Valedictory

Albert B Fernandez

Shimer College, April 1, 2015

I tried to come up with some sort of witty, clever way to start this talk.  Best I could do  was to try for some  reference to today’s date, which is April Fool’s day, by  saying something related to the archetypal  figure of the Holy Fool—he’s in Parsifal, for example—but only the first part would fit, so . . .

So I’m going to start by just telling you what I’m going to be saying, which in writing instruction is called a forecast.  My thesis is that we have reached a point in history at which the primary mission of liberal arts colleges like Shimer is to foster autonomous thought—as distinct from transmitting knowledge, preparing for careers, producing well-rounded persons, or other conceptions of what college is for, which I will not be critiquing in this address but which I do not simply  repudiate.   And I’m going to identify and critique some of the ideas, discourses, cultural factors that impede the development of independent thought, including at Shimer College.

I guess that’s rather edgy for a farewell address, and not in keeping with the Auld Lang Syne tonality that seems most suited to such occasions.  It might even be thought ungracious and ungrateful.  But as the Faculty’s entanglement in ever more numerous administrative tasks has increased over the years I have taught here, reflections on education, on what is supposed to be our main job, have pretty much moved off the radar screen.  Beyond that local justification, I offer some broader legitimations of criticism  (“) . . . . .the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism of writers by readers, e.g.—this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.”  That’s from W.E.B. Dubois, Souls of Black Folk, before the author begins his critique of Washington Booker.

But before I get into my subject, and since this is a farewell, I will say in appreciation that Shimer College has given my life. . . meaning, purpose, at least as much if not more than anything else.  And I can articulate this purpose as trying to do something to preserve and improve this kind of education. Nor has this been a mere quirk of destiny or providence, that I just happened to end up developing such purposes at this particular college, because whatever their weaknesses Shimer and its people take the value of dialog  seriously, seriously enough to have put up with me all these years and to have allowed me to play a largely adversarial role.

Also, this seems like a good time to repeat what I have been saying almost since I got here, in the fall of ’93, that I think Shimer College is probably among the top 100 colleges in the world, and I taught at six institutions before coming to Shimer, some of them quite good.  

That by way of introduction.

Modern higher education can be, and frequently is, divided  into a kind that is mainly concerned with professional preparation—which is sometimes referred to as “the German model”—and a second variety typically designated as “liberal arts education,” which is less concerned with career preparation, and focused rather  on what has been characterized as general education or the education of the whole person, as well as “moral education,” in ages less embarrassed by that phrase than we are likely to be.  Many liberal arts schools have been sectarian, but not necessarily. The so-called British “public” schools aimed at producing a whole person modeled on the ideal “English gentleman,” especially as welcomed in the military and by the Foreign Service. And the American Ivy League used to boast of “the Yale man” or “the Dartmouth Man.”  

“Great Books” education is in the tradition of the liberal arts and moral education.  Its earliest version appeared during the First World War as a compact course or program for American troops before they were sent to Europe, the idea being that if they read the Great Books they would be more motivated to fight the Huns, notwithstanding that, as you may have noticed, the Great Books are loaded with Huns.  So you could say the Great Books approach started as a form of propaganda.  Great Books education cannot be said to have been sectarian—if anything, it tends to favor the Greco-Roman pagans—but its earlier exponents did see it as transmitting a certain set of ideas and principles.  According to the last in  this earlier generation of advocates, Allan Bloom, the traditional Western canon provides the student with, as Bloom puts it, “the few really important questions and the few really important answers.”

During most of the 19th century, including when Shimer was founded, it was typical for Colleges to have a capstone course in your senior year, typically called “Ethics,” typically taught by the President, whether the President was a minister or a layperson, and in that course the student basically received instructions for how to lead a good life after graduation.  I’ve been looking at the oldest Shimer catalogs in preparing this lecture, and at Shimer at least up to about 1863, at the end of your undergraduate career you got “Moral Philosophy,” “Moral Science,” and “Natural Theology,” including, but apparently not limited to,  a book that’s still in the curriculum, Paley’s Natural Theology.  

Nowadays, as the capstone course, you get IS5 & 6—which Harold Stone suggested should be renamed “Books We Haven’t Read Yet.”   The course does not claim to present guidance or tenets for after graduation.  That function of advice for life persists today in vestigial form in the commencement speaker, who is authorized and expected to bestow pearls of wisdom on graduating classes.  Not only could the current faculty at Shimer or in most colleges never agree on which philosophy, to say nothing of which religion, should be imparted on graduating students, but even if we somehow did, most or all of us are too much children of modernity to have confidence that we’ve identified the best solution for the human condition.  

