For quite some time, universities have been increasingly charged with preparing young people for the labor market. Students (and society in general) have demanded that they be given “competences” that are “relevant” to the problems posed by “global competition” or some other ominous force. More recently, however, concerns have begun to be voiced, by both educators and employers, that this drive for competence has neglected a set of underlying competences that were, perhaps, too readily dismissed as “academic”. We can call these “scholarly” competences.

They are important in what has been called “the knowledge society”. Indeed, scholarly competence constitutes what it means to be knowledgeable. Knowledge-able, i.e., “able to know”. It is, of course, grounded in the theories and methods that students learn at university. But it also has an important “craft” dimension, which is the focus of this blog. Most concretely, the ability to know things is supported by the student’s facility with texts, with reading and writing. And that is why the CBS Library has a resident writing consultant. We want to integrate writing skills and library skills into a unified ability to understand the changing world in which we live.

We are confident that this will also be useful to students on the job market, and society in the long run.

I’m going to start posting here again soon. It may take a little while to find a regular rhythm and clear focus. But we have to start somewhere.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

These two famous questions were asked by T.S. Eliot in 1934. That’s in the very, very early days of television and 55 years before the invention of the World Wide Web. I remember reading somewhere that Eliot used to say he didn’t read the newspapers because they were “too exciting”.  These days it’s becoming increasingly fashionable to take a break from the excitement of social media. Where’s the information, we me might ask, that we’ve lost in the outrage?

Libraries are often associated with the notion of “information literacy” and I’ve written about my doubts about this “metaphorical” use on the notion of literacy before. I think something is being lost in the idea that sifting through the vast amount of information that is available “at our fingertips” is on par with reading and writing, i.e., literacy proper. To apply the metaphor, when we teach (and preach) “information literacy”, I worry that we’re now teaching students something akin to using the Dewey decimal system to locate a book in a library but not teaching them how to read the language it’s written in.

I got a sense of the problem recently when I was part of a team teaching writing and library skills to a group students who were beginning their master’s dissertation writing. I noticed that they got a bit restless when we started teaching them how to use the library’s databases to survey the literature and locate sources. There wasn’t anything wrong with the advice we were giving them; it just didn’t seem to satisfy their curiosity.

It got me thinking that maybe the students reach a point, not of information overload, but information fatigue. The wisdom of knowing what you don’t know is replaced by the knowledge that comes from being informed about how much information there is (i.e., too much). In the end, the students’ awareness of how well-informed they are (i.e,. how much access to information they have) becomes a hindrance to the formation of proper beliefs about the practices they are studying. Indeed, it undermines their ability to form justified, true beliefs, i.e., to know things.

So I want to consider an alternative approach. Perhaps at a certain level of education (a master’s program and certainly a doctoral program) we should begin with what the students believe and teach them how to use their access to inform those beliefs. This will often, of course, mean challenging what they think is true.

The idea would be to get them out of the sort of naive open-mindedness that seems to guide their early engagement with the Internet. Recognizing that they don’t know something and that someone “out there” probably does, they go looking for someone to replace ignorance with knowledge. “Information literacy” here becomes the competence of recognizing a trustworthy source. But as they advance, they need us to help them replace false beliefs with knowledge, and to better support true beliefs on their scientific basis. This last is important in any effort to refine what is known, to study it further.

In this mode, students would go the databases with much more specific questions. The question is no longer “What has been written on this subject?” but “Is this claim true, and if so, how do we know?” This sort of inquiry will invariably lead them to research that is critical of what they thought they knew, and to competent practitioners of the methods that are normally used to test the relevant claims.

Instead of sifting through thousands of pages of “information” about a subject, students might now engage with dozens of scholars who are knowledgeable about particular claims about the world. What we have here, indeed, is a version of the distinction between being merely “literate” and being actually knowledgeable. In the end, we’re trying to give students the ability to know things, not just to find sources. We want to help them locate, not just the information, but the conversation.

