PLEASURE AND PROVOCATION; HUNTER RAWLINGS ON LIBERAL EDUCATION
I bet you missed it. In the middle of the holiday rush Hunter Rawlings, a classicist who has (twice) served as president of Cornell, published an essay called “Stop Defending the Liberal Arts. The Chronicle of Higher Education published it on December 21, 2017, just before Christmas, when not a creature was stirring, not even an op-ed junkie.
[ N.B. Do not confuse this with a piece I called “Please Don’t Make the Case for the Humanities” which appeared (under another title) in InsideHigherEd .in 2016. Great minds run in the same channels, but some run deeper than others. Read Rawlings!]
Rawlings’ essay is a delight to read, rich in its observations about art, poetry, science, indeed all aspects of liberal education. But it is also provocative about some of the hot-button issues on campuses today. It is a “MUST READ”,
In case you can’t get it through the Chronicle, the full text is appended. Please share it with friends, colleagues and administrators. They too will find it a pleasure and a provocation, and sharing it is the best way I know to make the case for liberal education.
--
Stop Defending the Liberal Arts
By Hunter R. Rawlings III DECEMBER 21, 2017
How can we think about the human brain? Here is a poetic answer.
The Brain—is wider than the Sky--
For—put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside--
The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For—hold them—Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As Sponges—Buckets—do--
The Brain is just the weight of God--
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound--
And they will differ—if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--
Emily Dickinson writes about the brain as our means of encompassing and absorbing the world, and as our link to God. The poem is an awed reflection on how the individual brain makes the world that each of us lives in, and on its capacity to learn and expand. It is, or can be, both wide and deep. It can conceive of a God who is not physical.
The poem suggests to me the defining component of a liberal education: liberation. The mind, when it is learning, evades or outgrows some of our most severe constrictions: those of physicality (consider Dickinson’s sheltered life, or the accomplishments of Stephen Hawking); those of a narrow-minded upbringing, of one’s unexamined opinions, of the provincialism that may characterize a Manhattanite as well as a resident of the most remote hamlet. Search Intellectual and aesthetic pleasure is an essential goal of higher education, one we omit at great cost and peril. What about our students? Are we liberating them — or, more accurately, helping them to liberate themselves? Lucas Stanczyk, a political theorist at Harvard, makes the case for why we should be doing our absolute best:
The most important reason to improve education is not to make children fit for tomorrow’s job market. Nor is it to make them capable of voting well and serving on a jury. It is to help people escape a life of vapid consumerism by giving them capacities to appreciate richer pursuits and to produce their own complex meanings.
Dickinson injects a sly humor toward the end of each stanza: "—and You—beside" in the first; the prosaic concreteness of "sponges" and "buckets" with the quirky "do" in the second; and the happily inconclusive "if they do" in the third. We can be pretty sure that, as far as she is concerned, the brain and God do not differ except in one’s perspective. And note how these three monosyllabic insinuations rhyme: "you," "do" and "do." They draw attention to themselves, making us readers think about how we think. There is a whole world of thought in this poem, a world of "richer pursuits" and "complex meanings."
Emily Dickinson has one way of considering the brain; today’s neuroscientists have another. In recent years, neuroscience has made impressive progress in understanding the brain and its functions, but so far has entirely failed to comprehend consciousness — to make the leap from the physical brain to the conscious mind. And yet Dickinson does so effortlessly, poetically, humanely. The humanities have inquired for centuries into what makes us human; science is only beginning to investigate this essential question. The Dartmouth College physicist Marcelo Gleiser has noted that as science and its methodology developed, from the 17th century onward, the arts and humanities asked questions that science did not touch: "What is the nature of physical reality? What is mind? Why am I who I am? How do we construct a sense of reality? What is justice? What is a good life?" Now, as science begins to address questions of humanity and meaning, Gleiser sees an "unprecedented opportunity to bring the sciences and the humanities back into constructive engagement." Humanists, he believes, need to learn about scientific research that relates to their fields, while scientists would benefit from the broader context of humanistic thought. This is what a good liberal education will pursue in coming years, the connections and contrasts between science and the e humanities. Think of how much fun this is going to be for students who have access to it!
Now consider another poem, this one from the multifaceted work of A.R. Ammons. It’s called "Their Sex Life," and here it is in its entirety:
One failure on
Top of another.
In those few words I see another component of liberal education: irreverence. A liberal education is not always grave or solemn. It should be sharp, funny, curious, joyous. It is big enough — wider than the sky — to include palpable jokes like this one, a verbal and visual pun.
