Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 241

populist leaders and the defiance of norms

After the release of the Vigano letter detailing Pope Francis’s rehabilitation of Cardinal McCarrick, people started saying, “I don’t see how Francis can survive this” or “This will mark the end of Francis’s papacy.” It’s precisely the same sort of thing that people say when yet another revelation about Donald Trump comes out, or yet another member of his inner circle is convicted of a felony.

And yet there is no plausible path for Trump to be removed from office — congressional Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they will stick with him through thick and thin, and even a Democratic Senate won’t have enough votes to get him tossed out — and no path at all for Francis being forced to resign.

I think the assumption that many people make about both men is that they can be brought to heel by the force of political norms — that they will see that the violation of important norms makes their position unsustainable. But as I wrote 18 months ago,

Like Donald Trump, Francis makes dramatic and apparently extreme pronouncements which send the world into interpretative tizzies. When he says things like “Who am I to judge?” Catholics who support him effectively say that he should be taken “seriously but not literally” — just as Trump supporters say about their man. Both men generate massive, thick fogs of uncertainty.

Like Donald Trump, Francis cuts through political complications by issuing executive orders and blunt power grabs, as when he dismissed the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and is seeking to replace him with a “papal delegate” under his own personal control, a move of questionable legality.

Like Donald Trump, Francis is an authoritarian populist: he bypasses institutional structures and governs by executive order, but believes that there can be nothing tyrannical about this because he is acting in the name of the people and is committed to “draining the swamp” of his institution’s internal corruption.

Norms are created by institutions, and we live in an age of weak and despised institutions. This is how populist leaders arise: when a great many people believe that institutions exist merely to serve themselves, they come to despise not just those institutions but also the norms associated with them, and applaud leaders who scorn and seek to tear down the whole edifice. And if those leaders make their disdain known in sufficiently charismatic ways, few will notice when they are guilty of the very sins they decry. Moreover, when people see the sheer size of the institutions at which they’re so angry, they despair of any real change happening, and are content with listening to leaders who channel their own frustration.

General contempt for our institutions, government and church alike, makes them too weak to enforce their norms, which first enables corruption — the kind of corruption American Catholic bishops and members of the Congress of the United States are guilty of — and then produces populist figures who appear to want to undo that corruption. But the institutions are too weak to control the leaders either, so those leaders are empowered to do more or less whatever they want to do. This is the case with Trump, who will surely last at least until the 2020 election, and also, I think, with Francis, who will probably last until he dies or chooses like his predecessor to resign.

Moreover, since neither Trump nor Francis is interested in doing the work needed to repair their corrupt institutions — they don’t even have any incentive to do so: the ongoing presence of “swamps” is what lends them such legitimacy as they possess — all the products and enablers of corruption are safe. This is why the American bishops who spent decades enabling and hiding sexual abuse are probably feeling pretty good about their prospects right now.

 

P.S. I wonder if the people who expect resignations or discipline of corrupt leaders tend to be old enough to remember stronger institutions, and more effectual norms, than the ones we have now.  Or perhaps they have participated in strong institutions. Younger people, and those whose experience with institutions has reinforced a belief in their weakness and inconsistency, don’t even bother to demand what seems to them clearly impossible.

big news, no action

The story Rod Dreher reports here would in a certain kind of world be catastrophic for the Catholic hierarchy. I do not believe that we live in that kind of world. Here’s what I think the fallout will be:

Pope Francis will not comment.
Curial spokesmen will make evasive comments, and simply deny that the Pope knew anything or did anything that would make him culpable.
American bishops will continue to deny that they knew anything about anything, and will, when talking among themselves, express great relief that the spotlight has shifted away from them for a while.
Expressions of regret will continue.
Committees and task forces will be convened.
No one will resign, and no one will be disciplined.
No collective action will be taken by lay Catholics.
The long slow drift of American Catholics away from Catholics will continue.

That’s it, I suspect. Given that (a) the statute of limitations on the worst crimes from the Pennsylvania dioceses has run out and (b) there is no institution capable of holding, or willing to hold, prelates accountable for non-criminal acts, what can happen? Nothing significant, as far as I can tell.

after Catholic fusionism, what?

Kevin Gallagher’s essay on “The Eclipse of Catholic Fusionism” is elegantly written, incisive, and largely quite persuasive. I commend it to you, and hope you read it straight through.

[Pause while you read it straight through.]

