Daily Archives: July 14, 2021

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Conservatives say the payments from Liberal MPs' offices to Data Sciences, founded by a childhood friend of Trudeau, smacks of taxpayer-funded nepotism

Author of the article:

The Canadian Press

Stephanie Taylor

Publishing date:

OTTAWA Conservatives are plotting their next steps on how to probe payments the offices of Liberal MPs made to a company founded by a friend to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while the clock ticks down to a possible election that would bring any parliamentary investigation to a halt.

The partys push to get a parliamentary ethics committee to study why members had contracted Data Sciences Inc., and hear from its founder went nowhere after about five hours of debate on Monday.

Its important for Canadians to know, before we have an election, what their taxpayer money has been going to, Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett said Tuesday.

The Globe and Mail reported last month that MPs expenditure reports showed most of the Liberal caucus had paid money through their office budgets to the company founded by Tom Pitfield. He is a close childhood friend of Trudeaus and also served as chief digital strategist for the Liberals in the 2015 and 2019 election campaigns.

Conservatives say the payments from Liberal MPs offices to Data Sciences smacks of nepotism funded by taxpayers. They also point out the Liberal Party of Canada has a relationship with the company, which had been hired to provide digital services and support for its voter database.

Trudeau has said his members use Data Sciences for constituency casework and there is a complete separation between political and parliamentary work.

We have always ensured that all rules are followed, he told the House of Commons June 23.

Messages sent to the Montreal-based office of Data Sciences did not get an immediate reply.

A spokesperson for the Liberal Party of Canada confirms it continues to work with the company on a wide variety of innovative digital engagement as it has during the past two election campaigns.

The Liberal Party of Canadas use of (voter database) Liberalist is not associated with the parliamentary work of Liberal MPs, and information from parliamentary offices isnt shared with the party, Braeden Caley said in an email Tuesday.

During Mondays debate, Liberal MP Brenda Shanahan, who is vice-chair of the committee, brushed off the Conservatives concerns as a witch hunt and a fake scandal.

She told the committee her office relies on the company for technical support and because its a Canadian firm, it can offer services in both French and English.

Barrett said Tuesday that the Conservatives are speaking with other opposition parties about other ways to push the issue forward.

They were supportive of getting some answers on this, he said.

He stopped short of saying Liberal MPs should no longer pay Pitfields company and believes the first priority is to get more details on the contract.

The House of Commons is on its summer break and is set to resume sitting September, but it is widely believed that Canadians will head to the polls before then.

The Conservative party used the Liberals ties to Data Sciences in a recent email seeking donations ahead of a possible federal vote, saying its leader Erin OToole will clean up the mess in Ottawa and is the only ethical choice for prime minister.

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Conservatives seek help from opposition parties after Liberals block ethics probe over company - National Post

It was five days before the Chesham and Amersham by-election when the Liberal Democrats decided to order some big blue bricks and a plastic orange mallet. They had spent the campaign in this Buckinghamshire constituency being surprised, again and again, by the palpable frustration of Conservative voters, who were wavering in their support for a party that many of them had supported for their entire adult lives. When theyknockedon the same doors in the last week of the campaign, they found that many of those Conservative voters were switching to the Liberal Democrats. Theywere tentatively confident they could win in this previously safe Conservative seat.

When the Liberal Democrats did win in Chesham and Amersham five days later, overturning a Conservative majority of more than 16,000, their leader, Ed Davey, duly celebrated by knocking down a blue wall of bricks with the orange mallet, in a clip that aired across TV news bulletins all day and was widely shared on social media.

[Hear more on the New Statesman podcast]

[See also:Nicola Sturgeon is nurturing a new generation of SNP talent to win independence]

It was incredibly cringe. We all knew that, says one senior Liberal Democrat. We all thought, this is awful, but its also brilliant. And it worked, right? Overnight, the blue wall was cemented in the political lexicon to name and amplify an idea that had barely been acknowledged before: that the Conservatives are vulnerable in a lot of their traditional, southern seats, and vulnerable in particular to the Liberal Democrats, who are second to them in 79 of those constituencies.

Chesham and Amersham wasa microcosm, Liberal Democrats believe, of the general election to come; the weaknesses of the Conservative campaign there revealeda wider Conservative complacency about its vote in the south. Liberal Democrats on the ground spoke of voters surprise at having politicians knock on their door at all, having gone years with no contact from a Conservative party that thought it could rely on their votes. One senior Liberal Democrat saidthat the Conservatives didnt have good data on their voters, and on polling day itself [Conservative campaigners] were knocking up our voters for us, not having realised their traditional voters had switched. When Theresa May arrived to join the Conservative campaign ahead of polling day, she was reportedly appalled.