There is room for irreverence even as we are challenged to bring all our intellect to bear on the subject at hand: the nature of light, the density of a Jorie Graham poem or a Henry James novel, the intricacies of cellular processes, the machinations that have led to wars. Though we have literary canons, scientific laws, mathematical axioms, landmark events in history, and other such foundational aspects of our disciplines, if we are inspiring teachers, we will try to instill knowledge of and respect for these meaningful matters, but not a stultifying reverence for them. You have to get off your knees to accomplish very much. A good liberal education encourages students to engage with foundational concepts in an imaginative way, not just absorbing but questioning.
Several years ago I finally read, for the first time, Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Then, a year or two later, I visited an art gallery in Washington and saw, to my astonishment, a magnificent portrait of the novel’s protagonist, Isabel Archer. I was so struck by it that I bought it. The artist, a young woman named Maud Taber-Thomas, has a background in Victorian literature as well as in fine arts. Besides the beauty and expressiveness of the painting, I am intrigued by the artist’s choice to interpret literature by imagining and portraying its protagonists. James, in a manner that was quite innovative at the time, illuminated a fictional consciousness, the drama of interior life, often focusing on what the critic Michael Gorra calls "moments of refusal, events that don’t happen." Taber Thomas’s painting also illuminates an interior life — and I am confident that it would do so even for a viewer who had never heard of Isabel Archer, or even of Henry James. But for those who know the novel, the painting enlivens our understanding of it, and the novel enriches our perception of the painting. Here is a beautiful example of that buzzword "interdisciplinary," reminding us that the buzzword means something. And this example has its roots in a liberal-arts education.
Now a few lines from Sappho: …
Anactória, she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely step, her sparkling glance and her face
than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and glittering armor.
Here is an expression in poetry of a critical component of liberal education: pleasure. A liberal education should invoke the pleasure of learning, of figuring things out, of seeing the physical turned into words, of devising an experiment that works. The pleasure of synthesis — of seeing how something you learned about Renaissance art enriches what you learned about European history; how vectors are important in physics as well as in calculus; how both macroeconomics and the photographs of Walker Evans can testify to the realities of poverty. Why are we here, after all? We are so busy being utilitarians today that we derogate pleasure as a superficial end in itself. And yet intellectual and aesthetic pleasure is an essential goal of higher education, one we omit at great cost and peril. We are in the age of big data, accountability, and higher education as a product to be bought off the shelf. But long-term quality, not instant quantification, should be our concern — teaching our students to develop what Lionel Trilling calls "an awareness of the qualities of things" for a lifetime of personal pleasure and democratic contributions.
Consider another poem, “Agreement,” this one by a contemporary poet, Kay Ryan:
The satisfactions
of agreement are
immediate as sugar— a
a melting of the
granular, a syrup
that lingers, shared
not singular.
Many prefer it.
The component of liberal education that I find in this sly little poem is provocation. A liberal education provokes; it does not invite the syrupy satisfactions of agreeing with each other all the time, but the rougher, more granular process of thinking for ourselves. A liberal education demands that you decide — agree or disagree? Find the nuances in the issue, and voice them. Challenge authority. Argue forcefully — and with wit and reason. Write clearly and persuasively about your research, ideas, conclusions, interpretations. Students will not learn to appreciate the qualities of things, to discriminate, to challenge, to argue persuasively, in an environment condescendingly signposted with hedges and cushioned with caveats. I am of course talking about two of today’s hot topics in academia, trigger warnings and safe spaces. It is important to be clear about the use of these terms. I am not objecting to alerting students that an upcoming topic of discussion or an assigned reading may be painful because it involves graphic violence, for example. Some students have experienced traumatic events, and a warning can help them handle the topic. But I do object to warnings that infantilize our students — warning them about every controversial subject, or allowing them to skip discussions that provoke them or make them uncomfortable. Getting an education is not supposed to be a comfortable process. "Safe spaces" is also a term that means different things to different people. Under whatever definition, whether a physical place or an intellectual atmosphere, it must not undermine free speech, academic freedom, or the intellectual development of our students. Henry Cabot Lodge — U.S. senator and confidant of Theodore Roosevelt — once pointed out the value of both provocation and pleasure in education. In 1870, a very young Lodge took a course at Harvard from the almost equally young Henry Adams. Here is what Lodge had to say about the difference that course made in his life:
In all my four years, I never really studied anything, never had my mind roused to any exertion or to anything resembling active thought until in my senior year I stumbled into the course in medieval history given by Henry Adams, who had then just come to Harvard … [Adams] had the power not only of exciting interest, but he awakened opposition to his own views, and this is one great secret of success in teaching. In any event, I worked hard in that course because it gave me pleasure. I took the highest marks, for which I cared, as I found, singularly little, because marks were not my object, and for the first time I got a glimpse of what education might be and really learned something. … Yet it was not what I learned but the fact that I learned something, that I discovered that it was the keenest of pleasures to use one’s mind, a new sensation, and one which made Mr. Adams’s course in the history of the Middle Ages so memorable to me.
