“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
Two months ago, I published an article on Substack, critiquing what I saw to be some of the various excesses, inconsistencies, and contradictions of ‘woke’ ideology that have gained significant traction within western academia over the past 5 years or so. Since its release, the article has fast gained over 24K views online and I have received dozens of emails and messages from students, academics, non-academics, and colleagues alike(often privately) offering their deep gratitude, support, and agreement with the essay’s content, analysis, and overall thrust. Many of the emails and messages I received echoed repeated themes of fear of getting cancelled or professionally ruined for voicing criticism of the current intersectional orthodoxy, feeling inert, helpless, and inefficacious to do anything of significance to combat this growing and pernicious trend within academia and beyond, fear of being outed by students and fellow colleagues for privately harboring heterodox views, and feeling fundamentally betrayed by the institutions that they had put so much of their own blood, sweat, tears, years, and livelihoods into.
One of these messages, in particular, was a very thoughtful and harrowing tale of a would-be academic, much like myself, who wrote the following,
“Halfway through my PhD the entire cultural climate shifted. Right after Trump, woke- ism swept through the whole academy, and the same academics who for years criticized the Bush-Clinton neoliberal/neocon apparatus were quick to turn around and support Hillary in her bid for presidency. Any dissent was met with ice cold glares and harassment. To dissent was to be a fascist. There was no room to conduct research outside of race/gender/sexuality/identity; that was the only acceptable form of research that you could publish without perishing. Every canonical work of literature in philosophy and politics must be interpreted through it is merely the oppressive system of "dead white males". I then came to realize that this was not a small cadre of pomo intellectuals in the English department, but was in fact undergirding the whole education system. The whole higher education edifice was crumbling before my eyes. I was enjoying cocktails on the Titanic, unaware that there was a massive iceberg on the horizon. I finished my PhD, but immediately decided to leave academia, however with debt, and with vague notions as to how to apply a PhD in philosophy in the real world. Its saddening because I had dreams, I really believed in it, and gave my life for it, my youth, for the life of the mind at a small liberal arts college, which is a beautiful life. But now those days are long gone. Silly me for having ingested Dead Poets Society as a vision in my youth.”
Such stories and stories like these are becoming all too commonplace for many graduate students and academics alike. Soo too are the growing number of incidents of woke ‘campus madness’ within western academia over the past months or years. That being said, a thorough-going description of such events or an explanation of how exactly we got here would be to simply re-tread old ground by now. Indeed, one need only listen to a Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, or Jordan Peterson to get a general explanatory theory of our present predicament. A re-telling of Gramsci, Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, of Foucalt and Derrida, or of Enlightenment Liberalism gone awry is therefore not what this particular article is about.
Rather, what I aim for in this particular article is something more explicitly assertive. Given the growing instances of woke indoctrination, cancelling, and silencing taking place on college campuses and within academia more broadly, we might therefore ask; what would the elements of a new and better academia begin to look like? For if we don’t even begin to try to articulate such a forward-facing, future vision, then what those presently frustrated with academia will be left with will be little more than a plan of mere reaction and/or perpetual retreat. That being said, here is a 10-point list of what I think a new and better academia would look like.
10 Features of a New Academia
1. Scholasticism- If I had to choose only one word to describe what is most desperately needed right now in academia it would be Scholasticism. Indeed, I am not alone in this sentiment, as folks like philosopher, Ed Feser, have recently advocated for the very same. The conceptual presuppositions of enlightenment modernism have demonstrated themselves to be either a slippery slope towards our present post-modern situation or wholly ineffectual at this point in offering any kind of assertive counter-position to the ongoing leftist creep. What is in order, therefore, I suggest, is an open-minded investigation of Western Civilization’s Aristo-Thomist roots. Not a knee-jerk reactionaryism, as it were, but an earnest reconsideration of the transcendental categories of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, of formal and final causation, and of vocation that our intellectual forebears may have jettisoned too hastily somewhere along the way.
2. (Actual) Liberal Education- Expanding on this theme of Aristo-Thomism, Aristotle, in the Nichomachean Ethics, argued that a truly ‘liberal’ education versus a ‘servile’ education, should be grounded in the cultivation of the virtues. In other words, a well-balanced, flourishing individual and a well-balanced, flourishing society should center around the habituation, practice, and living out of internal virtues like courage, prudence, temperance, etc. Specific knowledge, skills, and competencies should then center around this core scaffolding of a virtuous character.
3. Education of the Full-Person- Along these same lines, colleges and universities, I argue, should involve education of the full person. This essay’s opening quote, about ‘specialization being for insects,’ exemplifies what Robert Heinlein called ‘The Competent Man.’ Similar to the ethic exemplified in classical Greek education, Montessori schools, and the Boy Scouts, Heinlein’s competent man stands as an exemplar of well-roundedness, resourcefulness, and fully-realized capacities. This vision of man’s proper education is sharply counterposed against the increasingly hyper-specialized, increasingly niche education of the 21st century cubicle-farm worker. In a sea of only specialists, the well-rounded generalist will be the most sought-after specialist of all.
