Apparently, I rarely ever got that message through.
So, I no longer work as a professor (huh?!)
During those professorial years, I once tried to bring William Deresiewicz to campus. I had hoped for two different sessions on the purpose of higher education: One in which he would engage with students, and in another the audience would be faculty and staff.
Deresiewicz was ready to do it for practically no fees. But, I couldn't convince the powers-to-be.
Deresiewicz is direct right from the get go in this essay. One can't get more direct than this:
... religion is a lie. [Ross] Douthat is “puzzled” that secular-minded people think the rationality of religion has been disproven. We are puzzled that anyone as intelligent as Douthat (my favorite of the Times opinion columnists, though I often disagree with him) can still believe, not just in a higher power or cosmic intelligence, but in the whole menagerie of dogma: miracles, messiahs, resurrections, angels and demons and heavens and hells, the literal truth of ancient myths.
But, the essay is not about religion or god. Instead, it is about the purpose of higher education.
Before we get there, Deresiewicz notes:
But Douthat is right about one thing, and it is a very big thing. He is right (the point is only touched on in this particular piece, but he has pursued it elsewhere, and it is the very premise of the kind of argu-ment he’s making here) that secularism leaves us in a moral and spiritual and in some sense emotional vacuum. It doesn’t tell us what to do or how to live; it doesn’t connect us to anything larger than ourselves; it doesn’t bring us into relationship with other people. It leaves us alone with our terrors, our confusions, our despair.
For some of us, this is vaccum is also a freedom to conscientiously make our choices on how to live a good life. We don't do certain things and pursue others not because we are afraid of hell and are attracted to the promise of heaven--because we don't believe in heaven and hell--but because what we do or don't do is important to us in this lifetime. And through those carefully considered decisions we feel connected to people and to the cosmos.
In a secular framework, as Deresiewicz asks, we are faced with important questions: "What is college for? What should we teach our students?"
You can now see why I wanted Deresiewicz to come to campus and engage with students, faculty, and staff.
In my own ways, I tried to engage with students who came my way, and with a few faculty and staff. Ironically, most students and faculty thought I was a conservative. I was not being an activist to their liking. Activism that is captured under an umbrella of "social justice."
Deresiewicz argues that in the non-religious secular context in which teaching and learning happen, social justice has become the new religion. "With stunning speed and unanimity, colleges and universities have rebranded themselves en masse as seminaries of social action, places where you go to learn to “change the world.”
Like any cult, this rebranded religion of activism will soon meet its end. If only faculty and students had instead engaged in something that will stand the test of time:
I have also long recognized what art, what the humanities, cannot provide them, or me. It cannot provide us with the stability or certainty of creedal religion (including the certainty that it is, indeed, the right path). The only structure humanistic study offers is the classroom; the only guidance, a welter of ambiguous representations. You read a book—and then what? You graduate from college—and then what? Art enlarges our capacities, but it doesn’t tell us what to do with them. It develops our ability to figure things out for ourselves, but we still have to figure things out for ourselves. Our wisdom is always tenuous; our convictions are always tentative. We are never sure of anything, including ourselves.
Deresiewicz has long been an outsider after his voluntary exit from higher education. I now join him in exile.
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