How should we change the University?

[This is part three of a series: here are parts one and two.]

• University should be universal. Not everyone will need skills taught by university to do their jobs. But the role of the university is making people better, not teaching them skills. Everyone can benefit from free engagement with ideas and people. Everyone should be encouraged to think
• ... and free. Like the health service and education at school, university should be free at the point of use, and paid for by taxation. Ultimately everyone will be a graduate, so this is no more than an extension of the principle of a 'graduate tax'.
• Learning should be eclectic. As in the American system, students should be able to choose a wide range of different topics to study, including sciences, languages, and humanities. The aim should not be to make students into experts in one field, but to encourage curiosity and versatile thought.
• ... and open. Every student should experience something like the tutorial system. Teaching should start, not end, with lecturing. It should be a conversation that not only imparts knowledge but inspires thought, and also instills the habit of discussion.

None of these proposals are complicated or novel. The central thing is to recast how we conceive the function of the university, which is what I have tried to do in the previous two parts of this thread. Structural changes like these are necessary to achieve that ideal, but it is the ideal itself - not the proposals - that can provide an animating force. Culture and expectation are more real, in this case as in others, than the institutions and the practices in which they are embedded.

What should the University do?

[This is part two of a series; part one here.]

Everyone knows that university is an experience that mostly happens far beyond the lecture hall and seminar room: a catalyst and venue for encounters with the world. But that cliche itself holds onto a distinction between inside and outside of those designated areas, between official academic business and the rest of what being a student is about. That distinction should be tested, and perhaps dissolved. For after all, the lecture hall is a place of encounter too, with people and ideas.

The purpose of the university should be to create change, and the core of that is changing students themselves. Not just giving them some skills, or some knowledge, and at the same time (separately) a place for personal and social adventures. Those are all good things, but they are all well-trodden ground in this debate, and they have proven insufficient to justify the system as it exists. Again the radical solution begins with synthesis: what students do inside and outside the lecture hall must be part of the same larger experience.

This is the fundamental point: that university experience should not be an adjustment to the already-existing world, of work and things as they are; it should be a seedtime and a training-ground for thought and action that will make things better. The intellectual adventure of conceiving 'what is to be done' should intertwine with all the other aspects of our lives, enriching each other, so that the woman or man who emerges is not simply 'equipped' with ideas and knowledge, in their special toolbox, but actually makes them part of her or his life; no longer able to separate ethics and politics from life as she is lived, but conscious of their everyday reality.

What is the University for?

One effect of the 'expertise' justification for academia is to separate its teaching and research functions. The fact this separation is so often taken for granted is a symptom of the same problem. Yet both functions are, separately, subordinated to the scheme of 'expertise', or (for undergraduates) 'skills': we do research in order provide expert opinions; we teach students because it gives them skills to do their future jobs. The tasks themselves are separate but the tendency is one.

A genuine justification of academia must address both sides of the question: why should we really do research, and why should we really teach students? I think the most satisfactory answer will address both together, and in that way also mend the rift between these functions, which is a huge weak-spot in the expertise-based defence of the university. After all, if academics are policy experts, why should they teach students at all? If we want to teach skills to students, why would policy experts be appropriate teachers?

Obviously I don't think the purpose of academia is to teach skills to students, or to provide expert opinions. Robin Hanson makes convincing comments on the actual function of the university. But I'm more interested in what its function should be. In short, it should be the framework and the hub of thought. In teaching and research alike, it should act as a platform from which we ask: what should the world be like, and how can we get there? It should be a perpetual and reiterating social movement, and it should be moving somewhere.

Historians and Experts

In the essay I quoted the other day, the social sciences were linked to the idea of 'expertise'. In this context, I think that means preparedness to offer specific, authoritative explanations, and perhaps solutions, to problems that an audience is interested in; in other words, an expert is the plumber you call in to look at your pipes. This may not be quite a fair on social scientists, but it does seem to be the model of the new approach to academic funding, based on measurable impact. Hence, Zizek in the New Left Review:

Underlying these reforms is the urge to subordinate higher education to the task of solving society's concrete problems through the production of expert opinions. What disappears here is the true task of thinking: not only to offer solutions to problems posed by 'society' - in reality, state and capital - but to reflect on the very form of these problems; to discern a problem in the very way we perceive a problem.

