Coming to Terms: On the Discipline of Building Theory

Once again, I am blowing the cobwebs off this project. Over the next weeks I will try to weave together some new (to me) thinking about what it means to build theory about education. At one level, this is fairly tedious work. The aim is to reign in my own experience as a teacher and program developer and try to see the space of the classroom/college from the standpoint of a sociologist or anthropologist. For better or for worse, a career in teaching rhetoric and literature appears not to have involved this sort of discipline (or it did and I resisted).

At another level, this work is what interrupted by career as a teacher of rhetoric and literature and convinced me to be a student again. Over the past week, I have been squirreling away hours to (re)read Jameson’s 1991 book on postmodernism. There, in the machinations of a philosopher/literary critic/linguist/cultural critic, I am circling back on my assumptions about imagining a project now here in the 21st century. Jameson’s willingness to thinking aloud about thinking from where he stands is, for me, evocative. He wonders about being a Marxist in a postmodern setting (not himself able to engage in good pomo reification); I wonder, with a good deal of guilt and even less facility with reification, about noodling with philosophy in order to think about spaces for teaching and learning. My knee-jerk response is simply to teach and learn and figure out the space as the activities happen (my current guilt grows from doing this writing instead of the work of teaching and learning). On reflection, though, I am haunted by the limitations of spaces of teaching and learning. It is a foregone conclusion that a social arrangement (dare I still say, a culture) constitutes what can and cannot be talked about and perhaps what relations between things can be imagined—the open question really is to what extent “individual freedom of movement” is possible within these spaces. I suspect that movement or resistance or what Jameson calls “permanent revolution in intellectual life” depends on an examination not of static notions of truth and validity but on the historical conditions of possibility. Just teaching and learning absent such reflection is reproductive. It can lead where we want to go, where individuals want to go, but it can as easily lead us down paths we had not expected. Habermas notes that the fascist Karl Schmitt was a legitimate student of Weber.

And so, I plan to spend some time coming to terms with what it means to theorize teaching and learning spaces (to arrive at propositions concerning the relations between important factors) without violating the human practices of teaching and learning. My initial guide is Kris Gutierrez and the thinking that she has done concerning “third spaces.” She and her colleagues made a careful study of California classrooms and began to tease out “differences in involvement, participation, and learning” because they were attuned to interactivity (rather than static measure of development) and took as axiomatic that interactions involve “multiple social spaces with distinctive participation structures and power relations.” Explicit in this axiom concerning interaction are two basic assumptions. First, learners and teachers bring their worlds with them into the classroom and that learning (and by extension teaching) involves changes in the horizons (organizations of meaning including notions of what counts as knowledge) of learners and teachers but also in the horizon of the classroom (and the discipline itself). Second, sense making is triggered by unresolved tensions and dilemmas. Gutierrez has acknowledged that these assumptions are the result of riffing on Vygotsky to account for intersections of diverse activity systems and not simply individuals.

What my friends who approach social reality with numbers in mind might call “factors” come into view here: involvement, participation, and learning but also multiple and irreducible “activity systems” and power relations and dilemmas. How are they related? Gutierrez offers metaphors (a struggle for intersubjectivity that can be seen in Wells’s semiotic apprenticeship or Gee’s tool kit or Gutierrez’s own notion, “social dreaming”).

The determinate relations between variables remain fuzzy for me. Gutierrez’s data comes from groups that I do not study. Still, there is a brash attempt at totalizing here that I like. I am taking it next into more directly Marxist thinking about social space to see if I can push the assumptions closer to the economic and to history.

