What Are Universities For?

Stefan Collini, professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge offers some considerations in his 2012 book of the same title. His erudite, yet conversational style made for a quick and enjoyable, yet thought provoking read. The last third of the book are previously written essays in response to major reports emanating from efforts to examine the state of higher education in Britain.



As he notes, this environment is even more accelerated in the U.S.  Among the thoughtful insights spread over 199 pages

...One of the most predictable places where pseudo-market guff comes in is the issue of 'rewards' for academics (as if they had just found lost treasure or an escaped criminal). HEFCE [Higher Education Funding Council for England] has already been on to this we are told, with its insistence that certain elements of the annual grant are tied to institutions having in place 'human resources strategies' which, above all, 'reward good performance': This process has successfully kick-started the modernization of human resource management in higher education.' 'Modernization' is, of course, trademark NewLabourSpeak, here combined with the language of the personnel departments of commercial companies. What it essentially means is that, given a number of people doing roughly the same job, a way has to be found to pay some of them less than others. Otherwise, given the assumptions of market democracy, no one will have sufficient reason to try and do their best: they will only do this if they can see that it could earn them more money than their colleagues. 'Modern' here means using the market model. Result: endless procedures involving specious attempts to measure effort or effectiveness which have the net effect of being  divisive and demoralizing. On this point it is well worth recalling the moral confidence of what one historian has described as 'one of the great state papers of this century', the Robbins Report of 1963: 'We believe any such disparity between the incomes and prospects of persons doing similar work in different universities, which are all in the receipt of public funds, to be unjust; and we consider its effects to be harmful.'

...It is another of the misplaced market assumptions of our time that giving a lot of money to a  few individuals at the top of an institution is what best contributes to the overall performance of that institution. In fact, in many activities morale, commitment, cooperation, and a sense of solidarity are far more precious, and they tend to be fostered by a system that uses only modestly differentiated pay scales. [pp.160-162]

When an artist creates a work with the emphasis on what will sell as opposed to what is in her heart, we generally find that the art is diminished, the beauty tarnished. Higher education in the past few decades has been so focused on ‘what sells’ that their product is at best blemished, at worst graduating people who will use their power for their own betterment and against the public good.

Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the heedless pursuit of wealth from investments. If you pursue the highest returning stock regardless of what that business is unleashing in the world, have you not sold your soul? I seem to remember a Biblical parable about that.

Higher education like, so much of the investment craze for narrow and quick profit (can you pronounce hedge funds), has unwittingly driven the consumption of much that is not for the public good. A serious discussion of what is the public good and what universities are for beyond making its graduates 'profitable' needs to take place. University reactions to the escalating threat of climate change and increasing inequality will speak volumes about the what their leadership believes universities are for.

Beyond Knowledge - Towards Understanding Through Scholarship

     "The default condition of the scholar is one of intellectual dissatisfaction. No matter how exhilarating it may be to discover new evidence or come up with an illuminating apt characterization, one can never (and perhaps should never) entirely banish the sense that the current state of one's work can only ever have the status of an interim report, always vulnerable to being challenged, corrected, or simply bypassed. The mind searches for pattern, for a kind of order, but this is a restless, endless process. One of the things that can make a book influential in the humanities - and it usually is a book, since a fairly wide canvas is needed to display the pattern in all its persuasive detail - is that the pattern which it proposes becomes the framework for much subsequent scholarship in the particular area. Obvious examples of books which shaped a whole sub-field a generation or more ago might include E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), or Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (1967), or John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), and in some respects those works never lose their pertinence. However, not only are such books subjected to more or less constant criticism and revision (including by their own authors), but there is a sense in which a particular scholarly community  simply moves on - moves on to other topics, or to using different methods, or to asking new questions. That it does so is not entirely a matter of discovery of new empirical evidence or the operation of intellectual fashion or shifting pressures from the outside world, those these can have a part to play. It is, more fundamentally, because no starting point is beyond reconsideration, because no assumptions (about how societies change or how people act or how meanings mean) are beyond challenge, because no vocabulary has an exclusive monopoly. And this is where that existential state of intellectual dissatisfaction turns into something like a methodological precept. It will in practice, require experienced judgment to decide at what point asking a different kind of question is a fruitful way to proceed and when it is simply going to be obstructive or irrelevant. But in principle no question can be ruled out in advance. Someone else can aleays start from somewhere else - and so, therefore, can we. There can only ever be interim reports.

