Culture Studies vs. the Liberal Arts

Hugh Mercer Curtler

I f you ask people who are supposed to know, they will probably tell you that a lib- eral education is a broad education that exposes students to a variety of academic

disciplines. This once translated, in many universities, to a "General Studies" core requirement consisting mostly of introductory courses to various disciplines that were loosely related to one another around general themes, or groups of academic disciplines. For the most part, these courses were designed to entice students to take more courses in those disciplines, though attempts were sometimes made to relate the courses to the theme and, perhaps, to one another. Recently, however, core courses rarely have anything to do with one another, have no relation whatever to any sort of general theme, and, even more to the point, they have little, if anything, to do with education. The reductio ad absurdam of the latter view of liberal studies is the University of Minnesota where, despite the fact that 47 percent of the student's undergraduate requirement is in the "core," the core consists of over 1,400 courses from nearly every segment of the University! Coherence in such a case is clearly not a concern.

While the former of these two views is preferable, they both share the common assumption that breadth is of first importance in a liberal education. There are two things wrong with this assumption. To begin with, a core requirement that consists of a variety of related or unrelated courses that students can randomly choose from presupposes that (a) students have a knowledge base on which to rest those choices, and (b) that all courses are of equal benefit to the student. Both of these assumptions are false. Students do not, in fact, have an adequate knowledge base upon which to make informed choices about which courses on a long list will ultimately benefit them: they cannot, because they do not yet have the knowledge the course is designed to provide them with. Further, the courses are not of equal educational value: almost certainly they do not all meet the real needs of the students---especially when the choices number in the hundreds.

What the view of liberal education as broadening does is to confuse the necessary with the sufficient conditions of what constitutes a coherent, liberating education. Breadth is indeed necessary to help the young avoid overexposure to one or two aca- demic disciplines; but it is not sufficient. Depth is also necessary. Consider: a liberal education is supposed to set young people free from bias, superstition, ignorance, and parochialism. It is also supposed to enable them to think for themselves, comprehend what they read, write coherent paragraphs, speak clearly and persuasively, and figure

Hugh Mercer Curtler is emeritus professor of philosophy at Southwest Minnesota State Uni- versity, Marshall, MN 56258; curtler@ southwestmsu.edu. Among Professor Curtler's books is EthicalArgument: Critical Thinking in Ethics, the second edition of which Oxford University Press released in 2004.

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accurately. In a word, a liberal education is supposed to put young people in posses- sion of their own minds in order to draw them nearer to the ideal of genuine human freedom. It is by no means clear that a random smattering of courses can do the job, especially in institutions where such courses as "Women in Aviation" count as science or "University Singers" counts as a course in literature, history, or philosophy. 1

In addition to this confused notion within the academy itself of what a liberal education is, there are any number of obstacles standing between students and their intellectual freedom. In this paper I shall focus my attention on the current academic craze, which is culture studies, or the random sampling of books written by or from the perspective of a person within a culture other than the student's own--books by such writers as, say, bell hooks or Chinua Achebe, that will, presumably, give students a taste of the "black experience"---or, books about books, such as Sexual Politics, that are supposed to introduce students to "gynocritics." I shall attempt to strip such studies of any pretense they might make to provide students with a liberal education. In doing so, I will take as my focal point a book by one of the most articulate and persuasive advocates of "multiculturalism," Martha Nussbaum.

Professor Nussbaum's book is titled Cultivating Humanity and subtitled "A Clas- sical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education." Indeed, Nussbaum sounds very much like a traditionalist when she says such things as "the only kind of education that deserves the name liberalis.., is one that makes the pupils free, able to take charge of their own thoughts, and to conduct a critical examination of their society's norms and traditions. ''2 The key phrase here is "their society's norms and traditions," and I shall return to this in a moment. Nussbaum continues to note that such students will be free "because they can call their minds their own. ''3 This sounds remarkably like what I said above when I noted that a liberal education should "put young people in possession of their own minds." In addition, Nussbaum's emphasis on a Socratic ap- proach to learning and her adaptation of Robert Hutchins' notion of educated persons as "citizens of the world" are both notions I can readily embrace.

