Saving the University from Its Defenders

with John McWhorter and Wendy Schiller

There is plenty to critique about modern universities. They’re vulnerable to modish intellectual trends of dubious value, their faculty skews way to the left of the general populace, and they tend to spend their students’ tuition fees on administrative make-work and facilities that have nothing to do with their core missions. Reform would undoubtedly do them some good.

But there are universities and there is the University, an institution that employees experts to produce new knowledge and to teach young people and to train the next generation of researchers and scholars. The University both transforms the world, by fostering new discoveries and innovations, and perpetuates the world’s history, by preserving and maintaining a staggering array of traditions, bodies of knowledge, and modes of inquiry. The University, like Democracy, is an ideal to which we can aspire, even if we never realize its full potential. Pursuing the perfection of these institutions is a worthy goal in itself. And as America’s preeminence in higher education has demonstrated, the University and Democracy are intimately linked.

In this clip from a live conversation with John McWhorter and Wendy Schiller at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown, I sometimes feel like my interlocutors are talking about universities, while I’m talking about the University. I agree that we’re facing multiple crises. The most obvious is the Trump administration’s recent intervention at Ivy League schools. I fear that, in its attempt to enact its agenda, it will destroy the intellectual freedom required for universities to carry out their mission.

But another cause for concern is overreaction to those interventions, an attempt to soften the healthy challenges of higher education in order to ensure that students don’t lose interest. I understand there is only so much universities can do in the face of the technological advancements now altering the way we receive and process information. Wendy and John note that their students simply can’t focus for long enough to read an entire book. Universities can’t change that. Indeed, most of the research that drove developments like AI and smartphone technology began at universities.

Again, innovation is one side of the the University’s mission, and tradition is the other. Reading challenging books is part of that tradition. I’m talking about the likes of Dostoevsky and Kant and Adam Smith here, the foundational thinkers and writers of the modern era, not to mention those of prior eras and those yet to come. Perhaps we can no longer expect undergraduates to read all of Crime and Punishment, as John says. Nevertheless, it is our mission to try, to make the case that it’s worth it to try, and to insist that the effort itself is an essential part of what it means to be part of the traditions that universities preserve. Those traditions are our inheritance as human beings, not simply as students.

That doesn’t mean we ought to shun tools like AI. I have no doubt there are ways to use them that will enhance rather than degrade the educational experience. But the challenge of these books and the ideas in them—whether you read them on paper or a screen—is the important thing. They’re difficult because, well, they’re difficult! If we abandon the things worth preserving in the University, the ideal will dissolve. The universities left in its stead will become nothing more than the overpriced professional development centers that so many already threaten to become. Those of us who care about the transmission of knowledge—especially that precious knowledge that has no “practical application”—should worry about that just as much as we worry about Trump.

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WENDY SCHILLER: So thinking about the American public that goes to college or doesn't go to college, and thinking about what we believe is essential for the accountability of elected officials, which is some level of knowledge. I have some students who are in my “Philosophy of the Founding” class here. John Adams wrote into the constitution of Massachusetts in 1780 a right to public education. It's in the constitution of the state of Massachusetts.

So what does that education consist of now that will be accessible to people with college or without college that says, this is the preferred society, this is the rule of law, this is how we want to live? How do we think about that in this environment, translated across the country in terms of education from social media consumption to the fact that sometimes students don't read a full book? Sometimes they don't even read a full chapter, and we speak as if people are gonna read the whole book. You slave over your conclusion and your introduction and everything in between, because you think they're not skimming. But they're skimming.

So what do we do about that, if that's the elite? And what do we do about that fundamental component of the relationship between education and what we believe is a pillar of the preservation of democracy?

JOHN MCWHORTER: If I could blow it all up and start again, there should be 13 grades. This is not my idea. This is Leon Botstein of Bard's idea. There should be 13 grades. College should be for people who've really got to have it, but an awful lot of education should be packed into everything up through 13th grade. And we'd have to make a decision as to what it was supposed to be and how national and how uniform. That's now a 40-year-old discussion. But we would do it that way.

Also, getting people to read books the way all three of us did? I think the horse is out of the barn, and I completely understand why. Because there's this [holds up phone]. I don't mean anything specific, but these phones that distract one. And if you've grown up with it, I can't see how they would have the same relationship to folios that we did. I force myself to read for one hour every day, because I can feel how easy it would not to be to do it. But it's in half-hour chunks, because I can't go any longer than that before looking at the phone.

Now imagine if I was 16 or 20. I fully get it. But you can use things online productively. There is a lot of good teaching online these days, and I don't mean the Great Courses, although—separate mine from all them—the Great Courses are really good. Those people do really good audio-visual work, and my sense is that a lot of people who are 20 learn as much from them on Audible as they would from some tome.

So I'm trying to accept that. Because no, I can't assign my students as much now as I used to. They're not gonna do it. That doesn't mean they're dumb, but they get so much of their information from this. And so I figure a lot of it'll be in there. Am I crazy to think of it that way? Am I giving up, you think?

GLENN LOURY: I don't know. I think a couple of things. I think cultivate intellectual curiosity and an interest in the life of the mind from a very early age. I'm not a pedagogue. I don't know how exactly one does that. As one is introducing young people to, what is our cultural inheritance? I assume a lot of it would have to do with reading books, reading literature.

But I grant you, picking up War and Peace is more than a notion.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh, not that.

The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Those aren't for children!

No, you cultivate the curiosity and the habit of mind such that by the time they're able to absorb these things, they know that they're there. It's a mountain. You don't climb the mountain on day one. You put on your boots, you go up the hill, you develop your legs and your muscles and your stamina and look up at the mountain and you appreciate its majesty and you begin your ascent. Something like that.