[See also:The Brexiteers never took the Irish border seriously and it shows]

The Conservatives are, famously, pursuing a Red Wall strategy, having courted and now hoping to retain voters in Labours traditional heartlands. This has been in the expectation that their own traditional voters will stick with them and in 2019, they did.But the current Conservative government has little to offer these traditional Tories and much to repel them such as planning reforms, which were a major factor in the Chesham and Amersham contest. Theyre leaving their flank open and were coming in and having a big good go, Davey told me during the campaign in Amersham. Thats before you look at the underlying demographic shifts in these seats, the gradual post-Brexit realignment of British politics, and the Boris Johnson toxicity factor, which senior Liberal Democrats identify as one of the biggest current Conservative vulnerabilities among its traditional voters a factor they think was masked at the last election because of the similar unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn.

There's no doubt that dislike of Johnson in the seat wasn't just an overnight thing," says a senior Liberal Democrat. "We were also getting the sense that they didn't like him before. But they voted Tory before because of Corbyn.

"He was toxic.Maybe former Labour people like him. Maybe former Brexit people do. But a lot of traditional Tories don't like him, they add. Those traditional voters are less keen on Johnsons entire approach to politics: the conduct of Brexit, the proroguing of parliament, or what they see as a wider culture of impunity in his top team, exemplified by the Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock scandals. It is a private worry of plenty of Conservative MPs too.

The question for the Liberal Democrats is, having identified the Conservatives weaknesses, whether they are likely to fix them by the time of a general election. Its too soon to tell, one of the partys MPs says, admitting that the party is dependent on the resources that the Conservatives decide to pile into its southern seats and how much it reorients towards its southern voters. That also depends on the Labour party. A strong pushback from Labour in the Red Wall would force the Conservatives to focus their energies there and not on the Blue Wall, helping the Liberal Democrats. But despite benefitting from Keir Starmers replacement of Corbyn as Labour leader, some Liberal Democrats are still worried that Labour is not a particularly strong opposition at the moment. One of the partys most senior figures is more confident, however: The Tories are going to have to fight on two fronts. That's their problem.

The Liberal Democrats have been bruised by recent elections and find themselves on a low ebb in Westminster, with only 12 MPs. But from that low base they find themselves unexpectedly well-placed to rebuild, and the strategy for doing so is unexpectedly self-evident. While the party has, historically, argued over its strategic position relative to the two main parties (a choice between equidistance or explicitly stating a preference for Labour), the current Conservative leader makes the choice simple: Johnson is seen as politically anathema to the Liberal Democrats, and, luckily for them, he is similarly repellent to their target voters. Davey has explicitly ruled out a coalition with Johnsons Conservatives.

The electoral arithmetic makes it even simpler. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have distinct areas of strength on the current electoral map, and will be facing Conservatives, and rarely each other, at the next general election. It wont be so simpleif there is a new Conservative leader or if the Liberal Democrats find themselves in pole position to target more Labour seats for the election after next.But that is not a Liberal Democrat concern for now, and nor is the worry among some activists that the strategy is too focused on middle-classsoutherners, with the party's MPs pointing to northern targets likeCheadle and Hazel Grove, and other areas of interest like Sheffield, Harrogate, York, Hull, as well as noting relative stability for the party in Scotland.

We have to start somewhere, is how one Liberal Democrat MP puts it. Another senior Liberal Democrat notes that traditional Tories vote are turned off by Johnson everywhere, not just in the south. There is, however, some private acknowledgement that the party needs to do better at articulating its own message, focusing on the crisis in care and the climate emergency.

But the Liberal Democrats are, overall, buoyed by their recent win in Chesham and Amersham and confident that the only way is up at the next election. Under Davey, the party has reversed the cuts to its campaigning team that took place in 2011, and reallocated resources to its ground game, going back to its campaigning roots as one senior Liberal Democrat puts it. It is by rebuilding from the ground up, with a rootedness in community activism and local government, as well as capitalising on current electoral dynamics, that the Liberal Democrats believe they can make a comeback. Chesham and Amersham was just the start, they believe.Davey still has the orange mallet in pride of place in his office.

[See also:How much austerity are the Conservatives prepared to impose?]

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What the Liberal Democrats are planning in the Blue Wall - New Statesman

Atlas Network CEO Brad Lips contends that the world now confronts a liberal democratic crisis

Atlas Network CEO Brad Lips' new book 'Liberalism and the Free Society in 2021' contends that, in the wake of an extraordinary health crisis, the world now confronts an extraordinary freedom crisis.

Arlington, Va., July 14, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In July 2021, Atlas Network will celebrate its fortieth anniversary with the release of CEO Brad Lips Liberalism and the Free Society in 2021. The new book contends that, in the wake of an extraordinary health crisis, the world now confronts an extraordinary freedom crisis.

Lips explains, My big hypothesis is that a great deal of history will unfold in the 2020s, and the groups that make up the freedom movement are undervalued assets for revitalizing liberal democracy and ensuring a brighter future. The book takes a sober look at how the values of free societies are now being tested by lockdowns, cronyism, cancel culture, and more; and it finds hope in the capacities of a growing community of civil society organizations that aim for social change and policy reform in the direction of freedom.

For four decades, Atlas Network has played a leading role in growing a freedom movement of principled, non-partisan organizations. The independent partners of Atlas Network counter the arguments of left-wing socialists and right-wing populists, working instead to create a consensus around classical liberal ideas of individual liberty and limited government.