But while Nussbaum and I may agree on what the purpose of a liberal education is, we do not agree on the means to that end. Further, I would argue that her means will not achieve that end, while mine will. Nussbaum is convinced that an education whose main focus is on culture studies, approached Socratically so as to engender a critical attitude toward the ills of their own culture, will set young people free; I am not. While culture studies have the appeal of breadth, they lack depth, because, as indicated by Nussbaum's comment quoted above, they tend typically to encourage critical attitudes toward the student's own society rather than to serious problems in every human society. One is reminded in this regard of the comments made by the Australian philosopher David Stove who warned us in 1982 to beware of "the frivolous elevation of 'the critical attitude' into a categorical imperative." When this occurs, Stove reminds us, we merely "fortify millions of ignorant graduates and undergraduates in the belief, to which they are already too firmly wedded by other causes, that the adversary posture is all, and that intellectual life consists in 'directionless quibbles."4

40 Academic Questions / Winter 2006-07

Nussbaum quotes with approval the definition of indoctrination offered by Christina Hoff Sommers who suggests that it centers on information that is not open to ques- tion in the classroom, a "closed system" in which conclusions are assumed before- hand. Nussbaum says of this definition that it may not be bad pedagogy. 5 This is patently absurd. But it should not surprise us as an educational theory that focuses on culture studies does indeed risk confusing education with indoctrination, since it emphasizes the acquisition of (selected) information rather than assimilation of information based on an open and sustained scrutiny of all possible points of view written by the best writers who have ever set pen to paper. As Alan Bloom has noted in this regard,

I appreciate and need further information. So do we all. The serious scholars in nonwest- ern thought [i.e., certain culture study advocates] should bring us the powerful texts they know of to help us. The true canon aggregates around the most urgent questions we face. That is the only ground for the study of books. Idle culture reports, Eastern or Western, cannot truly concern us, except as a hobby. 6

I shall return to this in a moment. At present I would like to turn to an example from Nussbaum's book that reveals the weak theoretical base her thesis rests upon.

Nussbaum asks us to imagine "Anna, a political science major at a large state university in the midwest." Anna takes a job upon graduation with a large firm that decides after a trial period to send her to a new office they are opening in Beijing. According to Nussbaum, Anna's education has not prepared her for this move unless it has centered around culture studies--in this case, Chinese culture.

She needs to know how Chinese people think and work . . , she needs to know how co- operative networks are formed, and what misunderstandings might arise in interactions between Chinese and American workers. Knowledge of recent Chinese history is impor- tant . . . . Anna also needs to consider her response to the recent policy of urging women to return to the home, and the associated practice of laying women off first. This means that she should know something about Chinese gender relations, both in the Confucian tradition and more recently. 7

Now, ignoring the fact that Anna is not likely to learn a fraction of this informa- tion in a culture studies course, or even a cluster of such courses (especially if she ignores the Chinese language), we must wonder what Anna would do if her company chose instead to send her to Moscow or, perhaps, Kathmandu. In point of fact, what Anna needs to do is to learn to use her mind, to read critically and comprehendingly, and to think cogently. If she can do this, she can acquire the information she needs about China, or Russia, or Nepal when the necessity arises. Immersion in studies about China for four years will make Anna terribly narrow and not necessarily well educated.

There are a number of serious drawbacks to making culture studies the focus of a liberal education and it is time we took a careful look at some of them. Before doing so, however, I must repeat that one would hope that any graduate of an American

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college or university in this day and age would be sensitive to cultures other than his own and that any liberal curriculum would include exceptional works from a variety of cultures. The key here, of course, is that the works be excellent.

The main flaw with making culture studies the central focus of a liberal education is that they cause the student to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Culture studies typically ignore common human problems in order to focus favorably on the pecu- liarities of other cultures or the conspicuous features of a number of cultures super- ficially surveyed. And, as Nussbaum suggests, the emphasis is on the study of these cultures in order to draw attention to the shortcomings of Western culture, which are, admittedly, numerous, with little regard for the shortcomings of the cultures under examination--cultures that often practice, or have practiced, such things as human sacrifice, slavery, cannibalism, suttee, foot-binding, torture, infanticide, apartheid, and clitoridectomies, or ignore charity, justice, and human rights. But there are other problems with a focus on these studies as well.

To begin with, as E.D. Hirsch argues in Cultural Literacy, students must be mono- cultural before we can expect them to become multicultural. And note, please, that Hirsch does not consider himself a close friend of traditional educational theory. But Hirsch knows, as do we all, that American students, especially, are deplorably ignorant of American language, history, and literature, not to mention Western history and literature generally. Even Martha Nussbaum admits that American students need to know their own primary language and culture well. Hirsch notes in this regard that

we need effective monoliteracy more than ever. Linguistic pluralism would make sense for us only on the questionable assumption that our civil peace and national effectiveness could survive multilingualism. But, in fact, mult'tlingualism enormously increases cultural fragmenta- tion, civil antagonism, illiteracy, and economic-technological ineffectualness . . . . In the best of all worlds, all Americans would be multiliterate. But surely the first step in that direction must be for all of us to become literate in our own national language and culture?

Multiculturalism, along with academic overspecialization and the multiplication of elective courses in American colleges and secondary schools has already led to cultural fragmentation, functional illiteracy for a large portion of our population, and an increasing inability to communicate with other members of our own community, as attested to by the report Nation At Risk completed more than 20 years ago and supported by numerous subsequent studies.

