April 2009.

     This is another preliminary dispatch from the weltanschauung desk.  It doesn’t require a lengthy preamble.

     Early in 2009, the University of Richmond’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa needed a speaker for its annual banquet and induction of new members and its preference was for someone who holds a key and knows the secret handshake.  The organization went first to Abner Linwood Holton, who wasn’t interested, then to The Better Half, who absolutely wasn’t interested and who referred the organizers to me, who was untroubled by being the third choice.

     The call was for a thirty-minute after-dinner talk extolling the virtues of liberal arts education and that was what I cobbled together.  Though it’s heavy on academic boilerplate, there’s not much in it that I, reading it now, find, “cringe,” as the kids say.

     For the purposes of blogtown, the relevant part is near the end, the section addressing “the ‘consumer’ paradigm in education.”  It delves into what might be called the neoliberal takeover of higher education, Mont Pelerin’s besieging of the final bastion of the humanistic ideal.  Context here is useful.  The inductees were part of the first graduating class in the wake of 2008’s economic meltdown.  They were being thrust into an ugly, uncertain circumstance.  My worry was that the financial crisis would lend impetus to a trend I’d already discerned for a decade or more:  mounting pressure on students, especially from parents, to make immediate postgraduate employment not just the top but the only priority, to make the pay envelope the lone metric for judging an education’s worth.  Any unremunerative academic requirement was deemed inherently extraneous and should be excised from the mandated curriculum.  And any surviving remnant of the superfluities damned well better not be intellectually rigorous or taxing.  That would take the eye off the prize.

     I would like to say that my misgivings were unwarranted or maybe just exaggerated.  I can’t.  Many universities have wandered into the neoliberal glue trap and have made pandering to the “customers” the governing ethos.  This has manifested itself in the reduction, sometimes dismantling, of general education requirements and the dilution of whatever might be left.  The situation is indeed worse than this.  The siege metaphor works here.  As the ramparts are being breeched, the besieged clamber over one another to snatch bits from dwindling stores of food and water inside.

     An anecdote perhaps best illustrates the direness of the circumstance.  Several years ago, before the plague descended, I was party to a conversation at a social event on a downtown rooftop bar.  A woman representing some foundation – probably a right-libertarian outfit bent upon bring academia to heel once and for all – was flogging snake oil.  Her proposition:  Higher education’s overarching goal is to make students the best possible entrepreneurs of themselves.  The obvious corollary to this is that humanistic study must accommodate itself to this end or lose all relevance.  Somewhere Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises cackle.

     On that cheery note, here’s the thing. . .

Annual Dinner of the Richmond Association and the Epsilon Chapter of Virginia of Phi Beta Kappa

Robins Pavilion, Jepson Alumni Center

University of Richmond

3 April 2009

“The Liberal Arts Education in a Bottom-Line World”

     I would like to thank Lois Badey and Ellen Massie for allowing me to participate in this evening’s happy event.  The invitation compelled me to pay my Phi Beta Kappa dues and to purchase a pin, something precluded by student poverty at my own initiation.  Your ceremony returns me to spring 1982, when my graduation was imminent and all the possibilities attendant with youth and a liberal arts degree were ahead of me.  Now, many years later, I can assert categorically that virtually everything I value, all the good things in my life, find their roots in my undergraduate liberal arts education.  As an unabashed and joyfully biased partisan of the liberal arts, it seems best to remark on two things:  first, my own tiny bailiwick in the vast realm of the liberal arts – my research and teaching – and then the value of the liberal arts education.

     The genesis of my interests – I am a medievalist who focuses on the social and economic history of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England – is a typical liberal arts tale.  A first-generation university student attends a western civilization survey in a large lecture hall with 250 of his closest friends and an inspirational instructor, an Italian medievalist by trade, kindles and, as the student’s academic advisor, nurtures an interest in medieval England.  The student leaves the Bluegrass for the Buckeye State to complete his education and is influenced by two more medievalists and many other professors and his interests ultimately bear the imprint of all these people.  The initial curiosity about the impact of ninth- and tenth-century Viking raids on Anglo-Saxon England gives way to a focus on how the eleventh-century Norman Conquest shaped English rural society which in turn surrenders to a fascination with the socioeconomic institutions of late medieval England.

