Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching!
Academia has become unrooted from pedagogy.
We’re delighted to feature this article as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we’ll feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
It’s no coincidence, it seems to me, that the decline of liberal democracy, as a fact and value, has succeeded the decline of liberal education as a fact and value. If we are ever to revive the first, an essential step will be to resurrect the second. The two “liberals,” after all, are the same. They refer to political liberty, as understood by ancient Athens, republican Rome, the American Founders: not libertarian freedom from individual constraint but collective self-government by civic equals. Its opposite is tyranny, arbitrary rule by a single will, a dispensation we’re becoming more familiar with than we had ever thought we’d be.
Liberal education is that form of education that prepares individuals for the exercise of political liberty—in other words, for citizenship. (Its opposite, in Aristotle’s account, is servile education, that which aims at mere utility, the performance of an economic function.) For generations, its importance was a governing idea in American higher education. In 1945, to pick a single milestone, Harvard published what became a widely influential volume, General Education in a Free Society (known from its color as the Redbook)—a pedagogical program, as the war neared its end, for the emerging era of mass political participation. “A republic, if you can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin, and liberal education, which the Founders also championed, is part of how you keep it.
But citizenship, too, is a concept in long-term decline (along with republic, for that matter). On campus, as a goal of education, it has given way to mere utility, salaried servility, veiled, at selective schools, beneath the drapery of “social justice,” the language of changing the world, which bids young people be not citizens but activists.
Yet to imagine oneself as an activist is, in important respects, the reverse of regarding oneself as a citizen. The two entail divergent aims, virtues, attitudes about this country that we share. An activist is a soldier in a social or cultural war. A citizen is a member of a political community, a group of individuals who recognize that they have responsibilities to one another. Activism divides: us versus them, the good guys and the bad guys. Citizenship unites: we speak of “fellow citizens” or “fellow Americans.” Activists see those who oppose them as enemies to be defeated and, ideally, eliminated, if only through reeducation (though also, more and more, through violence). Citizenship demands toleration, the acknowledgment that even those you hate the most possess an equal share with you in the political collective: an equal right to speak, vote, advocate, educate, organize, assemble, and, if elected, govern. Activists say, go away; citizens say, we’re all in this together, dammit.
What would it look like to restore the idea of citizenship to the center of undergraduate education? What does liberal education entail? Two things: what to teach and how.
The what is named in Harvard’s title: “general education.” In other words, that which every student needs to know, regardless of what they major—that is, specialize—in. It seems obvious to me that that which every student needs to know as a citizen (and, a fortiori, at elite schools, a future leader) of this country is American, Western, and, to a lesser extent, global literature, philosophy, and (something often overlooked in core curricula) history. These compose the basic grammar of our common thought and culture, including, or especially, our lazy hot-take half-thought and our derivative-schlock popular culture. How much can’t you understand, of our collective imagination, if you do not know the story of the Exodus; of our political contentions, if you haven’t studied the development of the concept of equality in Western thought; of international affairs, if you aren’t familiar on at least a basic level with the history of European nationalism?
It’s incredible, to start with, that one can graduate from college in this country (that one can graduate from high school) without having taken a class in the documents and ideas of the American founding. To a mandatory course on those I’d add a second term on American political thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, full years each on American literature, American history, Western literature, Western philosophy, European history, and global history, plus two terms (from a menu of options) on non-Western civilizations.
Yes, it’s a lot—16 semesters in the curriculum I just sketched—and that seems right, if we are going to graduate individuals who actually know a damn thing beyond their specialty, who can effectively evaluate whatever nonsense shows up in their feeds. One third to one half of an undergraduate career, to speak a little less prescriptively, should be devoted to general education. If that prevents students from double-majoring, so be it. There’s too much of that already anyway (largely since the withering of general education has left specialization as the only part of college students understand). If it means that engineering departments can no longer mandate 20 courses in their majors, good. They need to play better with others. As for the objection that students won’t or can’t read even single books, let alone a dozen courses-worth or more of weighty tomes, I call bullshit. If we can demand that students study chemistry and physics, French or Spanish, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, let alone calculus, before they even get to college, we can insist that they read. And if they cannot get through college without reading a lot, or even be admitted if they haven’t read a lot already, then high schools will insist on it, as well.