Furthermore, we must ask when addressing the question of culture studies: which cultures are worth studying? More to the point, what consti tutes a "culture"? In my field, philosophy, the vast majority of "culture studies" turns out to be women 's studies and it is not at all clear that women comprise a separate culture in America or the West generally, though it is reassuring to know that, according to Nussbaum, philosophers are doing an excellent job of teaching feminist thought. When we turn toAfrican-American, Native-American, or Hispanic-American studies, we note im- mediately that these subcultures are first and foremost American. In every case, these

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groups have been shaped, for the most part, by Western popular culture. As Russell Jacoby notes in this regard,

The issue is how different these "cultures" are from one another and the dominant American culture. Do they constitute distinct structures of work, living, and beliefs? In their dress, activities, religion, and desires these cultures are becoming more alike. Only in the current ideological climate is this news or heresy . . . . America's multiple cultures exist within a single consumer society. Professional sports, Hollywood movies, automobiles, designer clothes, name-brand sneakers, television and videos, commercial music and CDs; these pervade America's multiculturalism . . . . The multiple cultures define themselves by their preferences within a consumer society, not by a rejection of i t . 9

The irony here is that openness to other cultures has always been a mark of Western culture for most of the modern period, as evidenced, in part, by our taste in art, music, and fashion. In fact, tolerance itself, together with a concern for human rights, indi- viduality, charity, due process, and civil liberty are peculiarly Western ideals, though we do find traces of these ideals in some non-Western religions. In fact, most of the criticisms of Western culture that form the basis of many culture studies courses are stated in the vocabulary and conducted within the theoretical framework of Western literary and philosophical tradition going back at least as far as the Sophists of ancient Greece. To be sure, culture studies may engender critical attitudes in students toward the evils of Western culture, such things as colonialism, social injustice, genocide, and environmental destruction on a grand scale, and this is not a bad thing. But real thought occurs only when students learn the limits of tolerance and gain a critical stance toward all cultures that engage in dehumanizing behaviors, ignore justice and human rights, or embrace narrowness of vision. We need only recall Max Weber's advice:

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach the students to recognize "inconvenient" facts--I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. 10

Even so, it might be the case that facts are less important than the way they are presented.

At the risk of sounding like a progressive educator, I would stress the importance of process as every bit as central to education as content, or facts. For the most part, however, discussions about culture studies center around what the students should know. This is certainly the case with Martha Nussbaum's recommendations, which focus almost exclusively on subject matter and which are so inclusive as to leave no time for electives or major courses. But while content is important, we must also consider how that content is delivered. As Mark Van Doren noted long ago, "we must be armed against thugs who care only about what we think and not how we think." In this regard, Martha Nussbaum does not appear to be one of the thugs Van Doren warned us about, since she seems concerned about open-mindedness and alertness to the antithesis; however, we must pause when she pillories defenders of the Western canon in the following manner:

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It is easy and relatively inexpensive to organize a course around a list of "great books." Even faculty who are not experts in a given field, such as the Greek and Latin classics, can read the books (usually in translation) and make at least a show of teaching them, little though they may know about the rest of the culture, lj

If Nussbaum were truly a champion of the Socratic method, as she repeatedly insists she is, she would realize that one does not "teach" great books. The books themselves are the teachers and readers approach them, hat in hand, in order to learn from them what they can. In a seminar setting, a leader will attempt to show the way, because he or she has been there before. But the leader's knapsack is filled with questions, not answers, and he or she seeks to lead an exploration in which the students discover for themselves the hidden mysteries of the text. In this regard, it does not matter if the leader is an "expert," or if the students "understand" the text, or have detected the author's cultural blinders when the discussion is over. What is important is that all interested parties have joined the "great conversation" and have had their minds stretched and their intellects expanded. This is how thought is engendered and how one learns to read carefully and critically. This is why the texts must be both challenging and worthy of serious attention, and why the process itself is at least as important as the subject matter.

Stress on content to the exclusion of process, like the stress on breadth rather than depth, tends to reduce culture studies to "identity politics," as has been noted by critics at both ends of the political spectrum, and identity politics has nothing whatever to do with the goals of a liberal education. Nussbaum seems to recognize this, but her hope that culture studies need not necessarily degenerate into identity politics has a hollow ring to it, in light of the realities on most college campuses these days.

