Thoughts on The New College of Florida Controversy
Happy New Year!! I hope each of you had a restful holiday season and that you experienced time for reflection and gratitude.
In this edition of the newsletter, I’m writing about Govenor DeSantis’ effort to turn a leftwing state school into a rightwing state school, in the name of the “classical liberal arts.” As you might imagine, I have mixed feelings about the project. But first, some items to note.
1): I was admittedly part of the group that got inflation wrong - by which I mean I expected it to be more transitory than it proved to be. But I’m once again optimistic about the outlook for the coming year. This chart from Twitter shows why:
Certainly, we still have a way to go in getting inflation to the Fed target of 2%, and the latest Covid disruptions in China suggest that supply chains may continue to be gnarly, but I think the fever is broken - without requiring the massive uptick in unemployment that economists like Larry Summers were arguing would be necessary.
2): Congratulations, I guess, to Kevin McCarthy: as the old slogan goes, 15th time’s a charm. But we all know who should have been elected Speaker…… Jeb!
3): The FairTax Act is almost as old as I am, apparently. That just goes to show that sometimes in the marketplace of ideas, the dumb ones just won’t go away. Here’s how one expert at AEI summarized the proposal back in 2015: “Like many novelty tax plans bandied about on the right, the math of the FairTax is simply unfair to middle-income America and conflicts with fiscal reality.”
A New Day at New College?
Let me just start with this. I think every college student, regardless of their major, should be required to read at least one Shakespeare play as a prerequisite for graduation. And in general, I’m always going to support curriculum reforms that emphasize primary tests over textbooks in the humanities and social sciences. I think a world where more students are reading Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Luther, Locke and Rosseau, etc., is a world worth seeking to build.
I also believe that genuine encounter with Great Books is necessarily risky proposition along a number of dimensions for those who have a specific agenda or outcome in mind for their students. Below I’ll just outline two.
First, as a theist, I think often about accounts I’ve heard of people reading their way into atheism after an encounter with Dostoevsky. Certainly, Dostoevsky is not a “safe” author by which I mean an author who can be 100% relied upon to affirm and strengthen the religious convictions of students. But Dostoevsky is a valuable author because of the ways he seeks to reconcile Orthodox faith with Modernity, because of the way he doesn’t sugarcoat the issues of theodicy, because of the way he deals squarely with advances in mathematics and science that alter our fundamental understanding of the universe. Still, it’s an existential risk to assign Dostoevsky to students, or Milton, or any number of authors regularly assigned, but the demands of the liberal arts is that we pursue truth, and that we equip our students to do the same, even when that means they diverge from our own dogmas or cherished beliefs.
Second, Great Books are dangerous precisely because their insights help us to transcend the limited conceptual contours of our own moment in time, and that includes stepping back from the particulars of our own nation’s politics. To exactly the extent that a student is successfully classically educated, that student should be able to distance herself from any totalizing ideology, particularly when that ideology is deeply contingent and parochial. Certainly, there will always be unserious partisans who seek to use a given classical author to push a particular set of politics, but the fault there lies with the teacher, not with the text or the broader liberal arts framework - and the hope is that the texts themselves can overpower the attempts at indoctrination, regardless of the aims of that indoctrination. This is all to say that while I do think the typical Great Books canon is mostly anti-totalitarian, a student can easily agree with Hobbes, for example, and pursue a politics of Levithan, while another student is inspired by Locke (assigned perhaps in the same class!) to dig into libertarianism. From my vantage point, the latter outcome is more preferable than the former (though neither are ideal), but the liberal arts should not be folded into a an overaching project for forming Hobbesian or Lockeans, based on the dictates of the professor, the department, or the board of trustees.
All of this leads me to Governor DeSantis’ recent decision to try and turn a state school into a classical school. Ostensibly, this decision is an effort to weed out political ideology in order to allow genuine liberal arts education. But it is also clearly a partisan move, as evidenced by the appointment of Christopher Rufo, whose whole stick is scorched earth culture war, with a goal of stigmitizing any topic he doesn’t like. That’s not my unfair assessment of him, that’s merely taking him at his word: Rufo has described his activist aims very bluntly on Twitter in the past: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."
There’s not much suggestive of a desire for truth or a dedication to classical texts for their own sake in Rufo’s public-facing statements or activities. But perhaps we can find better statements outside of Twitter and in a more refined piece, such as what Rufo wrote for City Journal to explain his vision for higher education.
