Martha C. Nussbaum's Blog

A Liberal Education

Last month was decision time for the many academics who left their tenured jobs to work in the Obama administration. Universities standardly grant leave for at most two years, at which point a professor must either return or resign. Some, of course, can hope to be rehired later, but prudence often rules. Many of my acquaintances made the choice to return to writing and teaching. A few have stayed on. For a long time I’ve been comparing my free and sheltered life to those exposed and difficult lives, with a mixture of relief and guilt. I keep thinking of Cicero’s acerbic commentary on philosophers who refuse to serve the public realm: “Impeded by the love of learning, they abandon those whom they ought to protect.” Even worse, he accuses them of arrogant self-indulgence: “They demand the same thing kings do: to need nothing, to obey nobody, to enjoy their liberty, which they define as doing what you like.” It’s difficult not to hear that voice in one’s dreams, even if one believes, as I do, that writing itself can serve the public good.

While I pondered my own regal privilege and the recent choices of my friends, I happened upon a book that sheds as much light on such choices as any I know: A Liberal Education, by Abbott Gleason. Gleason is a respected historian of Russia in the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods. He taught in the History Department at Brown from 1968 until his recent retirement—but with a two-year stint in Washington running the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a leading think tank focused on Russia and its surrounding states. Gleason’s father Everett, also a historian, made the opposite choice, leaving his tenured position at Amherst and taking on the jobs of chief of the current intelligence staff for the Office of Strategic Services, and of deputy executive secretary of the National Security Council. So Tom (as I always knew him, when we overlapped at Brown) grew up in two worlds, and this early experience informed his later choice.

Gleason was a child of WASP elite privilege, and he ultimately came to detest narcissism and egotism in all its forms, even those that masquerade as revolutionary zeal. That’s what makes this memoir, written with a lovely sense of irony (Orwell is his favorite stylist, and it shows), so tricky and so fascinating. As Tom depicts his early forays into left-wing politics while a Harvard undergraduate, some of the commitments were genuine—he ran real risks in the South during the civil rights movement. But there was also a lot of narcissistic hype, as he came to believe that he and his mostly Jewish friends (he congratulated himself both on having such friends and on being able to keep up, almost, with their smarts) would someday run the world, in a far better way than it had been run before. Meanwhile, as he shows, his own life contained stunning pockets of unexamined arrogance, particularly in his role as a husband who just expected that his wife would like everything he liked and do whatever was most convenient for his career. (It is a testimony to his interest in genuine self-knowledge that the marriage has endured and flourished.) The tale Gleason tells is, ultimately, one of patient self-unmasking and self-recreation, as his radical effusions gave way to a cautious and deeply unfashionable liberal individualism with conservative elements (the love of community attachments that he depicts historically in his best known book, Young Russia).

Where government service was concerned, Gleason took issue early on with contemporaries who denounced everything that went on there as corrupt, while saluting one another with canned revolutionary slogans. But he also knew how life in Washington, with its constant jockeying for reputation and power, its severe restraints on self-expression, had drained his father of joy over time, and he was determined not to be drawn too deeply in. After two years of what he regards as useful and enjoyable public service he had had enough. He had learned something—a richer sense of the reality of political choices, a new confidence in his grasp of the whole range of issues affecting Russia—but he saw that beyond a certain point staying there would not satisfy his desire to understand.

But why the academy? Gleason’s portrait of that life (my life, the life of those returners) is far from rosy. He trenchantly puts before us so much vanity, so much anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, so much disdain for the legitimate demands of students, that the reader begins to wonder why he didn’t run screaming away. He’s particularly rough—rightly—on Harvard, where both professors and students alike operated (and maybe we should use the present tense!) on an unearned assumption that they were indeed kings and that they would rule the world with their superior endowments.

And yet, there is just the delight of finding something out and teaching it to others. It’s deeply moving to see Gleason find, slowly, the subject that grabs his passions and, ultimately, sustains his life. Moving, too, to find that he connects his curiosity about Soviet history with the capacities for self-criticism and self-change that he slowly developed, and with his evident capacity for thinking critically and creatively about academic institutions. (He almost became provost while I was at Brown, but withdrew from the final group of two because of a health issue.) In the final chapter, he talks about his current struggle with Parkinson’s disease. As his body increasingly eludes his control, there is still the abiding pleasure of doing some work every day, learning just a bit more, being just a bit deeper as both thinker and person. He’s still getting a liberal education, and that, in the end, he suggests, is what life is really about.

