Monday, December 20, 2010

Eagleton's Death of Universities


Below is my response to Terry Eagleton's Article in the Guardian. 

As universities continue to struggle with the shortfall of public assistance, this situation opens up the financial crisis to speak once more on the function of higher education, and what we value as higher education.
First, the function of a university is employment for most people. However, does this really follow? I never thought it did. I have friends with degrees in French literature working at Enterprise Rental Car, or investment firms hiring linguistics degrees in addition to more common degrees like Business or Finance. Back at the turn of the 21st century, I walked into a philosopher’s office, and decided to change my major. I went from Art Education to Philosophy. It’s a rather strange switch, I know. However, it just felt right. I did it for my own purposes, which I saw as self-empowerment. I never went to university to think that I’d get a job in my field of study. Instead, I went because in some ways I was expected to go.
Self-empowerment came from philosophy’s benefit as a therapy of the soul. Philosophy courses taught me not what to think as so many other courses do, but challenged my personal beliefs. Every philosophy professor challenged me to rethink my own thoughts. I’d learn how some problem had been articulated by a historical philosopher, and challenge their argument. I’d see the implications of some historical idea for my life, or I’d find that the philosophy or philosopher in question led to different questions altogether than the one’s I had started with. I’d stop by the professor’s office hours and have very meaningful conversations that one cannot find in the public anywhere else. In this way, philosophy taught me to think about questions that have no definitive answers. It fosters skills in critical thinking, logic and the intellectual imagination that only comes from philosophy and by extension other humanities-based disciplines. 
Think about it—an entire major that answers questions that have no definitive answers. How many times in life do we come into contact with those types of questions? Everywhere. Whereas if we conceive of education as only for getting a career, our education will not be soulful or meaningful beyond the career we have chosen. Certainly, human life has more experiences that reflect the type of questioning that goes on in the humanities at large, and more specifically philosophy. How many times have we wondered if something our governments did was just, or how we ought to proceed in doing a very difficult and moral thing? How many times have we reflected on what was art, or what really is beauty? How many times have we found our faith lacking in certainty and sought in reflection what we thought faith took for granted?
The type of questioning in a philosophy courses we ask our students to do cannot be reliably predicted. The benefit I argue for philosophy is one in which this unpredictable growth produces a sense of intellectual autonomy and learning that defies contemporary practice. Students are made uncomfortable once they are shown exactly how vulnerable our beliefs actually are, and this is the most common reason why students fail to experience philosophy (and the humanities at large) in a positive light. They are taught that more practical fields of study can be given a single answer. In many disciplines, students are shown the right answer, and the questions they are taught to ask have definitive answers. In engineering, the calculation for what the buttress can support has one right answer. However, in living our lives as human beings, we rarely face such clear problems. Not every dilemma we face can be put to an equation. Sometimes, our problems are different than that.
This is not to say that the humanities are for everyone. They are not. Some people are just better at soil science than others. Some people are more comfortable with narrowly entrenched questioning than going to push the limits of what is conceptually possible to know. However, a university is a place for self-empowerment and understanding. Students should have the freedom to study these questions. These are the types of questions that are important to reflective individuals. If you’re not reflective about the human condition, then do something else. If you have the nerve to ask questions of a philosophical nature, then the more power to you as an individual versus a world that is unsettled by philosophical investigation. Philosophy so affected my soul in my younger days that I couldn’t put it down. I can’t stop being philosophical and so I have decided to go to philosophy graduate school. I have taught it to undergraduates for the last five years, and continually love teaching it.
Now, does anyone think that the humanities are for the rich at large? I’ve never found this to be the case. I’ve studied philosophy at Essex in the UK, Simon Fraser University in Canada, and at SIUC in the United States. Most of the graduate students I’ve run across are run-of-the-mill Middle-classers. No one is exceptionally rich and the demands of graduate study force one into poverty. We all know that as first-time lecturers or as Associate Professors in North America, we will not make much. We’ll be lucky to payback some of the student loans. Still, if we can land a job in academia, we will be comfortable, and that’s all I or my colleagues truly want.

 Lastly, I wanted to touch upon the incompatibility between advanced capitalism and public universities. Eagleton’s point about their incompatibility raises the question that I started this response with: How are we to value higher education? If our societies are not interested in turning out reflective individuals, but simply consumers and career-oriented people, then what is valued is not reflection about the human condition. Instead, what is valued is how universities simply function as a cog in the overall machine of the economic state. We make practical oriented decisions about what we value everyday. In so doing, we don’t need to dispose of the idea of how some public goods are better managed by government than the private market forces that have infected the management of public goods. We can make practical decisions without disposing of some intrinsic goods that must always be part of the equation such as public housing for the poor, or emergency responders. How we manage our universities is just another way to ask what we value as a public good over thinking that no such intrinsic goods need matter—a debate it should be pointed out that is entirely philosophical!


