
Nevertheless, reform confronts formidable obstacles.
The principal one is professors.11 Many will fight such a common core because it would require
them to teach classes outside their area of expertise or reduce the number
of students for boutique classes on highly specialized topics. Moreover,
one can expect protracted battles over the content of the social science
and humanities component of the core of the sort that eventually led Yale
to return that $20 million
gift that was meant to support study of Western civilization. Meanwhile, as
I have noted, students and parents are poorly positioned to effect change.
Students come and go in four years, and, in any event, the understanding
they need to make the arguments for reform is acquired through the very
liberal education of which they are currently being deprived. Meanwhile,
parents are far away and otherwise occupied and have too much money on the
line to rock the boat.
But there are opportunities for those who will seize
them. Change could be led by an intrepid president, provost, or dean of a
major university who knows the value of a liberal education, possesses the
eloquence to defend it to his or her faculty and the public, and has the
skill and clout to wield institutional incentives on behalf of reform.12 Change could
also be led by trustees and alumni at private universities who acquire
larger roles in university governance and by alumni who connect their
donations to reliable promises from universities that their gifts will be
used in furtherance of liberal education, well understood. And, not least,
some enterprising smaller college or public university, taking advantage of
the nation’s love of diversity and its openness to innovation, might
discover a market niche for parents and students eager for an education
that serves students’ long-term interests by introducing them in a
systematic manner to the ideas and events that formed their civilization,
the moral and political principles on which their nation and those of other
nations are based, and languages and civilizations that differ from their
own.
Reforming the university is as urgent as the obstacles
to it are formidable. Citizens today confront a mind-boggling array of hard
questions concerning, among other things, the balance of liberty and
security at home; war and peace in faraway lands; the challenges some
civilizations face in achieving liberty and democracy and others face in
promoting them; the extent of the public’s responsibility for the
poor, the sick, and the elderly; management of the extraordinary powers
science provides for caring for, and manipulating, nascent human life, the
unborn, and the frail and failing; the worldwide threats to the environment
and appropriate national and transnational measures to combat them; the
impact of popular culture on private conduct; the meaning of marriage and
the structure of the family; and the proper relation between religion and
politics. No citizen can be expected to master all the issues. But liberal
democracies count on more than a small minority’s acquiring the
ability to reason responsibly about the many sides of these many-sided
questions. For this reason, liberal democracies depend on colleges and
universities’ supplying their students a liberal education.
Today’s educators could scarcely find a better way to begin to
recover an understanding of the aim of a liberal education and their
obligation to provide it than by studying John Stuart Mill’s
Inaugural delivered to the University of St. Andrews in 1867.
1
Derek Bok, who
served as Harvard University president from 1971 to 1991 and has exercised a commanding position in American higher
education for 35
years, has written the most authoritative recent book on the troubles that
beset undergraduate education. Our
Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why
They Should be Learning More (Princeton
University Press, 2006) is in many ways illuminating. But there are bright lines that
Bok, currently interim president at Harvard, cannot or will not permit
himself to cross. He breezily dismisses charges leveled over the past 20 years, mainly by
conservatives, most influentially by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), that the undergraduate
curriculum lacks a unifying purpose, that intellectual standards have been
allowed to deteriorate, that undergraduate education is increasingly
oriented toward preparing students for jobs, and that faculty neglect
students in favor of scholarship. Against the conservative critics, Bok
assures us that he “find[s] good reason for the satisfaction of most
alumni with their education.” Yet he undercuts his assurance by
proceeding to describe an alarming array of failures in undergraduate
education that belie alumni satisfaction and fit well with the
conservatives’ critique: “Many seniors graduate without being
able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason
clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, nontechnical problems,
even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a
college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak
or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative
reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed
citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems” (1–8, 310–312). In
response to these failings, Bok argues effectively that universities should
“conduct useful studies to evaluate existing educational programs and
assess new methods of instruction” (320). And he is right to insist on the need to improve the
quality of teaching and learning on campus (324–325). But he provides no reason to believe that progress will
be made without reforming the compassless curriculum and the politicized
classroom.
2
Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 257.
. 3
Richard H.
Hersh and John Merrow, eds., Declining by
Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2005),
xi.
4
Bok
contradicts himself on what can be learned about higher education from the
opinions of students and parents. First, he asserts that undergraduate
education can’t be as bad as the critics contend because parents
continue to pay the bills and students and graduates continue to express
satisfaction with their college experience (Our
Underachieving Colleges, 7–8). Then he subverts his
defense of the status quo by acknowledging that students’ concerns
about social and professional advancement deflect their attention from
questions about the quality of the curriculum (26–27, 36–37). Similarly, Bok mocks those who doubt that students are the best
judges of the quality of their education and then endorses the proposition
that they are not (compare 6–7 with 310–312, 325–326, 334). Concerning parents, Bok subsequently agrees that they are in a
poor position to form a responsible opinion about the quality of their
children’s college education: “The faculty’s reputation
has far more to do with research than with education, since few people
outside a campus have any idea how effectively its professors teach, let
alone how much its students learn” (Our
Underachieving Colleges, 328). 5
On Liberty, in <
i>Essays on Politics and Society,
J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1977), 252.
6
The address
appears in Essays on Equality, Law, and
Education, J.M. Robson, ed. (University of
Toronto Press, 1984).
7
This section
draws on Peter Berkowitz, “When Liberalism Was Young,” Claremont Review of Books,
Summer 2006.
8
Both appear in
Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1969).
9
“A Test
of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” a
Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret
Spellings (September 2006), 7–8.
10
For a
discussion of these and their limitations, see Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 11
See also Bok,
Our Underachieving Colleges, 12
See also Bok,
Our Underachieving Colleges, 335–343.
.
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