I admire and honor my friends who have made Cicero’s choice for service and who stick by it. They are giving the world something that we who write all day are not. Reading Gleason’s powerful memoir, however, reminds me that it is not just cowardice or truculence that keeps us here in the study. It is something in which a reasonable person could reasonably hope to find the meaning of a life. 

Martha C. Nussbaum is professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author of From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution and Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

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What We Could Learn From India and Korea

In my last column, I argued that Singapore and China, so often praised for their achievements in education, are terrible models, bad even at generating a creative and accountable business culture, and hopeless in forming the preconditions of stable democracy. Rejecting their guidance, however, does not mean that we should turn away from Asia for insight. The humanistic traditions of both Korea and India offer much that we should applaud.

Korea today is the only nation in the world, outside the U.S., that strongly promotes a liberal arts model of college and university education. So far from waning, this humanistic commitment has been strengthened recently by a reform that changed legal education from an undergraduate to a post-graduate course, meaning that law students in Korea, like their U.S. counterparts, must have a liberal arts background before embarking on the study of law. To some extent this trend reflects Korea’s intense admiration for American universities, as parents strive to send their children to the U.S. not only for college, but, increasingly, even for high school. The roots of Korea’s different path, however, are older and deeper, closely connected to ideas of national self-definition.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, Korea had a Confucian style of humanistic education, focusing on history, philosophy, and poetry. This system benefited only male elites, but it later became the basis for a renewed and more democratic commitment to the humanities. During the Japanese occupation, Confucian education was strongly repressed, along with the Korean language, and Koreans were limited to low-level vocational training. Illegal village schools, however—in some cases aided by U.S. missionaries—continued the Confucian vision, in a more democratic and inclusive form, open to women and to all classes. (Thus American influence, then and later, was seen as on balance pro-Korean and consistent with national pride.) Much later, when Korea took the world stage as an independent nation, it was a point of honor to reassert this tradition—in an aggressively democratized form that focused on equality, while also emphasizing values of human rights, critical thinking, and imagination.  

Korean universities vary widely in type and quality—partly because more than 70 percent are privately funded—but the norm in the best universities is that of a broad liberal arts education that encourages independence of mind. I’ve seen this for myself, and it’s very impressive. Less prestigious universities often focus on vocational and technical education, but at least the best universities are squarely in the liberal arts camp. If only more nations would associate their nationhood with poetry and philosophy, rather than only with increased GDP per capita.

What about India? India today tends strongly toward a focus on technical and vocational studies, and the dominant pedagogy of rote learning makes things worse. In her past, however, India has been home to some of the most creative forms of humanistic and interdisciplinary education, providing examples from which the entire world—and certainly India herself—can learn today. Ideas of democratic education flourished in many parts of India in many forms, but the greatest of India’s educators was certainly Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, but who also had world-class gifts as a composer, choreographer, visual artist, philosopher—and educational pioneer. Hating every school he had ever attended because he detested rote learning, Tagore created a school and, later, a university, that popularized a new norm of Socratic self-examination and cultivated imagination. Describing its aims, he said, “We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy. … This education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed.”

Tagore’s Santiniketan school set out to change all that. (Tagore’s ideas have much in common with those of John Dewey, and it’s likely that Dewey knew about Tagore’s experiments.) Education at Santiniketan focused on critical thinking—Tagore described his own pedagogy as Socratic. The arts were woven throughout the curriculum. Particularly keen to empower women, he focused on dance as an avenue of expression. Among the most gifted of the student dancers was Amita Sen, mother of economist Amartya Sen (himself later a pupil in that school). She has written eloquently about the liberating effect of Tagore’s deeply emotional choreography on shame-imprisoned girls. Explicit themes of gender equality and social criticism were common in the dance dramas. Meanwhile, Tagore’s songs, which became famous all over India (he’s the author of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh), emphasize ideas of dissent and independence that resonate to this day. Here’s one that is especially beloved, and which embodies well the school’s spirit (it is even better with the music, of course, so I wish I could produce my colleague Dipesh Chakrabarty to perform it for you):

If no one answers your call, then walk on alone.