     This is one of the places where insisting on the difference between knowledge and understanding becomes vital. How we understand a particular topic depends, among other things, on what else we already understand. The point here is akin to that made long ago about the search for authenticity in the so-called 'early music' movement: we may play the pieces on period instruments but we cannot listen to them with period ears. Part of the reason why we, now, cannot understand Shakespeare in exactly the same way as, say A.C. Bradley did in his classic work on Shakespeare Tragedy (1904) is not just because our knowledge of that particular writer has advanced, but because our understanding of so much else has changed. It is true that we know more now than we did a century ago about, for example, the transmission of Shakespeare's texts or about the conditions of Elizabethan stagecraft. But, more fundamentally, we have encountered different ideas about matters as various as the operation of ethnic stereotyping or the social subordination of women as well as about the the interpretation of character in drama in general or even about the relation between writing and meaning. In some repsects scholarship attempts to come as close as we can to acquiring period ears, to become more and more familiar with the language and assumptions of the period in which a work was written. But, still, it is we who are doing the understanding, and we are trying to communicate that understanding to a contremporary audience in a contemporary idiom. We couldn't simply  repeat the perceptions and judgments of a hundred years ago even if we tried."
                                                 [Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? London: penguin, 2012]

Wise Souls

I have been privileged to meet many fine folks over my 65 years. Fame doesn't necessarily wear well on all who achieve some level of it. Which is why many of those I put in this category of fine folks would include the not so famous who are close friends. But while I was sustainability director at MSU I was able to invite some very well known authors, thinkers, activists, scholars to campus. As the host I was afforded the pleasure of their company plus the initial and subsequent conversation and correspondence. Many of those I hosted were indeed good souls. They radiated a warmth, a wisdom, a humility (despite any fame) and a commitment to a better world. Amongst the top of my list I would include Scott Russell Sanders, Vandana Shiva, Terry Tempest Williams, and Satish Kumar.

Satish is less well known here in the states than the others, but he's been shining his light since he began his walk around the world to urge nuclear disarmament in 1962. Since 1973 he's been working and editing the magazine Resurgence, a voice for the interdependence of humans and the natural world and subsequently founding Schumacher College. When you are with Satish, you realize you are with a wise soul.

All the more reason perhaps that his newest book, Soil, Soul, and Society reverberates that soulfulness.

 

Some excerpts worth sharing:


       The meaning of the word 'education' is to bring out what is already there, the potential of every student. Every soul has its own built-in intelligence. For example, every seed has its own built-in tree. A forester does not need to put a tree in every seed; his or her work is to nurture the seed and help to bring the tree out of it. In a similar manner, a professor or teacher is not to consider a student an empty bucket that needs to be filled with information. A teacher needs to observe the student, spot the potential and help the student in such a manner that the dormant potential can emerge.[pp.111-12]

In summarizing Schumacher's thesis in Small is Beautiful, Satish writes:

     Organizations are conceived and built for some ideals such as caring for the health of people, or providing education for the young, or producing and distributing food for people, or caring for the environment. Large scale organizations tend to get bogged down in the maintenance of the organization itself, and the ideals for which the organization was set up seem to become secondary. Large scale often forces people to be at the service of the organization, whereas small scale tends to make the organization at the service to the people.

One of the primary tests of an organization is whether it turns people into instruments to perpetuate the system and sees people as a means to an end, or whether the organization exists as a means and people are the end. Large business organizations aim to maximize profit and then people become subservient to the profit motive, whereas smaller business organizations are better able to maintain a balance between the well-being of its members and the community they serve, as well as keeping an eye on the bottom line.