Democratic Intellectual Resources

A month or so ago, I finished Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard, 2008). At the center of Newfield’s argument is a pair of assumptions. First, in the U.S. context, public universities have made available intellectual and cultural resources for negotiating the American democracy (see for instance pp. 6-11, 47, 125, 126, 273-275). This basic premise likely finds broad acceptance (though I can imagine some think tanks muttering about elitist university sorts and a lack of common sense). The second assumptions is less plain (and likely would cause Bill O’Reilly to go apoplectic): “The culture wars discredited the cultural conditions of the political and economic ascent of . . . college-educated, middle-class workers. The culture-war strategy was a kind of intellectual neutron bomb, eroding the social and cultural foundations of a growing, politically powerful, economically entitled, and racially diversifying middle class, while leaving its technical capacities intact” (p. 6). The book is a selective (Newfield knows the California context best) social and intellectual history that rereads the culture wars of the early 1990’s and traces rise of supply-side economic and cultural analysis and policy that argues relentlessly that cultural and economic explanations of phenomena are neither mutually exclusive nor hierarchical in explanatory power.

What I am left mulling over, though, is how to embed this narrow history in broader economic and cultural histories. Newfield mentions John Kenneth Galbraith several times but seems uninterested in James Galbraith’s ongoing work on inequality. He pauses now and again on the ecological implications of the supply-side orientation of the culture warriors but never quite jumps into a consideration of the way that ecology informs and perhaps underlies both economic and cultural arguments. I finished the book thinking that early in the 20th century (prior to the period that concerns Newfield), the university took over the role once played by land. In the American context, the “availability” of land supported the myth of providential development but also required elaborate rationales for violating basic values (respect for property, respect of persons and a concomitant abhorrence of slavery, respect for nature, participation in community life, among others). As the public universities began to draw growing numbers of students between the world wars but especially after World War II, research and the development of an entire society stood in for the chance to go west and start over. At a university, “anyone” could take up a profession and find her way into the middle class (or become one of the lawyers and surgeons in her pedigree). Again, the myth of American growth had to cover over the denial of access to college to various Americans and to the radically different experiences available along lines that seemed to imply a class system. But the means were there for boundless growth.

Historians of U.S. higher education (Newfield included) celebrate the period between 1945 and about 1972 as a time of growing equality, a time that suggested a potential for a multi-racial society with a majority middle class. They also either explain or cover over a redirection of this trajectory. The university seems, since the 1970’s, to have begun producing inequality and self-interest in various stripes. Relatively few link this redirection to a toxic media environment, an energy crisis, leveraged redevelopment of properties, and public investment in a military industrial complex that would soon have to hope for enemies in order to justify its budget. The American myth of growth had by 1980 exhausted its ecosystem, could not continue to produce at current levels without doing serious cultural, economic, and ecological damage, but the myth insists on growth, more this generation than last.

I started a B.A. in 1981 at a regional Midwestern university that seemed still to consciously aim at gathering together the (largely white) children of Wisconsin and provide them opportunity to go where their interests and efforts took them (the economy willing). While I was at school, though, my campus voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in its history, for a candidate who had declared that government (one that in my state still supported a collegiate experience for the top 75% of a high school class) was a problem. My classmates voted for Reagan at a point when the culture warriors were still working out their white papers (Friedman’s important stuff was already in circulation but just finding significant application to policy). We (I was not at that time knocking on doors for the Green Party) voted for Reagan for cultural and economic reasons but not those, I think, that Newfield considers. My classmates jammed TV lounges to see episodes of General Hospital and loved MTV (I myself cannot be blamed for these 1980’s legacies). In the year I graduated, Dire Straits released “Money for Nothing.” The culture warriors clearly did sit in smoke filled rooms and think through political and economic and cultural strategies (Newfield’s argument is compelling for me), but they too were products of cultural and economic forces themselves and they found willing audiences for their arguments. They simply declared, You can have your MTV (and vacation in Hawaii) but only if you make sure to protect your interests. We obliged and went on a shopping binge of biblical proportions with little regards for energy, water, food, and real estate policy that was on any measure short-term and on most measures insane. Divorced from any interest in thinking about habitat and community in ecological, truly democratic terms, we followed the easiest credit.