A larger point here is that liberals need to reclaim the great books, and the humanities more broadly, from both the right and left: from the know-nothing populists who think that “Western civilization” means “I’m better than you” and the tenured avengers who use “dead white male” as a term of abuse. It’s been many years since liberals have even had a theory of culture, have engaged with culture as an object of thought or recognized its relevance to the political (many years since the heyday of Partisan Review). I remember hearing Al Franken, then an Air America host, insisting that the only poems he was interested in had five lines and started “There once was a.” That’s about the level of seriousness with respect to culture that liberals have been operating on since, I’d say, the 1970s.
A second point is that the university must recognize that the fields proper to general education do not exist for the same purposes, and should not be conducted in the same manner, as the natural and social sciences. The latter, at least in their mature form, are native to the modern research university, that factory of facts, with its positivist conception of knowledge, its quantitative methods, the kinds of questions that it asks. But philosophy and literary inquiry predate the research university by many centuries. They arose to ask a different set of questions, ones about the nature and meaning of existence, which cannot be answered empirically (or, in any final way, at all). It was only once they migrated into the modern university that those traditions became “the humanities,” a set of academic disciplines, and they’ve become denatured from needing to conform to scientific standards—the reason that, whether produced by non-academics or by academics writing in non-academic modes, a great deal of the best philosophy (often in the guise of “thought”) and certainly of the best literary criticism (and music, art, and theater criticism) has continued to take place outside the university.
But the purpose of general education is precisely to equip students to address those fundamental human questions—questions of value, not fact—which are perforce the fundamental political ones. That is why the study of literature (to turn to something dear to me as a former professor of English) is integral to liberal education. Even individuals and institutions committed to civic education and core texts (and there is a growing movement toward both, especially at public universities in states like Florida and North Carolina) do not appear to grasp this. Beyond Homer, Greek tragedy, and Shakespeare, curricula lean largely to political philosophy—that is, to texts that seem more relevant to public questions.
That literature is equally relevant, if less obviously so, begins for me with a remark that a professor made in graduate school, a kind of gnomic aside, and that I’ve been pondering ever since. He said that stories are a form of knowledge. What form, exactly, is what I’ve been pondering, but this much is clear: it is a form that’s recognized by every culture we’re aware of. Every culture tells stories, and not just for entertainment. In every culture, stories are central to the transmission of collective understandings. They are a culture’s way of expressing its sense of how the world goes, and of how we should conduct ourselves within it.
Yet that expression is rarely transparent. In the Old Testament, for example, replete though it is with commandments and precepts, the meanings of stories are far from obvious—think of the binding of Isaac—which is why they’ve given rise to a vast and ongoing interpretive discourse. Indeed, one of the books of the Old Testament, the most morally and existentially challenging of all, is itself concerned with its own interpretation. Job spends most of his story largely in the company of friends who prove exquisitely unhelpful, precisely since they keep proposing simple answers, trying to understand the meaning of what has happened to him. Then God shows up and tells him the answer, which is that there is no answer—not one, at least, that humans can grasp.
When we turn to the New Testament, we find that Jesus himself told stories, the kind of stories we call parables, which are likewise frequently distinguished by their open, enigmatic quality, their endless interpretability. And so it is with all the great teachers: with Socrates and the Buddha, with the Zen masters and the Hasidic masters. They do not offer extractable morals or lessons. They offer riddles and puzzles, enigmas and dilemmas, because that is what life does itself. And the same is true of great works of literature, texts so central to our own culture that we denote them by a term that once referred exclusively to Scripture: the canon. The Iliad does not offer readily statable meanings, and neither does Antigone or Hamlet or Moby-Dick or To the Lighthouse.
Literature offers us not answers, but vivid ways of posing questions. Unlike philosophy, with which it shares an interest in foundational perplexities, it deals not in abstractions but particulars. Unlike the social sciences, with which it shares a focus on psychology and sociology, it puts us in the midst of life. Unlike both, it gives us a plurality of points of view. When you read a work of exposition, not just philosophy or social science but commercial nonfiction, opinion writing, even personal essay, you know what its author believes, because it is the purpose of the thing to tell you. But the better a work of literature is, the harder to say what its author believes—famously, most difficult of all with Shakespeare. Great works of literature present divergent perspectives without choosing between them. They show us the validity of all: Antigone and Creon, Lear and Cordelia, Elizabeth and Darcy. This is an essential political idea, a liberal idea. The world isn’t heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. It is people, who are always flawed and always have their claims.