But what I'm trying to say is lifelong learning, where it's a question of the disposition, it's an appreciation for the wonder, a kind of wide-eyed wonder at the discovery of things. And I don't know what the technology is gonna offer. I'm sure we can't anticipate entirely what artificial intelligence, which is remaking our world even as we speak, will offer. But the spirit of it ought to be human culture is a magnificent thing. Don't miss it.

JOHN MCWHORTER: And don't only be interested in the fact that people do horrible things to each other.

Oh, that, yeah.

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JOHN MCWHORTER: That's really important. So for example, fostering curiosity in kids. I'm not a pedagogue either, but one thing I did with my daughters is we were at this place that we spend the summer. I got a bug net, like on an old TV shows, and we collected bugs. We got a few praying mantises. We put one in a big tank. It wasn't really that big, but we put it in and we gave it food and we put other praying mantises in, and they learned about this exotic creature that you're not gonna learn about, generally, in Queens. That sort of thing, to foster curiosity.

Or say you're outside. They're doing construction and you can see all the pipes underground. I would stop them and say, girls, look, this is something you don't see every day. Take a look at this now. This is how water gets into our house. To me, that works better than saying here, this is Little House on the Prairie. I had to read it, now you're gonna read it, too. Because they don't get it.

WENDY SCHILLER: But this is not about Little House on the Prairie. Dostoevsky is about power. Struggle for power, struggle for place, struggle for survival. That's Dostoevsky, right? Some people could think, and I think some students in the room could think, we are living now in what could be that, particularly at the most elite levels of our educational system. I'm not accepting this sort of let's inch by inch. If you are here, you have a responsibility to your society. How do you instill and inculcate that? That is one of the reasons we justify our existence in higher education.

So I'm not hearing a lot that helps fight back against people who don't want to forgive student loans, who want to crush research funding, who want us all to go away. And if we want to argue that we're gonna serve this fundamentally important purpose for humankind, how do we instill that in the people we're trying to teach?

JOHN MCWHORTER: I would venture to say that one does not have to read all of Crime and Punishment. It's a great work, but maybe just assign a part of it. And not just three pages, but enough for them to understand. I have to assign students in one of the courses that I teach all of Plato's Republic. A great piece of work. However, as the years have gone by, it's ever clearer that they're using certain artificial means. And I think, suppose we took 50 pages of it and really went over them with a fine-tooth comb. I'm not sure that would be such a terrible thing. Although even there, maybe I'm giving in to the kids, but it's been my approach, especially over the past two or three years. The pandemic changed things, also. Attention spans.

I'm okay with all of that.

WENDY SCHILLER: You're okay with all of that?

I'm thinking, I said what I thought. I thought that the cultivation of an interest in intellectual pursuits broadly understood was the most important thing. And the question of pedagogic method was something I wasn't qualified to comment on. But the goal should be to engage with human culture in a serious way and to understand the majesty of it and to be challenged to enter into this pursuit. And it should be a lifelong undertaking.

But what that says about K-12 or what that says about college, I don't know. Maybe it says college shouldn't be like summer camp. Maybe it says it's not about having a good time. It's not about the parties. It's not about how well-equipped is the gymnasium and how many accoutrement we have in the dormitory facilities.

Maybe a bootcamp college is the right idea. Maybe all the action is in the interaction with other students over ideas and with faculty over ideas, not in getting in the fraternity or the sorority or the eating club or whatever it might be.

WENDY SCHILLER: But do you think the Trump administration would be going so hard after elite education if they didn't see a threat to the product of elite education to their hold on power?

Yes.

WENDY SCHILLER: You do think they would be going hard, even if they don't believe that?

JOHN MCWHORTER: I think you're imputing a sense that they have a hold on power that I'm not sure I see in most groups of people, and especially this particular group of people, who are hazy of definition and professionally unreflective.

I worry that the way that you're describing it—I get it completely—is something you perceive from the outside more than something that they feel. I think their intent is much cruder than that. They're insulted by and weary of what they see as divisive ideology. Maybe a little bit of elitism is something that bothers them. But I think it's less we need to have power to enforce our agenda.

That might be the project 2025 people. Maybe they were thinking that way. But for all the other ones, it's just get rid of that stuff, that stuff that's ruining the fabric of the country. That's my sense of it. Just like I don't believe there's such a thing as white people will only give up power when they decide. Who? Which? The woman at the store behind the shopping cart? It looks that way to Eldridge Cleaver, but that's not the way it is. So it's same thing. That's just my bias.

I have a friend. He's a formal naval officer, an aviator, a graduate of Annapolis. He flew and landed jet planes on aircraft carriers. He became an executive at Bell Helicopter, and he became an undersecretary of the naval department in the Republican administration. He's now on boards of corporations. He makes a lot of money, and he knows the insiders in the Republican party and in the game.

When I complained, “This is an assault on the crown jewels of Western civilization by know-nothings,” he said, “No, it's not. This is a show of power and an illustration of the golden rule. The golden rule is he who has the gold makes the rules, and this is the administration saying, ‘We got the gold. You guys man up and woman up. New sheriff in town.’ And it's about a display of power.”

Do they think really that the Middle East Studies Department is a threat to the Trump administration? I don't think so. They have the views that they have about what the Middle East Department is saying about a particular conflict in our time, and they want 'em to shut the F up, and they're throwing their weight around to that effect.

Imagine taking Edward Said under federal receivership to decide whether or not his books about Orientalism were worth reading or not. They may or may not be worth reading, but I damn sure don't want an apparatchik telling me.

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