I like Newfield’s remedies (develop public universities that 1) aim at racial equality (of opportunity and outcome); 2) aim at a synthesis of access and quality; 3) redefine development as not primarily economic; 4) increase public funding; 5) publish research describing societies as something other than markets). I finished his conclusion wondering how he might find an audience for these remedies beyond the readers of Harvard Press books on higher education. The elitism of the culture warriors seems largely to define his analysis. The university will produce the knowledge needed. Networked societies are not without need for such universities (and indeed, there are reasons to believe that universities will continue to provide intellectual resources and leadership), but the intellectual resources that will matter will, I suspect, come more and more rarely out of English departments. Wendell Berry has long produced such resources well away from the university (and there are 20 and 30 somethings doing close to subsistence farming on his advice). James Gustave Speth managed a book like Bridge at the Edge of the World only be stepping outside of the discourse of the university. It is figures like Naomi Klein and projects like Witness.org or the Human Rights Video project that will recycle ideals about global human rights into resources.

I am glad to have read Newfield’s book. I wonder if he is prepared to have English departments embrace access and develop cultural and intellectual resources.

Ideas of the University: Common Goods

Over the next several weeks, I am going to work through a series of views of college. While I have recently read through Declining by Degrees, a 2005 collection of essays that serves as the backdrop for a PBS documentary, I want to start with Clark Kerr’s 1963 revision of the moral virtues that Robert M. Hutchins believed necessary for a university president. Hutchins at the University of Chicago at the height of American Modernism believed in courage, fortitude, justice, and prudence; Kerr at the University of California on the cusp of the Postmodern, in judgment, courage, and fortitude. Prudence and justice. What have these ideas to do with higher education, with advanced learning in the 21st century?

First, prudence. Kerr removed (perhaps was pressed by his context to remove) the deliberations of the wise from the enterprise of learning. I will avoid bringing up Aristotle’s discussion of the virtue of phronesis (as I would surely misrepresent it). But I will turn to Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on the “Self and the Ethical Aim” (from Oneself as Another, 1992). At the beginning of his “little ethics,” Ricoeur argues that ethical practice has its roots in the trajectory of a human life. Rather than cycling between ends and means, he looks for the constitutive rules (always socially established) that give a game (a chess match, a soccer game, a human life) its direction. For a human life, it is phronesis or more importantly the phronimos that or who give voice to the constitutive rule. Ends and means cannot help to determine the aim; the community works it out in a place at a time through a dialectic between self-esteem and self-interpretation (a search, as Ricoeur puts it, for “adequation between our life ideals and our decisions”) done in the view of others (p. 180). Living a good life (and I will argue against notions of higher learning that consider living a good life irrelevant) entails reflecting on phronesis and engaging the phronimos in public. The smart and courageous student, researcher, university president who is not also prudent is likely to lose her way.

At what cost? The cost of justness. The choice here (still channeling Aristotle by way of Ricouer) is between power in common and domination. A just president (or student or teacher or researcher) is continually confronted with the equality of the other, of all others. Arguments grounded in means (this will be possible or cheap) and ends (look at what will be accomplished) that dismiss as significant the cost to another are, on this definition unjust. I am not so naïve as to believe that university presidents can make an endless string of win-win decisions. In fact, I believe that in a social space where there real conflicts, the win-win decision is a myth (a wise mediator once told me that if the conflict is real, no win-win decision is possible). I content that a president has to acknowledge that decisions enable some stakeholders to be agents and other to suffer. A just president offers reasons for making decisions (these will involve means and ends) but also an analysis of impact. The community (that is, the phronimos) already knows which impacts, whatever the ends, are unacceptable.

These reflections raise for me questions about human development and the place of learning within that development. The process is inherently risky and historically contingent (where one can go is dependent on where one is). There is in Cardinal Newman (as Kerr tells him) and the models of Robert Paul Wolff a Romanticism that I find a bit annoying. The belief in the individual in isolation strikes me as wrong-headed and not especially useful thinking. What Wolff does that seems critical, though, is to push a materialist/political-economy analysis far enough to notice the conflation of need, felt need, expressed demand and to consider the causal structures that link those quite distinct concepts. He (and Newman for that matter) argue for a space for normative discourse that makes no recourse to profitability. They wrestle to get to a constitutive rule that might take the place of profitability.

