Some Links
Ilana Redstone on Transparency in Higher Ed; Kevin Erdmann on housing supply; Bennett Zippel and Zach Rausch on online games and kids; Michael Strong on the humanities
Instead of dictating what can or cannot be taught, require universities to clearly label courses and materials when they present politically contested assumptions as fact. This achieves the same goal—ensuring students understand when they're being presented with one perspective rather than settled truth—without triggering institutional defensiveness or accusations of federal overreach.
So instead of titling a course “Race in America,” you would title it “The Progressive View of Race in America.” She thinks that her compromise would satisfy everyone.
Universities can comply without feeling their core mission is under attack
Redstone is the author of The Certainty Trap. My guess is that the left is so caught in the trap that they would bristle at any change to a course title that suggests that the viewpoint might not be correct. And on the right there is also dissatisfaction with bias against conservatives in admissions, hiring, and university policy. So I doubt that this would satisfy the signatories of the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education.
Families that used to spend 30% of their incomes to rent 1,200 square foot units now spend 40% of their incomes for 800 square foot units. If we just had a large, but not ridiculous, shortage, they would be spending 30% of their incomes to live in 800 square foot units.
…In any world with supply conditions that are anywhere short of ridiculous, it takes a lot of work to keep homes from getting cheaper.
I have three daughters. Their household incomes are all higher than mine was at a comparable age. And the quality of their housing is much worse. So I take Erdmann’s point.
Bennett Zippel and Zach Rausch write,
Few parents would ever allow their children to spend hours everyday in an amusement park full of unvetted rides designed by random people (including children), hidden charges engineered to extract money, and anonymous adults pretending to be children. Yet this is precisely the experience that many online games have introduced into the schools, bedrooms, and pockets of millions of children.
…Our hope is that, someday soon, gaming companies will compete on safety. Until then we are handing over our children to amusement parks that seem to be free, but that are extracting a hidden price few parents would knowingly pay.
They do a sort of business model audit of Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. They find serious problems, particularly with the latter.
The point of such a “Great Books” education is not to worship the classics - any healthy student may indeed loathe the beliefs of some of the authors. But it is precisely by taking seriously the beliefs of such radically different perspectives that a young person learns the most important lesson from the liberal arts, to transcend the parochialism of time and place. Should we take Aristotle’s concept of “natural slavery” seriously? Was Aquinas correct that heretics should be put to death? Although both abhorrent by today’s standards, we should learn the full range of beliefs that were held in the past and with what justifications.
…students should begin to explore their own epistemological, moral, and aesthetic/spiritual commitments. Thus the centrality of Socratic discussions in our process, where the child is always being asked to reflect and develop her own understandings of the true, the good, and the noble/beautiful.
Reading this, it occurs to me that the way to approach giving an exam on The Social Code is not to think in terms of finding the student right or wrong. It might be asking students to reflect on the issues raised in the seminar.
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Erdmann is correct about a shortage, but wrong about what's in short supply. It's not houses--we've got plenty of shelter--the shortage is of nice places to live. "Urbanize the suburbs" is an exactly wrong solution to the problem.
"Instead of dictating what can or cannot be taught, require universities to clearly label courses and materials when they present politically contested assumptions as fact."
It's completely unworkable to set up a system that could try to 'require' such labels.
For over a decade I've been arguing for "adversarial pedagogy", especially when one is covering the history of a field's intellectual development, by placing the prominent cases and arguments in the context of the dialectic debates of their time and contraposing them with the best counterarguments from those debates.
As an example, in Law School, at least when covering the key cases, students are usually required to read - and become able to wield the arguments given in - both the opinion and the dissents. You don't need to name a class "The Progressive View on Constitutional Law" when the students are reading just as much Justice Scalia as Justice Ginsburg.
Other examples could include teaching the Declaration of Independence alongside Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures upon the Declaration, or the Federalist Papers alongside the Anti-Federalist Papers, or John Stuart Mill vs James Fitzjames Stephen or Carlyle, or even trying to recapture the debate between Origen and Celsus. Seems like something AI would be excellent at arranging, heh, AI could also be "Adversarial Instruction".