"The University: what it is, and why it matters"

Thomas Pfau Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English & Professor of German Member – Duke Divinity School Faculty https://duke.academia.edu/ThomasPfau Reinhard Hütter Professor of Systematic Theology Duke Divinity School http://divinity.duke.edu/academics/faculty/rein hard-hütter New Course Proposal “The University: what it is, and why it matters” The aim of this course is to enable our Duke undergraduates to develop a comprehensive understanding of the university and how, at various points in time, its purposes and ends have been diversely articulated. We stress that even as there is a historical component to this course, it does not mean to present a “history of the university.” Rather, by juxtaposing contemporary with older reflections about the university, we aim to enable students to understand the historically contingent evolution and character of the university in which they find themselves today. The typical eighteen-year old arriving at Duke today will likely accept as objective and immutable fact the institutional landscape of schools, departments, disciplines, sub-fields and the many ways in which, more recently, these entities have sought to collaborate with and enhance each other. At the same time, the sheer complexity and fluidity of the modern research university is bound to bewilder students who must chart a meaningful and worthwhile course through its labyrinthine structures within four short years. Yet inasmuch as the objectively given structures encountered by new students constitute the only institutional reality they know, their academic choices, habits of learning, and they way they impinge on their overall flourishing as persons unfold in something of a vacuum. The premise of our course, then, is that students will want to have a fully articulated understanding of the institutional framework they now inhabit and how it variously advances or impedes personal, intellectual, and professional flourishing. To that end, our course will seek to explore different incarnations of the university and how they reflect fundamentally different models of advanced study, its aims, its implicit values, and its overall ends. To do so is also to confront the question, not answered in the negative until a few decades ago, as to whether university education should also include the formation of students’ moral and spiritual persona. Related to the underlying question – viz., whether the university is primarily invested in goods of efficiency or also in goods of excellence – is the marked evolution of academic study from an ethos of studiositas (prevalent in Scholastic and Humanist models of the university) to the pursuit of curiositas, which after 1600 rapidly mutates from a moral vice to an intellectual virtue. To understand such a shift will help students see the deeper implications of the appraisal of knowledge as a marketable commodity as it prevails in the contemporary research university. Studying this shift, which is dramatically accelerated by the conception of the modern Protestant research universities of Berlin, Breslau, and Bonn after 1809, will also help students understand the genesis of the peculiar disciplinary landscape as it characterizes most universities today. In scrutinizing the historical rationales tendered for this model, students will also be in a better position to reflect on the tensions and limitations intrinsic to the by now dominant, pre-professional model of academic study. – Another issue to be broached concerns the problem of academic hyper-pluralism and the seeming loss of coordination between discipline-specific forms of inquiry and notions of what constitutes knowledge. Here we will explore how the ideal of a Leitwissenschaft – a prima scientia coordinating the various disciplines initially shifted from Theology to Philosophy, which in turn came to be assimilated to mechanist models borrowed from Physics, only to melt away entirely after 1800. We aim to reflect on the possibilities and liabilities of advanced inquiry in a fully deregulated institutional landscape where individual disciplines and sub-fields are no longer in substantive conversation with one another, certainly not as regards the underlying ends and values to be realized by advanced study. – Finally, and related to the preceding development, the course will seek to take up the question of whether the modern research university is still able (and, given its nature, inclined) to pursue questions of value and normativity. Drawing on accounts (Buckley, Gaukroger, Dupré) of the rise of modern epistemological and historicist method, we will consider the question of whether a hermeneutic (interpretive) and a strictly method-based (“verificationist”) approach to advanced study are commensurable and what implications the answer to that question holds for the modern university from here on out. Closely entwined with this question is, of course, the current, lively debate regarding the role of the Humanities in the university and society at large. Select Bibliography (includes texts from which some readings will be chosen) Ashley, Benedict. The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: UNDP, 2006) Arum, Richard and Roksa, Josika. