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The 2020 presidential election has put into sharp relief not only the political polarization of the American people but also the widespread confusion and skepticism among the citizenry about democratic practices. While this confusion and skepticism threaten our electoral politics (look no further than the messy aftermath of the 2020 election), our problems run much deeper. At the core of the democratic ideal is the vision of citizens coming together to address our most pressing challenges. Today, however, we are increasingly unable to trust and work with one another on problems and projects that can advance the public good.

When we think about higher education’s role in our democracy, we often think of students as future citizens who need to learn particular academic content in order to take their rightful place in the citizenry. For example, perhaps they need to take a course in American government or political philosophy. More broadly, we might imagine that a course in sociology or even literature (studying the poetry of Walt Whitman, for example) could nurture civic virtues. We also might have students engage in various forms of experiential learning—service learning, community-based research, or even particular travel experiences.

While all of the above strategies undoubtedly can contribute to cultivating good citizens and thus strengthening our democracy, they might not be enough to facilitate the kind of democracy we so desperately need. Perhaps one way to advance towards a more robust democracy is to think of our campuses as laboratories of democracy. Perhaps what we need today are radically democratized campuses that allow students to see democratic practices in action and to participate in those practices.

Certainly, the academy prides itself on the practice of shared governance, but often that is merely a form of consultation. While the faculty might be given control over curricula as well as tenure and promotion decisions, that control is limited and therefore not fully democratic. Faculty members might also participate on many committees throughout their organizations, even on top-level boards, but this is often token, not effective, participation. Staff also might have some shared-governance role, but it is generally even less significant than that of the faculty. Students rarely if ever observe the shared governance on their campuses—so they never see these (albeit limited) democratic practices. And certainly, students have little power or say in the administration of institutions.

What if the administration of our academic institutions were radically different? What if students could regularly see democratic practices among the various campus constituencies and even participate in various democratic practices? For example:

• Instead of a staff council or faculty senate that operates in isolation with relatively little institutional power, what if all the constituencies (including students) were part of one deliberative body and process? What if such a body were given the power to make decisions that traditionally have been the reserve of upper administration?
• What if students joined with faculty in determining curricula? At the course level, perhaps students could help determine topics or readings. At the broader curricular level, perhaps they could help determine what kinds of courses should be scheduled. Obviously, some disciplines have accreditation constraints that limit curricular diversity, but most disciplines have significant flexibility.
• What if we mapped power relations and decision processes and sought to analyze how to democratize that power and those processes? With such maps, we might find many places where students can be legitimate partners in the decision-making process.
• What if we sought ways to give the broader citizenry a greater say in the direction of the academic institutions that are in their communities? Many of these institutions are public, and their missions are to serve their communities and regions. Shouldn’t community representatives have some say in how these institutions operate? Imagine how powerful the experience would be for students to work closely with community members in this regard.
• What if we abandoned traditional elections on our campuses and took the “democratic lottery” approach instead? This approach allows all qualified and interested candidates to “throw their hats into the ring” and, through simply a drawing, one of them is selected to serve. Such an approach has been proven to increase participation and get a richer diversity of voices into campus conversations. Democracy should be something other than a popularity contest—and that goes for elections to faculty senates and committees as much as for elections to student governments.

These are just a few ideas for democratizing campuses. Efforts in these directions would allow faculty and staff to truly engage in shared governance and enjoy the empowerment of democratic practices. They would also show students what genuine democratic practices look like, while at the same time bringing them into those practices and thus cultivating civic skills and capacities. In the end, our campuses could become true laboratories where students not only learn about democracy and civic virtues but also live democracy and practice civic virtues. As educators who proclaim the democratic purposes of higher education, we then would be practicing what we preach.

An earlier version of this article was presented as part of a panel presentation at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society for Values in Higher Education.

Additional Reading

Bain-Selbo, Eric and Paul Markham. “Did I Teach Them That? The Implicit Power of Democratic Education.” eJournal of Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 2, 2012, ejournal.missouristate.edu. Accessed 12 July 2020.

