If you’ve seen the movie Good Will Hunting, you’ll remember a scene between the psychologist, Sean, played by Robin Williams and his patient, Will, played by Matt Damon. Will has never been to college. It’s unclear whether he finished high school. But he’s a genius. Will’s sped-read his way through thousands of volumes from the Boston public library – from history, to philosophy, to literature, to (“just for fun”) organic chemistry – and can solve mathematical equations that stump the top professors at M.I.T. The scene I have in mind involves a psychotherapy session between Sean and Will, which unfolds as follows:
Sean: Do you feel like you’re alone Will?
Will: What?
Sean: Do you have a soul mate?
Will: Define that.
Sean: Someone who challenges you.
* * *
Will: I got plenty.
Sean: Well, name them.
Will: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O’Connor, Kant, Pope, Locke.
Sean: That’s great. They’re all dead.
Will: Not to me they’re not.
Sean: You don’t have a lot of dialogue with them. You can’t give back to them Will.
While it’s not the movie – or even the scene’s – real point (and with apologies to screenwriters Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for using their work in a way they may not have intended), this exchange helps illustrate the difference between learning and education. Will may know more about a greater range of disciplines than anyone else on the planet, but he is not an educated person. He has not lived and studied in a community of his peers. He has not run the risk of offering up his own thoughts for others to critique and challenge. He does not know how to engage in meaningful interchanges with others and profit from them. What he has learned makes him able to perform tasks of great value – many enterprises want to hire him for his mathematical skills – but it has not given him joy, helped him decide how to live his life, or resulted in wisdom.
With this in mind, let’s turn to a story prominently featured in today’s New York Times and Washington Post.
The University of Virginia is joining a consortium that will offer online courses to mass audiences across the globe. The venture is a collaboration between a private firm, Coursera, and a dozen of the nation’s most prestigious universities, including Stanford, Princeton, Penn, and Caltech. Coursera has already offered – so far on an entirely free and open basis – 43 courses to 680,000 students in 190 countries.
Harvard and M.I.T. have formed a rival joint venture named edX. “Online education – it is revolutionary. Online education will change the world.” So said Anant Argarwal, director of M.I.T.’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, when he announced the formation of edX.
Perhaps. But whether it changes the world for better or worse remains to be seen.
I’m not against online teaching programs. They have their uses. But should colleges and universities be involved with such ventures?
Colleges have a special, critically important, and I will even go so far as to say sacred mission – to turn our nation’s next generation into educated citizens. Becoming educated involves acquiring information, but that may be the least important part of the process. More importantly, education involves developing analytic skills and critical reasoning. It requires reevaluating one’s biases, prejudices, and values – not necessarily to change them, but to better understand one’s choices. And to better understand other people’s choices too, for democracy cannot thrive unless we can understand and talk with one another. It requires learning to think and to be creative. And it involves finding the joy in one or more pursuits.
Most of us who have had the good fortune to go to college believe that we learned as much outside the classroom as we did in the classroom. Actually, it’s the interaction between the two that makes college unique. College is about living for a period of time in a community of intellectual stimulation and engagement. It entails passionate discussions in the classroom and in the dormitories, cafeterias, and pubs as well. A cyber-community will never be an adequate substitute for a flesh-and-blood community.
Technology is fabulous. But technology provides tools, nothing more. When Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in 1819, there were no electric lights or ball point pens. Blackboards were then cutting-edge. I expect that if Thomas Jefferson were to visit the University of Virginia today, he’d been delighted to discover that computers have replaced slide rules. (Yes, slide rules existed in 1819. In fact, they had been around for more than two hundred years.) But how would Jefferson react if he learned that the University of Virginia had joined Coursera?
University officials would tell Jefferson: We can now project education across time and space, to the far reaches of the nation and the world. They might even confront Jefferson with one of his own quotes: “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people...they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”
But Jefferson might ask: What do you now mean by education?
Thomas Jefferson also said: “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."" Was Jefferson speaking about citizens who had merely acquired information and technical skills?