Similarly, large government organizations become obsessed with their hold on power Other human, social, and ecological considerations become subsidiary to the overriding imperative of remaining in control, even if lip service is paid to improving public services or maintaining sustainable development. [pp.131-32]

Soil, Soul, and Society cracks open the seed of possibility and nurtures its potential to become a better world for all. Reading it will feed the soul.

Climate, Prosperity, Economic Growth, and Governance

     "It must always be remembered that the greatest barrier to humanity rising to meet the climate crisis is not that its too late or that we don't know what to do. There is just enough time, and we are swamped with green tech and green plans. And yet the reason so many of us are greeting this threat with grim resignation is that our political class appears wholly incapable of seizing those tools  and implementing those plans> And it's not just the people we vote into office and then complain about  - it's us. For most of us living in post-industrial societies, when we see the crackling black and white footage of general strikes in the 1930s, victory gardens in the 40s, and Freedom Rides in the 60s, we simply cannot imagine being part of any mobilization of that depth and scale. That kind of thing was fine form them, but surely not us - with our eyes glued to our smartphones, our attention spans scattered by click bait, our loyalties split by the burdens of debt and the insecurities of contract work. Where would we organize? Who would we trust enough to lead us? Who, moreover, is "we"?

     In other words, we are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project - one that has too often taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular gratification - seeking units to maximize our narrow advantage. This project has also led our governments to stand by helplessly for more than two decades as the climate crisis morphed from a "grandchildren" problem to a banging-down-the-door problem." Naomi Klein, in The Nation, October 6, 2014

British economist, Tim Jackson writes in last week's Guardian about the conflict between economic growth and climate change. In The Dilemma of Growth: Prosperity vs. Economic Expansion, Jackson asks:


"Rethinking prosperity is a vital task because our prevailing vision of the good life – and the economics intended to deliver it – have both come badly unstuck. Financial markets are unstable; inequality is rising; and despite the 500,000 or so people who took to the streets before Tuesday’s UN Climate Summit in New York, tackling climate change still faces a “frustrating lack of progress”. If this were not enough, the proposition that more is always better has signally failed to deliver, particularly in the affluent west. But questioning these values is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries."

Add me to that list.

But wait, there are signs of hope. From author Terry Tempest Williams blogging at the NYC Climate March, just a week ago -
    
     "They just kept coming in waves, in torrents, a river of people convening on the streets of New York City in the march for climate justice. They just kept coming, hundreds of thousands of individuals, indigenous, black, white, brown, yellow, and red, a rainbow of colors winding through the canyons of Manhattan.
     This movement of climate justice is no longer segregated, is no longer privileged, is no longer young or old, or the radical fringe moving toward the center. Instead, this movement resides in the core of a collective concern: Earth has a fever. There is no Planet B. What we witnessed on Sunday, September 21, was 400,000 individuals standing in the center of this crisis with love."

Maybe, there is just enough hope, that readers will throw off the shackles of hopelessness and take up the hard and long work of redirecting our future.

An election is only five weeks away. It's not too late or too early to work for a candidate or proposal in your community that can point us in a new direction. Not sure who? LOOK HERE

 

Now, not tomorrow.

Dangerous Love

 

The newest (October 2014) issue of The Sun arrived late last week in my mailbox (October issue is not available online as of the time I write this. As of this morning I've read most all of it. Since resubscribing after many years of absence I have found it to be 'soul building' food. The writing, the topics, the diversity all filled with writers sharing their soul. Even the short pieces of the monthly "The Readers Write" section are uniformly moving, thoughtful. It says a lot about the editor, Sy Safransky, who has been publishing this little magazine, AD-FREE, for decades.

There is a lengthy interview in this issues with someone I had never heard of before, Reverend Lynice Pinkard under the title of "Dangerous Love". The interviewer, Mark Leviton introduces the interview -

 "I first encountered the work of Reverend Lynice Pinkard when I read her essay "Revolutionary Suicide" in the magazine Tikkun. Her writing combined fervor and thoroughness with a big heart. Although she is a Christian - she grew up in the African American Church - her analysis of the Hebrew prophets resonated with my Jewish background. When I contacted Pinkard about the possibility of interviewing her for The Sun, she suggested I first listen to some recordings of her sermons, archived on the website of First Congregational Church of Oakland  where she served for eight years as a pastor. I did and was impressed by the passion of her presentation and the rigor of her arguments as she exhorted her congregation to switch from a  typical American life of consumerism to one of giving without expectation of reward."

