[The Montana Professor 19.2, Spring 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Anthony T. Kronman
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009
308 pp., $27.50 hc
Linda W. Gillison
Classics
UM-Missoula
linda.gillison@mso.umt.edu
Secular humanism, multiculturalism, political correctness, specialization, the research ideal, fundamentalism, spirit. These are some of the terms employed by Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law, former dean of the Yale Law School, and currently a member of the Directed Studies Faculty at Yale, in his analysis of a tendency in American higher education which he decries and which he sees, just now, an opportunity to begin to alter.
Why, Kronman asks, can American higher education no longer help its students to confront the big questions: "What (9) is life for?" "What (23), in the end, should I care about?" Why, he asks, are these considerations deserted and even despised by American higher education today and their examination privatized and left to non-rational, non-pluralistic religion and various fundamentalisms (45)? Why does American higher education staunchly refuse such assistance to a generation of students who are entering adulthood in the midst of a crisis of spirit (229)?
That Kronman's book is only one contribution to a lively recent public discussion of the spirit and future of our academic enterprise reflects a vivid interest in the topic: on the positive side, a desire to consider together where we have been and where we are going; in its darker presentations, perhaps, a creeping fear that we have somewhere gone badly astray. Of course, there have been numerous other voices in this conversation, including Harry R. Lewis (Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, 2006), Derek Bok (Our Underachieving Colleges, 2006), William Clark (Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, 2006), all recently reviewed in this journal; Harold T. Shapiro (A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society, 2005); and Susan Jacoby, as part of a larger discussion of current American culture in The Age of American Unreason, 2008).
Kronman is an eloquent and passionate proponent of an intellectually rigorous discussion about academia in America. His book will not leave the reader unmoved; it may raise blood pressures and elicit cheers and boos as it has among other reviewers and in the blogosphere. Read it for yourself. I think it's an important work, however (thought-) provoking one may find it.
The new and striking thing about Kronman's work is his framing of the analysis in terms of shifting "authority."/1/ Understood as I think he intends it, "authority" is not the power to compel compliance with one's wishes or instructions but the ability to influence the actions and thoughts of others in a desired direction; an influence which those others grant willingly (on the basis of their experience with the potential "authority" and their consequent trust in it) and which they can at any moment withdraw. To state Kronman's thesis briefly: in the early days of America's collegiate history, society broadly and the colleges more narrowly "authorized" the classics (largely biblical and Greco-Roman); that is, they granted them permission to guide curricula and even lives and to answer questions of meaning. As time passed and numerous quite world-rocking events took place (the findings of Darwin, the Civil War, the development of the "research university" on the European model, a veritable scientific "revolution," the Civil Rights Movement), society began to distribute "authority" differently, and campuses joined in. Today, Kronman maintains, we as a society and we as a world of higher education "authorize" science and technology as well as the related research ideal (205), but not the humanities. We live in an "Age of Science," when science, technology, and specialist research are the repositories of our trust and the formulators of many of our questions and we would probably ask them not only to make our lives easier and in many ways better but also to show us the meaning of life—if only they could. This shift of authorization, Kronman maintains, has left our universities and our society poorer intellectual and—gosh—spiritual places (202).
Someone recently said of Max Weber that "he was no Luddite about the real benefits of technological mastery, but neither did he ignore what is lost in the disenchantment of the world."/2/ Now "disenchantment" is not a term which Kronman uses in the work under review, but it may stand in (albeit somewhat awkwardly) for what he does miss in the higher educational world of the twenty-first century.
If you are familiar with Max Weber's late lecture (tt 1918), what Kronman misses in our "Age of Science" will not surprise you. What science and technology don't address, Kronman maintains, is the very fact which alone gives human life meaning: mortality. In fact, technology functions largely to allow us to ignore this fact of our existence (212). Since science and technology don't tend to talk about meaning or values—instead constantly pushing back the limits of human endeavor and existence—we need someone to confront us with the knowledge and wisdom which many ages have possessed and which we seem largely to have lost; namely, that "our powers have meaning for us only within the limits of human life" (230). Kronman agrees wholeheartedly that science and technology are valuable tools for understanding the workings and controlling the conditions of our world, but he misses any focus on or even acknowledgement of the most essential kind of knowledge: understanding of our human selves (234).
