RN Nursing Club Members Laura Beattie, Zoe Spyralatos, and Carrie Ludwig selling baked good to support the Roswell Park Breast Cancer Resource Center

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself as the newly elected President of the Trocaire College Student Association. My name is Amanda Tredinnick. I am a full-time third semester RN student. I am also a mother of two, and I work in the Palisano Learning Center as a Peer Tutor for Med Essentials 1 & 2. I am very excited to have been elected into this position, and I look forward to working my hardest to represent the students’ voices at Trocaire. 

There have been some changes in officer positions for this year, but the majority of the students elected last year are still on the board. 

The officers are listed as: 

President: Amanda Tredinnick 

Vice President: Lila Ahmed 

Vice President: Chris Kopera 

Vice President: Lakeisha Page 

Secretary: JoAnne Batugowski 

Secretary: Kimberly McQueary 

Treasurer: Jessica Brown 

We also have several students that are going to be representatives for their title, such as an Evening Student Rep, Multi-cultural Rep, Traditional Student Rep, Non-Traditional Student Rep and even a Single Parent Rep. We even have reps for our Transit Road location, The Russell J. Salvatore School of Hospitality & Business. 

Some of our officers will have their picture taken and posted on the TV screens in the Trocaire hallways by the front door as well as the cafeteria. This way, we can be better identified for students or faculty. 

There are several issues that we plan on addressing and hopefully resolving this year as well as some fun activities planned. Just a few are: 

• IT and Computer Issues
• Parking at Lorraine Academy Elementary
• Smoking & The Grounds
• Better communication of upcoming events and changes at the school

There are some exciting activities coming up for students to take full advantage of… 

• We had our Student Association Dance at the Pearl Street Grill on November 20th. Food, Dancing, and basket raffles made for a wonderful evening.

• There are plans to have more free lunches provided by Student Activities

• A Family Appreciation Day. Fun for the whole family!!!!

Trocaire Student Association Meetings are held once a month and are open for any student to attend. There will be fliers posted around the campus as well as notices sent out online and posted on the TV’s in the hallways. 

I hope that we can all work together to make this a great and successful year. 

Thanks,
Amanda Tredinnick – Student Association President

Expanding Academic Activities

The expansion of Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi includes planning for the development of international standard tertiary care facilities in a number of fields, including cardiology and oncology.
Photo: Gary Otte

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The University is also moving ahead with plans to become a comprehensive centre for learning with the construction of a new campus for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). This new campus, to be located on 1,100 acres on the outskirts of Karachi, will offer a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, from archaeology to quantum physics, from music to South Asian history. In the first phase, FAS will enrol 1,500 undergraduate and 100 postgraduate students.

In East Africa, a new US$ 250 million Faculty of Health Sciences is being built in Nairobi. A second campus, in Arusha, Tanzania will augment the University’s medical and educational development programmes in the region with an expansion of academic programmes in the liberal arts. The Arusha and Nairobi projects of the Aga Khan University together represent a US$ 700 million investment in tertiary education in East Africa.

Read detail at AKDN Spotlights

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The new housing brochures arrived today! Housing packets have been delivered to the mailroom and should be in mail boxes next week.

And just when things couldn’t get any better, Bill from Wingra stopped by the Admissions Office with free ice cream (thanks, Bill!).

The admissions staff put together 600 housing packets today. If you’ve been admitted to Edgewood College for Fall 2010… yours should be in your mailbox soon!

Full post here.

“…in the days when, to get a Ph.D., you had to study Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old French, and linguistics, on the notion that they served as a kind of hard-core scientific basis for literary study.”

and of the New Criticism he says:

“I’ve been skeptical from the beginning of attempts to show that for hundreds of years people have missed the real point,”

Did literature professors at one point have something more substantive to teach?

In a broader context, hasn’t the Western mind has shifted to “science,” instead of God as a deepest idea, and so too isn’t literature a part of this shift?

As Richard Rorty sees it, no standard objective for truth exists but for the interpretation of a few philosophers interpreting whatever of philosophy they’ve read.  It’s all just an author’s “stuff.”  Here’s an excerpt discussing the debate between him and Hilary Putnam:

What would be a good way to teach literature, anyways…letting the people who know most about it go forth?

Addition:  Western mind shifted to “science?”…well as for poetry T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens had some fairly profound religious influences.

See Also: Should You Bother To Get A Liberal Arts Education? From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

From the home office in Ebenezer, New York- The top five reasons “You know that you don’t have enough money”:

5. You’ve been walking back and forth to Trocaire for so long that you wore out your shoes and put a hole in your socks.

4. You cannot afford the latest 3G phone with 100,000 apps – the old landline phone will have to do.

3. You cannot afford a monthly manicure – you will have to do your own nails.

2. You cannot afford to go to this year’s Kissmas Bash Concert – you’ll have to listen to music on your parents’ record player.

1. You cannot afford your 2-cup-a-day cappuccino habit – you only have enough money for 1 regular cup of coffee per month.

Now that I have your attention, below are some helpful tips on setting up a budget:

Step 1  Access Your Finances

How much money do you have? How much money can you make at your job while in college? How much are your parents willing to give to you?  In other words, what is the total amount of money that you have available for use.

Step 2   Set Your Goals

In order for you to budget your money, you must decide what your financial goals are.  If you simply want to get by, you may be able to do that without any sacrifice.  But if you plan on a major purchase such as a used car or spring break vacation, you may need to take a different approach to reach your goals. Start by making a list of your short range and long term goals.

Step 3   Access and Prioritize Your Expenditures

The last step in creating your budget is to analyze your assets and expenditures to figure out how you can have it all, or how to eliminate what’s not necessary.  If you need to make some cuts, think about things you can cut back on: i.e., is a cappuccino a day necessary or can I have it once a week?   How much do I spend going out to the clubs? Can I cut back to going out once a month?

To recap, in making up your budget, the total amount of money available to you minus what you spend should be equal. Anything left over is called your discretionary funds. This is the money that you can put into the bank or spend depending on the goals you have set in step two.

Stop by the Trocaire College Financial Aid Office and see me.  We have some great handouts, or I can be available to you if you would like some assistance in setting up your budget.

-David Schwab, Default Manager/Financial Aid Assistant

or How to Break Big News to Your Parents

Max

Max is a freshman business major at a Big Ten East Coast college. He wanted to be a business major and said he’d probably double major in accounting and economics. For years, some of his heroes have been titans of business. He had it all planned out and his parents, that would be Mike and me, were on board.

 Recently, I received a text from Max, asking me the names of some of the “famous” people I used to work with at the major investment bank where I spent 18 formative years of my life: Mildly surprised at the question I quickly (for me) texted him back an answer and a flurry of texts flew back and forth.

 It turns out Max was writing a paper for his English class and part of it is about me. I’m flattered he even remembers what I used to do in myhigh flying career that occurred mostly when he was just a little boy. He asks me if I’d be willing to read it for accuracy.

“Of course,” I say.

So I wait for the email to arrive.

And wait.

And wait.

It arrives in my in-box at 1:30 a.m. in its entirety, long after I’ve gone to bed.

How do you take your tea?

 I sit down with a morning cup of tea and begin to read. With his permission, I’ve reprinted parts of it here. Remember, to know Max, a charming rogue of a young man, is to love him.

 The paper begins with both truth and humor (and I might add the family we are with is Mike’s side) , always a compelling mix.

 “Not too long ago my extended family gathered for a small barbecue. No other activity can so deftly combine the great facets of life: conversation, alcohol, and meat. I have tackled numerous topics over the years with my family at these culinary functions and luckily have only just begun to indulge in the second facet, which hopefully indicates I may have retained some of these lessons for life. As we met up for the last time before my cousin and I headed off to college my aunts and uncles tried to leave us with as much information as they could think of to motivate us in our search for knowledge and hopefully a marketable degree. The overarching commonality between the advice of the degrees present, “I am doing nothing at all related to the degree I earned at University. My main strength was my ability to communicate and that got me to where I am today.”

