Why Students Don’t Suffer (Part IV)
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.