July 7, 2023
Periodically, I find myself writing another newsletter on liberal education, especially education in the humanities. I do not wish to become tedious, but I feel the need to return to the issue for the same reason that the economist Paul Krugman continues to write columns on inflation: it’s not as if the problem has gone away. I write with some urgency because humanities education itself may very well go away, at least outside a small circle of elite universities that can afford to maintain humanities departments as preserves for exotic species threatened with extinction. People not connected with academia seem a bit startled when I tell them that it may, in many if not most schools, become impossible to major in English, let alone some special program like “gender studies,” in the not-too-distant future. English may, possibly though not probably, become a service department teaching freshman composition and a small number of Introduction to Literature courses to fulfil a gen-ed requirement. The outcome is not at all inevitable, but my warning is not just alarmism either.
The term “liberal education” comes from the 19th century, when “liberal” meant free from the necessity of making a living. It was designed to produce the “gentleman,” in other words, someone from the upper classes who was polished and refined and not just a rich and ignorant boor. It was, in other words, elite education for an elite class, enjoyed by perhaps 10% of the population. In the United States in 2023, this elite class and its elite education still exist, as an island in a vast sea of mass education serving the middle and lower middle classes. If you get your news about education from the New York Times, this kind of elite education and the elite institutions that offer it are all you will hear about. Harvard has been in the news because the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, but if you read more widely you will discover that that ruling will have the greatest impact mostly on Harvard and a handful of other institutions that have used affirmative action to counterbalance—really to cover up—what they really are, gateways that ensure that the “right people” get the kind of education, and the networking that goes along with it, that will lead to success in the upper levels of society. The right people are those who get in because of legacy admissions, which are white, upper-class affirmative action. It turns out that Harvard has been using affirmative action to recruit more African Americans, but discriminating against Asians. Why? Because Asians tend to be high performers who, if admissions were really according to merit, would not leave sufficient places for the less talented and hard-working offspring of the privileged. Meanwhile, the lower-ranked schools that most students attend admit most of those who are qualified, at least according to the articles that I have read, not because they are enlightened but because university enrollments are plummeting, and average schools are increasingly desperate to enroll enough students, of whatever race or ethnicity, to keep their doors open. This will become even more true in the future.
In the more or less economically secure era after World War II, humanities majors from non-elite schools could get jobs—if not immediately, then eventually. Academia made English majors an honest promise that the language and critical thinking skills of good English majors would make them viable in the job market, at least in the long run. But the systematic undermining of the middle class since the 1980’s, capped by the economic meltdown of 2008, has created a crisis of confidence in which students have deserted the humanities in droves in a panic to find something that promises money and security in an increasingly Social Darwinist society. The pandemic then hit families that had never really recovered from the job losses of 2008. I am amazed at how puzzled economic experts seem to be by the depressed, pessimistic, half-angry mood of the American public, a mood that accounts for President Biden’s low approval numbers despite all that he has done for the middle class, which is arguably more than any president has done in my lifetime. “But inflation is dropping, and prices, despite widespread gouging, are no longer rising. The housing situation is dire, but outside of that the economy is in a fairly good place,” the experts say. Even astute and decent-minded analysts like Paul Krugman in the New York Times do not seem fully aware of the underlying problem, which is that most middle class American families are barely surviving. People work multiple jobs, with poor job security, have no savings whatsoever and in fact are in debt through no fault of their own. A year of inflation approaching 10% if you are in that condition is not a temporary inconvenience or minor hardship—it is a potential disaster. Until this changes, people will continue to desert the humanities in droves and flock to business and professional degrees. Liberal education depends on relative affluence and security, sad but true.