What is unsettling for me in Kerr and Wolff is their belief in . . . professors. I, like the students that Wolff describes, love the university. But I struggle to see it as a progressive institution. I look to figures like Will Allen and . . . Deborah Pontillo and Brian Bansenauer for progress. They find themselves at odds with late capitalist institutions (though they cling to the edge of colleges).

What idea is in view here? The urgent need for spaces where a phronimos can practice and my commuities—in and out of college—in pursuit of common good. I can hear the howls about that final phrase. That may be compelling proof for the assertion.

On Spontaneity

Over the next weeks, I am going to blog about what I am reading in a seminar on “inquiry in educational leadership and policy analysis.” As part of this seminar, I am regularly writing 250 word reactions. Entries below will testify to my need for a few more words than that.

Here’s a set of readings.

Harter, S. (2006). What is your burning question? The challenge of framing a problem. In C. F. Conrad and R. C. Serlin (Eds.), The SAGE handbook on research in education: Engaging ideas and enriching inquiry (pp. 331-348). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Ortega v Gasset, J. (1969). On Studying. Some Lessons in Metaphysics. W.W. Norton

Grogan, M. (2004). Keeping a Critical, Postmodern Eye on Educational Leadership in the United States: In Appreciation of Bill Foster. Educational Administration Quarterly 40(2) 222-239.

At the center here for me is a question about the authority to pose questions. Do we ask the “burning questions” that launch meaningful inquiry or do they ask us? How do we implicate ourselves in the practices of education and at the same time distance ourselves from those so that we can ask authentic questions?

Ortega (1932/1969) and Grogan (2004) outline the dilemma but from quite different traditions of thinking about authority. Ortega, in good Modernist form, argued that only an individual’s immediate need avoids falseness in the process of study. Like his contemporaries, Ortega is trying to find space in Modern experience for the intuitive and spontaneous without abandoning the light of Marx and Freud and Darwin. Intuition is bound up, for Ortega, in doing rather than in some abstract (being). Grogan, adopting a “postmodern view” (p. 223), draws on Foucault to argue that needs are always already (to use a 1980s, pomo adverb) largely defined by the discourses those humans use to articulate their needs. She invites “writers and researchers” (p., 234) to take on local, ethical problems by looking at discourses and building counter narratives. She avoids specifics, tries not to get bogged down in how one resists a dominant discourse or how thoroughly integrated the discourse of educational leadership is (and so how difficult to resist).

Nonplused by the postmodern, Harter’s (2006) looks at what she has made. Her needs have arisen in reading philosophers (who turn out to be “worthy of revival at the level of empirical investigation,” p. 336—cannot resist including that phrase), attending to reality, historical theory, clinical practice, acknowledging uncertainty; finally developing a narrative that makes sense of the problem. Looking back at a career in science, she concludes that this often “top-down” “enterprise” (p. 346) is increasingly an activity that finds topics through “curiosity and exploration” (p. 347). She knows of what she speaks.

As I decide how to be a “scientist” (in addition to and never instead of a “humanist”), I wish I could find Harter’s steady pursuit of “truth” (in quotes here for Foucault) more compelling. She began studying self-esteem about the same time that Foucault began lecturing at the College de France. Foucault was questioning, among other things, the ability of scientists to be scientific. Late in his career, notably in a 1977 interview touching on “Truth and Power,” Foucault (1980) argues that intellectuals (his phrase for scientist in this setting) are in service (he notes an important distinction between those intellectuals who actively serve a hegemonic system and those “organic” intellectuals who arise from and remain connected to the proletariat). An intellectual’s contributions are further constrained by the position of her life and work (i.e., her field and political and economic relations) and also her position in relationship to “the politics of truth” (i.e., the ways her work deal with systems or “ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements,” p. 133). Sitting in the position of the professor (a topic Foucault and his contemporary Derrida wrote about extensively), she is after the “genuine” and “rewarding” (p. 331) with a remarkable disinterest in thinking about how those categories are produced. I came to the role of intellectual myself during the culture wars and the excesses of deconstruction; I cannot muster the faith she holds.

