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Why Students Don’t Suffer

The best American colleges students are perhaps the most prepared, accomplished, and engaged students ever with stellar academic accomplishments and active civic engagement.[1] At the same time, they also might be the most frighten and anxious ones, too, being mediated with mood-stabilizing drugs and monitored by compliance offices about what to say and think.[2] This paradox is a reflection of the ever-widening chasm between, on the one hand, the remarkable external achievements of these students and, on the other hand, the paucity of examination about their interior lives, unless it is the therapeutic speech of empowerment and identity politics. Students seemingly move from one achievement to the next without suffering any setbacks in either external affirmations or interior reflection.

In this chapter I will argue that the external achievements and affirmations of students and the lack of self-examination of their interior lives is a result of the university seeing them as commodities and customers rather than human beings who need cultivation. Students consequently see suffering – to be vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded – as a type of personal weakness and moral failing because it does not affirm their external accomplishments. There is to be no discrepancy between the flatness of one’s interior life and the mountain of achievements in the external one. To do so otherwise is tantamount to admitting failure.

The exception to this is identity politics where suffering is acceptable because of one’s race, ethnicity, gender, class, or sexuality and seen as a badge of honor to be expressed in ideological cant. For those students who do not belong to a suspect class, they are expected to acknowledge and share in the suffering of these groups. But instead of generating genuine sympathy and empathy, these students only confirm their meritocratic superiority by publicly acknowledging their moral smugness in being self-aware. Rather than trying to understand the feelings and situations of the less fortunate and undertaking concrete action to help, students resort to ideological and emotive language.

In spite of their best intentions, offices of diversity need to address the problem of suffering in a way to cultivate the interior lives of all students so that they can sympathize and empathize with others. By suffering, I mean the acknowledge of one’s own inadequacy of being dependent upon another person; and by empathy, I mean the understanding and recognition of the feelings and situations of those who are less fortunate. Instead of promoting an ideological agenda, the university, with its administrators, staff, and faculty, should focus on developing the interior lives of their students under the guidance of reason, logic, and evidence. By doing so, students will recognize the gap between their external and interior lives and thereby may recognize that suffering, to sympathize and empathize, is not a sign of powerlessness but the beginning of the path towards wisdom.

Students’ Character

The best college students are excellent test-takers, have impressive resumes, and dutifully fulfill the requirements to receive an A in their classes.[3] They are respectful to authority, accept the ideology of diversity, and are advocates of social justice.[4] They are David Brooks’ “organizational kids” that he had described a generation ago and are the crowning achievement of the American education system in its project to mold students’ characters to be flexible, nonjudgmental, and acquisitive in accumulating various skill sets and ways of knowing. [5] They see themselves as citizens of the world and look forward to participating in a globalized economy where they can live anywhere, perform any task, and make friends with anyone.

Yet students are not motivated by a love or passion of learning for its own sake but rather out of a fear or anxiety of being left behind in a winner-take-all world.[6] A globalized economy has made it more difficult to secure a middle-class lifestyle, the orthodoxy of diversity and groupthink has made it challenging to publicly proclaim otherwise, and the unmooring of knowledge into postmodernism has made it impossible to determine what is precious and valuable, much less what constitutes one’s own self-worth.[7] Formed by a childhood of constant test-taking, scheduled activities, and technological surveillance, today’s students respond by accumulating achievements upon achievements and skill set upon skill set in the effort to steel themselves against to the uncertainty of their future.

In this resume arms race against one another, students are taught that suffering is a sign of weakness: to be vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded are signs of a personal and moral failing. To be left behind in the globalized economy is to be one of life’s losers. Hence, the constant need and continual efforts for external affirmation – whether in social media, academic achievements, or social status – to validate their choices, career paths, and even spouses. Suffering in this sense – to acknowledge dependence upon another person and thereby recognize one’s own inadequacy – is to be squeezed out at all costs in the process of college admission, summer internships, and profitable jobs afterwards.