Now, I want to call attention to the essay’s final paragraph, breaking it into two parts. Here’s the first part:

Across the political spectrum, electoral dislocations and popular discontent have persuaded many that the liberal intellectual consensus of the last century is crumbling and unhelpful; what will succeed it is nowhere yet clear. But the resurgent discourse of identity suggests that the era of the naked public square is over, and political arguments made with baggage attached — representing a particular tradition, nation, or tribe — may now be admitted to the bar.

I have a question: Whose bar? Because the idea that there is a permanent, viewpoint-neutral court in which disputes can be adjudicated is the governing fiction of the very liberal order that Gallagher says is now collapsing. That belief in such a bar did indeed govern, and was indeed a fiction, was convincingly shown many years ago by Stanley Fish in the pages of First Things, back when First Things was the parish magazine of fusionism:

If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism’s table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism’s table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers. That is, someone will now turn and ask, “Well, what does religion have to say about this question?” And when, as often will be the case, religion’s answer is doctrinaire (what else could it be?), the moderator (a title deeply revealing) will nod politely and turn to someone who is presumed to be more reasonable.

The collapse of the liberal order means the collapse of the very category that Gallagher invokes here: “arguments made with baggage attached.” After liberalism all arguments are understood to have baggage attached, which means that the relevant question becomes: What baggage are you carrying? And the baggage carried by Catholics is simply not welcome at the bar of the New Just City. Gallagher is implicitly rehashing here the old saw that “postmodernism brings a level playing field,” when in fact it relieves the rulers of the obligation to level that field. Under the ancien regime of liberalism people needed to come up with reasons for dismissing religious positions, and typically did so, even when the reasons were very badly formed indeed; now the reasons are unnecessary. “You’re a bigot” does the job just fine. As I once heard Richard Rorty say, “The theists can talk, but we don’t have to listen.” There may be, and indeed I think there are, good reasons to abandon fusionism, but the idea that in our current order integralist and other post-fusionism arguments will have greater purchase than fusionism did is, I fear, a fantasy.

Now on to the second half of that paragraph:

For Catholics, this is an invitation to boldness, to parrhesia: there is no point in watering down traditional teachings to comply with the norms of a decaying liberal discourse. And for non-Catholics, it offers the possibility of new political alignments, based not on a false equation of Catholicism with any other school of thought, but on the identification of genuinely shared goals. As Catholics become less diffident about the politics their religious commitments imply, they can be more selective in their alliances, seeking allies that not merely pay the Church occasional lip service, but genuinely engage with her ideas. Catholics, of course, hold these ideas to be true. But even nonbelievers may have reason to welcome a more intellectually assertive Catholic politics. In this ideologically unstable era, the tradition of the Church offers an alternative to moribund liberal modes of political thought, an alternative that may avoid many of the errors and illusions that confound contemporary society. As that ideology loses its grip, as liberalism loses credibility, there is less profit than ever in a scheme of fusionist accommodation. To participate in this no-longer-neutral public square, the Catholic tradition must be prepared to speak in its own voice.

Again, I agree with the conclusion but not with the reasons stated to support it. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Catholic particularism will have any more “credibility” to the society at large than Catholic fusionism did. “The Catholic tradition must be prepared to speak in its own voice” not because that will be more credible or effective but because it is the Catholic tradition’s own voice. Calculations of political effectiveness are misplaced in a social environment where all substantive (and hence exclusive) religious stances are indistinguishable from the grossest bigotry. The dogma living loudly within you won’t win many friends or influence many people. But it ought to live loudly within you anyway.

Which leads me to my chief point: earlier I pointed out that Gallagher was employing a category (“arguments that carry baggage”) that in our moment has become invalid, and now I’m going to point out one that’s absent from his essay but I think has some use. That category is “Christian.” Note that Gallagher writes of “non-Catholics” and then, a little later, writes of “nonbelievers” in a way that suggests he sees the two terms as synonymous. I suggest that they aren’t. But Gallagher’s essay contains only the vaguest of hints that non-Catholic Christians exist.

This means that he doesn’t note that one of the natural outgrowths of Catholic fusionism was a certain attention to ecumenism. If, as a Catholic, you could make common cause with free-market conservatives, then you certainly ought to be able to make even more common cause with free-market conservative Protestants, especially if they also shared your views on abortion. Thus the Evangelicals and Catholics Together project, which began, more or less, here and is now moribund.

