Joseph Epstein and Andrew Ferguson discuss the state of liberal arts education on Uncommon Knowledge

last year Newsweek listed quote the most useless college majors among the top ten philosophy religion fine arts English political science and history in other words the liberal arts today on uncommon knowledge Joseph Epstein Andrew Ferguson and what happened to the liberal arts for the Wall Street Journal this is uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson by the way be sure to take a look at our website Hoover dot o-r-g /uk or look at us on facebook at facebook.com slash hunk knowledge facebook.com slash UNC knowledge for some three decades an English professor at Northwestern University and the author of more than two dozen books Joseph Epstein writes frequently for commentary the New Criterion the Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal Joseph Epstein's latest book essays in biography all you need to do to get a feeling for the way people within the literary community view Joseph Epstein is to open the cover flap who is the greatest living essayist writing in English unquestionably it is Joseph Epstein a former speechwriter Courtin job a former speechwriter for President George HW Bush Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard writes a regular column for commentary and contributes frequently to time and the Wall Street Journal Andrew Ferguson is the author of three books including most recently crazy u1 dad's crash course on getting his kid into college Joe and Andy welcome to uncommon knowledge pleasure to be here a segment one what's the big deal Joseph Epstein and his weekly standard essay who killed the liberal arts quote in a loose definiton the liberal arts denote college study anchored in preponderantly Western literature philosophy and history with science mathematics and foreign languages playing a substantial the less central role close quote where did the liberal arts come from and what was what was the point what was the idea well I think they came from Greece for the most part and picked up by Rome and then picked up in early Christianity I hope I'm doing this quick survey in an accurate way and then probably the next divided between Oxford Cambridge Oxbridge kind of Liberal Arts and then things change slightly in German education where research was the sense of us a good deal of Education but then and then of course when they were transported to America the religious element came in more strongly with the Protestantism most of the great harvard-yale were Protestant institutions the institution which I taught northwestern is a Methodist institution though you there's nothing Methodist about it that I could make out in the 30 years I was walking around there but that that's their origin I think it's centered in in ancient soul East when a raw 18 year old turns up at the campus of Northwestern or the University of Virginia or Dartmouth College and signs up as a liberal arts student that kid is dipping his toe into an ancient stream of thought and learning and belief about what is important in life absolutely fair enough absolutely you know I went I have to tell you I went it was not at all a good student at the University of Chicago which in a way was a kind of Mecca Vatican City st. Petersburg of the liberal arts people and I was such a student and you can give us the decades you were there out here in the middle 50 like and it was all a complete mystery I the idea of how to pronounce the name through Citadis if you would ask me just to pronounce the acidities on at the 18 euro boy I would have said something like sucka deities I had no notion of it but somehow I understood and this is again speaking as if someone who is not a stellar sparkling student that this is big stuff thing important stuff Joe let me quote you once again I'll come to you and II fear not believe me I'll come to you if I had not studied liberal arts at the University of Chicago I suspect I would be wealthier I might have been happier mm-hmm yet I would not trade in those years for anything mm-hmm why because it gave me some notion of the standard in life and what one can reach and what should one which one should attempt to reach and always fall short of but it's the great game I think you can say without mawkishness without ingenuity kind that you were a better man because you read the liberal arts at Chicago half a century ago no I would never say that you would not know I because I would never impute virtue to myself and I would say I would say that I I think it's made life much more interesting for me but I would not I would not say you know one of the sadnesses of culture Peter as you know and as Aunt Andy knows I'm sure is that the people who have enormous cultural attendance and a ridiculous creepy awful people in spite of it that's problem that I don't have a quick solution to me right Andy we've discussed Joe's years at the University of Chicago you write of your years at Occidental College quote I explored the great city of Los Angeles joined a rock and roll band became a regular at a Zen temple attended concerts without numbers swung through doomed romances and pursued a dozen other forms of fun close quote and yet you are here today to rise in defense of the liberal arts in defense of the things I had nothing to do with yes well I'm I'm actually sort of the same position as Joe I