            I am used to taking family advice with a grain of salt, if not because of the sometimes-inebriated state of advice around the kitchen, than because I generally don’t see myself walking directly in the footsteps of my elders. This conversation really got me to thinking though: Why am I here, in a Liberal Arts program?

           Since I was first weaned on “Pat and Matt” books in a summer camp before I entered Kindergarten I have been blessed with the ability to read and an appetite for books that I seldom saw in other students I matriculated with. This seemingly basic ability has allowed me to excel in and develop my favorite subjects, namely history and English. A broad base of literature has allowed me to rise through school with what I think is relevant knowledge and a knack for communication that helps me every day. My mother calls it the gift of bullshit.”

 It segues into a description of what I used to do, talks about how ‘self-directed’ liberal arts majors need to be to succeed, then he compares today’s students, business versus liberal arts. He constructs intelligent comparisons and presents compelling analysis. Wow. And this is our son.

 I read the last two paragraphs, by this time glowing with pride at what I thought was a really well-thought-out and well-written paper:

 “No true American student should ever be unable to identify Omaha Beach (my roommates), or Aristotle (fellow English student), or where Germany is on a map (strike two for my roommates). Basic foundations and ideas are all well and good, but we must stick it to Liberal Arts majors to go beyond the call of just squeaking by and graduating with “some degree” to go on to “some job”. The fire and passion of Aristotle is gone from all but a few classrooms in today’s university system, and those classes are run by teachers today’s college students think are too hard and sometimes wholly Satanic for assigning more than just the most basic of papers. We must give those few educators the power to create more brilliant minds and that means giving them quality raw material to work with.

I entered “Big Ten School” with the intent on majoring in Accounting. I thought my understanding of business and markets uniquely suited me to a business degree. As economic events continued to unfold, however, I became more and more disenchanted with the profit-driven focus of business and public outcry against those whom I thought were the geniuses of our time. Instead, I’ve changed my focus and switched into the College of the Liberal Arts. I hope to earn a major in History and satisfy my own quest for knowledge of something bigger than fleeting business tactics and ephemeral stock market transactions.”

  . . .and then it sinks in. 

History. . . History? Max changed his major to history? Did he tell me that and I don’t remember? He will say that I just don’t remember; that he did tell me he changed majors, no big deal. And for a split second I’ll believe him, knowing that I’m middle aged and sometimes can’t remember what I had for breakfast let alone what he told me a week ago. But then I’ll remember that I’m talking to Max, Mr. Smooth, and I’ll know that the first time I heard it I read it in his paper.

My favorite professor on campus is Renee Gouaux, who works in the Art Department. Professor Gouaux teaches classes such as Sculpture and 3D Design. The thing I love most about Renee is that she is always up for a good conversation and she loves to laugh. Some of the best moments during class are the times when Renee is about to tell a story and can’t seem to stop laughing. No matter what kind of mood you’re in, those moments are guaranteed to make you smile, if not bust out laughing with her. She has tons of great stories and is always really animated while telling them.

Renee is also really flexible, understanding, and has a happy-go-lucky attitude. She’s open to new ideas and allows her students to assist her in creating or modifying class projects. She relates to her students well and there is a very down to earth quality to her. She’s easy to talk to whether it’s class-related or not.

She expects good, thoughtful work and always goes out of her way to make sure her students have necessary materials and are comfortable with assignments and class activities. Renee also seems to like her students to be open-minded and try out new things. Some of the most interesting art projects I’ve ever created have been in Renee’s class, such as a cardboard chair or a dress made completely out of recycled materials.

I haven’t received written feedback yet on Tina Pippin’s class blog, The Bible and Human Rights in Atlanta, but after speaking briefly with her on the phone, I’m even more excited to see it! I asked on the evaluation if students thought they would refer to the class blog after the course ends and Tina said they asked in class if they could continue using it! This feedback is especially surprising because the class overall seemed pretty resistant to blogging in the beginning.

She also said that the blog represents how honest students were this semester. Instead of writing what they thought the professor wanted to hear, they seemed to speak directly and honestly about their thought processes and beliefs. Isn’t that what every professor actually wants? To me, that honesty and willingness to explore and express ideas is what a liberal arts education should be about!

One success I see in this particular class blog is that it made transformations students experienced visible to those of us outside the course. One student in particular wrote a post about her transformation that gave me chills. Her screen name is enough to communicate the resistance she felt to the blog and course in the beginning: dontcare23. Her first post communicated indifference again, as she titled it “Something Random from my reflection on the death penalty.” However, mid-semester, she wrote another post titled “Hey Kid,” a creative response to the class’s visit to Peoplestown, a historic neighborhood in Atlanta. She addresses it to a boy she met while she was there.

I was inspired to write this reflection because I saw in Jabarri, a great kid in a struggle to be successful and not be a product of his environment. I was touched by his humbleness and inspired by his light spirit. Although I grew up in a neighborhood similar to his, I feel like we were “playing hood”. I’ve never lived in public housing, never experienced being put out of my home because rent doubled. In fact,there was hardly ever a such thing as rent in my home. My parents paid a mortgage. I however have experienced schools, segregated by race and class, the lack of necessary technology to compete globally with other students, and teachers just showing up for a paycheck as opposed to being passionate about teaching and facilitating the development of a brighter future for students. This is my mid semester statement just to say… Jabarri and kids just like him can make it… Nothing is impossible for God… (Hey kid…dontcare23 cares…)

What a piece to share… who else votes that the class blog was worth it?

In my opinion, the best professor on campus is Andy Witt. He is a professor in the History Department, and I took him the second semester of my freshman year after receiving many recommendations from friends. His teaching style is very different from any other that I have encountered (in a good way). He has a good sense of humor, and that livens up the class. Though I personally like history, even my friends who don’t say that it’s much more tolerable in his class. He can make all subjects funny, but doesn’t ever make them seem unimportant. He gives you the real facts about history, he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. If you want to take a class in which you learn a lot yet still have fun, I would definitely recommend one of his classes. And the nice thing about taking one of his classes is that you can enjoy an interesting professor and finish one of your foundation requirements at the same time.

As of Monday November 30, 2009, the Lorraine Academy Elementary School parking lot is no longer available for Trocaire College students and employees. We all knew starting the 2009 Fall Semester that at some point we would lose the privilege of parking there. I just don’t think students thought it would be so soon.

For years, the number one complaint of students at Trocaire has been parking. Each year, the Student Association would talk to the administration about the difficulties associated with the parking situation around the college. Students many times felt as if the college did not understand the perils of parking in our South Buffalo neighborhood.

All sorts of suggestions from students have come up about how the college should combat this issue. From buying and demolishing homes in a “residential neighborhood” to putting spaces in Cazenovia Park, I have heard them all. I usually responded to these ideas with a “Would you want a parking lot next to your home?” or “I think there might be some zoning issues with that.” Rumors have even existed about secret parking locations just for faculty and staff.

I even joked at Student Association meetings that they we’re not allowed to talk about parking issues anymore. Ok, I was serious. But the discussion would never lead to any resolution and thereby waste people’s time when other issues could be discussed.

Last spring, the Trocaire administration started discussing the idea of a shuttle that would pickup and drop off our students from various locations. The idea met various levels of skepticism, some from our own students. Several of the student leaders thought that in the warmer weather students would rather walk than wait for the bus. The college would be better served to have a shuttle only during the winter months. The idea at this point was put on hold as further discussion developed.