We can say more. One of the limitations of the way we think about both public and private life today, I’ve come to feel, is that we invariably talk in terms of problems and solutions. Not that there aren’t problems, or that they don’t need solutions. But some things—again, the fundamental things—do not have solutions, which means it doesn’t help to think of them as problems. Call them, rather, tensions: the tension between equality and liberty, or prosperity and the environment, or a woman’s bodily autonomy and the interests of her unborn child. Or, in private life, between desire and fidelity, or between our love for our parents and our need to separate from them. These aren’t problems to be solved, or resolved. They are tensions to be endured. They are tragedies, in Hegel’s sense of tragedy: a conflict between two rights, two values.
And that is what literature shows us: these tensions, those tragedies. The point of studying Antigone is not to decide whether Antigone is right or Creon is right. It is to see that they both are. That sometimes there are not only not simple answers, but any answers at all. That this, at its most acute, is what life is. That we all exist within these tensions, those tragedies—as individuals and as political communities.
Students may not read, but they are soaking in stories: superhero movies, action movies, rom-coms, detective shows, shows about teens with special powers. Video games. Porn, which tells a kind of story, too (though the ending is always the same). As well as, in the realm of supposed nonfiction, conspiracy theories, partisan narratives, propaganda. In other words, bad stories: stories that offer easy answers, stories with good guys and bad guys, stories where the hero gets their every wish fulfilled, stories where it all works out in the end. All of which has political implications, because it shapes one’s expectations of the world. Another reason students need great stories is to guard themselves against the bad ones.
If all great literature is, as Harold Bloom insisted, wisdom literature, then what its study helps you to develop is, precisely, wisdom. And wisdom is different from skills or expertise or subject knowledge, as valuable as all of those are. It is such understanding as pertains to the conduct of life. And not only the individual life—the collective life, as well. That is why Plato spoke of the need for wise leaders and we speak of the wisdom of the American Founders, their grasp of human nature. Wisdom is a political virtue. It is the highest political virtue.
So much for the what of liberal education. Now for the how. When people talk about the college classroom as a training ground for citizenship, they mean the inculcation of a certain set of virtues and habits. You sit around the table wrestling with Locke or Dostoevsky, and you learn to have a civil conversation: to disagree respectfully, to listen, to consider arguments, to change your mind. As David Bromwich puts it, you learn how to be wrong. You develop humility, patience, tolerance, courage (the courage to speak up, to make waves, to risk looking foolish)—perhaps above all, a thirst for truth, even at the cost of self-regard.1
Though—to digress for a moment—it is a lot easier to teach students how to disagree if they actually do. I’m speaking not just of the ideological conformity, real or performed, that dominates selective institutions, but also of the social homogeneity that lies behind it. I love that schools like Harvard claim they want their student bodies to “look like America”; I only wish they meant it. Looking like America would entail enrolling 40% of their students from the white working class (as opposed, at elite schools, to virtually none). Imagine how quickly campus culture would change if institutions did that—and, before long, how the culture of the professional-managerial class would, and then how our politics would. We are polarized because we’re siloed. The domains we occupy are not just different; they are separate, non-communicating. We need to reconstruct a shared world, in Hannah Arendt’s sense: a sphere of mutual intelligibility, an arena of discourse not in which we all agree, but in which it’s possible to disagree. At present, we cannot even disagree, because to disagree you need to understand each other. A genuine commitment to civic education at elite schools would begin by gathering students together across relevant forms of difference—social, cultural, political.
In any case, it’s easy to talk about teaching for citizenship; it’s a lot more difficult to do it. Teaching well is hard. The kind of seminar-style teaching that general education involves—orchestrating conversations that are substantive and rigorous, that keep the focus on the text, that stay on point, that require students to respond to one another, not just wait until the other person stops so you can say your thing, that don’t degenerate into speechifying or (in lit class) group therapy—is much, much harder. It takes a lot of time to learn, and it continues to take a lot of time even after you’ve learned, since each new text you teach necessitates reverse-engineering a fresh set of questions, and a lot of the art involves asking questions: ones both specific and challenging, not ambiguous or vague or obvious, not “so what did you guys think?” or guess-what’s-in-my-head, questions that you don’t have settled answers to yourself. The guiding principle is this: whoever is doing the talking is doing the thinking. In a seminar, 90% of what comes out of the instructor’s mouth should be questions, and 90% of everything should come from the students.