Bloom, who, by the way, pretty much started the culture wars in 1987 with a book called The Closing of the American Mind, insists that there’s no such thing as an educational system or institution that does not, however surreptitiously, strive to turn out a certain kind of person—and I think he’s got that right. And I would say that at this point in the Hegelian dialectic, the type of person that most liberal arts colleges are trying to turn out is one who has the capacity for what is most often called “critical thinking.”  I think that’s the term or the concept around which a consensus has been building for the last few decades as to what liberal arts education should be about.  And, to clinch it, Adam Kotsko said pretty much the same thing not long ago.

There are lots of designations, some quite old, that are meant to get at what is now being called critical thinking:  independent thought, autonomous thought, not taking things for granted, thinking out of the box, even “metacognition.”  All these designations refer to a capacity that is not supposed to depend on or lead to any particular ideology or philosophy.  In this sense “critical thought” can be thought of as a value without content, and that’s just what exercises Bloom and other conservatives like William Buckley about contemporary education.  “Critical thought” is the educational goal that befits an age of dissensus and disunity.  The term “critical thought” or its cognates implies a new theory of intelligence, which no longer means being smart, or witty (in the old sense), or just knowing a lot of stuff, but rather what Karl Mannheim proposes in Ideology and Utopia, which is, being able to understand a variety of points of view and perspectives and positions.  And to be able to compare and evaluate them.  A very important point in Mannheim’s book is that evaluation is so woven into discussing subjects in the humanities and in politics, that if you don’t evaluate consciously you’re going to evaluate unconsciously.

Since this is my valedictory, I’ll permit myself to tell you that what I consider my most important single contribution to Shimer College is my having introduced into Shimer discourse, the expression “critical open-mindedness.” I was led to it by noticing a tendency at Shimer and elsewhere to interpret “open-mindedness” as acceptance without limits, to the point of unintentional humor, as when I read a student paper that contained the phrase “the terrorist community.” Well, that sure sounds open-minded, but it’s not critical thinking or critical open-mindedness.

On the other hand, no less than a purely open open-mindedness, invective, vituperation, a purely critical, or nihilistic, or deliriously hostile discourse does not merit being called critical thought either.  Hegel distinguishes between a destructive and what he calls a positive dialectic.  As you probably know, in Hegel’s thought dialectic can refer to an encounter between a person or persons taking different positions or to a clash of historical forces, or of ideas, with all three being able to represent or embody the others.  The positive dialectic is the true manifestation of the spirit-- the good one--because it does not merely and uncompromisingly repudiate what it opposes, but rather absorbs or  “sublates” what’s of value in what it opposes and incorporates it.  Using the terms of another authority, David Shiner, when you disagree with an interlocutor you should make an effort to acknowledge and recognize what you don’t disagree about.   You could say that this is just common sense, although it’s always nice to bring in Hegel, but you may have observed debates between political candidates in which there seems to be an inflexible law that no matter what your opponent says you have to vigorously reject it. 

Another way to understand this relatively recent elevation of critical thought or critical open-mindedness to centrality as a goal of education is to understand it as a “a return to Socrates,” and the Socratic method, especially if you read the dialogs the way some interpreters do, regarding the doctrine of the forms or of knowledge vs opinion or other doctrinal content as injections by Plato into the discourse of the original Socrates.  According to this view, the only thing that’s really Socratic in the dialogs is the questioning, or speech forms equivalent to questioning, without position taking. But even if you don’t read the dialogs in this purist way, it’s evident that what Socrates is about at least most of the time is asking questions, often impertinent or unwelcome questions—to allude to Harold’s State of the College address—with the purpose of being a “gadfly” and waking people up from mental “sluggishness.”  The original Greek word is rendered as “gadfly” in most translations, but the translation that’s more literally faithful to the Greek original is only found in the rare Albert Fernandez translation, where it’s rendered as “pain in the ass,” in reference to the part of a horse where gadflies prefer to land.

So the elevation of critical thought in the absence of ideological consensus is also the elevation of Socrates. And remember that Socrates has not always been King of the Hill among philosophers. For probably longer periods of time it’s been the lecturer, Aristotle, who has been regarded as “The Philosopher,” as Aquinas calls him. If Euthyphro had run into Aristotle  instead of Socrates, then instead of coming out of the encounter awakened but disconcerted he would have walked away with a diploma in piety from Aristotle.  
 