For many years I tried to persuade reluctant or indifferent Catholics that this kind of ecumenism is not just feasible but mandatory. I typically did so by citing, enthusiastically and in great detail, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (See an example of this kind of argument here. I was so innocent then.) But eventually it dawned on me that the Argument from Catechism was wholly ineffective. For liberal Catholics, it is a product of the very Magisterial authority that they try hard not to think about; for integralists and other traditionalists, its close association with the much-loathed Second Vatican Council — very large chunks of the Catechism are copied and pasted from the documents of Vatican II, and this is especially true of the sections dealing with the “separated brethren” — tends to make it even less appealing to them than it is to liberals.

I just wish I had realized this about a decade earlier than I did.

So I am left with a few questions for integralists and other traditionalists. Without asking that you in any way compromise your integralism or traditionalism, I wonder:

Does the category “non-Catholic Christian” mean anything to you theologically?
If not, why not?
If so, what does it mean?
Does the category “non-Catholic Christian” mean anything to you politically, and especially in the American context?
If not, why not?
If so, what does it mean? Do you think of these particular matters in ways distinct from the fusionists?

from Welles to Saul

Here’s a passage from the Preface to my new book The Year of Our Lord 1943:

Touch of Evil, that Gothic masterpiece by Orson Welles, begins with the most famous tracking shot in the history of cinema. In muted light, we see a close-up of a kitchen timer attached to what appears to be an explosive device, held in a man’s hands. The camera pulls back to show him darting towards a nearby automobile: he sets the time — it looks like around three minutes — then furtively drops the device in the car’s trunk and scampers off. We are, we now see, in a city at night. The camera remains focused on the car as an oldish man and a young woman get into it and drive away. The camera pulls back to the rooftops and tracks backwards ahead of the car, which is soon stopped by some goats in the road. As various people move in and out of the frame, the camera continues its retreat and soon picks up a couple walking down the street. Eventually the car, having overcome its obstacles, re-enters the frame; its driver and the couple come simultaneously to a border crossing. Conversation ensues with the border patrol. When the car is waved through, it passes out of the frame; the camera stays with the couple as they embrace. Then their kiss is interrupted by the blast and flash of an explosion.

I have imitated Welles in this book. A chapter or section begins with one figure, whose ideas and writings are explored. Then, at a point when those ideas intersect, thematically and (roughly) temporally, with those of another figure, the focus shifts. We remain with that thinker for a while, then link to a third. Eventually the one with which we began rejoins the scene. The lives of the people who populate this book only rarely meet, or even correspond; but their ideas circulate from one to another constantly. It is this circulation I have tried to capture by an eccentric means of narration. What might correspond to the explosive device of Welles’s film I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Obviously I have thought about this scene quite a bit — which makes it more annoying to me that when I first watched an episode (208) of my favorite current TV show, Better Call Saul, I missed an absolutely brilliant homage to it. Here’s the scene, which begins, of course, at a USA-Mexico border crossing:

Single Shot Scene from “Better Call Saul” – “Fifi” (S2E8) from qiu on Vimeo.

Amazing stuff. I found online an interview with the director, Tom Schnauz, in which he doesn’t mention Welles. Let’s just let the homage be our secret, then.

once more on generational thinking

Reading this post by Rod Dreher, I am moved to say a couple of things I’ve said often before:

I believe that thinking in terms of generations is far more likely to lead us astray than to help us understand. It encourages us to ignore a whole series of factors (class, region, religious belief or unbelief, level and kind of education, etc.) that are at least as important as date of birth.
If you must think in generation terms, then use Joshua Glenn’s more fine-grained and thoughtful scheme. Otherwise you’ll use absurd categories like “Boomer,” which has Donald Trump and Barack Obama in the same generation, which is manifestly absurd.

That said, people do think in rather crude generational terms and it has a major effect on our social discourse — but not one that is equally distributed. As a rule, your ideas get attributed to your generation when you’re under 30 or over 60. In between your ideas might be popular or they might be scorned, but they generally won’t be explained by your generational placement — though they might be explained by your gender or sexuality or (rarely) social class, for Bulverism we shall always have with us.

When you’re noticeably younger than the people we tend to see in leading roles on TV and in the movies, or noticeably older, your age is registered and then deployed as a causal agent — almost always in order to dismiss your ideas. (Rod’s post is unusual in that it gives equal weight to the influence of generations on people in the in-between years.)