Walk alone, walk alone, walk on alone.

If no one says a thing, oh you unlucky soul,

If faces are turned away, if all go on fearing—

Then opening up your heart,

You speak up what’s on your mind, you speak up alone.

If they all turn back, oh you unlucky soul,

If, at the time of taking the deep dark path, no one cares—

Then the thorns that are on the way,

Oh you, trampling those with bloodied feet, you tramp on alone.

If a lamp no one shows, oh you unlucky soul,

If in a rainstorm on a dark night they bolt their doors—

Then in the flame of thunder

Lighting your own ribs, go on burning alone.

Think of young children growing up on that song, and you’ll see a spirit of dissent and challenge that strengthens the backbone of India’s democracy even to the present day.

Meanwhile, at the university level, Tagore focused on interdisciplinary liberal education, something that really did not exist in India before that. He made it clear that his goal was the formation of intelligent critical world citizens. (The university’s name is Visva-Bharati, “All the World.”

For many years Tagore’s school and university were famous and beloved, defining norms of what education for the new nation should be—so much so that Jawaharlal Nehru sent his daughter Indira there, even though she spoke no Bengali. (It was the only happy time she ever had in school.) Today, however, the fashion for technical and pre-professional education has won out, and India differs from Singapore and China only in her firm commitment to freedom of speech and of the press, and thus her totally different surrounding political culture. How long, however, will that culture endure without the animating spirit of dissent and cultivated sympathy? Tagore’s university, now run by the state, has become like every other university; the school, rejected by ambitious parents, has become a museum of Tagoreana, while the glory of a parent is the admission of a child to one of the Institutes of Technology and Management.

It is time to call for a return of the humanistic values represented by Santiniketan, rightly seen by Tagore as essential bulwarks of a decent political culture—not just in India, but everywhere. Korea has shown that a nation can adhere to humanistic commitments while succeeding economically. (And why not, when economic success, like democratic stability, requires a cultivated imagination and a culture of accountability?) India is a glorious democracy, but it is unwise to assume that democratic traditions can thrive in the absence of education for democratic citizenship. No nation is so secure in its commitment to democracy that it can afford to gamble its future away by pursuing the false idols of rote learning and mere technical mastery. At any rate, if the U.S. is going to emulate Asia, let’s follow Tagore and open up our hearts, educating not for herdlike conformity, but for sympathy and reasoned argument.

Martha C. Nussbaum is professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author of From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution and Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

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The Ugly Models

American leaders, impressed by the economic success of Singapore and China, frequently sound envious when talking about those countries’ educational systems. President Obama, for example, invoked Singapore in a March 2009 speech, saying that educators there “are spending less time teaching things that don’t matter, and more time teaching things that do. They are preparing their students not only for high school or college, but for a career. We are not.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof regularly praises China, writing (on the eve of the Beijing Olympics) that “today, it’s the athletic surge that dazzles us, but China will leave a similar outsize footprint in the arts, in business, in science, in education”—implying his strong approval of China’s educational practices, even in an article in which he decries the Chinese government’s ferocious opposition to political dissent. But Obama and Kristof and all the other U.S. proponents of Singapore and China’s educational systems apparently aren’t thinking very hard about the relationship of those policies to democratic debate and democratic autonomy. Indeed, they are glorifying that which does not deserve praise.

What do educators in Singapore and China do? By their own internal accounts, they do a great deal of rote learning and “teaching to the test.” Even if our sole goal was to produce students who would contribute maximally to national economic growth—the primary, avowed goal of education in Singapore and China—we should reject their strategies, just as they themselves have rejected them. In recent years, both nations have conducted major educational reforms, concluding that a successful economy requires nourishing analytical abilities, active problem-solving, and the imagination required for innovation. In other words, neither country has adopted a broader conception of education's goal, but both have realized that even that narrow goal of economic enrichment is not well served by a system focused on rote learning. In 2001, the Chinese Ministry of Education proposed a “New Curriculum” that is supposed to “[c]hange the overemphasis on … rote memorization and mechanical drill. Promote instead students’ active participation, their desire to investigate, and eagerness … to analyze and solve problems.”

