Oh woe are the humanities, or, What becomes of moral education in an age of intellectual specialization?

Pual Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Melancholy Mandarins: Bloom, Weber, and Moral Education, The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2017. I've snipped from paragraphs from the article here and there.

Relying mostly on anecdotal evidence, and writing in accessible, simplifying prose, an insider-outsider figure—almost always a male humanities professor with solid academic credentials—condemns the culture of specialized research. He tells readers that as a result of this and other ills, alma mater has lost her way. Our once great institutions of higher learning have strayed from their mission of guiding young people through the process of building a soul, a failure that is both a symptom and a cause of a broader decline in our system of values. The lament culminates in a call for colleges and universities to rededicate themselves to the humanities in the right way. Pushing them to do so is the best chance we have to save ourselves from our malaise.

Institutional imperatives:

Despite their differing views on the fate of the humanities in the modern age, Bloom and the more recent melancholy mandarins agree that the research university has undermined the kind of education they deem so essential. It compartmentalizes inquiry into ever more specialized domains and thus makes “knowledge of the whole man,” Bloom’s formula for the end of education, impossible. Delbanco, in laying out what college should be, distinguished the purpose of research universities from that of the undergraduate colleges they house. Whereas the former produces new knowledge, the latter enables “self-discovery” or the formation of “a new soul,” he wrote, citing the German sociologist Max Weber, the man credited with first using the term “mandarin,” which had referred to Confucian scholar-bureaucrats, to describe Western intellectuals not lacking in self-importance.

And yet:

But there is also a great irony to the melancholy mandarins’ position. It was the modern research university, after all, that sacralized the humanities, accorded them prestige, and made the study of humanities an end in itself, providing a foundation for the academic freedom that, according to the mandarins, “real education” requires. The modern research university created the humanities as we know them today. Despite their differences in context and disposition, Bloom and Weber understood both this and the profound contradictions that followed. Even more reason, on the thirtieth anniversary of Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind and the centennial of Weber’s Science as a Vocation, that we return to those texts in order to make sense of the permanent crisis of the humanities in the modern age.

The old system subordinated the humanities–philosophy, philology, history, rhetoric, and literature–to professional education in law, Theology, or medicine. Reformers set out to change that at the beginning of the 19th century.

During the nineteenth century, the reformers’ dreams were, in one sense, largely realized. Humanistic inquiry was liberated from law, medicine, and theology, and humanities scholarship flourished. Universities in Berlin, Göttingen, and Heidelberg established the standards of systematic scholarship for everything from philosophy and classics to history and literature. New mechanisms for promotion were institutionalized. Research seminars were founded. Professional journals and societies were created. The modern principle of faculty self-governance was put into practice. And though its dependence on German state governments made for complications, the research university moved toward giving scholars academic freedom—the institutional space and support to teach and write what they wanted. As the Prussian constitution of 1850 codified it, “Scholarship and its teachings are free.”

But as humanities scholarship advanced, scholars within the university, as well as critics outside it, began to worry that the success of the research university had ushered in a fragmented and ever narrower kind of knowledge. The modern university and its ideals of pure research and academic autonomy may have helped free the humanities, but they also paved the way for another master: specialization.

Along comes the mid-20th century:

By the time Harvard released its influential report General Education in a Free Society (1945), a very different ideal student had emerged, and with that student a different form of moral education, one more compatible with the now ascendant research university and postwar American democracy. As the report put it, the purpose of the humanities was to enable “man to understand man in relation to himself, that is to say, in his inner aspirations and ideals.” General education, and the humanities in particular, was now about fostering the values of openness, critical thinking and reflection, inclusiveness, and equity. “General education,” wrote the Harvard faculty members, “is distinguished from special education not so much in terms of the subject of matter as in terms of method and outlook.” Despite the distinction, the “method and outlook” of general education were in fact fully amenable to the demands of the research university, because there, academic freedom and unconstrained thought were prized above other values such as respect for tradition and the recognition of legitimate authority. These values were now cast as the “intangibles of the American spirit. [...] The ideal student is one who can choose her own moral ideals and craft her own moral life.