Paradoxically the refusal to acknowledge one’s own suffering encourages a climate to empathize with the suffering of others, particularly with those who are less privileged. To understand and uphold the legitimacy of the feelings and situations of those less fortunate is to reassure students of their own sense of achievement, status, and superiority in this winner-take-all world. Embolden by the offices of diversity on campus, students engage in identity politics and groupthink not to sympathize with the non-privileged – to recognize that their suffering and experience are the same as theirs – but to confirm their sense of achievement, worth, and place in the world.

Thus, the creation of “safe spaces” and the embedment of the ideology of diversity in university life are well-intended but misguided attempts to cultivate students’ interior lives.[8] These policies are well-intended because they try to address the thoughts and feelings of students who believe themselves to be marginalized on campus, tapping into their interior life so that they, and others, can learn from it. However, these policies are misguided because they substitute ideology and emotivism rather than reason and evidence to access students’ interior lives, thereby making them not individual human beings that one can suffer, sympathize, and empathize with but instead groups capable of mobilization for ideological ends.

This lack of an interior life in students, where they can acknowledge their vulnerabilities and therefore need for others, is the source of their suffering. Raised in a world of relentless external affirmations, today’s students were not allowed the space to grow and develop unnoticed, with the trials, errors, and mistakes that life brings with it. Students live in a persistent state of fear of being noticed and shamed if caught flat-footed. Rather than risking embarrassment and humiliation, students have become nonjudgmental and nice, playing it safe where their interior life is defined and shaped almost exclusively by their external one.

Not surprisingly, the absence of a developed interior life leads students to adopt libertarianism or identity politics.[9] The ideology of libertarianism feeds into students’ beliefs of meritocracy, that they deserve what they have and where they are now because of their own singular achievements, whereas identity politics gives permission to empathize with the non-privileged while, at the same time, implicitly reassure themselves of their own merit and superiority. What is missing is a genuine sense of communal politics where people can openly and civilly acknowledge, discuss, and debate their differences. A place where people can disagree without fear of ad hominin reprisal and see whether a common good could be achieved.

Teachers therefore must find a way to cultivate the interior life of students such that it is not dependent upon external affirmation. They should encourage students to take risks and make mistakes. One way to accomplish this is to have students realize that luck had played as much a role in forming who they are as their own efforts and abilities: their success may have been dependent upon factors beyond their control, thereby raising questions about their earned standing and superiority. And if this were the case, then being vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded may be a trait not to run away from but instead to acknowledge and embrace. It prompts students to recognize their own inadequacies and therefore their own needs for another person.

There are a variety of ways that teachers can attempt to cultivate an interior life with an internal affirmation for students. One is to have students read certain works where authors reflect upon their own interior life: Socrates in Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo; Augustine’s and Rousseau’s Confessions; Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Montaigne’s Essays; the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin, Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank, and Nelson Mandela. These and similar readings can reveal to students the richness, diversity, and importance of an interior life, especially when it does not correspond to the external one. These works can provide a template for how students can reflect on their own lives.

The assignments that teachers can give to their students is another way to prompt students to think about their interiority of their lives. Whether it is journal entries, analytical essays, public presentations, or group projects, these assignments are less about mastery of the material than for students to explore questions that do not have a definitive answer. Teachers consequently should evaluate these assignments with this purpose in mind, the cultivation of an interior life, and allow students to revise their assignments in the hope that they learn there is nothing shameful about making a mistake or taking a risk.

If done properly, seminars, small group activities, and the Socratic Method are wonderful ways to teach students the art of inquiry and disagreement where the virtues of magnanimity, corrigibility, and civility can be learned.[10] In these modes of teachings, students can learn to sympathize and empathize with others in a way where reason, logic, and evidence are the conveyers of feelings, attitudes, and moods.[11] It is a way to show students that insight and wisdom can come by being vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded in a setting of equals.