Some distinctions are in order.  Something that is sometimes invoked as a an educational goal akin to “critical thought, “ but which I did not include in my list of its synonyms and near synonyms  is “problem-solving skills.”  If critical thinking is understood as no more than the taking into account of multiple possible solutions without hastily accepting or rejecting any, than that would be helpful in dealing with all kinds of problems.  But I think the usage of  the phrase “critical thought” and the value laden connotation of “open-mindedness” suggest a distinction between critical thinking and problem-solving in general—which apparently not everyone accepts.  In 2008 Stanley Fish, long-time lit Professor at the U of Illinois, took a position in articles that appeared in the New York Times that is antithetical to the liberal arts tradition and the Great Books tradition even in the more abstract or “contentless” form that it takes today.  Fish said that, really, the only reason for studying, say, John Donne, a 17th-century English poet Fish seems to have been covering in class at the time, is because it’s enjoyable.  And he went on that some might say,” well, doesn’t studying literature, language, and its interpretations promote the development of critical thinking.”  And Fish’s answer was “yes, but so do a lot of other things, such as playing chess, or arguing about who’s going to win the Super Bowl.”  I think we can accept that there are paths to wisdom outside higher education.  And I can go further and suggest that it’s quite possible that the best way to increase the sheer brainpower of students, enable them to solve problems in general, could be to stick to math, or even deploy (shhh. . .) games, video games, build up quick decision making ability, taking in gestalts, eye-hand coordination.  But the kind of problems that are likely to be posed in the classics, in the humanities, in social thought, and in theoretical or as I would call it philosophical science, are  not like just any other kind of problem … because they call for overcoming.  Overcoming of what? Of bias (even if it’s impossible to overcome it completely), of antipathy, of basic reassuring assumptions, including those about the physical world, and also overcoming fear—including the fear that people are going to say you’re a nut or a crank.  That’s where the autonomy, the freedom comes in in critical thought, as I understand it, in the overcoming of pre-existing tendencies, passions, prejudices, . . .outside you and inside you, the way you were brought up. Granted that people can get very invested in topics such as who’s gonna win the next Super Bowl.  But when you’re talking about politics, values, morals, truth, competing historical narratives, in which the future is at stake, it’s not just the skill of problem-solving that’s needed but the virtue of critical thought

Now you might be thinking, all this talk of critical thinking, critical open-mindedness, arguments pro and con—isn’t all  this rather left-brained, not to say . . . masculine.   Well, first of all, in this context, and in the educational context in general, the word “argument” can include rhetorical forms that are not strictly speaking arguments, they may be questions, rhetorical examples, lines of thought, alternative explanations, analogies, etc. There’s a lot more to rhetoric than arguments. And yet--if you agree with difference feminists like Carol Gilligan and her descendants—I think the short answer to the question is yes.  We read a lot of old books at Shimer, consequently a lot of books written by men, and usually they’re in the domain of the left brain, and even when we read women writers they’re also often or usually operating in the register of argument back and forth.  Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein have written a book—They Say, I Say—maintaining that the most important ability for success in college in any major is the ability to make, sustain, and refute arguments.  But whether you regard argumentation as gendered masculine or not, there are other kinds of texts, or materials,  that call for a different kind of thinking. I’m talking especially about fiction and non-fiction narratives but also about other artistic productions, the understanding of which also  calls for what I’ve been calling critical open-mindedness, but in the register of imagination, empathy, sympathy, and antipathy. I could cite several instances in which it has seemed to me that some readers were not understanding a novel or a story because they were being narrow or close-minded in their sympathies and missing the clues and images that authors of novels, especially, tend to throw in to problematize the question of who’s the bad guy or gal and vice versa. So there is a critical openness of the logos, and a critical openness of the imagination. 