Rufo immediately begins with the well-rehearsed line that the universities are hotbeds for leftist indoctrination:
The most significant political story of the past half-century is the activist Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Beginning in the 1960s, left-wing activists and intellectuals, inspired by theorists such as Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, made a concerted effort to embed their ideas in education, government, philanthropy, media, and other important sectors.
This process came to spectacular fruition following the 2020 death of George Floyd, when it seemed that every prestige institution in the United States got busy advancing the same ideological line on race, gender, and culture—which, whether they knew it or not, mimicked the precise themes that the old radicals had originally proposed.
The long march through the institutions, in other words, was complete.
But conservatives, too, have updated their playbook. They have read their Gramsci and have begun to understand that ideological capture poses a grave threat to the American system. President Donald Trump shook conservatives out of their complacency with instinctual, if sometimes crude, cultural countermeasures. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has built on this approach, offering a sophisticated policy agenda for protecting families against captured bureaucracies.
These leftists (communists, Black Panthers, drag queens?), Rufo has us to believe, do not reflect the true values of the state (State?) and so we need reforms that are more in keeping with what voters (presumably the ones who voted for the Governor, being the majority in this case) want:
The premise of this reform is simple. Voters in Florida, who charter and fund the public-university system through their legislative representatives, deserve to have their values reflected and transmitted in their public institutions. Left-wing hegemony over public universities, in academic departments and administrations, is antithetical to free inquiry and civil debate. With the New College of Florida transformed into a classical institution, voters will have access to a wider range of voices, scholars, and opportunities for their children. At a moment when universities are merging into a homogenous, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-style morass, it is essential that the people’s elected representatives create meaningful alternatives.
There’s much to commend in the call for free inquiry, civil debate, and wide range of voices, scholars, and opportunities. And inasmuch as this new initiative may successfully lead to more study of Shakespeare, that’s a net gain for Florida and the rest of the nation. But no, a university - public or private - does not exist to reify the current values of elected leaders, parents, voters, or any other social constituency. And no, a university is not a vehicle for retrenching one set of politics over and against another. And no, the process of establishing or strengthening a dedication to the classics and to the liberal arts tradition should not be entrusted to bad-faith actors like Rufo who gleefully weaponizes rhetoric and who does not engage with ideas or fields of study on the merits but rather makes it a point to delegitimize them through duplicitous practices at every turn.
But for all that, I am not too concerned. The pursuit of truth lives on. The writings of the greatest minds are still read. Subversive questions are still asked. Moments of recognition and transformation still occur. And long after Rufo is a mere footnote, and DeSantis an entry in wikipedia, universities will continue to provide space for students to reflect thoughtfully about themselves, and their world. In the meantime, if some administrator positions are eliminated and more Paradise Lost is assigned - that’s all for the best from my vantage point. And besides, you can always buy The Color of Law at your nearest bookstore.
What I am Reading Elsewhere:
In the New York Times, an incredible tribute to Adolfo Kaminsky who saved thousands of Jewish lives by forging fake documents. “I saved lives because I can’t deal with unnecessary deaths — I just can’t."
Raise a toast to the FTC who is pushing to abolish or at least heavily reduce the use of “non-compete agreements” as part of unfair labor practices. As the FTC notes, “noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."
If you’re like me, you probably don’t recognize the name Martin Ravallion. But it turns out, he’s the pioneering economist who popularized the idea that millions of people around the world live on less than $1 a day. This recent profile shares how Ravallion fundamentally changed the way we understand and measure global poverty.
Recently, an adjunct art history professor was let go after a Muslim student complained over a classroom showing of an image of the Prophet, despite ample trigger warnings preceding the event, and despite the fact that the image is a famous part of Persian culture. The tenured faculty in the department offered a strong showing of solidarity in the following statement that is worth reading in full: “In response to Dr. López Prater’s non-renewal, we speak strongly against Hamline’s intertwined attacks on academic freedom, on the integrity and dedication of faculty (especially those vulnerable to dismissal) and on the related enterprises of knowledge dissemination and debate."
I haven’t done a deep dive into Effective Altruism but my kneejerk reaction is suspicion given that so many people tied to the movement are self-identified utilitarians. But this recent article on the EA Forum makes a case for EA via the “capabilities” approach associated with figures like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. This approach seems to me to be much more compatible with virtue ethics, both classical and neoclassical (figures like MacIntyre.)