A further question might be, what is the real purpose or necessity of the 'expert' opinions produced, or meant to be produced, by the machinery of the academy? On one hand, is it not to add the gloss of 'expertise' to policies already formulated in advance? And on the other, is it not the patched-together nostrum of a desperate effort to defend and justify that very machinery (and at the same time fight for privilege within it)? As Zizek's formulation implies, academics must embrace a far more radical task if they are to find a genuine justification for themselves.

Historians and Everyman

Yesterday I quoted: 'history is a mode of scholarship and thinking that can construct narratives that are themselves actors in public life.' This is a true remark that also has an interesting double-edge. Back in the 1930s two American historians called Carl Becker and Charles Beard both used their respective Presidential Addresses to the Association of American Historians to think about this question of how history can act in public life. Needless to say, they came to contradictory conclusions.

Becker's speech, given in 1931, was called "Everyman His Own Historian". In it he said history is 'an imaginative creation... an engaging blend of fact and fantasy, a mythical adaptation of what actually happened.' But this does not mean the historian himself has any power to create these blends of fact and fantasy as tools of social and political change, because each work of history derives authority only from what use Everyman may wish to make of it:

[For Everyman] is stronger than we are... The secret of our own success in the long run is in conforming to the temper of Mr. Everyman, which we seem to guide only because we are so sure, eventually, to follow it.

Beard's speech came two years later, and it was called "Written History as an Act of Faith". He urged that writing history 'is an act of choice, conviction, and interpretation respecting values, is an act of thought,' and that as such it entails 'the intellectual and moral perils inherent in any decision.' Beard, without contradicting Becker directly, implied in these statements a far greater influence of the historian upon the public. It was that influence that made the role of the historian a moral and political one, and that made his work 'an act of faith.'

This question could be broadened to include all scholarship and all culture: how, if at all, do these types of activity [help] make change happen? Are historians the tools of a public life that has already chosen its direction; or are we actors who face meaningful choices about what we write? Perhaps the answer to that question is itself an act of faith.

It would be much too crude to say that Beard sought in his version of relativism a justification for an activist stance, while Becker found in his a justification for abstention. Much too crude, but with more than a grain of truth. [Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 1998]

Reblogging: Public History

Thomas Bender (NYU) on the differing pretensions of history (humanities?) and social science:

Most of the social sciences claim “expertise” relevant to policy, which is delivered in a variety of non-public settings or distinct “audiences,” mostly governmental or corporate, as opposed to a public. Historians, however, do not claim that type of knowledge, and they generally lack such audiences or clients. Their narratives and interpretations, which are heavily weighted with contingencies and interdependent rather than dependent variables, are somewhat unwieldy and harder to package as “expertise.” Rather than finely tuned expertise for specific audiences, historians offer broad interpretations, often at a macro level, to a diverse public.

On history and future politics:

History is a mode of scholarship and thinking that can construct narratives that are themselves actors in public life. But historians must be ready with a relevant narrative of how things got the way they are and what makes them a matter of concern when a public emerges. That narrative, I think, must address institutional power, both of the state and of our economic institutions. A future politics depends on that.

The American Revolution and Universal Government: Part Four

[Here are part one, part two, and part three.]

The Jeffersonian vision of universal government was structured by a series of political units - ward, county, and state republics - acting as if they were individuals and accorded equal status with their counterparts. These units were layers between the citizen and the top level of the government. The primary concern was to protect the citizen from threats of powerful authority. Federalists who fought for the power of the central government took an opposing view: they wished to mould the people into just one unit, one political order.

