at their best, our colleges and universities have resisted the demand to make themselves over in the image of the democratic values of the culture as a whole. Even while striving to make the process of admission more open and fair, they have held to the idea that part of the work of our most distinguished institutions of higher learning is to preserve, transmit, and honor an aristocratic tradition of respect for human greatness.
I hope that elsewhere in his book he is a bit more hard-headed and realistic.
Later in the excerpt, he writes,
How can the cultivation of a spirit of aristocratic connoisseurship make our democracy stronger? The answer is by developing the habit of judging people and events from a point of view that is less vulnerable to the moods of the moment; by increasing the self-reliance of those who, because they recognize the distinction between what is excellent and common, have less need to base their standards on what “everyone knows” or “goes without saying”; and by strengthening the ability to subject one’s own opinions and feelings to higher and more durable measures of truth and justice. In all these ways, an aristocratic education promotes the independent-mindedness that is needed to combat the tyranny of majority opinion that, in Tocqueville’s view, is the greatest danger our democracy confronts.
I gather that his book argues that contemporary universities are not performing this task well. I would put this point in the strongest terms: for the purpose of promoting a culture of rigor against a culture of dogma, the universities have not only ceased to be the solution and are instead the crux of the problem.
“…for the purpose of promoting a culture of rigor against a culture of dogma, the universities have not only ceased to be the solution and are instead the crux of the problem.”
In the Humanities, I fully agree. In the hard-sciences and Engineering, much less so (though the threat is there). I’d also say that people who are interested in a traditional ‘aristocratic’ education increasingly must (and do) seek it outside the academy (with things like the ‘Great Courses’ offerings).
Where (i) a significant majority of eighteen to early twenty-somethings are all attending college or a university at the same time, and (ii) popular culture and the latest social zeitgeist can transfer at near the speed of light among all of the colleges and universities across the country through social media, can colleges and universities ever serve that kind of role anymore?
“Aristocrats therefore needed a better education in order to compete with the learned bourgeois in obtaining the influential offices at the king’s government…
…
However, from an aristocratic point of view, universities could not teach the important qualities of honor, virtue, and taste. In 1594 Antoine de Pluvinel opened an académie d’équitation in Paris. Here young aristocrats learned horsemanship and fencing but also good manners, playing the lute, painting, mathematics, classical as well as modern languages, poetry, literature, and history. The academy emphasized the teaching of the mind as well as development of the body, which was to be hardened as well as refined according to aristocratic norms.”
-Encyclopedia.com “Aristocratic Education in Europe”
Kronman’s bigotry is breathtaking, but alas, nothing new, merely an ancient tension recast as a modern entitlement. Whereas in the Renaissance, aristocrats once had to work to achieve nobility and pay from their own purse for the privilege, today, a certain class of poseur demands government protection and financing to support their pretensions. The state-financed, tax-exempt university, free of political strife, must be provided for their privilege or else the barbarians will have won.
I know several college drop-outs laboring as contractors or small business owners on whom I’d wager the equal of Kronman in literary exposure and taste, breadth of knowledge, and ability to think for themselves. Anyone who professes to require the wardship of a university to attain aristocratic pretensions is a poseur. All the world’s treasures are readily available to anyone with the will to make use of them and develop their own power to think. The true modern aristocrats are sprinkled throughout a population that is not afraid to decry the monarch’s sartorial poverty. See Martin Gurri, Revolt of the Public.
Although I have resisted reading him since first encountering his Contracts textbook some 45 years ago or thereabouts, reviews of his recent books suggest that opposition to current trends on campus can be as loathesome as the trends themselves. Both are built on vile prejudices, assuming knowledge of the way that others think, and imputing disreputable motivations onto others in service to one’s own hobbyhorse.
In Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, Kronman argues in his words ““Most people take note of the fact that we live in time; that things come and go; that we come and go; that nothing we do lasts; that accidents befall us; that shit happens. But they aren’t stopped in their tracks by the question ‘Is there anything that isn’t touched by time?’ There are only a few people who, once this question comes to them, can rarely think about anything else.”
How is this dismissive attitude towards the spiritual life of hundreds of millions of people that he doesn’t know any different from idiot social justice warriors who condemn entire populations as racist, sexist, anti-progressive etc. etc. without nuance or reservation? And then only in service of providing a new theology supposedly required for those who “demand a God that is compatible with their modern ideals.” Is this supposed to be “the preservation of a cultured appreciation of excellence in human living?” The incongruity is intriguingly confusing but pointless. It is readily apparent Kronman mistakes his noodling for profundity.
Similarly in “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life” Kronman quite sensibly states ““The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.” Ironically, this, in a 320 page book arguing that teachers are necessary to guide students through works of great literature.
No amount of university humanities instruction will ever compel any part of a subculture, or individual for that matter, to achieve the “ideal of an order of moral, spiritual, and cultural excellence.”
The only meaningful humanist agenda for higher education reform consists of the following three actions:
(1) Elimination of tax-exempt status for educational entities;
(2) Privatization and sale of all state-sponsored educational entities; and
(3) Elimination of governmental guarantees and loans for educational purposes.
Only these actions will liberate and empower individuals to achieve their full potential.
Stirner says: “There is everywhere a great abundance of political, social, ecclesiastical, scientific, artistic, moral and other corpses, and until they are all consumed, the air will not be clean and the breath of living beings will be oppressed.”
Intolerant colleges today are the largest of several roots of the polarization and against a mental rigor oriented toward Truth. Civilization needs thinkers who can list the positives and negatives of current reality, as well as estimate changed pro’s & con’s with a changed policy.
Colleges are now discriminating against hiring Republicans as professors, or as administrators. And they have been for decades.
Ending gov’t loans & guarantees, as well as tax-exempt status would be good.
I’d like to see class action “false advertisement” suits against colleges, claiming to support “diversity”, but not having Republicans as professors. With big judgements against the colleges, including being big enough so that the college “goes bankrupt”, perhaps like the suit against Oberlin college (for their Bakery libel)
Pretty good example of Conservative Marxism right here.
Expand on that?
I would think you would have written “promoting a culture of dogma against a culture of rigor”.
The desired goal of the college is to promote a culture of rigor. The critique is that they’re not doing this. In fact, the university’s are now promoting cultures of dogma, and are the source of the problem.
How to reform the university? Not yet answered here, nor in proposed policy.
Above, I’m suggesting punishing the colleges for False Advertising (diversity, which they don’t have). That’s similar to but not quite Affirmative Action for Rep Professors — since colleges could just give up their advertising claims of being diverse.
Cutting the colleges off from gov’t money is a necessary step, but unlikely to be sufficient. Ending their tax-exemption status is a bigger hit. Taxing them like a normal business might help.
Big need is some IQ / educational credential similar to a US degree that doesn’t require attendance at an indoctrination campus. Online courses seem among the mostly likely candidates, right now.
universities are