Bain-Selbo, Eric and Paul Markham. “To Practice What One Preaches: Deepening Civic Education.” Journal of College and Character, vol. 13, no. 4, 2012.

In a speech in the House of Commons on 11 March 1873, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli proclaimed that “a university should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.” Those of us in the humanities have seen our programs repeatedly attacked as meritless in terms of consumer profitability and, according to some, pernicious in their liberal persuasion.  We wish more people would believe in Disraeli’s aspirational statement rather than place faith in the profit models that currently drive too many university investments and curriculum choices. As I hope to demonstrate, the humanities offer more than a chance to discuss old books and therefore matter to every program within a university—if our goal is the making of a better, more just world for all.

I regularly teach an undergraduate class titled “Women in American Literature.”  The course was added to the curriculum decades ago in order to address the inadequacy of a predominantly white masculinist canon of literature to represent the cultural production of Americans, and it reflected the then dominant feminist critical practice of examining images of women.  The canon exploded in the 1980s through radical inclusion; as a result, literature anthologies now routinely offer writing by authors of all races, genders, classes, ethnicities, and sexual persuasions.  Nevertheless, what can be taught is not necessarily what is being taught.

As I tell my students at our first class meeting, I used to include male writers in my course since the only available anthologies then did so.  But, times have changed, and we need no longer relegate women to the status of spoken about rather than speaker.  These days I choose to focus solely on American literature by women writers.  Many students mention in their first reflection papers that they hadn’t expected the focus on women writers, but my introduction to the class made them realize they hadn’t actually read, or even knew of, many American women writers.  We then move on to read together and analyze gender, class, race, and sex representation in the works, along with the aesthetic qualities of each piece.

Some instructors of the same course still include, and sometimes focus upon, male writers’ creation of women characters, and that is their right, though I consider that decision a bit myopic given the rich tradition of women writers now readily accessible to all.  Much more troubling are those instructors who continue to disparage “women’s” literature as strictly a special interest.  One wonders how anyone can simply dismiss the work of half the population as a “special interest.”

The explanation can be found, in part, in recent studies of misogyny, the perceived entitlement that those who promote heteropatriarchal standards consider the norm, and because of which any form of identity politics or political correctness is too often marked as a dangerous challenge to those who hold power in politics, education, religion, law, and other ideological state apparatuses.  I’ve been working through Kate Manne’s Down Girl:  The Logic of Misogyny, a challenging philosophical investigation of what too many people simply dismiss as individual irrational behavior or psychological aberration.  Manne argues that misogyny is, instead, a political phenomenon, and we must address it as such.  As Manne documents through extensive examination of quotidian as well as catastrophic instances of misogynistic acts, we still live in a white heteropatriarchal society in which sexism is “the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order” and in which misogyny is “the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations” (20), rewarding only those who perform their cisgender designated roles as they have been traditionally inscribed.  While misogyny can involve hatred of women, more importantly, Manne argues, it has a specific social function as a “system of domination” similar to “racisms, xenophobia, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on” (13).  Misogyny is designed to keep women in their place—inferior to, beholden to, and complicit in male supremacist ideology that acknowledges women have value only if they never step over the line into the space belonging to men.

Manne focuses on both infamous acts of violence and everyday micro-aggressions against women in both the United States and Australia (the country of her birth), analyzing, for instance, the Isla Vista sorority killings, Trump’s never-ending assaults on Hillary Clinton, and Rush Limbaugh’s demand that male taxpayers should be able to witness the sex acts of those women who want health insurance to cover the cost of their birth control pills.  She also draws our attention to the particularly virulent form of misogyny, what Moya Bailey calls misogynoir, experienced by black women.

Manne’s book has received extensive laudatory reviews in leading critical journals even as, not surprisingly, it has been summarily dismissed on bookseller sites as liberal feminist ranting by anonymous readers, several of whom make clear that they have read only the first few pages.  The book demands a close reading of and commitment to taking seriously Manne’s meticulous investigation into misogyny’s history, social function, virulence, and effect.  You should read it, and you should also read and promote study of literature by women.