Finally, within the confines of professional expectations and behavior, teachers should be available to meet with students individually to discuss not only their external achievements but also their interior lives. Sometimes what endures more in a student’s mind is a conversation with his or her teacher rather than the content of what the student had learnt that semester. To be respected and loved and to be taken seriously is what most students want as they try to figure out how to navigate their lives in the university. Whether in the classroom or during office hours, it is impossible to know which moment will have a lasting impact on a student. But if teachers can show to students that their interior life can be as rich, if not more rewarding, than their external one, they have done more than enough to help students see there is more to life than production and consumption.

The Student as Customer

Because of the competitive demands of the globalized economy, students see themselves as customers of the university and are often treated as such by administrators, staff, and faculty.[12] The university is no longer seen as just providing academic knowledge to students but also to beget a social experience with rock climbing walls, computer tablets, and gourmet-style dinning. Education itself is treated as a vocationalized end instead of a lifelong process of inquiry and discovery with universities transforming themselves into brands.[13] Administrators care more about student recruitment and retention than the content of student learning; thus, they spend vast amount of time and resources trying to answer the question that parents and students have when they visit their school, “what am I buying?”

With ever-increasing amounts of debt when they graduate, students are justified in asking whether their time at the university will be worth with the cost.[14] Teachers, especially those in the humanities, are not able to provide a persuasive economic reason when compared to their STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) counterparts and therefore have become obsessed with recruiting students into their programs and retaining the ones they already have.[15] Classes become infomercials to pluck students to their majors. The result is not only a further neglect of the interiority of students’ lives but a reinforcement of seeing them as a customer whose decision-making is driven by economic considerations.

This commodification of the classroom, where students are seen as customers, has been fostered by a culture of assessment and the promotion of technology in teaching. Students are continually assessed in quantitative metrics to confirm students are learning and technology is marketed as a panacea because it accommodates students’ wants in flexible class schedules and their inclinations to use the Internet (i.e., “digital natives”).[16] Teachers therefore are required to assign assessment, often which they have no input into creating, in their classrooms and write reports afterwards to demonstrate that their students are learning.[17] They are also incentivized by administrators with course release-time, monetary compensation, and performance evaluation to incorporate technology into the classroom.[18] Thus, the commodification of the classroom ensures teaching is conducted in standardized, measurable units suitable for technological consumption.

In this environment, students see knowledge as a type of commodity to be packaged and sold rather than a lived experience or enduring wisdom. The classroom is a place to be entertained whether with a professor directly speaking to you or hidden behind a screen online. The relationship between teacher and students–and among students themselves–is seen in contractual. The culture of assessment and the online delivery of knowledge reinforces this customer-service perspective of education because knowledge is presented in discrete measurable units. The messiness of knowledge, the serendipity of discovery, the ineffableness of learning becomes lost in this environment of commodification, quantification, and technological assessment.

The underlying cause for this account of education is many: the increasing power of university accreditation agencies, the transformation of administrators from colleagues to managers, the neoliberal university competing for students and dollars in an era of shrinking state support, the public demand for educational accountability in a period of debt and spiraling costs, the uncritical adulation of the capacity of technology and the culture of Silicon Valley to change education, and a philosophy that believes in the power of number to reveal what is really transpiring in reality.[19] For students, the culture of assessment and technology makes education not a cultivation of their capacity for sympathy and empathy but to harden them for a future life of external affirmation. The culture of assessment, bolstered by a technology that dictates how teaching and learning transpires, purifies education into a sterile exercise of mastery of critical skill sets and ways of knowing.

And when teachers do teach sympathy and empathy in their classroom, it is evaluated by some quantification metric to demonstrate students have learnt. The current culture of assessment and technology do not encourage an environment of introspection, reflection, and self-examination because the quantifiable measurement of these activities fail to reveal wholly and deeply what students experience. The Likert scale cannot capture the complexity of what transpires in the encounter between teacher and students: the teacher’s content and delivery and the students’ reception of it; the personalities and the particular histories of each person on that day; the specific moments of discussions, questions, and conversations; the camaraderie of partaking in a common endeavor; the tedium of fulfilling and evaluating assignments; the process of discovery, curiosity, and reflection. Because these activities and experiences do not conform to the technological design of learning and the quantifiable character of assessment, they do not count. Teachers therefore are pressured to teach in a way to steer students away from the interiority of their lives and to a learning that can be externally sanctioned, measured, and affirmed.

