Here's to shutting up.

When someone who's still immature as a thinker starts a blog of ideas (academic, cultural, political, etc.) she's going to think she has something to say to the world. For a while, she'll make her case. If she's lucky — if she finds the blogging world at its best — thoughtful people will see her posts and offer criticism. Or maybe they won't see her blog, but the minor disciplines of linking, following, and commenting will bring her to writers that have thought through her problems already. And she'll come to realize her intellectual immaturity, and see that she needs to rethink some things.

There might be some who would say that it's a virtue of the blogosphere that our young blogger can keep writing, and that she should now write in the mode of a certain famous blogger who likes to opine fiercely and then let his readers help him make up his mind. They might say, further, that this is the democratic process in action, and that this is how blogs function as part of our public sphere.

I'd say that this kind of public thinking isn't really thinking, and that when an intellectually immature blogger has begun to exhaust a position, it's better to keep quiet and read carefully than to keep chattering. For when you've got a good idea to work with, the process and responsibility of public elaboration is helpful, but there's a necessarily private element in the weighing and thinking through of rival theories that remains until a thinker reaches maturity. Or so I would imagine, being an not-yet-mature thinker myself.

Milliner on friendship and education.

Public Discourse has a new essay by Matthew Milliner, one section of which I'd like to endorse:

Christopher Olaf Blum’s essay “Newman’s Collegiate Ideal” explains that Newman’s focus on friendship enabled the university to be “not a chance collection of individuals building their careers, but a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity was to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” Common meals were the soil where acquaintanceship grew into friendship, which Aristotle understood to be among the highest of life’s rewards. Genuine learning without the “pure and clear atmosphere of thought” fostered by true friendship was difficult to achieve. Like Origen, Newman understood that “personal influence… was the means of propagating the truth.”

In an age of unmanageable class sizes and overworked (and out of work) professors, advocating such an intimate scale of virtue-based learning may seem naive. Yet such ideals are probably closer to most of our own learning histories than we might think. If a given class distilled more than mere information, but instead shaped our lives and futures, some kind of friendship probably played a role. Wherever our own education occurred, or is occurring, transformative learning continues to happen as it always has—through communities of friendships upheld by some measure of mutual virtue.

The best thing that ever happened to me, intellectually, was that my friends and I had to take the same classes and read the same books. Our discussions gave me a stake in my coursework, which touched off a cycle. Imagining higher education based on a principle of friendship — why, one might think that the striving for wisdom is the second paradise of world.

"Cultivating our historical imagination."

Peter Wicks on liberal education:

The question of what the humanities are for has no simple answer, but if I had to sum it up in 60 seconds here is what I would say:

The best time to have a midlife crisis is in college. I don’t mean that anyone should expect to graduate feeling as if they have life all worked out, but by the time they graduate they should be in the habit of thinking seriously about what gives life meaning and value.

The humanities equip us for such reflection by cultivating our historical imagination. By studying the literature and ideas of those who came before us we learn that, like them, we are living in a particular historical period, and we come to recognize its prejudices and blind spots. We also discover that our sense of what is obvious has a history, and that what now seems obvious once seemed revolutionary. We don’t just learn to quote the great thinkers of the past; we learn that we have been quoting them without realizing it for a long time.

Graduate degrees and value, continued.

I linked to an article a few days ago about the downside of pursuing a PhD. in the humanities. Freddie DeBoer and John Schwenkler have some more on that theme. (Bonus: Michael Bérubé shows up in the comments on Freddie's post.)

John connects education debt with the wave of foreclosures by tracing them to the same root: the desire to get easy money now and figure out how to pay it back later—with interest, of course. Freddie emphasizes again the degree to which universities depend on the cheap labor of the graduate students who are stuck in and depend on the system. He says:

“In a perfect world, more potential grad students would self-select themselves out of the grad school chase. But the fact that it takes so long to get your doctorate acts as a kind of buffer for looking at the reality; I think a lot of people just say ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’ And they are following their passion, after all. People really do care about contemporary Portugeuse novelists and the effect of absentee fathers on child literacy rates and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s politics and allelic variation as evidence of sexual reproduction in the opportunistic human parasite ‘Candida Albicans’. God bless them for it. I think academic interest is a wonderful thing. The problem is that often the passion for those things seems like a small solace when people have emerged from six or seven years of school and work and can’t get employed. And now they’ve got a wife and kids, and they’re behind on the mortgage, and contemplating getting a job at the mall….”

I've got a pile of interests; I picked mathematics out of the bunch because it had a certain practical value that I was looking for. I'm thankful that something I'm interested in has that kind of value.

I've heard it said that, if you choose not to take the grad school route, it might take more than a decade longer to read the stuff you would have to read in grad school (or at least the part of it that you want to read), so it's a better value to pursue it on the side if you're not absolutely dedicated to the career or absolutely assured of your own talent. But then there's the fear that you won't really be able to test your ideas without fellow students and teachers.

So you become a blogger instead. (But it's just not the same.)

I'd like to know whether the university system ate up independent or amateur scholarship after the big post-WWII college boom. I know that most “professional poets” are teachers in creative writing programs, and that many novelists support themselves in the same way. Before widespread college attendance, was this even possible? That is, was there a time when intellectual culture was not so closely tied to institutions of higher education as it is now?

Pessimistic professor: don't try a PhD. in the humanities.

“Thomas Benton” writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.

“Most undergraduates don't realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training). They don't know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late.”

[…]

“…during the three years that I searched for positions outside of academe, I found that humanities Ph.D.'s, without relevant experience or technical skills, generally compete at a moderate disadvantage against undergraduates, and at a serious disadvantage against people with professional degrees. If you take that path, you will be starting at the bottom in your 30s, a decade behind your age cohort, with no savings (and probably a lot of debt).”

Oh, the poor humanites. I wonder if these disciplines should start doing everything in their power to be less insular—to encourage lateral movement between academia and the outside world. I hate to think that large groups of PhD candidates are just grist for the academic labor mill, but that conclusion is hard to avoid, considering the amount of extra work the grad students usually put in for their schools and how few of them will end up in tenured positions. On the other hand, if the system is stable, why shouldn't it just keep going the way it is?

(via The Gadfly)