I’ve been told that I think the way I do because I’m white, because I’m straight, because I’m a Christian, because I’m Southern — but rarely, to my recollection, because of my age. I’m pretty sure that’s about to change. In a few weeks I’ll turn sixty, and then I will have the rest of my life in which to enjoy having my ideas waved away because of the year in which I was born. Which ought to be fun.

I have one question

Avital Ronell is “original and inspiring.”

I’m sure. But did she sexually harass her graduate student?

Her “mentorship of students has been no less than remarkable over many years.”

I will gladly take your word for it. But did she sexually harass her graduate student?

She is “a powerful, radical, queer, feminist, professor who has always spoken out for the marginalized in society.”

Okay. But did she sexually harass her graduate student?

“It’s not the same thing to accuse a male person in power versus accusing a woman. It’s just not the same thing, because we’ve got a culture and a very long history in which males were dominant and abusing their power.”

I concede the point. But did she sexually harass her graduate student?

“People know that she is very friendly and open and crosses traditional boundaries in relationships with her students.”

Duly noted. But did she sexually harass her graduate student?

Ronell “is a walking provocation for a stiff Politically Correct inhabitant of our academia, a ticking bomb just waiting to explode.”

This could very well be true. But did she sexually harass her graduate student?

episcopal feelings

One of the more curious aspects of the fallout from the recent revelations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy is the emergence of a certain language of emotion. For instance, Richard Malone, Bishop of Buffalo, wants his flock to know that when he took his recent vacation his “time away for R&R was clouded by the challenges we are facing right now in our diocese.“ He found that his mind was “preoccupied” and his heart was “troubled.” He had feelings. We know that he cares, we know that he takes these “challenges” seriously, because of the feelings he had — even at the beach.

The idea that underlies this kind of communication is made quite explicit in this interview with Fr. Hans Zollner, “a member of the Vatican Commission against paedophilia and president of the Child Protection Centre established at the Pontifical Gregorian University.” The key moment comes when Zollner is asked if the Church is doing enough to protect children and to respond to its past failures to protect them. Zollner’s response: “If we talk about these cases and remain shocked, it means we are taking them seriously.” He goes on in the usual vacuously bureaucratic way to describe the scheduling of “meetings and workshops,” but really the whole substance of his response is this: What matters is how we the clergy feel.

Were your children abused? Well, just look at how “shocked” I am. There. Better now?

When conservative and traditionalist Catholics talk about changes in the Church since Vatican II, one of their most constant themes is the near-disappearance of Confession, of the sacrament of Penance. You can find plenty of commentary on this phenomenon not just in Catholic venues — here and here, for instance — but also in Slate and the Washington Post. (That last piece, from 2007, is about a big push for a return to Confession in the Archdiocese of Washington by its then-newly-appointed archbishop, Donald Wuerl.) There are many speculations about why confession has fallen into such disfavor, but I won’t get into those here, because I have a different point to make.

One could argue that the really key thing about the historical, now almost lost, understanding of penance is this: it’s not something you feel, it’s something you do. There’s an excellent moral realism in this emphasis. Feelings come and go; feelings can be manufactured or pretended-to. But actions — you either do those or you don’t. You say your paternosters or you don’t say them. You wear sackcloth and pour ashes on your head, or not. You take the road to Canossa or you stay home.

Now, to be sure, these actions can be taken for impure reasons. Maybe you wear the sackcloth because you want people to see how holy you are; maybe you kneel before the Pope because you want to keep your crown. But you’re putting yourself to trouble, maybe to some really significant trouble. Moreover, as Bertolt Brecht noted, “weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping.” There are costs to acts of penance, some known, some unknown and unanticipated.

The declaration of feeling, by contrast, is cost-free. Nothing is easier than to say that one’s heart was troubled at the beach, or that one is shocked — shocked! — by further revelations of abuse. Which is why so many Christians are begging the bishops to do something, something that enacts penitence, or at least grief. But the most the bishops, who themselves seem wholly unaware of the enacted grammar of penance, are willing to do is to speak of their feelings.

Oh wait, they also schedule workshops. My bad. Complaint retracted.

the “gradual decay” of Twitter

Am I finally done with Twitter? After years of leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back? If I haven’t learned how to leave Twitter, at least I’ve learned how not to claim that I’m leaving Twitter. But I’m closer than I’ve ever been.

