Go to Google and type in “is college.” If your autocomplete is anything like mine, your computer will then suggest “worth it?” as the right way to finish that question.
These are actually the images pulled up by that autocomplete brilliance that assumes to know our human, all too human, minds better than we do:
Two things jump out at me about these images (and there were many, many more like them when I continued to scroll down the page.
First: There is an assumed economic value-theory underlying the notion of “worth.”
Second: There is absolutely nothing here that would indicate that human existence, selfhood, and society are important separate from that economic value-theory.
Just on its own, this should be a striking realization. Seriously, let it sink in a bit that when we use the most powerful (search) tool in the history to survey the vast wisdom of global traditions, it spits back out to us that college is primarily (maybe exclusively) a matter of getting jobs that pay a lot of money.
Sigh.
Ok, so let me just warn you that this post is a bit longer than usual and a bit more philosophically technical, but hopefully it is helpful for framing an important social issue in rigorous, while also accessible, ways. Let’s dive in . . .
Hopes for Our Children
About 10 years ago I gave a keynote talk to a group of several hundred prospective students at a university. I began the talk by saying the following:
If you are a parent or guardian or mentor who has brought a young person to campus today, raise your hand.
Hands went up (and yes, I am now autocompleting this sentence myself with the lyrics from the Beastie Boys “Paul Revere” - “hands when up as people hit the floor . . . “ Yessssss. Anyway, back to the thought) across the auditorium. I then said:
Leave your hands up if you care more about what your kids do for a living, what job they have, how much money they make, than you do about who they become as people who seek truth, cultivate virtue, and create beauty in the world.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, all the hands went down. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.
Of course they did. They should have.
I then asked the audience:
Then why do nearly all of your words and actions convey the opposite commitment?
The room fell silent.
This is not the kind of thing you are supposed to say at an opening keynote for an admissions event! Isn’t my job simply to convey how amazing this institution is? Shouldn’t I just be pointing out that we are better than other schools because of the amazing jobs that our students get?
Well, even though I think that institution is awesome and even though the students do get amazing jobs and go on to staggeringly impressive careers, I felt then (and feel even more strongly now) that stressing distinctiveness according to the economic value-theory that is assumed not only by Google, but also by nearly all the parents in that room, amounts to abandoning the true importance of education itself. Moreover, it threatens the critical role of the university in contributing to human flourishing, maximizing social stability, and envisioning creative possibilities for the future.
Dichotomies Persist
Look, I want my students to get jobs! And, as a parent, I definitely think that it is necessary to weigh the economic realities of the spiraling (and deeply problematic and immoral) costs of higher education (which must always be considered against the backdrop of socio-political priorities that have gutted funding for public education for years - and tragically so in the areas of the humanities). However, as a philosopher, and a professor, I think that we are quickly falling deeper and deeper into a hole whereby the very place where thinking critically about such socio-political priorities should occur (namely, universities) is becoming less and less able to do such work.
Universities are increasingly, and ever more quickly, becoming places where the goal is simply to create employees (regardless of the cost to their personhood), rather than to create persons capable of critical reflection about what it means to consider the title of “employee” as part of one’s social “worth.”
Ok, I get that many of you are likely saying:
This is a false dichotomy! Getting a job is part of what it means to pursue a meaningful life!
I get the claim, and it is not wrong. But I do think it misses the fundamental point that I am trying to highlight. Think about it this way, universities (in the effort to be attractive to students and their parents) often narrate the main goal of higher education as being to prepare students for “the real world.” However, one would be forgiven for asking “exactly what ‘world’ is understood to be ‘real’ here?”
Is it the “real world” in which assholes almost always win in business and kindness is viewed as hampering “success”?
Maybe it is the “real world” in which racism and sexism continue to mark our social interactions, institutions, and social systems?
Perhaps it is the “real world” whereby gun violence is so common as to warrant active shooter drills in elementary schools?
Or could it be the “real world” where conspiracy theories, lying, a disregard for evidence, and self-protective ignorance are taken to be acceptable strategies for political leaders?
The point is that we all know what the “real world” is internal to these university branding slogans. It is the economic system by which one’s happiness is dictated by one’s bank account and one’s social identity and moral worth are nested in one’s economic status.
