liberal arts classics
519
also includes LA colleges
thiel libtards say college has no value; prior powell memo bs that it makes commies
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BOB NYT 5 26
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington
:{Add The New York Times
:
Humans may be on the way out. But at least the humanities are back.
Or so some of the tech gods tell us.
After decades of dismissing liberal arts and humanities studies as useless and insisting that the mastery of science, engineering, math and tech is essential to future success, the tech world is coming around to the idea that learning about human nature could be a valuable asset in the coming A.I. revolution.
As it turns out, tech jobs may be drying up after years of students rushing to computer science. Who needs to code? A.I. does that for you.
What A.I. can’t do — yet — is the stuff that makes us human: empathy, emotion, psychology, critical thinking. “What a piece of work is a man,” Hamlet said, describing an intricate and infinite creature.
“I think A.I. is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”
He said he was shocked that students last semester were hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. “They were particularly into Kant and his ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’ Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and the myth of Sisyphus,” he said, adding that the cool reason of A.I. comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends.
Daniela Amodei, a founder of Anthropic, told ABC News that “the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important.” She said that at Anthropic, the company is looking to hire people who are “compassionate and curious” about other people.
Amodei, who majored in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human — understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick — I think that will always be really, really important.”
Other billionaires and execs — Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, Ginni Rometty at IBM, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Mike Novogratz at Fortress Investment Group and Jack Clark at Anthropic — have warned of the need for emotional intelligence and storytelling in a world dominated by A.I.
Reed Hastings, a founder of Netflix, said on Reid Hoffman’s podcast recently that we have moved beyond the days when STEM swallowed the Stanford University campus. If he had a 3-year-old today, he said, he would be “doubling down” on teaching the child emotional skills.
“For students and parents, the best defense today is to be broadly educated so they can adapt to the changes coming,” Hastings told me. “A.I. is better at rational thinking than it is at emotional depth. The last job that A.I. will get is stand-up comedian.”
Mark Cuban, an A.I. optimist who predicted a decade ago that English majors would have the edge in the future, told me: “A.I. is going to do a lot of amazing things with drugs and devices and stuff that’s going to be insanely important and cool. But, you know, humans are humans. Curiosity is the greatest skill you can have in an A.I. universe.”
Some people are beginning to realize you have to avoid sautéing your brain in A.I. slop if you want to keep it fit.
“The people who are reading hard books and are still writing have built these brain circuits, and they’re comfortable with cognitive strain,” said Cal Newport, a Georgetown University computer science professor. “These are the people with real value if everyone else has fried their brains.”
Rob Reich, a Stanford professor who teaches the social ethics of science and technology, said that computer science students are awash in anxiety about their future. “The first time that there’s been a decline in computer science enrollment at Stanford in 20 years is in the past 18 months,” he said.
Maybe humans are getting worried about becoming less human. As a friend of Reich’s says, we have gone from visiting people on birthdays to letters to phone calls to texts to emojis.
Reich suggested that humans, unable to keep up with A.I., may have decided to go read some poetry or literature or philosophy and remind themselves of “enduring sources of meaning in the world.”
When Anthropic’s head of A.I. safety, Mrinank Sharma, left the company in February, saying that “the world is in peril” from A.I. and other things, he posted on X about looking for meaning in poetry: “I want to explore the questions that feel truly essential to me, the questions that David Whyte would say ‘have no right to go away,’ the questions that Rilke implores us to ‘live.’”
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Reich said that some people think that once A.I. does the majority of economically valuable work and we live in a world of abundance, “what will be left for humans to do is fundamentally a more humanistic set of questions about artisanal projects that people might want to direct themselves toward.”
Some of my academic friends doubt this is a real trend, as they see liberal arts and humanities departments shrinking and closing, graduate enrollments slashed and reading scores falling.
The New Yorker declared “The End of the English Major” three years ago. The Washington Post reported this past week on a Texas study in which liberal arts landed at the bottom of undergraduate programs that paid off after college. “Just try to imagine a world — or a working democracy — when those skills are limited to a few,” keened one Shakespeare professor.
Maybe the lords of the cloud are feeling guilty as it becomes apparent that A.I. is going to subsume us. So they’re wishfully thinking that truth and beauty can help us steer A.I. toward its better angels.
“They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived,” said Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties. “Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities.
“There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information,” Wieseltier said. “Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2026, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: What A.I. Kant Do.
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uber1
https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1229
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watch rhet term co-opt eg neo-con neo-liberal --> classical liberal
related artl says college students actually centrist except NE us lib arts colleges
sieg heil
left-leaning media outlets have villainized Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, painting his recent moves in the Sunshine State’s education system as a hostile takeover from the Right. So Matthew Spalding, a professor at Hillsdale College whom DeSantis recently appointed to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees, decided to set the record straight.
“DeSantis Allies Plot the Hostile Takeover of a Liberal College,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times. Goldberg referred to Hillsdale College as “the template for this reimagined New College” and noted that the conservative Hillsdale—based in southern Michigan—worked with then-President Donald Trump to create a patriotic education curriculum.
“DeSantis moves to turn a progressive Fla. college into a conservative one,” runs the headline on Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post**story. The subheadline: “His administration says he aims to make it a ‘Hillsdale of the South.’” Strauss brands Hillsdale a “bastion of far-right conservatism.”
“A Tiny Christian College in Michigan Is Infiltrating Florida’s Schools” runs the headline on Mary Harris’ Slate story.
The New Republic‘s Jack McCordick also slammed DeSantis’ appointment of Spalding, writing that Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute “eagerly hitched their wagons to Trump” and are “home to some of the country’s most notorious coup plotters and insurrectionists.”
McCordick suggested that Spalding’s appointment by DeSantis represents a threat to the “uniquely proactive nature of the New College’s student body.” He quoted alumnus Derek Black, who credited that student body with his conversion from a “white nationalist activist,” implying that the governor’s new appointments might enable white nationalism to emerge at the school.
These media outlets eagerly cited remarks from Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute scholar best known for combating critical race theory and homelessness. DeSantis also named Rufo to New College’s board. In remarks to The New York Times, Rufo said he aimed toreverse a Marxist “march through the institutions.”
“If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” Rufo told the Times.
The media outlets also cited James Uthmeier, DeSantis’ chief of staff, who told the Daily Caller: “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college … more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”
“Florida is where woke goes to die,” DeSantis said in his victory speech following his nearly 20-point reelection victory in November.
