You Can't Really Believe That

The clash between claiming importance and acknowledging responsibility

I want to wrap up the thoughts I had earlier this week about the New York Times op-ed arguing that universities need to re-institute “civics education” (and welcome to the many new subscribers and patrons that discovered this newsletter through that post).

The first point is that the most common counterargument I encountered on social media was of the “to be fair” variety—you know, well, to be fair don’t we all need to brush up on the basics of civics, like how a bill becomes a law?

I really hate this comment whenever it pops up, and not because it seeks to contradict me. I really hate it because it comes from a tendency by which the speaker making the comment has set himself up as the arbiter of fairness—a position above the fray between these two partisan sides. “To be fair” is, in this context, an expression of power—an arrogation of the ability to pronounce something in-bounds.

The person making this claim feels himself to be the judicious moderate, but in reality he’s (and, yes, I’m using the pronouns intentionally, out of long internet experience) more like Romeo intervening between Tybalt and Mercutio, an intervention to which the only response can be “Why the devil came you between us?”

All of this may seem overly harsh, but a quick review of the facts shows that this is a fair evaluation because it turns out that the to be fair camp hasn’t done the reading.

For the thing about the Stanford proposal is that the op-ed contrives to call a class that’s really Western Civ 2.0 by the name of “civics education”, thereby satisfying both the camp that wants a great books-ish experience and the camp that wants to have more of the milquetoast civics education that the “to be fair” camp thinks they’re defending. The class does not talk about “civics education” in the way that focuses on procedure and politics would have it; rather, this is a class about philosophy, ethics, and soft skills:

Called Civic, Liberal and Global Education, it includes a course on citizenship in the 21st century. Delivered in a small discussion-seminar format, this course provides students with the skills, training and perspectives for engaging in meaningful ways with others, especially when they disagree. All students read the same texts, some canonical and others contemporary.

And when one goes to the course description on Stanford’s web page, you will find that the course is relentlessly philosphical:

Citizenship is not just what passport you hold or where you were born. Citizenship also means equal membership in a self-governing political community. We will explore some of the many debates about this ideal. How have people excluded from citizenship fought for, and sometimes won, inclusion? These debates have a long history, featuring in some of the earliest recorded philosophy and literature but also animating current political debates in the United States and elsewhere.

Now, I have no quarrel with this description or intention per se—it seems like a fine course. But a course in which students will read Plato’s Apology is neither novel nor one that fits them to understand the institutions and conflicts of contemporary U.S. politics, except in the remotest possible way. If one’s to be fair intervention is that people need to know how a bill becomes law, that is really an indictment rather than a defense.

(Of course, the further rebuttal to this point is that defining “how a bill becomes a law” is either a fairly straightforward description that could be satisfied with an hour-long YouTube video or an enormously fraught and inevitably “political” discussion that involves taking a long, hard look at how electoral incentives, donors, chamber rules, policy windows, and the like come together to turn legislative proposals into policy. I wrote about that here, before this whole controversy.)

The other major point I want to make is much deeper, and goes beyond the immediate op-ed. The NYT piece reflects a common set of assumptions about the role of higher education in society, namely that

1. colleges (or at least elite colleges) play a major role in how society operates through elite socialization

2. that the, or at least a, principal vector in how colleges socialize elites is through the actual, formal curriculum

3. and that colleges should be able to set their own curricula in response to perceived needs

Last time, I mostly focused on 2, with a little bit of 1. The Stanford op-ed goes a little further than the standard argument, though, and in doing so it reveals the tension between 1 and 3. In particular, the Stanford op-ed postulates that undoing Western Civ courses caused at least some measurable part of our democratic crisis, which is the warrant for their changes to Stanford’s curriculum and their call for other colleges to follow their example.

Yet if college curricula have such incredible power, there’s no way that we can continue to allow them to operate without far greater regulation than we have now. When researchers in the mid-twentieth century abused their research subjects one too many times, the federal government imposed a regulatory apparatus to curb the worst forms of abuses, which is one reason why I have to go through a (welcome!) review process every time I want to issue a questionnaire. If the Stanford assumptions are right, though, then universities hold the fate of democracy in their hands, or at least in the hands of their curriculum review committees, with vastly greater potential (and, in their account, actual) harm than caused IRB.

In other words, if the Stanford op-ed’s writers believe their claims, the logical conclusion is that oversight of college curricular changes should be placed in the hands of outside agencies who can vet and check course content and graduation requirements.

The writers cannot possibly believe that. But in that case they cannot also believe that the stakes of these curricular changes are so great as to warrant their sweeping claims.

They might have made a more limited claim. They might, for instance, have pointed to specific and limited ways in which universities can serve the interests of the public, such as by promoting ethical standards in research and action. They might then have talked about a duty to develop character and care for students who should go on to care about others. (My doctoral alma mater, Georgetown University, would call this cura personalis.) And they might have acknowledged that such interventions might be limited because of the wide array of forces—from venture capital to academic incentives—that can lead us into temptation. Nevertheless, universities can serve as a candle in the dark.

This would have been a resurrection of an earlier moral mission of higher education—indeed, just a gloss on what makes this form of education higher in a sense other than the progression from kindergarten to specialized credentialing. And it would have also recognized that universities, by being set apart from the world, are not responsible for the world.

It would, of course, not have been an op-ed that the Times would have published. “Universities can’t fix everything” isn’t news, it’s just truth. (To be fair, the Washington Post has published essays like that.) And it’s not a kind of language that we speak in this century. In the legalized, financialized vocabulary of contemporary higher education, words like “integrity” and “care” are defined by lawyers and regulators, not by philosophers or ethicists. Instead, administrators speak of impact, leverage, transformation—the hand-me-down phraseology of the previous generation of business thought leaders.

But maintenance, care, preservation—these are serious obligations that should be served by serious institutions, even if sometimes you have to speak the faddish words to further those purposes. So, too, is a recognition of limits, and recognizing that one is only responsible for what one is responsible for—and no further.