     My research is admittedly arcane.  The late Middle Ages have, however, impinged upon popular imagination through cinematic images, for example Braveheart’s depiction of Anglo-Scottish conflict, Bergman’s exploration of the medieval understanding of death in The Seventh Seal, Olivier’s and Branaugh’s portrayals of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and, recently, A Knight’s Tale, a rethinking of chivalrous knightly combat for the MTV- and post-MTV generations.  For me, the best popular evocation of the late Middle Ages is not cinematic but literary.  For her 1978 study of the fourteenth century, the popular historian Barbara Tuchman offered the defining image of A Distant Mirror.  For Tuchman, late medieval Europe darkly reflected the concerns of her own twentieth century – political conflict and endemic and large-scale warfare, deprivation and famine alongside conspicuous consumption, epidemic disease on a mind-boggling scale, religious controversy and spiritual unease, and popular resistance to the established order – concerns I’m confident that Ms. Tuchman, were she alive, would deem equally relevant to our young twenty-first century.

     The era has inherent interest and I have observed it through the prism of a major ecclesiastical official, the abbot of the monastery at Bury St. Edmunds.  This wealthy abbey held property in more than 150 villages scattered across southeastern England.  I’ve focused on the villages where the abbot was sole landlord and managed his property personally.  In this profoundly agrarian society, land was the lion’s share of the abbot’s material wealth.  He received all produce from the acres he tilled.  The labor that brought the crops forth was performed by the abbot’s dependent tenants, their effort a condition of holding their own small plots from the abbot’s land.  Copious records produced by the abbot and his staff as they managed his property provide a window for viewing the layers of English society – a vast hierarchy stretching upward from the landless peasant who toiled as a day-laborer in order to eat to the abbot himself, who was a vassal to the king and an attendee of Parliament.

     At the eve of the fourteenth century, life was relatively placid in the abbot’s villages, at least on the surface.  Population growth during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had kept wages low and rents high, and, as a result, the abbot’s tenants were in no position to request reduced obligations and the abbot’s property was profitable.

     The abbots and his tenants, however, soon faced a series of transformative events.  Exceptionally cold and wet weather in 1315 – the so-called year without summer – triggered crop failure across northern Europe.  An ensuing Great Famine over several years carried away as much as fifteen percent of the population.  Speculation regarding the toll of a changing climate and a population possibly outgrowing its capacity to feed itself has been irresistible for some scholars.

     If England was overpopulated, that ceased a generation later when the Black Death entered England in 1348 and reached the abbot’s lands in 1349.  In short order perhaps half of the island’s inhabitants suffered a painful and dehumanizing death.  Subsequent national and local outbreaks ensured that England’s population was at best stagnant if not depressed for the balance of the Middle Ages.

     A generation yet further on, the social tensions arising from these profound demographic changes manifested themselves in England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the largest popular uprising of the European Middle Ages.  Perhaps one-hundred thousand rebels, inflamed by firebrand preachers and charismatic leaders to question the justice of the prevailing social order, left their villages and demanded freedom from demeaning labor services and dues.  The main peasant band struck London while another plundered some of the abbot’s villages, entered Bury St. Edmunds, stormed the abbey, executed the monastery’s prior and a local royal official, and paraded their heads on pikes before the authorities suppressed the rebellion.  While achieving little, the uprising underscored that transformative change was afoot in England.

Famine, plague, and rebellion were far from the only reasons the late Middle Ages have been called the “age of adversity.”  England and France engaged in a trans-channel military contest from 1337 to 1453 – the Hundred Years War – that closed the coffin on the chivalrous armored knight and introduced rank-and-file national armies and the use of gunpowder-fueled firearms and artillery.  The papacy departed Rome for Avignon in southern France for seven decades and across four more decades competing popes sat at both Avignon and Rome and a third pope briefly wandered northern Italy.  Consternation and spiritual unease fostered charges of a church grown too preoccupied with worldly power and property and too little engaged in the moral improvement and salvation of Latin Christendom.  The abbot and his tenants felt directly and indirectly these eddies in the stream of the late medieval experience.

     As is doubtless evident, the late medieval era can be painted in dark colors.  When I asked students this past autumn in my seminar on the late Middle Ages whether they would visit late medieval Europe if afforded the opportunity, their refusal was unhesitating and unanimous.  Study of the abbot, his property, and his tenants has, however, clarified for me some of the lessons to be gleaned from this turbulent era.

     Sometimes the most cataclysmic events become catalysts for ultimately productive changes.  For peasants who survived famine and pestilence, their labor became a scarce and valued commodity and a newfound ability to bargain with the abbot progressively reduced their servile obligations until they virtually vanished.  Their wages rose, their material standard of living improved, and, their persons became less bound to land and lord.  Put another way, the so-called manorial institutions that had for centuries subjected the vast majority of people to servility unraveled and energies were liberated that helped to push England into early modernity and modernity.  Viewed from another perspective, the abortive popular uprisings were perhaps not the product of oppression as much as of socioeconomic changes advancing too slowly to satisfy all.