The Republican governor has taken aim at critical race theory, a framework that claims to find “systemic racism” in American institutions and that critics say leads educators to treat white students as oppressors and treat black students and other minorities as oppressed. DeSantis also has opposed transgender ideology and signed a bill protecting parental rights in education and preventing institutionalized instruction of LGBT lessons in kindergarten through third grade.
Spalding, vice president of Washington operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale’s satellite campus in the nation’s capital, did not address DeSantis’ program but insisted that the political controversy is “overwrought.”
Spalding, a former director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation, parent organization of The Daily Signal, also said he doesn’t aim to turn New College into a carbon copy of Hillsdale College. Rather, he told The Daily Signal, he intends to champion liberal arts and classical education at the historic Florida institution.
“The political controversy surrounding recent appointments to the board of New College of Florida is overwrought,” Spalding said in a written statement provided to The Daily Signal. “I am honored by the appointment and look forward to engaging in reform to achieve educational excellence.”
“As a professor, dean, and vice president at asuccessful liberal arts college, my focus is on the work at hand: restoring New College’s ‘distinctive mission’ as the ‘residential liberal arts honors college’ of Florida,” Spalding said. “I appreciate the complimentary nods to Hillsdale College, but we are not going to serve New College’s mission by remaking it into a carbon copy of another institution.”
“In the liberal arts, the college—which means a partnership, one between students and faculty—works together and comes into conversation with great thinkersand writers who’ve asked timeless questions about human purpose, about the good and justice, and how to live well,” he added. “The very aim of liberal arts education is to liberate the mind from current fads and popular ideologies by inviting students to address these questions in pursuit of the truth about what it means to be fully human. That pursuit transcends contemporary politics.”
Getting “such an education teaches one how to think, not what to think,” Spalding added. “The surging enrollment at my home institution and others like it shows that students hunger for such serious academic inquiry.”
The author of this article, Tyler O’Neil, is a Hillsdale College alumnus.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now
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is it lib arts or kochademia:
PPE / the Oxford degree that runs Britain
An extraordinary number of Britain’s elite studiedphilosophy, politics and economics at Oxford.But does it produce an out-of-touch ruling class?
https://yyy.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain
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an 1020
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/an-illinois-university-got-major-pushback-for-cutting-religion-french-and-anthropology-but-other-colleges-are-dropping-the-humanities-too/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-end-of-the-liberal-arts-dream/
curtis white salon
Most people know that student debt is a problem, and most people agree that “something should be done about it.” The consensus opinion appears to be that something should be done because it’s “not fair” to young people. According to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trust, 80% of Americans believe that “the government should make it easier to repay student loans.”
Even so, there is very little understanding of why student debt has become so burdensome in recent decades. It’s as if we thought student debt were an unhappy fact of nature, like a weather front that has passed through leaving us with no option but to put on a warmer coat if we can find one, and if we can’t find one, it’s welcome to the Brave New World of Cold and Indifference.
And yet, it was not so long ago that things were very different. I was born in a working class suburb of San Francisco in 1951. At that time, public education was good, teachers still had some social prestige, universities were affordable (cheap actually), and few students graduated with debt. It was possible for me to sally forth without the threat of young adult bankruptcy.
In other words, at that time students were freer to choose what they wanted to study and freer to explore careers. As for me, I was free to be a student of literature and philosophy at the University of San Francisco. I learned to play the classical guitar up the hill at Lone Mountain College. I was also a longhair war resistor and draft counselor in the chaplain’s office. And I was mostly sure that I wouldn’t be punished for these decisions, or not punished any time soon.
unhappily, the university as I knew it no longer exists.Through the decades of Reaganomics and neo-liberal austerity, an elite determination was made that the state should no longer pay for public higher education; henceforth, universities would be funded through personal debt. Tuition to public colleges and universities became a bloated “user fee” for access to a government-affiliated service, like gaining access to a parking lot. Novel arguments gained force: students were just another type of consumer, and “student demand” should determine the content of the curriculum. What was lost in such market logic was the fact that programs in the arts and humanities—not just in universities but at all levels of education—had become the primary way in which we were allowed to think about who we are, where we are, how we got here, and what, if anything, we’d like to see changed. In the place of that worthy process, we were left with what David Harvey described succinctly: “The traditional university culture, with its odd sense of community, has been penetrated, disrupted, and reconfigured by raw money power.”
In both the public and private sectors, the corporate university has been slowly growing for many years, but it has now become more brazen in its destructive tendencies. For an example that is close to me personally, the Board of Trustees at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) in Bloomington, Illinois, announced in May of 2020 that it was considering the elimination of many long established programs all of which were in the liberal arts and social sciences. I say this is personal because my wife, Georganne Rundblad, taught sociology at Wesleyan for twenty-five years, and many of the faculty there were among our friends.
Without the consent of the faculty, the Board of Trustees sent pre-termination letters to twenty-five faculty members and instructional staff in philosophy, anthropology, music, foreign languages, sociology, art, and religion — in total, about a quarter of IWU’s faculty.A liberal arts university without philosophers is a contradiction in terms, but a Wesleyan university without a department of religion is an exercise in self-mockery. No doubt, IWU will continue to claim that its “primary focus” is in “opening students’ minds,” but the college of business will have to do most of the opening.
That, too, is already happening. Those departments that were not eliminated were said to be in need of “transformation.” Provost Mark Brodl told faculty member Scott Sheridan that “philosophy will support business and accounting, computer science and data science.” In another example of what Harold Bloom called the trahison des clerks, university president Georgia Nugent (a classicist by training) said that the department of art will “move more in the direction of art and design,” including graphic design and product design. In other words, before the arts can transform students, commerce will first transform the arts. Andy Warhol saw it coming: art is a can of soup.
Of course, there’s no reason to think that this is the end of these transformations, these latest shudders of what Bill Readings called “the university in ruins.” (Readings: “The contemporaryUniversity is busily transforming itself from an ideological arm of the state into a bureaucratically organized and relatively autonomous consumer-oriented corporation.”) Remaining faculty and programs can’t sleep comfortably, wondering who and what will be cut next, a year from now, five years or ten. University boards can wait — they’ve been waiting patiently for fifty years. For fifty years American universities have moved toward a sense of mission that a businessman can recognize, respect, and, most importantly, donate money to.
But from the perspective of the liberal arts itself, a liberal arts university that doesn’t recognize the value of the liberal arts shouldn’t transform anything. It should shut its doors, fold it all up. Better that than becoming what Illinois Wesleyan has become: a watery version of the Wharton School of Business.