What is or are the nemeses of critical thought? We need only recall the story of Socrates to understand that there’ a great deal of resistance to challenges to accepted practices or beliefs, to “doxa,” in Socratic language.  To some extent the resistance is inherent in our being social animals.  Continuing in this vein of natural history, heterodoxy in history is like mutation in evolution.  There’s no guarantee that the new idea, new gene, is a good idea and it has the dangerous potential of disrupting cooperation, even at the level of cell colonies or herds.  And yet without mutation, species, as well as human societies, would have no adaptability and would be doomed to eventual extinction.  I’m probably preaching to the converted.  At this point in the Hegelian dialectic there are few, or at least few in this room, who can believe that anything is answered and settled in perpetuity.  The advance of democracy has established freedom of expression, which necessarily includes the freedom to think and dissent, as a basic human right.  But these considerations raise a question which is of great interest to students of modernity, including me:  namely, is it really true that as a result of the establishing of democratic governments and rights, such as free speech, human beings actually do have more freedom than before?  Among the more recent responses to the question is the one offered by Michel Foucault, whose line of thought, especially in Discipline and Punish, is that, yes, we are no longer susceptible, at least in the developed democratic nations, to being burned at the stake for uttering heresy, but, on the other hand, there’s a great deal more of what Foucault calls “discipline,”  by which he means the swarm of “microcontrols,” of fine-grained norms, standards, regulations, schedules, bureaucratic procedures, ratings, evaluations, assessments.  

In considering whether modern societies are still oppressive, it’s decisive to understand that modernity and democracy have changed the nature of the predominant forms of  authority, into forms that—to again bring in Foucault—are less “spectacular,” less blatant, but perhaps all the more powerful precisely because they are less noticeable and less noticed. By now there’s a pretty long tradition of writers who call attention to that form of authority, including some who are regularly read in the Shimer curriculum, starting in the mid-19th century with Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw the greatest potential for tyranny in democracies such as the United States in the majority.  Emile Durkheim, at the turn of the twentieth century, maintained that what constrains the behavior of individuals in society is not necessarily bosses, or authorities in the traditional sense, or alpha males, or government, but rather the much broader category of what he called “social facts” which are simply widespread forms of thinking and behaving that people tend to follow.

At Shimer, besides De Tocqueville and Durkheim, we also read about the already classic Stanley Milgram social psychology experiment in Obedience to Authority, and the similar experiment by Zimbardo, Haney, and Banks.  (For those of you who are not familiar with Milgram’s work, very basically, an experiment in which people dressed up in white coats tell volunteer test subjects to torture somebody. The victim is actually an actor who doesn’t actually get tortured, but the test subjects don’t know that.  And, contrary to expectations, most of them go right ahead and torture the guy.) The test subjects mostly obey authority, but what authority?  It’s not a boss, there’s no head scientist, no professor, it’s more obedience to the setup as a whole, maybe to science. What the guys in white coats tell the volunteers when they start thinking of backing out of their role is “The experiment requires you to continue.”  And in one variant of the experiment, it emerges that whether other test subjects (also actors) are complying or not, makes a huge difference in the degree of obedience of the real test subject.

Then, still in the field of social psychology, there’s  the experiment of Solomon Asch in 1955,  in which, essentially, a volunteer is brought together with other supposed volunteers, who, again, are actually actors, plants, and the instruction is to look  at  several straight lines on a card and say which one is not the same length as a line on another card. One of the lines is indeed clearly shorter than the others.  But, as they go around the room, the fake volunteers don’t pick the shortest line. Instead they all agree that one of the visibly longer lines is the shortest one.  The poor actual test subject does not know that he or she is being faked out, and in most cases agrees with the majority and not with what their own  eyes are telling them.  You might suppose that the test subject is just lying because he’s cowardly, but there might be an induced agreement factor that powerfully operates without deliberate lying. 

And finally in 1972 social psychologist Irving Janis came out with a book called Groupthink, the title of which has become a household word.  Its main exhibit is an analysis of  what has come to be known to history as the Bay Of Pigs fiasco, of  1961, in the first few months of the Kennedy administration.  It was basically a secret invasion of Castro’s Cuba by Cuban exiles organized by the CIA and closely overseen by President Kennedy and his advisors.  The invasion was a total failure.  It’s an event that has become eponymous for really bad policy decisions.  Kennedy himself said that he couldn’t understand how they could have been so mistaken.  Well, Janis found that, first of all, there were several Kennedy advisors who thought that the Bay of Pigs operation was a bad idea, but they mostly kept it to themselves.  And a second finding was that these dissenters were not discouraged from speaking up by Kennedy, by the alpha male.  In fact at the beginning of his presidency Kennedy had said that he wanted to hear all opinions before making up his mind  The reason for the silence of the critics, according to Janis, is that they did not want to violate what Janis calls “group cohesion.”  Kennedy’s cabinet was like a second Harvard.  He had gathered around himself a group of academics and intellectuals, who were later dubbed, in a book by David Halberstam, “The Best and the Brightest.”   So that an intense esprit de corps and group loyalty enveloped Kennedy’s advisors, and the thought of going against the group produced feelings of impropriety and anxiety. 

