Liberal Education is a Unique Enterprise

   

I read with eager interest Elizabeth Corey’s thoughts on Michael Oakeshott and education.  I found the distinctions she made and the analysis of great merit.  I retain, however, some lingering concerns about how adequately liberal education might fare in the course she charts, especially for non-flagship institutions in this current educational environment.

Dr. Corey’s analysis of Oakeshott’s distinction between enterprise association and civil association and his views on education (specifically how to envision the university), is both original and illuminating.  Corey makes good on her promise, showing that universities as enterprise associations are too often focused on skills training, and what Oakeshott identifies as socialization:  “education” to change the world or serve the needs and wants of a society.  Generally, the focus on mission statements (and, one might add, the current obsession with learning outcomes), places the value on practical, usually productivist, outcomes, along with deeply embedded social and political projects.

The model of civil association offers an attractive alternative.  The university as civil association avoids the temptation to empower professional administrators and educational consultants to treat universities as business corporations:  making the important (but not the only) considerations of efficiency and return on investment the determining variables.  Civil association also offers an attractive, one could call it an accommodationist, solution, especially for large institutions with adequate resources.  I’m certainly drawn to allowing multiple and diverse views of the university to live together in harmony, recognizing the variety of types of education and goals that large American universities house today.  And, as Corey notes, this might be the best practical path for survival of a liberal arts education.

My concern is that universities and colleges are, at bottom, enterprise associations, though with a particular type of goal or purpose, and that not acknowledging this is likely to lead us, unwittingly, in the wrong direction, particularly for tuition driven, small, private schools and second or third tier state institutions.

Universities and colleges are voluntary associations.  And so, unlike the state (which is a compulsory association not easily left), one need not confront the difficult problem of how to reconcile one’s freedom with one’s obligations to the state.  If one does not agree with the direction and purpose of a particular university or college, one is free to find another.  That universities and colleges are free to choose their own path has resulted in a remarkably diverse set of educational institutions in the United States from which would-be students are able to choose.  Not only is there a wide variety of types of education offered but also a plethora of worthy goals (professional, moral, religious, civic, cultural, etc.) that one’s educational experience may be brought to bear. Civil association makes sense when there is little agreement about overarching goals for the whole community to collectively achieve, and in a context where individuals have put a great premium on self-direction and autonomy.  Here the most appropriate way to relate is to acknowledge the authority of general rules to create conditions of civility among citizens as they pursue their self-chosen courses.

A university is an enterprise association and I believe this is important to remember that to prevent corruption of the university.  However, one needs to be rather careful in how one approaches the nature of the enterprise and the goal or purpose the enterprise might have in mind.

Oakeshott identifies many venues for where learning creatures, such as we are, learn.  The world one inhabits is a place of learning.  However, Oakeshott says, “human beings, in so far as they have understood their condition, have always recognized special places, occasions and circumstances deliberately designed for and devoted to learning,” including the family, school, and the university.  Universities are distinct as places where occupants recognize themselves as “preeminently learners”, where “learning is a declared engagement to learn something in particular”, and where learning is not limited, but is done secluded and detached from “the here and now, of current living” (24).[1]  It is a cooperative enterprise of people in physical proximity to one another engaged in the collective pursuit of learning.

The enterprise or purpose of the university is then, learning; and the activity or engagement is to “learn something in particular”.  If this is the goal, then what does Oakeshott have in mind by learning and what is the “something in particular” he has in mind one is to learn?  Oakeshott’s position on the nature of learning is both quite expansive, yet definable and concrete.  University learning, neither has the specificity of being trained to operate a metal lathe or to debug a software program, or having at one’s disposal the molecular weight of water, the length of a U.S. senate term, or a set of references to display one’s cultural literacy, or even developing the skills to serve democracy.[2]  Nor is university learning unbounded and general.  Oakeshott is rather critical of nonspecific learning: such as learning by following one’s inclination; learning through free discovery, with an emphasis on imagination, creativity, and self-expression (72-73); or the general goals of “improving one’s mind” or “learning to think” (24)

