A Philosophy of Prudence and the Purpose of Higher Education Today (Part I)
Since the beginning of this century, there have emerged several books that have spoken about the crisis in American higher education.1 However, what this crisis is and how do institutions best address it remains uncertain. For example, some critics have followed the concerns laid out in the Spellings Commission’s 2006 Report, A Test of Leadership, that find the American workforce is increasingly ill-prepared for a globalized “knowledge economy” because of the marginalization of undergraduate learning in American colleges and universities.2 Books such as Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education confirm these fears that American higher education is not providing the requisite skills for a twentieth-first century workforce: faculty indulge their passion for specialized research, students are preoccupied with their social lives, and administrators and staff support every perceived need and interest of both faculty and students but have no coherent idea about the essential mission of higher education.3 Adopting an economic utilitarian approach to American higher education – the purpose and relevancy of colleges and universities is prepare students to become economically productive actors – these critics see the crisis confronting higher education institutions as their inability to deliver the requisite skills for the United States to remain competitive in a globalized economy.
Another and entirely different set of concerns about American higher education is the erosion of the liberal education curriculum. Books like Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Why Choose the Liberal Arts, and Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life defend the need of liberal education in a world that is increasingly being defined by economic utility.4 Although these authors differ in their reasons as to why liberal education is essential to American higher education – preparing students for democratic citizenship, instilling a morality of secular humanism, or giving young people the critical skills needed for an ever-changing workforce – they all agree that liberal education, particularly the humanities, should return to the center of college’s and universities’ curriculum – a similar argument that was made a quarter century ago in Allan Bloom’s Closing the American Mind.5
Besides these two groups, there also have emerged another set of critics that have focused on the organizational and administrative issues of American higher education institutions. Mark Taylor, for instance, sees faculty specialization in arcane scholarship as the source of the marginalization of undergraduate teaching in colleges and universities. His solution is to end tenure, restructure departments for interdisciplinary studies, and embrace technology to connect students worldwide.6 Naomi Schaefer Riley is also of the same mind with Taylor in ending tenure as a way for faculty to return back to teaching as their primary mission.7 Motivated by the recognition of their peers in publications rather than how well they teach their students, faculty give priority to scholarship and pay little attention to teaching. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifu agree with Riley and Taylor that teaching is marginalized but they believe that the cause of this problem is the lack of student access to higher education and the present inequalities in resources that exist among institutions.8 Their answer is to look at those institutions that exhibit what they deem to be best practices as potential models for other colleges and universities to emulate.
It is clear from these critics that a crisis exists in American higher education, but there is no agreement about the nature of this crisis and how to address it. Perhaps another way to approach this problem is to ask how American colleges and universities are relevant to society, as this appear to be the underlying concern among these authors. What should be the role, mission, or relevance of American higher education institutions for society: should it to make our students economically productive actors, democratic citizens, or morally-informed people? And once this mission is determined, how should it be implemented? Are certain institutions, such as research universities or small liberal art colleges, better prepared for this mission than other types of institutions?
I propose that the primary mission of American higher education should be to cultivate the character and practice of Aristotelian prudence. Among the various functions that higher education institutions can serve, the cultivation of prudence is uniquely suited for American colleges and universities. Prudence provides a bridge not only between theoretical and practical reasoning for students, but it also can combine the traditional activities of the university – teaching, research, and public service – into a coherent mission that makes colleges and universities relevant to society. In a certain sense, prudence has always played a critical role in the mission of American higher education since the inception of the republic. Although never explicitly articulated, prudence is required not only for the development of democratic citizens, which was the primary concern of American colleges and universities in the nineteenth century, but also for these institutions to fulfill their public service role as that became increasingly prominent in the twentieth.
Notes
1. I want to thank The Political Science Reviewer for granting me and Lexington Books the right to republish this article in this volume.
2. Margaret Spellings, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, September 2006). Available at http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/pre-pub-report.pdf
3. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. H. Hersh’s We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education (Houndmill, Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011).
4. Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Mark William Roche, Why Choose the Liberal Arts (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2010); Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
5. Allan Bloom, Closing the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Although Bloom defended liberal education, his reasons were different than Kronman’s, Roche’s, and Nussbaum’s. For Bloom, liberal education was reserved for the intellectually-gifted few rather than to serve the many in democratic society.
6. Mark Taylor, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (New York: Knopf, 2010).
7. Naomi Schaefer Riley, The Faculty Lounges, and Other Reasons, Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid for (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2011).
8. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifu, Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About (New York: Times Book, 2010).