As for explanations of the phenomenon of obedience or conformity to the group, and its prominence as a modern phenomenon, well you can see without much analysis that the rise of democracy goes along with power to, and also reverence for, “the people,” whom Socrates had called “the many.”  But democracy is also about freedom, freedom of speech, free thought, the sovereign individual.  An explanation of the power of conformity in democracy and therefore in modernity is already succinctly provided by de Tocqueville when he asserts that “The love of Americans for equality is greater than their love of  Liberty.” He doesn’t just mean love for equality in the sense of love for legal equality, equal rights, but love of a more general social and cultural equality, which goes along with distrust of the outlier, the nonconformist, and a reluctance to stand out.

De Tocqueville’s diagnosis was fleshed out in mid 20th century in another landmark work of social thought called The Organization Man, by William H. Whyte   Whyte’s thesis is that the culture in American corporations and other places of employment is a culture of conformity—not because of the operation of traditional forms of authority, such as the terrifying alpha male boss,  or loyalty to the company, but rather because of a longing for feelings that Whyte designates as “Belongingness”  and “togetherness”, and not so much out of loyalty to the company but to attain a sense of “we’re all in it together.”   

For an explanation that goes deeper, there’s Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, from 1979.  For Lasch, and for psychiatrists, as well as for the old Greek mythmakers, narcissism is not exactly love of oneself but love of one’s image. If anything it’s lack of love for oneself, and its symptoms are an inordinate sensitivity and preoccupation with being liked, or being accepted.   For Lasch, echoing Durkheim’s study of Suicide, the modern world, starting with industrialism,  has dismantled the forms of fulfillment that were generally available before, and has done so in a myriad ways, by fragmenting the family, by making most people live in cities and work in large organizations, by undermining not only religious but other forms of belief—“all that is solid melts into air,”quoth Marx—and has thus created very psychologically needy people, a culture of narcissism.

Now, at this point you may be thinking, “Albert, you’re not going to try to tell us that at Shimer we’re a bunch of conformists, are you?”   I think that it’s almost inevitable for Shimer to be hospitable to critical thought and dissent because of four deeply embedded features of the institution.  One is that, in its current incarnation, in its post-Mt. Carroll  epoch, the College tends to attract outliers and non-conformists, especially as students.  Another is the reverence for dialog in the institutional culture. Another in my opinion, and this may surprise you, is the attention that is given here to old books, because I would say that on the whole they are a greater challenge to contemporary attitudes than the newer books. And the fourth feature is that in its core structure, I mean in the small discussion classes, Shimer takes those three ingredients and shakes them, and the result is practically bulletproof against unquestioning conformity.  And that’s pretty much why I said that I regard Shimer as one of the top 100 colleges in the US. But I also think that Shimer wants to be both a place of free inquiry and, as we keep saying, a tightly knit community, and that it’s not well aware of the inherent tension between the two.  And that, in its current avatar, Shimer is largely a product of the culture of the 60’s and that, as such, it carries a legacy of misunderstanding authority.    

