This article was downloaded by: [University of Auckland Library]On: 07 December 2014, At: 03:54Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Higher Education in EuropePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chee20

A ROMANIAN STUDENT ABROADCONSIDERS FOUR MYTHS OFAMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATIONAna Eugen LitaPublished online: 02 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Ana Eugen Lita (1996) A ROMANIAN STUDENT ABROAD CONSIDERSFOUR MYTHS OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION, Higher Education in Europe, 21:2-3,175-181

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0379772960210217

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is

expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014

HIGHER EDUCATION IN EUROPE, Vol. XXI, No. 2-3, 1996

A ROMANIAN STUDENT ABROAD CONSIDERS FOURMYTHS OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Ana Eugen LITĂ1

One consequence of western aid to Romanian academic life has been the opportunity for youngRomanian scholars, schoocco1led in their early university years under the aegis of the communistsystem, to study with western European and North American visiting scholars in Romania, and/or toattend higher education institutions in both western Europe and North America, and generally toparticipate in worldwide academic life. Such vital inter-cultural, inter-social, and inter-political lifeexperiences provide the expressed raison d'être of western academic aid.

INTRODUCTION

I realize that, in this short essay, I cannot encapsulate all of my varied responsesto the transformative event of capturing the dream of studying in the West after somany years of attempting to function as a humanistic scholar in a political systemthat actively undermined efforts of both students and professors to develop thecritical consciousness that is central to living an enriched life. The opportunitiesthat I have had to study under the guidance of western professors, first with thosein the Civic Education Project/Romania and the Soros Foundation for an OpenSociety/Romania, later on at the Central European University in Prague, andcurrently at Bowling Green State University in Ohio are the ones for which I shallalways be grateful. They have permitted me to live an intellectual life of a sort ofwhich I could never have dreamed when I was rudely dropped into teachinganything but philosophy in a rustic village school in Ceausescu's Romania.

So, let the reader understand that my views on the American higher educationsystem, while critical in the Socratic dialectical tradition, are not meant to benegative, but are presented in all rhetorical honesty so that educationalpolicymakers (both in Europe and in North America) can see the criticalconsciousness (that they profess to be the goal of their higher education structuralreform efforts in the region) in action.

1 A 1983 graduate of the History and Philosophy Faculty at the University of Bucharest, then ateacher and junior researcher at the Institute of Educational Sciences in Bucharest (specialized inthe socio-political aspects of the pedagogy of literacy), Ms. Liă studied at the Central EuropeanUniversity in Prague during the 1994-1995 academic year, graduating with merit from thesociology department with a Master of Arts. Currently she is a graduate student in the departmentof Applied Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA.

175

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014

A ROMANIAN STUDENT ABROAD

It is in this spirit that a Romanian junior scholar makes her contribution to avalue-centered debate on the ultimate worth of higher education.

MYTH NUMBER 1: EDUCATION AS ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT

The first myth of American academic life, as I have noticed it, is predicated on themodernist project as articulated by Descartes and subsequent modernist-scientificphilosophers. Knowledge is discernable, measurable, culminative, and ultimatelyprogressive in its effects. Progress is seen as a primary word of positive value.

Two concepts are central in the achievement of this progress. Academicsmust speak of reified objects of knowing, and they must speak of this objectiveknowledge to each other and to society via a value-free discourse. Such aimsplace trust in empirical reasoning and behavioural research methods as preferred"ways of knowing," because modernism is an analytical and secular endeavour,neither philosophical nor mystical as traditional thinking was.

Modernism is obsessed with surface realities: it only believes what it canobserve and measure. Thus, favoured research characteristics of existence arethose topics that can be: i) discerned with clarity; ii) quantified easily; Hi) assigneda structural-functional role within a larger system; and, iv) have an applied,instrumental bias. In fact, I have noticed that many research topics (and, ironically,even humanistic ones) are often studied analytically and quantitatively. Theintrospective view of interior motivations and beliefs in human behaviour arethereby neither encouraged nor developed in modern American academic life -witness the peripheral position of theology and Freudian psychological studies inthe classic modernist university.2

It seems to me, however, that such behavioural science is not value-free;rather, its shielded power helps elites who can master its symbols to make rationalchoices to secure and to maximize their interests. In the United States, therefore(as much as in the East during Communism), scientific research and technologicalwork, while not often governed by partisan political interests, is governed bysupra-political considerations that benefit what C. W. Mills (1959) called the"power elite" of all parties.

MYTH NUMBER 2: THE SOLITARY SCHOLAR SEEKING TRUTH

One aspect of social behaviour in the United States that really unnerved me until Igot used to it is the conventional social greeting ritual: I am in the hall, walking to a

See A. Ayer, Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1966), for a discussion of thephilosophical aspects of positivistic thought. In contrast, in Romania, after the revolution of 1989,theology, philosophy, and psychology regained intellectual respectability.