     Another lesson is more universal:  the indomitability of the individual human spirit and the strength of the bonds of community.  These peasants witnessed crises in human mortality that rival if not surpass modernity’s industrialized destruction of human life.  Perhaps twenty-five million Europeans perished in a mere five years from plague alone.  In these English villages, society for a time was disordered, but by the next year survivors were taking up the land of the deceased, fields were plowed, crops sown and harvested, manorial courts convened, religious festivals held, young couples married, and infants born.  While Voltaire was several centuries in the future, his injunction at the close of Candide seems quite literally relevant:  “We must cultivate our garden. . .”  In uncertain times, this has been for me a source of comfort.  People invariably, having sustained a blow, rise and move forward.

     These research and teaching interests reflect the impact of the liberal arts on my professional life; now a few brief comments about the personal impact of the liberal arts.

     The value of the liberal arts education has been much on my mind recently.  My teaching obligations include regular involvement in the University of Richmond’s Core course.  In Core, an instructor and a group of first-year students for a year read, discuss, and write about an impressive array of books:  scientific and philosophical works, classic and modern novels, poetry and spiritual texts, in sum a chronologically and culturally ecumenical corpus of materials.  Near the year’s close, when the students are reasonably comfortable with me, I solicit their opinions regarding the core-course experience and I have been gratified by their seriousness of mind and forthrightness.  Grievances about the course’s mechanics inevitably arise, the brand of criticism that materializes in reference to any inherently imperfect human endeavor, complaints that I duly note.

     Of greater concern is an opinion expressed more commonly and forcefully with each passing year.  Students acknowledge that the course exposes them to works they never would have read of their own volition and concede that some of them are enjoyable; however, they question the fundamental usefulness of the project.  Many do not see how any course beyond the confines of a chosen field of endeavor – yes, many of them have a first and even a second major determined before setting foot on campus – will be of value in their future pursuits.  Put colloquially, these students do not see how the experience contributes to their bottom line.

     This notion does not arise from a vacuum and seems to reflect a broader shift in attitudes toward education.  Pressures have emerged recently to curtail or even eliminate depth and breadth requirements from university curricula – the requirements that encourage students to take humanities and science courses outside a major – in order to accommodate multiple majors and minors.  This pressure has materialized hand-in-hand with the waxing of a “consumer” paradigm in education, the notion that the “consumer” should have precisely nothing more or less than what the “consumer” desires.

     I have embraced the students’ expression of this view as an opportunity in my poor fashion to defend the liberal arts education.  The present profound economic uncertainty, shrinking university endowments, state budgets in crisis, and the inevitability of difficult decisions looming for every educational institution make the matter seem vastly more urgent tonight.

     I concede to my students readily and with utter sincerity the significance of their career paths.  Every type of work has dignity; every type of work has value; every type of work has its personal satisfactions.  For the fortunate few – and I expect all of you will be among this lucky elect – career becomes vocation, a calling, and its satisfactions become immense.  The career ceases to be just a path to material sustenance and feeds the soul.

     The liberal arts education, however, aspires to considerably more than remunerative and satisfying employment.  It aims not merely to create the working person but the whole person.  While our universities find their institutional roots in the Middle Ages, the liberal arts curriculum owes much to the Renaissance.  For the Italian umanisti, the humanitates forged the complete individual, a person adept in any endeavor and comfortable in any venue, public or private.  For me, however, the content of the Italian humanist education is less significant than the process of education espoused by the humanists.  For them, institutional education had a terminal point.  Those of you not pursuing another degree will soon conclude your institutional education with diploma in hand.  For the Italian humanists, however, education never ended.  Their goal, a goal shared with the modern liberal arts educator, was to inculcate the student with the knowledge, values, habits of mind, and tools to remain a student for a lifetime.  Stated more simply, the liberal arts education, better than any other, teaches one how to learn.

     With this, everything becomes possible.  It’s an education not intended to confirm one’s presuppositions but to test them through the examination of the manifold variety of human experience.  As you weather personal and professional conflicts in your future – such conflicts are inevitable – your ability to view the world through the eyes of others may not foster sympathy but perhaps just enough empathy to locate a patch of common ground and possibly then even resolution and reconciliation.  Moreover, what you’ve learned and what you are yet to learn will guarantee a life with richness, a life with texture, a life with depth, a life with context.  Most directly expressed, your liberal arts education is not just about your job; it’s about your life.

