Reply to NY Times editorial: "Universities Like Yale Need a Reckoning"

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Reply to "NY Times editorial: "Universities Like Yale Need a Reckoning""

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[quote=Anonymous]Not a very well written article. Took me a few paragraphs to understand what it was about or where the article was going.

Here are the last few paragraphs which summarize the conclusion:

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Perhaps “we” need above all a moonshot for public schools, secondary and higher (not going to happen under Republicans, but we must keep the long view), founded on an aggressive, positive assertion of the values and faiths that such an education represents. The American university is a profoundly important reinvention of an ancient idea, remade in medieval times in Italy, Germany and Britain, and then recreated again in colonial America. Among Americans’ most treasured values, embedded in the modern university, is that a higher education can remake one’s life. As endangered as such an idea may seem, who does not want to believe in that gospel if it is available? Our herculean task is to make it work again.

“We” need to openly recommit to learning and teaching about the whole of our knowledge — our histories, our literature, our sciences, our social structures, as much or more than we stress our racial, ethnic and gendered parts. Those fields of study are important and established for good reasons. But the whole and the parts have to sing together or there is no democracy or broad learning or informed citizenry in the end. We could drown in the habits of our own particularities and favorite ideologies, and lose hold of how humans connect across a multitude of difference. We need answers for our critics who believe we are an ideological monolith, whether they are right or not. We may not like universals anymore, but there are some, like elections, that stun millions into despair or glee.

Election outcomes, if nothing else can, should make us aware that substantial parts of our society may like to know why history or science or art themselves even matter in their daily lives. “We” know they do, but “they” are scared by the price of milk, and tuition, and by hurricanes. Universities like the one at which I am privileged to teach, need their own reckonings that can make us look outward, to get outside of ourselves and do what we do best — create knowledge and teach about and to the whole world, not merely to those within our own gates in language only we can hope to understand.

Trumpism is a dire threat to all that universities believe in, but let us not forget that democracies tend to die from within, not by conquest.[/quote]

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