Rhetoric about “the real world” is tantamount to a discourse that underwrites and reinforces the status quo of our economic value-theory. We want to prepare students for the “real world” because we want to convince them that this is simply “the way things are.” Universities have embraced this language because it not only plays well with students and their parents, but also with the broader business and political culture that constitute the donor class.
But, universities must be places where the goal is not simply to reinforce the status quo, but to interrogate it.
Universities cannot be sites of quick acceptance, but rather must be places of patient questioning.
In this way, universities do not exist simply to prepare students to become employees ready for the “real world,” but primarily to invite students to become people who understand the importance of asking what “world” should be made “real.”
Notice the difference in these two options.
The first is a matter of shutting down human imagination in favor of just falling in line with the vision set by others - a vision that now is presented and embraced as “obvious,” “necessary,” and “unchangeable.” The second, alternatively, fosters a robust embrace of the importance of human imagination for continuing the active conversation of humankind about what vision is worth pursuing as a social possibility.
Whereas the first reflects the culture defined by corporations, the second creates a culture in which corporations should then be situated.
Reflecting or creating?
I see this as the fundamental choice that universities face moving forward. I desperately hope for the sake of humanity (and even the fate of our non-human neighbors with whom we share the earth) universities find the courage to lean into culture creation.
It might sound weird, but in this way, the university must actively become more marginal, rather than more mainstream. Universities must be marginal not in the sense of being less important, but in the sense of being oppositional to false-necessities, supposed-obviousness, and assumed-values.
Another way of putting this basic point - consistent with my general concern for doing philosophy in the wild - is that universities should be “wild” things. They should not be tamed by the broader social priorities reflecting the power structures of economic preference.
Only as a “wild” site where the broader social logics and economic value-theories are not assumed, can the university be what it must be if we are to have a future worthy of the finitude that defines the human condition itself.
Borrowing Russell McCutcheon’s helpful categories (which he applies to the possible roles that professors can play in social discourse), I contend that universities must be critics of the status quo, not caretakers of it.
I imagine that if you are reading this that you are already the sort of person who shares my view of higher education. But, whether you are saying “Amen!” or pounding your fist in outrage at my ignorance born of oblivious privilege, I hope that you will at least think carefully about the stakes of these ideas.
In order to give a little bit of philosophical framing for the general picture I have painted above, I want to turn to the phenomenology of Michel Henry. In his book, Barbarism, Henry starkly presents the need for marginalized universities.
The Destruction of the University
The subtitle for this section is actually the title of the chapter in Barbarism where Henry explains the importance of universities as liminal or marginal institutions. By using the term “destruction” he is appealing to the heritage of phenomenology - both in its Heideggerian form of the “destruction of western ontology” and its Derridean form of the “deconstruction” that “makes language tremble.”
What does it mean to “de(con)struct” the university? For Henry it is a matter of understanding the genuine task that universities must play in order for them to stand as culture creators in a society devoted to the death of culture.
Here is the basic idea:
Henry contends that “subjectivity” is fundamentally about “Life.” Life is a complicated concept for Henry because it “cannot be confused with the object of scientific knowledge” (6). Instead, life is something that everyone knows, as part of what we are” (6). Such phenomenological life is “the very fact of sensing or experiencing oneself and nothing else” (6). It is in the liv-ing in which we are always engaged whereby we are affected at the most basic level. Life is not a thing, it is the animating dynamic of those living things who experience themselves as alive.
Ok, yeah, I get that this is starting to sound a bit fuzzy.
But, here is the important part. As a matter of life, subjectivity is not something that can be expressed in externals. It is radically immanent. This matters because it forces us to reconsider the value-theory by which human dignity is conceived according to an economic logic.
The villain of the piece in Henry’s telling is scientism - not science as a human practice reflecting the ways that subjectivity can play out as a social discourse, but the value theory by which objectivity is privileged such that subjectivity needs minimized and diminished. When objectivism reigns as the criterion of meaning, life becomes an inconvenient obstacle to be overcome.