Once the Fall 2009 Semester hit us, the college saw enrollment increase and the deletion of a whole block of parking spaces on Choate Avenue (this part of Choate was made two ways so emergency vehicles could have easier access to the new Mercy Hospital Emergency Room). The college also knew that the spaces at the elementary school were short-lived and would soon add to the stress of parking.

The idea of a shuttle service really got moving. Then, Friday November 20^th, when shuttle plans were being finalized for a December debut, the college got the call all students were dreading. The elementary school parking lot would be closed off to us. The Dean of Students asked for an extension until Monday November 30^th so we could notify the Trocaire community.

Starting, Monday, November 30, 2009, the college rushed into service a shuttle in hopes of alleviating some of the parking struggles at Trocaire. The concept is simple; a shuttle will run from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. A 20-minute loop will start at the Knights of Columbus parking lot at 261 South Legion Drive at 7 a.m. It runs throughout the day between the Knights of Columbus, the Salem Lutheran Church, and Trocaire College. Students and employees just need to show their Trocaire ID card to gain free admission to this service.

The building at the Knights of Columbus is available for you to wait inside. Signs will also be posted at both lots to signify pickup and drop off locations.

As, part of the new service, a significant discount for evening students is now available so they can park the hospital ramp. After 3 p.m., students and employees can park in the Mercy Hospital ramp for $1.00. You must buy a parking sticker from the front desk or the bookstore and place it on the parking ticket you get once you enter the ramp. The college is subsidizing the majority of the cost of this service in order to give our students easy accessibility and security in the evening. Just for clarification, the ramp is very busy during the day and having spots available for our day students and employees was not possible.

So now that you heard the story of the evolution of the Trocaire Express, please also know this service has only been implemented on a trial basis until the end of the year. It will be re-evaluated in May to see if the cost meets student demand. For the long term viability of this service, it is important for students and employees to use the shuttle and make its existence part of the Trocaire culture.

All Aboard!
Tony Funigello, Associate Dean of Student Affairs

This is the first of what will eventually be a number of posts on this topic:  this is one of my central concerns.

Some liberal arts professors, in the deconstructionist school, notably Stanley Fish, have recently argued that the only purpose of gradschool in the arts is to produce arts professors.  He sees literary criticism as a craft, and his english department is supposed to teach that craft.

He also argues that the notion that the liberal arts can ‘improve people’ is pure hogwash.

Deconstructionism, however, isn’t exactly known for its idealism:  Fish is an anti-idealist.  And, arguably, he and his ilk are the principal problem with the arts in the US.  In their literary criticism, they argue that there is no purpose to anything.  Thus, they are purely of the 1950s nihilist school of artistic thought, which was following dadaism, which was following Nietzsche, in arguing that since Christianity was false, therefore God was dead.  With god dead, they reasoned, there was no real or ‘true’ idealism:  thus, no truth, beauty, etc.  Since there was no such thing as beauty, art did not have to be beautiful.  And, more to the point, there was no way to judge that art was beautiful.

In my post on aesthetics, I have challenged this notion by arguing that human beings all have certain instincts and characteristics which means that, yes, some things are inherently pleasant to almost all people, and some things are inherently unpleasant.  A noise as loud as a jet engine up close is going to be unpleasant, unless you are deaf.  Likewise, a 15 storey building will always strike us as tall, because we are only ever going to be about one meter high, as humans.  Dogshit will always be unpleasnt, except in that taboo freudian way which causes us all to find shit somehow fascinating, even while we find it disgusting.  Likewise, the golden section in art and music replicates the same proportions of the human body and all other natural things with DNA, thus, we find these things inherently pleasing.  This is why credit cards and TV screens are the proportionality that they are:  we find this soothing, somehow correct, becasue the 3:4 proportionality is based on our own human proportionality.  So, in other words, I have argued that even if God is dead, there is no reason for us to throw out the Platonic ideals:  they make sense to us, and all of us yearn for them.  They are part of our instinctual and psychological makeup, and to deny this, as the 20th century experiment has revealed, is just to create garbage.  This is how one can describe most 20th century art which comes from the nihilist vein, including Stanley Fish’s criticism, for the most part. 

A major value of the arts, in other words, help us to see ideals, to appreciate the gestalt, and to move above the level of being mere animals, or mere machines.  Vocational education, which is dedicated exclusively to the pursuit of technical training, for the purpose of making us good at performing one particular type of task, is ideally suited to machines rather than people:  its ideal is to have people who merely perform an economically lucrative task well.  Thus, purely vocational training, while useful, also degrades us, and denies us the power of our minds, our souls, our thinking parts, the parts of us which have perspective, and which make sense of things. 

But to defend the arts effectively we should perhaps move out of this realm of the idealistic and deductive, which Fish and his Aristotelianist adherents do not like, to the concrete world of the inductive and empirical:  let’s keep it real.  Here on our critics’ own ground there are still many reasons to see value in the arts, and this is probably the most fruitful way to defend the arts to society at large.  The arts have a number of serious, concrete, and arguably essential purposes to perform in any democracy.  While Fish dwells on the purely vocational aspect of arts training, and finds the rest to be garbage, I have argued, however, that there is another side of the coin:  20th century arts criticism, insofar as it was decentering, was also the most productive theory perhaps ever, in terms f how much egalitarianism it has fostered in our society. 

The liberal arts have been both nihilist in the 20th century, and to this extent the arts establishment has alienated itself both from itself and from the public, but it has also been highly progressive:  it has presided over the greatest single increase in equality , true equality based on thought, word, and deed, that has ever existed, due in large part to the psychological discoveries of the power of language by the likes of Laing, followed up by Foucault.  This has led to the modern ‘political correctness’ movement, which people groan about, but which actually is the popular side of an incredible decrease in sexism and racism and almost every other type of ism.  I argue that this is the fault of the liberal arts.  But people like Stanely Fish have almost entirely hidden this from the public view, by continuing to hold the spoltlight on their silly nihilism.  Their generation, thankfully, is dying out.  But as Fish notes, it has also taken the notion of tenure with it, and in many ways, the last notions of a sinecure professoriate which is free to produce at leisure, like gentlepeople.  The new generation of professors are jobsworthies – in fact they work just as hard as people at the most high powered offices.  This is not good, because it means they are to a large degree thinking only vocationally, and can often miss the forest for the trees.

At any rate, why study the arts?  The arts are not worthless, as Fish argues.  They are perhaps responsible for all that is progressive in society.  Where else do people study empathy?  The arts, in essence, are empathy.  Your subject is people, and to be scientific about the study of people, you need to be able to put yourself in their shoes. 

The individual arts subjects are also all historical, as I have argued in my history post.  English is the history of english, Philosophy is the history of philosophy.  Political Science is the history of Poly Sci, and psychology ditto.  in other words, when you take any course in these fields, from 101 up to a PhD, you are doing history.  When you do history, you scientifically engage with the artefacts of other people – specifically, their texts.  Their distilled thoughts.  You must empathize with their texts, to understand them.  And you can then judge which of their ideas are worthy and which aren’t, and which were significant and which weren’t.  But the point is, you are empathizing, for the most part, in some way or another:  you’re recreating other lives, other thoughts, other societies, with the notion of understanding them, so that you can understand the main issues in your field.

In Holland, you only study the arts at university, which is considered the ‘highest’ type of postsecondary education.  The vocations, including architecture, are at vocational school.  The sad thing is that in this way, architects and other vocational educations, engineering, etc., have no exposure to the arts at all.  And the university students just do the arts – or other things which can be done ideally, wihtout applying them (like economics, and the sciences).  Even though of course many of these things do have applications.  And in holland, companies hire university grads for the highest management posts under the assumption that they have learned how to think critically. 