Analyzing literary works offers us the opportunity to interrogate the social practices and cultural narratives we have inherited, to question the values being passed down to us.  Education in the humanities—in philosophy, literature, religious studies, cultural history, foreign languages, classics—is key in helping us fight against the many systems of domination that still poison our lives today. Today, more than ever, we must work to ensure that the university is a place of light, learning, and liberty for all.

Kate Manne.  Down Girl:  The Logic of Misogyny.  Oxford University Press, 2018.

In 2013, Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a study about the extent to which the jobs of Americans with college degrees matched their undergraduate majors.[1] Two of this study’s findings have the potential to reshape both the way Americans understand the value of higher education and how college graduates plan their future careers. First, as has been mentioned elsewhere, there is a significant difference between rural and urban workers in terms of how closely jobs are related to workers’ major field of study: urban workers have better job matching and earn higher wages as individuals.[2] Second, a strong majority of Americans, over 62%, with bachelor’s degrees are working in jobs that do not require a college degree at all. These findings call for a closer look at the efficacy of college degrees, at the growing economic divide between rural and urban America, and at how industries determine minimum hiring requirements.

Another of this study’s findings is especially important for the way Americans can, and should, think about liberal arts degrees: 73% of U.S. college graduates work in jobs completely unrelated to their college major. This finding undermines the positions of people on both sides of an educational divide: those who value liberal arts degrees as intrinsically valuable, and those who want to replace liberal arts programs with majors connected to specific jobs. Consequently, it could also open the way forward to a new and better way of talking about the value of a liberal arts education: its market value.

A useful illustration of the currently polarized discussion of the value of the liberal arts comes from March 2018, when the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point made an audacious announcement.[3] Facing chronic budget shortfalls, and spurred by a desire to address the immediate business needs of the state of Wisconsin and its surrounding region, the university announced that it would cut “programs with lower enrollment, primarily in the traditional humanities and social sciences” and instead invest in majors with “clear career pathways.” The institution proposed dropping thirteen majors, including history, English, philosophy, sociology, and several foreign languages. The plan to cut these liberal arts majors was in ideological alignment with Republican Governor Scott Walker’s failed 2015 attempt to amend the “Wisconsin Idea,” the portion of the state’s code that had previously defined the university system’s goals as teaching students to “search for truth” and “improve the human condition.” Walker sought to replace those goals with the phrase “meet the state’s workforce needs,” implicitly dismissing the intrinsic value of a liberal arts degree.[4]

Public debates over Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s program cuts were similar to those concerning Walker’s proposed changes to the Wisconsin Idea. 2017 Wisconsin-Stevens Point graduate Samantha Stein, quoted in the student newspaper The Pointer, lamented her alma mater’s decision to give up “what a college education is all about,” which she defined as “the opening of one’s mind to other cultures, languages, the arts, political science and so much more.”[5] Stein’s insistence on education for its own sake echoes opponents of Walker’s earlier attempt to designate a college degree as a career path; these opponents asserted that creative exploration and individual enlightenment were the bedrocks of higher education. Walker and his allies countered that the high price of tuition necessitated that a college degree lead directly to a job.

Although both points of view are valid to some degree, neither reflects an understanding of the job market and of college education grounded in the economic reality that Abel and Deitz’s study exposes. For Walker and his allies, the study completely upends the idea that there are definite and “clear career pathways” for new college graduates because it demonstrates that direct pathways are not the most common result of college degrees. Students should not choose a major solely to get a specific job, or even enter a specific industry, for three out of four will end up working in an entirely different field—thereby capitalizing on an opportunity for advancement previously unavailable to workers. Furthermore, the idea that a university should create majors to meet immediate “workforce needs” is problematic given the realities of the modern, rapidly changing job market.

