The Higher Learning

"Why is it that the chief characteristic of the higher learning is disorder? It is because there is no ordering principle in it. Certainly the principle of freedom in the current sense of that word will not unify it. In the current use of freedom it is an end in itself. But it must be clear that if each person has the right to make and achieve his own choices the result is anarchy and the dissolution of the whole." Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America

BK: Hutchins is referring to the system of electives that allows students to choose what courses they will take. His point actually brings up several issues.

The problem is not that freedom is an end in itself. The problem arises from a fundamental tension between liberty and belonging to an institution. What may the institution dictate and what ought to be left to the choices of individuals? This leads to the second issue.

Failure to adequately map out the boundaries between institution and individual can be a disaster. Here students have liberty but do not understand what liberty is; and neither does the institution. Here is where Hutchins is right: Institutions that try to give too much liberty to students find themselves in a quandary. Why should any decision be denied to students, including institutional choices? (This problem also rears its head in shallow understandings of Democracy)The institution cannot allow this. Students do not understand why. Campus unrest ensues because neither the administrators nor students understand the realm and limits of freedom. I submit, the campus unrest of the 60's was a direct result of failure to even try to understand the proper role of liberty. This leads us to the third issue.

Hutchins assumes that freedom is letting students and faculty do whatever they want. This cannot serve as an organizing principle of the higher learning. What could, though, is the principle of freedom understood as the study of individual liberty within and between various institutions. Here what orders the higher learning is a proper understanding of the realm and limits of liberty combined with how it may be legitimately enjoyed. This need not be the entire curriculum, but it could be a powerful unifying element tying together students' earlier theoretical studies with their later choices of a profession. Hutchins' own advocacy of the great books provides no such tie and it comes as no surprise that he thinks professionalism does not belong in the university. Here he is consistent, but he fails to realize that even a curriculum of great books does not really provide a unifying principle. It must be the ideas in those books, and one of those ideas is surely liberty.

Connecting Great Books

In the September 8th, 2006, Chronicle of Higher education, Jonathan Brent tells us that "Freedom Depends on the First Person Singular". This also happens to be the title of his article. In this article Brent recounts teaching a class on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The focus of the day's discussion was on Shukhov, a gulag prisoner who had basically most, if not all, of his animal desires satisfied for the day. Brent asked his class what was wrong with this and it took almost an hour for these students to hit on the idea that what was wrong was a lack of freedom and individuality.

What hit me about Brent's article was his surprise that bright students who had taken the college's First Year Seminar and had read "Locke, Rousseau, Kant and other great thinkers in the Western tradition" took an hour to come to this realization. Yet, is it so surprising? If these books are simply read in isolation from each other, then it is no wonder the students took so long to arrive at the idea that freedom may be important. One class meeting discusses natural rights, another the education of the young and the third the Categorical Imperative. Individually these are all reasonable aspects of the texts to teach, and in a survey course that concerns itself with great ideas these are the ones likely to be distilled and conveyed to students. Individually great, they do not tell the student why freedom is important.

This is not a repudiation of the great books, nor is it to say they are the alpha and omega of education. Rather, it is to ask what we want students to learn. If we don't at least ask this question, we will continue to be amazed that students who are reading difficult texts ,with no overarching guide, fail to see any connection between these authors let alone their connection with freedom.