"I think the faculty want me out," Yale President Richard Levin told an emeritus professor glumly last spring after a faculty vote of "no confidence" in his and his trustees' move to establish a new liberal-arts college, bearing Yale's name, in collaboration with the authoritarian, corporate city-state of Singapore.
Levin's announcement last week that he'll resign effective in June -- and Fareed Zakaria's resignation as a Yale trustee only two weeks earlier -- were indeed driven partly by growing faculty resistance to the "world is flat" corporate expansion of American universities that both men championed. But what now, and what kind of leadership should succeed them?
Not so subtly, the liberal arts at Yale are being reinvented "from the ground up," as one Yale publication put it -- instrumentalized, I fear, not only to benefit Asia's future capitalist leaders but also in a "parallel university" that has been emerging at Yale itself outside of the faculty's deliberation and control.
On Levin's watch, that parallel university bestowed upon President George W. Bush an honorary doctorate at the 2001 Yale commencement, where Bush told "the C students among you" graduates that this proves that "you can be president." Levin's parallel university installed Stanley McChrystal as a professor only a few months after Barack Obama fired him. It has hired Charles Hill, Ryan Crocker, John Negroponte, Tony Blair, and, most recently, David Brooks as instructors for undergraduates who thirst for celebrity, authority, and connections from eminences fighting old wars in Yale's classrooms.
The "parallel university" does this through its Grand Strategy, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and other programs for Yale undergraduates hungering for that kind of misdirection.
Yet Levin's and Zakaria's resignations are no occasion for gloating. "If Rick [Levin] leaves, you'll appreciate how much he was protecting the liberal arts from immense pressures to undermine them and how many other good things depended on him," one of his defenders told me months before.
She may be right. Levin managed Yale well fiscally and physically. He strengthened its bonds to its workforce and to New Haven, and I've credited him with these achievements here before.
He even got the Wall Street Journal's right-wing bashers of the liberal academy -- Robert Whitewater Bartley, John Fund, Bret Stephens -- off Yale's back by touting the Grand Strategy and other national-security oriented programs and Yale's short lived, neo-con propaganda factory the Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, which the university wisely abolished in 2010.
But while Levin and his trustees have been deft managers of their storm-tossed craft, they've been poor visionaries and navigators for liberal education, whose course will require different risks and courage.
Unless faculty and students can affirm the liberal arts in better ways, Yale may be even more mindlessly corporate after Levin than it has been under him. A similar challenge faces other universities, I argue in an essay, "With Friends Like These, Who Will Defend Liberal Education?", that Dissent magazine will post and publish on October 1 in its special issue on higher education.
Those of us who've criticized Yale's Singapore venture know that many wonderful young Singaporeans want a fuller liberal education, but we also see the advance of a slick model of self-censorship in an authoritarian corporate milieu in that country and, increasingly, in public life in the U.S. While self-censorship in Singapore is ubiquitous and routine owing to fear of the state, here it's embraced almost enthusiastically by some undergraduates who think it will bring them closer to power and commercial advantage.
This old misunderstanding of where power really comes from and how it flows has carried Yale undergraduates from secret, Skull & Bones bonding of yore into countless foreign-policy and domestic blunders. Yet some students embrace that kind of self-censorship with refreshed ignorance every year because they want "access" without thinking about what they're gaining "access" to or recognizing that they're only cultivating profiles in timidity.
Students need "access" to what the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called "the great conversation" of the humanities across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the spirit. They need to learn how to recognize and take responsibility for meeting those challenges, sometimes even by defying established power instead of saluting or fronting for it.
Levin himself glimpsed this in 2010, when he wrote that "... India has a powerful advantage over China" because "it affords faculty members the freedom to pursue their intellectual interests wherever they may lead and allows students and faculty alike to express, and thus test, their most heretical and unconventional theories -- freedoms that are an indispensable feature of any great university."
Singapore's Han Chinese ruling elite doesn't favor that. Is Yale's ruling elite much better? Faculty and students should insist that Levin's replacement establish new, formal mechanisms that reflect the centrality of the faculty in the life and essence of the university: no more Iron law of oligarchy, in which presidents and other administrators think they're entitled to rule.
And every university president should be asked publicly to restore balance between the institution's academic mission and its economic goals. Every president should try to repair the damage being done to universities' ethos by corporatization.
Conservatives as well as liberals are awakening to dangers in the neo-liberalization of liberal education. What a bitter irony if Yale, which the philosopher George Santayana called the "Mother of Colleges" because it has nourished so many of them and American civil society, has fallen asleep.
Despite the responses from Singaporeans at the student panel on April 20, I want readers to realize that their defence of the system and culture of self-censorship is not endorsed by all Singaporeans. Not all of us are the kool-aid guzzling drones that the Western media perceives us to be.
Sentence fixed.
Lernfreiheit and old-school Bologna uber alles!
This is the point that the Corporation missed when it plunged Yale into its compromised relationship with Singapore, relying mainly on its own selected faculty to deliberate about the venture. I explained what the proper balance should be -- and how Yale's trustees have forgotten it -- in the first link above ("a faculty vote of no confidence") and, further down, with the word "here".
These are the direct links. I hope that readers who are interested in university governance -- and in how trustees and administrators get it wrong -- will read them:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/how-yales-singapore-ventu_b_1352729.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/the-showdown-at-yale_b_1401122.html
Your first article links to another article of yours, "Examining the Crimson's civic slide". Philosophically I take issue with this: "``students are free agents and . . . should study what they wish" drains its ``long-term commitment to the welfare of students and the society they actually serve,""
Quoting Martin Haberman's "The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching" (Phi Delta Kappan, 12/1991, p.292), and indirectly refering to the recent cheating scandal at Harvard and your quote above:
"Having learned to navigate in urban schools based on the pedagogy of poverty, students will not readily abandon all their know-how to take on willy-nilly some new and uncertain system that they may not be able to control"
... Especially in this day and age of incessantly demanding multi-tasking and external controls.
So in that sense I agree with your take, but no school, and no advisor at a school, is Mentor. And we, the students, are ultimately adults who must chart our own courses for good or ill.
Personalizing the issue:
In my opinion, Lernfreiheit was the sole saving grace of Eliot's reform agenda. But this comes from a smart person who learned in primary school to follow his own muse (to the detriment of grades in secondary school and graduation in tertiary school).
Of all the required gen. ed. courses among the 195 earned *semester* credits taken toward my eventual Bachelor's, only one course which I would not have taken otherwise, Public Speaking, I felt genuinely added to my development.
Robert Evans
IUPUI '12, B.S. Biology
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana '08, A.S. Biotechnology
Bremerton High School '96
Full disclosure:
Harvard applicant reject '96
HILS applicant reject '11