Yet Abel and Deitz’s study also has implications for how liberals like Stein talk about, or perhaps should talk about, the value of a liberal arts education. Given that three-fourths of graduates will end up in careers outside their fields of study, students need a foundational, broad-based set of knowledge and—more importantly—transferable skills that enable a worker to move from job to job and field to field. Many humanities and liberal arts programs are ideally suited to teach those skills, such as communication, leadership, and problem solving, that recent studies have demonstrated will have a direct and real bearing on their graduates’ ability to navigate the twenty-first-century job market.[6] Although it might pain liberals to make it, this market-based argument is more likely to persuade critics of higher education than Stein’s insistence that one should study the liberal arts for the sake of the “opening of one’s mind” or to attain the Wisconsin Idea, the Wisconsin university system’s statement of purpose that Walker sought to remove: that higher education is about “improv[ing] the human condition.”[7] Those ideals should not be abandoned. However, asking graduates to embrace the liberal arts for their intrinsic value when they are saddled with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars of debt, is a hard sell. As Abel and Deitz’s study shows, it is also an unnecessary one.

An increasing number of college students commute to college, work at least part-time, and are raising families while going to classes.[8] Their concerns about the economic payoff of a liberal arts education, for which they are sacrificing a great deal of time, money, and energy, are legitimate. Abel and Deitz have shown that the answer that they get a degree “to get a job” is insufficient, for that job is more likely than not to be unrelated to their major course of study. Conversely, educators’ blithe admonition to students “to expand their minds” often seems an inadequate response to the concrete economic realities facing most college students. Although it certainly will not end debates over the meaning of higher education or the value of liberal arts degrees, Abel and Deitz’s study implies that the more persuasive argument on behalf of a liberal arts degree is also the most accurate. A liberal arts degree will help students gain the diverse set of skills and knowledge they need to compete and thrive in the labor marketplace of the twenty-first century.

However, educators must first accept the realities of the marketplace that students are actually facing. For instance, since today’s job market is constantly changing, the most successful workers long-term will have a set of skills that they can use in multiple careers. This means that liberal arts majors, despite the prevailing discussion over the intrinsic value of their degrees, have even more market value now than they had in the twentieth century. Similarly, although it might seem counterintuitive, the thinner local labor markets in rural areas make such transferable academic skills even more useful than they are in the thicker local labor markets of urban areas. Consequently, students planning to remain in or relocate to rural areas are better served by choosing liberal arts degrees over majors that provide job-specific training. These economic realities not only bolster arguments in favor of liberal arts degrees, but also necessitate deeper discussions about the purpose and efficacy of higher education that go beyond the neat dichotomy that has come to dominate the public conversation.

[1] Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz, “Agglomeration and Job Matching among College Graduates,” (New York: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2012, revised 2014), online at https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr587.pdf

[2] Brad Plumer, “Only 27 Percent of College Grads Have a Job Related to Their Major,” Washington Post May 20, 2013, online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major/?utm_term=.1737fe77e6d2

[3] “UW-Stevens Point Proposes Adding, Cutting Programs to Prepare for Future,” Press Release, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, March 5, 2018, online at https://www.uwsp.edu/ucm/news/Pages/Repositioning18.aspx

[4] Valerie Strauss, “How Gov. Walker Tried to Quietly Change the Mission of the University of Wisconsin,” Washington Post, February 5, 2015, online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/05/how-gov-walker-tried-to-quietly-change-the-mission-of-the-university-of-wisconsin/?utm_term=.763e07b492cb

[5] Kathryn Wisniewski, “Campus Responds to Curriculum Restructuring Proposal,” The Pointer, March 14, 2018, online at http://thepointeruwsp.com/2018/03/14/campus-responds-to-curriculum-restructuring-proposal/

[6] Emma Whitford, “Employers Want Liberal Arts Grads,” Inside Higher Ed, November 13, 2018, online at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-report-shows-colleges-how-bridge-gap-between-liberal-arts-and-work-force and Michelle R. Weise, “Leveraging a New Rosetta Stone: Deciphering Human + Technical Skills to Navigate the Future of Work,” Competency-based Education, 2019;e01186. https://doi.org/10.1002/cbe2.1186