4.) Education of the Physical Body- Returning once again to the classical Greek conception of a mens sana in corpore sano, bodily intelligence and health as cultivated through things like sport, exercise, dance, movement, and sound nutrition have all been tragic casualties of the modernist/Cartesian worldview; that of a wholly disembodied, abstract mind being the only proper subject of education, intelligence, or focus. To be fully human though, requires that one put down the abstractions at some point and embody virtue in our day-to-day physical practices. Put simply, man was meant to move.
5.) Use of Hands and Tools- From the writings of the ancients, to contemporary exemplars like Wendell Berry, Victor Davis Hanson, and Jonathan B. Crawford, the education of the entire person should also involve competencies with using one’s hands and the use of tools to fix, create, and maintain things in one’s own immediate environment. Computers, algorithms, and the management of abstract symbols in one’s head can be part of education, but so too can rolling up one’s sleeves, getting one’s hands dirty, and actually building or fixing something for one’s self. Bottomline, education needs to get back to things like farming, fishing, hunting, and the trades.
6.) Entrepreneurship & Self-Reliance- The American project was founded primarily upon an ethic of entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and an existential disposition towards faith in one’s own abilities and capacities to solve and overcome life’s problems and challenges. The present culture of academia, for the most part, largely incentivizes, fosters, and propagates the complete opposite ethic; that is, one of a victim mind-set, or ever-expanding niche grievance groups, and of knee-jerk excuse-making rather than equipping students with the inner resources and attributes of character to solve their own problems and to succeed at life.
7.) Beauty- Truth is but one avenue towards education of the flourishing individual. The Good is but another. But a full education would be woefully incomplete without cultivation and appreciation for Art and Beauty in its classical forms. Let’s get back to the Great Works of Art, Music, and Literature.
8.) Localism- Following once again in the ethic of Wendell Berry, G.K. Chesterton, and Patrick Deneen, higher education should involve instilling in students a sense of embeddedness in and responsibility towards one’s own local community. Stewardship of nature and animals, protection and preservation over one’s local eco-system, and thick connections to the persons and institutions within one’s own local community both ground a person in their sense of self and belonging as well as provide them with a set of duties and responsibilities that are manageable and realistic. Let’s take a break then from encouraging young students to try to save the entire world in one fell swoop and get back to encouraging them to solve problems and challenges at the local level.
9.) Citizenship- From Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum to and through scholastic and classical conceptions of academia, the telos and purpose of higher-education has always been inextricably intertwined with the proper cultivation and formation of the citizen. Let us then return to an education that focuses upon teaching core and canonical concepts of Western Civilization, Constitutional law, Civics, and notions of citizenship.
10.) Gratitude- Closely connected to this concept of citizenship is the notion of gratitude for the past. Indeed, both Benjamin Boyce and Konstantin Kisin have argued for something very similar. With increasing and proliferating narratives within colleges and universities of guilt and shame regarding both America’s founding and Western civilization as such, the present zeitgeist within academia is one now largely of uncritical and unreflective resentment for the sacrifices and contributions of one’s ancestors and forebears. What is therefore needed in academia to off-set this cult of resentment, is a return to an ethic of gratitude for one’s own country. Not, as it were, a mindless, knee-jerk nationalism in the other direction, but a tempered and historically-informed disposition of general appreciation and gratitude for the institutions, traditions, and sacrifices of the past that have given rise to the present historical limb that we all presently sit upon. To quote Alasdair McIntyre in ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’
“A central contention of the morality of patriotism is that I will obliterate and lose a central dimension of the moral life if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country. For if I do not understand it, I will not understand what I owe to others or what others owe to me, for what crimes of my nation I am bound to make reparation, for what benefits to my nation I am bound to feel gratitude.”
Let us then get back to a higher education curriculum that provide students with a balanced sense of perspective, appreciation, and gratitude for the sacrifices of their forebear as and for their embeddedness within a much larger national, cultural, and historical story.
While this list is far from exhaustive, I believe it provides the beginning template of what academia, colleges, and universities could and should look like in the coming future if they are to be salvaged at all. For if we do not course correct soon, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Photo from: Gabriel Ghnassia
But I also do not think the university may be salvaged - not unless funding is taken away by the federal government as punishment for refusing freedom of speech. We may have to start our own schools. A pastor friend and I plan to start a local church seminary. But that's a far, far cry from a university.
I love this so much. I have always felt like an outlier because I am interested in so many things: clearing trees in the woods with my chainsaw, learning music theory for my guitar so I can write metal tunes and shred, teaching basic Phil at a community college part-time, homeschooling my kids. I'm 49 now and I'm taking accounting classes. My goal is to be able to work from anywhere and use my spare time to teach the Bible, apologetics, and theology, and mentor young men. We have a small garden too. :). Thank you for this article!