At a basic level, liberal learning is the activity of attempting to critically understand ourselves.  Who am I?  The imperative is to “know thyself”.  Who we understand ourselves to be, Oakeshott insists, is a product of what we have learned to understand ourselves to be.  Being a human being is an historic adventure.   We learn from others, what others have said and understood being human is all about.  The collection of these understandings Oakeshott, somewhat reluctantly, calls a “culture”, or a civilization, or an inheritance, with all its contradictions, fragments, tensions, artifacts, practices, etc.  From this vantage point what is to be learned seems too vast and encompassing to manage.  However, not all in the culture is of equal value.  And, there have been some ways of attempting to make sense of the cacophony of meanings that confront us.  Some explanations have caught-on, and seem to provide a more or less coherent way of seeing the world and understanding the whole and our place in it.  Oakeshott early identified these patterns of explanation as modes in his Experience and It Modes in 1933 (namely practical, scientific, historical modes).  Later, he identified these ways of imagining the whole as voices, in his essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” in 1959.  To the practical, historical, and scientific voices, he added here the “poetic” voice.  Further, there have been great investments in thought to make sense of our world and ourselves:  Oakeshott identifies natural science, languages, literatures, histories, philosophy, social sciences—all “investments in thought” to understand our world and ourselves (32-34).  It is here where the concrete of liberal education appears.

Though each mode, voice, or branch of learning has a similar formal character (each is a kind of language of self-understanding) each also has its particulars (methods, a language, a developed curriculum chosen to best initiate the newcomer to that particular language of self-understanding, etc.) (97).  Oakeshott memorably identified the meeting place for all these explanations as a conversation.  Initiation into the conversation about what it is to be a human being is the heart of liberal learning at the university, through concrete and specific invitations to reflect and think and reformulate one’s own thoughts about this adventure.

Oakeshott has a phrase he returns to often when he talks about liberal education.  Liberal education is a release from the “fact of life” to recognize oneself in terms of a “quality of life” (91). It is in this that the liberating aspect of education clearly appears.  As Oakeshott eloquently describes the freedom felt on that first day as an undergraduate: “Almost overnight, a world of ungracious fact had melted into infinite possibility; we who belonged to no ‘leisured class’ had been freed for a moment from the curse of Adam, the burdensome distinction between work and play.  What opened before us was not a road but a boundless sea; it was enough to stretch one’s sails to the wind.  The distracting urgency of an immediate destination was absent, duty no longer oppressed, boredom and disappointment were world without meaning; death was unthinkable.” (103)

I return, however, to my concern: this brief moment one has as an undergraduate, to be released from “the fact of life”, from practical concerns, to consider the “quality of life”, to explore in very specific ways what others have made of themselves and this world, is too easily eclipsed or silenced by the allure of profession, of power, of status, of wealth.  In short the allure of “the world”—a view certainly I as a young person (and I know others) came already to the university equipped with. The way Oakeshott put it is even more true today in our current media environment.  “The world in which many children now grow up is crowded, not necessarily with occupants and to at all with memorable experiences, but with happenings; it is a ceaseless flow of seductive trivialities which invoke neither reflection nor choice but instant participation.” (41).  I worry that liberal education is not able to answer the seduction of “worldliness” adequately in its language, any more than Socrates was able to convince a majority on the jury in their terms.

Add to this, there are many colleges and universities (some quite desperate) who are struggling with enrollments, budgets, declining humanities majors, etc.  The opportunities to shelter low enrolled philosophy programs under the financial umbrella of a business school, or to preserve a small classics department on purely educational grounds (as Howard University recently has done) are not available.  The temptation to make the “worldly”, short-term financial decision is just too great.

As Oakeshott puts it, “A university needs to beware of the patronage of this world, or it will find that it has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage; it will find that instead of studying and teaching the languages and the literatures of the world it has become a school for training interpreters, that instead of pursuing science it is engaged in training electrical engineers or industrial chemists, that instead of studying history it is studying the teaching of history for some ulterior purpose, that instead of educating men and women it is training them exactly to fill some niche in society” (103)

So, I applaud Corey’s ingenuity and genuine concern for and commitment to liberal education.  I believe different institutions require different approaches to sustaining liberal education, and approaching the university more as a civil association might be the best response for some.  Other smaller institutions need to embrace their enterprise status and regain a vision of liberal education that will allow them to hold firm in the face of strong pressure to abandon their character.  The expansion of possibilities that opened up to me as an undergraduate, to see the world and myself in such different terms, needs to be available to those who have not been traditionally given the invitation, particularly at the less renowned and less resourced institutions that currently make-up the educational landscape.

[1] Parenthetical references are to Michael Oakeshott’s education essays, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

[2] For a thoughtful example of this last goal, see Ronald Daniels’ What Universities Owe Democracy (Johns Hopkins, 2021).