The increasingly emphasis on STEM disciplines as the only “practical” majors in college reflects this objectivist/scientistic perspective. Importantly, though, as I have argued in more technical ways elsewhere, the “success” of STEM disciplines as “relevant to the real world” is underwritten, supported by, and justified according to, a business logic and an economic value theory. So, we should think of the “relevance” of STEM(B) as the actual way in which such objectivist thinking creeps into our universities.
Again, science is not the problem. It is crucial to human flourishing. I like vaccines!
But, when classics programs are cut to make room for pre-professional programs, when philosophy departments are gutted and the faculty lines switched to entrepreneurship professors, and when historians are viewed with suspicion alongside the “obviously” important health sciences faculty, the university is no longer a critic of the scientistic social priorities, but merely a caretaker of such “practical” priorities.
Ugh. . . for two reasons: 1. Since when did “practical” not include careful analysis facilitating better navigating the human condition? 2. The data consistently shows that even on the economic logic of job placement, humanistic disciplines does an exceptionally good job of preparing students for jobs! So, even if you fundamentally reject my deeper critique of the social logic in play, perhaps it is worthwhile asking why the humanities are under such continued public assault? Maybe it is because the humanities are so good at training students to take seriously what everyone else takes for granted? Maybe it is because they are comfortable with question-marks where everyone else wants quickly to drop in periods? Simply put, social priorities narrate being “practical” as a task of becoming a “caretaker.” But, as “critics,” students are threats to the power structures dictating the terms of engagement . . . and the conditions of employment.
Don’t misunderstand me, pre-professional programs are important, entrepreneurship is wide-ranging and valuable, and health-sciences majors are crucial for taking seriously the dynamics of lived embodiment. None of this is about pitting one discipline against another one. It is about the ease with which we deploy rhetorics of importance, value, and the stakes of life itself. It is about pushing back against the dichotomy that so quickly assumes value to be anchored in our ability to count (students in majors, percentages of students getting jobs 6 months out from graduation, and lifetime earning expectations), rather than our ability to think deeply about the ways that such abilities should be deployed in our academic identities.
Anyway, the upshot of the objectivist proclivities Henry identifies is what he calls “barbarism.” This is a situation in which culture dies. Culture is, for him, what results from an embrace of subjectivity as the hallmark of human dignity. Art, ethics, religion, philosophy . . . these discourses are manifestations of human imagination being anchored in the affective dimension of our embodied existence.
Culture constantly returns us to our humanity.
Barbarism strips us of our humanity and turns us into things.
Culture encourages a clear distinction between what we do (for a living) and who we are (as alive).
Barbarism suggests that what we do defines who we are.
Culture sees our vulnerable embodiment and finitude (our eventual death) as the conditions of meaning.
Barbarism seems our vulnerable embodiment and finitude as problems to be addressed with technological solutions.
Culture realizes that “in the end there is the unmanageable” (thanks to David Kangas for this phrase).
Barbarism supposes that all of life is something to be handled via the strategies of management principles.
With the rise of scientism as the guiding criterion of meaning and value, economics and business as the fundamental logic by which such a criterion is deployed, and the wisdom of subjectivity being replaced by objectivist technical knowledge, Henry concludes that “we are entering into barbarism” (1).
Barbarians at the University Gates
But what does the university have to do with this slide to barbarism?
According to Henry, the “barbarism that gradually corrupts society entirely makes it impossible to maintain a University that lives up to its own concept” (115).
How so?
Well, given that the university is fundamentally about culture creation, about life, about deepening subjectivity as the key to human dignity and social relationships, it must operate according to a “principle of marginality” (116). It must be a critic of the encroachments of barbarism that present themselves as simply concerns with “preparing for the real world.” But this “real world” is an “inhuman world” (120).
Listen to Henry’s explanation of this claim:
“Inhuman refers to the ontological revolution through which the guiding and organizing principle of a society that found its substance in life no longer exists. It is now only a sum of knowledge, processes and procedures that have set aside life so that they can be established and used. Such a situation . . . is the barbarism of our times. In the society that it brings about, there is no longer any place for a University, if, as a place of teaching, apprenticeship, and research, it reunites all the processes of self-development and self-fulfillment of life” (120).