One practice or principle that until recently has been quite dominant at Shimer College, although we seem to be getting away from it, is what goes by the name of facilitation, which I’m well known for having been a critic of almost since I arrived at Shimer.   I'll grant immediately that facilitation is among the functions that a teacher or a faculty member should be able to carry out, and that there is, as always, a range of conceptions of facilitation from the most mild and moderate, to, let’s say, the purest.  The basic idea is that in the classroom the Faculty member should play a reduced or even minimal role in terms of amount of intervention, especially in the number of interventions that convey some sort of opinion or take on the text. The professor, as one education writer put it, is turned into an “unobtrusive valet” of the students.  The argument for facilitation is precisely that it’s supposed to nurture autonomous critical thought on the part of the students, and that if the prof does not hang back, especially if the prof is male, then his authority and influence will stifle the students from developing their own thinking. So it would seem that I should be enthusiastically in favor of this approach. Actually there are lots of problems with its argument.  The first one, the practical one, is that if all the students need are facilitators or moderators, then Shimer should stop hiring Ph.D.’s. You can just go to one of the websites  where facilitation services can be hired, and it would eliminate Shimer’s budgetary problems very quickly and result in greatly reduced tuition. But that’s merely pragmatic.  Another objection is that if a talkative interventive instructor is supposed to inhibit the students thinking for themselves, it’s not clear why the author of the text being read is not similarly regarded as having that effect.  From the perspective of the old Great Books approach there’s an easy answer to that objection, namely that the whole point of relegating the prof to the background is to get out of the way of the radiant authority of the Great Book, and in the old school that applies to the students too, they’re also supposed to be deferential and circumspect . One example of the enshrining of the Great Author in the Great Books tradition is an episode  narrated by Robert Pirsig from his days at the U. of C. in which  as a student in class he  raised some sort of objection to a great book, and the response he got from the Prof was  (“) we are not interested in what you think, we are interested in what Aristotle thinks.”  But if at Shimer we don’t take that attitude, and as I often say if we’re not orthodox Great Books but reform Great Books, and if we say that in order to get the students to think for themselves the prof has to be off to the side, then why doesn’t the author have to be likewise off to the side?  

But the decisive objection to the logic of facilitation as an attempt to protect the students from the authority of the prof, is that it misunderstands authority.  It does not take into account that when the students enter college or walk into the classroom, they are already under the influence of authority, not just parents, or previous teachers, but also peers, movies, tv, other media, advertising, pop culture, all sorts of social facts, as Durkheim would call them, with their constraining effects. From this perspective, you can see that the prof can be and in my opinion should be not so much an authority but a counter authority, practicing a critical pedagogy, a challenger, like Socrates, who sure as hell was no facilitator. If today the primary function of educators in the liberal arts is to foster crtical thinking then, to take the term coined by former Shimer faculty Steven Werlin, discussion profs should be  not so much  “facilitators” but rather “difficultators, “ as Steven put it. The word does the job of clearly manifesting an alternative to facilitation, but it’s also a surpassingly ugly word—difficultator--so I think that the term “examiner” will do.

There’s no such thing as not being under some kind of authority, and if you don’t notice it, then it has all the more power over you.  The best remedy for conformity is contention, in essence, to expect and ask that people provide reasons or grounds for their claims, and especially for their judgmental claims.  In reviewing Norman Mailer’s fictional biography of Hitler, the South African writer J.M. Coetzee considers  the question of how Hitler got to be what he was.  And Coetzee notes that Hitler, never having gone to a university, never had the experience of having his views challenged, of having to provide evidence or arguments, or to respond to alternate views. 

It’s crucial for the educator who practices the Socratic method to be able to contest not only points of view that s/he already disagrees with, but also the ones that they find congenial.   That’s what I try to do, as I suppose many of us do, depending on how the discussion is going I stick up for an author or an interpretation or if the discussion is turning into an admiration fest I try to introduce a disruptive element.  And in my opinion  it should be a major or primary qualification for teaching discussion classes in the liberal arts that the instructor have both enough cultural literacy and enough capacity for ideological disengagement to be able to be an equal opportunity “difficultator.”

Broadening the point, education cannot be the students, whom the old Greeks called “the new ones,” teaching themselves.  That just means that the authorities are invisible behind the scene. Neither would I say that education is a transaction between the students and the prof. Rather, I think it’s most accurately seen as a transaction between generations, in which the professor is not just voicing his/her own ideas and opinions, but also, or mainly, representing those who are not “new,” channeling the dead is not far off, even when the students are the same age or older than the prof.  Finally, if it be asked what should be the authority in the classroom, I say that not the teacher, or the text, or the students, but rather the authority that Socrates repeatedly invokes in the dialogs when he says “Let us follow the argument wherever it leads.” 

If one tries to think of ways in which academia in general, and in spite of its ostensible commitment to academic freedom, suppresses dissent, probably the first thing that springs to the minds of many or most people is the horror stories of coercively or even violently enforced political correctness that get media attention, whose paradigm could be the time, in1978, that E. O. Wilson, the originator of sociobiology, was interrupted during a panel discussion and had a bucket of water  thrown at him by some militant radicals.  I do think that such actions are appalling, in fact, fascist, with a lower case f, and I’m not using the word as a mere epithet, I mean it in the specific sense that Karl Mannheim provides in Ideology and Utopia. And I’m not saying that only right-of-center voices are susceptible to being silenced in academia, though their silencings may be the ones that provide more photo-ops.  For example, you can probably guess that I don’t much agree with radical feminist Mary Daly, although maybe more than you might suppose, but as far as I can tell her being denied tenure was an instance of suppression of dissent.  

