The academy in bloom

...Now the sort of place the guardians of standards have in mind could be set up without too much trouble or overhead...

...The life of the mind is worth pursuing for its own sake - but you will be graded on your performance - and if you do not get the right number of the right kinds of grades, you will not get a job...

...They tell their congregations that the world's definition of success does not matter, while courting it with all their might...

...The problem is that the real ancestor of the present-day university of whatever kind, whether land-grant college or Ivy-League haven for the sons and daughters of the idle rich, is not the academy of Plato but the medieval university...

...This is too flippant a dismissal of Kuhn's provocative and influential essay, which is far from an argument for simple relativism...

...The politics of the sleaziest lobbyist is generally more honorable than the politics of academicians, because it makes no bones about its real focus - power and money: Like church politics, academic politics pretends to be about something nobler than what is actually being argued...

...Wanting to have the institutional security of the university, and the disinterested love of knowledge at the same time, reminds me of what Kierkegaard said about preachers who live in a way which contradicts their message...

...Who can blame them...

...It would involve gathering around truly brilliant teachers groups of students who could gain absolutely nothing by being there, but a contact with someone who knows more than they do, who would not be graded or granted any credential, and who might get, at the end of the process, a letter of introduction to some other person in the field...

...One sees a bit of decay around the edges of its good conscience, formerly so robust...

...More unfashionable truths have been told by journalists who can be fired tomorrow than by tenured professors...

...But they have arrived at their offices by tailoring their doctoral theses to the whims of senior neurotics in their fields, and by fighting like blood-maddened tigers for the sweet security of tenure through a process which combines fawning with character assassination...

...Wanting both the finite and the infinite, he said, is like wanting both to have a mouthful of flour, and to blow...

...There is, from this point of view, a direct line of descent which can be traced from Plato's academy to the Harvard or Yale or University of Chicago of, say, the fifties...

...all descend from this approach to education, which was from the start career-oriented, and meant the bestowal of credentials at the end of a structured process...

...The jobs involved were clergyman and lawyer (the two overlapped for awhile...

...That is the notion that the academy is a place which until recently (the sixties is the usual villainous culprit-time) was a disinterested guardian of the life of the mind and the best traditions of Western thought, a position now sullied by faddishness and an obsession with the preparation of students for careers...

...While it is true that the study of theology and, to a lesser extent, the study of law involve students in the contemplation of some of the truths taken up by Socrates, it can be argued that the study would not have been taken up at all, by students in the Middle Ages or now, if the other aspects of the process were not involved...

...Most of the rest of us find it funny, if a little sad...

...I have heard professors complain that all their students care about is grades...

...That has nothing much to do with the love of wisdom, and never has...

...Educators who worry about this should refuse to give grades, and encourage universities to stop granting degrees...

...A young fourteenth-century Parisian who aspired to a position as canon of a cathedral read philosophy and theology not only because he was interested in truth for its own sake, though he might have been drawn that way to a certain extent...

...On the other hand, many of Bloom's concerns are on the side of the angels - my angels, anyway...

...It is letting us all down, young people and society at large, by its failure to engage what is wrong with the modern world, by its failure to challenge relativism, by its failure to expose students to the great books and great ideas of the Western tradition, and by its capitulation to the shallowest and trendiest ideas of the age...

...Neither had a Ph.D...

...the rest want what the university has existed for all along: credentials, a job...

...None of the earliest and greatest philosophers had tenure...

...Universities whore after government grants to do practically anything asked of them...

...The people who take it all very seriously are not themselves to be taken seriously...

...Epicte-tus was a slave, and Marcus Aurelius was an emperor...

...It is true that in-universities you can't find people who care about Plato, and some reading of Plato and Shakespeare and Dante really should be demanded of anyone who is granted a liberal arts degree...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey THE ACADEMY IN BLOOM SECURITY & THE DISINTERESTED LOVE OF KNOWLEDGE If you believe some academic writers - Allan Bloom comes first to mind - the modern university has fallen from a height to which it should be restored...

...Let people who want to pursue subjects for their own sakes do so - without worrying about credentials...

...Who cares...

...From the start, the university has sent mixed messages...

...Puritans see through this and become terribly disillusioned...

...if, that is, there were not a credential or a job somewhere down the line...

...To that extent I agree with people who worry about standards and argue for a core curriculum...

...No further discussion, and no summary of Kuhn's argument for the many readers who have praised Bloom's book without having much or any familiarity with the ideas of the people he discusses...

...At any rate, it is too typical of Bloom's method...

...Our modern university fixtures - full professorships, academic chairs, endowments, etc...

...That is all someone who really cares about a subject or range of subjects wants...

...The professor cares about tenure, position in the department, and so forth...

...I have been around academic politics, and have also worked around a state legislature...

...How would you pay the wise people at the heart of all this...

...The credentials helped you get a job, and kept other people out...

...He read it primarily because he had to, to follow a career...

...Most half-literate people could do most of the jobs which currently demand bachelor's and master's degrees, with no more than what used to be considered an adequate high school education and on-the-job training...

...Books like Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are popular symptoms of this condition...

...I didn't finish it, because I was irritated at the simplicity with which Bloom was capable of saying such things as the following, which comes in the midst of one of Bloom's frequent attacks upon our society's pervasive relativism: "Is science true...

...Bloom's disdain can be accepted without quarrel only by those who have never read Kuhn or who, if they did, did not understand him...

...The other side of this is that credentials should not be demanded where they are not required...

...Even before I read Martha Nuss-baum's sharp and persuasive attack on Bloom's Closing of the American Mind in the New York Review of Books [November 5,1987] I had problems with the book...

...Professors, guardians of the life of the mind, tell their students that what matters most is the fearless proclamation of the great ideas...

...What it comes down to is this: if you care about the love of wisdom, the promotion of the higher values, the pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake, the last place to look for it is in places where people make their livings by granting credentials that promise their holders economic success...

...But one assumption made in his book, and in a lot of other conservative academic writing, needs challenging...

...However, the notion that the university is or has been the primary or the best guardian of what matters most to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual traditions of our culture ought to be questioned...

...A lot of what he worries about is worth worrying about...