So in Holland, as an arts major, you automatically are up for the best posts in upper management.  Management school is for those who will do lesser things.   This obviates the American obession with the question:  what good are the arts?   Most american parents, of course, will tell their kids to avoid the arts like the plague, and do something which will ‘earn them a job’ afterwards.  This makes sense, for most middle class people.  

But some of us simply will not learn.  It tends to be those whose skills most lie in language.  Language is messy, and very complex.  Math can be very complex, but complex in a formulaic way.  You can proceed in clear logical steps, and it’s a question of if your brain can follow the chain, for the most part.  Same with most vocational training.  There are problems, and usually, there are paths that you take to create solutions.  In the arts, however, the essence is text, and language, which often, as epitomized by poetry, has quite a few meanings at once.  There are gradations:  philosophy attempts to be the most logical; the social sciences aim to find social formulas.  But it always comes back to language, and its slipperiness.  Because of its complexity, one can make a strong argument that the very smartest, certainly the most sophisticated, people are those who can master language.  The arts are therefore the most challenging and engaging of all university subjects.  Anyone can learn formulas (though few can master them, admittedly–this takes genius).  That whole notion  a “Beautiful Mind” being the mind of a math genius, is typical our society whose liberal arts’ establishment has been pursuing nihilism for 50 years:  thanks, Mr. Fish.  I  would argue, and the entire weight of the Western tradition would be on my side on this one, that a beautiful mind, whatever else it may be, must be a philosophical mind as well.  A mathematically gifted mind can be an orderly mind, but for it to be beautiful – its beholder has to have an inkling of all the Platonic theories of beauty which originated the notion that mathematics are beautiful.  In other words, a math genius’ mind only differs from a machine insofar as someone (the mathematician or someone else) with an understanding of language, aesthetics, and philosophy can create an entire cosmos of meaning around the notion of order, logic, and the ‘laws of nature’ of which mathematics are a part.  (The ‘laws of nature’ were originally supposed to be a reflection of the thoughts of God himself–a beautiful notion, which has the power to make me weep).  Mastering the art of working with language is therefore of a higher order:  only with language, do you have a fighting chance of encompassing and describing the significance of all science, all math, all music, all experience.   

Still, why do it, practically speaking?  Because, as I argue in my democracy book, the arts are the guardians of philosophy, history, and humanism.  Without a rigorous historical arts university curriculum in your society, there is no history.  If there is no professional history being done (or serious amateur history), then your society will naturally fall back into a state of mythology regarding God, and other social beliefs.  This is a gateway to hierarchy, since mythology favors hierarchy historically speaking.  In other words, business people who know no history will find it much easier to adhere to, say, fundamentalist christianity, which itself favors patriarchy, and the power of the few, despite its egalitarian protestant roots. 

The arts are also the anchor for philosophy, which is the basis of science.  Historically, before there was science in any society, there had to be the rigorous application of reason to all human problems.  Natural philosophy, was the beginning of science – it was a branch of philosophy.  Any society which has no institutionalized philosophy will also tend to slide towards myth:  the advertisers will win (see my post on advertising and marketing).

And, the arts, by institutionalizing empathy, will naturally tend to foster humanism.  Without the arts, no society can long justify human rights.  Most societies today do not have adequate human rights.  These are the same countries which have weak university systems–the ones which have only technical schools, minus the arts.  

There is a reason why the arts have always been the core of the university curriculum in the west:  they are the foundational building blocks of a rational, ordered enquiry into all of the major aspects of human life:  the seven arts were grammar, logic and rhetoric  (all dealing with how to apply reason to the use of language), and then arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (all to deal with the rational application of math and space to the earth, and the cosmos).  This means, that the sciences and the arts have always been intimately bound.  They are, in essence the same thing.  If a society tries to concentrate just on the sciences, without the arts, or more specifically, just on the applied sciences, without the arts, then it will also slide into myth – humans will perform their vocational jobs well, but they will be very ignorant in terms of history, and society, and they will then fall prey to the priests:  the televangelists, who are the modern versions of the Priests of Karnak, or of Baal, or of Yahweh.  They are the enemies of equality and democracy, since they are essentially hierarchical and patriarchal.

Thus, Stanley Fish’s criticism of the arts is entirely fragmented, and ahistorical, and shows a lack of true understanding of the arts, or indeed, of the western university system.

Study the arts, then, because you are smart, and in our economy (see my economic posts), you will always be able to get some kind of job if you really want one.  The ideal, however, is to try and avoid having a real job, and to live like a gentleperson, with a sine cure, whose main job is to make the world more beautiful, and more ideal for everyone else, if by no other means than by setting a good example, by living a noble life yourself.  Of course, you will want to apply yourself.  My definition of a noble life is one which is also useful to society.  For those of you who find this too idealistic, or too flippant, then study the arts because it will indeed give you much more perspective on most of the aspects of human life and society, about which you can know very little if you merely study vocation.  Study the arts, then, so that you can be an effective manager.  Because effective managers understand what they are doing, and how to have agency.  And this requires perspective (literal and figurative:  as it worked in the renaissance, when gaining historical perspective into the history of the latin language, encouraged mapmakers to draw realistic maps of the world, and inspired Columbus to sail across the Atlantic).  Only the arts can do this. 

Fish not-jokingly says that the people in his department are not better people than average.  He uses this to argue that the arts can’t ennoble, since the professors he knows are not noble.  But, he’ll note, they are some of the more progressive, and egalitarian, and pro-democratic people, as a group, and as a profession, that exists.  And, a new study just came out which clearly links education with lack of anger, i.e., lack of violence.  I’ve already tied democracy to reason, and hierarchy/totalitarianism to violence in other posts.  This is yet another way that studying the arts, in many subtle (and yet quite obvious if you step back to look at them)  ways, is good for society.

And finally, and example of what society would be like without the arts, or at least, one of the major arts subjects.  In Holland, there is no such thing as a literature major.  There are no dutch majors.  You just study grammar instead (philology).  The nation is a very prosaic one (good in many ways, but also prosaic).  This is in great contrast to the US and Britain, where literary studies have produced, inter alia, by far the most sophisticated music lyricists of anywhere in the world.  Why is that?  Because English majors exist.  The society in general is more textually aware, and has more perspective, and arguably thinks in these poetic ways, in a way that is unique in the world.  That is just one way that the arts effect society, but it is subtle enough that only people who are steeped in these thoughts, and who actually live for long periods in both cultures, have a chance of detecting.  So, study the arts.  And travel.

Every Friday we post links to a few interesting resources that we’ve come across lately, or have been using a lot with students on advising. On the heels of Vinal’s post about why your major does not have to equal your career, here are three organizations that recruit UM students and understand the value of a liberal arts education.

1). Target is no stranger to the UM campus, and they’ll be back in February for positions within their corporate office (Business Analyst Intern) and at the stores level (Executive Team Leader, Stores Executive Intern). All three positions are open to all majors. Leadership skills are very important to Target, so be sure to emphasize your extracurricular involvement in your application on Career Center Connector.

2). Epic Systems Corporation creates software for medical groups and healthcare organizations, and they’re looking for seniors of any major to fill their Implementation Consultant/Project Manager roles. You’ll be working directly with hospitals and healthcare organizations to get Epic software up and running, so your application should demonstrate great communication skills and some project management experience. You can apply via Career Center Connector until the end of January, with interviews taking place in mid-February here at The Career Center.

3). Google is one of the most popular destinations for UM students, and they have plenty of opportunities for students of any major, not just engineers. As Google puts it, “If you are studying Psychology or Art History, don’t let that arts degree keep you from applying to Google. We also have internship work in many non-technical fields – including Finance, Marketing, and Sales.” The application for their BOLD Internship Program (Summer 2009 info page) isn’t ready yet, but keep an eye on Google’s internship opportunities page for more information in the coming months.