Working within this culture of assessment and technology, teachers can be creative in finding ways to have students reflect upon their character, of how to sympathize and empathize with others unlike them. Teachers can assign content that may challenge students’ sense of meritocracy by showing how chance and serendipity plays an important role in the formation and achievements of people. Certain works – like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, or the film, The Kite Runner – can provide a perspective of how other people live and what are their values are in their interior lives. Teachers can tack on a qualitative assessment in their assignments to prompt students to think and reflect about what they have read. They can encourage discussion, whether in small groups, seminars, or using the Socratic Method, for students to express their view in an environment conducive to reason and civility.

Teachers can also work with other university programs to cultivate sympathy and empathy in students. For example, the invitation of a speaker from the office of diversity into the classroom can followed by an assignment that employs reason, logic, and evidence to analyze the presentation. It would be an opportunity to teach students both a critical skill set and a different perspective that would foster their sympathy and empathy for others unlike them: What were the concerns of the speaker? Are they consistent with one another or contradictory, and how so? What evidence supports the speaker’s claims? What theory or paradigm best accounts for the speaker’s position? Are the solutions proposed feasible and effective or utopian and emotive? How does the speaker’s experiences differ from yours and do these differences account for your divergent opinions? What role does experience play in shaping one’s way to see the world and what is the role of reason in making sense of one’s experience?

Special programs are also another way for teachers to develop students’ sympathy and empathy: internships, study abroad, service-learning, civic engagement, and other outside of the classroom experiences are opportunities for students to be with others unlike themselves and thereby sympathize and empathize with them.[20] However, teachers must cautious about, knowing that the practicality of these programs is often at the cost of their academic rigor. Teachers should aim to blend both academic standards and experiential learning together in the formation of a student’s intellect and sociability while, at the same time, provide assignments that prompt reflection of in his or her interior life.

But if teachers want to cultivate students’ interior lives, they are confronted with the challenge of creating more work for themselves by adding non-quantifiable and non-technological components in their classroom. The chance to do more work without compensation hardly seems like an enticing proposition. Teachers therefore work within their universities to change how assessment is designed so that assessment is part of the classroom exercises rather than being something additional and external to it. Assessment already is taking place in the classroom, as evaluated by the students’ grade. Thus, teachers should be able to use their own evaluations as the assessment of student learning rather than having something externally imposed upon them.

Another approach is to design assessment so that it is flexible enough to accommodate the variety of contents and the multiplicity of its delivery in the classroom (e.g., qualitative, quantitative, technological, non-technological). There should not be a one-size-fits-all approach to assessment such that it drives what and how is being taught; instead, the assessment should be a template that permits a multitude of ways to teach and evaluate. This way the dual approach of assessment and grades as separate activities in the classroom is erased and become one and the same.

The Student as Data

The credentialization of knowledge by university accreditors is one of the primary drivers in the standardization of knowledge and the growth of administrators and staff.[21] To be certified by these accreditors is to have access to the federal government’s financial loans so students can borrow in order to pay for school. The traditional division of supervising universities – the federal government monitors issues of financial support and access, the states focus on consumer protection, and accreditors examine educational quality – has changed with the federal and state governments relinquishing their responsibilities to accreditors.

Accreditors now include access and consumer protection in their mission to see whether universities are ensuring equal access to all types of individuals and groups for an education and to see whether students are learning.[22] These two responsibilities are amendable to metrics of quantification by examining how students received financial support and default on their loans, how many students are retained and graduate, how many students are employed after graduation and how much they make afterwards. The outcomes especially for student learning have changed from qualitative, peer-review self-studies to corporate documents of strategic mission statements, branding, and numerical data. Universities are now accountable to these metrics with poorer outcomes interpreted as a sign of failure rather than a baseline from which the institution should improve.[23]

Quality of education consequently is defined in the metrics of student retention and postgraduate salaries rather than evaluations of student character and reflections about life. These metrics assert themselves even more today because in the age of technology information is more available. Data, as the numerical assignment and valuing of reality, has the illusion of being objective and transparent.[24] It is therefore a valuable commodity by which accreditors, administrators, teachers, and students evaluate themselves. Those experiences, activities, and moments not amendable to the pre-set standardized categories of evaluations are ignored. It is no wonder that the university is governed by the metrics of external affirmation because of the ease and attractiveness of data that accreditors use to see whether an educational institute has succeeded or failed.