Grogan (2004) provides, at least initially, a more compelling path: she notes that the enterprise is collaborative (as does Harter) and that we have to find or problems in narratives about narrowness of understanding that obfuscates oppression. Almost in spite of herself, she too resolves the problem of agency, the difficulty of asking. Her “writers and researchers” partner with those who will do the work, will “encourage ‘oppositional imaginations’” (p. 234), but they do so by leading and writing and intervening. Foucault never worked out very completely how a human being might actually do the work of resistance; he was quite sure that writing and advising no longer (in 1977) could detach truth from current forms of hegemony. Grogan is unbothered by this uncertainty and, like Harter and Ortega, believes in the individual’s ability to resist.

So where to come down? I often return to the poems of T.S. Eliot or the philosophy of Hannah Arendt to make sense of the human condition, so I will throw in with Ortega. Posing a burning question is facing down a contradiction in the problem space that Grogan defines but then doing the work of metaphysics, seeking with and for others a “basic orientation” in a lifeworld that is finally disorienting. The questions of science (and poetry) grow out of doing and (being) in the world. These questions are ever contingent but that contingency is open to history, to the dimensions of time a space. The activity that comes to the surface for me here is waiting. Isaiah and Jeremiah mediated on the human need to wait. J. Alfred Prufrock and also the narrator in the Four Quartets try to engage in the act of waiting without falling into despair or losing faith in the possibility of ceasing to wait.

How do we provide spaces for waiting for the folk who do higher education and higher education policy? What is and might and, perhaps, ought to be their focus as they wait?

Landings

I am (not) home.

For the past month or so, I have been pedaling my bike through the Rock and Wisconsin River watersheds once again. I know where I am, seem to know the people I walk by on the street, for their basic facial features are much like those of my own family. The black ash and Norway maple that line the streets here in Madison, Wisconsin formed the landscape of much of my youth. While I grew up on the other side the northern sub-continental divide in the Lake Superior Basin among sugar maples and the occasional remaining white pine, time in Eau Claire and Madison, and Milwaukee and Cleveland and Washington State, for that matter, set me on my path. While I came into myself along the waters that flow out the Montreal River into the big lake, it has been the Wisconsin and Cuyahoga, even more the Nooksack, Nisqually, but especially the Cedar-Sammamish and the Milwaukee that have brought me to where I am. A child of streams I could drink from, I am a person of polluted urban waters.

My path has circled back to the city where I first lived away from home, a place between the Northwoods and the city. Madison is, of course, not the place I remember. A two-decade consumer binge is everywhere visible here. The campus is more akin to what Mark Edmundson (1997) called “a retirement spread for the young” than to a land-grant college. Indeed, it is much easier to find a local restaurant on the UW homepage than to find the University mission statement. Still, the mission is compelling:

The primary purpose of the University of Wisconsin–Madison is to provide a learning environment in which faculty, staff and students can discover, examine critically, preserve and transmit the knowledge, wisdom and values that will help ensure the survival of this and future generations and improve the quality of life for all. The university seeks to help students to develop an understanding and appreciation for the complex cultural and physical worlds in which they live and to realize their highest potential of intellectual, physical and human development.

It also seeks to attract and serve students from diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds and to be sensitive and responsive to those groups which have been underserved by higher education.

The phrases that make a college work are here: “examine critically,” “knowledge, wisdom and values,” “quality of life for all,” “appreciation for . . . complex cultural and physical worlds,” “ intellectual, physical and human development,” “serve,” “underserved.” But it is a mission that has abandoned the land-grant context for one that is closer to an unabashedly self-interested culture. The Extension can take care of the state’s needs. The UW is a global brand and as such cannot be constrained by a mission that binds it to a lifeplace in any concrete ways. Like its sister institutions, the UW has given up on embodying the Morrill Act. That mission simply does not pay.

The mission of this place was revised in the late 1980s when I was last here. Oddly, the dissonance I feel in that mission is part of what has drawn me here. An educator, I have uncoupled myself from the role of teacher and come to study the context of U.S. classrooms. I am caught in Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) paradox of neighborhood: I can “recognize the extent and uniqueness” of the place of interest—the classroom—only by moving to adjacent places that let me look back at it, but by making this shift, I am less involved in the place of interest, less a neighbor. I need the distance for a time if I am to see more deeply what it means to compose college.