wasn't a stellar student in fact for this book I went back and the people at Occidental College were nice enough to fish out my old college transcript which was sort of reliving a nightmare and so this this sort of monument to mediocrity page after page of them but I look back and there were and I think everyone who's been through this liberal arts education has the same thing there's one or two people who were thrilling and there's just professionals yes professors do it there's really no other way to put it it was it was something and it was a hint it's something it wasn't they weren't presenting me with a package of anything they were sort of opening up a way to live your life so that you would constantly be surprised and enrich and trying to learn new things about new things and so it wasn't an end in itself you know I mean the degree they should probably take it back okay so but but what what I want what we can establish then is that despite this screwing around and the monument to mediocrity that you compiled on your I don't believe this entirely because you ended but you have no regret at having been a liberal arts student I don't wish you've been a business major or no all right now Joe one more quotation from you for many years the liberal arts were my second religion yet defending the liberal arts in the condition in which they now linger on scarcely seems worth the struggle explain because they've been altered and changed so the very basis of them as wet a Western values have been undermined by most of the people who are now teaching them and who have been you know swayed and taken up by multiculturalism feminism the politicization of them has destroyed them from within I think which brings us to segment two the decade when everything went wrong the seventies to quotations Joseph Epstein the 70s was the age of deconstruction academic feminism historicism Marxism early queer theory and other lunacies Andrew Ferguson in the 1970s the revolution of a decade before was ratified as everyday-life core curriculums were jettison the general shape that schools assumed in the 1970s stubbornly remains close quote what went wrong in the 70s and why did it happen then well I think yeah I thought a lot about that why why do things happen at certain times I think it was it was a long the culmination of a long series of intellectual developments my particular bete noire right now is the social sciences which there's sort of an internal dynamic that makes the sciences imperialistic and they keep sort of covering more and more areas of life and as they became validated the the biological and physical sciences gave way to the social sciences and the social scientists started to do the things that the humanities had done or pretend to do the things that the humanities and done which is why do we do the things that we do what constitutes happiness what is meaning in life and so on but because it's a science it doesn't really point to any answers for those things because it's essentially materialistic so you start to think well those questions don't really mean anything at all you know because if science can't answer them then they're probably not real questions and once you start to say that the whole edifice of the humanities collapses and meanwhile I would add to what Andy said is the humanities themselves to start a tape the sciences yes because that's where the money was they would look around and see these magnificent grants been given by foundations by the government to science it's always tried to tsiyon ties themselves so you might count the number of times in in Homer a certain verb arises you know empty arid we have this new discipline now called the digital humanities yes exactly so but I think it's the loss of confidence that these are the great writers that there is no play to anyone like Plato no one like Tolstoy no one I have I haven't obviously thought about this the way the two of you have but it has occurred to me that in the sciences you get this thrill of new information or new discoveries research implies cutting edge to use that horrible phrase but breakthroughs and so forth and in the humanities you've got it really should be the Matthew Arnold formulation the best that has been thought and said so what you're doing is not in a certain sense you're precisely not seeking new information you are insisting that you must understand the patrimony of the culture you must understand what has come before so I'm not here to tell you anything new about Shakespeare says in my theory a good English professor I'm here to make sure you understand that Hamlet is valuable in itself I'm here too under to make sure you understand what your grandparents understood what is that affair I think it I think it's fair I also think something else is going on and that is the sciences are very tidy when I taught I always felt how pleasing would be to have a specific problem and then answer it you know and the answer would be numerical whereas there were no answers to the things I don't none whatsoever they're just question after question opening out into question question and it's called a life of learning I disagree with party with the way you frame that because I don't it makes it sound as though really humanities will just say reading Aristotle's politics or something is is a is plowed over ground and what we've just got to learn is