Resisting the corporate imperative

Over at Commonweal, Jackson Lears, the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University, has written an insightful review of the book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, by William Deresiewicz. Deresiewicz, a former member of Yale’s English faculty and a past member of its admissions committee, has written frequently in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of liberal arts in the United States.

The thesis of Deresiewicz’s book is that elite education in the United States is turning out automatons, and that this is happening because of a corporate imperative. He wants colleges and universities to recover the liberal arts on their own terms, not only as handmaidens to the corporate imperative–that is, not only as disciplines that merely amp up students’ ability to become Great Leaders in Businessland.

Lears cleverly characterizes Deresiewicz’s topic:

We are besieged by a resurgence of positivist scientism—the transformation of science from a method to a metaphysic, promising precise answers to age-old ultimate questions. Yet while pop-neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and other defenders of quantifiable certainty have beaten back postmodern philosophical critiques, the postmodern style of ironic detachment has flourished. The recoil from modernist high seriousness, epitomized by the turn from Abstract Expressionist painting to Pop Art, has persisted long after Andy Warhol displaced Jackson Pollock as the celebrity artist du jour. As a signifier of the dominant cultural tone, the furrowed brow has been largely eclipsed by the knowing smirk. The commitment to searching out deep truths has yielded to the celebration of playing with surfaces (in the arts) or solving problems (in the sciences). The merger of postmodern irony and positivist scientism has been underwritten by neoliberal capitalism—whose only standard of value is market utility.

The critique of the corporate imperative and the need to reinstate the humanities as the center of the college experience is nothing new; it has appeared in different forms, from Allen Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987, which Deresiewicz cites frequently) to David Brooks’ essay on the Organization Kid (2001) to Anthony T. Kronman’s book Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2008). All these authors fear that what we are doing in higher education is creating expensive hoops for young people to jump through so that they become hip, rich technocrats, killing their creativity and authenticity in the process.

Lears’ summary of the book is helpful. He quotes Deresiewicz:

“An undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted. The purpose of college is to enable you to live more alertly, more responsibly, more freely: more fully.” The key to this process is “developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.” So it comes down to an effort at self-culture, as Emerson would have said. And self-culture involves an inward turn: it is “through this act of introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. And that is what it means to develop a self.” Deresiewicz, the son of Orthodox Jewish parents, is not himself religious. But he finds religious language—beginning with the marriage of self and soul—inescapable in describing the intellectual quest fostered by the liberal arts. “People go to monasteries to find out why they have come, and college ought to be the same,” he writes. It takes real courage to make such claims amid the market-driven discourse of contemporary higher education.

I am struck by Deresiewicz’s appeal to the monastic ideal. The earliest universities in Europe grew out of monastic communities, and some still bear vestiges of their monastic past. (I am thinking in particular of Oxford’s colleges, one of which I spent a year in as an undergraduate.) These institutions were not, it is important to note, fundamentally oriented toward religious learning, but rather the cultivation of mind through the liberal arts. (Only advanced students–those who came to self-understanding through humanistic study– proceeded to study theology.)

I have not read Deresiewicz’s book yet, but intend to. In the mean time, I am reading The Making of Men: The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin, and am struck by the contrast between what John Henry Newman sought to cultivate in the university experience and what is our present reality in the United States. I will post a longer review of this book soon, but for now I wish only to highlight that the key difference is in what the title of the book suggests: that the university was not beholden to any extraneous imperatives at all–not even specifically religious ones. For Newman, the only imperative was that the university be a place where young men learned how to be men. The university was for him first and last a place where an authentic humanism thrived.

Ours is an age in which we have at once developed a more rounded humanism, thanks to healthy strains of feminism and critiques of other -isms. Yet during this modern period, colleges and universities have become less like monasteries (places that resist assimilation to political and economic imperatives) and more porous. Various federal and private research dollars drive research agendas. Various political agendas drive curricula and catalyze acrimonious departmental debates.

I would like to think that Catholic colleges and universities are less likely to be driven by extraneous imperatives. Historically, core curricula served to anchor a common academic experience. But in this age of greater demands within professional programs, it is increasingly difficult to justify the massive number of credits such curricula demand. Unless, of course, we recover a stronger sensibility that the curriculum is oriented fundamentally toward forming men and women for life, and that the curriculum is first about that task of formation.