The Four Competing Approaches to Higher Education

“Many critics point out that this one dimensional approach to education helps produce citizens who are selfish, disinterested in politics, and unprepared for dealing with moral complexities, which are not reducible to cost-benefit analysis.”

Introduction

In the time since the publication of God and Man at Yale by National Review founder William F. Buckley in 1951, conservatives have had a lot to say about the politics of the university. Indeed it has become something of a rite of passage for young pundits—from Dinesh D’Souza to Ben Shapiro—to write a tell-all monograph chronicling their experiences in post-secondary education and argue that universities are hotbeds of left-wing agitation. This disposition carries into other conservative media where there is a constant string of commentary accusing universities of undermining Western civilization, corrupting the youth, and waging a culture war. Interestingly enough, very similar kinds of accusations have also been leveled by the far-left against the university system. Commentators like Noam Chomsky argued that post-secondary education was a tool for indoctrinating students into accepting the American world order and its values. Other commentators like the liberal egalitarian Martha Nussbaum and the radical theorist Wendy Brown argue that universities are increasingly being driven to denigrate whole fields of study and teach students that the pursuit of self-interest is the only viable way of living. Consequently, topics like philosophy or the humanities, which suggest different ways of life are viable and preferable to neoliberal governance, are denigrated as wastes of time, which will not get students a job in today’s cutthroat economy. Interestingly, some conservative commentators like Steven Crowder agree with this line of thinking.

Debates about how the university operates almost always turn on how certain disciplines are being taught. You see relatively few people commenting on the current state of mathematical education or arguing that physicists are being hoodwinked into accepting a given worldview. There are, of course, interesting exceptions, such as were presented in physicist Lee Smolin’s excellent book The Trouble with Physics, which argues that high level scientific disciplines are often more driven by politics than one would expect. But these lines of thinking have generally not captured the public imagination. Their attention pales in comparison to the intense culture wars surrounding everything from what texts should appear on the curriculum of social science and humanities classes to endless accusations of indoctrination and questions about whether teaching certain subjects necessitates adopting a concrete political stance (or if such can be done in a neutral manner). This is likely because—in contrast to science and mathematics—the social sciences and humanities are regarded as less objective, more political, and, therefore, more inclined to challenging or reinforcing different sets of values. All the while, some disciplines like psychology and economics fall into grey areas. Given this intense focus—and, of course, my own background—in this article, I will discuss the different approaches to how universities should approach the social sciences and humanities (what I will call the human disciplines from here on in).  In the conclusion, I will suggest that a critical approach is the correct one; but contending that this necessitates that students have a strong grounding in the traditions and writings they are critiquing.

How to Approach the Human Disciplines

Debates about how the human disciplines should be taught stretch back to ancient times, with philosophers and pedagogical theorists from Socrates to Confucius all weighing in. For figures like Socrates, the point of teaching should be to produce critically-minded citizens. Individuals who mindlessly parrot talking points drawn from their traditions or religious outlooks are not taking seriously the moral requirement that they think for themselves. This radical orientation is at the basis of Western philosophy and is one approach to studying human beings. By contrast more conservative approaches like those pioneered by Confucius stressed respect for traditions and social institutions and the necessity of learning from the past rather than presuming one possessed all the right answers—or was asking the right critical questions. It was important to look to history for models of excellence and try to base our actions and orientation on their exemplary behavior and disposition. Education was, therefore, considerably more about veneration than critique.