There can be little doubt that the conditions under which scholars work shape the ideas they have.  To my mind, this makes it extremely important to think seriously about those conditions. As Steve Fuller suggested already in his first book, Social Epistemology, it ought to be possible to predict what kind of knowledge a particular organization of cognitive labor might produce, or, indeed, to work out what the best way of organizing our intellectual pursuits might be if certain kind of knowledge is our aim. More existentially, we can ask what kind of mind will result from subjecting a human body to a particular form of discipline.

That’s, of course, the question I have been asking over the past four posts about the formation of an “academic” way of thinking in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education, then onward to graduate school. In this post, I want think a little about the most advanced stage of academic development, namely, the mind of the full-time scholar, the tenured professor. This means I’ll be fast-forwarding from graduate school to tenure, without paying much attention to the increasingly important “formative” (deforming? disfiguring?) process that occurs in the “post-doctoral” but “pre-tenure” period. This is the life of adjunct faculty and assistant professors and deserves a post of its own. But I think it is useful, first, to sketch the sort of mind that those years are supposed to both produce and allow us to select for a life (more or less) of service to the university.

I believe that a university should provide conditions under which people who have demonstrated their intellectual abilities are free to make up, and speak, their own minds. One way to put this is that it should be a place where it is possible to have an idea without holding to an ideology. A place where it is possible to think outside the orthodoxy. (Remember that story about Galileo from my last post; it is possible that the Church actually offered Galileo such intellectual freedom–albeit only to make up his mind, not to speak it.) Another way to put it is that it should be possible to think without the support of a “foundation”, i.e., a funding agency with an agenda. Rather, the university should provide the, let’s say, universal foundation of “reason”, to support the inquiries of scholars.

I think there is way too much pressure, even within the university, for academics to “sign on” to one or another ideological tradition, to make themselves useful to one or another social project. Riffing on Al Gore’s famous title, I once asked Fuller whether truths could be judged more or less “convenient” to particular political interests, and whether all truth is destined always to be judged, in part, on this kind of convenience, rather than being held to some more universal, rational standard. He answered that “universities have a vital role to play in mainstreaming awkward voices … by integrating them into a curricular narrative, so they are not seen as merely slaughtering the sacred cows but as replacing them with a more durable species.” For “awkward” here, we can read “ideologically inconvenient”. Most importantly, we can imagine a university that does not let a truth that is inconvenient for some current constellation of interest groups also be inconvenient for an individual scholar to believe it and, as it were, “profess” it. Indeed, we can make it entirely convenient for professors to believe and say whatever they want.

It seems to me that the value of such an institution, where ideas would be able to flourish independently of their utility for enterprises of state or business, is obvious. The same institution would expose each new generation to a similarly flourishing kind of mind in the classroom. And it also seems to be a pretty straightforward matter to arrange the necessary conditions. Compared to the enormous costs of running today’s universities, I think such institutions would be relatively inexpensive to establish. Obviously, governments and corporations could always try to entice the greatest intellects out of their garden of free inquiry and into more “gainful” pursuits. Let those whose first love is truth remain behind. There’s nothing shameful about either set of values; they’re just different. The important thing is to ensure that universities are staffed by people who value freedom and stability over profit and innovation.

One of the things we learn about ourselves as undergraduates is whether we have a natural disposition for “academic” work. While a university education is increasingly necessary to success in professional life, it isn’t something that everyone finds equally enjoyable or interesting. Some people just “get through it”, even with very good grades, and look forward to earning their degree and starting their careers. Others, however, are saddened by the prospect of leaving school and getting “real jobs”. For some of them, there is grad school.

