Stanley Fish on being recently disinvited from speaking at Seton Hall (behind a paywall):
‘Recently I was invited, then disinvited, to speak at Seton Hall University. Members of a faculty committee had decided by email that they didn’t want a university audience to be subjected to views like mine. I had been writing on the emergence on campus of what I call a regime of virtue. this was the first time I experienced it directly.’
A fairly typical pattern: A group of student activists claim that a certain speaker’s views are so dangerous that this speaker cannot be heard.
Many ideologically aligned, sympathetic, or sometimes cowardly, faculty members encourage or endorse these student activists.
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A worthwhile Stanley Fish piece, from many years ago, at the NY Times: ‘The Last Professor:‘
‘In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.
This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”
A few conservative folks have said to me: Whether it be Kant, Mill, Locke or even Isaiah Berlin, conservatism (conserving what is) does not necessarily require a movement towards Continental and rationalist systems of thought.
It’s a trap!
There’s important truth in such a statement, of course, but I don’t think you know quite what you’re up against, here, and who my audience is. I’m looking for anchors.
As posted:
More here.
Link sent in by a reader.
Interesting paper presented by Erika Kiss, beginning about minute 32:00 (the whole conference is likely worth your time for more knowledge on Oakeshott).
According to Kiss, Oakeshott’s non-teleological, non-purposive view of education is potentially a response to Friedrich Hayek, Martha Nussbaum, and Allan Bloom, in the sense that all of these thinkers posit some useful purpose or outcome in getting a liberal education.
Hayek’s profound epistemological attack on rationalist thought is still a system itself, and attaches learning to market-based processes which eventually drive freedom and new thinking in universities. The two are mutually dependent to some extent.
Nussbaum attaches liberal learning to ends such as making us ‘Aristotelian citizens of the world’, or better citizens in a democracy, which has struck me as incomplete at best.
Allan Bloom is profoundly influenced by Straussian neo-classicism, and wants love, classical learning, honor and duty to perhaps be those reasons why a young man or woman should read the classics. This, instead of crass commercialism, the influences of popular music, deconstructionism and logical positivism.
On this site, see: Mark Pennington Via Vimeo: ‘Democracy And The Deliberative Conceit’
A taste of her Nussbaum here. Also, see: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’
Via C-SPAN-The Historical Context Of Allan Bloom
…Timothy Fuller At The New Criterion: ‘The Compensations Of Michael Oakeshott’John Gray At The Literary Review Takes A Look At A New Book On Michael Oakeshott: ‘Last Of The Idealists’