There’s almost never any pleasure in visiting Twitter now, just the utility of finding out what my friends are up to. Still, something in my brain remembers better times, so left to my own devices I check in far more often than makes sense. So lately I’ve been using Freedom to block Twitter except for a brief period each morning and a brief one each evening. I have found that I don’t miss the place, yes, but also that more and more often I forget to visit when the window is open.

Now that Twitter is finally hobbling the third-party clients that make using the site bearable, and is continuing to get bad publicity for its inability to control bad actors on its platform, I’m seeing in my RSS feed a number of suggestions for how Twitter can be fixed. All of them are ideas that have been put forth for a decade now — adding a paid tier, forcing the third-party clients to show ads, improving the ability to block users — so it would be very strange if Twitter started making intelligent decisions at this late date. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t known for his wit, but I think often of what he said some years ago about the creators of Twitter: They drove a clown car to a gold mine, and then fell in.

Twitter’s current leadership are flailing around right now, looking for ways to fix their platform, but there’s virtually no chance that they’ll make good choices. They have never understood their own product, in large part because few of them use it themselves, and a dozen years in that’s not going to change. And for people like me, it’s too late anyway.

There’s a very moving passage in one of Samuel Johnson’s essays about how friendships end that captures much of how I feel about Twitter:

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal. — Those who are angry may be reconciled; those who have been injured may receive a recompense: but when the desire of pleasing and willingness to be pleased is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless; as, when the vital powers sink into languor, there is no longer any use of the physician.

But if my friendship with Twitter is dying, I still care for the friends whose company I have enjoyed there. I hope I will hear from them elsewhere — maybe even at micro.blog.

going big, going small

Here’s the promised follow-up my recent post on the university. In one sense I want to think bigger than Daniel and Wellmon do, and in another sense I want to think smaller. Let’s start with “bigger.”

When Ross Douthat recently commented on my new book, he used it to turn his attention to the condition of the humanities in American universities today. I responded to that turn in a couple of tweets that probably have been deleted by the time you read this, so let me quote them here:

I think it’s important to distinguish between the humanities (intellectual disciplines located primarily in educational institutions) and humanism, or humane reading and learning (which have fuzzier and more flexible institutional placement). It is possible to renew humane learning without renewing “the humanities,” and to some extent vice versa. It’s worth remembering that only one of my five protagonists was an academic (CSL), though Auden taught for a while to make ends meet.

All of my protagonists were concerned with education, but none of them particularly with university education. By then, most of them thought — Lewis was particularly explicit about this — it was too late for major interventions into a young person’s formation. Nor were any of them especially concerned with the curricula of lower schools. Rather, what they wanted to shape was a culture in which humane learning was valued — a culture that, for at least some of my protagonists, began with the family and extended into the public sphere. On this model, what happens in schools at any level is downstream from other, more fundamental forces.

I’m attracted to this idea and think it applicable to our own moment — maybe more applicable now than it was 75 years ago. Given the tentacular infiltrations of the internet, the building of a humane culture can begin anywhere, and even if you’re a professor it’s not necessary to confine your efforts at culture-making to the inner structures of the university. You can think of culture as neuronal, branching dendritically, memetic axons carrying information and moral impulses among family, school, public sphere. Indeed it may be the case that if we want to make our universities healthier the best course might be not to aim directly at them but to nourish families and the public sphere, in order to stimulate universities from without. In that sense I am thinking a little bigger than Daniel and Wellmon do.

But cultural nourishment begins at home. While I can think of my interventions occurring along axons that link multiple cells of culture, I can rarely control my levels of access to any given cell or aggregation of cells. To take a very homely example: I am very interested in the informational culture of the institution where I work — the ways the technologies we have adopted shape our reading, our writing, and our pursuit of knowledge, and while there are several faculty committees on campus that deal with these matters, I have never managed to get myself appointed to any of them. Every year I volunteer; every year I hear nothing. (I am not sure why this is — I think it’s a product of some long-standingly perverse politics here at Baylor — but the reasons aren’t relevant to this post.) It is very difficult to see how you can directly help to shape “the university” if you can’t get appointed to the very faculty committees that a great many of your colleagues are trying to avoid having to serve on.

So, as needed, you get more local. You start with your classroom, or your personal blog (hi), or whatever is, as Heidegger might put it, zuhanden. One of my favorite scenes in Dickens’ Bleak House comes when the indefatigable Mrs. Pardiggle tries to enlist our heroine Esther Summerson in her “militant” evangelism among the poor — which is in truth not evangelism at all but rather relentless moral hectoring. Esther finds it appalling, and overcomes her characteristic diffidence sufficiently to resist:

At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect. But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications. That I was inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of view. That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which must be essential to such a work. That I had much to learn, myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide in my good intentions alone. For these reasons I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.