what are Aristotle's categories and and just which everybody is known for since he was you know fifteen hundred years since he was rediscovered and so on but what the humanities promises is you can take this information that is old information that every great mind has absorbed and and you make it your own what's new about the humanities and why the humanities could constantly refresh itself it's because human beings are new someone will do something with Aristotle that's never been done before so so the illusion that it's that it's all you know you're opening up an old closet full cam perfumes and things is not right because because if that's very humanities because they're about human meaning beings and human beings are always fresh segments floor once again what's the big deal Joseph Epstein some eighteen million people in the United States are now enrolled in one kind or another of undergraduate education but fewer than 100,000 are enrolled in liberal arts colleges at the same time for that small number of elite liberal arts colleges applications continue to rise well now wait a moment this is a very arresting datum only a hundred thousand students out of eighteen million are enrolled in liberal arts institutions so for the two of you to be so concerned about liberal arts you you understand what this makes you a leadest fuddy-duddies okay no I send yourself I I have no problem with being nearly any leaders because I don't come out of a latest background and I I think I think of elitism as opposed to a snobbery is just craving for what one thinks the best and I can live with that very easily I don't I don't find that at all troubling to be called an elitist as long as that elite as long as the club is open to everyone right I see I think this is one of the wonderful I think innovations in America has been the idea of a Democratic elite that is that there are gradations of sophistication about things and talents and skills but it is open to everyone it is something that isn't class bound it isn't hereditary and this is one of the wonderful things about the 50s and the liberal arts actually contributed quite a bit to it they called it the middle brow at the time but the the idea was you will be thrilled to learn about a Beethoven sonata and it doesn't matter your parentage or where you live or anything this is something to which people of all kinds have access and should have access and so that's a kind of elitism but it's also sort of a populist does this proportion sound right to you a hundred thousand out of eighteen million that is to say does it strike you as correct on the face of it that the liberal arts really is for only a very small proportion of students well there's a sense only a small proportion can afford either to afford it or have this sang-hwa not to be worried about getting a job but if you if you if we could make you dicta if we could make you philosopher cultural commissar of cultural if we you'd have all 18 million instructed at least in some rudimentary aspect of the I would like I would like it yes I'm enough for Democrat I'd like everyone to have a kind of shot at this is what's going Andy let me repeat a piece of that quotation from Joe for that small number of elite liberal arts colleges applications continue to rise close but if the liberal arts are in such disarray what is going on why isn't the market punishing these institutions instead of rewarding them well this is to add on to your point about the utilitarianism of it it's not simply a Tillet aryan good at college education it's also a status good which makes it impervious to certain kinds of market pressures and so you know to have a degree from Harvard is going to have its own value in the marketplace as long as people think Harvard is a great place to go by the way sitting right there about three months ago Thomas soles said and if this isn't a quotation it's a pretty close paraphrase the principle value of holding a Harvard degree is never again having to be impressed by a Harvard degree no I I'd like just take it a step further I wrote somewhere that some of the worst people in the country are graduates of Harvard Yale Law School names unrequested I said I'm sorry I won't hire you I'll just start with Eliot Spitzer we'll go from there and why should this be why should why should people in the country have gone to Yale and Harvard Law School and I think the reason is that they are driven by a kind of empty ambition that the culture has put on so that one goes through college not really interested in education but in getting into Harvard and Yale which is a very different thing which a digression as if everything I haven't said up till now hasn't been in digression but I mentioned to you earlier before the show began I had a cousin named Sherwin Rosen who was the chairman of the Department of Economics I don't know that you were cousins yes he can't use come on to Hoover yes yes at Sherwin's a memorial service Gary Becker got up and he said you know when Sherman was a graduate student we almost washed him out two or three times and the reason we did was something his performance and seminars were so poor we would ask him a question and his answer would be halting faltering it just wasn't there but not on infrequently he would come to your 2 days later and say you know the question you asked me on Tuesday I don't think it was properly