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on American Campuses (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2010) Bloom, Allen. Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (Simon & Schuster, 2012) Bok, Derek. Higher Education in America (Princeton UP, 2013) ------. Our Underachieving Colleges: a Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton UP, 2006) Bok, Derek. Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton UP, 2009) Bonaventura. De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam. (On the Reduction of the Sciences to Theology) (ca. 1248-1256) Butler, Judith. “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity”, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009) Gregory, Brad. The Unintended Reformation (Harvard UP, 2010) Cole, Jonathan. The Great American Research University (New York: Public Affairs, 2010) Collini, Stefan. What are Universities for? (Penguin, 2011) Delbanco, Andrew. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton xxxxxx) Derrida, Jacques. “The University Without Condition,” idem, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002), 202-37. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education (1916) Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham UP, 2008) Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar” (1837) Gleason, Phillip. Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford UP, 1995) Grafton, Anthony and Jardine, Lisa. From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) Grafton, Anthony. Worlds Made of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, Mass., 2011) Griffiths, Paul. Intellectual Appetite: a Theological Grammar (Washington, D.C., 2009) Hauerwas, Stanley. The State of the University (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) Higton, Mike. A Theology of Higher Education (New York: Oxford UP, 2013) Hobbins, Daniel. Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (College Park, Pa.: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Hofstadter, Richard and Wilson Smith (eds.). American Higher Education: A Documentary History. 2 Vols. (Chicago UP 1961) Howard, Thomas Albert. Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford UP, 2006) Hugh of St. Victor. Didascalion de studio legendi. (Instruction on the Study of Reading) (ca. 1130) Hutchins, Robert. The Higher Learning in America (1936) Hutchins, Robert. The University of Utopia (1950) Kallendorf, Craig W., trans. and ed. Humanist Educational Treatises (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2002) Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary B. Gregor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968) Kronman, Anthony T. Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008) Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York, 1982) Lonergan, Bernard. Topics in education in Collected works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) MacIntyre, Alasdair. God, Philosophy, Universities (Notre Dame, IN: UNDP, 1996) ------. “Reconceiving the University as an Institution and the Lecture as a Genre” in three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame Press, 1991) Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Universality of the University,” Communio 40/1 (Spring 2013), 64-75 McGettigan, Andrew. The Great University Gamble: Money, markets, and the future of higher education (Pluto Press, 2013) Melanchthon, Philip. Orations on Philosophy and Education, trans. Christine F. Salazar (Cambridge, 1999) Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York, 2010) => review by A. Grafton Mill, John Stuart. “Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St. Andrews” (1867) => online text Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University (1855) Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Future of our Educational Institutions (1872) Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: What Democracy needs the Humanities (Princeton UP: 2012) Oakeshott, Michael. The Voice of Liberal Learning, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989) Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Idea of a University: a Reexamination (New Haven, Ct.: Yale UP, 1992) Pieper, Joseph. Leisure—the Basis of Culture (1952; reprt. San Francisco, 2009) Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins (1992) Reuben, Julie. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1996) Ridder-Symoens, Hilde de and Rüegg, Walter, eds. A History of the University in Europe (Cambridge, 1992-2011), 4 vols. Rothblatt, Sheldon and Wittrock, Björn. The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile: or, on Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979) Schelling, Friedrich. On University Studies, trans. E. S. Morgan (Athens: Ohio State UP, 1966) Schopenhauer, Arthur. “Über die Universitätsphilosophie” (1853) Seneca, “On Liberal and Vocational Studies“ in Moral Epistles, no. 88 Spaemann, Robert. “The Courage to Educate,” Communio 40/1 (Spring 2013), 48-63 Thomas Aquinas. The Divisions and Methods of the Sciences, trans. Armand Maurer. 4th ed. (Toronto: PIMS, 1984) (ca. 1255-1259) Tuchman, Gaye. Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (Chicago UP, 2011) Veblen, Thorstein. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918) Weber, Max. Science as Vocation (1919) Syllabus Advance Reading: Andrew Delbanco, College: what it was, is, and should be (2012) Session 1 - Introduction PART I – Articulating the Mission of the University Session 2 – University Charters and Strategic Plans Statutes of Harvard (1646); The Charters of Harvard (1650), William & Mary (1693), and Yale (1745) Session 3 – Post-Enlightenment Models of Higher Learning Benjamin Rush on Republican Learning (1798) Alexander von Humboldt, Charter for the University of Berlin (1809) Rockfish Gap Commission on the Proposed University of Virginia (1818) Session 4 – Defining the Modern Research University Mill, “Inaugural Address at St. Andrews” (1867) Charles W. Eliot, Inaugural Address as President of Harvard and statement “On Scientific Schools” (1869) Session 5 – A Turning Point: the Debate over the “Elective System” Charles W. Eliot, “Liberty in Education” (1885) James McCosh, from The New Departure in College Education (1885) Charles Moore, from “The Elective System at Harvard” (1903) Session 6 – Higher Education and Forming a Democratic Citizenry after WW I John Dewey, from Democracy and Education (1916) => make selections at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm Robert Hutchins, Speeches (1935-1939) and selections from The Higher Education in America (1936) John Dewey, review of Hutchins, Higher Education (1937) James Bryant Conan, from General Education in a Free Society: Harvard Committee Report (1945) PART II – The Ends of Higher Learning: Philosophical Perspectives Session 7 – Learning as a Journey toward the Good: Plato Plato, Republic, Books 6-7 Session 8 – Plato (contd.) Plato, Republic (contd.) Session 9 – Stoicism as a Philosophy of Education Seneca, Epistle 6 (“On Sharing Knowledge”); Epistle 88 (“On Liberal and Vocational Studies“). – Epictetus, “On How Reason Is Able to Contemplate Itself” – “On Preconceptions” – “How We Must Struggle Against Impressions” Session 10 – The Liberal Arts and the Ultimate End of Learning St. Bonaventure, from Of the Reduction of the Arts to Theology (~ 1270) Session 11 – Renaissance Humanism Pier Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth” (1403) Walter Ruëgg, from A History of the University in Europe II: 24-42 Session 12 – Reformation Humanism Erasmus of Rotterdam, On the Method of Study (1512) – Philip Melanchthon, from Orations on Philosophy and Education – “On the Order of Learning” (1531); “On the Role of the Schools” (1543); “On Philosophy” (1536); “On Natural Philosophy” (1542) Session 13 – The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Pt. 1 Francis Bacon, from Essays (“Of Custom and Education,” “Of Studies”); from The New Organon, Book I. Roy Porter, “The Scientific Revolution and Universities” in A History of the University in Europe, vol. 0: 00-00 Session 14 - The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Pt. 2 Francis Bacon, New Organon (contd.) Stephen Gaukroger, from The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (“The Aims of Inquiry”) Session 15 – Socializing Individuals in a Secular World: Locke on Education John Locke, from Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), §§ 44-67; §§ 133-139; §§ 184-191 Session 16 – University or Multiversity: Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties Immanuel Kant, from The Conflict of the Faculties (1798) Session 17 – Self-Cultivation (Bildung) as the End of Higher Learning Wilhelm v. Humboldt, from The Limits of State Action (1792), Chapter 2 (“Of the individual man, and the highest ends of his existence”) Friedrich W. J. Schelling, from On University Studies (1803), Lectures 2, 3, 5, and 7 Session 18 – Self-Cultivation as the End of Higher Learning Friedrich W. J. Schelling, On University Studies (contd.) Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar (1836) Session 19 – John Henry Newman, Idea of a University (1852/1873), Discourses I-IV Session 20 – Newman, Idea of a University (contd.), Discourses V-VIII Session 21 Max Weber, “Science as Vocation” (1919) PART III - Assessing Higher Education Today Session 22 – Unmaking the University in the Name of Efficiency Lord Browne Report, “Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education” (2010) Session 23 – Pre-Professionalism and the Shrinking Scope of Higher Learning Harvard Report, “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities” (2012) Duke University, “Strategic Plan” (http://stratplan.duke.edu/pdf/plan.pdf), Chapters 1-4 Session 24 – Neo-Conservative Perspectives on the Contemporary University Leo Strauss, “What is Liberal Education” (1959) Allan Bloom, from The Closing of the American Mind (1987), “The Student and the University” Session 25 – After Virtue: Secularism and Hyper-Pluralism in Higher Education Alasdair MacIntyre, from Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (“Reconceiving the University as an Institution and the Lecture as a Genre”) (1991) Brad S. Gregory, from The Unintended Reformation (2010), “Secularizing Knowledge” Session 26 – Two Closing Perspectives Derek Bok, from Our Underachieving Colleges (2013), pp. 310-343 (“Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education”) William Deresiewicz, from Excellent Sheep: the Miseducation of the American Elite (2014), pp. 77-87