I have not read the essay Leviton mentions in Tikkun although the link to it above is there and I will read it soon. His interview with Pinkard is compelling and challenging especially for this agnostic, but I feel like I'm a better person for having read it. Below are just two short excerpts that fail to give a full flavor of the interview, but on their own are worthy of sharing with readers of this blog.

"I also believe that what we have loved in our short lives constitutes our legacy, and that we become who we are, with all our flaws and faults, because somebody somewhere loved us and cared for us and sacrificed for us. I have loved some people, and some people have loved me, and that has saved my life." (p.17)

"It is our job to collaborate with each other and activate that love." (p.16)

The Politics of Peace

      "Satish Kumar’s title – Soil, Soul, Society – could hardly be more sparse; yet it represents, he says, a “distillation” of his own lifetime’s thinking and that of his heroes – and the three small words are all we really need to put the world to rights. For our aim should be – should it not? – to create harmony in the world; and this must be achieved at three levels. As individuals and as a species we need to move away from our anthropocentricity – for “humans have come to believe that they are separate from Nature and above Nature” – and to see ourselves once more as part of Nature; and this is the notion symbolised by ‘soil’.

       For this as for all else, we need harmony within ourselves, practising humility and seeking to abandon ego: the idea encapsulated as ‘soul’. Of course, too, we need to seek harmony with the rest of humanity – ‘society’ – and indeed to treat all creatures with the same compassion. 

        All this should be second nature, yet it is the diametric opposite of the worldview that came out of the West and now dominates the whole world: entirely anthropocentric; entirely materialistic; crudely ‘rational’ in a calculating kind of way; employing science to control and even ‘conquer’ Nature; and locking us all into no-holds-barred competition, which in essence and commonly in practice has no truck with compassion at all.

So begins the review of Satish Kumar's recent book by Colin Tudge in the recent issue of Resurgence.
The issue includes many gems including pieces by Charles Eisenstein and Samdhong Ripoche. The topic of the issue that arrived in my mailbox over the weekend, "The Politics of Peace", has been coursing through my veins more intensely of late, perhaps because of the events in Gaza, Ferguson, Missouri, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and my own involvement with our Peace Education Center.

More likely it's tied to the just completing a short book by Barry Gan, Violence and Nonviolence: An Introduction. In it, Gan, a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Nonviolence at St. Bonaventure University, succinctly lays out five myths of violence:

• Myth of Physical Violence
• Myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys
• Myth of Necessary Violence
• Myth of Effective Punishment
• Myth  of Nonviolence as Ineffective

 

Gan sets up this critique of myths of violence with a short story about looking for a missing wallet. After searching endlessly in all the wrong places, they eventually retrace the actions that preceded loss of the wallet.

     "The point is that when we look for something we have lost, we first decide where we might have displaced it, and then begin to search. However, if we are wrong in our assumptions about where we lost it, we fail to find it. Our likelihood of success is determined by our initial assumptions. This observation illustrates the central and noncontroversial point of the first part of this book: that our assumptions govern or direct our individual behaviors, and the assumptions of a community or society govern or direct its social, political and economic behaviors and policies." (p.3)

In the 111 pages that follow, Gan not only addresses each of the five myths (false assumptions) he gives us a concise, jargon-free review of the alternative. Yes Margaret Thatcher, There Is an Alternative!!

Like Satish Kumar's new book listed above, Gan concludes that peace/nonviolence must come from the inside out. There is a fearlessness in this approach that is hard to come by for most of us.

I find it hard to fathom that so little of the curriculum in our schooling from K-12 through PhD really gives much attention to these assumptions about violence or the POSSIBILITY that there might be a better way. As I have written before we spend billions to prepare for war and almost nothing to understand and nurture peace. More money funds university research on weapons than on approaches to resolving conflict. Where we spend our money shows what we believe in.