In addition, the anxious and neurotic mood engendered by the plight of the middle class accounts for the Trump phenomenon. While the core MAGA following is a racist, sexist, homophobic, Christian nationalist rabble exploited by grifter politicians, they are not enough to win most elections. But, from 2016 onward, they have been joined by those who have given up, with good reason, on the political and economic system. We are talking about more than a number of out-of-work coal miners in Appalachia. Yes, those who vote for Republicans are, by and large, not poor, rural, and unemployed. But if, as one survey showed, your family could not easily absorb even a one-time extra cost of $400 because you are living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, you are going to at least lend an ear to people who say they are angry at “elites.” Meanwhile, the left, instead of uniting and trying to make common cause with beleaguered moderates, hammering on the issue of economic inequality, has allowed itself to fall down the rabbit hole of the culture wars. In fact, as I have said before in these newsletters, providing economic security for the middle and lower middle would probably do more than any amount of “woke” agitation to defuse racist and gender hysteria, much of which is due less to some kind of innate evil-mindedness than to fear for survival, a fear that gets projected onto scapegoats. A college degree is a promise of economic security to those who are increasingly desperate—and who are not going to major in art history or philosophy, or even in English, ending up $30,000 in debt for a degree that they see as basically a gamble.
The present newsletter has been sparked by the news of one possible means of survival for liberal education in general and the humanities in particular: a university that is entirely online. Let us make clear that we are not talking about for-profit scams like the University of Phoenix of yesteryear. Let us assume, rather, an attempt by well-qualified people to preserve the humanities in a time of crisis. The first reaction of some people is most likely to groan. We have just come out of a pandemic in which education moved onto Zoom, and many of the results were not pretty. But let us make the case for the sake of argument, and that case would begin by insisting that the pandemic years are not a good model. Students trapped in their homes, many with inadequate Internet access, suffering from increasing mental health issues: it was a state of emergency, not a norm. Let us instead think of online university education along the lines of work-from-home, which has become so popular that employers are being forced to allow it, or at least compromise with it, whether they like the idea or not. An institution that exists online eliminates infrastructure: the enormous cost of buildings, staff to maintain buildings and campus, food services, and the like. The widespread belief that colleges and universities are ripping the public off with their constant tuition increases is based on ignorance. Most of them charge the minimum they can and still get by, and no one, not even the university president, is making a princely salary by business standards. It simply costs that much to maintain something the size of a small town. For students, online education eliminates either dorm fees or problems with commuting, which in turn means that universities can recruit from a wide area, possibly even internationally, whereas right now most smaller schools like my own Baldwin Wallace University recruit from an area that is at most statewide.
But, some will protest, college is more than academic instruction. However, the biggest change I have witnessed in nearly four decades as a professor is one that is not very often discussed, at least to my knowledge. No one talks much anymore about “the college experience,” which used to be one of higher education’s most highly advertised selling points. Beginning with the postwar academic boom of the 1950’s, the four years of college life began to become something of a middle-class playground, modeled on the upper-class playgrounds of the elite schools, with their rowing clubs and, for the women, tea in white gloves with the Dean of Students. Professors complained about students who were there mostly for the party, and about administrators who encouraged the idea that college was mostly about four years of having fun. You will form friendships here that will last the rest of your life, students were promised by administrations hoping to instill in graduates a lifelong nostalgia that might translate into lifelong financial support. Much of the non-academic aspect of school was dominated by Greek life. Fraternities and sororities were hugely popular, and the main events of the school year, such as Homecoming and the May Day games, were organized by and around them. With Greek life came parties and binge drinking during a time when the legal age was still 18. When I began at Baldwin Wallace in the early 90’s, the administration seemed almost obsessed with the dangers of binge drinking, including, for women, the danger of date rape that went along with it. This too was borrowed from the elite schools, as the Brett Kavanaugh hearings showed a few years ago. Some places achieved the dubious distinction of being “party schools.” This extraverted atmosphere seems to be greatly diminished, perhaps on the verge of dying out altogether, along with the two student publications that promoted and recorded the “college experience,” the yearbook and the student newspaper. Our yearbook became extinct some years ago; our student paper survives, and is in fact better than it has been in many years, but I do not have the sense that many students pay attention to it.
What college experience survives has been swallowed by social media. Social connection still exists, but it exists on a screen, indirect and at a distance. Social media have conditioned many students to feel comfortable only with distanced connection. The relatively new phenomenon of “social anxiety” appears to mean that a good number of students are not comfortable with any interaction that is face to face—including, for some, sitting in a classroom with other people. This is remarkably thoroughgoing: they never, ever seem to talk on their phones. Phones are for thumb-twiddling and tweeting. They communicate even with their moms by texting. In class, a third of the students are staring at their phones at any given moment, not, I suspect, because they are bored but as a security device: it is a safe escape from being in a room full of people. In addition, students are not motivated to sink themselves heavily in debt in order to socialize for four years. The temptation to remain a perpetual student, delaying graduation for the sake of the party was a phenomenon of a system in which very few graduated with any significant college debt.