I’ve been at Shimer a long time and I have not seen any incidents on that level of egregiousness, hope there aren’t any in the future. But I think there are practices and maxims and discursive rules at Shimer, apart from the reduction of the professor to facilitator, which often have much to be said for them and which in most cases I would not want to be simply abolished, but which do tend to make it difficult to speak from off center at Shimer, and when I say off-center I mean  any kind of controversial minority position or point of view. 

In the earlier version of this talk, at this point I had an annotated catalog of these practices, but I’ve edited them out of this version, for the sake of reducing its duration.  So now, I’ll just move on to say that in spite of the powerful factors I mentioned earlier that support autonomous thought at Shimer,  it’s still difficult to speak from off-center at Shimer,  largely because of our very strong, and probably only partly conscious, aspiration toward community, equality, belonging that that whole series of authors that I went through before have investigated.  A formulation that fits the contemporary form of what De Tocqueville called the preferring of equality over liberty might be the elevation of sensitivity above inquiry.  For an example from outside of Shimer, I recently read that the Oxford University Union, which is renowned for sponsoring debates since time immemorial, canceled a debate on abortion on the grounds that it would distress women who had recently had an abortion.  I read the article, that was what they said. Now, take note that this was not an attempt to silence one side of an issue, in the style of some 60’s radicals, but to silence discussion itself in the name of sensitivity.  The most I can give them is that to have such a debate in certain settings, such as the home of a woman who had recently had an abortion, would be spectacularly insensitive.  But to cancel the debate in an institution that’s supposed to be dedicated to inquiry?   And at Oxford they’re probably flying the flag of critical thought or its cognates too.

The egregious example from within Shimer of silencing discussion, not out of ideological opposition, but  so as not to distress susceptible persons, comes from the Waukegan era, when a junior faculty member (who did not remain at Shimer) made a rule in a course, against discussing religion, either for or against, because it’s a very sensitive subject for some people, which it is.  Maybe we should get rid of Humanities 3?  

Something that I’ve heard at Shimer from time to time, and recently, is that anything that makes anyone feel offended should, for that very reason, not be permitted. If that statement is taken to mean what it literally says, the response might be, well, why don’t just go ahead and repeal the first amendment? It shouldn’t take a lot of  thought to realize that the  idea that anything that offends should be prohibited is a perfect prescription for totalitarianism, because just about anything is going to be offensive to somebody.  And the most trenchant answer to that maxim  is that the maxim itself is offensive to some people.  It is to me. It actually does distress and frighten me, so by the very principle of the maxim itself, the maxim itself should not be spoken.  If you want a society in which people are protected against any possibility of being offended, it’s already been planned out, it’s on paper, it’s called Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

There’s more.  Although I haven’t crunched the numbers, I have been looking at student evaluations of my own courses and the courses of colleagues, because as you may not know, senior faculty at Shimer read each others’ student evaluations, for more than two decades .  And I would say that, much more so than in the other six schools where I’ve taught, the comments are  for the most part about  classroom dynamics, and further, a good dynamic tends to be assumed to be without distress and discomfort.  And this focus on dynamics is, inevitably, at the expense of attention to the whole category of “how much have I learned in this course?” and related considerations.  In other schools where I taught, the great cliché of student praise for a professor was “demanding.”  If you didn’t get at least one “demanding” per batch, that was a bad sign.  At Shimer, I don’t think I have ever seen the term “demanding” used in either my or anybody else’s evaluations. 

Cicero says that “There can be no discussion without contradiction.”  The quote appears in this year’s Montaigne competition essay, where Montaigne characterizes the relation between two people discussing as a friendship, but “a friendship that delights in the sharpness and vigor of its intercourse,” and that “is not vigorous and generous enough . . . if it fears knocks and moves with constraint.”  