Also entitled: THE GROWING DIVIDE BETWEEN THE LINGUISTIC & MATHEMATICAL ARTS

The denial of axioms, those first principles that are either self evident or derived from a higher science, has led to an utter separation of the mathematical arts from the linguistic arts in the general liberal arts to the detriment of both general fields of study. This process began with force with the reformulation of the ancient order of the mathematical arts beginning with the reconsideration of the classical geometry of Euclid. Once the primacy of Euclid was destroyed and geometry seen in a new light of symbolic signs from which new and further abstractions could be gleaned, the mathematical arts further developed which gave rise to the new primacies of the algebras and calculus. Though the new primacies are not necessarily to be lamented in themselves, the preoccupation with the manipulation of numbers, variables, and other symbols abstracted from nearly all intelligible realities has led the mathematical arts into an isolated world with minimal contact and sharing with the world of the linguistic arts.

I. GEOMETRY OVERTHROWN

The classical geometry of Euclid had a multitude of benefits which contributed to its long reign as the basic mathematical art. Firstly, it proceeded from indemonstrable first principles which were (and are) self-evident, and, thus, common to many arts and sciences. Common notions such as “the whole is greater than the part” or “things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to each other”¹ were the bedrock principles upon which Euclid’s geometry was based. Secondly, the fundamental geometric realities that were the considerations of classical geometry were and are immediately abstracted from the natural, material world. Thus the concepts of magnitude, square, circle, and triangle, once the varying qualities of matter were left behind, could be considered in their perfections. Thus this conceptual art was eminently intelligible to the intellect as its conceptual realties were immediately abstracted from nature and its proofs were based on arguments that proceeded from self-evident first principles.

While its intelligibility was without question, certain aspects of the classical geometry underwent further development especially in the realm of abstraction. The proofs, although well argued, possessed an inefficiency of expression that could be “streamlined” if further abstractions were performed. Further, with these additional abstractions, alternate considerations could be applied to the signified magnitudes that were not able to be performed previously, viz. arithmetic operations. Many, including the likes of Dr. Otto Bird, assert that René Descartes pioneered this consideration. In Descartes’ work, The Geometry, he asserts:

“Any problem in geometry can be reduced to such terms that a knowledge of the lengths of certain straight lines is sufficient for its construction. Just as arithmetic consists of only four or five operations, namely, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the extraction of roots…so in geometry, to find required lines it is merely necessary to add or subtract other lines.”²

In short, Descartes takes a magnitude and reduces it to a unity which serves to be the measure of other magnitudes. Geometric magnitudes, then, are reduced to numbers. This is done by way of assigning letters to the magnitudes themselves and then performing an arithmetic operation. With this assertion, many claim, came the dawn of analytic geometry and the birth of the Cartesian coordinate system³ and the subordination of geometry to algebra as all geometric realities become a relation of numbers, with numbers themselves as expressed as variables, and not magnitudes, becoming the principle object of consideration. It is for this reason Dr. Bird says:

“Since all the variable letters in our equation represent numbers the geometric line is no longer anything that need be done geometrically; it can be done with numbers. So lines, curves, figures, solids and their relations can all be determined by equations which ultimately are but variable expressions for numbers. Thus Euclid’s Pythagorean Theorem⁴ proven as a relation between the sides of a triangle, and squares erected on them can now be stated, as we saw, much more simply as A² + B² = C², where at issue is a matter of numbers even though they may also be taken as the lengths of the sides of the triangle. The arithmetical algebraic expression is admittedly more abstract than the corresponding geometric expressions, but it is simpler and easier to work with. Geometry has been arithmetized.”⁵

In addition to the additional abstraction applied to geometry further removing the signs from the original signification, mathematicians like Descartes established a new precedent by beginning their works not from axioms or any principle from a higher science but from postulates. Granted, Euclid worked from postulates as well, but not exclusively. Rather, he proceeded from postulates stemming from axioms and definitions thus rooting his art and argument in principles that require not blind ascent but common, rational experience. Further, Galileo and Newton also proceeded from axiomatic principles, but their era saw the dawn of arts that posited their own principles that defied scrutiny from other arts and sciences. Other developments in the mathematical arts certainly contributed to the replacement of geometry as the basic mathematical art, but non so much as the first introduction to numeric abstractions and the abandonment of axiomatic principles.

II. MATHEMATICAL STUDIES AFFECTED

With new primacies came new considerations. With old boundaries removed, so went many of the old obstacles. With the advent of variable numeric representation came the reconciliation, or rather the “ever approaching reconciliation”, of that which was formerly believed to be utterly irreconcilable: the curve with the straight and the discreet with the continuous. The efforts of Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Bonola, etc. allowed for curved realities to be given representation with discreet alphanumeric signification. Naturally, this called the necessity of the traditional mathematical arts as the principle mathematical arts of consideration into question, or, at least, called them into question insofar as how they were considered. Music and astronomy as the principle arts of ratios and mobile magnitudes respectively were replaced by more universal and abstract algebraic understanding of ratios and more universal applications of calculus to mobile beings in general. As stated before, these developments are not necessarily to be lamented insofar as they are productive of more profound knowledge of realities, whether they be concrete or conceptual. But the arts, or, rather, their proponents did not stop there.

Coupled with the abandonment of the scholastic understanding of the universe and its causes, including the disavowal of traditional metaphysics and theology, mathematics took on a new import which it previously did not enjoy and consequently affected its study insofar as its import was concerned. Theology and philosophy were no longer the highest sciences. With the sloughing of the scholastic world-view, the essence of things, natures as such, were no longer the most sought after knowledge for the means to know natures were abandoned. Instead, that which was most knowable to man became the most sublime to him: quantity. As a result, mathematics ascended to primacy among the sciences, a status it enjoys to this day. Let us return again to Descartes and his peers:

“Since the only known natural sciences with some degree of systematic coherence were astronomy and mechanics, and the key to the understanding of mechanics and astronomy was mathematics, mathematics became the most important means to understanding the universe. Moreover, mathematics with its convincing statements was itself the brilliant example that truth could be found in science. The mechanistic philosophy of this period thus came to a conclusion that was similar to that of the Platonists, but for a different reason. Platonists, believing in the harmony of the universe, and Cartesians, believing in a general method based on reason, both found in mathematics the queen of the sciences.”⁶

This new pedestal upon which mathematics was placed perpetuated infatuations that exacerbated its abstract nature and considerations. Abstractions and their manipulations themselves became the primary concern in many circles resulting in a “science of symbols” where often the symbols themselves were abstracted from any meaning whatsoever. Weber, Frege, and Peano were pioneers in this filed. As bizarre as this may sound its effects were far reaching, the evidence of which can be seen in most high school math textbooks to this day, much to the chagrin and consternation of many a high school student. Struik notes it well:

“…Algebra changed its ancient character. Instead of merely encompassing the theory of algebraic equations and the associated theory of invariants and covariants, it became the abstract doctrine of today with its rings, fields, ideals, and related concepts. One of the origins of the newer algebra was the development of group theory from Galois theory of algebraic equations into an abstract theory in its own right, especially in the theory of finite groups, thus setting a model for the transformation of algebra as a whole.”⁷

As history has shown, those arts which enjoyed primacy, if not in reality then by popular acclamation, subordinated others arts and often attempted to subsume them to themselves. Advocates of mathematics were no different. The venerable art of logic was the target for this attempted annexation with the most poignant attempts by the likes of Russel, Whitehead, Cantor, and Frege. Logic itself became the target of abstract symbols for its signification with the imposition of symbolic logic with its two subcategories, propositional and predicate. The attempt as noted by both Struik⁸ and Bird⁹ ultimately failed but the efforts persisted. The effects are still seen today in texts and graduate institutions that insist upon teaching symbolic logic in their philosophical programs.