Graduate studies, of course, require a certain aptitude for intellectual labor.  But they also require a set of (for lack of a better word) “moral” competences to engage with others in a common project of maintaining and extending our cultural heritage. Graduate students have the double task of demonstrating that they are able to study an issue carefully to arrive at qualified conclusions and showing that they are able to participate in a community of inquirers who will both agree and disagree with them. In some disciplines there is plenty of room for cantankerousness or independence of mind (as you choose), whereas other disciplines are less tolerant of aggressively critical personalities. Indeed, some disciplines outright require a certain assertiveness, while others, conversely, require deference, often no less explicitly. Finding the right field, for you, involves being sensitive to the tone of discourse and gauging your own reaction to it. Is this the sort of relationship you’d like to develop to your peers?

These posts on academic “formation” have been concerned with the place where our moral and intellectual competences meet–particularly as they meet in statements of what can be called “doctrine”, i.e., orthodox truths. I have been trying to argue that being too eager to indoctrinate our students with what we believe is true (and sometimes good) might interfere with their ability to form the habits of mind that are needed, later in life, to form their own beliefs in a scholarly or scientific way. Sometimes (indeed, most times) we have to let them hold false beliefs for good reasons, on pain of getting them to hold (or just profess) true beliefs on our authority. I’ve shown how this might work in primary, secondary and post-secondary education. But can this tolerance for falsehood be sustained at all levels of education? Does it apply, for example, to grad school as well?

One of the most important things I learned from Steve Fuller many years ago was to treat “theories” as “presumptions”. This, he suggested (in Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge), might help me to feel less oppressed by the intellectual orthodoxies that one constantly encounters on university campuses. Instead of imagining that I have to believe an orthodox opinion, I can treat it as a presumption that governs how I am allowed to discuss it. It guides the process of conversation, the “procedure” by which the truth may be challenged and defended. In this sense, it works much like the presumption of innocence in a trial. I don’t have to believe that the accused is innocent, but I do have to treat the accused as though she’s innocent until such time as my challenge succeeds.

How can this inform the development of the graduate student’s mind? Well, instead of forcing our graduate students, whether at the MA or PhD level, to adopt as gospel the currently fashionable theory of the phenomena they are interested in, we can ask them merely to presume that their elders are right about it until the preponderance of the evidence they gather persuades the community to change its mind. That is, we can allow them to earnestly pursue and expose our errors, so long as they grant us that those errors are the result of our own earnest and sincere attempts to discover the truth. We can require them to acknowledge the orthodoxy, that is, without demanding that they genuflect to it.

The traditional symbol of such genuflection is, of course, Galileo’s renunciation of his belief that the Earth moves, at the demand of the Catholic Church. I won’t get into the details in this blog post, nor presume to settle the issue in such a place, but it is important to note that the conventional caricature of Galileo as a victim of orthodoxy has been plausibly challenged (by Paul Feyerabend, among others). The truth, some argue, is that the Church was perfectly willing to let Galileo continue his inquiries into the hypothesis that the Earth moves, so long as he did not publicly denounce the current orthodoxy until a sufficiently robust and elaborate alternative could be constructed. If they did not proceed more cautiously (than the fiery Galileo would have preferred), the Church feared, it would only cause confusion and draw the general authority of the Church into question. The result would be chaos, both moral and intellectual. On the face of it, there is some wisdom in that attitude.

Today, the University plays the role of the Church. It demands that scholars be careful in their public pronouncements (about the climate, vaccines, evolution, gender, etc.), always acknowledging the dominant view (as that held by “97% of all scientists”, etc.), while at the same time promoting and defending their right to pursue their inquiries wherever their curiosity leads. It’s freedom with responsibility, to use a favorite conservative slogan. And it is sometimes forgotten that a university is much better thought of as a knowledge-conserving institution than a knowledge-innovating one.

The existential question that graduate students should be trying to answer, and should be helped by their supervisors to answer, is whether they have the personal disposition to work in an environment that presumes the truth of a number of statements that they, personally, know to be false. We must, I would argue, never demand that they believe something they have good reasons to reject, but we can, in fact, ask them to proceed on the presumption that what we’ve known for decades more or less holds. We should not be ashamed of testing their knowledge of the tradition, no matter how “conservative” that makes us look.