176

2

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014

A. E. LITA

class, and pass a colleague. He or she will ask automatically: "Hi! How are you?"Being who I am, I would take the question as a sincere expression of personalinterest; thus, I would stop and attempt to engage in conversation. Wrong move!The colleague would want to keep going, minding his or her own business with themost civil of inattentions. The greeting was a mere convention, a convention thatmade me feel very uncomfortable until I caught the stereotypical answer andmotion: "Fine. Thanks!" and kept walking.

This typical surface behaviour reveals something deeper, that Americanformal freedoms lead to an informal social conformity and a strange docility, anobservation most striking for me, coming from a country in which everyone knewthe real limits of political freedom under the totalitarian regime but could,nevertheless, enact a real personal behaviour of freedom among intimates. Forexample, in Romania, jokes about the ruling ideology were permissible, as long asthey operated within the context of an isolated socio-political sphere. Thus, withinan ideology that relentlessly translated the " I" into a "we", ironically, the solidaritythereby existed whereby we were able to bear our material poverty humanely.Perhaps this was the freedom espoused in the Janis Joplin song, Me and BobbyMagee, wherein the definition of liberty is given as "Freedom is just another wordfor nothing left to lose". This freedom is that of the philosopher - an existentialfreedom that many Romanians possessed, but that many striving Americans,atomistic actors under the pressures of economic competition, lack.

The American conception of freedom seems to me to be based upon aRousseauean paradox. In the natural condition of nature, human beings enjoyed asolitary, autonomous, self-sufficient freedom, with society and its controls aproduct of history paralleling a fall from naturally free conditions to the corruptedconditions of modern life, thereby requiring "perfectible" human endeavours -suchas education. In this context, the American experience posits a social contractwhich controls the individual psyche in the very act of exalting it. Hence, theisolation of the frontier becomes the idealized metaphor for an individual'sdevelopment, but this metaphor operates within a mass and bureaucraticindustrial and educational system. For example, while the American universitysystem of instruction operates with the extensive use of mass lectures and groupwork, it nevertheless emphasizes a thorough-going imposed solitude when doingthesis and dissertation research, as well as an ethos of knowledge therebyproduced as private property that has to be protected by stringent rules regardingplagiarism and copyright restrictions.

MYTH NUMBER 3: SALVATION BY GOOD (HARD) WORK

In its mores, the American academic would reflects the classicProtestant/capitalistic myth as articulated by Max Weber (1977), that economicprogress and personal salvation can be married through hard work. The academic

177

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014

A ROMANIAN STUDENT ABROAD

work at Bowling Green State University is quite demanding, and, being moreindividualized than in eastern Europe, more isolated. Capitalistic completionseems to underlie even a supposedly co-operative enterprise as graduateeducation.

Unfortunately for Weber, however, all this salvation by good work issabotaged, I think, by this individualistic need for socially-validated success. Whatdoes this success mean when it is rendered almost meaningless by being somuch emphasized by the media and dramatized by a beauty pageant mentality? Inthis fashion, the myth of success renders futile the concept of internal worth in thatthere is too much focus upon what someone appears to be, rather than what he orshe is.

Briefly stated, the myth of success (and of the hard work mentality thatsustains it, at least initially) is other-regarding rather then self-regarding. Thus, onefinishes by being obsessed with the extrinsic rewards of educational attainment(credentials) even when one starts with a motivation of intrinsic self-improvement.

This fact is, indeed, encouraged by the generalistic bent of most highereducation curricula in the United States according to which one is motivated to getgood grades in courses that seem irrelevant to the specialism of the qualificationsought (this tendency is most marked at the undergraduate level, but does affectsome post-graduate offerings as well). But the competitive need to get ahead andobtain seemingly economically useful qualifications is such a strong core valueamong many American students that they willingly tolerate such a state of affairs.

This attitude arises because, as many American students see it, they live in asociety that is inconceivable without hard competition. Every now and then onehears the statement, "He (or she) works so hard to finish," but what the student isfinishing and for what reason he or she is finishing it is left unstated. I amreminded of a quotation attributed to the writer Gertrude Stein when she visitedLos Angeles. She stated that "there is no there there"; similarly, finally arriving atan educated state in the America of today never happens. This paradox leads to apositive (and largely unique) aspect of American higher education. It is open toalmost anyone at any time of life as people seek to make themselves competitiveon the marketplace, or perhaps, seek some self-improvement if they are secure intheir finances.

MYTH NUMBER 4: THE BOTTOM-LINE OF IT ALL: WHAT ISTHE COST/BENEFIT OF HIGHER EDUCATION?