The power of data resides in its apparent objectivity, an attractiveness that is especially appealing in democratic societies where, according to Tocqueville, individuals believe that everyone has an equal right to understand reality for him- or herself.[25] In democratic societies, each individual relies upon his or her own judgment to make decisions and reduces everything to its practical or utilitarian value: to “accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better.”[26] But because everyone is equal to one another in democratic society, no one is certain that his or her judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus dominated by the majority.

Data is the crystallization of democratic judgment because nobody can object to it: it is objective, transparent, and universally accessible. Data therefore is employed to evaluate university access, faculty scholarship, student learning, and other educational functions. But the assumptions behind the creation and reception of data require examination, for data is a type of scientism, an ideology that assumes the fact-value distinction where facts are derived only from the scientific-technological method and values are products of only subjective prejudice.[27] On the one hand, knowledge is restricted to realities that conform to the scientific-technological method because this process is objective, valid, and universal; on the other hand, any realities outside of this method is an illegitimate form of knowledge because it is unscientific. The use of data by accreditors, universities, teachers, and students is to de-legitimate a whole set of experiences and knowledge that cannot be standardized or quantified in a pre-given way.

Now there is nothing wrong with data as long as it is recognized as one way of evaluation among many.[28] The problem today is that data is the only way to evaluate anything in education. This not only neglects a valuable body of knowledge and experiences, particularly those who are needed for cultivating sympathy and empathy, but also has several potential negative consequences. Muller lists a number of these problems, such as goal displacement through diversion of effort to what gets measure; the promotion of short-termism and the discouragement of risk-tasking and innovation; the cost in people’s time to compile data; and the diminishment of cooperation and common purpose in the university where reward is based on individualized measured performance.[29] Rather than cooperation and teamwork, competition and rivalry become the driving motivation for people.

The university’s demand for more data also changes the nature and purpose of teaching from the cultivation of the interiority of a student’s intellect and character to the mastery of measurable performances of skill sets. Students therefore see education as a series of competencies to be conquered before graduation and a career; teachers view their vocation in term of citation indexes and student evaluation scores; and administrators conceive of the university as a store to placate student consumers, manage teacher employees, and appease the accreditor board.[30] The university has become like any other business in the United States governed to maximum growth, minimize liability, and motivated by profit.

There are no immediate practical solutions to this present state of American higher education. Accreditors and administrators are too entrenched in the power while students and teachers implicitly agree with this arrangement so as long as students pass their courses and teachers are mostly left alone. The university has become the preparatory grounds for students to succeed in a globalized economy where things are quantified, standardized, and externally sanctioned. The interior life of the students, their character and the cultivation of sympathy and empathy, is absent in this world because it cannot be measured.

Student Knowledge

A broader conversation about the purpose of university education is required to shift from the paradigm of data, external affirmation, and the globalized economy to one of judgment, the interior life, and the humane world of sympathy and empathy.[31] There are some programs, colleges, and universities where this transpires, but a societal shift, if one were to occur, will take several generations and therefore calls for patience and perseverance. Nonetheless, conversations about how to transform the university can be made now, planting the seeds for a different perspective about the nature and purpose of higher education in the future.

