Monthly Archives: March 2018

Responsibility

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I know what I know, says the almanac.
Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina“

Where does responsibility begin? Where can it end? Alasdair MacIntyre observes that we tell our stories in part to account for our actions–which is also to say, to make them intelligible to ourselves in terms of the responsibilities we accept. Of course we must also accept forgiveness, and we must also forgive ourselves. Yet there is responsibility, which in one crucial respect simply means the thing I should say something about, that thing to which I should respond.

Obliged, accountable, responsible. Yes. But also, at its root, “responsible” means “answered, offered in return.” A largely silent blog, the blog this blog has become, suggests no answers, no response, little or nothing to offer in return. Yet not to offer some response seems ungrateful, and especially ungrateful to those whose responses continue, often at great cost, to offer hope: a great gift. I know this blog is my responsibility. I have not responded as I ought. So I write these words for myself, to answer myself, to speak of my own silence–but not to excuse it.

This week, which is Holy Week for Christians, I am particularly haunted by these words from They Thought They Were Free, a book recommended by Timothy Burke, whose recommendations I take very seriously:

A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal conditions, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good…. Responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain. They detach themselves altogether from the consideration of the evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with. Their denial compels their detachment. A good man–even a good American–running to catch a train on an important assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street and concentrate on catching the train and, once on the train, he has to consider the assignment about which he must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough, and his assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice the dog-beating when he passes it by.

Forgiveness may be at hand. In the meantime, there is Peter’s bitter weeping: a response, a measure of responsibility, a dark offering, a key still before him.

Good Friday.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

POSTSCRIPT: And speaking of responsibility, another mea culpa: Mayer’s phrase “good American” is harshly ironic in this context. They Thought They Were Free is about Nazi Germany, and one of Mayer’s throughlines is that no one is immune to the rejection–and even more damning, the denial–of responsibility he describes here. Not even “good Americans.” And Mayer also suggests, hauntingly, that difficult calculations are inevitable, and very painful, and that wrong answers are wrong nonetheless.

I am sorry not to have made this clear in my initial post, and grateful to Stephen for his response in the comments.

“The Moral Crisis of the University”

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Michael B. Katz is a new discovery for me (h/t Roving Librarian). His scholarship on the history of public education in the U.S.is fascinating, troubling, and revelatory. I’m sure his conclusions are contested–whose aren’t?–but at times the clarity and forcefulness of his insights take my breath away.

“The Moral Crisis of the University,” reprinted in Katz’s last book, Reconstructing American Education (1987), is full of such insights. The essay doesn’t make for happy reading, but every time I read it I come away with a renewed understanding of what will be lost if  higher education centered on the life of the mind and nurtured by a strong sense of civic obligation disappears. In many cases, this has already happened. The change Katz describes in 1987 has accelerated in ways that may go beyond his worst nightmare. Along with that acceleration, of course, is a great deal of business as usual, as there always is. We look here when the real erosion is happening there. It’s hard to know where to look, even when there are no distractions–and there are always distractions.

There’s an old joke about going broke, credited to Hemingway: Q: “How did you go bankrupt?” A: “Little by little, then all at once.” During the little by little stage, people who sound various alarms risk being called cranks, or worse. And it’s true: a premature or mischievous cultivation of outrage may damage or destroy what little semblance of community may be left.

And yet, the little by little becomes greater every year. Michael Katz gives me a way to see that. With that clarity also comes hope, the hope that recognizing problems really is the first step toward addressing them, managing them, perhaps even solving them.

Here, then, for Week 7 of Open Learning ’18, my last week as hub director, is some Michael Katz for us to consider together.

[W]hat is it exactly that makes a university distinct from other social institutions? [Robert Paul] Wolff offered a compelling definition based on a conception of the ideal university as a “community of learning.” The ideal university, he argued, should be “a community of persons united by collective understandings, by common and communal goals, by bonds of reciprocal obligation, and by a flow of sentiment which makes the preservation of the community an object of desire, not merely a matter of prudence or a command of duty.” Community implies a form of social obligation governed by principles different from those operative in the marketplace and state. Laws of of supply and demand lose priority; wage-labor is not the template for all human relations; the translation of individuals into commodities is resisted. The difficult task of defining common goals or acceptable activity is neither avoided nor deflected onto bureaucracy….