III. THE GULF BETWEEN THE TRIVIUM & QUADRIVIUM WIDENED

Mathematics has abandoned the axiomatic system. This was the first and most fundamental break which has led to other divisions between the mathematical and linguistic arts. Without self-evident first principles, how can real knowledge be had? What relation then exists between the linguistic arts which are eminently grounded in reality and an art which seeks not sound and indemonstrable principles? Can mathematics now claim what it once could as expressed in the mouth of Dr. Bird?

“In fact it’s no exaggeration to claim that mathematics has provided the clearest and most explicit instance of reason, of reason itself at work, of reason reasoning, in its development of the axiomatic method. The earliest and most extensive use of this method is to be found in the thirteen books of Euclid’s Elements.

[...]

In denying that there aren’t any self-evident axioms these people are denying that there are any axioms in the old sense as principles distinct from postulates, with the result that the two words have come to be used interchangeably. In any case, an axiomatic system is one that begins from certain indemonstrable principles from which certain other propositions can be deduced as conclusions. “¹⁰

Ironically, the attempt to bridge the gap between the linguistic and mathematical arts by attempting a pure mathematics that could be propositionally inferred from earlier principles only served to broaden the chasm between the two general arts. The attempt at reducing logic to a branch of mathematics was intrinsically an attempt at reducing all sciences to the jurisdiction of mathematics –sciences that had concerns over and above that which was quantifiable. As a result, symbolic logic has been relatively ineffectual in the other arts (including philosophy in spite of its persistence) and has only enjoyed any real and lasting effects in mathematical logic. Instead of subsuming logic, mathematics, or rather mathematicians, developed its own language of logic apart from the linguistic arts. But this was not always the case with mathematics and logic. As Dr. Bird points out so well:

“…It is better to retain the old understanding of logic as the study of the principles that assure the validity of inference, and that its laws are those of the laws of the other sciences. Logic is thus the science of sciences, as Aristotle called it, or the art of arts, as Saint Thomas called it.

[...]

Mathematics since the time of its development by the ancient Greeks has always been prized for the power and beauty of its reasoning, and indeed for its ability to form and train the faculty of reasoning itself. As long as Euclid was studied as the basic introductory work to mathematics, Euclid’s geometry provided the basic training for the logic of argument. It provided the basic understanding of what a proof is and the means of constructing and establishing a proof. “¹¹

The former complementarity enjoyed by the trivium and quadrivium through the cooperation of geometry and logic has died. If logic is found to be taught at all in schools, it is done so independent from geometry when this would never have been the case in ancient or medieval education. Hence we have one clear rift between the mathematical and linguistic arts.

Finally, a rift exists between mathematics and reality. Due to the aforementioned obsession with the manipulation of abstractions without any reference to that which is meant to be quantified, mathematics, at least in the general sense of the liberal arts as found in high school and undergraduate institutions, is practically divorced from all reality, concrete or conceptual, since it has become a “science of symbols” meant to arbitrarily signify anything in general or nothing in particular. The ancient considerations of mathematics, whether it was geometry, algebra, or calculus, though abstracted, abstracted from that which was real and considered that which was real. This was true for Euclid’s Elements, Apollonius’s Conic Sections, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Galileo’s Two New Sciences, Descartes’ Geometry, or Newton’s Principia. Now, reference to the real which was once found in the ancient quadrivium can often be more readily found in the more advanced and specialized mathematics proper to certain vocations –not to education in general. The linguistic arts have not suffered this problem; thus the widening between the linguistic and mathematical arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Bird, Otto, Ph. D. “The Mathematical Arts of the Quadrivium II”, a lecture given for the International Catholic University and Holy Apostles College & Seminary for the course, “Liberal Arts: Their History & Philosophy”, 2005.

2. Euclid. The Elements of Geometry, Thomas Health (translator), Dover Publications, New York. 1956.

3. Descartes, Rene. The Geometry, David Smith & Marcia Latham (translators), Dover Publications, New York. 1954.

4. Struik, Dirk J. A Concise History of Mathematics, fourth edition, Dover Publications, New York. 1987.

The Marketing Department at Stonehill College is looking to hire a Web Technology Manager and a Graphic Designer. Visit  Stonehill’s Current Openings page to download job descriptions and submit applications.

Send me winding through the trees,

a wind at my back, and breeze at my front

free-flown and empty

tattered wings air out in the rain.

Aidez-moi, please, peace and thank you.

I never knew how far I could go

into the shadows,

sometimes I think I never came back.

Silence reaches me tonight.

I can’t even hear my own names

echoed back to me.

Like most people, I grew up thinking that history is extraneous to ‘real life.’  It’s just entertainment, right?  It’s something that certain smartish and/or nerdy people know stuff about, because they actually watch the ‘hitler’ (history) channel.  And, I was taught by my parents, and learned from people in high school, that ‘real’ education meant studying something vocational:  i.e., something that would allow you to get a job afterwards, and the higher-paying that job track was, the better.  But I was never a very practical person, so I majored in english, and remember promising to myself, that by the end of my 4 year degree, that i would be able to tell myself what was the point of studying the liberal arts.  By my second year, I had a pretty good answer.  So I’ll share it here, hoping that some of you, at least, won’ t have to go through so much soul searching and self-doubt; or at least, that what follows will help you marshal your inner forces against the naysayings of your ‘practically’ minded parents, friends, etc.

The first thing i’ve learned is that history is a science.  All of the liberal arts are in fact sciences.  So, to say ‘liberal arts and sciences’ is in fact, somewhat misleading.  The thing that makes a university subject a university subject, is that it is scientific.  Things which can be proven by science are studied in universities, and things which cannot be studied by science are, generally speaking, not studied in university (except perhaps Liberty University and its ilk).  Even theology, these days, busies itself with studying the proveable history of various religious texts, and of various religious beliefs.  Theology proper, then, is a branch of history.  So is english:  to study english is to study the history of the english language.  Thus, it is a branch of history.  And philosophy also, is studying the history of philosophy.  Ditto political thought:  a political philosopher is actually a historian of political thought.  This means that, as a professor of political thought, when you do research, you are going back, finding original documents in archives and old editions (just like an historian), and reconstructing the history of how people came to important conclusions about the nature of government (e.g., the invention of democracy, of checks and balances, of a split between executive, legislative, judiciary, the notion of human rights, etc.).

Why are these subjects studied in the university?  The university is a product of western thought, which invented science.  Well, the greeks, specifically the 6th and 5th century Athenians, invented science, and Europeans rediscovered it in the renaissance.  But a trickle of it was rediscovered earlier, during the middle ages, and during that time, universities were founded, in which people studied theology at first, but also, gradually, all of the other subjects which today we can study in a university, including the major vocational subjects of law and medicine.  But the basis of university study was always the ‘liberal arts and sciences.’

Originally, the sciences as we know them today were collectively called ‘natural philosophy.’  And this indicates that they were seen as a branch of philosophy.  Philosophy was the greek (and medieval) word for all things which can be studied through the use of reason:  i.e., what today we call science.  All else was a matter of faith, and even today, we do not study astrology in university, for example, becasue it cannot be proven through reason, and we don’t study subjects which have no theoretical basis, like hairdressing, because these are purely mechanical (though schools of hairdressing do do hairdressing theory, some at least, which is a version of art theory, but too far for anyone to have thought to put this under the umbrella of a university). 

Philosophy, then, aims to explain the world through reason.  Originally, the Greeks thought that what was most important was man, and so they put most of their effort into understanding human society:  philosophy proper includes ethics and metaphysics, scientifically attempting to address the questions of “how should a man properly act?” and “what happens to us when we die?” and “do we have souls?”  Nowadays we tend to think that metaphysics is impossible to discuss rationally, but there are still questions which science hasn’t entirely driven from the realm of proof.

