History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

Timothy Burke posted last Friday about Ross Douthat's critique of Harvard's curriculum in the Atlantic Monthly, which might have been appropriately and sardonically titled, "The Education of Ross Douthat."

Douthat doesn't go as far as Henry Adams; he doesn't refer to himself in the third person. But he might well have quoted Adams, his fellow Harvard alumnus, who made most of Douthat's points in 1918:

For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.

Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. (p. 50)

Now, no one really takes Adams' lack of seriousness about Harvard seriously either. Indeed, Adams spends his entire autobiography complaining about the ill fit between his nineteenth-century education and his twentieth-century experience, but in the process of doing so he does a pretty good job convincing his readers that he's a pretty educated guy, in all senses of the word. Harvard must not have been that bad for Adams. After all, he went back to work there.

But back to Douthat. There has been more discussion of the article at Left2Right, Brad DeLong, and Matthew Yglesias. Douthat speaks back here and here.

Most of these discussions concern the covering laws that Douthat suggests about contemporary philosophy -- that the dearth of metaphysics and morality in philosophy departments has doomed the discipline to popular irrelevance. Several philosophers in the above discussions have bristled. Since this is a history blog, though, I might as well point out that historians make out even more poorly in Douthat's article, what with all their pointless essay questions, microhistory, and, of course, their postmodern sensibilities. (I might respond by invoking Henry Adams too: "In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either to be taught as such -- or falsified. Adams wanted to do neither." Ah, the eternal dilemma of the conscientious history teacher.)

In both the article and one of his blog responses to critics, Douthat takes history and their disciplinary cousins to task for what he calls "the tendency of the humanities to become more scientistic in various ways over the last half-century -- via the dominance of Theory in the English and Literature departments; via the emphasis on primary research, material history, etc. in the History Departments; or more recently, via the rise of rational-choice theory in the realm of political science." This seems to me an odd way of thinking about what it means for the humanities to be "scientistic," and it is especially disorienting that the article dubs this baneful tendency as "postmodern." Emphasizing primary research and adopting rational-choice theory also seem to me horses of very different colors; I'm not sure I see what the tendency that Douthat is identifying is, unless it's the standard complaint that humanistic writing has become more science-like -- jargony and what not.

What I really wanted to point out, however, was Douthat's response to those (like me) who believe he underestimates the crucial role of the student in higher education. His response is that we overestimate that role. I'm inclined to agree (as Burke also seemed to suggest) that a balance has to be struck between administrative facilitation and student self-motivation in order for that mysterious cocktail called "education" to be shaken up. Douthat's complaint about those who place the onus on students reads like this:

I tend to think if you take a bunch of teenagers, however smart they may be, and drop them into a stress-ridden, hypercompetitive school in which the only academic guidance takes the form of a terrible, terrible Core Curriculum, most of them will take the path of least resistance, seek out easy classes and popular, potentially lucrative concentrations (hello, economics!), and generally fail to get the most of their four years. Is this a moral failure on the students' part, and therefore something that the administration and faculty shouldn't be concerned with? DeLong et. al. seem to think so. Their attitude is apparently that if you didn't do a good job picking, without any kind of guidance (I don't know what the advising system was like in DeLong's era, but it's nearly nonexistent now), thirty-two classes out of the hundreds and hundreds of potential offerings that Harvard flings at you -- well, then tough luck, buddy. And good luck at the consulting firm.

It struck me while reading this how uncannily it sounds like a liberal view of government. We know from others of his writings that Douthat doesn't like what he calls "left-liberalism." But his impassioned critique of the university as a passive institution, and his defense of the betrayed student from the charge of "moral failure," sound an awful lot like he's a closet liberal. Try this experiment: go back through the paragraph above, and read it this way:

I tend to think if you take a bunch of [people], however smart they may be, and drop them into a stress-ridden, hypercompetitive [market] ... most of them will take the path of least resistance ... and generally fail to get the most of their [potential]. Is this a moral failure on the [people's] part, and therefore something that the administration and [government] shouldn't be concerned with? DeLong et. al. seem to think so. Their attitude is apparently that if you didn't do a good job picking, without any kind of guidance ... [life options] out of the hundreds and hundreds of potential offerings that [the world] flings at you -- well, then tough luck, buddy. And good luck [on the unemployment line].

Okay, it's a highly selective edit, but it raises this question: Why are so many conservative critics willing to make structural arguments about the failures of "the system" when it comes to higher education, while they sneer at the insistence of liberal critics that "failure" in the school of hard knocks is not knock-down evidence of "moral failure" on the part of people who need help now? Are the rules that apply to universities different from those that apply to all other social institutions?

(Cross-posted at Cliopatria.)