Cases have been made about changing the university to be more aligned with the cultivation of the interior life but they have little traction in today’s public conversations. For instance, the appeals to tradition and the arguments about the inherent value of liberal education are akin to religious belief because they are only persuasive if one already agrees with them.[32] And other arguments about teaching students critical skill sets and civic engagement only reinforces the life of external affirmations.[33]

One possible way to promote the cultivation of the interior life as part of the primary purpose of education is talk about the need to develop students’ prudence.[34] Adopting an Aristotelian account of prudence, I would define the virtue as both theoretical and practical reasoning that demands one to be flexible in his or her pursuit of moral virtue without collapsing into cynical calculation or abstract speculation. Teaching students prudence would require the academic rigor of the classroom and experiential activities outside it where students learn how theoretical and practical reality intersect. Students would learn how their interior lives do not always comport with their external ones and this is not necessarily a bad thing but a basic part of the human condition.

Such a disconnect can lead students to reflect why this is the case and how others have confronted this situation, thereby leading them to conclude that suffering, to recognize and acknowledge one’s own inadequacy and dependency on others, is the beginning path towards wisdom. It also would make students to see that the suffering of others, especially those who are less fortunate, is a matter of chance rather than a moral failing. To sympathize and empathize with others is to build one’s interior life

As a societal institution, universities are uniquely situated to teach students prudence. Unlike business, where theoretical reason is in service of practical aims, or the liberal arts school, where practical reason is neglected for theory, the university can value both theoretical and practical reason equally, even when they are at times in conflict with each other.[35] By navigating between the extremes of the business and the liberal arts school, the university can teach students how to reason both theoretically and practically. Such a case about the nature and purpose of education would satisfy those who are only concerned about utility and those who only care about theory. The university fulfills both needs and, in the process, providing external and internal affirmations for students.

How a paradigm of prudence be implemented in universities would depend upon the type of institution. For example, religious institutions may focus on theological beliefs in the formation of their students, while public institutions may make a civic and democratic engagement their primary mission.[36] Just as there is a diversity of universities in the United States there is a multitude of ways that prudence can be realized, as long as theoretical and practical reason are both taught. Hopefully over time accreditors would recognize that educational quality can be defined in numerous, non-numerical ways.

A paradigm of prudence provides an opportunity for universities to think about their mission and can serve as a unifying idea to cohere its activities of teaching, scholarship, and service. It forces universities to determine the proper balance between theoretical and practical reasoning in its curriculum for students, the type of scholarship it wants its faculty to produce, and the kind of service it wants its members to engage. The paradigm of prudence makes possible this type of conversation within the university and demonstrates its value to the public. It may not stop today’s questioning of the value of the American university but it at least offers a response that allow the cultivation of the interior lives of students while, at the same, provide them opportunities of external affirmation.[37]

The character of today’s student, the power of accreditors, and the predominance of data metrics have yielded a world where the cultivation and expression of the interior life is seen as a sign of personal weakness and moral failing. To be vulnerable, exposed, and unguarded; to admit about one’s own inadequacies and dependency upon others; and to empathize with those less fortunate are experiences and expressions that resist quantification and standardization and therefore are not encouraged, unless for ideological reasons of diversity or the reinforcement of the belief of one’s own meritocratic superiority. Students today do not want to suffer – they do not want to sympathize and empathize in a genuine and humane way – and so they pursue a career defined by the external affirmations of money, status, and power and less able to reflect upon the meaning of life and the care for others, refusing to be open to the messiness of life, with all its glory and horror.

 

Notes

[1] I would like to thank Richard Avramenko, the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Saginaw Valley State University for supporting my sabbatical which enabled me to write this chapter.

[2] This characterization does not apply to all American college students but, as we will see below, it is a reflection of what is occurring on most college campuses today.

[3] W. Deresiewicz (2014) Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press). For a view that disagrees, see D. Bok (2006) Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton: Princeton University Press) and R. Arum and J. Roksa (2011) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

[4] F. Furedi (2016) What’s Happened to the University? A Sociological Exploration of Its Infanilisation (New York: Routledge); M. Rectenwalk (2018) Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage (Nashville, TN: New England Review Press).

[5]D. Brooks (2001) “The Organizational Kid,” The Atlantic, April. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-organization-kid/302164/.