If we accept this understanding of the functions of science and technology and the definition of ours as "an age of science," the students whom we meet each day on campus, reared in just such an age, really may not even understand that there are human limits to be contemplated; we might say that they inhabit that "blind hope" which Prometheus, in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, claims to have given to humans to prevent their focusing obsessively on their mortality. They may well not know themselves as truly human, no matter their knowledge of science and despite the powers that technology gives them.
The ancient Greeks, at their best and most thoughtful, believed that self-knowledge was the most valuable—indeed, the indispensable—kind of knowledge. Self-knowledge included the awareness of mortality and of the limits inherent in that condition; that human action, freedom, responsibility only took meaning when viewed within that frame. Odysseus, for instance, chose to return to the trials of mortal life and his aging Penelope rather than stay on deathless, ageless Calypso's island and share her immortality. He knew, we always say to students, that heroism was only possible in the world of mortality, where the "game" was played for the highest stakes of all—survival itself.
Now, if we agree that self-knowledge is essential, where will our students find guides as they pursue it—if they become convinced, at last, of the need for it? Kronman asserts that their most common institutional source of this knowledge today is the religious community, where questions of life's meaning, death, choice, and values are comfortably at home in the conversation (197).
There will be readers of this review and of Kronman's book who are content that this is just as it should be. But he cites two characteristics of religion which might occasion pause: that "no religion can be pluralist in the deep and final sense" and that "every religion at some point demands a 'sacrifice of the intellect'" (198). Kronman wants to pull discussions of life's meaning back to the public stage where they can be carried out in the rational and pluralistic way which (he maintains) our society demands of itself in other areas (203). And he insists that higher education is the best venue today for such discussions with young people in whose minds these questions (should) loom very large (259). Within academe, due to the limitations of science and technology, the only possible source of guidance Kronman identifies (74) will be in the humanities classroom—a humanities now no longer based on old, common traditions but more broadly founded on the literature and culture of the Western world into modernity and working under the secular humanist conviction that, even failing those once-shared Christian underpinnings, it is possible to guide students as they search for meaning in life./3/ (In curricular matters, Kronman grounds his Western traditionalism on two bases: first, the incontrovertible influence of the western (broadly understood) "canonical" authors on the intellectual, social, and political traditions of the west and even on societies beyond; and, second (169), the folly of plunging the neophyte undergraduate in an American university into the works of a society radically different from her own with any expectation of meaningful result.)
Kronman acknowledges the virtues of diversity, equal access, and equal rights before the law, affirmed in mid-twentieth-century legal decisions which had massive effects on life in academe (139). The insinuation of those values into the realms of curriculum and pedagogy, though, he identifies as the proximate cause of the humanities' abdication of its (until then considerable) authority to talk with students about life's meaning. According to his construction, having for some decades tried to keep themselves afloat and on course in the new world of the research ideal, humanities faculties raced into the "new" materials offered by a diverse multicultural world as into a convenient port. No longer could the classics—or any other literature—be prioritized; all literatures were of equal merit and importance; no system of values could be preferred to any other; it thus became impossible to discuss in a rigorous or respectable way any choice of values as preferable to any other. Meanwhile, the simultaneous importation of what is commonly called the "liberal political agenda" into classrooms closed the mouths and minds of some students and sowed suspicion of "indoctrination," Kronman maintains: the diversity (of race, gender, and ethnicity) embraced by "today's politically and morally inspired defenders of the idea...rests implicitly on attitudes and values that everyone is expected to share" (153).
