Lehrman American Studies Center

"Universities have no business teaching students how to be good people or good citizens."

I can still remember one of my colleagues adamantly stating this opinion almost a decade ago. Now I find myself in the interesting position of having to revisit this question in my current work of reviewing and revising my university's general education curriculum. Is there really a role for character and citizen education in a general education curriculum?

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I realize that many readers of this blog are advanced graduate students and those who have just finished the Ph.D., but who do not yet have full-time academic positions. As chair of my department, I typically head up our tenure-track searches as well as hire adjuncts on a semester-by-semester basis. Therefore, I thought might be beneficial for those who anticipate hitting the TT search relatively soon (in the next year or so) to consider adjunct work to bolster both your CV and your chances of landing a position in a difficult job market.

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I have heard it said that fly fishing is the only sport with its own literature. I am not sure what to make of this claim exactly, for I have acquaintances who insist that both baseball and golf have inspired some really fine writing. Fly fishing certainly has one thing going for it that the other two do not: it is a sport that always takes place in the most beautiful natural settings on earth. And I cannot think of any other sporting activity that is so satisfying to people of a contemplative disposition. Perhaps this more than anything else accounts for its allegedly unmatched literary aesthetic.

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From the perspective of the student, a major weakness of the “great texts” approach is that it fails to provide them with much information on current events. While I do my best to explain to them that political science is not the same as current events, there is an element of truth in their criticism because political science strives to understand what is going on now.

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By way of continuing my discussion of a philosophically honest approach to the search for truth, it can be said that partial nature of postmodernism's insight into the inescapably contextualized human condition, if approached in the wrong existential condition, often leads either to a wholesale rejection of that partial truth or a fanatical acceptance of it as the whole truth.

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If education is soul-crafting at its best, then crafting a general education curriculum is perhaps the epitome of educational soul craft. So imagine my delight in being given the opportunity and privilege to lead my institution’s effort to review and perhaps revise its general education curriculum. I truly was delighted (some may think me crazy!). But there are very few times in academia when one has the opportunity to develop and create or re-create something from the bottom-up. And, alas, here was my opportunity. Let the tinkering begin!

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Universities exist to form lovers, not data masters. It is an erotic education.

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In Part I, I introduced a line of thinking that rejected Enlightenment-variety philosophical certainty in favor of MacIntyre's contextualized rationality. Now, the reader might be thinking that all this sounds suspiciously like a warmed over version of theological, philosophical, and cultural relativism. If we cannot know absolute truth in an absolute manner, what is the use of philosophizing anyway?

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A few years ago it fell upon me to become the inflictor-in-chief of assessment upon my colleagues (as chair of the relevant committee). Here I hazard to offer you all a bit of what I learned in my stint on the "other side", focusing on the positive.

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"Knowledge is produced in response to questions; and new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."

– Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

   Teaching as a Subversive Activity

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