Wesleyan trustees felt no need to provide a rationale for their actions beyond the crude idea that the affected programs were not cost efficient and that financial exigency threatened them in the near future, somehow — never mind the university’s $200 million endowment. They offered no educational reasons for the changes, and no argument for how the changes were consistent with the values of the institution. Like the bandits in John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” they said, “Reasons? We don’t need no stinking reasons.”
The feelings of faculty and alums are raw now because they feel, rightfully, betrayed. One member of the IWU Alumni for the Liberal Arts, Molly McLay, wrote to me:
I am infuriated by the lack of humanity and empathy in this process. Most of my professional work revolves around understanding, responding to, and preventing trauma. I truly think this experience at IWU has been a collective trauma.
Affirming McLay’s thought, Scott Sheridan, a professor of French and Italian at Wesleyan, commented to me:
I feel like I’m just caught in the middle of an administration that has lost its bearings, that is changing the rules on me late in my career. I’ve bought into the ivory tower model, I’ve done everything asked of me, and now when the economy has tanked, Covid is blazing, higher ed is collapsing, and the University has damaged my professional reputation, I find myself completely cast aside, looking at the necessity not only to retool my professional objectives but to rethink my life.
Professor Sheridan has lawyered up.
Finally, and elegiacally, Professor of English Michael Theune commented to the Chicago Tribune, “It is a bad day. The faculty’s control of the curriculum has been taken away.”
The motto over Wesleyan’s portal should no longer be “Scientia et Sapientia,” knowledge and wisdom. I propose that it should read like the legend over Dante’s Inferno: “No Admittance Except on Business.”
After the second world war, there was an enormous investment in public education. For the first time, the children of the working class had an opportunity to study subjects, like literature, that were formerly a privilege for the children of the affluent. We studied the humanities and the social sciences and in so doing found ways to critique and resist corporate culture and all of its murderous inequalities. In the 1960s, universities became best known for their “student protests.” The protests may now be in the streets and not on campus, but many of the protestors of the present—marching with Black Lives Matter, or against gender bigotry, or against the world as organized for the benefit of oil companies—got their intellectual chops in universities taking courses like Professor Rundblad’s “Sex and Gender in Society” or “Race and Ethnic Relations.”
But all this time our masters have been paying attention, and they have seen clearly and correctly: for many, many students, going to college was and remains a liberalizing experience (thus Biden’s enormous lead over Trump among college-educated voters). Our plutocrat masters concluded, “So this is what happens when you let the working class and minorities go to college. They study things of no value to us, and they learn to hate us.”
As a consequence, slowly, decade after decade, universities were starved and students were put in debt.Meanwhile, the wealthy came to the rescue and became university trustees. In these fallen days, the ideal trustee is someone who has money or knows people with money, ideally both. (The chair of Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees is Timothy Szerlong, former president of worldwide field operations at CNA Financial Corporation.)
The ultimate benefit of all this for our oligarchs, the 1%, is a new but very powerful form of social regimentation. Their message to students: “If you want a job, you will study what we want you to study, or else you will live in debt.” We could call this naked coercion, but for students it is their first adult taste of American Un-freedom.
In 1969, the year before I entered the University of San Francisco, I was working at a McDonalds in the East Bay. The franchise owner liked me and offered me a scholarship to McDonald’s Hamburger University. I laughed. I shouldn’t have.
Curtis White is a novelist and social critic. His most recent book is “Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed,” published by Melville House.
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quite good
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-visible-hand-what-prominent-social-thinker-john-ruskin-teaches-us-about-having-an-economy-that-demands-we-die-for-it/
lynne p
“There is no wealth but life.”
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860)
A chilling experiment is underway in America, with plenty of unwilling human guinea pigs.
Many parts of the country are reopening for business against the warnings of medical experts, flying in the face of grim predictions of sharply rising body counts. Two-thirds of Americans fear that the restart is happening too quickly, and the President himself acknowledges that by easing restrictions, “there’ll be more death.” Yet he presses on, even as his own White House suffers a viral outbreak.
News screens flash with tallies of death and tallies of wealth: New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has declared that lives must be saved “whatever it costs,” insisting that for Americans the choice “between public health and the economy” is “no contest.” But he did not ask celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who some weeks ago expressed his view that reopening schools could give the country its “mojo back,” and perhaps “only cost us 2-3% in terms of total mortality. (2% sounds conveniently small compared to its equivalent in human lives, 6,560,000. Oz later apologized after public outrage).
Meanwhile Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, offered his own assessment of the trade-off between capitalism and the lives of America’s senior citizens, explaining, “there are more important things than living.”
Since the days of Adam Smith, free market capitalists have held that human beings are rational actors who pursue economic gain for self-interested motives. But here is Patrick, a free marketer if there ever was one, talking about a gift-sacrifice economy model in which people – some people, at least – lay down their lives to keep the economic engines revved.
Patrick’s words reveal an unspoken truth about capitalism. For the system to work smoothly, there have always been requirements of human sacrifice — a certain portion of the population was expected to act not as self-serving homo economicus, but self-sacrificing homo*communis*, focused upon what benefits the collective at their own expense. If these people can’t social distance at the workplace, they are expected to show up anyway. If there isn’t enough safety equipment, they are declared essential workers who must put their lives and that of their families at risk for the greater good.
But for whom and for what is this sacrifice intended? How much dying will be figured into state budgets and gross domestic product (GDP)? When ranked by GDP, the U.S. is the wealthiest economy in the world, but is a country’s wealth something totally separate from, or even contrary to, the health and life the majority of its citizens?
Wealth v. “illth”
To help us navigate these questions, it is useful turn to someone who offered potent challenges to the economic calculus of his day: John Ruskin, the 19th-century art critic-turned-political economist. He was one of the most outspoken critics of capitalism and prevailing economic ideas of the Victorian era, and his work presciently points to shortcomings that have followed us into the present day.
Ruskin questions the premises on which free market capitalism is based, returning to first principles: what is wealth? What do we value? How should we understand the relationship between people, the economy, and the state?
In his view, economies are, above all, social systems whose true end is to benefit the people, and not, as the Texan politician would have it, the other way around. Anticipating the behavioral economics of our own day, Ruskin rejected the idea advocated by such economists as John Stuart Mill that there could be a deductive science of economics based on the assumption that the human being is “a covetous machine” that when applied to actual situations could take “the social affections,” the non-rational aspects of human behavior, into account. Ruskin recognized that such a system implicitly removed the marketplace from the constraints of religion and morality that are supposed to apply to all human behavior. He compared it to an assumption that humans are essentially a skeleton with flesh, blood and consciousness as add-ons founding “an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul.”