     Each of you now embarks on a grand adventure.  You’ll doubtless spend your twenties and thirties ascending the professional ladder.  I have absolute confidence that your UR liberal arts education will bring you professional success.  These years will also be filled with wonderful interpersonal experiences; your heart will be broken a time or three; you might as well be ready for it.

     It’s my expectation, however, that the value of your liberal arts education will become most evident to you as you pass through your forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and hopefully even beyond this.

     In this regard, I conclude with a personal example, my father-in-law.  He’s a retired physics professor who received an arts-and-sciences education at Princeton during the early 1940s and then did graduate work at the University of Illinois.  While at Urbana-Champaign, he met his future wife, who was completing master’s work in German language.  He was hired by Stanford University and there they settled and there they remain.  His career has been enviably successful both as a pure researcher and as a public scientist who has advised policy-makers across the political spectrum on arms control.  His marriage produced a great family and I’ve had the privilege to be part of it for nearly two decades.  In the view of many, I not only married “up” but I married well.  A fact about my father-in-law:  among his valued possessions is a book of poetry from his student days.  Now dog-eared, brittle, and on the verge of physical disintegration, it contains verses that he’s added as he’s encountered them over the decades.  An even more relevant fact:  in his eighties he has become a devotee of the classical Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides.  With the affable Herodotus, he has traveled the length and breadth of the vast Persian Empire and has mused along with Herodotus about why the Persians and the upstart Greeks came into conflict and how the Greeks against all odds prevailed.  With the complex, sophisticated Thucydides, he has analyzed an internecine conflict among Greeks – Athenians and Spartans – examined the nature of power and empire, and seen how both folly and achievement mark every phase of the human experience.

     In sum, because of your choice of a liberal arts education, you have much to look forward to.  At every age of your life, the world will remain a marvel.  On a good day, each of you will feel, to paraphrase a great writer, that you contain multitudes.  And, for me, that’s the ultimate bottom line.  Thank you.

Coda.

     The talk went about as well as it could have.  A colleague who attended afterward said, “I thought I was going to cry.”  The Better Half did her publicist routine, so the text of the speech made the rounds.

     And then there was the other guy.  An older gentleman, presumably a member of the Richmond Association, a club for the city’s Phi Beta Kappas, buttonholed me after most of the crowd had scattered.  He was vaguely, maybe begrudgingly complimentary, but he had a critique:  my failure to place reading of the Bible at the core of my characterization of the liberal arts.  I told him that the Core syllabus included Genesis and one of the gospels and that the university offers courses in religious studies.  I also mentioned that many students come from other religious traditions.  He wasn’t having it.  To him, a curriculum eschewing scriptural indoctrination is defective.  As he turned to leave, he said, “Be sure to get the Bible into your next talk.”  Between partisans of neoliberalism and those who envision the university as a Christian madrasa, higher education faces formidable challenges, to say nothing of the peculiar convergence of these groups politically, especially under the Trump regime.

Coda, coda.

     And then there’s the damage in public perception that higher education inflicts on itself.  The following year I was on the dais as a passive spectator of the Phi Beta Kappa induction.  The speaker was a high university administrator.  His address was problematic.  He essentially blew a clarion call for the inductees to take up the rhetorical weapons given them by the liberal arts and with them smite the head of every conservative they encounter.  The gentleman seemed not to realize that he wasn’t at a political rally, that no assumptions should be made about any student’s political leanings, or that many students had invited their parents because Phi Beta Kappa remains a signal honor and a source of parental pride.  The induction is a happy event, a celebration, and no one should leave it with a bad taste in their mouth.  I have no qualms – obviously – with using education to support one’s values and to persuade others but it’s nonsense like this that feeds the charge of universities as left-wing indoctrination camps.  The man’s deficit in self-awareness was breathtaking.

     I attended another Phi Beta Kappa banquet a few years later because several of my former students from the Core course were inductees.  The address fell to another university administrator.  The speech struck me as an act of industrial-grade projection.  Its gist:  The world is pain, Pain, PAIN with the odd soupçon of despair and your liberal arts education may help to understand and cope with PAIN, PAIN, PAIN, DESPAIR.  It fell well short of celebratory.  To borrow Bush the Younger’s reaction upon hearing The Prevaricator in Chief’s inaugural address:  “That was some weird shit.”  Other attendees confirmed my impression.  The address also underscored the perceived strangeness of academics.  Had I been a parent, I too might have wondered about the use of my money.