I should make clear at this point that I’m in no way advocating that out-and-out verbal abuse, as defined in the Student Handbook, be permitted.  Nor am I denying that my own argumentativeness or that of others doesn’t cross the line at times.  It’s bound to happen, that whatever you tend to do, you will at some point overdo, and whatever your characteristic virtue is, it will at times morph into your characteristic vice.  That’s essentially what Rahm Emmanuel has been saying in his campaign ads.  I didn’t get it from him.  I’ve been saying that for years.  So he must have gotten it from me.    Nor am I saying in any way that being a dissenter necessarily means that you’re right.  Yes, the truth is often called heresy; but heresy is just as often called truth.  That’s why we need critical open-mindedness.   What I am doing is what I was saying seminar leaders should do, that is, uphold the side that seems to be getting marginalized.

Just last weekend I was assessing a discussion among Montaigne Scholarship competitors, using the standard Shimer form for assessing discussion.  One of the questions or criteria was “the student exhibits a willingness to change his/her mind” Isn’t it possible for a student to be too willing to change his mind?  What if you change your  mind just because the majority of the group doesn’t agree with you? Why isn’t there another question or criterion on that sheet that says “The student does not change his/her mind without being given reasons and grounds for doing so?” It seems to me that in our student assessment criteria, in general, there is a very noticeable bias toward what might be called soft values, cooperativeness, collaboration, respect for others, “listening,” understood in the sense of sympathetic listening, willingness to change one’s mind.  “Are you saying you’re against those things?”  I would like to see a complementary and balanced recognition of integrity, forthrightness, honesty, courage of conviction, and independence of thought.  If we’re serious about fostering critical thought those qualities are at least as important as the first set.  

At Shimer, we may be even more susceptible to subordinating critical thought to group cohesion than modern people in general are supposed to be, according to some of the authors I’ve mentioned—because of our size, because the current incarnation of Shimer College—the post-Mt Carroll epoch—originated in what can be called a commune, and because a lot of people come to Shimer or stay at Shimer because they are seeking community.  I did, I originally came to Shimer because I didn’t just want an academic job.  I too wanted to belong, and still do, of course.  No, nothing wrong with that, but we should not forget the complementary values and purposes.  When I hear it said that the classroom should be a “safe” environment, I wonder, safe from what? Safe from getting punched in the nose? Certainly.  Safe from having epithets hurled at you?  Of course.  But safe from having your beliefs challenged and tested?  Safe from having to face up to your own ignorance?  The liberal arts classroom is not a comfort zone.  Education is not therapy

I was talking not long ago to student Dan Seaver, whom I’m quoting with his permission, and he remarked that it seems that lately we’ve had a series of student valedictorian speeches along the lines of, “I originally came to Shimer for the books, but eventually I realized that it’s not about the books, it’s about the relationships.”  And Dan said, “You know, I wish that just one time some valedictorian would say “I came here for the relationships, but then I realized that it’s about the books.”  A lot depends on what “the books” means.  If it just means getting the degree, getting your papers done, fulfilling requirements, and studying the texts—not life, or the world, please!—just the texts.  Then I agree that the relationships are more important.  But if “the books” means nothing less than freedom.   . . . . I think most of us, when confronted by the dichotomies I’ve been laying out in this paper, will say, “Why not both?”  To attain both community and autonomy is perhaps the main task of political thought in our time.  

It’s not that easy.  But it might help if we keep in mind that there’s more than one kind of relationship. These days, if we speak of relationship we typically mean sex, or at any rate, some sort of symbiosis or intimacy, or something that’s reciprocal, or merely reciprocal.  But there’s another sort of relationship, which appears in our core curriculum, and is exemplified by Diotima’s vision of love in Plato’s Symposium, where the loved one serves to redirect the lover to something higher than the loved one, and carnal love is a stepping stone for love of knowledge.  This kind of love resonates with the love of Dante for Beatrice, which is a love that is aimed not just or not so much at each other but at God or Heaven.  And there’s also the love of Petrarch for Laura. And remember that Montaigne, in the quotations from “The Art of Discussion” that I was reading earlier, in which he says that in discussion what he calls “knocks” come with the territory, he’s describing what he considers a kind of friendship. And Montaigne goes on to say shortly after that passage that “the cause of truth is the common cause for both” of the friends discussing.  In all four of these cases love or friendship is not merely reciprocal, it’s aimed at a third and higher point.  Think of two faces gazing at each other, in comparison with two faces gazing outward together at a light or a star.  I suggest that this latter image of love or friendship is a better model for the kind of relationship that’s right for a community of lovers of wisdom, and that the best name for this form of community is “fellowship” (which is  nowadays a gender-neutral term).  And I think that the best name for the common cause is still TRUTH.          

(c) Albert B. Fernandez

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