Ruskin defined wealth quite differently from many of his contemporaries, and ours. For him, wealth is anything that supports life and health, from the supplies in your storeroom to the song in your heart: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.” (Unto this Last).
By that definition, America is looking increasingly impoverished. And it is not a virus which is stealing our wealth away.
Playing on the root of the word “wealth” from the Old English word “weal,” signifying health,Ruskin proposed that while wealth was anything life-supporting that could be used and enjoyed, it had a dark counterpart that he called “illth” from the Old Norse word for bad – the things that make people ill, their lives stunted and despairing, their environment polluted. Wealth cannot be produced without illth, but great fortunes have been made by extracting the means of wealth without paying the cost of illth. To take a Ruskinian example, a factory that pollutes the water it uses, fouls the air and pays its workers below what a healthy life requires will be more profitable than a business that cleans up after itself and pays a living wage, but its illth becomes a form of national debt expressed in damage to the health of others and the environment. Think of something like a toxic Superfund site.
Economists have a term for Ruskin’s concept of illth, referring to it as “negative externalities,” even though they are not external to the capitalist economic system, but intrinsic to it. The most daunting problems of the current age, environmental disaster and inequality, are fueled by illth.
The Covid-19 crisis has merely amplified trends of rising illth, of despair, sickness, and alienation, which have been on the rise for decades as globalization, money-driven politics, decimated workers’ rights, and privatization have tipped the economic balance far in favor of the very few. If we are to judge a country’s health not by GDP, which rises in the face of a massive oil spill, but according to the criteria of the World Happiness Report (WHR), which measures things like social trust and faith in institutions, America is in bad shape when it comes to the ratio of wealth to illth. Scandinavian countries top the WHR, while the U.S. ranks a dismal 19th.
According to the Columbia University study of the 2020 WHR report, the key factors that account for the relative happiness of Scandinavian countries — what makes them wealthy in Ruskin’s terms — are precisely those that have been under pressure or cut back in the U.S. since the rise of neoliberalism: “emancipation from market dependency in terms of pensions, income maintenance for the ill or disabled, and unemployment benefits” together with labor market regulation such as a high minimum wage. Of course, no one likes to pay taxes, but Scandinavian “citizens’ satisfaction with public and common goods such as health care, education, and public transportation that progressive taxation helps to fund,” meets with approval at all income levels.
Pandemics are exacerbated by illth. We can see it in communities of color where the coronavirus strikes down those whose resources and access to health care have been limited by discriminatory policies and high contact employment. We can see it in factory farms where broken supply chains have caused farmers to euthanize livestock and plow under crops while people across the country go hungry. Airlines got immediate stimulus aid in the U.S., but there has been no subsidy for the restaurant supply chain that could be diverted for distribution by food banks and favorably located restaurants thus sustaining at least some of our much-vaunted small businesses. No one has to fly, but everyone must eat.
We sense illth accumulating in the comments of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, who, in her eagerness to get the casinos back in business, told an astonished Anderson Cooper on CNN that she would offer up the city’s workers as a “control group” in a reopening experiment. If they weren’t able to social distance, Goodman was unconcerned: “In my opinion, you have to go ahead,” she said. “Every day you get up, it’s a gamble.”
Ruskin saw the capitalists of his day as gamblers heedless of the costs they foisted onto ordinary people: “But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other losses and gains, far away among the dark streets, are essentially, though invisibly, dependent upon theirs in lighted rooms.” (Unto This Last).
In other words, not only do capitalists gamble with other peoples’ lives; they are oblivious to the fact that there are other ways to arrange society, to deal the cards differently, more fairly.
Witness the post-Covid reality imagined by Governor Cuomo. Instead of focusing on what changes could better support the health and lives of ordinary people, he has called in Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a commission to reimagine New York state with more technology permanently inserted into every dimension of civic life. A better deal for Silicon Valley, to be sure. But what is in the cards for everyone else? When educational platforms and health protocols are mapped by gigantic and unaccountable corporations, who gets lost? Surely the answer is those who can least afford it.
President Trump says that it is time to move on from the coronavirus and get on with economy. Ruskin would have recognized the deity worshipped by country’s leader, which he called the “Goddess of getting on.” Only Ruskin recognized that she tended to favor “not of everybody’s getting on – but only of somebody’s getting on,” — what he called a “vital, or rather deathful, distinction.” For capitalists, getting on post-Covid means executives working remotely while the rank and file return to the factory floor without adequate face masks, and large corporations, not public input, determines the blueprints for our lives.
The issue of worker safety does matter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but not because he fears that some will get sick or die, but for a potential “epidemic of litigation.” In the next pandemic relief legislation, McConnell is looking to solve the problem of worker safety by shielding corporations from lawsuits rather than supporting Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mandated regulations that would both promote safety and sort out what is and is not actionable.
The Visible Hand
Instead of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, Ruskin advocated a Visible Hand of reasoned management, a government which could allocate resources effectively and create stores of what citizens most needed in a crisis. In our day this need not be a literal storehouse but surge capacity. The Obama administration, for example, contracted with Halyard Health to design a machine that could turn out 1.5 million N95 masks per day. They were ready to build the machine in 2018 when the Trump administration cancelled the program.
In Ruskin’s view, the Visible Hand was the guardian of the lives of the citizens, especially the poor, whose health and lives were their essential property. Ruskin actually defined an economy as the wise management of labor, applying labor, carefully preserving what it produces, and wisely distributing those products. A country’s wealth is in the people’s strength and health, not their illness and death.
Ruskin’s concepts of wealth and illth help us understand the centrality of ethics and responsibility to economic activity, and how economies are not an assemblage of atomistic human units but whole systems of people interacting, where the activities of some impact the lives of all. His work indicates the need for a whole systems approach to a crisis in which what happens on the beaches of Georgia impacts a nursing home in North Carolina, and visitors to New York City or New Orleans can carry the infection home. The decisions of one business in a complex international supply chain can impact the fate of millions.
In unregulated capitalism, Ruskin sussed out what Sigmund Freud might have recognized as the death drive.Decisions about the economy, he held, must be informed by the essential biologic basis of life itself: “The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life; and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction” (Unto This Last).
