On Jennifer Frey and the art of educating intellectual independence.
Jennifer Frey is Inaugural Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa (and a trained philosopher). She has offered her vision on the nature of liberal arts education in a number of ‘popular’ essays that are refreshingly free from administrative jargon and groupthink. She also seems to have the freedom to implement her vision at Tulsa, so her words are not inconsequential. In today’s post I will engage with her recent essay, “The Liberality of Liberal Education” first published at Fusion, and then recently reprinted at Credo. And while undoubtedly her essay also functions as a branding/recruitment exercise, I leave that aside in what follows. I would want to be a teacher in her college, despite some of my hesitations in what follows.
I had never heard of Fusion or Credo before. Fusion’s name is a homage to Frank S. Meyer, and explicitly looks back to the way (to paraphrase) religious conservatives and classical liberals joined forces in defense of liberty. This was the dominant intellectual perspective Stateside on the right between, say, 1970-2015. Interestingly, “Credo exists to retrieve classical Christianity for the sake of creating and cultivating reformation in the church today.” The editor, Matthew Barrett, is a theologian at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I mention this last bit because I was very struck by Frey’s Thomist framing of her own essay in what I took to be a Protestant journal. But it’s been clear for a while that Christian intellectuals Stateside are having pan-confessional conversations that were once much rarer.
Okay, let me turn to Frey’s argument. This is organized around a distinction between “liberal or free… arts which are concerned with knowledge for its own sake, and servile… arts which are concerned with utility, where the knowledge sought is for the sake of some already pre-determined, practical end.” In the context of education, we would call ‘servile’ as she notes, ‘professional’ education. Somewhat jarringly, Frey persists in using ‘servile’ which surely will make her popular among Deans of the business, law, nursing, and medical schools everywhere.
As she recognizes — I have also noted this in passing — the professional schools often tend to dominate student numbers on campus. (This is not true everywhere; many social sciences have large enrollments, and the extent to which, if any, they have pre-determined ends is actually a rather deep issue.) Let me quote her because she is a wonderfully direct and vivid writer:
The servile arts—what today we would call professional schools and majors—dominate today’s academy. In spite of all the hysteria around gender studies or critical race theory, very few students are pursuing these or other humanistic modes of inquiry—including traditional liberal arts, such as mathematics, music, and philosophy. Even natural sciences like physics and chemistry seem increasingly pointless.
The reason has nothing to do with politics: it is simply not obvious what the practical goal of such study might be. Unless there is an answer to the question of utility, study seems vain or empty. But this has things exactly backward. If all one’s study is for the sake of making oneself useful and productive, what gets lost is the most essential task: the formation of the person who must grasp the ends their productivity serves. A person who has not been trained to do this will exhaust themselves on a hamster wheel; they will realize, at some point, that they never bothered to ask where they are going or what their efforts are ultimately for.
Before I get to the main point, it’s worth noting that professional education for the professions — law, medicine, nursing, social work, engineering, and even public administration — need not be oriented toward ‘utility.’ In fact, it is precisely characteristic of the professions that they have an ethos or mission that is not characterized by utility.* Often, professions are characterized by a code-of-conduct, and mechanisms of self-governance that are wholly orthogonal to utility.
Obviously, that a profession has a distinct ethos that frames their use of skills and techniques (apart from utility) is important to wider social theory. There is a reason why fascists attack, as Michael Polanyi perceived (recall), the independence of the specialized, partially self-governing intermediary societies (within science, art, law, engineering, medicine, etc.) because they are, in part, constitutive of liberal society. Now, Frey may still suggest that within such professions, the ends are not up for debate and so there is a sense in which they are ‘servile’ in Thomas’ sense. I think this is most true for engineering, but clearly somewhat true in the other professions.
Before I continue, because Frey’s essay is, in part, a polemical response to “Menand’s condescending takedown of Montas’s passionate and deeply personal defense of liberal learning,” in Rescuing Socrates: How Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, part of her argument is also a critique of expertise/narrow scholarship and a defense of humanism/“liberal learning.” I think because of this she misses how liberal learning and teaching is itself rooted in forms of scholarship (not the least the philologists of the renaissance). But because I already responded to a version of Frey’s argument when I encountered it in Hitz’s wonderful Lost in Thought (recall here), I won’t repeat myself here. Especially because Frey is also committed to the thought that the dichotomy between “research and liberal learning is a false one, and we should try to avoid it. It is possible to do both.” Even if all of this merits further consideration, it’s not my main point today.
To be sure, I am not critical of Frey’s polemics. Something is at stake here.
So much for set up. According to Frey “an education that is primarily directed towards preparation for work is lacking something essential for human fulfillment.” This strikes me as correct and significant. Crucially, on Frey’s view part of human fulfillment is that a person grasps ends/goals for which production and work are organized. That is to say, one must have a sense of one’s place in a larger whole and the rationality of both, at least if one is “in a society that is well-ordered.”