Singapore, similarly, reformed its education policy in 2003 and 2004, allegedly moving away from rote learning toward a more “child-centered” approach in which children are understood as “proactive agents.” Rejecting “repetitious exercises and worksheets,” the reformed curriculum conceives of teachers as “co-learners with their students, instead of providers of solutions.” It emphasizes both analytical ability and “aesthetics and creative expression, environmental awareness … and self and social awareness.” The language used in both of these reforms harks back to the ideas of the great progressive educators John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore, both of whom visited China, and both of whom once had considerable influence throughout East Asia. Singapore and China are trying to move toward open-ended progressive education that cultivates student creativity—just as we seem to be moving away, with the increasing emphasis on teaching to the test that has been the result of No Child Left Behind.

Observers of current practices in both Singapore and China conclude that the reforms have not really been implemented. Teacher pay is still linked to test scores, and thus the incentive structure to effectuate real change is lacking. In general, it’s a lot easier to move toward rote learning than to move away from it, since teaching of the sort Dewey and Tagore recommended requires resourcefulness and perception, and it is always easier to follow a formula.

Moreover, the reforms are cabined by these authoritarian nations’ fear of true critical freedom. In Singapore, nobody even attempts to use the new techniques when teaching about politics and contemporary problems. “Citizenship education” typically takes the form of analyzing a problem, proposing several possible solutions, and then demonstrating how the one chosen by government is the right one for Singapore. In universities, some instructors attempt a more genuinely open approach, but the government has a way of suing professors for libel if they criticize the government in class, and even a small number of high-profile cases chills debate. One professor of communications (who has since left Singapore) reported on a recent attempt to lead a discussion of the libel suits in her class: “I can feel the fear in the room. …You can cut it with a knife.” Nor are foreign visitors immune: NYU’s film school has been encouraged to set up a Singapore branch, but informed that films made in the program may not be shown outside the campus. China, needless to say, does not foster creative thinking or critical analysis when it comes to the political system.

It is time to take off the rose-colored glasses. Singapore and China are terrible models of education for any nation that aspires to remain a pluralistic democracy. They have not succeeded on their own business-oriented terms, and they have energetically suppressed imagination and analysis when it comes to the future of the nation and the tough choices that lie before it. If we want to turn to Asia for models, there are better ones to be found: Korea’s humanistic liberal arts tradition, and the vision of Tagore and like-minded Indian educators. I’ll take up their more enlightened approaches in my next column.

Martha C. Nussbaum is professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author, most recently, of From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution.

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A Passion for Truth

These are grim times for the academic humanities. Seen as useless frills, which nations can prune away to focus on the “things that really matter”—by which the speaker so often means “things that contribute to national economic growth”—the humanistic disciplines are being cut at all levels, from elementary school to college and university. Even worse, they are being asked (on pain of extinction) to refashion themselves as tools of profit, demonstrating the (economic) “impact” of their inquiries. To begin thinking about why this focus on “impact” is a pernicious business, we can do no better than to pause to honor one of the greatest classical scholars of the past century, who illuminated the world through such unfashionable values as mastery, rigor, and a passion for truth.

Sir Kenneth Dover, who died on March 9 just days short of his 90th birthday, was a scholar unsurpassed in his mastery of ancient Greek language, culture, and thought. What Dover could do without effort, most scholars could not do even with the most painstaking labor. When his autobiography, Marginal Comment, first appeared in 1994, I was visiting Dover and his wife Audrey at their home in St. Andrews. With a mischievous smile, he dashed into his study—to emerge a short time later with an inscribed copy. On the flyleaf was a Greek elegiac couplet in which Dover had managed (1) to use in an apposite and humorous way a Greek word whose meaning we had discussed in a co-authored article, disputing its translation with John Finnis; (2) to express pleasure at the collaboration; and (3) to compare the “daring” outspokenness of our article to that of his own memoir—all with not only impeccable meter and style, but also graciousness, wit, and elegance. This in ten minutes, from a man who wrote that he spent twenty hours preparing every hour-long undergraduate lecture he gave—so you can imagine how much knowledge those lucky students had lavished upon them.