Other branches of philosophy addressed human society:  things which today we call the ’social sciences.’  And the university subjects of literature, art history, and theatre, for example, study the history of these subjects, i.e., they attempt to reconstruct what happened in these genres, and how these interacted with, and were products of, their age, and what the artefacts of each genre can tell us, scientifically about the socieites which created them.   Psychology aimed and still aims to scientifically understand the composition and workings of the individual human mind.   

Finally, the sciences addressed the non-human, the dumb, unthinking, material, part of our universe.  This was inherently much less interesting to the greeks, and indeed, it’s much more straightforward, no matter how complex the formula may seem, than studying anything which has to do with human society:  humans being so varied, so complex, and language itself having so many shades of meaning.  At least with science, most of the time, what you study is what you study.  It is material, and it can be broken down into component parts (at least until you get to the quantum frontier – where things get interesting again, in my view).  Even here, scientists work by studying the history of thought in their subject;  i.e., biologists learn the history of what biologists before them have been studying, and from there, the best of them go on to make new additions to the scientific literature. 

This is what historians do:  they study the scientific literature, written by historians who have gone before them.  Thus, they are scientists.  Of what?  Of all human society.  If we have any chance of improving society, then we have to study it.  Otherwise, we contninue to reinvent the wheel.  But don’t take my word for it.  Following are proofs.       

So point 1) is that, all university subjects, when viewed this way, are history.  They are all branches of history, subgenres, and no science can be done without doing history.  This in itself should cause us to realize that history is pretty important. 

Point 2)  This is besides the fact that, if you had no history, you would be like a goldfish, who loses his memory every few seconds.  Our memories, our experiences, what makes us wiser as we age, is that, hopefully, even the dullest of us have learned from our personal histories.  It should be only natural then to conclude that, as a species, if we learn history, we will be wiser.  It’s easy to dismiss this as a platitude, but in fact, it’s made all the difference. 

3)  Most human societies did not do history.  We as a species don’t do history by default, because we are naturally largely irrational.  And history requires sustained use of reason to investigate the past.  Thus, most societies were religious, rather than historical.  The greeks were absolutely unique for inventing the notion of scientific history, which consciously rejected religious explanations for events;  i.e., supernatural explanations.  Only thucydides, and herodotus, followed by the latin historians such as livy, maintained a sustained skepticism.  All else is mere chronicle; usually interspersed with credulity which accepts supernatural explanations.  Even the best chinese and indian ‘historians’ were not so rigorous in their desire to understand scientific explanations for social events .  so the point is that only greeks, and europeans since the renaissance, and those who have followed in their wake, actually study history.

4)  Thus, history is a highly specialized, highly scientific discipline, and a relatively rare one in human history.  But we in the english-speaking world take it for granted, because in many ways, the english were the first to bring it to the level of a generally socially accepted science, beginning with Gibbon in the c18th (after the renaissance italians passed on the torch).  

Perhaps the best way to see the value of history, then, is to travel to societies which do not have a strong historical profession. 

If you go to spain today, where they have a much weaker historical tradition, you realize that most of the ruins you see, no one knows anything about them.  If you go to morocco, people know even less.  But that is not all:  muslims have not been studying the history of islam, and are only starting to do so:  thus, we know far far less about the history of islam, and of islamic countries, than we know about christianity.  Scholars know full well, that the christian bible was a product of its day, because we have dissected every detail of the text.  But the koran has been shielded from this criticism, and thus, many more muslims can believe absolutely that it is an ahistorical text, and thus from god;  if historians studied the history of this text, its historical nature would be revealed, and thus, it would be seen in smilar light to the christian and jewish texts.  The point being, is that history is a very powerful antidote to fundamentalism: 

In short, history was a major stepping stone towards the enlightenment, the scientific revolution , the industrial revolution, the microcomputer revolution, and all of the modern advancements in equality for minorities, women, etc., which has ever happened.  When there is no historical establishment to debunk the myths of a given society, that society is free to live wrapped in its own primal mythologies, which are inevitably pro-patriarchy, and pro-ruling class.  In other words, having a strong historical profession is essential to having a democracy.  it has been historically, and the proof for this is taht the english discovered how to debunk their own national myths, and how to kick out the superstitions of catholicism, at the same time as they discovered how to look critically at their own past.  England is the most historically-advanced country, and it has also been the one which has almost singlehandedly invented all of the things mentioned above;  enlightenment, industrial revolution, universal sufferage (and other anglophone countries have been party to this, through anglophone dialogue).

Thus while most people see the trappings of history; the details, the fun facts about knights, kings, and ruins, and the footage of World War II:  in fact, this is mere stage dressing.  This is just the icing on the cake.  At the heart of history, lies the fact that, if someone did not do it, we would all be ruled by theocrats.  The historians, then, in greek times, in the renaissance and ever since, have been the torch bearers, those who have led the way against the would-be priests, the theologians, the soothsayers, and those who would enslave us all to do the bidding of the elite.  Humankind naturally loves myth:  historians have, very slowly, cleared places around the globe where reason can persist, dispelling the darkness of unreason and superstition while their researches construct, in actual detail, what actually happened, and how we have gotten to be how we are. 

A strong historical profession is prerequisite, therefore, to human rights themselves (and capitalism, for that matter).  This, then should be more than enough defense:  even if individual historians’ PhD theses may seem silly, the profession as a whole is an essential pillar of modern society, which would quickly atrophy without it.  And remember, there are very, very few professional historians.  That society contributes less than .00001% of its resources to professional history (most of which pays for itself, anyway) should be seen as a small price to pay for such an important service.

So, why study history?  Because you are becoming a scientist:  and learning empathy, and also, becoming a brain cell in the collective memory of humanity:  this, as we have tried to show, has many positive effects, and almost no negative ones.

“The University brings out all abilities, including stupidity.” — Anton Chekhov

“I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” — Winston Churchill

I am an assistant dean in the college of liberal arts at a public urban university.  Part of my job is to help students solve the myriad of problems that can interfere with their studies.  Believe me, in my three months on the job, I have seen enough to fill several blogs and perhaps a couple of novels. 

Since I am in the College of Liberal Arts, I feel the urge to address the subject of liberal education and its decline on the modern college campus.  Liberal education is one of the few things that I find sacred; and as a professor I was a zealous disciple.  I could not understand (or accept) the fact that my students were not true believers as well.  Reactions to my teaching varied considerably.  On course evaluations my students usually wrote that “my expectations of them were unreasonable.”   On more than one occasion I even heard some of my African-American students call me a racist because I dipped freely into the Western canon for material for my history classes.  I had a few African students who had been educated in the European system.   Interestingly, they found my classes “engaging.”   Some faculty colleagues fretted that my methods would upset the classroom status quo and bring unwanted scrutiny to the department.  Others applauded my efforts, but told me privately that they were doomed to failure.  The rising generation, they warned, did not value learning—or at least, not the type of learning that was familiar to me.

I believe that we have become afraid to expect more of ourselves and our students.  Our consumer-oriented society and the escalating cost of college tuition have convinced us that education is just another product to be purchased; and thus, it must therefore be as attractive and non-threatening as possible to the largest number of potential customers.  True liberal education demands that assumptions be challenged, and ideas be twisted and pulled, and exposed to extremes of opinion.  In my view, to be educated is to be conscientiously uncomfortable.

Ignorance, to update Derek Bok’s familiar adage, is not only expensive, but also user-friendly.  Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.

Trocaire College’s Lifelong Learning Office offers non-credit classes and certificate programs for the professional and personal development of alumni and the community. These courses are available on campus and through the Online Instruction Center. With an emphasis on Nursing, Allied Health, Business, Education, and Technology, Trocaire’s wide range of alumni services are aimed to provide lifelong success.