12 comments:

Canadian Pragmatist said...

Caveat: I haven't read Eagleton's article yet.

"...philosophy taught me to think about questions that have no definitive answers. It fosters skills in critical thinking, logic and the intellectual imagination that only comes from philosophy and by extension other humanities-based disciplines."

Aside from the last point about 'intellectual imagination', I think other disciplines require logic and critical thinking. Perhaps I'm wrong; if I am, please excuse my ignorance.

Also, presumably, if you want to increase your imaginative capabilities reading great books (philosophy books or otherwise) will do this for you. And since most all of these books are available in the library (or on amazon, if you don't live in a big city with an equally big library). Why take philosophy courses, if you're not taking them to get a job?

I think that's the problem student - like me - have. We think that if we get a degree, we have some hope at landing a decent job. This is even more true of a graduate degree. With the job market for people looking to be professors in philosophy, so bare, it really is hard to justify encouraging people to get a philosophy degree.

I should say, I'm in my fourth year of a honours degree in philosophy, but I can't help but think that if I could go back I may have considered minoring in philosophy and majoring in something else.

After all, it's not like I can't stay in touch with students who I like to talk to or professors I enjoy speaking to. Also, there are philosophy cafes all around now, and if you're looking for high-level conversation, I would suggest you can get it just as easily - for free - at one of these cafes as opposed to for hundreds of dollars an hour from a professor during office hours.

I can conscience encouraging younger students to take a few phil. courses before they graduate, but to encourage majoring in it, I'm afraid I cannot conscience.

Canadian Pragmatist said...

"I went from Art Education to Philosophy. It’s a rather strange switch, I know. However, it just felt right. I did it for my own purposes, which I saw as self-empowerment. I never went to university to think that I’d get a job in my field of study. Instead, I went because in some ways I was expected to go"

Could you explain how self-empowerment and going to University because you were expected to go don't contradict each other? Presumably, now that you're empowered, you would go back to your un-empowered self and advise him not to go to University just because he's expected to go.

Am I missing something?

Carbondale Chasmite said...

Well, in order:

1) Logic and critical thinking are taught in their purest form because a) philosophy invented logic and b) you can apply things like logic to your life as demonstrated in critical thinking classes. No other discipline teaches you the martial art of logic and critical thinking as directly as philosophy. You may be a history major, or political science major. You may be taught history through a neo-marxist filter or study politics through behaviorism. Yet, the critical thinking offered outside philosophy means that some professors have transmitted some theoretical framework that you are to make sense of yourself. This isn't bad, but it's not critical thinking. It's a poor substitute for what you get in philosophy classes.

This moves me to the second point. Sure, someone can pick up philosophy books and read them. However, the historical context of reading say any author will come from how implicit assumptions have affected the philosopher your reading. You won't be aware of these historical determinations, not to mention the nuances of translation if you pick up, say, a European philosopher. So, say, you pick up Heidegger and read him. A responsible reading of Heidegger requires at minimum a decent knowledge of Hegel, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kiekegaard and lots of Husserl. That's just for one book. That said, I am not committed to the logical impossibility of someone that doesn't take classes picking up on the nuances of Heidegger's thought as they are affected by previous historical conversations that give rise to a lot of his points in the text. I'm just saying it is very improbable that such a person exists. Finally, there is an element to the classroom that no amount of self-tutoring or online classes can really give you given that philosophy is such a nuanced thing. I think this holds if you are also an analytically-minded philosopher. If someone just picks up, say, Michael Smith's response to Bernard Williams about reasons internalism, the person will be just as lost.

If you honestly think that because you will get a degree there is a job out there waiting for you, then you have another thing coming. When I go on the job market, I have confidence in things I have done to make myself a worthy job candidate over others. It is not simply from acquiring a degree. I know French literature graduates working in the Finance Industry pulling down six figures, and the point is who they are, what they did as individuals to get there. The degree is only one step, but it is not the entire step for undergrads and grads alike. A lot has to come from your own steam.

Carbondale Chasmite said...
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Carbondale Chasmite said...