To teach students that it is a pleasure to use one’s mind and to encourage critical thought and intellectual opposition are our most important tasks as educators.
One final component of liberal education — courage. Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, does not write poetry or fiction but oral history, the product of countless hours of deep interviews, edited and shaped into lyrical portraits of lives caught up in vast events. Her works grapple with the experiences of Soviet women in World War II, of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and of their families at home, of victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, of ordinary people amid the collapse of the Soviet Union. To write her books, to show the rest of us what these lives and deaths were like, took monumental courage. Alexievich immersed herself for years in people’s accounts of suffering, and risked her health by going to the Chernobyl area. She is now politically unwelcome in her homeland; some of her books are banned, and she was prosecuted for defaming the Soviet army. Where does her courage come from? It was not generated in "safe spaces." Alexievich traces its source to her childhood in Belarus:
It was the postwar period, when young boys were still getting themselves blown up in the forest by German and partisan mines. As far as I remember, only women lived in the village. No men had returned from the war. In the evenings, after milking the cows and finishing up the housework, the women would sit outside and talk about life and death. They talked about the war: how they saw their loved ones off, how they waited for them. How they believed the gypsy women who promised them miracles. It seems to me that I learned everything there was to know about love from their stories. Their stories affected me more than books. Life seemed mysterious and frightening. It took me a long time to find a genre that corresponded to the way I viewed the world …I chose the genre of the human voice.
Alexievich finds another source of courage in literature: Dostoevsky asked the question: "How much of the human is there in a human being?" How can the human in this human being be protected? That’s the question I’m looking to answer. I collect the human spirit. Liberation, irreverence, pleasure, provocation, courage — those are, in my view, five essentials of liberal education. Many more could be proposed, of course. But I hope these five suffice to justify a contrarian recommendation: Stop defending the liberal arts. Op-eds and other public assertions by those of us in academia inevitably sound defensive and self-interested. So let others whose minds have been awakened by a liberal education do the defending for us.
Hunter R. Rawlings III, a classicist, was president of Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and the Association of American Universities.
January 2018
I bet you missed it. In the middle of the holiday rush Hunter Rawlings, a classicist who has (twice) served as president of Cornell, published an essay called “Stop Defending the Liberal Arts. The Chronicle of Higher Education published it on December 21, 2017, just before Christmas, when not a creature was stirring, not even an op-ed junkie.
[ N.B. Do not confuse this with a piece I called “Please Don’t Make the Case for the Humanities” which appeared (under another title) in InsideHigherEd .in 2016. Great minds run in the same channels, but some run deeper than others. Read Rawlings!]
Rawlings’ essay is a delight to read, rich in its observations about art, poetry, science, indeed all aspects of liberal education. But it is also provocative about some of the hot-button issues on campuses today. It is a “MUST READ”,
In case you can’t get it through the Chronicle, the full text is appended. Please share it with friends, colleagues and administrators. They too will find it a pleasure and a provocation, and sharing it is the best way I know to make the case for liberal education.
--
Stop Defending the Liberal Arts
By Hunter R. Rawlings III DECEMBER 21, 2017
How can we think about the human brain? Here is a poetic answer.
The Brain—is wider than the Sky--
For—put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside--
The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For—hold them—Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As Sponges—Buckets—do--
The Brain is just the weight of God--
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound--
And they will differ—if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--
Emily Dickinson writes about the brain as our means of encompassing and absorbing the world, and as our link to God. The poem is an awed reflection on how the individual brain makes the world that each of us lives in, and on its capacity to learn and expand. It is, or can be, both wide and deep. It can conceive of a God who is not physical.
The poem suggests to me the defining component of a liberal education: liberation. The mind, when it is learning, evades or outgrows some of our most severe constrictions: those of physicality (consider Dickinson’s sheltered life, or the accomplishments of Stephen Hawking); those of a narrow-minded upbringing, of one’s unexamined opinions, of the provincialism that may characterize a Manhattanite as well as a resident of the most remote hamlet. Search Intellectual and aesthetic pleasure is an essential goal of higher education, one we omit at great cost and peril. What about our students? Are we liberating them — or, more accurately, helping them to liberate themselves? Lucas Stanczyk, a political theorist at Harvard, makes the case for why we should be doing our absolute best:
The most important reason to improve education is not to make children fit for tomorrow’s job market. Nor is it to make them capable of voting well and serving on a jury. It is to help people escape a life of vapid consumerism by giving them capacities to appreciate richer pursuits and to produce their own complex meanings.