formulated you know you left out marginal utility of value or something bad you know and our Gary Becker said you know the lesson I drew from this is that real learning isn't about quick response but almost all education is and it's a deep flaw you know I say to Peter eight reasons for the Renaissance come on come on come on eight reasons you know Andy he only had four reasons for the Renaissance what a dope you know he's like being unconscious exactly but you know you think about it any any kind of serious intellectual work is about brooding going the wrong way catching up whereas most education is eight reasons for the Renaissance what is to be done the generational solution as the faculties that came of age during the 60s and 70s retire matters on campus will write themselves of their own accord it was the madness the lunacy to use that your term of the 70s that became tenured and will thank God died off well there so just let's just stop wringing your hands wait a decade well there's the problem with universities is they they operate so slowly you know what now in university they say you're fired I want you out here by 2017 and you know a person is is is brought up in the dairy dafu co-generation into you manners and he's gonna teach and it's gonna be there for 40 years death is the only cure their death is the cure and then you have to hope that they haven't infected the next generation well that's the question is it has it become self-perpetuating now or is it a generation that will we will eventually see the backup I've always wondered how do these people fill the hour that is to say after you've said Shakespeare is gay and a running dog of capitalism you've still got I still have 54 minutes you know what else do you listen intent so you think it would exhaust itself but one hopes that well you know when I was doing the book I talked to a lot of academics and I remember speaking to one academic who had used chairman of a literature department at a liberal arts one law and he had come up in the 70s as a champion of the working man in the usual yes all that and eventually became the chair of his department first he was head of the hiring committee then chair of the department so I mean it's a getting ready to retire now and I spent a wistful afternoon but I'm in the in his office and the Sun was going down I really should have written this one out the Sun was going down I mean he's and he finally said how the department had changed and he said you know you can now get a degree in literature from my school and never read Shakespeare and it when he said it was it was almost as I think I screwed up my whole career because because he saw it as the fruit of what he wasn't in the motion and he was reluctant so you know it's fine for him because he's about to retire it's it's the kids who are gonna come after then it worried this this reminds me by the way the only funny thing Lionel trilling has ever said I recorded that in the story of this time of that place a young sort of Hardy comes up to the teacher in the story and says you know I was myself an English major and the professor said oh really in what regiment sure now the resort to alternative institutions at the ancient and prestigious universities the liberal arts may have become corrupted but look at the smaller institutions many of them quite of recent foundation st. John's a great books program st. John's with two campuses in Santa Fe an Annapolis Hillsdale in southern Michigan half a dozen or more quite new Catholic universities st. Thomas Aquinas here in California Christendom in Virginia Thomas More and new by the way the full name of little the splendid little college in New Hampshire is Thomas More College of the liberal arts so you wait a few decades and the reform that these small new institutions are beginning will have taken effect or they're just flickering lights as the darkness descends but hue make of it you're the one with the sunset oh I don't know I have to say though our job was not an answer Wow permissible the eight reasons for the Renaissance well I'll just say my little experience with Hillsdale College I was there and taught a class for a couple of weeks and was just astonished at the quality of the students and the the range of curiosity and the earnestness with which they wanted to acquire skills and understanding and it turned out that a good half of them were homeschooled and and sort of their parents had consciously it kept them away from the taint of public or general reformed education for their entire lives and you know and then they pop up at Hillsdale College and they're fascinating brilliant people I would say as you as you say this it occurs to me they think the courage it takes you have a son a daughter and she's he or she has been accepted Harvard Yale Princeton and he this child says to you I want to go to Hillsdale hmm what do you say to the kid go do you do you I think so you may I think you you were better man than I I would be very nervous about that decision I would be because I would say too I would be thinking is you know I'm closing a lot of doors well you had the discussion that's rawness the prestige matters it is a part of the resident social connection and empty as it is the high-tech solution Andy Coulson Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute quote the traditional Association of the liberal arts