The Covid crisis has exposed contradictions in market and America First ideology. Without federal aid to state and local governments, essential personnel are being laid off even as we declare them heroes. Employer based insurance is failing, but few American politicians are willing to fully embrace single payer insurance. Meat plant workers are declared essential, but still subject to deportation, as if famed Revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale had said, “I only regret that you have but one life to give for my country.”
Ultimately, the most dangerous pestilence that threatens the country is not a packet of RNA called Covid-19 but an economic and political system that does not value true wealth, and promotes the life of the few while condemning the many to literal sickness unto death.
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mla 2019 conf
have you ever seen that viral picture from 2017 of a party of Oregon golfers calmly putting while, in the near distance, a wildfire consumes the landscape? Trees blacken; smoke, pinkish-gray, shrouds everything in impasto blots; nature itself seems to creak, groan, and at last give way. But the golfers go blithely on. The conversion of this Edenic place into Dantean incandescence won’t interfere with the genteel game they know and love — or, if it will, they are determined to get in one last round before the region is razed. “Eye on the ball, Chet!” one can hear them saying. “Not on the cataclysm!”
[...]
What does it mean,” I asked, “to be ‘essentially a builder’ in an institution that’s burning? Isn’t it too late for building at this point?”
“There’s no more urgent time than ‘too late’!” she said. “We need to build up animating stories about how reading, writing, and thinking support human flourishing. And we have to build up the university by unionizing, by fighting administrative bloat, and by committing more to service work, which too often gets belittled and falls to women.” She thought for a moment. “The threat of extinction — not just academic extinction but human extinction in worsening ecological conditions — is a vicious one that calls for wild imaginings, which is exactly what the humanities enable.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/as-herman-melville-turns-200-his-works-have-never-been-more-relevant/
no lnx
As Herman Melville turns 200, his works have never been more relevant
Written by The Conversation August 3, 2019
Outside of American literature courses, it doesn’t seem likely that many Americans are reading Herman Melville these days.
But with Melville turning 200 on August 1, I propose that you pick up one of his novels, because his work has never been more timely. This is the perfect cultural moment for another Melville revival.
The original Melville revival started exactly a century ago, after Melville’s works had languished in obscurity for some 60 years. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, scholars found his vision of social turmoil to be uncannily relevant.
Once again, Melville could help Americans grapple with dark times – and not because he composed classic works of universal truths about good and evil. Melville still matters because he was directly engaged with the very aspects of modern American life that continue to haunt the country in the 21st century.
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yikes ~ liberal arts?
https://theconversation.com/gates-launches-lobbying-arm-higher-education-on-agenda-119077
no lnx
Bill and Melinda Gates have launched a lobbying group in part to drive their agenda on education.
The move comes as Congress is negotiating a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the main federal law concerning student financial aid.
The Gates Foundation has also recently started up a commission to determine the value of a college degree or certificate. If Gates lobbyists convince legislators to embrace the agenda of the Gates commission, then Congress may make it harder for students in certain majors to secure loans or grants.
In this way, I believe the Gateses could transform universities and colleges that presently offer a wide array of courses into vocational training centers that focus on immediately marketable skills.
I’m a political theorist who researches education policy. In my book on the Common Core, I describe how Bill and Melinda Gates funded and coordinated the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I argue that the Gateses helped build an educational system that emphasizes a narrow set of reading, writing and math skills that can be tested on computers.
The stated purpose of the Gateses’ lobbying effort is to focus on educational outcomes for black, Latino and rural students and move people from poverty to employment.
The Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Value Commission gives some insight into what the Gateses mean by educational outcomes. The commission aims to create a way to measure the value of certain degrees or certificates. If legislators adopt this measurement tool, then they might only fund things that lead to an immediate economic payoff.
Thoughelite institutions of higher education will likely still provide students a liberal arts education, regional state schools could be under increasing pressure to cut majors such as history, French, geography, philosophy and political science.
Why lobby now...
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uber1
https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1229
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_college
liberal arts college or liberal arts institution of higher education is a college with an emphasis on undergraduate study in the liberal arts and sciences. Such colleges aim to impart a broad general knowledge and develop general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum.[1]Students in a liberal arts college generally major in a particular discipline while receiving exposure to a wide range of academic subjects, including sciences as well as the traditional humanities subjects taught as liberal arts. Although it draws on European antecedents,[2] the liberal arts college is strongly associated with American higher education, and most liberal arts colleges around the world draw explicitly on the American model.
According to US News & World Report, the top ten ranked Liberal Arts Colleges in America for 2019, by alphabetical order are: Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Carleton College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College, Middlebury College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Wellesley College, Williams College.
There is no formal definition of liberal arts college, but one American authority defines them as schools that "emphasize undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study."[3] Other researchers have adopted similar definitions.[4]
Although many liberal arts colleges are exclusively undergraduate, some also offer graduate programs that lead to a master's degree or doctoral degree in subjects such as business administration, nursing, medicine, and law. Similarly, although the term "liberal arts college" most commonly refers to an independent institution, it may also sometimes refer to a university college within or affiliated with a larger university. Most liberal arts colleges outside the United States follow this model.
- 1Distinguishing characteristics
- 2Liberal arts and liberal arts college
- 3Globally
- 4Lists of schools
- 5See also
- 6Works cited
- 7References
- 8Further reading
- 9External links
Distinguishing characteristics
From a student perspective, a liberal arts college typically differs from other forms of higher education in the following areas: higher overall student satisfaction, a general feeling that professors take a personal interest in the student's education, and perception of encouragement to participate in discussion.[7] Many students select liberal arts colleges with precisely this sense of personal connection in mind.[7]Liberal arts colleges are distinguished from other types of higher education chiefly by their generalist curricula and small size. These attributes have various secondary effects in terms of administration as well as student experience.[5] For example, class size is usually much lower at liberal arts colleges than at universities, and faculty at liberal arts colleges typically focus on teaching more than research.[6]
From an administrative standpoint, the small size of liberal arts colleges contributes to their cohesion and ability to survive through difficult times.[8] Job satisfaction is also typically higher in liberal arts colleges, for both faculty and staff.[9] The smaller size also makes it feasible for liberal arts colleges to adopt relatively experimental or divergent approaches, such as the Great Books curriculum at St. John's or Shimer, or the radically interdisciplinary curriculum of Marlboro.
In addition, most liberal arts colleges are primarily residential, which means students live and learn away from home, often for the first time.
