I've spent too much time reading and not enough writing so, with some big projects on the horizon, it's time for some warm-up exercises. A friend provided this TED talk, presented by Bennington College President Liz Coleman, as a prompt.
I could be supportive, but I'm an over-educated generalist so I'll play the critical marxist instead.
This talk proposes the citizen/generalist educated in liberal arts as the answer to the challenges of our civilization: social and economic in equality, an anti-science culture, social and environmental degradation and the dysfunctional economic system presently in a long crisis. The casual viewer may recognize it as a hybrid of two common debates over the purpose of education — citizenship vs worker training and generalist vs specialist — contextualized in current events. The subtext, however, is a defense of modern capitalism and Red Scare revisonism masquerading as a milktoast liberal critique of Ivory Tower institutions.
(Embedded video below the fold.)
Liz Coleman's call to reinvent liberal arts education, filmed February 2009.
The speaker's introduction into the "creative imagination" begins with her exposure to educational technocrats in the "newly free Eastern Europe and Russia" (0:30). She relates that they were trying to figure out how to "rebuilt their universities" (0:40). "Since education, under the Soviet Union, was essentially propaganda serving the purposes of a state ideology," she states, "they appreciated that it would take wholesale transformations if they were to provide an education worthy of free men and women" (0:45).
Semiotically, "reform" or "renovate" carry substantially different meaning than "rebuild", which implies demolition or destruction. It strikes me as profoundly unlikely that a PhD (nevermind an international expert) in liberal arts would choose this metaphor carelessly, so it's reasonable to ask: what was it that demolished Soviet institutions of learning? The answer, empirically, was the capitalist restructuring of state institutions, which transfered wealth and revenue from the public sector to newly liberalized and privatize economic sector. Soviet society valued arts and culture for their intrinsic esthetic value and social prestige was awarded to professions (like doctors) for command of cultural capital, as opposed to market exchange value of labor. The absence of reflection on the radical re-valuation of literature, languages, philosophy and history in post-Soviet societies is marked and conspicious when these same liberal arts are advanced as the solutions to the ills of western capitalism.
Second, the speaker reflects on the irony of post-Soviet educators going to the United States, where "liberal arts education no longer exists" (2:00). Rather than draw parallels between the post-Soviet experience and the decline of liberal arts in the Anglo North Atlantic, she focuses on the "increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure" (2:45). Absent from this preamble is an admission that liberal arts institutions have suffered consistent and persistent cuts, in public funding and prestige, as education and cultural policies have slowly yielded to the logic of capitalist enterprise. Over-specialization cannot explain away de-funding undergraduate arts education, but it does provide a logic for the elimination of faculty positions in fine arts and palaeography. Absent these faculty, the elimination of economically irrelevant course offerings in the history of western civilization become inevitable.
While couched in the language of citizenship and collective action, the speaker's endorsement of private-public partnerships in education betrays an uncritical misreading of the capitalist system. Because business is driven by the profit motive, it cannot resolve collective social problems, except as a happy side effect of the pursuit of individual self-interest. The irony of inviting industry into institutions of learning, while simultaneously decrying the reduction of education to specialized professional training, could not be lost on a student well rounded in politics, economics, liberal arts and critical theory.
The speaker turns the "education for citizenship" argument into a call to arms for participatory solutions to the world's problems. The emphasis on personal empowerment and responsibility reiterates the tired liberalism that that puts the onus for global solutions on individual responsibility, instead of structural reforms. For example, the criticism of academia as a domain of over-specialized (to the point of irrelevant) experts rings hollow without a commitment to reforming the tenure and publication processes. Similarly, the individualization of the responsibility for solutions to energy consumption and economic malfeasance is the educational equivalent of "Plant a tree, save the planet".
It would be wishful to dismiss these short-comings as naivete when presented by an international expert in the relationship between liberal arts, democracy and freedom. Consequenly, I'm resigned to accept that the speaker is prescribing poison to the poisoned: arguing for the values which undermine the public sphere while decrying its decline.
/marxist rant