Dover did path-breaking work on Greek comedy, oratory, prose style, and popular thought, but he is best known for his Greek Homosexuality (1978), which influenced all subsequent work on this topic, not least that of Michel Foucault. Challenging the received wisdom that sexual desire and choice vary little from one society to another, Dover showed that ancient Greek social norms profoundly structured sexual experience and even desire, making the desire of an older man for a younger one feel not unnatural, but profoundly normal and natural: even the gods themselves were thought to enjoy such passions. To make his argument Dover needed not only the lack of prudery and the passion for accuracy that were always such a huge part of his personality; he also needed the mastery I’ve mentioned, since he had to give convincing interpretations of difficult texts from many genres, as well as works of visual art. A life devoted to mastery of such arcane matters illuminated the world for us all.

In Britain today there is a new government program called the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Under the REF, scholars in all fields will be rated, and fully twenty-five percent of each person’s rating will be assigned for the “impact” of their work—not including its impact on other scholars or on people who like to think, but only including the crasser forms such “impact” might take. (Paradigmatic examples are “improved health outcomes or growth in business revenue.”) “Impact” must be immediate and short-term, and it must be brought about by the scholar’s own efforts, not by the way in which another generation might find their world enlivened by a book the scholar has produced. Britain’s assault on the love of truth for its own sake is particularly explicit, but such pernicious trends can be found in every country.

Dover would do poorly in the REF: even his widely influential ideas were not “marketed” by him, but were simply put out there to be picked up by others, a process that may take many years. And yet they changed our understanding of human sexuality. While the world mourns a towering figure (and while I mourn a man of the highest sort of daring, whom I am lucky to have known as a friend), let us not mourn the passing of the type of scholarship he loved. Let us fight for it, because it may still survive. If it does not, our nations and our individual spirits will be the poorer. The pursuit of short-term profit is death to the life of the mind.

Martha C. Nussbaum is professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author, most recently, of From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution.

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The Passion Fashion

A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century


By Cristina Nehring


(Harper, 328 pp., $24.99)

Women today are too risk-averse in love, charges Cristina Nehring. We “settle,” and seek comfort rather than passion. In flight from pain, we end up too often with mediocre and cramped relationships. Obsessed with control, we lack “the generous fault to put oneself entirely in another’s hands and thus be at his mercy.” We employ a whole battery of devices to lessen our exposure to experience, to distance ourselves from real vulnerability: we regard our passions with ironic distance; we convert sex into a commodity; we glorify momentary pleasure rather than lasting emotion.


 

In the process, Nehring continues, women are losing out on one of life’s great goods. For love is not just wonderful in itself, it is also a source of energy for the rest of life’s activities--particularly, perhaps, for artistic and intellectual creativity. And it is a source of insight, leading us to see ourselves and others with more generous and accurate eyes. (Here Nehring draws persuasively on Plato’s Phaedrus.) In sum, love makes the entire person come alive--but only if it is pursued with sufficient openness and daring that it brings with it a constant danger of pain and loss.

So far, so good. Nehring certainly raises an important issue--although it is not only with respect to love, and not only yesterday and today, that people have preferred to live in an excess of caution. Most people in most times and places have been averse to risk, avoiding deep commitments of all sorts--to work, to justice, to a cause, to a country--


because they can see that through such commitments they would risk failure on a large scale. Most people enjoy contemplating the sufferings of tragic heroes, but they do not wish to be called upon for heroism themselves. Not caring deeply; looking at everything with irony, as a mere spectacle; and pursuing superficial pleasures: these are clever ways of evading or thwarting tragedy--in love, but also in every department of life. The smallness of aspiration against which Nietzsche inveighed in his portrait of “the last man” is not, as he suggested, a recent creation of bourgeois European Christianity. It is a pervasive inclination of ordinary human life.