Dickinson injects a sly humor toward the end of each stanza: "—and You—beside" in the first; the prosaic concreteness of "sponges" and "buckets" with the quirky "do" in the second; and the happily inconclusive "if they do" in the third. We can be pretty sure that, as far as she is concerned, the brain and God do not differ except in one’s perspective. And note how these three monosyllabic insinuations rhyme: "you," "do" and "do." They draw attention to themselves, making us readers think about how we think. There is a whole world of thought in this poem, a world of "richer pursuits" and "complex meanings."
Emily Dickinson has one way of considering the brain; today’s neuroscientists have another. In recent years, neuroscience has made impressive progress in understanding the brain and its functions, but so far has entirely failed to comprehend consciousness — to make the leap from the physical brain to the conscious mind. And yet Dickinson does so effortlessly, poetically, humanely. The humanities have inquired for centuries into what makes us human; science is only beginning to investigate this essential question. The Dartmouth College physicist Marcelo Gleiser has noted that as science and its methodology developed, from the 17th century onward, the arts and humanities asked questions that science did not touch: "What is the nature of physical reality? What is mind? Why am I who I am? How do we construct a sense of reality? What is justice? What is a good life?" Now, as science begins to address questions of humanity and meaning, Gleiser sees an "unprecedented opportunity to bring the sciences and the humanities back into constructive engagement." Humanists, he believes, need to learn about scientific research that relates to their fields, while scientists would benefit from the broader context of humanistic thought. This is what a good liberal education will pursue in coming years, the connections and contrasts between science and the e humanities. Think of how much fun this is going to be for students who have access to it!
Now consider another poem, this one from the multifaceted work of A.R. Ammons. It’s called "Their Sex Life," and here it is in its entirety:
One failure on
Top of another.
In those few words I see another component of liberal education: irreverence. A liberal education is not always grave or solemn. It should be sharp, funny, curious, joyous. It is big enough — wider than the sky — to include palpable jokes like this one, a verbal and visual pun.
There is room for irreverence even as we are challenged to bring all our intellect to bear on the subject at hand: the nature of light, the density of a Jorie Graham poem or a Henry James novel, the intricacies of cellular processes, the machinations that have led to wars. Though we have literary canons, scientific laws, mathematical axioms, landmark events in history, and other such foundational aspects of our disciplines, if we are inspiring teachers, we will try to instill knowledge of and respect for these meaningful matters, but not a stultifying reverence for them. You have to get off your knees to accomplish very much. A good liberal education encourages students to engage with foundational concepts in an imaginative way, not just absorbing but questioning.
Several years ago I finally read, for the first time, Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Then, a year or two later, I visited an art gallery in Washington and saw, to my astonishment, a magnificent portrait of the novel’s protagonist, Isabel Archer. I was so struck by it that I bought it. The artist, a young woman named Maud Taber-Thomas, has a background in Victorian literature as well as in fine arts. Besides the beauty and expressiveness of the painting, I am intrigued by the artist’s choice to interpret literature by imagining and portraying its protagonists. James, in a manner that was quite innovative at the time, illuminated a fictional consciousness, the drama of interior life, often focusing on what the critic Michael Gorra calls "moments of refusal, events that don’t happen." Taber Thomas’s painting also illuminates an interior life — and I am confident that it would do so even for a viewer who had never heard of Isabel Archer, or even of Henry James. But for those who know the novel, the painting enlivens our understanding of it, and the novel enriches our perception of the painting. Here is a beautiful example of that buzzword "interdisciplinary," reminding us that the buzzword means something. And this example has its roots in a liberal-arts education.
Now a few lines from Sappho: …
Anactória, she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely step, her sparkling glance and her face
than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and glittering armor.
Here is an expression in poetry of a critical component of liberal education: pleasure. A liberal education should invoke the pleasure of learning, of figuring things out, of seeing the physical turned into words, of devising an experiment that works. The pleasure of synthesis — of seeing how something you learned about Renaissance art enriches what you learned about European history; how vectors are important in physics as well as in calculus; how both macroeconomics and the photographs of Walker Evans can testify to the realities of poverty. Why are we here, after all? We are so busy being utilitarians today that we derogate pleasure as a superficial end in itself. And yet intellectual and aesthetic pleasure is an essential goal of higher education, one we omit at great cost and peril. We are in the age of big data, accountability, and higher education as a product to be bought off the shelf. But long-term quality, not instant quantification, should be our concern — teaching our students to develop what Lionel Trilling calls "an awareness of the qualities of things" for a lifetime of personal pleasure and democratic contributions.