Fortunately, I have landed in a corner of the campus that will bind me to learners. My initial foothold in the UW is a project assistantship in the WIDA Consortium, a WCER project. WIDA aims at this mission:

To promote educational equity and academic achievement for linguistically and culturally diverse students through the development and dissemination of curricular, instructional, and assessment products and resources.

While this statement is as distant from the places of learning as the UW mission statement, there is a difference in its implementation. WIDA is a consortium; its members are bound by statute to pursue the needs of three-quarter of a million English language learners and their teachers. The products and resources that WIDA produces have to work in the classroom, have to facilitate access for English language learners or those products and resources are abandoned, in part because they will not sell. Working at WIDA, I will study how language learners gain access to school and the cultural, social, and economic capital that are accessed through school. Moving through the ELPA, I will imagine how college students gain access.

Place matters. I have a new one.

Redirections

On 12 June 2009, I formally resigned from a tenure-track position at Cascadia Community College, my college. A member of the fourth cohort of faculty at this new college, I find leaving it much like leaving home. In my six years at the College I rethought teaching college English and labored over reinventing the structures of the kind of college education that Mark Taylor (New York Times) or Thomas Toch (Atlantic) and various other voices have been calling for of late. As I began to clean out my office, I wondered about my decision to leave that place and the community that has put down roots there. I am, after all, college teacher by vocation and intuition as well as by training. If I could not ply my trade and grow at Cascadia, I likely am unable to pursue my profession anywhere.

Yet, leave I have. In the fall, I will start at the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, a new place where I will develop differently. My guess is that the ELPA community has a very different interest in college teaching than my Cascadia community. The students and faculty there study educational leadership and policy; they are not engaged in guiding novices into higher education and making space for them. While, like my Cascadia community, they must generate feedback about performances for learners, they likely perceive learners and learning quite differently. Performance at Cascadia means documenting interactions in a half-dozen new and distinct discourses in search of growth in one’s ability to think, learn, communicate, and interact (Cascadia’s college-wide learning outcomes). Performance in the research-1 world seems to be more focused on contributions by already fluent members to specialist discourse communities. Cascadia aims at the cultivation of reflective practitioners; the UW, at credentials.

At one level, this change in professional trajectory makes little sense. Many teachers, especially those interested in general education, move away from R-1 settings where the focus is status and research rather than collective learning. At another level, though, the professional trajectory of a teacher has to wend through settings where the development of new knowledge is central. The demands of community college teacher’s life, at least on my interpretation of those demands, left me disconnected from the new knowledge being generated in my field and largely unable to affect the evolution of ideas or practices or institutions within that field. After teaching for 20 years, I am finally dissatisfied with the way a classroom teacher has been constructed, and I aim to push back a bit at that structure.

This change has been invigorating but also deeply sad. Sitting in my inbox this morning was a note from a former student who had encountered a Tobias Wolff short story on iTunes and flashed back to an experimental entry-level literature course that he and I shared. Corey was a student who had learned to learn and, in that class, learned to turn away from grades and toward art. He thought I might appreciate the piece and sent along a link. I will, for the next few years, not meet students like Corey in the context of a class I have designed and facilitate. I hope, in a few years, to understand more completely how that class worked for Corey and whether it is possible to ground a functional college curriculum not in grades and status but instead in craft and performance. Unsurprisingly, it is a student who, at just the right moment, helps me see what I am about.

This new gig cannot work without ongoing collaboration with learners who see themselves as learners. Cascadia provided those collaborations. Here is to discovering new provocateurs (not really collaborators, as I think about it) at the University of Wisconsin.

On Great Books

I am mulling over Earl Shorris’s fall 2008 Common Review article on “great books” (I'm hoping it shows up as a back issue soon). As I contemplate surrendering (for a time) a position as a humanities teacher and taking up the role of education researcher, this seems like a theme worth thinking about.