and four-year colleges was already becoming an anachronism before the rise of the worldwide worldwide web and it is now a crumbling fossil close quote the Internet is changing everything and soon enough students who want to study the liberal arts will be able to do so cheaply and miles away from Harvard or Yale because all they will need is a computer with an internet connection for lectures and texts and even we now have Skype is the beginning of the ability to have face-to-face conversations even classroom conversations you buy this I don't not a bit I have the feeling that much of what goes on in the Internet's about information and not about knowledge or education I'm told of people who have taught online courses find it as teachers very trying and dreary you know you just handle hundreds of emails every day from students and there there isn't that feeling of something's going on you know when I when I taught these sort of soft courses and Henry James and Willa Cather and Joseph Conrad all I was really aiming for was to convince these another small classes of 30 or so students how serious and important this is and yeah and that I in that I was myself without saying it a kind of serious person with an interesting point of view about the world and we said what I remember about my teachers that I was impressed by their general culture in my case they were many of them were Europeans who are you know Hitler's gift to America who did come here and and hoping that they would want as I wanted entree to this sort of higher culture this interesting way of looking at the world but no no answers with just this interesting way of Andy the internet won't cut it well I think that this sort of utopianism that a lot of Internet Maven's have is infecting the talk about the liberal arts now but just a second or do it joe said is so much of a real education is social in this sense and I don't mean everybody going on Facebook I mean social in the sense that you're surrounded by people that maybe you want to impress or people who can tell you things in the off moments as you're walking out of class or you know in the unlikely event that your professor has any office hours you can go see him that sort of thing so there's a you know aspect to it that I suppose is lost but again I feel churlish complaining about it because I seem to be complaining about everything about it about it and it does it does offer some kind of way out perhaps last question listen for a moment and it will take a moment but I think it's worth it listen for a moment to John Sloan Dickey president of Dartmouth College speaking in 1954 the liberal arts present choices ranging from the largest philosophic issues of wisdom and wrongdoing that ulemas of statecraft the hypotheses and many wrong ways of science to the most delicate variance of taste and style and expression and all art forms could any field other than the liberal arts yield as broad and as significant an introduction to life's comparisons and choices could any other provide a more vital classroom experience for the development of men who are free not primarily because of birth but because they have learned to use their birthright to choose a way of life close quote marvelous stuff and I would only had one thing to it mr. Dickey would not get the job today there's a president of Dartmouth that was my question what must we do will we ever live to hear an American educators speak first of all just in that register exactly of hi serious exactly let alone what he was saying the register with which he said it and to speak so seriously of the law will we ever hear it what was what was we do to live long enough to hear the president of a major American institution to speak in such a way Andy well you know I actually had lunch with Jacques Barzun once a confused a friend of yours and I was I had lunch with him to Buster he lived to be 104 yeah is that like a humble Brian is just anyone Akbar isn't the Provost of Columbia the author of many books the man who at the age of 93 published a magnum opus on Western civilization you had lunch with Jack Parsons so my pal Jackie and I were having them and yeah she was all for it but anyway I remember is going on in my usual gloomy way as much as we have here and and he was absolutely refused to give him to despair or blue or any of those other sins and his attitude was and I think that this is partly because he had mind it was so formed by the entire life of Western civilization was not stoicism but sort of you know it is sometimes given to people to live in an age like this where certain things are crumbling it's not clear what new things are going to come whether there will be any comparison to the new things as opposed to the old things and you just hold on to what you know to be true and that's really all you can do but it's no reason to you know stick your head in the oven Andrew Ferguson author of crazy you and Joseph Epstein author of essays in biography you've both written more and you're now working on a book on the humanities in American higher education I'm trying to work your as well that's Joseph Epstein Andrew Ferguson thank you thank you Peter for The Wall Street Journal and uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 29,807

Keywords: education, liberal arts, values, culture

Id: JF2eJSHKKd0

Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2013