[7] Wisniewski, “Campus Responds” and Valerie Strauss, “A University of Wisconsin Campus Pushes Plan to Drop 13 Majors—including English, history and philosophy,” Washington Post, March 21, 2018, online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/03/21/university-of-wisconsin-campus-pushes-plan-to-drop-13-majors-including-english-history-and-philosophy/?utm_term=.84d8536a8ad5

[8]Emily Deruy and National Journal, “At Universities, More Students Are Working Full-Time,” The Atlantic, October 28, 2015, online at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/at-universities-more-students-are-working-full-time/433245/

If you are a teacher, you might recognize the following scenario. It’s the beginning of the academic term, and you’re pulling together syllabi, texts, and notes for your first class meetings. You check your email and find a few messages from new students giving you information they consider crucial. Sometimes it’s the names they go by. I am not talking about nicknames or using middle instead of first names or just the initials of first and middle birth names. These students most decidedly do not want to be deadnamed in class—and that new term signals the importance of this issue to them. Rather, these students have taken up new names reflective of their ongoing self-fashioning, and it is these names they need you to acknowledge and use. Such announcements typically contain in the signature line the student’s preference in pronoun use (masculine, feminine, plural, or newly invented forms such as xe, xem, and xyrs). Now imagine remembering the individual pronoun preferences of a class of, say, thirty students. Of course, the ready solution to constant confusion and possible offense is to learn every student’s name (of choice) and to use it instead of any pronouns beyond “you” (which to me always sounds a bit rude). Less easy to know how to handle are other personal markers students also share in emails: “I am trans*” or “I am nonbinary” or “I am a cis-gender male.” What is each declaration trying to say? What is one supposed to do with this information? Why or how does this matter, one asks oneself, in a course on American realist and naturalist literature?

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As evidenced by the infamous “Prof or Hobo?” online quiz,[1] professors are not known for being particularly stylish. Whether due to a sense that matters of style are trivial or a lack of time to plan nice outfits, many professors would likely dismiss fashion as a low-level priority. However, rather than being an indication of merely aesthetic preference, I argue that fashion provides a venue for teaching students about values without ever speaking a word and that this premise suggests that female professors might actually have an advantage over their male counterparts. Continue reading →

Algorithms, especially computer algorithms, are playing a larger role in everyday life. Algorithms work well when they serve as filters that limit data overload and increase relevant search results. Facebook’s algorithms, for example, use a ranking system that examines the inventory of all of the possible stories (posts by the user’s friends, posts by companies the user follows), examines signals given by the user (types of stories that the user likes/shares/blocks), predicts which stories the user is likely to enjoy (share/like), and develops a relevancy score (Mosseri 2018). Stories are then posted on the user’s newsfeed based on that score. This process can be useful since it prevents the user from having to sift through many unrelated and unwanted posts.

I contend, however, that there is a fundamental problem with some computer algorithms: the effect they can have on the development of the individual’s I-for-myself. The I-for-myself is an internal self-definition. It is how our lives feel to us, day to day, on the inside. Our conception of the I-for-myself, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, comes from the initial words of the parents that are internalized by the child as self-definition (1984, 1986, 1990, 1993, 2017). As individuals encounter new people and ideas, this inner definition is used to judge new definitions of the individual given by external others. The inner definition is modified as the individual openly interacts with a world of other selves. When those others lose their personhood, when the individual no longer sees others as individuals but as stereotypes, categories, or images, the individual becomes less trusting of the other and less open to change. Algorithms quicken this shift by flipping the normal equation: the individual interacts with programs that create a snapshot of the individual at a given moment. The (artificial) algorithmic image stands in for the authentic other, “helping” the individual develop her “self” by presenting the individual with articles, stories, or search results that “match” her. Because the development of self requires voices that bring novelty, the algorithmic voice, which brings the individual conformity (material she already has affirmed as part of her “self”), shuts the person off from herself and her development.

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