Both of the two most famous achievements of Federalist political thought converge on this point. The first is James Wilson's conception of popular sovereignty, in which government derives authority directly (not through intervening ward republics) from the people it encompasses: the 'We, the people,' of the Constitution. The second is James Madison's solution to the problem of majority and factional rule:

Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probably that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens... [Federalist #10]

Although he declaims it himself for a different reason, it is clear that Madison's logic leads towards a universal government: the maximum extension of the sphere. He finds that it is union, the combination of humanity in its variety, that best protects the individuals who come under its head. If Jefferson fears most the tyranny of distant rulers, here Madison fears the oppression that occurs on local scales, and every day: man's inhumanity to man.

The Federalists, if we take their thought to its extreme, sought the emasculation of the layers of parochial authority. In his plan for the Constitution, Madison provided no representation for the states: his senate was proportional to population. Likewise, he gave Congress a veto on laws made by individual states. His republic was to be supreme and unitary. On both counts he and his party were defeated in the Philadelphia deliberations, and the Constitution as enacted does not purely reflect Federalist thought. In fact, in its text lies a dilemma - midwife to the Civil War and nurse to party strife - between two visions of an abstract, universal government.

The American Revolution and Universal Government: Part Three

[This is part three in a series; part one is here and part two is here.]

In Jefferson's system of ward republics, we are given to assume that each such ward should be treated equally, and likewise each county, and each state. In his book Empire of Liberty, Peter Onuf puts this concept of equality between political units at the core of Jefferson's philosophy.

[Jefferson's] Republican doctrine was... predicated on the autonomy and equal rights of the parts - individuals and states - that constituted new wholes [p.96]... From the very beginning of his political life, Jefferson recognized the central importance of the autonomy, integrity, and equality of republics as corporate entitites. [pp.112-3]

The premise that political units like states ought of course to be considered equal, just as individuals ought to be, is not subject to discussion by Onuf: but it is the most important problem faced by theories of extended (universal) government. In his successive subdivisions, Jefferson's concern is mainly to ensure the means of democratic participation by each individual within its unit. What he does not deal with is the actual inequalities between the units.

For example, one of Jefferson's wards might contain people who have lots of property, prestige, or other valuable thing that the neighbouring ward doesn't have. Or more fundamentally still, some will be on better land than others. These same kinds of inequality occur at all levels of the system, even if the number of people remains equal between different units (which is difficult to secure over time, even if they start out that way, which they didn't in America of course). Now if all the units are equal, then they presumably must pay the same tax, furnish the same number of men for militia service, and so on: this discriminates against the poor wards. But also, all must have the same amount of political representation and power: does this not discriminate against the rich wards? So the question is, do these discriminations balance out, and who decides if they do?

As well as this problem of differences between wards, there is also one of differences within wards. Think of it in much the same way as the 'first past the post' system in Parliament: voters for minority parties might make up a significant proportion of the country as a whole, but not of their respective constituencies. Where political decisions are made locally, the voices of diffuse minorities like these are inaudible: they face discrimination from majorities within their wards. It is the Bill of Rights that, in the Jeffersonian system, protects minorities like these, hence the importance of such guarantees to those who favor this kind of system: men like George Mason of Virginia, who wrote that state's Bill of Rights and fought against the U.S. Constitution because it did not contain one.

What We Think Is Right

What has more value as an index of somebody's thought: their private diaries and notes, the letters they write to their friends, speeches they make in debates, or articles they write in newspapers? Many historians suspect the 'private' notes and letters of prominent eighteenth-century Americans were written, and kept, with one eye on posterity. Anonymously (or pseudonymously) published articles may represent the truer feelings of the moment without fear for one's reputation; but how much faith would a writer have in his identity not being unmasked; or given that it has been unmasked, by us if not by contemporaries, was total secrecy the real intention?

These are problems that a supervisor put to me once, and I was impressed with the difficulty, but I didn't think about it very much. Now I have something to add: does having one eye on posterity make us write less what we really think, or more?

