Content & Context

DO YOU MIND?

Liberal arts education is getting more pragmatic, two recent articles in the New York Times suggest. The first says that liberal arts colleges are offering more vocational training programs as a supplement to liberal arts curricula. The Times cited Colgate, Columbia, NYU, USC, and Virginia as some of the schools that have been offering additional vocational training, and said that more schools are thinking about it.

“We continue to think that a liberal arts education is valuable in the new economy,” said Colgate dean Adam Weinberg. “But it is important for students to know the language—the jargon—when they go on the job market.”

But Amherst president Anthony Marx said he’d prefer students use any extra time they have to “go deeper into the liberal arts, because that is the seed corn of an intellectual life and informed citizenship.”

That ideal seems more remote today, some educators say. “In the 1960’s, the dominant thing kids wanted to develop was a philosophy of life. They were going to college for idealistic reasons,” says David Breneman, Virginia’s dean of education. “Then making money just shot to the front.” A recent University of Connecticut survey found that 64 percent of adults say the primary purpose of education is preparation for a certain career—three times as many as those who say the point is general knowledge. Adds a religion professor at Case Western Reserve University, in a letter to the Times, “Most students whom I have taught in elite liberal arts colleges … are not enrolled in liberal arts classes by choice but merely to satisfy prerequisites en route to a vocational graduate school. The ‘life of the mind’ has become another catch phrase that is mentioned only nominally at convocations and graduations.”

It doesn’t seem to matter that most students will change careers like outfits over the course of their lives, rendering vocational training all but obsolete within years of completion. Or that educating students to be complete people and not just drones is the most rewarding aim for both teachers and students. Instead, instrumental thinking about higher education dominates. Which is where the second article comes in.

• The commencement speech season prompted the Times‘ Peter Steinfels to look back at a recent Stanley Fish screed about higher education and morals. Fish wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year that teachers can make students into good researchers, but “you can’t make them into good people, and you shouldn’t try.” Fish’s sentiments echo an address to arriving students at the University of Chicago by political science professor John Mearsheimer. Higher education should have two “non-aims,” he said; it avoids making claims about truth and morality. “Today, elite universities operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between intellectual and moral purpose,” Mearsheimer said, adding, “collectively we are silent on the issue of morality.” (Though not Mearsheimer’s colleague Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics.)

Never mind that morality is not an “issue,” or that “silence” or neutrality is impossible for human beings (which is why Mearsheimer noted that the prohibition against student plagiarism is an exception to the university’s amorality). As James K.A. Smith pointed out recently in the newsletter Sightings, worldview-free or value-free education is a fantasy (third item here). Steinfels posits two main responses to the idea of “amoral education.” One, that it is “liberating … to filter out the moral from the intellectual”; the other, that it is a “preposterous … tearing asunder that is not only impossible but undesirable.” He quotes Emerson, who said at Harvard: “Character is higher than intellect.” Steinfels suggests this question become part of the undergraduate curriculum.

• This debate continues amid a renewed conflict over faith and reason in academia, the Boston Globesays: a duel between “atheistic scientists and intellectual Christians.” Natalie Angier speaks for the former in an American Scholar essay called “My God Problem—and Theirs,” which says scientists should be more outspoken against “biblical supernaturalism.” But the Globe noticed a piece in First Things by Jesuit theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles called “The Rebirth of Apologetics.” Dulles affirms that “God’s grace does not circumvent or suppress our native powers, but guides them so that they may act more perfectly.” Contemporary apologetics has two parts, Dulles says. “First, it uses philosophy to prove the existence of God and the possibility of revelation; then it turns to historiography to vindicate the biblical record of sacred history and its culmination in Jesus Christ.”

The Globe glosses over the philosophy part, content to sum up Dulles’ model as “a new, more humanistic sort of apologetics” that relies primarily on the testimony of the Apostles, calling the effort but “a new avenue for believers to evangelize nonbelievers.” Such simplified summary will do little to allay the Globe‘s fear that in the debate over faith and reason, “worldviews seem to slide past one another like planets in orbits that will never cross.”

Related: B&C series in response to the papal encyclical on faith and reason.

