NYT guest essay by Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein
SS:
I think the article is self-congratulatory sophistry, but as self-congratulatory sophistry goes, excellent.
Me:
Your comment on self congratulatory sophistry preset me to a jaundiced view of the piece going in. I hope unaided by your Reveen-like hypnotic take, I’d have come to have the same view of it as in fact I have.
But not hypnotic enough for me not to be stronger in my dislike or this piece than you. “Excellent“ as a descriptor doesn’t come rushing to mind. More like self satisfied liberalism in a bad sense of liberalism.
My first problem arises with the glib dismissal of what DeSantis is trying, in effect Pardy inspirited, to do in Florida. His attempts to battle woke need more than a dismissive one liner compared to the imposition of the woke ideology on college campuses aided and abetted by the DEI establishment. He may have been heavy handed in this but it amounts to a graduated banning of trans, gender and generally sex education matters in public schools till age appropriateness is reached. I’m not fully aware of other state imposed constraints and some may have gone too far but as I and Chris Rufo see it, it’s a pitched battle and in the fog of war collateral damage abounds. It’s fair to knock DeSantis on these grounds but a self satisfied dismissive swat with the acontextual once sentence hand is absurd.
My next more diffuse problem is that while I agree with American schools from elementary school on up to college requiring learning American civics, this piece suffers from over and under/misemphasis.
“Over” is the claim that civics courses are an (the?) answer to intolerance and hyper partisanship manifest in the attack on free speech. On a good educational model every course provides an answer if taught liberally in the best sense of liberally, captured in one formulation here:
"...Liberalism both believes and doubts, and “…indicates a pattern of culture which criticizes itself... It has customs and standards of behaviour. But it also has...the attitude of...questioning its own dominant beliefs and standards... The liberal both believes and doubts...and... if an individual or a group will hold fast both to custom and intelligence, then its experience will inevitably be paradoxical and divided against itself. The being who seeks intelligence is a divided personality.”
Mill, coming from a different angle, has of course something to say about it as well as have countless others.
These op ed folks have 0 to say about that vis a vis courses generally. Civics must (singularly?) come to the rescue.
“Under/mis”, unless I misread this essay, S&E have nothing or too little to say about the virtues of grounding in American civics for Americans and students coming from abroad to study in the States. A little soft power here flexing subtly its muscles for the latter?, Why not?
My next problem is the defensiveness as to under/mis, which is to say, conceding the Americanness and Western Europeanness of the American tradition of Civics as a limitation needing amelioration:
“The limitations of Western Civ are evident from its title. It exposed students to Western ideas only, implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) suggesting that these ideas were superior to those from other cultures.”
They amplify this concession by diluting that very Americanness and Europeanness:
“At Stanford, since 2021, we once again have a single, common undergraduate requirement. By structuring its curriculum around important topics rather than canonical texts, and by focusing on the cultivation of democratic skills such as listening, reasonableness and humility, we have sought to steer clear of the cultural issues that doomed Western Civ.”
Last not least as a problem is smugly predominately fixing the blame for the lapse in teaching civics on the market demand for student as consumer individual choice and the market based turning of universities effectively into vocational schools.
Not that there isn’t something to this critique but its predominance is obtusely one sided and in tension with what S&E have already noted:
“Eventually, these limitations proved intractable. In 1987, activists at Stanford denounced the “European-Western and male bias” of the university’s first-year requirement, then called Western Culture. The course was replaced with a program that had no Western focus…”
They then argue against what is a relative straw man in arguing for what’s more important than individual choice, thus subtly consolidating their misplaced main diagnosis.
They obtusely go on predominately to fault the “market” for the jettisoning of civics instead of acknowledging what wokery has wrought.
In their self satisfied tweedy elbow patch liberalism replete with obfuscation, evasion and shooting wide of the mark, S&E by their mediocrity here highlight the strength of Pardy’s piece.
SS:
I found their article superficially clever but believe it is profoundly intellectually dishonest. They gotta know they’re gaslighting.
I thought it started off well:
"..We believe that this intolerance of ideas is not just a consequence of an
increasingly polarized society. We think it also results from the failure of
higher education to provide students with the kind of shared intellectual
framework that we call “civic education.” It is our responsibility as
educators to equip students to live in a democratic society whose members
will inevitably disagree on many things. To strengthen free speech on
campuses, we need to return civic education to the heart of our
curriculum..."
For sure. Can't disagree with a single consonant. But then, for me they
head straight south to Sophistryland:
"...Many colleges said the change was a pragmatic one, given the
disagreements about which texts should be mandatory. We believe there was
another reason universities turned toward an à la carte curriculum: They had
come under the spell, like much of society at that time, of a free-market
ideology. In this vision, individual choice and individual advancement take
center stage. Requirements are recast as paternalistic; freedom is
understood as doing as one pleases..."
Yeah, right. It was free-market ideology. Sure. That's the ticket.
Couldn't possibly be ideology from the other side of the spectrum. Nah.
Struck me it wasn't an intolerance of ideas that led to the abandonment of civics courses, it's that there's an ideological intolerance for specific ideas - Western culture and inevitably, its odious invention, classic liberalism. Other ideas have become not only predominant but exclusively acceptable in academia and society, based on critical race theory, postmodernism and related ideological corrective lenses.
That's certainly more akin to my brother's experience as an academic with a 40 year career.
Me:
We’re agreed.
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