The distinctiveness of these attributes is somewhat eroded by the tendency of universities to adopt aspects of the liberal arts college, and vice versa.[10] For example, several American universities, including the University of California system, have experimented with a cluster colleges model in which small liberal-arts-college-like units within a larger university form a "honeycomb of residential colleges".[11] In addition, some universities have maintained a sub-unit that preserves many aspects of the liberal arts college, such as Columbia College within Columbia University.[10]
Liberal arts colleges themselves sometimes cluster to offer greater curricular breadth or share other resources (for instance Colgate University and Hamilton College in New York allow cross enrollment).
Liberal arts and liberal arts college
In academia, liberal arts generally refer to subjects or skills that aim to provide general knowledge and comprise the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, as opposed to professional or technical subjects.[12] Most liberal arts colleges nowadays, however, offer more than just liberal arts subjects, such as computer science from the formal science discipline.[13]
Globally
In 2009, liberal arts colleges from around the world formed the Global Liberal Arts Alliance, an international consortium and "matching service" to help liberal arts colleges in different countries deal with their shared problems.[16]Liberal arts colleges are found in all parts of the world. Notwithstanding the European origins of the concept of liberal arts education,[2] today the term is largely associated with the United States, and most self-identified liberal arts colleges worldwide are built on the American model.[14] The Global Liberal Arts Alliance, which incorporates institutions on five continents, refers to itself as "an international, multilateral partnership of American style liberal arts institutions."[15]
In North America
Main article: Liberal arts colleges in the United States
The liberal arts college model took root in the United States in the 19th century, as institutions spread that followed the model of early schools like Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, although none of these early American schools are regarded as liberal arts colleges today.[17] These colleges served as a means of spreading a basically European cultural model across the new country.[17] The model proliferated in the 19th century; some 212 small liberal arts colleges were established between 1850 and 1899.[18] As of 1987, there were about 540 liberal arts colleges in the United States.[4]
The oldest liberal arts college in America is considered to be Washington College, the first college chartered after American independence. Other prominent examples in the United States include the so-called Little Ivycolleges in New England, the surviving predominantly female Seven Sisters colleges along the northeastern seaboard, the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, and the Ohio Five, but similar institutions are found all over the country. Most are private institutions, but a handful of public liberal arts schools exist (such as the University of Mary Washington, and New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho).
Liberal arts colleges are also found in Canada, including Bishop's University, Concordia University, Mount Allison University, St. Francis Xavier University, and St. Thomas University.
...
See also
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/why-do-conservatives-hate-oberlin-college-so-much/
Why do conservatives hate Oberlin College so much?
Keith Spencer / SalonJune 19, 2019
The reasons that Oberlin bears the unique brunt of right-wing hate, and the reason it has become synecdoche for “social justice warrior troops,” is probably partly because of its location.
no lnx twt
Why do conservatives hate Oberlin College so much?
[ Protesters unite to peacefully object to national emergency on border issues in Oberlin, Ohio at the corner of N Main St and W College St.]
written by Keith Spencer / Salon June 19, 2019
When I was an undergraduate at Oberlin in the mid-Aughts, there was a student in my class year who was obsessed with 19th-century British Royal Naval culture. Every Friday evening, he would host a sing-along in a dorm lounge, for which he would bring xeroxes of historical sea shanty lyrics and pass them around so that we could sing along, waving our glasses of “grog.” This was a semi-established event — he had distributed flyers around campus advertising the weekly British Royal Naval sea-shanty singalong and grog-drinking event, which would extend late into the night. Though he was not a resident of the dorm where it took place, he was welcomed into the lounge by its members, and became a fixture of sorts.Like many well-endowed liberal arts schools in rural areas, Oberlin College functions as a sort of de facto social welfare state, and is designed to encourage and cultivate one’s passions, even if they are not strictly academic. Thus, after writing up a proposal for the student-run activities board, the same student, the British Royal Navy culture guy, was able to plan, organize and execute a ticketed Royal Naval Ball, held in the atrium of the science center. The event featured 20 dishes of authentic British era-appropriate cuisine, cooked by student chefs, several courses of wine and port, and a violinist present to play period-specific music. The whole affair culminated with a traditional, British partner line dance — its sole inauthenticity the fact that we didn’t pay attention to our dance partners’ genders the way the Brits would have.
I mention this story because when I try to explain succinctly what attending Oberlin was actually like, it is a good synthesis of the experience. You could be really into something totally esoteric, even if it wasn’t strictly academic, and often get direct or indirect support for doing it while you were a student. I am a firm believer in the cultivation of these kinds of eccentricities; I imagine a postcapitalist welfare state will encourage the pursuit of intellectual and physical labor that extends outside of what is typically considered “productive,” which has always been an arbitrary category anyway.
In any case, this kind of open-ended intellectual atmosphere isn’t unique to Oberlin. All kinds of liberal arts colleges are like this — creative pseudo-welfare states where you are encouraged to pursue your weird interests. And even though most of my college experience involved, well, taking classes and doing homework, I am frankly thankful my education included a crash course in British Royal Naval culture.
Compare my experience among the students and staff of Oberlin to this description of the college from one of the biased right-wing blogs gleefully covering the recent lawsuit between a local bakery and the college:
The victory of the ordinary men and women of Gibson’s Bakery over the smug, dismissive, arrogant higher ed bureaucrats and their social justice warrior troops is a large part of the reader reaction. It was the deplorables prevailing, once again, and I don’t mean that politically.
There are many reasons to make fun of Oberlin, and I will be the first to do that: There is a small but overly visible minority of entitled Manhattanite trust-fund children, from whose privileged ranks people like Lena Dunham (’08) sprang. As with many nonprofits, the wealthiest donors have untoward power to dictate the institutional whims of the college — and many of those wealthy donors reaped their money from unsavory activities, particularly investment banking and hedge fund management. Like most young people finding their footing in the world, the students are forming and articulating their identities in a way that is often unnecessarily performative and/or self-righteous. The students are not nearly as class-diverse as those at a public university. And it seems to be a magnet for socially awkward young people — though most are charming once you get to know them.
But the idea of Oberlin students as “social justice warrior troops” is so abominably stupid as to defy rebuttal. Indeed, that kind of rhetoric speaks to a fantasy about Oberlin that many conservatives have. You can see it in the way the right-wing media seizes on every story about Oberlin as a chance to smear it. Breitbart has long been on the Oberlin hate train. Similarly, The Daily Caller gleefully spins any news at the school as bad news, as if the school were a right-wing punching bag on par with Hillary Clinton.