Most faculty do not know how to do this. Most college teaching is mediocre at best and often far worse. This is not a guess or an impression (though I’ve seen enough of it myself). In The Amateur Hour, a history of college teaching in America, Jonathan Zimmerman lays out the gory details. We’ve had the same problems, for the same reasons, with the same failed solutions, since the emergence of the research university: professors neglecting instruction; enormous lecture courses (and tedious discussion sections); contingent and underqualified faculty; students feeling bored and cheated; resistance from faculty to supervision, evaluation, or change; innovations, often based on new technology, rolled out with large claims; and no improvement ever. The reason for this last is clear. Under the research model, faculty are incentivized to do a single thing only: create knowledge. Publish or perish. When good teaching happens, it happens by accident, and often at a cost to one’s career.
Which means that if general education is going to be resuscitated—and undergraduate education in general improved, and academia despised a little less—colleges and universities need to start seeing themselves, to an extent they never have before, as teaching institutions. “Our scholarship is a professional enterprise,” Zimmerman writes. “But when it comes to teaching … [w]e are flying by the seat of our pants.” No more. Instead of being flung into the classroom with minimal preparation and expected to figure it out on their own, graduate students need to learn to teach in a concerted, informed, and organized way: with extensive training, repeated observation, regular feedback, iterated improvement, and continual support. Just like in K-12. And they need to continue to learn and improve once they get a position, just like in K-12.
Faculty should meet to talk about teaching on a regular basis: troubleshooting, sharing insights, discussing best practices. Master teachers ought to serve as mentors for less experienced ones, including through team-teaching. Some of the former should act, at least part of the time, as instructional coaches, going into classrooms and working with colleagues on specific areas of weakness. Doors should stay open, and observers should be free to enter class at any time. Professors must get used to being less defensive and territorial about their teaching. Faculties should see themselves as communities of mindful practitioners, striving together toward excellence.
But how are academics ever going to find the time for this, with all of the research they do? Well, that’s just the thing. I hate to say this now, when the government seems intent on killing scholarship and science altogether, but there is far more research done than anybody needs. Truckloads of articles, monographs, studies, much of it trivial, most of it essentially ignored. The research model was never meant to apply to more than a relatively small number of institutions, but given academia’s incentive structure, especially since the postwar funding boom, it has spread to nearly every corner of the enterprise. The lion’s share of significant work continues to be done at a few dozen schools, the ones with the money and prestige to attract the best people. Yet according to the latest count, there are 543 Carnegie-classified research institutions in the United States, including 187 R1s alone (in 1994, the latter numbered 59). And that is not to mention the 2670 other colleges and universities, which also maintain expectations, albeit at a lower level, for scholarly production. No wonder there is so much fraud in science, a replication crisis in the social sciences, and mountains of meaningless bullshit in the humanities. Most research should simply stop. Most if not all of a professor’s time, at the vast majority of schools, should be devoted to teaching.
Believe me, I know what I’m saying sounds crazy, including the part about turning over much of the curriculum to general education. My suggestions would necessitate enormous changes: structural, cultural, and, above all, psychological. Academics would have to learn to see themselves, and value themselves, in radically different terms, as members of a helping profession. It isn’t clear how we could even do these things with the existing professoriate, given the way they’ve been socialized and trained. A new faculty, somehow, would have to be raised, gradually and in part, perhaps, from outside the academy.
But now is the time to think big. With the recent Yale report and other scattered indications, it seems that academia is starting to acknowledge its disasters and its culpability for them. Incremental changes, though, will not suffice. More than once in our past, at moments when the sector recognized that it had ceased to serve the nation’s needs, higher education overhauled itself in fundamental ways: in the late 19th century, when Ivy League and other colleges transformed themselves into research universities and the fixed curriculum of Greek and Latin, in place since time immemorial, was discarded for the system of majors and electives; in the 1960s, when the old-boy, private-school arrangements in elite admissions were torn down in favor of meritocratic criteria, which remade the American leadership class. This is the kind of juncture where we find ourselves. This is the scale at which we need to act.
William Deresiewicz is an author, essayist, and critic. He is working on a historically situated memoir about being Jewish in modernity.
Follow Persuasion on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
For a great account of what this looks like in practice, see this conversation with Jennifer Frey on The Honest Broker podcast.