If you honestly think that because you will get a degree there is a job out there waiting for you, then you have another thing coming. When I go on the job market, I have confidence in things I have done to make myself a worthy job candidate over others. It is not simply from acquiring a degree. I know French literature graduates working in the Finance Industry pulling down six figures, and the point is who they are, what they did as individuals to get there. The degree is only one step, but it is not the entire step for undergrads and grads alike. A lot has to come from your own steam.
o allay your fears, I have met several BA honours degrees during my time at SFU, and they have all went onto better things. Some have went to get there LLBs, others have worked in non-profits. As a philsoophy major, you're well poised to do something with your life. It might just not be philosophy, but most graduate departments outside philosophy respect philosophy immensely. I just met an anthropologist on my street that worked on Merleau-Ponty in a weirdly appropriated way.

Yes, there are philosophy cafes. One can visit many of them in Vancouver, and they consist of the touchy-feely BC types that want to sound smart by reading Nietzsche. Then, someone like me walks in and sits for about an hour and hears how Nietzsche is really misunderstood and I start to grade the level of conversation. On good days, there might be 1 out of 10 people capable of getting a C-. Other times, it is not that philosophical but a dialogue with philosophical highlights. There is no substitute for having conversations with experts. I had this experience in Canada where I had the private ear of one of Gregory Vlastos's students on Socrates. The guidance he offered was spectacular and he was very accomplished. Of course, such a perspective is wanted when one realizes the depth of philosophical inquiry requires expertise in more than just picking those books off the shelf.

I can only surmise your dispassionate view of your philosophy degree has been overly analytical. However, I dare not say much after that because I can entirely be wrong. I can only say that had you read Nietzsche, you'd have internalized a measure of stoic stalwartness that would not have manifested in so much whining. It is not the existence of philosophy degrees that breed bad fortune, but the individuals themselves not achieving the intellectual autonomy to listen to what Kant called "counsels of prudence."

Carbondale Chasmite said...
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Carbondale Chasmite said...

Finally, there is no contradiction:

The decision to go to university at the time of making it was heteronomous. Once there, I act autonomously. There's no equivocation, just different temporal moments of how this process came to be.

Canadian Pragmatist said...

I'm not worried about getting a job. There are a lot of graduate programs I've applied to including MPAs, Toronto's History and Philosophy of Education MA and plain Jane philosophy grad programs. Aside from that I happen to have a father who builds houses, so I could always just do that.

That's not really the point though. I doubt your french lit. friends wanted to work in finance or in any other fairly random industry (random, considered after a french literature degree). I mean, that they're working is disparate fields (as far from their degree as possible) is not a testament to the versatility of a philosophy or french lit. degree. It says something about the versatility and triumph of the human spirit, but you have to conclude in those cases, their degrees let them down. They have good jobs, sure, but I mean, if I end up in finance, I will regret the philosophy degree; and I don't see a clear reason why they wouldn't regret their degrees.

Obviously my philosophy degree has been analytic (as if I had a choice). However, I've read almost all of Nietzsche's books, and Solomon's, Nehamas', Danto's and Leiter's take on him. So, I get your point about individual responsibility, but it's not clear to me in the end whether Nietzsche himself would encourage people to study a subject so disengaged from the struggles of real life - e.g. philosophy.

But I mean, I was rescued from my self-incurred tutelage and empowered by about the end of first year. After that I had just done so many philosophy courses, that it wouldn't have made too much sense to change at that point.

And I've read the Eagleton piece, since my last comment. He seems to be speaking the truth to me. Humanities are still important, but they're only supplementary for the vast majority of people.

Also, you're speaking a truism, that non-philosophers can't be as knowledgeable about philosophy as philosophers, but I almost count this to their credit. Who cares about phenomenology, existentialism, etc. anyways, really?

Those on the continental side have not provided a very good alternative to analytic philosophy as far as I can tell. They're only more esoteric in many cases. The only real alternative in pragmatism, but of course the greatest pragmatist of my time ended up teaching comparative literature (Rorty), so what does that say about the future of a useful philosophy?

Canadian Pragmatist said...

[I'm sorry, this may be a repeat. In which cases please disregard it. It wasn't clear to me whether the first time this comment went through]

I'm not worried about getting a job. There are a lot of graduate programs I've applied to including MPAs, Toronto's History and Philosophy of Education MA and plain Jane philosophy grad programs. Aside from that I happen to have a father who builds houses, so I could always just do that.

That's not really the point though. I doubt your french lit. friends wanted to work in finance or in any other fairly random industry (random, considered after a french literature degree). I mean, that they're working is disparate fields (as far from their degree as possible) is not a testament to the versatility of a philosophy or french lit. degree. It says something about the versatility and triumph of the human spirit, but you have to conclude in those cases, their degrees let them down. They have good jobs, sure, but I mean, if I end up in finance, I will regret the philosophy degree; and I don't see a clear reason why they wouldn't regret their degrees.