Shorris, and the Great Books Foundation for that matter, has me in a sort of bind. I am the product of a great books education. Well, more precisely of a books education, for few of my faculty would have identified explicitly with the University of Chicago or the Great Books initiative. I spent seven years studying literature before I ever thought of how to build a career as a college English teacher. I kept taking classes in my masters program even after I had met the basic requirements because the books and the chance to read was what I needed to do in my mid twenties. In those classes, I forged lasting relationships with other humans and also a sense for how I fit in the world and what the traditions I inherited from my parents meant. I took up a habit of learning that has stuck. While that education has rarely directly produced much social or economic capital, I would not trade it. I love those books.

But still I wince when Shorris reels off the phrase “great books” without any need to justify the adjective. Indeed, he uses the phrase almost to declare that the adjective is inseparable from the noun (he is even able to talk about “the greater great books”). It is not the notion of “great” value in these books that makes me pause. My work in college classrooms over the past twenty years and my reading of establishment media makes me believe that we need what Shorris declares readers get from great books:

They see a thousand disputes and expect a thousand more. They learn that the comfort of surcease is slavery. That is what they find in great books, the common dream of humanity, the unending dream of humanity, the unending argument, freedom.

Amen. This basic criteria describes the texts that kept me in school. The most important of them, though, were not great by the measures Shorris implies (books with authority, classics). Sir Thomas Wyatt’s epistolary satires, the sonnets of Barnabe Googe, the work of Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck and Lucille Clifton. Wyatt is labeled a “silver” or “drab” poet; it is Shakepeare who is golden. The craft in these texts and the contexts in which I encountered them caught me up, addicted me to the “unending argument.” It is not clear to me that naming that craft “great” is either valid or useful. The contexts in which I encountered these texts surely were not universally great. I studied at times with indifferent teachers and nearly always with too many distractions. I read Steinbeck for the first time in a rush to be ready for an exam. The books had their effect, but they were not books on Shorris’s implied list, and the setting was rarely that of the Clemente program.

In 1993, in my first full-time college English gig, I taught a class called “Great Books.” As I read parts of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces with students at a regional campus of Kent State University, I found myself caught between a certainty that this reading mattered and a deep skepticism about how my college and discipline named what mattered. I found then and find now the need to declare books “great” curious. I am happy to argue for the qualities of different texts; I know that I prefer the Inferno to the Republic, and I know why. I wrote a dissertation that reflected at length on the history of the reception of texts, of how texts become great and lose that status. I have spent hundreds of hours drawing relatively students into texts with no interest in declaring those books or those students “great.” Indeed, my students have taught me again to relish Hamlet, in part because they do not know whether it is great.

Shorris’s need to have great books strikes me now as both self-evidently important and at the same time revelatory of a culture losing its way. Not knowing the cultural artifacts that make up one’s cultural entitlement is, at some very basic level, to be intellectually poor and, worse, to lose track of what it means to be human (though Shorris is surely right in arguing that knowing these artifacts does not necessarily make one intellectually right and humane). Of course, a meaningful education needs to include a careful reading of tradition, of great books. But declaring the artifacts of a tradition great can also invite a kind of quietism. Shorris concludes, rightly I think, that the great books make space for continual dispute. The stories he shares of poor people in Darfur and Cuernavaca and and Chicago and Madison sitting to read great books are compelling, and Shorris labors not to idealize the effects of reading Plato. But the telling of these stories dodges action and responsibility. I can read them and feel that the world still works and then flip on HGTV or go and fill my car with fuel or buy tomatoes from Mexico in Seattle in January. I finish the article more certain that the humanities matter and also that Shorris’s humanities and the institutions he mentions (among them Bard College, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College but also Berea College and the Korean National University) are complicit in “the comfort of surcease.”