To that I simply say, Amen.
Insofar as university administrators think that they are only going to survive if they become increasingly pre-professional sites of objectivist discourse feeding the machine of technological advancement at the cost of the humanities, they are not only fooling themselves, but they are actively contribution to the destruction of the university as such.
Yeah, that’s right. I said it. You should too.
We need to be critics of the way that universities are understanding themselves as caretakers if we are going to get back to a place where universities are doing the work they are meant to do.
That society needs them to do.
That we depend on them to do.
Jobs Matter, but They are Not Ultimate
Neither Henry nor I is saying that jobs don’t matter. This is no clap-trap about just pursuing one’s love or following one’s passion and disregarding a concern for economic conditions of human existence. No, this is simply an appeal to universities to be universities, not shills for corporations.
But, that doesn’t mean that we stop encouraging internships, say. Rather, we change the rationale of why we encourage them. Internships are crucial ways of exploring different options for how one’s selfhood/subjectivity might play out in particular lived directions.
We shouldn’t stop helping students to think about careers, but remind them that doing so is an important facet of inhabiting meaningfully the social world that has contingently been allowed to become a fact (at least for now).
We shouldn’t get rid of career services offices, but instead partner with them to integrate humanistic priorities within their missional directives and their operational procedures.
We shouldn’t tell students that jobs don’t matter. That is lying to them. But we can help them see the humanities and the arts (along with the sciences, when stripped of scientistic idolatry) as some of the best resources for developing professional competencies (as stipulated by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, for example). Importantly, such competencies are not merely instrumental tools to be used for monetary gain. Instead, they are important requirements for human social existence. It is because we are social beings from the outset that we need to develop skills like critical thinking, communication, and leadership, while fostering commitments to equity and inclusion, teamwork, and professionalism.
Importantly, though, professionalism is not manifest in one’s wearing a business suit, but in a recognition of the real “value” of fostering selfhood for all of those with whom we share the world. Universities are one of the best places for this important work and, hence, they should reject any conception of value that understands the question “is college worth it?” to be entirely answerable on a Profit-Loss Statement.
Yes, as Henry rightly admits, “on the one hand, it is true that [university teaching] must enable everyone to fulfill a social function and thereby to be able to get a job. On the other hand, however, it is essential to allow one to use all of one’s gifts and abilities in order to realize one’s own individuality, that is, the essence of humanity in oneself” (121-22).
When we take “the economic end as sufficient and valuable on its own,” we actively undermine the university. “To construct the University on this basis [of self-sufficient economic principles] is to limit its field or vocation terribly, and if this vocation is culture, it is to destroy it” (122).
The university must be a place where what is worth being considered as “ultimate” is an active and constant question. Yet, when we reduce higher education to an instrument of a broader logic of economic value, when we “tame” it and make it complacent/complicit in the STEM(B) priorities, we do not invite students to think about what matters, but we tell them that they only matter if they are economically prosperous.
If Henry is right, and I am inclined to think that he is, doing so is not only a tragic abdication of responsibility, but it also leads to barbarous consequences for ourselves and all those who would then inherit the “real world” we have handed them.
Stay Weird. Stay Wild.
I have heard that many hope to “keep Asheville weird.”
Well, since I live near Asheville, that sounds fine to me, but I think that we should also strive to make, and keep, universities “wild” things. We must resist the dangerous temptations to nostalgia that so often creep into discourses about humanistic study. None of this is meant to be nostalgic. It is instead an attempt to be truly innovative in light of a phenomenological awareness that continues to speak to us and that we continue to hear.
That, I believe, is a job that is definitely “worth it.”
Our future depends on our being very, very good at it.
Ok, so let’s get to work.
Citations from Michel Henry, Barbarism, Trans. Scott Davidson, Continuum: 2012.
Thank you so much for digging a bit deeper with me in this post. I would love to hear your thoughts about it. If you are a paid subscribe, drop a comment and let’s continue the conversation. And, yes, I get the irony of railing against an economic logic and then encouraging you to support my public philosophy in monetary ways. But, again, jobs matter, but they are not ultimate. I am so very glad that you all think with me about things that matter and help push me to think better about what I think about.
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