Moral education in this sense is less the shaping of a secular soul in the classroom, less the inculcation of particular systems of belief and the moral ideals that go with them, and more the cultivation in students of the capacity to think for themselves, determine fact from falsehood, and reckon circumspectly with their own beliefs and commitments. It isn’t the kind of moral education that a student might have received in a church, an early-nineteenth-century college, or even a more orthodox religious community. ”

Weber was dismayed:

The ideal of a unified, universal knowledge—what nineteenth-century Germans called the Einheit der Wissenschaft, and Americans called moral theology—was for a different era. Now it was a dangerous illusion that gave demagogues, charlatans, and irrationalism an opening.

Once this ideal was no longer tenable, argued Weber, the relationship between scholarship and what might seem to be the most important kinds of questions fundamentally changed: whether you should or should not, say, join this or that political movement or embrace one religious tradition over another—or none at all. Which decision made sense, according to Weber, would depend on one’s own ultimate ideals, and adopting ideals, including the ideal of free systematic scholarship, required an act of faith incompatible with the practices and methods of the modern research university. The disintegration of the university into competing and ever more distinct enclaves also signaled its end as a certain kind of moral institution.

His proposal:

Although Weber underlined the distinction between facts and values, which in its turn is associated with the prizing apart of scientific and moral education, he was not trying simply to pit systematic scholarship against religion or faith-based moral values. Nor was he looking to establish a hierarchy, with the pure realm of value-neutral science and scholarship standing above attempts to shape or advance values. Following Nietzsche, Weber regarded the latter endeavors as being of “earthshattering” importance. The mediation of values should be treated with all due seriousness. And scholars who donned the authority of expertise and specialized knowledge to propagate their own ultimate values in the lecture hall did not take this process seriously enough.

Insisting on the irreducibility of “ultimate ideals” to scientific calculations was also Weber’s attempt to protect the integrity of scholarly practice and protect science from itself. After all, science was the great agent of disenchantment, as Weber saw it, but science itself needed nonrational values. Both science in general and the particular questions scholars asked derived their meaning from ideals, interests, and a “passion” that science couldn’t ground on its own.

In Weber’s account, universities could not impart comprehensive visions of the good, the true, and the beautiful in the way Allan Bloom wanted them to. In a modern age, they were simply incapable of forming human beings on their own without sacrificing gains in knowledge and the freedom that had led to those gains as well as to a complex, compartmentalized structure. Yet in Science as a Vocation, Weber often reduced moral commitments and forms of life to “ultimate personal decisions” (“letzten Entscheidungen”) that one could make on one’s own at, if not exactly in, the university. He reduced values, ideals, and moral commitments to personal decisions, thereby overemphasizing the capacity of individuals to forge their own ideals and ultimate ends.

Once again, things are falling apart:

Though some of Bloom’s more histrionic formulations might have indicated otherwise in 1987, when he published his bestseller, and even as recently as 2014, when Deresiewicz published his, the world order seemed fairly intact. Such is no longer the case; our moment is in some ways closer to 1917 than it is to 1987. And the sense of dissolution it has brought, of the overturning of core, stabilizing civic values and the fragility of our institutions, has prompted higher-education leaders to tack away from Weberian ideals and consider reclaiming traditional moral education for the research university.

In her commencement address a year ago, the president of Harvard, still a bellwether in American higher education, spoke bluntly of her fears stemming from “the tumultuous state of American politics.” Then Drew Gilpin Faust told the class of 2016, “With the rise of the research university in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, moral and ethical purposes came to be seen as at odds with the scientific thinking transforming higher education. But in today’s world I believe it is dangerous for universities not to fully acknowledge and embrace their responsibilities to values and to service, as well as to reason and discovery.”24

The high-minded road of moral education is fraught with dangers and dead-ends, and not only because it can lead to a lot of infighting: Which moral traditions and values could faculty, administrators, alumni, and students agree upon, other than the ones they already promote through the ethos and practice of free inquiry? Nor is it the problem that value-based and fact-based discussions might be conflated in the classroom; depending on the topic, this comingling can be nearly impossible to avoid.

Rather, making “responsibilities to values” into a curricular centerpiece and pursuing a more comprehensive moral commitment could imperil academic freedom, which is grounded, as Weber reminds us, not in political guarantees of freedom of expression but in the ideals of the research university and the very idea of knowledge that sustains it. Stray from these ideals and the moral commitments consistent with them, and the justification for academic freedom and, thus, the university, will suffer.