More on students and politics
Do we still believe the university contributes, through its teaching, to the common good?
Have you read my recent article in Commonweal about what’s really going on with college students and politics? It’s right here, free to read and share. I hope you’ll enjoy it. In brief, I argue that the national narrative about college students as brainwashed, censorious radicals — a narrative that is currently costing the country dearly — is false. I base this contention on on conversations and classroom visits with students and professors at colleges across Texas and Oklahoma, and not just the most prestigious ones. Hearing from them might give you a glimmer of hope for the future of American democracy.
Toward the end of the story, I refer to “the educated citizen’s duties to share what they’ve learned and contribute to the common good.” I don’t defend the claim that educated citizens have such duties. I believe they do, but I wonder if this belief is widespread.
Certainly, in years past, political leaders argued that such duties existed. In a graduation speech at Vanderbilt University in 1963, President John F. Kennedy called attention to the responsibilities of educated citizens. The first of these responsibilities is to promote education itself:
If the pursuit of learning is not defended by the educated citizen, it will not be defended at all. For there will always be those who scoff at intellectuals, who cry out against research, who seek to limit our educational system…
But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that "knowledge is power," more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, "enlighten the people generally ... tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day." And, therefore, the educated citizen has a special obligation to encourage the pursuit of learning, to promote exploration of the unknown, to preserve the freedom of inquiry, to support the advancement of research, and to assist at every level of government the improvement of education for all Americans, from grade school to graduate school.
Do we — does the American public at large — believe this? I fear that elites on either end of the political spectrum by and large don’t. Doesn’t it seem patronizing, in our populist age, to claim that the more-educated owe an education to the less-educated? Isn’t the point of populism, currently the ruling ideology and soon to be co-opted by the opposition party, that “the people” need never improve? That they only need to be set free from the sneering elites who hold them down?
If my suspicion is correct, then Kennedy’s second responsibility of the educated, a duty to the public, also no longer rings true:
I would hope that all educated citizens would fulfill this obligation--in politics, in Government, here in Nashville, here in this State, in the Peace Corps, in the Foreign Service, in the Government Service, in the Tennessee Valley, in the world. You will find the pressures greater than the pay. You may endure more public attacks than support. But you will have the unequaled satisfaction of knowing that your character and talent are contributing to the direction and success of this free society.
Some people, including Alice Morris, the Rose State College student who appears at the end of my essay, clearly still believe in this obligation. But who else does? The populist ideology fits hand-in-glove with an ethos of rapacious self-enrichment by those with an advantage of education. You don’t get a college degree today to serve the public; the degree is incidental to the drive to get the biggest stack you can.
If we’re looking to the 1960s for ideas about the relationship between politics and higher education, we won’t only find the broadly-palatable fare presidents offer in graduation speeches. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education last fall, Franklin Eccher, a graduate student at Penn, sees the 1962 Port Huron Statement as a model of leftist thinking and activism within the university.1
To Eccher, the Statement’s advantage, compared with the campus protests of 2024, is that the Statement has an account of the value of learning in relation to political action. Eccher quotes a passage from the Statement that strikes me as quite different from how people in the universities picture their institutions’ political roles today:
The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.
On this account, education and politics are inseparable components of human flourishing. Eccher thinks this notion has not been on display recently:
So long as campus protesters lack a coherent defense of the university as anything other than an expensive dais from which to make demands, the right’s claim to the university is, if only rhetorically, an effective one.
While the populist right tries to destroy the university, the left, in Eccher’s view, ought to consider what it wants the university to do. In his words:
it would be fruitful for the left to ask honestly: Does it still believe in the university?
The importance of the university as a bridge to power is undeniable. But to marshal its influence without attending to its central function — teaching — forecloses any possibility for true coalition building. As the Port Huron Statement reminds us, we need not settle for pedantry, patronizing administrative programs, or the vicious and anti-dialogic rituals of outrage and cancellation. The problem of the university is as pedagogical as it is political.
At a community college like Rose State College, which I visited to report for my article, the task of building up citizens is totally obvious. It’s an unmistakeable part of what the college aims to do. I think that should get more attention, be more of how faculty and activists think about the political work of the university.
Democracy is a means toward human flourishing not simply because it leads to better outcomes (indeed, it doesn’t always), but because self-governance honors the dignity of the individual person. This dignity, as I understand it, means that each person deserves education (along with various rights, a living wage, etc.). It doesn’t mean that each person’s worst impulses deserve recognition. It means that you, because you’re a person, are worth investing time in — in school, but not only there.2
Final notes:
I was quoted in an Atlantic article by Chris Moody about imposing 1990s-style physical boundaries around office work — particualrly going home and not using a smartphone.
That Commonweal article of mine, once again, is available here.
I assume he’s referring not to the original Port Huron Statement but to the compromised second draft.
By the way, the third responsibility of the educated citizen, according to Kennedy’s Vanderbilt speech, is to uphold the law:
[The educated citizen] knows that law is the adhesive force in the cement of society, creating order out of chaos and coherence in place of anarchy. He knows that for one man to defy a law or court order he does not like is to invite others to defy those which they do not like, leading to a breakdown of all justice and all order. He knows, too, that every fellowman is entitled to be regarded with decency and treated with dignity. Any educated citizen who seeks to subvert the law, to suppress freedom, or to subject other human beings to acts that are less than human, degrades his heritage, ignores his learning, and betrays his obligation.