Plato's Dogs: Reflections on the University After 9/11
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Unblushing members of “the military-industrial-academic complex,” universities make an indisputable contribution to America's daunting power to do good or ill in the world. The principal question facing the authors of this volume is: What contribution can these same institutions of higher learning make to the wise use of America's formidable power? How can our universities help us respond intelligently to the unprecedented perils and challenges of the new century? What politically important role can universities play in this new, complex, changing, and turbulent world? To pose this question is already to suggest that American universities are not now playing the role that they could and should play, that they are not, for example, doing a creditable job helping produce the educated public that we so manifestly lack and need. That more than 50 percent of Americans apparently still believe that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11 provides an unflattering, if not shameful, commentary on the educational preparedness of this country's opinion-making elite. So why have we fallen into this miserable state? Some of the cultural critics included in this volume claim that our institutions of higher education are betraying us politically because they have been suffused with commercial values. Whether persuasive or unpersuasive, this charge is anything but new. In 1918, for instance, Max Weber wrote: “The American's conception of the teacher who faces him is: He sells me his knowledge and methods for my father's money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage. And that is all. To be sure, if the teacher happens to be a football coach, then, in this field, he is a leader.” According to their more recent and perhaps less humorous admonishers, U.S. universities have now succumbed to the market conception of freedom, oriented to the satisfaction of individual desires, and have thereby irresponsibly shed the civic conception of freedom, which (at some unidentifiable historical moment) involved intense public debate about common purposes. I cannot say that I understand this claim very well, especially given the prominence and persistence of faculty tenure, an antimarket institution par excellence. But, of course, I appreciate as much as anyone the irony of professors who earn money by selling books in which they showcase their dislike or distrust of the market. Those who focus on the continuing commercialization of higher education, admittedly, are not simply self-deluded. Derek Bok, for example, has helpfully drawn public attention to the way the pharmaceutical industry is endangering the independence of biochemical research. Moreover, critics are right who argue that universities, to play a positive role in our political life, must be shielded to some extent from the pressing demands of the private economy. They must not be turned into wholly owned subsidiaries of for-profit corporations. It is reasonable, therefore, to ask universities to disentangle themselves somewhat from the most robust and dynamic part of society, that is to say, America's large and immensely influential profit-making enterprises. But is it realistic to ask universities, as some of my colleagues have done, to attach themselves instead to a political culture of democratic “participation” and deliberation that does not, in fact, exist? “Commercialization,” if the truth be told, is a rather rarefied charge. It is much more common to hear politically tinctured complaints. For instance, right-wing critics of U.S. universities deplore what they perceive as disloyalty, that is, a lack of patriotism. Left-wing critics, by contrast, lament student apathy, that is, an absence of engagement. The two charges have some things in common, but they sound more similar than they actually are. The former is genuinely pernicious, for instance, while the latter is merely frivolous. I want to postpone my discussion of patriotism versus disloyalty for a few pages, so let me now say a few words first about engagement versus apathy. To begin with, “participation” is a very sixties word. It emits a strong aroma of nostalgia for the days of student protest against the Vietnam War. There is nothing wrong with the ideal of participation, in fact, except its ineradicable ambivalence. Participation is good or bad depending on the knowledge, habits, skills, motives, psychoses, and antipathies of the participators. To say that universities should foster greater and more intense participation is therefore nonsensical; and no one who says it actually means us to take it seriously as a platform for university reform. There is no point trying to supervise other professors' theorizing, to be sure. But I would suggest that, given the scarcity of time and the urgency of the need, we refocus, not on how a reformed university might conceivably promote the most demanding personal and social ideals, but, instead, on the urgent political and social problems that we can help solve with the materials at hand. There is no use proposing a remedy, however, before we have a clear understanding of the disease from which the patient is suffering. So we should start with diagnosis.
Source Publication
To Restore American Democracy: Political Education and the Modern University
Source Editors/Authors
Robert E. Calvert
Publication Date
2006
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Plato's Dogs: Reflections on the University After 9/11" (2006). Faculty Chapters. 800.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/800