Am I attaching too much importance to these online ventures? After all, the online initiatives are still largely experiments, and no one is suggesting that online enterprises are going to replace colleges.
I believe deep concern is warranted. Recently, members of the governing board of the University of Virginia forced Teresa Sullivan to resign as president because, in part, they believed Sullivan was not moving the university quickly enough into online education. Helen Dragas, the head of the board, clearly believed that online education is a matter of fundamental importance.
A fire-storm of protest forced Dragas and the board to recant and retain Sullivan. But Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia has since reappointed Dragas to the board. The current line is that the board was mistaken and Sullivan had been moving Virginia toward online education all along.
And according to the Washington Post’s article:
Over the past decade, online instruction has exploded in higher education. But the nation’s top universities have been slow to embrace online for core undergraduate and graduate programs. The movement seemed at odds with the residential, dialectical learning experience that is their chief product.
Now, opposition is melting away. A compelling body of research has shown that some online initiatives yield improved outcomes at reduced cost, an irresistible proposition.
I don’t doubt that online programs can inculcate information and technical skills, and do so inexpensively. Nor do I doubt that tests can be devised to prove those things. Students can easily be tested on whether they can memorize the structure of a particular molecule, solve a math problem, translate a passage from a foreign language, or identify quotations from Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Kant, or Robert Frost. But objective tests aren’t going to determine how students react to Nietzsche, Kant, or Locke’s ideas, or evaluate their – that is, the students – criticisms of those thinkers. An objective test is not going to determine how Shakespeare and Frost make students feel, or what connections they make between Macbeth and the Critique of Pure Reason. It’s a terrible mistake to confuse education with what can be objectively tested.
Can colleges and universities both operate excellent residential colleges and provide online educational programs? I fear not. Running a first-rate residential college is a sophisticated undertaking that requires exclusive focus and effort. It also requires appreciating what true education is, and constantly explaining the value of true education to students, parents, and funding sources including, for public institutions, state legislatures and taxpayers. Helen Dragas has already demonstrated how easy it is to become seduced by the sexiness and potential profit of mass teaching through cyberspace. Or to believe that because the likes of Harvard, Stanford, and M.I.T. are doing it, it must be the thing to do.
Veep games continue. As I previously noted, until Romney announces his selection his campaign will float rumors that so-and-so is the leading candidate for the GOP vice presidential nomination, to be followed after a respectable pause that the leading candidate is now someone else. The objectives are to gin up as much eager anticipation as possible in Romney’s choice, and to flatter a number of politicians and their constituencies.
The current rumor – reported by a banner-headline story on the Drudge Report, and reverberating through the conservative blogosphere – is that Condoleezza Rice is the frontrunner. Undoubtedly, his campaign believes that this rumor puts Romney in a favorable light among some women, African-Americans, neoconservatives, and the remaining handful of admirers of the George W. Bush’s administration.
I previously speculated that Romney would seriously consider Rice – she is smart and would bring badly needed foreign policy expertise to the team – but that Romney would ultimately decide against choosing her because she’s associated in the public’s mind with the invasion of Iraq. The last thing Romney needs is to provoke reevaluations of that disastrous episode. What about arguing that the real boosters of the Iraq invasion were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and neoconservatives within the administration such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle – not to mention George W. Bush himself – and not Rice, who reportedly argued that America should concentrate on Afghanistan and not become embroiled in a second invasion? Forget about it. That would only make Rice look weak, that is, as someone who, despite her extremely close relationship with George W. Bush, failed to prevail within his administration’s inner council.
On the simplest level, anything that reminds voters about George W. Bush also reminds them that many of the nation’s current problems – including the recession, the ballooning deficit, bailouts for financial institutions – originated under his watch. Fair or not, putting Rice on the ticket would do just that. Rice was an important and visible member of Bush’s administration, and Bush’s close friend and trusted adviser. The prospect of having all of that exhumed in profiles of Rice – including photos of Rice and Bush together – is more than enough to drive a silver stake through the heart of a possible Rice vice presidential nomination.