In any case, Kronman is hopeful about the possibility of what he sees as salutary change. He perceives a growing societal interest in questions of a spiritual nature (243). He senses that many students who are now engaged in higher education "would welcome the chance to explore the question of life's purpose and value in a more disciplined way" (245). And he suspects that many parents would support a curriculum which included some orderly consideration of works which have long been considered "important" and which the growing student-choice-smorgasbord system of undergraduate education might not always bring to the fore (247). Only one factor causes his doubt to persist: "the continued dominance within the humanities of the modern research ideal." (247).
One very basic question about Kronman's analysis looms, though, along with several subordinate ones. Kronman's foundational assertion that the academic humanities classroom is the best place for consideration of "ultimate" questions will face strong resistance—predictably, he would say—from many academic humanists who will query whether discussion of "ultimate" questions and values is even their job. Whether our humanities classrooms now offer a suitable place for such discussion and whether humanities faculties are currently carrying out the task effectively would need to be questions of secondary rank. The supporting concepts of Kronman's analysis likewise raise numerous questions. To take them in something like an order of descending importance: is it truly impossible to discuss values and "ultimate" questions with students in a multicultural classroom, where work focuses on some cultural tradition aside from the Western one? Is the focus on values really so absent from the stated intentions of American post-secondary institutions as Kronman asserts? (Numerous institutions, in fact, have chosen to emphasize the "values" aspect of their undergraduate programs; such discussions are currently underway on my campus, as well.) Moreover, Kronman's representation of the "social sciences" as free from curricular and pedagogical tendencies which he decries in the humanities calls for evidential support. Despite their rigorous "scientific" methods and their claims of objectivity which seem to lodge them in the values-free camp of "hard" sciences, one might ask—and many will—whether those social sciences have really avoided the importation of political programs and correctness by which, according to Kronman, the humanities vessel has been swamped. (Kronman does differentiate (143) between the "strongest" social science—economics—and its "softer" disciplinary companions, but here, again, his generalization about various disciplines or groups of disciplines may seem overbroad.) In addition, Kronman takes only little cognizance of the sea change in student demographics during the history of higher education in America—from a largely homogeneous (well-placed, northern European-stock, male) population to one which, quite rightly and due partly to the G.I. Bill and partly to social movements of the mid-twentieth century, includes women and students of various social, ethnic, and geographical extractions. Moreover, the reader may well perceive both science and religion as much more diverse—the former more meaning-aware and the latter more pluralistic and "intellectual"—nowadays than Kronman acknowledges.
At base, Kronman asks that, looking to the greater advantage of society, we in academe change our customary way of proceeding. Society, he believes, will enjoy a richer and deeper public discourse as a result of these changes. If, though, society is going to reap this reward, Kronman asserts that we in humanities must win back the "authority" to participate with students in the disciplined and orderly consideration of "ultimate" questions of value and meaning. We can only be so re-authorized if society understands that the matter which we teach is worthy of students' (indeed, of all of our) attention and that the manner in which we approach it is open and honest and free from political agenda (159). From academic scientists and social scientists whose work fits comfortably into the kingdom of the research ideal, he asks a certain humility before questions which their own disciplines and methods may not allow them to pose or discuss and respect for the work of colleagues in disciplines which do. And from the academic world at large, he asks the confidence to let go of the research ideal as its gold-standard, one-size-fits-all measure of the effectiveness and professional fitness of colleagues whose own "work" may take them in directions of the general, the traditional, the non-objective.
I warned you that this book would not leave the reader unmoved. Too many of us—from Kronman's unhappy humanists (read the book), to multiculturalists offended by his understanding of their work's place and function within the humanities, to scientists insulted by his disparagement of their authority, to administrators and committees who find the publication record the easiest mode of evaluating the fitness of any particular faculty member for continued residence and work in the community, to parents fearful of the "liberal brainwash," to churches insulted by expressed doubts about their ability as sole (soul?) guides for student-aged youth in today's America—have an interest in its subject.
I'm not certain whether Kronman's advice can be followed or even whether it should. But this consideration of higher education in American society and of the ideas to which we grant authority over us is well worth the read.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 19.2, Spring 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]