After reading, Gans, Ripoche, Eisenstein, and  Kumar, and listening to this Tom Paxton classic song over the weekend for the first time in years, I think they have it right! This must come from the inside out. How does our educational system foster that kind of personal development? It's currently all about job and career. So until we fix that, we'll keep churning out 'educated' people who believe that violence is a given and we need to protect ourselves from others - humans, animals, nature. Ah, the myth of independence strikes again.

Now how to live fearlessly, committed to a world without violence, therein lies the rub. One thought at a time. Here's to you dear reader - may you have the strength of your nonviolent convictions!

Peace
Peace will
Peace will come
And let it begin with me

We
We need
We need peace
And let it begin with me

Oh, my own life is all I can hope to control.
Oh, let my life be lived for the good,
Good of my soul.

Let it bring
Peace
Sweet peace
Peace will come
And let it begin with me

Citizenship, Higher Education and Inequality

"If educators are agreed on anything, it is that the fundamental purpose of education is to prepare young people to be good citizens."

 

These words from John Hannah are etched on his statue that stands in front of the MSU Administration Building, that bears his name.
 
Hannah was the longest serving president of MSU serving in that capacity from 1941-1969. He saw it move from a respectable Midwest college to a major research university.  He also served as the first chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and later head of the US Agency for International Development.

I traced down the origin of that speech in his collected papers preserved in the University Archives and Historical Collections. From what I saw, the quote is indeed accurate, having been given at a National Conference on General Education in 1961. The speech was reprinted in the May 1962 University College Quarterly, under the title "Responsibilities in International Education". In examining the context of these etched words, we see a proponent for international education making the case for what he calls "six categories of responsibility in international education", the sixth category being the one etched on his statue and cited above which he also mentions later as "the responsibility for the preparation of American students to play their roles in the years ahead."

The sentences following the quote we began this blog with are equally insightful.

     "Adequate preparation for citizenship means learning many things. It means learning, among others, how to be a productive member of society economically. It means learning how to find one's proper place in society in agreeable relationship with others. It means learning how the political system works. It means learning enough of the world and of the universe to lend a proper perspective to the judgments a citizen must make."

Hannah goes on and finishes with the following affirmation of this central point of his address:

     "There are many ways to raise the level of understanding of the American people of the world situation, and develop their capacity to make the wise decisions required of them. Most of these methods are in the hands of our educational institutions. This is as it should be, for formal education has been assigned the primary role of preparing young people for effective citizenship.
      We may train selected specialists for specific assignments over seas. We may embark on worthy projects of many kinds in distant lands to improve the lot of underprivileged people. We may continue to welcome foreign students to our campus. We may do all of the other things we have considered.
      But none of them bears as directly upon the central interest of the American people as does the responsibility of preparing young Americans through higher education to be effective citizens in a troubled and rapidly shrinking world. To be an effective citizen in today's world makes extraordinary demands upon educated individuals. Fitting our students for this role is a primary responsibility of United States universities."

Earlier that year, Hannah gave another talk that I came across in his papers entitled "The Challenges of Equal Opportunity to the Colleges and Universities" at a Washington, D.C. Conference on Equality of Opportunity in Higher Education. Here Hannah lays out another responsibility of higher education, especially of land-grant universities.

     "All persons become more valuable by education, more useful to themselves and to the community.
      It is abundantly clear, then, that the land-grant colleges were established to correct an existing inequality in educational opportunity. That inequality was first expressed in terms of vocations and professions --[Jonathan Baldwin] Turner and others pointed out that agricultural and mechanical workers were not getting a fair shake when compared to the professions. This, they said, was unfair -- the American people, with their love of fair play and sympathy for the underdog, gave overwhelming approval to their proposals."

More than fifty years have passed since Hannah spoke these words and the data clearly shows we have more inequality. How higher education and institutions like Michigan State University, the original land-grant institution, address these issues is crucial for our collective future and the public good.