This last point leads to a discussion of the final, currently very pervasive, myth inAmerican higher education, that is, the demand to obtain measurable results: inresearch (number of books and articles published); in teaching ability (quantified

178

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014

A E. LIJA

and manipulated statistically); and nowadays even the ability to secure externalfunding.

Outside the academy, attitudes are even more pragmatic. Parents ofstudents, employers, and taxpayers usually want to have it proved to theirsatisfaction that, respectively, their son or daughter will get a good job with asizable paycheck upon graduation, that employees behave themselves and areeasy to train, and that professors actually work, preferably by standing in front oflarge lecture courses all day.

This pragmatic orientation in American higher education these days makesmany persons think in patterns that serve the success ideology of workingeffectively within the socio-economic-political system largely as it stands, withoutquestioning any other existing structural-level alternatives. Indeed, since the endof the Cold War, viable alternatives to liberal capitalism are thought of as not evenexisting (cf., Fukuyama, 1992).

To operate within this system, students have to develop basic skills ofadaptation in order to find sequential niches of professional competencethroughout their lives. If one cannot demonstrate this basic adaptability to marketconditions, then one can easily become a failure. This fear motivates manystudents in their study choices.

For example, the most popular degree programme in the United States is theMaster of Business Administration (MBA), for it is commonly believed that itconveys the possibility to gain employment immediately and to be perfect in the artof selling goods, regardless of their real worth. The trick is to know how to sell notonly the product at hand at the moment of sale but to sell oneself continuously asa product. Only if graduates (of almost any discipline) are able to do this, it isthought (including, oftentimes, by the university itself), is the desired result ofeducation presumed to have been obtained.

I find that while this covert curriculum teaches socially-useful qualities ofpatience, compromise, and tolerance, few courses seem to question the thornyproblem of community in an atomistic America (even though, given the currentperception of this problem among certain public intellectuals, this attitude may bechanging). In a climate wherein everyone learns the price of everything but thevalue of nothing, human well-being (both individually and socially) suffersconsiderably from this individualistically calculating point of view.

But changing this view will be difficult, for many Americans believe it to be theprice of economic growth, and they are therefore willing to accept their failure toadapt well to the defined social pattern in personal terms (as Weber theorized).Hence, it comes as no surprise to find an ego psychologist on every street corner

179

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014

A ROMANIAN STUDENT ABROAD

and in the programmes of every radio or television station to help persons changethemselves to meet the omnipresent demands of the New World Order.3

In sum, if one wants to have a good profile and to be marketable in the UnitedStates educational economy, he or she must account for, and make peace with,these four myths of American society and higher education.

CONCLUSIONS

I would not wish the reader to think that I can only see problems in Americansociety and education, for many good qualities exist as well. One of the bestqualities of the American higher education system is the accessibility andopenness of the teaching staff to students, a situation so unlike the pedagogicalstyle extant in communist-era Romania. In addition, while the myths I noted aboveexist in modern American education generally, there are undoubtedly (due to thelarge variety of educational institutions and programmes) places in which anyperson, however counterculture-or\en\ed, can find his or her own success. Add tothis flexibility of study programmes the almost magical technology (computers,internet, and automated research tools), it becomes possible for independentscholars to function in a vital way that would be almost impossible elsewhere.

No suggestion is made that American academics who care about the issuesraised do not exist, for they do. Ironically, indeed, my philosophy professors here,at a mid-sized state university in Ohio, are perhaps more sensitive to the negativeeffects of American educational mythology than many eastern European thinkerswould be.

I shall close by agreeing with philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1989) who hasdescribed America in all playful seriousness as a "realized Utopia." It seems thatmy dream, my Utopia, is coming true by having the privilege to study in Americaafter so many years of yearning struggle for sociological imagination in my owncountry, Romania.

REFERENCES

AYER, A., Logical Positivism. New York: Free Press, 1966.

BAUDRILLARD, J., America. Translated from French by C. Turner. London:Verso, 1989.

3 See J. Hillman and M. Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - and theWorld is Getting Worse (San Francisco: Harper-Collins Publishers), 1992, for a telling and

180

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014

A E. LITA

FUKUYAMA, F., The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon, 1992.

HILLMAN, J., and M. VENTURA, We've Had a Hundred Years ofPsychotherapy - and the World is Getting Worse. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992.

MILLS, C. W., The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

WEBER, M., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translatedfrom German by T. Parsons. New York: Prentice Hall, 1977.

entertaining criticism of the inner-child pop psychology so popular in America today, and thesocial effects of its resulting quietism.

181

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f A

uckl

and

Lib

rary

] at

03:

54 0

7 D

ecem

ber

2014