(il)liberal futures

Donald Kagan, Yale’s don of classical history, delivered his departing lecture, in New Haven, on April 25. The lecture, about liberal education’s precipitous decline, was republished as an essay in the New Criterion, a conservative review. Kagan’s critique harkens back to several decades of scholarly debate over the Western canon, its historical importance, and its contemporary relevance. Kagan’s conclusions, which propose a universal, if exclusionary, epistemology of liberal thought, merit a thorough, progressive response:

Traditional beliefs, however, are not replaced by a different set of values resting on different traditions. Instead, I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but also the world was born yesterday, a feeling that they are attached to the society in which they live only incidentally and accidentally. Having little or no sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that nothing is possible. They are inclined to see other people’s values as mere prejudices, one no better than another, while viewing their own as entirely valid, for they see themselves as autonomous entities entitled to be free from interference by society and from obligation to it.

The decline of education–of liberalism, of the humanities, and of educational opportunity–appears a fashionable subject, and one which liberal scholars, of all political stripes, have recently pondered. Leon Wieseltier, warning recent Brandeis graduates of the ponderous allure of “technologism,” cautions, “[o]ur reason [for knowledge] has become an instrumental reason.” Louis Menand, too, observes a quantitative decline in American participation in the humanities, suggesting a narrowing of the scope, receipt, and impact of liberal education.

I will accept, on its face, Kagan’s assertion of liberal education’s–and, to a degree, liberalism’s–dismal future. His diagnosis, however, is wanting, and bears further critique. First, consider Kagan’s assessment of liberal education’s purpose, which undergirds an epistemology of liberalism–that is, which knowledge is liberal, and which furthers the goals, purposes, and qualities of contemporary civilization? Adopting a classical mode, Kagan offers four functions of the liberal education: in the first, he describes liberal education as a self-contained virtue; in the second, as a didactic tool, through which we strengthen social character; in the third, as a platform for professional advancement; and, lastly, in the fourth, “to contribute to the individual citizen’s freedom in…society.” While medieval, Renaissance, and post-Enlightenment theorists reframed education’s liberal functions, the classical world’s four-part typology persisted.

For Kagan, the interdependence of the common curriculum, a pedagogical element, and a polymathic faculty, a professional one, shaped liberal education’s historical evolution. Both characteristics of the university, operating in imperfect tandem, defined the liberal system’s unwavering aspiration for “universal knowledge,” which diffuses common values, culture, and manner throughout, and within, generations. Under Kagan’s conservative epistemology of liberalism, the university’s over-reliance on “research,” rather than virtue, and individualism, rather than universalism, has unraveled the system’s cultural strength.

Kagan’s is a familiar trope, and its assault on the perceived relativism of the university, its morality, and its methods is well-rebutted. Freedom, Kagan suggests, is the liberal education’s missing virtue, and the university’s cultural void. This concern is ubiquitous, but likely underdeveloped. Contra Kagan’s classical forebears, a liberal education should serve two, interdependent roles: a vertical function, which improves the moral virtue of a democratic society; and, a horizontal function, which broadens the society’s moral education. The latter, in an important sense, defines the former, as the betterment of society, writ large, depends on society’s broad, common exposure to liberalism’s complex, moral character. Education’s crisis of freedom, therefore, rests on a crisis of fairness, which renders moot liberalism’s cultural, social, and political advantage in a democratic society.