[6] R. Srigley (2015) “Dear Parents: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son’s and Daughter’s University But Don’t,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 December. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dear-parents-everything-you-need-to-know-about-your-son-and-daughters-university-but-dont/; G. Lukianoff and J. Haidt (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin); B. Denizet-Lewis (2017) “Why are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety,” New York Times, October 11. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-american-teenagers-than-ever-suffering-from-severe-anxiety.html.

[7] D. Brook (2007) The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All-America (New York: Times Books); F. Furedi (2016) What’s Happened to the University?; M. Rectenwalk (2018) Springtime for Snowflakes.

[8] W. B. Michaels (2006) The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Dallas: Metropolitan); J. H. McWhorter, (2015) “Closed Minds on Campus,” Wall Street Journal, 27 November. Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/closed-minds-on-campus-1448634626; F. Furedi (2016) What’s Happened to the University? B. Ginsberg (2017) “The Unholy Alliance of College Administrators and Left-Liberal Activists,” Modern Age, 59/3, 17-27; M. Bauerlin (2017) “The Bad Faith of the Professors,” Modern Age 59/3, 49-60; M. Rectenwalk (2018) Springtime for Snowflakes.

[9] P. Wood (2014) “Libertarian vs. Progressives: The New Campus Divide,” Minding the Campus: Reforming Our University, November 30. Available at https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2014/11/30/libertarians-vs-progressives-the-new-campus-divide/; W. Egginton (2018) The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses (London: Bloomsbury).

[10] D. Hess (2009). Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion (New York: Routledge); D. E. Hess and P. McAvoy (2015) The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (New York: Routledge); L. Trepanier (2017) The Socratic Method Today: Student-Centered and Transformative Teaching in Political Science (New York: Routledge); S. Yaylaci and E. Beauvais (2017) “The Role of Social Group Membership on Classroom Participation,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 559-64.

[11] Specific examples can be found in and J. von Heyking and L. Trepanier (2012) Teaching in an Age of Ideology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books) and L. Trepanier (2012) The Liberal Arts in America (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press).

[12] D. Bok (2003) Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press); C. Newfield (2016) The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press); L. Bunce, A. Baird, S. E. Jones, (2017) “The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and its Effect on Academic Performance,” Studies in Higher Education 40/11: 1958-78.

[13] B. Ansell and J. Gingrich (2017) “Mismatch: University’s Education and Labor Market Institutions” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 423-25; L. Graf and J. W. Powell (2017) “How Employer Interests and Investments Shape Advanced Skill Formation,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 418-22.

[14] W. Zumeta, D. W. Brenman, P M. Callahn, J. E. Finney (2012) Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press); J. Best and E. Best (2014) The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press); C. Eaton (2017) “Still Public: State Universities and America’s New Student-Debt Coalitions,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50/2, 408-12.

[15] L. Trepanier (2017) Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books).

[16] J. Palfrey and U. Gasser (2008) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books); L. Trepanier (2008) Technology, Science, and Democracy (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press).

[17] L. Suskie (2010) “Why Are We Assessing?” Inside Higher Ed, October 26. Available at https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/10/26/why-are-we-assessing.

[18] R. M. Palloff and K. Pratt (2011). Excellent Online Instructor Strategies for Professional Development (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley).

[19] A. Hacker and C. Dreifu (2010) Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About (New York: Times Book); N. S. Riley (2011) The Faculty Lounges, and Other Reasons, Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid for (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee); M. C. Taylor (2010) Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (New York: Kopf); W. Zumeta (2012) Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization; J. Best (2014) The Student Loan Mess; S. R. Gallagher (2016) The Future of University Credentials: New Development at the Intersection of Higher Education and Hiring (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); B. Caplan (2018) The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press); R. Kelchen (2018) Higher Education Accountability (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press); S. D. Phillips and K. Kisner, eds. (2018) Accreditation on the Edge: Challenging Quality Assurance in Higher Education (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press).

[20] R. Zemsky, G. R. Wegner, and A. J. Duffield (2018) Making Sense of the College Curriculum: Faculty Stories, Conflict, and Accommodation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

[21] R. Kelchen (2018) Higher Education Accountability; S. D. Phillips (2018) Accreditation on the Edge.