It’s worth noting — before we evaluate it — how far this claim deviates from the nostrums and outright stupidity peddled by others. Frey is not a Marxist, but she clearly suggests that much education prepares students for a life of alienation from self and others because they are not prepared to think skillfully about the situations they will find oneself in. They will be unable to flourish, and their lack of fulfillment will make them miserable. Lurking in her account — “the mental health of our students has deteriorated” — is a possible diagnosis of the epidemic of depression and despair that is engulfing us. And as she rightly notes, “universities are weirdly unable to see that the more existential needs of their students are going unmet.” (emphasis added.)
This existential need is related to the second sense of how far-removed Frey is from conventional wisdom. It is fundamental to her picture that education doesn’t just form a person (or, as the Platonist in me would say, engage in soul-craft), but also engages with (for lack of a better phrase) political philosophy as first philosophy, “If there is no vision of what is ultimately valuable and choice-worthy for individuals and societies—then something is deeply amiss.”
Interestingly enough, and this is where Frey innovates, she treats the commitments described in the previous paragraph as the conditions of true freedom: “If we are never trained to ask and answer the question of what our work is for, because we have only ever been slaves to the purposes of others, then we are not truly free.” (Emphasis added.) Despite the Thomist framework (and the explicit nod to Straussianism through Alan Bloom in the text), there is a hint of Rousseau lurking here, in freedom as autonomous self-legislation.
Crucially, on her view what matters is that education forms the person. And it does so by opening up worlds that in thoughtful young minds creates existential crises and self-transformation. The self-trans-formation is guided by teachers, but ultimately is of the person who is being formed. I quote Frey’s autobiographical description of this process:
This recognition of how little I understood about what matters spurred me to study philosophy, history, literature, and a variety of old languages so that I could read the tradition in a serious way. I began to realize that just because something is repeated by people in power and isn’t questioned does not mean that it is true. I learned that the search for truth is far more complicated and demanding because it requires not only the desire to know but a certain kind of training and habituation, that, in the end, leads to a deep change in the kind of person one is. This process is rightfully characterized as a kind of liberation—from ignorance and confusion about who and what one is, to some modicum of knowledge and clarity of vision.
While Frey sometimes writes as if this existential transformation is only intended for “the next generation of leaders” and the select few (“young elites”) of the sort that may be admitted to a honours program, her view generalizes to all, “Every university student faces these questions of ultimate value, meaning, and purpose, because all equally suffer from the human condition.” (Emphasis added.)
I teach in an underfunded state university with massive enrollments. But when in our giant electives and seminars, I get my students to sit in a large square (I always think of the French carré), and we allow ourselves the space for a close reading, we often reach the point where we instantiate and approximate the demanding shared search for truth Frey hints at. Joint close reading of a text that can sustain scrutiny by asking us to reflect on the nature of character and society is a magical experience, time and again. It never gets old for me because I love learning from my students’ perceptions and be a silent witness to their self-transformation.
I deliberately use ‘approximate’ because for Frey (working with Thomist categories) a liberal education is intrinsically connected to leisure. I don’t think my students can experience their higher education as leisurely at all; the teaching ‘blocks’ are short and packed with a dense curriculum. I teach one semester long elective (a privilege I have long cherished), and I know that this year will be the last time. I can only provide my students with a temporary refuge from education itself constituted as work. When I recently described to a friend who teaches at a top US university how many of hundreds of students I teach each year, she (not wholly unfairly) denied it could be education at all.
But the question is what kind of soul-craft a liberal education could be. Sometimes Frey suggests that we create a person that grasps the ends of social production, sometimes that we create a person that is trained to question the status quo, sometimes that soul-craft must create agents who know what is choice worthy. (Interestingly enough Frey refrains from suggesting she is training citizens despite the focus on society that is well-ordered!) She also suggests more existentially that “every student will need to be equipped to face their own humanity and to help others face it.” I think it would be too easy to suggest that no single curriculum or praxis of undergraduate education can generate all of that.
Yet, what these have in common is a kind of independence that is the effect of intellectual training (a word she repeatedly deploys). I have to admit that I find this attractive, and I’ll be curious to learn more about Frey’s efforts.
But I am also increasingly skeptical that such intellectual independence is achieved in/through the classroom, or even in a honors college with a fairly social controlled environment. At best educators can plant seeds and habituate the young to take up certain persistent practices that fuel open-ended curiosity and collaboration; at best we provide training in the arts of life-long self-education. No less, but also no more.
To be continued.
*I deliberately leave out business schools because management never succeeded in generating an ethos distinct from utility.