Nowadays, the most high-profile event of the academic year at my institution is a relatively new one called Ovation. Classes are cancelled for an entire day that is given over to poster sessions by students about their research, dramatic and musical performances, poetry readings, all of it showcasing the intellectual and creative pursuits of students of many majors. Not everything is in decline in higher education. Ovation is a laudable replacement for, or at least supplement to, the older social activities, which were not only comparatively frivolous but which tended to reproduce some of the more toxic aspects of high school, especially the cliques and popularity contests. Students, at least a lot of students, are more serious about their studies than ever before. The shadow side is that much of the motivation is not intellectual curiosity but economic anxiety. Students are thinking of their resumés, of career preparation and networking. This would be true no matter whether instruction was in person or online.
But what of online instruction, the topic with which this discussion began? There have been online courses for many years, utilizing mandatory posting on discussion boards. What Zoom brought in, just in time for the pandemic, was the possibility of live instruction and discussion. Any online undergraduate degree program is going to have to cope with the fact that every group of students I have talked to agree with me that a class on Zoom is in many ways an unsatisfying experience. The question is why, since information can be conveyed and questions about it answered just as easily on Zoom as by direct classroom contact. And several advantages come with such instruction. First, there are no more “snow days”—Baldwin Wallace is in Cleveland, Ohio. In bad weather, students and faculty who commute do not have to risk their lives trying to travel to a physical classroom. Second, all classes can be recorded for the benefit of students who missed for any reason, good or bad. This is in fact already a requirement at BW, instituted during Covid but now clearly a permanent feature.
I have also noticed that the majority of “continuing education” non-credit courses offered by our Institute for Learning in Retirement are now on Zoom (or the equivalent), a boon for seniors unable to travel and fearful of Covid. I was recently approached by a network of senior homes who are planning a series of livestreamed lectures to the entire network. Well, seniors are one thing, but what about unmotivated undergraduates? Some of them have always complained about lectures, and now the lectures won’t even be live. But that is misleading. Students love podcasts. Judging by the number of them available on every subject under the sun, it appears that everyone loves podcasts, good news to someone who has one of his own. I do not have many listeners, but it is a thrill to get my stats and see that people have listened to my podcast all the way around the world. There are also the resources of YouTube. I am too old to have much idea of what is on TikTok other than dance videos and challenges daring teenage boys to steal Kias, but YouTube is a lot more than funny cat videos. I have taught courses on folk music and the blues in which YouTube footage of performances and interviews, some contemporary and some historic, was of equal value to the textbook.
And yet, there is a limit to what is possible online. Something is missing, namely, experiential immediacy. The distanced nature of postmodern life comes up against the fact that we are wired for direct social contact, for immediacy and the warmth that it engenders. Not for nothing do concerts and other performances advertise that they are Live! Livestreaming is not the same. We are attuned to respond to the presence of another human body, to voice and facial expressions, sometimes even to touch. It is why we go to see the band, or even the lecturer, in performance that we could comfortably listen to with earbuds. The mystique of Woodstock lies in the fact that people were willing to endure several days in the rain, with inadequate toilet facilities, for the sake of a communal experience. It was not just the music, glorious as that was, and, no, it was not just the drugs. It was a bonding. People have bonded through music and dance for thousands of years.