[22] S. R. Gallagher (2016) The Future of University Credentials.

[23] J. Z. Muller (2018) The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 67-88.

[24] L. Floridi (2014) The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press); D. Beer (2016). Metric Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan); C. N. Davidson (2017) The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books).

[25] L. Trepanier (2011) “Tocqueville, Weber, and Democracy: The Condition of Equality and the Possibility of Charisma in America” in L. Trepanier, ed. Political Rhetoric and Leadership in Democracy (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press, 2011), 22-48.

[26] A. d. Tocqueville (1990) Democracy in America Volume 2, Phillips Bradley, trans. (New York: Vintage Classics), 3.

[27] L. Trepanier (2008) “The Recovery of Science in Eric Voegelin’s Thought,” in Lee Trepanier, ed. Technology, Science, and Democracy (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press), 44-54.

[28] Muller provides a checklist to see whether one should use data and how to use it to evaluate performance. The checklist includes questions like “What kind of data are you thinking of measuring?”, “How useful is the data?”, “How useful is more data?”, “What are the costs of not relying upon data?”, “To what purposes will data be put: to whom will the information be made transparent?”, “What are the costs of acquiring the data?”, and “How and by whom is data developed?” Muller warns that even the best data are subject to corruption or goal displacement and that “recognizing the limits of the possible is the beginning of wisdom” (182). See J. Z. Mueller, The Tyranny of Metrics, 175-83.

[29] Ibid., 169-74.

[30] B. Ginsberg (2011) The Fall of Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press); W. G. Bowen and E. M. Tobin (2015) Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press); T. Kaufman-Osborn (2017) “Disenchanted Professionals: The Politics of Faculty Governance in the Neoliberal Academy,” Perspectives on Politics 15/1, 100-15; R. Srigley (2018) “Whose University is It Anyway?” Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 February. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whose-university-is-it-anyway/#!.

[31] For more about the history of higher education in the United States, see P. H. Mattingly (2017) America Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) and see L. Trepanier (2013) “A Philosophy of Prudence and the Purpose of Higher Education Today,” in T. Simpson, ed. The Relevance of Higher Education (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 1-23.

[32] J. O. Freedman (2003) Liberal Education and the Public Interest (Iowa, IA: University of Iowa Press); M. Nussbaum (1997) Cultivating Humanities: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) and (2010) Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press); D. N. Levine (2006) Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); A. Kronman (2008) Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); M. W. Roche (2010) Why Choose the Liberal Arts (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2010); L. Trepanier (2009) The Democratic Discourse of Liberal Education (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press).

[33] M. Spelling (2006) A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education). Available at http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/pre-pub-report.pdf; B. Ansell (2017) “Mismatch: University’s Education and Labor Market Institutions”; L. Graf (2017) “How Employer Interests and Investments Shape Advanced Skill Formation.”

[34] For more about this paradigm, Aristotle’s definition of prudence, and how to implement in the university, see L. Trepanier (2013) “A Philosophy of Prudence and the Purpose of Higher Education Today.”

[35] L. Trepanier (2013) “A Philosophy of Prudence and the Purpose of Higher Education Today.”

[36] G. Moreno-Riano, P. Hamilton, L. Trepanier, “Statesmanship and Democracy in a Global and Comparative Context,” in L. Trepanier, ed. The Liberal Arts in America (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press, 2012), 128-48 and “Teaching the American Political Tradition in a Global Context,” in L. Trepanier, ed. The Liberal Arts in America (Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah University Press, 2012), 149-66.

[37] Some recent examples of criticism of the university are A. Hacker (2010) Higher Education?; N. S. Riley (2011) The Faculty Lounges; M. C. Taylor (2010) Crisis on Campus; B. Caplan (2018) The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

 

This is a chapter from Suffering and the Intelligence of Love in the Teaching Life: In Light and In Darkness (Palgrave, 2019).

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Lee Trepanier is Chair and Professor of the Political Science Department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and former editor-in-chief of VoegelinView (2016-21). He is author and editor of several books and editor of Lexington Books series Politics, Literature, and Film (2013-present).

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