If we have felt the need to change what we put down because we know someone unknown will read it many years from now, why have we felt that need? We want them to think well of us. Perhaps what we are doing is predicting what the future readers will think, on whatever issue, and designing our words to appeal to them. Yet if the future person is not good and moral, is not better than us, then why do we want to appeal to him? We only care if we think they will be better. So we write what we think they will like; and that can only be what we think really is right.

The American Revolution and Universal Government: Part Two

[This is part two of a series, here is part one.]

Imagine Jefferson's excitement as he witnessed the beginnings of the French Revolution, towards the end of his tenure as ambassador to Versailles. For to him it certainly appeared then as the next phase of a global revolution that had been sparked in America: a republican revolution that would lead to the destruction of all monarchies and the apotheosis of popular sovereignty.

Jefferson's mindset, in particular of all the founders, was amenable to universal government. There is some irony in that, because he was a localist who usually meant Virginia when he said 'my country'. He was a 'federalist' in the technical sense of the term: that is, he thought government should layer like a Russian doll, with only necessary powers passed up by the people to each higher level in turn:

It is by division and subdivision of duties alone, that all matters, great and small, can be managed to perfection. [TJ to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816]

In that letter Jefferson began with the Federal government as the highest power, and proceeded by 'division and subdivision' to his famous 'ward republics'. But as he often did himself, we can quite easily reverse the line of thought: if wards are federated into counties, counties into states, and so on, the theory points towards a universal federation. Jefferson was visionary enough to project a continental one. Moreover, his post-mercantilist (that is, free trade) approach to foreign policy sets out the terms of such a global system. If, as David Hendrickson says, the politics of American union was international politics, we can again turn over the coin: the revolutionary ideal turns foreign policy into the politics of union.

Returning to France, the general problem is this: if the French revolution in its early stages could be seen as an extension of the republican spirit of '76, was there some point when that conception became untenable? Most Americans turned off the Jacobins very quickly. Jefferson held out even through the beginning of the Terror: it was Napoleon's monarchical triumph that finished it for him. His disappointment must be comparable to that of Communists in 1956. The revolution had taken a wrong turn. Theory collapses into practice.

But this collapse serves, for my purposes, only to highlight that the theory was there in the first place. The spirit of the revolution in America embraces global uprising against absolutism, and a universal republican government.

The American Revolution and Universal Government: Part One

[Recently trying to describe my research project, I claimed that it was all about the possibility of universal government and its conflict with localism: not a frame I had previously made central to the project. It may be interesting to speculate why I did that. But here are thoughts on the issue itself.]

The Americans who supported the centralization of government for the union of all the independent states during the 1780s are often called nationalists. However this eighteenth-century context is outside the ambit of normal definitions and investigations into 'nationalism' [e.g. Gellner, Hobsbawm, Anderson, or for the British case, Colley]. Also, the idea of nationalism for me implies a narrowing of vision (from what? the globe, the West, or something else). In our American 1780s it is the opposite, a broadening of vision, away from the standard unit of politial existence, which was each former colony - each state. American 'nationalism' in this case was not parochial, but cosmopolitan [in Jackson Turner Main's word].

That is, within limits; limits set by race, and perhaps other factors. In Federalist #2 Jay gives a precociously nineteenth-century definition of nationhood:

"a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence."

Yet, note that his point is to unite Carolinians and Rhode Islanders, rather than to separate Americans from, say, Canadians. Like Jefferson's famous [much-loved by my supervisor] allowance for "supplemental insertions" into the Linnaean system, the Constitution made room not only for new western states but pre-existing ones (and Canada explicitly) to join the union under equal terms. While resistance in the 1760s and 70s upheld 'the rights of Englishmen,' the revolution was fought under the banner of 'self-evident truths.' The first and second paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are ostentatiously general rather than specific to the situation of America or 1776.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...

Jefferson refers here to "all men" and "mankind," but neither to Americans nor Britons. In this sense the Declaration is a progenitor to the 'universal' declarations of rights that were institutionalised by the French Revolution a decade later. The relationship between the two revolutions is key to the development of the issue of universal government, and crucially, to subsequent perspectives of it.