Lectures are not inherently boring—only bad lectures are boring. Yes, students could acquire the informational content by reading, but something else happens, at least in the good times, when there is direct contact. That something is a feedback loop between performer—and a good lecturer is a performer—and audience. The performer feeds off of the energy of the audience, which is why the pandemic shutdown was so hard on musicians. But the audience is also energized by the performer, including the lecturer. Enthusiasm is contagious, and the lecturer’s possession by the material ideally gets communicated to the students. This is even more true of lecture-discussion classes, where it is the energized atmosphere that draws students into the discussion. It is difficult to create an energized atmosphere on Zoom, when what you are faced with are a set of talking postage stamps on a laptop screen. Anyone who teaches the same class in multiple sections, such as freshman composition, is familiar with the phenomenon that the same material, same teacher, same teaching methods that produce a lively class hour in one section elicit only the silence of the morgue in another. The endless preoccupation with “teaching methods” is largely wasted effort. What makes a class work, assuming a competent instructor, is chemistry, and, as with romantic relationships, some got it and some don’t. The difference lies with the students—their personalities, their engagement or lack thereof, their willingness to help create something together. The vibrancy of the class hour affects even the shrinking violets who never say a word for 15 weeks. In fact, it can affect them most of all, as you will find in the searching essays they write, inspired by what has transpired in the group. Any teacher is grateful for the talkers—especially those who really have something to say and are not just in need of attention—but they also contribute who listen silently with their whole heart and soul.
Indeed, the best education, at least in English, depends on a rhythm of alternated introversion and extraversion, taking in and giving out, like breathing. At the heart of the humanities is the introverted experience of reading and reflecting on what one has read. We complain that students don’t read, but the whole texture of contemporary life makes it difficult, because reading demands uninterrupted privacy (even if it is in the middle of Starbucks, the modern replacement of the French café). As I have said elsewhere, the original point of living on a campus for four years was to isolate oneself, the ivy-covered walls suggesting a kind of cloistered environment, in order to meditate effectively. Sneering at the “ivory tower” was always an anti-intellectual ploy. Ideally, however, this private experience has as its mutually-catalyzing counterpart a group experience that provides, not further information, but a community, the sense that one is alone and yet not lonely because connected to kindred spirits. This is true of the professor as well as the students, and is what keeps some of us in the classroom long after we are supposed to be “retired.” Such an experience depends on small class sizes of the kind traditionally provided by the small liberal arts colleges. That is the connotation of the word “college,” now becoming obsolete as most schools have rebranded themselves as “universities” in order to signal that they offer professional training. The Intro to Psych class in a large university that has to be held in a room with TV monitors for students in the back rows to see the instructor is not going to provide a certain kind of educational experience. In the end, the rhythm of introverted reading and meditation followed by extraverted group discussion comes full circle when students have to write an essay on the material, which involves a return to introverted meditation and close reading of the text, hopefully enriched by the discussion.
What may seem ironic and disconcerting is that literary theory since the 1960’s, of the dominant sort known as post-structuralism, has been unremittingly hostile to speech, setting it in opposition to “writing,” alleging that it is based on illusion and fosters sinister tendencies. The foremost theorist who privileged writing over speech was the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, arguably the most influential philosopher of the late 20th century and an enormous influence on all the disciplines of the humanities. I am forced to oversimplify here an exceedingly complex argument, but in two major books, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference (both 1967) Derrida argued that speech, orality, enforces what he called a “metaphysics of presence,” an ideology that postulates an immediate presence in space and an immediate “now” in time. It postulates a use of language in which meaning is immediate and non-problematic. In short, it postulates a unity and connection of all phenomena, a consciousness one with everything. This is delusional, an infantile failure to distinguish between the I and the not-I. The reality is not presence but absence, not unity but difference, not communal bliss but alienation. Speech is like a euphoric drug, intoxicating consciousness with the illusion of presence, of a suffused vitality or life force. Speech depends on immediate presence, or upon the instantaneous illusion of presence offered by electronic mass communications, whereas the whole reason writing exists is for communication at a distance. The distancing effect of writing promotes the sense of difference. Some deconstructionists have gone so far as to view the development of oral communication as a kind of fall. It would have been better if humanity had developed a method of communicating through writing alone, like the aliens in the science fiction film Arrival.