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

CAPE TOWN — Thirty-three years ago, the American novelist John Fante gave Robert Towne, a screenwriter and aspiring Hollywood director, a copy of his novel Ask The Dust. Inside, Mr. Fante wrote, “To Robert, in the hope he will take this to far places.” Whatever he meant, it is a sure bet that it was not Cape Town, 9,992 miles from Hollywood, at the time a sleepy seaport appended to Africa’s nether regions. Yet today, this is where Mr. Towne is directing a movie based on Ask the Dust, a love-hate story set in 1930’s Los Angeles … Mr. Towne calls it the perfect place to recreate a slice of Los Angeles as it looked then — even better than real Los Angeles, where skyscrapers and shopping malls have buried any sense of the past. “The weather, the beach, the sky, the desert,” Mr. Towne said, as he wrapped up a day’s shooting. “It is just a strange, serendipitous thing that we are in South Africa, because nothing could look more like Southern California than this does.” Serendipitious for Cape Town, too. Long a favorite location for fashion shoots and advertising stills, the city is also catching on with major film producers.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — “Silicon Valley is back” is on the lips of eager entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who [say] the three-year-long depression is over. But other signs tell a different story. The famed traffic jams of Silicon Valley’s boom times are still uncommon. A last-minute reservation at some of the area’s hot restaurants, like Tamarine or Spago Palo Alto, can still be had. And a suite in a gleaming office park that would have cost nearly $10 a square foot in monthly rent in 1999 can now be had for less than $3. Big portions of sprawling projects built on optimism in the mid-1990’s, like the Midpoint Technology Park in Redwood City, sit dark and unoccupied. On Mission College Boulevard in Santa Clara, 750,000 square feet of office space is still available in an archipelago of office parks built during the boom. … In more sober moments, even the optimists admit that this period is something quite different from the boom of the late 1990’s.

WEEKLY DIGEST

The best-selling book in America (for now) is about punctuation. Oprah has millions of fans reading Tolstoy. Soon fans will flock to stores to buy a 900-page memoir. So much for dumbed-down America, writes Ron Charles, book editor of the Christian Science Monitor, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Maybe John Kerry isn’t so out of touch with Americans: “A nation that’s weeping over Russian tragedy and worrying about split infinitives wants a president who can fight terrorism and revive the economy without dangling participles,” Charles quips. Article But is nothing sacred, asks the New York Observer? Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety presents Proust and other classics to the masses as “a middlebrow self-help narrative.” ArticleRelated:The New Republicon Tolstoy
When a loved one dies, the last thing on anyone’s mind is the loved one’s computer. But sooner or later, the data of the deceased becomes a delicate issue, said the New York Times ‘ Circuits section last month. “With home computers largely replacing filing cabinets as the secure storage place for financial records, tax returns and even sentimental pictures, the problem … may become more common,” the Times said. “Since most people do not leave a list of passwords before they die, their relatives and lawyers must often figure out how to break into the computer themselves or hire someone to do it.” Large companies like America Online require a death certificate before releasing a deceased customer’s data, but beyond that lies a legal gray area. Article
Pinocchio is a playful morality tale for children (and for Richard Nixon, whose nose was always extended by editorial cartoonists) about the importance of telling the truth. But the story of Pinocchio is more than “the condensed versions of his story that are thought more suitable for children,” says the New York Review of Books in a piece on the truth about Pinocchio. “The original novel by Carlo Collodi, which today survives mainly in scholarly editions, is much longer, far more complex and interesting, and also much darker.” Collodi’s Pinocchio is an incorrigible, destructive tantrum thrower who kills Jiminy Cricket. The moral arch and conclusion of the story are ambiguous, prompting various interpretations, but one thing is certain: Pinocchio is anything but a typical fairy tale. Essay
Miscellaneous:Why the FBI is tearing up the shoe bomber’s Time magazines from the New Yorker – Charitable giving held steady in 2003, report finds, from the New York Times – Welfare reform and marriage: not yet a match, says the Christian Science Monitor – Can New York City’s dogs be shushed? from the New Yorker – When Mozart got bad reviews from the London Guardian – The theory of complexity from the Boston Globe – Stradivarius lost and found from the Monitor
Resonance: This weblog linked to an item on the history of height in April. More on the study of height from the Melbourne Age … B&C May/June 2004 includes a review of After Theory. More on the future of theory from the Christian Science Monitor … The same issue included a piece on the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scotsman wrote recently about the dumbing down of Scotland … Last year’s B&C review of The Two Towers stirred up a discussion about the relative merit of books and movies in engaging a story. More on this debate from the blog Two Blowhards … B&C March/April 2004 included an essay on the meaning of the atonement. More on atonement from British theology blogger Alastair Roberts.
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