Obviously my philosophy degree has been analytic (as if I had a choice). However, I've read almost all of Nietzsche's books, and Solomon's, Nehamas', Danto's and Leiter's take on him. So, I get your point about individual responsibility, but it's not clear to me in the end whether Nietzsche himself would encourage people to study a subject so disengaged from the struggles of real life - e.g. philosophy.

But I mean, I was rescued from my self-incurred tutelage and empowered by about the end of first year. After that I had just done so many philosophy courses, that it wouldn't have made too much sense to change at that point.

And I've read the Eagleton piece, since my last comment. He seems to be speaking the truth to me. Humanities are still important, but they're only supplementary for the vast majority of people.

Also, you're speaking a truism, that non-philosophers can't be as knowledgeable about philosophy as philosophers, but I almost count this to their credit. Who cares about phenomenology, existentialism, etc. anyways, really?

Those on the continental side have not provided a very good alternative to analytic philosophy as far as I can tell. They're only more esoteric in many cases. The only real alternative in pragmatism, but of course the greatest pragmatist of my time ended up teaching comparative literature (Rorty), so what does that say about the future of a useful philosophy?

Carbondale Chasmite said...

Well, let's keep with the analytic motif for just a bit:

You say getting a job in some other field other than one's degree means "their degrees let them down." First, the idiom of letting someone down suggests you failed to fulfill someone's expectations of yourself. In this way, you wrongly personify the degree as something to be let down, and as such, you are speaking rather confusingly about degrees.

Recall that my defense of the humanities revolves around the self-empowerment and experiencing things about human life outside careers. That is just one area of human life. Guilt, death, redemption, these are all things in which wisdom and philosophers can speak about and talk about and if you are trained solely in analytic philosophy, then you'll be blind to the conversations of these themes in Continental philosophy at large, and be confused about what has been the intention overall for many of these thinkers. Continental philosophy never provides an alternative to the framework of larger analytic schools of thought, it sought to show how problematic those analytic frameworks are initially. That's a different thing than providing an alternative. An honest look at CP reveals how Nietzsche's insight start with the struggles of real life is picked in many of the authors in CP. So when you ask about who really cares about phenomenology and existentialism, just look at the range of departments that I may be employed in at the end with sufficient attention to interdisciplinary inquiries within CP: comparative literature, English, cultural theory, religious studies, art history. Of course, you can always study philosophy in English, with hair-splitting distinctions. How useful is that?

Canadian Pragmatist said...

"First, the idiom of letting someone down suggests you failed to fulfill someone's expectations of yourself. In this way, you wrongly personify the degree as something to be let down, and as such, you are speaking rather confusingly about degrees."

I didn't mean the degree is let down, but that the degree let the degree holder down. Certainly, a person with a degree can feel like the degree let them down. I don't see what's confusing about that. I'm not saying that their degree owed them something and wasn't able to pay them for the time they took to achieve it, but merely reporting that people feel this way.

I have a high enough GPA to get into most graduate programs someone with a phil. degree is eligible for. But of course I'm in the minority. Most of my friends who are about to finish or near finishing the same degree have a much lower average. I can't feel too bad for them b/c they didn't work as hard as I did in most cases, and they deserve the consequences, but I can't help but understand their new found bitterness towards their (now nearly useless) degrees.

"Continental philosophy never provides an alternative to the framework of larger analytic schools of thought, it sought to show how problematic those analytic frameworks are initially."

What's the use of doing that exactly? Doesn't that assume a lot of people care about analytic philosophy in the first place (and thus will care that it's not as great as they thought it was)? This is false. If CP doesn't provide a positive alternative, than we have a purely negative school of thought which I don't think Nietzsche would endorse were he around today. I don't have the book with me (I lent it to a friend) but I believe it is in "Twilight of the Idols" that Nietzsche writes that there is no justification to knocking something down a theory, school of thought (or anything else) unless you have something better to take its place.

CP, it seems to me has failed in the positive part. And of course, I don't care about their critic of analytic philosophy, b/c I never thought much of it in the first place.

Anonymous said...

Agree with the value of training in logic and conceptual systems. I earned an MA in philosophy. I'm a programmer currently. When I started this field, the training in symbolic logic made learning programming very easy. Not to mention the Aristotlean concepts of classes and objects, and their relation to each other one finds in object-oriented programming. And then there are the benefits of rigorous training in rational thinking for everyday life.
I don't feel let down by my degree.
I do think, however, that the cost of attending some colleges in the last decade has reduced the value of a degree in many fields - whether it is humanities, sciences, or business.