Consider another poem, “Agreement,” this one by a contemporary poet, Kay Ryan:
The satisfactions
of agreement are
immediate as sugar— a
a melting of the
granular, a syrup
that lingers, shared
not singular.
Many prefer it.
The component of liberal education that I find in this sly little poem is provocation. A liberal education provokes; it does not invite the syrupy satisfactions of agreeing with each other all the time, but the rougher, more granular process of thinking for ourselves. A liberal education demands that you decide — agree or disagree? Find the nuances in the issue, and voice them. Challenge authority. Argue forcefully — and with wit and reason. Write clearly and persuasively about your research, ideas, conclusions, interpretations. Students will not learn to appreciate the qualities of things, to discriminate, to challenge, to argue persuasively, in an environment condescendingly signposted with hedges and cushioned with caveats. I am of course talking about two of today’s hot topics in academia, trigger warnings and safe spaces. It is important to be clear about the use of these terms. I am not objecting to alerting students that an upcoming topic of discussion or an assigned reading may be painful because it involves graphic violence, for example. Some students have experienced traumatic events, and a warning can help them handle the topic. But I do object to warnings that infantilize our students — warning them about every controversial subject, or allowing them to skip discussions that provoke them or make them uncomfortable. Getting an education is not supposed to be a comfortable process. "Safe spaces" is also a term that means different things to different people. Under whatever definition, whether a physical place or an intellectual atmosphere, it must not undermine free speech, academic freedom, or the intellectual development of our students. Henry Cabot Lodge — U.S. senator and confidant of Theodore Roosevelt — once pointed out the value of both provocation and pleasure in education. In 1870, a very young Lodge took a course at Harvard from the almost equally young Henry Adams. Here is what Lodge had to say about the difference that course made in his life:
In all my four years, I never really studied anything, never had my mind roused to any exertion or to anything resembling active thought until in my senior year I stumbled into the course in medieval history given by Henry Adams, who had then just come to Harvard … [Adams] had the power not only of exciting interest, but he awakened opposition to his own views, and this is one great secret of success in teaching. In any event, I worked hard in that course because it gave me pleasure. I took the highest marks, for which I cared, as I found, singularly little, because marks were not my object, and for the first time I got a glimpse of what education might be and really learned something. … Yet it was not what I learned but the fact that I learned something, that I discovered that it was the keenest of pleasures to use one’s mind, a new sensation, and one which made Mr. Adams’s course in the history of the Middle Ages so memorable to me.
To teach students that it is a pleasure to use one’s mind and to encourage critical thought and intellectual opposition are our most important tasks as educators.
One final component of liberal education — courage. Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, does not write poetry or fiction but oral history, the product of countless hours of deep interviews, edited and shaped into lyrical portraits of lives caught up in vast events. Her works grapple with the experiences of Soviet women in World War II, of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and of their families at home, of victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, of ordinary people amid the collapse of the Soviet Union. To write her books, to show the rest of us what these lives and deaths were like, took monumental courage. Alexievich immersed herself for years in people’s accounts of suffering, and risked her health by going to the Chernobyl area. She is now politically unwelcome in her homeland; some of her books are banned, and she was prosecuted for defaming the Soviet army. Where does her courage come from? It was not generated in "safe spaces." Alexievich traces its source to her childhood in Belarus:
It was the postwar period, when young boys were still getting themselves blown up in the forest by German and partisan mines. As far as I remember, only women lived in the village. No men had returned from the war. In the evenings, after milking the cows and finishing up the housework, the women would sit outside and talk about life and death. They talked about the war: how they saw their loved ones off, how they waited for them. How they believed the gypsy women who promised them miracles. It seems to me that I learned everything there was to know about love from their stories. Their stories affected me more than books. Life seemed mysterious and frightening. It took me a long time to find a genre that corresponded to the way I viewed the world …I chose the genre of the human voice.
Alexievich finds another source of courage in literature: Dostoevsky asked the question: "How much of the human is there in a human being?" How can the human in this human being be protected? That’s the question I’m looking to answer. I collect the human spirit. Liberation, irreverence, pleasure, provocation, courage — those are, in my view, five essentials of liberal education. Many more could be proposed, of course. But I hope these five suffice to justify a contrarian recommendation: Stop defending the liberal arts. Op-eds and other public assertions by those of us in academia inevitably sound defensive and self-interested. So let others whose minds have been awakened by a liberal education do the defending for us.
Hunter R. Rawlings III, a classicist, was president of Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and the Association of American Universities.
January 2018
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