For all their problems, universities and their faculties remain immensely privileged. They retain a freedom of activity and expression not permitted in any other major social institution. There are two justifications for this privilege. One is that it is an essential condition of teaching and learning. The other is that universities have become the major source of moral and social criticism in modern life. They are the major site of whatever social conscience we have left…. If the legitimacy of universities rested only on their service to the marketplace and state, internal freedom would not be an issue. But their legitimacy rests, in fact, on something else: their integrity. Like all privileges, the freedom enjoyed by universities carries correlative responsibilities. In their case it is intellectual honesty and moral courage. Modern universities are the greatest centers of intellectual power in history. Without integrity, they can become little more than supermarkets with raw power for sale. This is the tendency in the modern history of the higher learning. It is what I call the moral crisis of the university.

I firmly believe that these large questions are essential foundations for any effective change or conservation in higher education. For always some new things must be invented, some things will benefit from change, and some things must be conserved. Some core principles must remain non-negotiable. I agree with Katz: tenured faculty in higher education are the last, best hope for addressing these large questions of common goals and acceptable activities.

It may not yet be too late.

Beautiful Study

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Elaine Scarry,

Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just has long been food for the journey for me. Yesterday Scarry’s insights emerged yet again at an important moment, both for me and for my students in ENGL 325, Early Modern Literature, as we met for a second time to consider Aemilia Lanyer’s brave, complex, and intense poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Lanyer’s poem is vitally concerned with beauty, truth, and justice. They’re central topics in her retelling of Christ’s Passion, but they’re also linked on multiple levels to Lanyer’s own biography and proto-feminist arguments. I wanted my students to get a feel for how deep, complex, and important Lanyer’s thoughts on beauty are–why beauty mattered for her, and in what ways, and how those ways might be relevant to us as learners, too.

I knew Scarry would be a vital part of the context for our discussion, so I read a longish excerpt aloud to set the tone for the class. What I read was so resonant at that moment for me, too (this always happens on good teaching days), that I wanted to share it with you all. For me, Scarry’s words go deeper, and are more vital, than much or even most of what I read about “higher education” these days. I think her words are especially interesting in light of Open Pedagogy week in Open Learning ’18.  For me, open learning seeks to reveal, and by revealing stimulate, insight and love. Or, as Scarry writes, “to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.” At its best, open learning shares and encourages the placement Scarry describes. Open pedagogy, then, leads by example.

I also think that “studying,” a neglected term in many contemporary conversations about learning, involves a version of the “staring” that Scarry celebrates below. One older sense of “study” used to mean something like that. When I was a child, my father would perceive me lost in a reverie and ask, “what are you studying?”   I hope such staring does not become lost in all the laudable “experiential real-world problem-based” approaches to learning celebrated so widely today, valuable as they certainly are. Contemplation, musing, mulling: these too are modes of active learning, no less important for the rapt stillness they inhabit.

So here’s Elaine Scarry, who begins by thinking about the way “beauty prompts copies of itself”:

This phenomenon of unceasing begetting sponsors in people like Plato, Aquinas, Dante the idea of eternity, the perpetual duplicating of a moment that never stops. But it also sponsors the idea of terrestrial plenitude and distribution, the will to make “more and more” so that there will eventually be “enough.” Although very great cultural outcomes such as the Iliad or the Mona Lisa or the idea of distribution arise out of the requirement beauty places on us to replicate, the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring. The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph but simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later–as long as the bird is there to be beheld. People follow the paths of migrating birds, moving strangers, and lost manuscripts, trying to keep the thing sensorily present to them. Pater tells us that Leonardo, as though half-crazed, used to follow people around the streets of Florence once he got “glimpses ot it [beauty] in the strange eyes or hair of chance people.” Sometimes he persisted until sundown. This replication in the realm of sensation can be carried out by a single perceiver across time (one person starting at a face or listening to the unceasing song of a mockingbird) or can instead entail a brief act of perception distributed across many people. When Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne, for “two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung.” This impulse toward a distribution across perceivers is, as both museums and postcards verify, the most common response to beauty: “Addis is full of blossoms. Wish you were here.” “The nightingale sang again last night. Come here as soon as you can.”

Beauty is sometimes disparaged on the ground that it causes a contagion of imitation, as when a legion of people begin to style themselves after a particular movie starlet, but this is just an imperfect version of a deeply beneficent momentum toward replication. Again beauty is sometimes disparaged because it gives rise to material cupidity and possessiveness; but here, too, we may come to feel we are simply encountering an imperfect instance of an otherwise positive outcome….

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato’s dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation. Sometimes their institutional gravity and awkwardness can seem tonally out of register with beauty, which, like a small bird, has an aura of fragility, as when Simone Weil in Waiting for God writes:

The love of the beauty of the world … involves … the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world, openings onto it.

But Weil’s list of precious things, openings into the world, begins not with a flight of a bird but with education: “Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of arts and sciences” To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.