Apparently, there is something deeply, indescribably evil about Oberlin, though what precisely is unclear. And thus, none of these conservative outlets nor commentators ever realize that their idea about Oberlin is a fable.
These fantasies are fully realized in the reactions to just about any article about Oberlin. Salon writer Shira Tarlo wrote a reported story on the Oberlin-Gibsons Bakery lawsuit late last week; she said she got more fury in her inbox from merely presenting the reported facts than any other story she had ever written. Here is one of the more astonishing emails, from a writer who needs a constitutional law refresher course:
You are not a journalist, you are apolitical actor spreading propaganda.
You are in violation of federal laws regarding fraud propaganda and malice, and are not protected under the 3rd amendment as you are not a journalist.
Enjoy your time writing your Bolshevik propaganda while you can, but know you will be spending your life behind bars or on the street at a certain point. I’d say learn to code, but I believe it is more likely you will be jailed fortreason in the coming years.
Sincerely, A ConcernedUnited States Citizen
And another favorite:
Why am I not surprised that Salon would attempt to weasel around on this matter. So glad they nailed these scumbags, many more to come. Mob rule by the Left needs to be stopped.
In the now-famous essay “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco, who himself lived through Mussolini’s regime, identifies fourteen features that presage a totalitarian regime. One of his bullet points, “irrationalism [and] action for action’s sake,” epitomizes to the right-wing rhetoric (and reaction) to anything written about Oberlin:
Irrationalism [confused with agnotology?] also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering’s fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play (“When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” and “universities are nests of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
It is evident that the mere name “Oberlin” — the concept, the notional idea of it — seems to represent something deeply evil and threatening to the right-wing commentariat. The specific evil is not quite nameable; the aforementioned right-wing legal blog never fully explicates why or how Oberlin harbors “social justice warrior troops”; it is tucked in at the end of a self-congratulatory blog post, as though that fact were somehow self-evident. Likewise, the “Concerned United States Citizen” can’t quite articulate why the Oberlin-Gibsons suit inspires such ire; it merely does. The right-media apparatus has instilled something intriguingly Pavlovian here, in that just as a dog can be made to salivate at the sound of a bell, an infuriated group of “deplorables” can be enraged at the sound of the word Oberlin.
Working at Salon, I know how this works; our magazine’s name, too, causes ejaculatory triggerings among the right-wing, online and angry. Indeed, I have a front-row seat to the immense power of the right-wing punditry to perpetuate a violent fantasyabout what we are as a magazine. In the two years I have worked here, we have twice vacated the office due to violent threats from right-wing plotters. Suspicious packages and threatening letters come every few months. The right-wing media loves to paint us as a fount of some form of evil politics — though the specifics to them are often vague, and those outlets never take any responsibility for the hate they engender and the fear in my own life that myself and my co-workers must endure. It is the cult of action for action’s sake, hate without reflection or articulation, wrapped in a cardboard box of anti-intellectualism.
This far-right hate-mongering towards Oberlin long predated the Gibson’s lawsuit; indeed, it exists independently of the lawsuit entirely. Interestingly, the Gibson’s family seems nominally uninterested in the way that their case has become seized upon by sadistic right-wingers who see it as symbolic of a cultural victory. I agree with the commentators who have noted that the sum awarded seems absurd and the legal outcome appears to defy First Amendment guarantees; regardless, I don’t begrudge the Gibson family. I know the right-wing hypocrisies keep piling up here, but I feel compelled to point out again: if the right genuinely believes itself to be the new protectors of First Amendment rights, they seem to have conveniently discarded that belief in reporting on this lawsuit.
The reasons that Oberlin bears the unique brunt of right-wing hate, and the reason it has become synecdoche for “social justice warrior troops,” is probably partly because of itslocation. Bard, Hampshire or Carleton probably have similar politics, while Wesleyan or Colgate or Williams probably have similar student bodies; but all of those colleges are in blue states (or counties). Oberlin’s situation in the Ohio part of the Rust Belt means that some on the right imagine there is some eternal culture war happening there. But the same kinds of identity politics debates are happening at just about every other school in the country, too — they are merely uniquely exaggerated at Oberlin, because of how closely its tribulations are followed by the aforementioned outlets.
Ironically for the right-wing haters, the staff of Oberlin largely resembles the composition of its midwestern environs. The college staff is comprised of rural local Ohioans that, the right imagines, detest the college. If the right imagines themselves as allies to these “real” Americans, blue-collar folks who work as landscapers, bursars and carpenters, then surely will grieve when some lose their jobs due to the college’s endowment being diminished by the Gibsons lawsuit? Just kidding. Of course they won’t. Theirs is not an ideology rooted in sense.
One of the right’s most reliable Oberlin tropes is the idea that the college and its students are at odds, somehow, with the surrounding community. This, too, is a fact belied by history. The school intentionally shed all gates and walls around its facilities around the turn of the last century; unlike Vassar or Columbia or other peer colleges, it is integrated with the surrounding town — no walls, no security guards stationed at its building entrances. Compared to its surrounding townships, the town of Oberlin is economically vibrant, in part due to the college’s largesse: when the local movie theater went out of business, the college bought it, renovated it and kept it open to the public. An annual open-ended creativity festival, The Big Parade, is put on jointly by students and townsfolk. Students and townies commingle in the Experimental College, an open-ended, free school for which anyone can apply to teach a class on anything that anyone can take.
Moreover, the idea that the town is opposed to the college unilaterally is also wrong: a recent campaign by the college’s union, which I witnessed when on campus last month, featured posters detailing testimony from staff members as to how they’d helped out students in need during holidays, hosted students for holiday dinners, and fed them when they were hungry. “We are Oberlin too,” the flyers read.
Many on the right disparage left-wing campus activism as having been reduced to “grievance politics” — articulating things that are wrong with the world and moaning about them endlessly. Ironically, this is now the fundament of the right. You get the impression from the right-wing reaction to the Oberlin case that they believe so deeply that they are aggrieved, that they are under ideological siege from all sides, that they are suffering so much. Indeed, Trump’s ideological army, the so-called “deplorables,” can be identified with the set of non-specific grievances about their culture, that is “white,” “normal” American culture (to them). These people feel that they are under siege by an imagined enemy — the fictitious “social justice warrior” and their “arrogant bureaucrat” leaders. I’m not sure how to convince them that they don’t exist. They could drink grog in the co-op and sing sea shanties, or perhaps hang out with the campus staff — to prove to them that, for the most part, Oberlin College consists of college students doing normal college student stuff. But I fear that their fantasies are too vivid now to be refuted by reality.