As we proceed along the path of one implausible name being floated after another as Romney’s vice presidential pick, I’ll keep saying “I told you so” – right through Romney’s ultimate selection of Rob Portman as his running mate.
In his New York Times column today, David Brooks writes that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act “represents a moment of, if I can say it, Burkean minimalism and self-control.” Brooks may be right about categorizing Roberts’ decision as Burkean, but I have a quibble with how Brooks put it.
The phrase “Burkean minimalism” has become popular, especially so in legal circles since Cass Sunstein wrote an article with that title in the November 2006 issue of the Michigan Law Review. It is not quite right, however, to consider Burke a minimalist.
Burke was not only a reformer – at times he advocated radical reform. Burke was, however, ever mindful that (1) our institutions, customs, and traditions have come to be as they are for good reasons that are not always obvious to us; (2) change, especially dramatic change, always has potential for unintended consequences; and (3) our ability to perceive those consequences through the use of logic and theories is limited. It is more accurate to say that Burke believed that reform should be undertaken with great care and a healthy respect for tradition and precedent than it is to call him a minimalist. Burke may have believed that, all other things being equal, modest or incremental reforms are preferable to sweeping or rapid reform; but Burke recognized that sometimes the status quo is unacceptable and radical reform is necessary, though even then he worked mightily – leaning heavily on the study of history – to proceed as carefully as possible and attempt to anticipate and correct for undesirable consequences.
Burke was a reformer with humility. Sunstein was right when he said in the text of his article that Burkean jurisprudence would “emphasize the limitations of human and judicial knowledge.”
Charles Krauthammer also devoted his column, in the Washington Post, to Chief Justice Roberts’ jurisprudential approach. Although he never mentions Burke, Krauthammer identifies something that is genuinely Burkean. “Institutionally, [Roberts] is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the court’s legitimacy, reputation, and stature,” writes Krauthammer. If Krauthammer is correct in surmising that Roberts’ decision was driven by those concerns, then Roberts did indeed act in a decidedly Burkean way.
Burke understood that our institutions – and widespread respect for them – are crucially important. The Court, however, diminished itself by determining the outcome of a presidential election along partisan lines in Bush v. Gore. I doubt the justices understood just how badly that decision damaged the Court’s stature.
In many eyes – including mine – the Court further damaged its reputation in other decisions such as its 2008 and 2010 Second Amendment cases. Prior to 2008, none of the then-sitting justices had ever considered the meaning of the Second Amendment. In that year, nine justices rolled up their sleeves, examined the history and text of the Amendment for the first time, and divided 5-4 along purely ideological lines about what the Second Amendment means. Two years later, the Court’s nine justices considered another issue they themselves had never confronted before: When does a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights apply only against the federal government and when is it incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment and apply against the states as well? Although this too involved the Second Amendment, the issue of “incorporation” is distinctly different than the meaning of the Amendment, and there is no sound jurisprudential reason why there should be a correlation between how justices come out in the two cases. Nevertheless – and I am sorry to say to no one’s surprise – the Court again divided 5-4 along the same ideological lines. It had become difficult to see the Court as anything more than another political branch of government.
The deterioration of the Court’s authority is a matter of great concern to any Burkean. Whatever else it may have done, Roberts’ decision gives at least a temporary boost to the Court’s stature.
As for the rationales employed by the chief justice, well, that may be a different matter. In an op-ed in today’s New York Times, Georgetown University law professor Neal K. Katyal argues that the Court’s decision may radically change established precedents and practices under which the federal government encourages states to engage in particular activities by funding those activities. And in another op-ed in today’s New York Times, Richard A. Epstein, a law professor at New York University, argues that Roberts’ decision may fundamentally change how we have interpreted Congress’ power to collect taxes to provide for the “general Welfare of the United States.” I pass no judgment today on either Katyal’s or Epstein’s argument. But whether, in future years, we will look back on the Roberts’ opinion and praise it as Burkean is very much an open question.