Let me offer an apology. Shorris imagines inviting people into the great books conversation might (again, he avoids utopian claims) result in more disputation and freedom. Surely this can happen, in some places. By holding onto his adjective, he seems to avoid locating the invitation and linking the reading of books with being in a time and place and owning the implications of actions. Reading the great books, according to Shorris, helps the reader understand that there is no answer to “the riddle of earthly life,” only unending argument. Great books on this line, sanction humans in disconnecting from place and the demand for answers and actions that relationship to place makes. The books may well be great; the abstract notion of greatness is problematic.

Since about 1970, students moving through U.S. colleges and receiving what Robert Hutchins might call—and the U.S. New and World Report certainly has called—“the best education” have dug a $2 or $3 trillion hole in the U.S. economy and exported the ideology of leverage. The economic growth that the best and brightest enabled between 2001 and 2008 is, it turns out, roughly equivalent to the debt that economy generated during the same period. Highly educated Americans have—reading whatever books were required, enshrined self-interest—become comfortable with the fruits of imperialism, if not with the idea. They have become expert in using law and reason as an instrument (Stanley Fish is a wonderful emblem for a humanist in this setting). They are caricatures of the heroes of the books collected in any culture (even the deeply flawed characters Shorris mentions). They are now managing a plot wherein the characters who have failed (made loans that won’t be repaid, cars that won’t sell, schools that do not provide all students access to learning) remain protagonists even though the logic of the plot aims at other values. They have overseen an environmental debacle and are able to make the argument that being concerned for habitat is too expensive.

I am one of those educated folks (though my pedigree is not great; I am the product of state schools). For the past 20 years or so, I have tried to manage a career as a public servant in a culture that is not clear on whether the phrase “public good” is meaningful. I love the books, but my exposure to the books tells me that I have to turn to service learning, I have to ask students to read their environments and take up an obligation for inventing and testing answers. We will still read, but rather than hiding behind abstractions about greatness, we are beginning to wonder about how studying at a publicly funded school draws us into networks of obligation.

We are working with, among other texts, Aldo Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic.” My students do the reading fairly quickly. The discover that Leopold noticed in the 1930s that environmental education (great or otherwise) had not slowed the flow of topsoil down the Mississippi and argued that more of that same education would likely not result in more learning. We talk about the big idea here: the question, for Leopold, was not the books to be read (though he sensed that content mattered) but the moral and ethical purpose behind the reading and the relation of the readers to the topic. My students read Leopold and wonder about his greatness, for I do sing his praises. His prose is beautifully balanced but difficult to their ears. His ideas seem of obvious importance and completely implausible. But what seems to matter in their education happens next. Once we have read, we try to use it to rethink where we are and how we relate to our place. In coming years, we will begin to use his thinking to launch community initiatives; rather than simply thinking about the great ideas, we will try them out and document our efforts.

My students find this approach to books, great or otherwise, a bit odd. They are accustomed to reading books selected by others because these books are correct though not always great. They are practiced in arguing about whether they agree or disagree with the ideas and being tested on whether they understand the main points. They are unused to hearing ideas generously, illuminating those ideas collaboratively, and putting those ideas to work in real environments away from school. The work is hard; evaluations of the work are descriptive and difficult to sort onto a normal curve. I am not used to this practice either. In fact, I rarely manage to facilitate it in a very complete way. This sort of service brings with it serious obligation to those who have not read the books and to those who have and have elected to do nothing with those books. My students regularly declare I am asking too much. They know other readers and writers are getting away by parroting forms.

But those who take up the obligation, find their way to a different voice. And they come to love the books, not because the books are great but because the books have the capacity to motivate and guide and obligate action. My students are honest about our realities: we acknowledge that we learn more about how we should be than we are willing to live out. Still, the books lead us to action, give us a sense of a public space in which we need to talk and listen and say what we have found in the books. Like Shorris, we learn that the public dispute is unending, but we also learn that we are obliged lovingly to make claims, to add to the tradition that we love. In the midst of this learning, often at the end of a course, my anxiety about “great books” and the humanities becomes productive not because my students and I have covered great content but because we have entered into a community that speaks from the tradition to the present. Our claims are almost never great. Indeed, in a ten-week quarter, much of what we write is not as good as what we are able to write. But we carry on, we are willing not to be comfortable.