All this sounds dubious enough, but I do not see Derrida as some kind of nihilist. He was apparently a dedicated teacher in a system in which the standard instructional technique was the oral lecture. I was moved by an anecdote about his continuing to grade student papers even while he was dying of cancer, despite his international fame. Moreover, Derrida was looking at the situation historically, starting with the introduction of writing in Greece in the time of Plato. Plato has many reservations about this new-fangled invention of writing, which he puts into the mouth of his teacher Socrates. Socrates was himself an oral teacher who taught small groups and clearly inspired his students, starting with Plato himself, by his charisma, his “presence.” But Socrates had two types of rival. There were, first of all, the Sophists—also oral teachers, but what they taught was the use of speech as a method of manipulating an audience by various appeals to emotion and prejudice. The effect of such teaching is to collectivize the audience, turning it into a mob. The Sophists did not condemn Socrates to death, but they reinforced the type of mentality that easily becomes a lynch mob. This is the Jungian shadow-side of orality. Used by manipulators and “influencers,” and unscrupulous politicians and outright lunatics, it can indeed become an addictive drug more deadly than any opioid. The electronic media enhance this collectivizing tendency. Hitler used radio. In the 80’s, Neil Postman warned that, due to television, we are “amusing ourselves to death.” Later still, there was talk radio, a witches’ cauldron of hate worse than anything Macbeth’s witches could have brewed. And now, of course, we have social media, so that hate groups can radicalize unsocialized young men and Donald Trump can rant on Twitter in capital letters representing the screaming that he would be doing in one of his MAGA gatherings. For that is the flaw in the deconstructionist argument. The collectivizing tendency is not inherent in speech—much of it these days is through writing. Marshall McLuhan was also wrong: the medium is not the message. It is how you use the medium that is crucial. Both speech and writing can be used to collectivize people into herd animals—or they can be used as what Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow called a “counterforce,” as a way of, well, deconstructing collectivized delusions and providing an alternative to the hysterical, fear-driven scapegoating that is so prevalent in our time. In liberal education, freshman composition gives students an entry-level introduction to “critical thinking,” the kind of detachment from immediate emotion and ideological conditioning on which democracy depends. We teach what Socrates did: the authority of fact and argument over prejudice, the primacy of what Northrop Frye called the “primary concerns” universal to the human race over anyone’s ideology. No wonder right-wingers are trying to intimidate teachers and take over educational systems.
There is one point further to be made. Those who get sucked into delusional belief systems are afraid, and thus easily manipulated. But they are not just ignorant, and critical thinking is necessary but not sufficient, for them as for us all. Too much education, especially of the “woke” persuasion, seems to assume that indoctrination and conditioning in the opposite direction is what is necessary. Not only can this become authoritarian in its own right, but it ignores a reason for the present social crisis that lies even deeper than economic insecurity and fear of change and difference. People are imaginatively starved. They have been told that there is ideology and nothing but ideology, nothing but the will to power, and may the best dog win. No wonder young people are drawn to dystopias that assume as much, like The Hunger Games.
If humanity is truly consigned within the limits of reality as perceived by the ideologically-conditioned ego, then existence is merely ironic. We are all Kafka characters trapped in a “system” that we can never even understand, much less change. The minute that the imagination suggests that, as Blake put it, “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics,” that expanding eyes may see a Big Picture beyond our dysfunctionality, the immediate assumption is that that picture is merely a kind of super-ideology, an imperialistic mythological structure that wants to subordinate all others to its “unity.” But if the sleep of reason breeds nightmares, the sleep of imagination produces hell itself—the only kind of hell there is, namely, hell on earth. The imagination keeps on insisting, despite the outcries of heresy from right and left, “I have a dream.” So did Adam, and he woke to find it true—a metaphor, Keats said, for the imagination. The imagination encompasses both speech and writing, presence and absence, unity and difference, and does not give a damn about the hysterical protests that this is illogical “mystification,” that opposites cannot be combined.
I do not think online humanities education is an ideal, but it may be one means of survival in hard times, and I wish it well. In hard times, imagination goes underground, into the catacombs. It will survive wherever two or three are gathered together in its name, as in the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and the gathering may sometimes be digital. But the ultimate catacomb is a book. I ended the introduction to The Productions of Time saying that, if this is indeed the end of Western civilization, or even of civilization itself, I would be content to be like Boethius and the other writers of around the 5th century CE, loading their books with all that they saw most precious to preserve, knowing that they might be buried for centuries like the Dead Sea Scrolls. But the dead have a tendency to rise, exploding in the process the limits that we call the real.