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I was perusing the venerable publication The American Scholar today, just in the interest of keeping up with my own Phi Beta Kappa.  I won’t mention the fact that I should probably be getting this journal free, but this is PBK, where you have the honor of buying a seventy-dollar engraved tie clip.  If you can see where this is going, you probably know me too well.

Anyway, here’s the spotlighted article, by a certain William M. Chace.  Give it a read, it’s free online.  I’m always interested in things like this, not just because it’s my field, but because as liberal as I might get, there’s something in the cantankerous “ubi sunt!?” that will always appeal to me, for better or for worse.  Anyhow, I read through the piece with increasingly mixed feelings, finally and frustratedly seeing what the problem was.  At least, in an opinion I shall seek to disguise as humble.

Here’s the gist of Chace’s argument: we all know that the humanities have lost tremendous ground since mid-century, and largely it has been stampeded and squatted upon by the thugs of Business (alias the Dread Negozioid!).  So far, so good: regardless of your ideological stance here, the facts are the facts, and Chace lays them out clearly instead of just ranting, to his credit.  Okay.  Where to go from here?  Instead of defaulting to country-clubby elitism or a caustic jeremiad against the modern univiersity, Chace goes introspective: we ourselves, as English faculty, are to blame for the erosion of humanities education and prestige.

How so?  It takes a while for the truth to come out, but it’s basically this: we’ve embraced Critical Theory.  ooOOOooo.  It’s not said in so many words, but this is what I feel to be the Main Import.  In Chace’s words,

… it turns out that everything now is porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture; the “clean slates” are endlessly forthcoming. Fads come and go; theories appear with immense fanfare only soon to be jettisoned as bankrupt and déclassé. The caravan, always moving on, travels light because of what it leaves behind.

Okay, we’ve heard this one before, and it’s got a kernel of truth to it; it’s not as though there haven’t been some circus performers on the critical theory tenure tracks.  As Henry James could tell you, in far more complicated sentences, importing European culture to our shores isn’t an easy task.

The solution — you might’ve seen it coming from paragraph 1. — is to consolidate, purify, and immure the discipline in clear boundaries, essentially a great-books-new-critical circumambience, which will no doubt attract a smaller but more dedicated crowd, giving English Lit a status somewhat like that of “the study of the classics.”  He doesn’t actually recommend a “purge,” but you can easily imagine that this world has little room for a Culler, a Spivak, or other such scholars.

This solution set a lot of little synthesis-bells going off in my head; isn’t this precisely the goal of many in the Republican Party (boot out Scozzafava in favor of Hoffman!  Make room for Beck and Palin!), and of a distinct minority in the Roman Catholic church (time to bring in hardline traditionalists and dial everything back to pre-Vatican II times!  Make all religious brothers and sisters go behind bars and you’ll get more vocations!)?  That’s not a judgment really, since it depends upon your view of those other things to make an analogy.  I’m just interested to see such a climate of retrenchment and ideological purification out there in the world today.

It makes me wonder if there isn’t something “out there,” in the general world, that is simply awry.  Is it really consolation enough to contract, to retreat, to calmly accept a marginal position?  Would this not lead to a necessary ossification, a stagnant lowland into which no fresh, challenging breeze can blow?  I don’t even want to touch the G.O.P. or the Catholic church, but just thinking about the humanities (esp. Literature): I submit that the hand-wringing and introspection is a distraction, specifically a displacement of the true problem, the proper object of our militancy.  What if the mass exodus into business programs is the result of an irresistible summons from the very fabric of our society?  What if people didn’t just “get stupid” and “abandon their culture” this century for no reason, but because economic reality constrained them?

This is where I lose most of you.  But I submit that those students’ obsession with financial stability isn’t a root cause of the problem; in other words, the paradigm shift placing money over fulfillment and philosophy didn’t just perversely arise out of some de novo increase in Greed.  It’s rather a symptom of the heady, unsustainable trajectory of late capitalism.  Does anyone really think that, ceteris paribus, people would still prefer business at the same rate if it paid the exact same as lit or philosophy?  I’d like to give our undergraduates just a little more credit.  Sure, some of them are devoid of the slightest interest in culture and truth; some should probably not be going to college at all.  But for the great mass, who just want to figure things out, their choices are clearly the result not of intrinsic shallowness, but of capitalism breathing down their necks.

It’s time to quit pretending here.  Time to quit taking potshots at straw men.  The time to agonize over our identity may come, but for now, we know who we are: the people who care, who look for more than the numbness of a moneyed bourgeois satiety.  Critical theorists or New Critics or anything in between, we are the humanities, and we’re being choked out.  The python of capital has us mostly dead, and the further we move into crisis economics, the more we will be squeezed.  Maybe it is time for introspection after all: instead of dithering around within the system and seeking little victories, why not try to imagine a university or a country outside it entirely?  We are almost beyond the point of imagining an alternative, but sooner or later, it has to happen.

Anyone who’s ever had to sit through the suicide-inducing hour that is a philosophy class knows that it’s not the philosophers that make it bullet-in-brain-worthy, it’s the students. There are 4 different types of philosophy students:

1. Me.

I make solid arguments about how whether we exist only in our minds or “truly” exist doesn’t matter, given that we’re stuck in this stupid class either way and regardless of our beliefs on the matter, will not be able to will ourselves to fly if we fall off a cliff (but I encourage any philosophy majors to try). Then I stare at the clock and make gun motions at my throat while type 2, 3, and 4 argue with me.

I think, therefore I eat.

2. The savvy stoner

He had an epiphany while he was coked out once, and he’s willing and eager to share. It’s funny how the trees look so… so not put together when you’re upside down (aka, all the coke has affected his spatial recognition). SS doesn’t really have a point to make, but he’s eager to light up and really understand the world.

3. The guy with the point

This person has a specific point in mind, but he’s not quite sure what it is. He says “well you see” and “the thing is” a lot, but he doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s like a flow chart that only leads to those two phrases. What the guy with the point is sure about, though, is that he’s one smart – WATCH YOUR MOUTH.

4. The person who doesn’t get it

The guy who doesn’t get it is the worst of the lot, because he’s the reason that you end up staying 10 minutes late every class as opposed to getting out 20 minutes early when you run out of material. He feels the need to pose “insightful” questions to the class, such as: “But… are we REALLY here?” and then looks around nodding with his eyebrows raised. He doesn’t know the difference between Nietzsche using reason and anybody else using reason (see: none), but he’s going to ask as many questions as it takes to ruin your life.

NV/R,

Margo

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Over the past few months I’ve seen an alarming increase in those family bumper stickers with one little cartoony person for the mom, the dad, all five kids and the puppy. Sometimes they’ve got Mickey Mouse ears or their names underneath but it boils down to one obvious objection I feel anyone with a BS* could see: YOU ARE PROVOKING PEDOPHILES AND RAPISTS TO ATTACK YOUR CHILDREN.

Grade A parenting there – the back of your car has every kid’s name, their schools and every sports team they’ve ever eaten orange slices at halftime with. You might as well add a signed field trip permission forms to the Catholic Boat.

The Catholic Boaaat, time to get some hot Christian action!

Congratulations Mom of the Year. Your Sienna is nothing short of a free peek into  your children’s… itineraries and an invitation into their orifices.

NV/R,

Maria

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*At this point, I feel you should all fully recognize how utterly worthless anyone with a humanities major is. You should never ever allow your child to be exposed to one or your 8 year old will be complaining about nihilism with about the same philosophical understanding that a senior philosophy major possesses (i.e. none).

I’m trying to start a new category called, “Multimedia” that will include education related videos, podcasts and links.  I begin this endeavor with a video from TED Talks, one of the truly amazing programs out there, currently.  “Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.”

This speech is one of the best celebrations of a liberal arts education I have found.