Complexification as a Goal of Higher Education

I don't teach all the time, and I am not integrated into any particular institution. When I am forced by a job to pay attention to higher education for an extended period, I often become extremely critical of the system, writing rants at  the end of the day. This one is from 2014.

Complexification as a Goal of Higher Education

The ideal of complexification of thinking, sophistication of thinking is a very common goal of liberal education and clearly something that needs to be addressed. It would make a great seminar, with Susan Hawthorne’s book on ADHD as one of the texts.

Conviction (the television series) complexifies to an extent: we see pretty decent people get sent to jail by an imperfect system. But it mostly reinforces the pillars of prosecutorial orthodoxy. The goal of punishment never gets challenged. It is an obvious player. Part of the long story line: the novices coming to realize the independent value of punishment, apart from any other social goal (deterrence, rehabilitation, restitution to victims, social utility). 

One wants to say: the value of having a complex, critically informed view is that one will sometimes seek out ways to do justice to more values, within the wiggle room provided by the system. Also, one will have a different manner, a different attitude, in one’s enforcement of the system’s rules. One may even, occasionally, work against the system in small ways that are not likely to get one fired.

Legal categories, like medical diagnostic categories – names that have power. This is what philosophy is about, in one way: exploring the power of naming – in at least two dimensions: to say what current naming does, and to say what alternative naming might do.

At a college or university, this is what philosophy contributes, in cooperation with history, sociology, literature, political science, to the complexification curriculum, which operates parallel to and complementarily to the pre-professional curriculum proper. Think of it as a sleeve around the pre-professional curricula.

One can describe pretty neatly the complexification recommended for each category of the undergrad population by identifying the simple-minded myth on which day-to-day operations depend: for the business major, the myth of independent, self-interested parties negotiating on a level playing field; for law, the myth of equal justice, of rules and punishment; for medicine, the idea of a canonical diagnostic manual identifying disorders which doctors diagnose and treat (a branching decision tree); for education, the idea of students coming with vocational goals which we help them achieve, or more general goals which students need information and skills to achieve; for athletic training, the idea that professionals identify injuries and certify when players can safely return to play; for ministers, that they interpret the word of God for their congregations.  For any vocational direction, there is the mainline stuff: here’s what you have to believe to be successful – and there’s the sleeve of complexification around the edges: here are the ways the main story is controversial, false, too simple, not universal. It’s even true in science: that’s why philosophy of science teaches Kuhn and his ilk.  You can’t make Kuhn into the main course: you can only teach Kuhn to soften people’s orthodoxy, a sort of quasi-pornographic bedtime reading for staid scientists. I think that every profession will have that sort of pornography –the stuff that people read to stretch themselves, before going back to being pretty normal folks. At one point, Wittgenstein’s later stuff was this sort of pornography for philosophers.

The thing about the ethics class pictured in Missile (Wiseman’s documentary about the training of the people who launch ICBMs) is that it is false-stretching: people think they have stretched themselves without really stretching. It does pretty well illustrate another function of higher ed: it tells people what nonsense they will have to accept, to be in this profession, so that they can go do something else, while there is still time. That happens also, in the college curriculum generally. It makes some people flexible, and it warns off people who cannot be thus softened up.

Is there any profession, the foundations of which are sound? If not, (I can’t think of one), is that a fact about the perversity of our age or a fact about social systems, professions, social roles in general: a fact that goes back to the Republic’s idea about minding your own business: Conviction would be a very good place to start, in doing a deep reading of the Republic’s views on division of labor. The prosecutors explicitly exhort each other, all the time, to just pay attention to their own role. Think of Conviction and The Sessions as between them defining the debate about professional boundaries. The episode of Conviction featuring the crack dealer who joined the navy is pretty good for this. (Although he has straightened out, has a clear path to respectability, the prosecutor insists on a prison term for an old crack dealing charge, as  the minimum acceptable punishment for this level of offense.)

College is not about radicalizing people, though it will radicalize some people: turn them into rebels and change agents, grass roots organizers. College is mostly about implanting enough flexibility in the people who take on social roles that the system doesn’t collapse from its own contradictions – it needs to be just compassionate enough, just accommodating enough, just individualized enough, to not crack open, if it is to endure. Priests have to bend on contraception, on abortion, on divorce, but not too much. They have to be somewhat uncomfortable with their roles. In a way, college is a splendid sorting hat: it sorts out those who can stomach the professions, partly by making it hard to get into them. It gives those who go into the professions a way of taking the professions with a grain of salt. It also builds the interests and side-passions that make participation in a fundamentally boring system possible. It siphons off those who are too intelligent or passionate to be players into a perfect holding tank: the higher education establishment. (Plato’s whole huge discussion of Socrates’ trial, extending over maybe 10 dialogues,  is a gigantic defense of his own solution of what to do with disaffection: to invent the university.)  It is a school of unease and diversion, a school for accepting and living with contradictions. This thing is an ecological masterpiece.

What can the Bat do? It can show people how their education is lived forward into the professions. It can provide exactly the service that the myth of Er provides.

One way of thinking about higher ed is that it is exactly on the fence between the Cave myth and the myth of Er. It serves both myths. For some people, the discovery of the contradictions and inadequacies in common conceptions makes them abandon those conceptions altogether, seeking other fundamental modes of understanding, which are then, themselves criticized. For, others, for most, education just shows students what they will have to put up with: to be a lawyer, to be a doctor, to be a social worker, to be a college teacher. They choose from the buffet. 

One consequence of this line of thought is that, if the academy works right, its work is still stomach-turning. And lots of the rhetoric around about abolishing the humanities, about turning the university or college into some pre-professional school, is just an effort to overturn an ecological system that works very well to support the current political, economic, medical climate. One can defeat lots of these proposals from a standpoint of utter loyalty to the most heartless and stupid systems imaginable. One does not need to care about anything much except stability to value the traditional liberal arts college.