But, in the end, the major problem with making culture studies the focus of a liberal education is that they are too easy. They are merely the latest step in the dumbing-down of the curriculum. They allow disengaged students to indulge themselves by learning a few tidbits about other "cultures" so they can feel good about themselves, savor the delicious taste of cynicism, and confirm their mindless convictions that truth and morality are both relative. "Who's to say what is true or good?" they ask as they pass on to something more important. John Heath has noted in this regard that:

We should not be surprised, I think, to learn that university students might prefer culture studies that reinforce their limited experiences, prejudices, and identities of race, gender, and class to works that challenge their preconceptions and demand hard-earned skills of rational argumentation and analysis. 12

The Greeks knew that what is worthwhile is difficult and one must suspect that studies that do not really challenge and provoke serious thought are not worth much. To quote an author who is no enemy of multiculturalism, "One must sometimes wonder if cultural studies hasn't prospered because, under the guise of serious intellectual analysis, it gives the customers what they most want---easy pleasure, more TV. ''~3 Culture studies certainly ought not to be the focus of an undergraduate education.

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Again, the liberal arts must be deep as well as broad. Thinking is difficult and it does not come from reading relatively easy, descriptive texts, or didactic novels, sitting in a circle, and nodding in agreement as students and faculty try to detect the author's bias or exchange witticisms about what is wrong with their own culture.

What is required to engender real thought is wrestling with extraordinary texts in a way that engenders disagreement: with other students, with the instructor, with the text, and among the texts themselves. It comes from a close reading of demanding and superior works that conflict with one another in a way that confuses and undermines prejudices and fixed opinions. An obvious example of this would be to have the students read Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics to see how the two thinkers (who knew each other intimately) differed on the question of what constitutes political wisdom in order to get the student to work carefully through the differing views to one of his or her own--an especially timely issue, one would think. We tend to defend our own belief systems and it takes real courage and an open mind to consider both sides of a complex issue in a way that will lead us to accept the more reasonable view, espe- cially when it conflicts with our own. To take a group of unprepared young people who know little if anything about their own culture, require them to read like-minded authors who echo the teacher's views, and encourage them to glean information from those texts, together with a one-sided discussion of those texts, in order to provoke a critical attitude toward their own culture, is not to empower them. Rather, it is to replace their old chains, born of ignorance, with new ones forged by their teachers. This should not be confused with liberal education.

Thanks in large part to the tendency to dumb-down the curriculum, students are losing their ability to read "or are giving up that ability in favor of an easier one, the capacity of being spontaneously righteous, indignant, and otherwise exasperated. ''14 Culture studies contribute to this trend to the extent that they focus attention on easy texts, present only one side of an issue, and encourage resentment and cynicism. If, as promised, they provide the students with new ways of looking at their world, they are to be applauded. But this goal, and others equally important can be sought, and are more likely to be realized, by reading what Matthew Arnold called "the best that is thought and written in the world" and discussing the texts in an open forum where all points of view are welcome.

Students do not come to a genuine awareness of social injustice by having their teachers point it out to them, but by reading what great minds have thought about justice and morality--such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Austen, and John Stuart Mill, among others--and making the connections for themselves when they encounter instances of injustice in this or any other culture. To an educated mind injustice leaps out of the pages of a newspaper or off the screen of a television set; it doesn't have to be pointed ou t - -a notion that is insulting to our students at the very least.

Thus, what students need, instead of a steady dose of culture studies or a blind choice among dozens, if not hundreds of miscellaneous courses, begins with a co- herent and challenging core requirement centered on the great writings of the human

Curt ler 45

mind. This core should also include a thorough grounding in the symbols o f human

thought, ianguage and mathemat ics , as well as a close study o f natural science. No less, and ideally more, than one one-third of the student 's undergraduate course of

study should address these essential core requirements.

As John Stuart Mill said long ago, we will not know what is possible for a person to do until we ask the impossible. Truly l iberating education is not impossible, but to make it work will require dedicated teaching and fixed attention not on what the

students happen to want at the moment , but on what they need as they struggle to

empower themselves.

Notes

1. Reference here is to St. Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota at Crookston, respectively, as reported in a study completed by the Minnesota Association of Scholars and referred to in Academic Questions, Vol. VI, No. 4.

2. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 30.

3. Ibid., 293. 4. David Stove, Popper and After: Four Modern lrrationalists (New York: Pergamon, 1982), 99. 5. Nussbaum, 203. 6. Alan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 29. 7. Nussbaum, 58. 8. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1988), 92. 9. Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 157, 158. 10. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," Quoted by John Bromwich in What's Happened to the

Humanities, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 221. 1 I. Nussbaum, 170. 12. John Heath, Victor Davis Hanson, and Bruce S. Thornton, Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing

the Classics in an Impoverished Age (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001), 60. 13. Mark Edmundson, "On The Uses of a Liberal Education," Harpers Magazine, Sept. 1997, 7. 14. Keruan (ed), What's Happened to the Humanities, 123.