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Conservative Universities and Intellectual Diversity - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/.../conservative-universities.../585511/
1.
Peter Thiel's Conservative Vision | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace.../peter-thiels-conservative-vision
Jul 22, 2016 - There was another form of conservatism at work in Thiel's ... who imagine themselves talented enough to circumvent college and begin their lives as entrepreneurs. Thiel .... Would they be right-wing populists like Sessions, or libertarians like Thiel? ... “Euphoria” and the Flawed Art of Gen Z Prophesying.
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Brazilian universities fear Bolsonaro plan to eliminate humanities and slash public education budgets
Renato Francisco dos Santos Paula, Universidade Federal de Goias
Brazil's new president was elected on promises to radically restructure Brazil. But proposed education spending cuts and curricular changes have students and teachers marching in the streets.
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https://hechingerreport.org/with-enrollment-sliding-liberal-arts-colleges-struggle-to-make-a-case-for-themselves/
...“Define ‘liberal arts.’”
That so important a task has yet to get past such an elementary question provides a confounding look at how far liberal arts colleges and departments have to go to make a case for themselves with students, parents and policymakers — even in a sector known for very, very slowly adapting to change.
“It is interesting that that’s where we still are,” said Melissa Vangsness, who made that presentation as director of communications and marketing at the liberal arts-focused University of Minnesota, Morris — a job she has since left to become a strategist at a higher-education marketing consulting company.
Now a few liberal arts colleges are taking forceful steps to bolster their positions, usually by providing data that shows their graduates get good jobs. At least one is offering a guarantee of that.
Related: How to save the humanities? Make them a requirement toward a business degree
It’s not that there aren’t solid selling points. Employers continue to plead for college graduates to learn such things as communication and problem-solving skills that can come from studying the liberal arts. Surveys show that liberal arts majors lead satisfied lives, and earn salaries that may not be as high as majors in the sciences, but are not too far behind.
Public liberal arts colleges offer “better learning environments with better student outcomes at a lower price. The challenge to us now is to prove it.”
Kathryn Foster, president, University of Maine at Farmington
“We definitely have those students who are baristas one year out, but they’re also writing a novel on the side,” said Kathryn Foster, president of the University of Maine at Farmington, which also focuses on the liberal arts.
Public liberal arts institutions like hers, said Foster, offer “better learning environments with better student outcomes at a lower price.” She added: “The challenge to us now is to prove it.”
It’s a challenge that’s becoming urgent.
Fewer than one in 20 of all degrees now are in humanities disciplines traditionally associated with the liberal arts, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. That’s down from a high of nearly one in five in 1967. The number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in history has fallen 25 percent since 2007 alone, English language, literature and composition 22 percent, and philosophy and religious studies 15 percent, the research firm Burning Glass Technologies calculates.
Pressed by students, parents and legislators to save money and show the return on their high tuitions, universities are jettisoning entire liberal arts programs or staff in favor of majors perceived to lead more directly to jobs.
Related: The surprising institutions that refuse to drop the liberal arts
This has occurred most recently at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, which has proposed shutting down 13 majors including English, philosophy and music literature while expanding chemical engineering, computer information systems, finance, management and marketing; and the University of New Hampshire, which has announced it’s cutting 18 lecturers from its College of Liberal Arts because of budget cuts and a decline in enrollment in language programs.
Small private liberal arts colleges also continue to close, most recently St. Gregory’s University in Oklahoma, Atlantic Union College and Mount Ida College in Massachusetts and Trinity Lutheran in Washington. Marygrove College in Michigan is shuttering all of its undergraduate programs. Sweet Briar and Antioch colleges, both of which were famously rescued by alumni and donors after announcing they would shut down, remain disproportionately dependent on outside contributions to survive.
Of nearly 500 small private colleges studied over the last 50 years, most of them focused on the liberal arts, 28 percent have closed, merged or changed their missions, according to a study released in December.
port
It appears true that the very definition of “liberal arts” is a problem. “Wait, you haven’t even defined it yet?” said Christian Hoeckley, director of the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont College, mimicking what non-academics must think of that.
High-achieving low-income students, in particular, don’t know what “liberal arts” means, according to a 2015 study by researchers at Stanford and the University of Virginia. And in a divisive political era, people whose job it is to market liberal arts schools “have had that conversation about which word was worse: ‘liberal’ or ‘arts,’” said Vangsness.
Related: Ivy League degree: Now what?
“We’re still suffering from the consequences of the culture war, where the humanities in particular and also the social sciences and now even the sciences are seen as ideologically driven,” Hoeckley said.
To overcome this, some advocates of the liberal arts have tried to quantify its practical value.
Nearly nine out of 10 people with degrees in humanities fields are happy with their jobs, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences pronounced in February, for example; those who never went further than bachelor’s degrees earn $52,000, which is lower than the median for all college graduates ($60,000) but equal to the salaries of life-sciences grads and more than those with degrees in education.
Liberal arts majors could make even more if “marketable skills” were added to their studies — digital design attached to a degree in fine arts, for instance — according to another study, released in February by Burning Glass and the American Enterprise Institute, called “Saving the Liberal Arts.”
“There’s great potential value to a liberal arts degree. But first they have to deliver that value. Then they have to tell people about it,” said Mark Schneider, coauthor of that study.
Not all the news is good. Forty percent of liberal arts grads said that, if they had to do it again, they would have picked a different major, a survey by Gallup and the Strada Education Network found. More than a third saw no relationship between their jobs and what they learned in college, according to that American Academy of Arts & Sciences study.
Related: While liberal arts decline in U.S., China and other economic rivals add them
“It’s an uphill fight,” said Hoeckley, who teaches philosophy. “The case for the liberal arts is definitely harder than the case for specialized, pre-professional education, and we need people that can communicate it in shorter than three-paragraph form. That probably won’t be the philosophy prof.”
A few liberal arts colleges and universities are trying to reverse these trends.
DePauw University in March announced a guarantee under which it will give a job to any students who can’t find one within six months of graduating, or let them return for free for an additional semester. Kenyon College meticulously plots, for prospective students and their parents, the actual job trajectories of graduates from each of its majors in what looks like the route map at the back of an airline magazine.
...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/what-the-philosopher-aquinas-teaches-us-about-political-disagreements/
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While a legal decision about her behavior as CEO lies…
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