This is what I counsel in relation to fixing the university: note what is to hand, make your interventions locally, see where they take you, and “try to let that circle of duty gradually and natural expand itself.” This is not a matter of “think globally, act locally”: you are thinking and acting locally. But if you do so faithfully and consistently, then maybe over time your “local” becomes rather more expansive.

another look at Daniel, Wellmon, and the future of the university

Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon respond to my response to their essay. (They respond to Cathy Davidson too.) Got all that?

My first thought is that if I had known that my blog post would be taken even this seriously I would have spent more than ten minutes writing it. (You live and you learn.) But now I’m digging into the subject more fully and thinking more seriously … and just getting more confused.

The stories I read about the American university just yesterday told me, with illustrative examples, that it’s a place where any dissent from leftist orthodoxy is being ruthlessly crushed; where the tyranny of deep-pocketed donors is driving out any resistance to free-market capitalism; where powerful humanities professors rake in big money for purveying pseudo-radical ideas while demanding sexual favors from younger colleagues and grad students; where soon enough there will be no humanities professors or humanities departments, and precious few humanities courses.

Again those are stories I read yesterday. Aside from the variety of the narratives, the chief thing that I would note about them all is that each claims to be saying something at least characteristic and perhaps definitive of “the University.” All tales about “the University” are morality tales, with very explicit lessons that are presumed to be transferable to any and every particular institutional context.

And that’s what makes all these narratives bullshit. It’s not that the events they describe didn’t or don’t happen; rather, it’s unsustainable imposition of definitive and universal judgments based on handfuls, at most, of anecdotal material.

I have therefore come to the conclusion that nothing of general validity can be said about “the University” – and not much about any given university in toto. Different schools and programs within the university conveyor very different purposes and characters. Even departments that seem relatively closely related, according to the taxonomy of academic disciplines, can sometimes lack a common vocabulary, common goals.

All of which means that I myself wrote too generally and abstractly in my earlier post. It is true that the people who make the biggest financial decisions tend do so along the lines I suggested, as Daniel and Wellmon agree. (Universities “have increasingly adopted the practices, technologies, and professional expertise of late capitalism…. In many places, these activities and idioms are gaining such purchase that they threaten to exert a decisive influence on what universities most basically do, to the exclusion of core academic considerations.”) But much else is going on – not all of it Good – throughout every university, and its many nooks and crannies. More on this later.

For now, though, I want to note that Daniel and Wellmon are not as afraid as I am of speaking in general terms, and make a broad recommendation: that the American university renew and intensify its (historically variable) investment in the American democratic project. “The democratic model” can offer a “normative ideal” for the university, and should be grasped as such.

My essential problem with this suggestion is that I do not know what it means. I think there are two broad possibilities:

The pedagogical: Universities should take on the responsibility toe educating students to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens in a democratic order.
The demographic: Universities should seek to serve a broader constituency than is characteristic of elite institutions, bringing in students from historically underserved populations and helping them to come into their inheritance as persons and citizens.

Maybe (probably) both of these are at work, but I suspect that the latter is the stronger emphasis. I’d appreciate clarification on this point.

I also don’t know how to understand this renewal of the democratic model as regulative ideal in relation to what Daniel and Wellmon say elsewhere in the essay about the university-as-corporation: “Too frequently, the question of how and whether they make the university a better university — by advancing teaching and research — is never seriously considered.” Does “advancing teaching and research” necessarily contribute to the democratic project? Or must teaching and research be adapted to make that happen?

Moreover: Let’s say that I sign up for this project. How do I contribute? To judge by his job title — “senior associate dean for administration and planning” at UVA — Adam Daniel may have some input into his university’s overall strategies. And Wellmon recently led a revision of UVA’s undergraduate core curriculum. But what should a teacher like me do? Try to get myself appointed to the right committees? Write essays for the Chronicle of Higher Education? Obviously I don’t expect Daniel and Wellmon to produce a blueprint. But I would like a better idea of how an academic might support a renewal of the democratic project, and how anyone might recognize the signs of such a renewal, were it to begin.

I said earlier that I would say more about the great variety of goods that are being pursued in any given university, but I’m going to save that for another post. Stay tuned.