Corporations, Marxists, and the Academy

Why Teach?  An interesting question, that. 

Mark Edmundson asks that: Why Teach?  In Defense of a Real Education. 

In a curious way, this was a rather thought-provoking book.  It’s a collection of essays which, truth be told, meander all over the place, united only by the fact that they have something to do with education. 

The book is best described as a cri de coeur.  Edmundson looks out and sees a sterile corporatized (a favorite adjective of the Academic Left) educational system which has moved well past taking root and is starting to flower, bear seeds, and replicate itself.  That college is anathema to Edmundson.  He is a prophet standing on the hill lamenting and denouncing and calling his people to repentance. Edmundson is Jeremiah. 

What does Edmundson want?  An education that matters, that rips right into the souls of the students and shakes them out of complacency into deep reflections about things that truly matter.  He wants faculty who don’t want to play the game of the modern college, who eschew the trendy pedagogical imperatives of the day.  He wants faculty who are most certainly not cool, who do not try to meet students where they are but force students to move to a better higher place.  He wants students to pause in their race to graduation and decide to learn something deep and meaningful.  Get rid of all that technological floor show, no multimedia spectacles, no simplifying the curriculum, no making everything easy.  Hard, meaningful work.  Studying important timeless things in timeless ways.  Professor, student, Great Book.  That is all you need.

Obviously, I agree with Edmundson.  He is the type of professor who often walks up to me after a faculty meeting and says things like “Wow.  Even though I totally disagree with your politics, I really agree with you about education.”  I don’t know why liberal faculty are always surprised that a conservative academic preaches the value of Tradition in Education.  I suspect it is because they think that the enemy of Education, properly conceived, is that “Corporatization” thing, and “Conservatives like Corporate America,” so Conservatives must hate Great Books.  It is strange how narrow minded modern liberal professors can be. 

By the way, this is not just some gratuitous swipe at Edmundson.  He fits the type I have met all too often.  For example: “My overall point is this: It’s not that a left-wing professorial coup has taken over the university.  It’s that at American universities, left-liberal politics have collided with the ethos of consumerism.  The consumer ethos is winning.”  So typical. 

In this book Edmundson spends many, many pages showing that the whole neo-Marxist-feminist-multiculturalist-genderindentityist crowd have destroyed the reading, real reading, of Great Books.  That new crowd has turned every book into a mirror, simply reflecting back the author’s prejudices.  From the argument in Edmundson’s book it is obvious that the left-wing professoriate has joined forces with the consumer culture to destroy the type of education Edmundson values. 

Yet, Edmundson must periodically assert his left-wing credentials by giving the very people he is criticizing a pass.  It is really quite sad.  When people like me note how the reading of Great Books has been destroyed, we are just called Neanderthals.  Edmundson should just embrace his inner Neanderthal. 

The problem with the modem college is not some sort of corporate takeover by evil outside administrators.  The problem is that the faculty have given up the battle to educate.  Providing an education is hard work. 

One of the overlooked things about the modern academy is: many (most?) faculty are really not interested in working hard at educating.  They get offended when you say this, by the way.  But, if you walk onto campus in the first week of January or sometime in the middle of the summer, I would suspect that far less than 20% of my colleagues are in the office. 

Similarly, when I hear my colleagues wax poetic about all those new innovative pedagogical tools, the thing that is left unsaid is this: if you use these new tools, then you won’t have to do so much work.  Show videos in class?  Don’t have to prepare a lecture.  Encourage students to get together in groups to work on problems together in class?  No lecture.  Flip the classroom so students watch lectures on-line and then come to the class to work on problems?  What do you know?  Less lecturing. 

Then there are all the pedagogical innovations that simply make less work for the students—and less work for the students means—you guessed it—less work for the professor.  Fewer readings for students?  Less reading for the professor.

Saying such things does not exactly make you popular with the crowd.  Edmundson almost says such things.  After reading the book, I doubt he disagrees with those things at all, but he never quite gets around to saying them.  He may be Jeremiah, but he is a kinder, gentler Jeremiah.