Liberalism and the Free Society in 2021 features findings from a new empirical study, the Global Index of Economic Mentality, which measures the extent to which the populations of different countries value private initiative, free competition, and personal responsibility over greater government intervention in the economy. The book also includes fascinating transcripts of wide-ranging interviews Lips held with thought-leaders in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. It is further enhanced by a photojournalism chapter, highlighting the concrete results in peoples lives that derive from policy reforms in the direction of economic freedom.

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In the final chapter, Lips presents A Path Forward, explaining how a broader consensus can be built around classical liberal principles by emphasizing inclusivity and equal justice.

Liberalism and the Free Society in 2021 is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon (print and e-book), and Target.

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New book Liberalism and the Free Society in 2021 examines the state of freedom worldwide - Yahoo Finance

In December 2020, after consulting faculty leaders,we welcomed Larry Smyrski as the Interim Dean of the School of Liberal Arts. Larry has been a great leader for the School, in the same spirit in which he has served for 28 years at HFC. You can read about Larrys distinguished background at the link above.

We are pleased to announce that Larry has agreed to continue as our Liberal Arts Dean through the end of 2021, and longer if needed.

Larry recently outlined his thoughts about our College, the School of Liberal Arts (SoLA), and his many roles. With his permission, we are sharing his thoughts with you.

I continue to learn about SoLA, its needs, and its potential. I am excited by ideas that faculty share to provide better education for students, to strengthen existing opportunities, and develop new ones. I am encouraged by peoples actions to move ideas from just ideas into practice, and by the support they receive from across the institution. I am impressed with the work to develop and strengthen relationships with other institutions, like the University of Michigan, that results in summer fellowships and research opportunities for students.

SoLA has programs that represent the College to the community, and the pandemic has been especially challenging for them. But I look at what Kevin Dewey, for example, was able to do to continue to provide music in virtual ways that helped lift peoples spirits, and I see the continuing potential we at the College have to make the world a little bit better.

Whether teaching or serving in an administrative role, a challenge is to make decisions (grading, projects to support or not) that can make people unhappy. As a teacher, I have to help students understand, think carefully, and communicate, and then critique them (and myself) through the grading process to improve. Students can find that painful. As interim dean, the decisions tend to impact more people, students and faculty and staff, and often (usually?) need to be made with imperfect information or options. The changing landscape of the pandemic and the resulting modifications to fall schedules exemplify this. Not every decision is made perfectly. I appreciate the support and constructive criticism people are willing to provide me.

As you can see, Larry is exactly the person we need leading our School of Liberal Arts, and serving our students and faculty at this time. It is a pleasure to work with Larry. We are grateful for his willingness to continue serving as Dean, especially because we know how much he misses the classroom his first love at the College. We hope all of you will have the opportunity to work with Larry, and to support him in this critical leadership role.

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Larry Smyrski will continue as Liberal Arts Dean at HFC - Dearborn Press and Guide

BEIJING, July 12, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- China Liberal Education Holdings Limited (Nasdaq: CLEU) ("China Liberal", the "Company", or "we"), an educational services provider in China, providing, among other services, smart campus solutions, today announced that the Company held an online-merge-offline ("OMO") teaching seminar with Beijing Foreign Studies University ("BFSU") to explore new models of teaching environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the development of OMO teaching, making it a mainstream trend since OMO teaching model leverages the advantages of the Internet and provides a full-scene, personalized teaching and learning experience to students, which can further optimize the teaching results.

During the seminar, the Company displayed its "OMO System" which was recently introduced to BFSU. The system is developed based on the Company's proprietary all-in-one AI-Space machine and specifically designed to meet the needs of BFSU.

AI-Space can be applied to various scenarios including command center, lecture hall, conference room, multi-functional exhibition hall, smart classroom, vehicle emergency, portable command, telemedicine, science and technology court, and smart home. The Company began to develop AI-Space in September 2019, following a thorough market research and demand analysis. AI-Space adopts the design concept of all-in-one, and integrates audio processor, seamless mixed video matrix unit, programmable central control unit, gigabit switch unit, cross-platform runtime, recording and broadcasting codec, video conference terminal and multi-party interactive MCU. It adopts a hot-swappable design, which is easy to operate, has powerful application functions and can be applied to a wide range of applicable scenarios, offering users integrated solutions.

Ms. Ngai Ngai Lam, Chairwoman and CEO of China Liberal, commented, "With the development of information technology such as big data and artificial intelligence, an intelligent education environment has become a new trend. We are very honored to see that our products are used by Beijing Foreign Studies University and we hope that they bring an excellent smart classroom experience to the students. In the future, we expect to continue expanding cooperation with universities, empower education with technology, realize the in-depth integration of information technology and education, and explore new teaching environment models."

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About China Liberal Education Holdings Limited

China Liberal, headquartered in Beijing, is an educational services provider in China. It provides a wide range of services, including those under Sino-foreign jointly managed academic programs; overseas study consulting services; technological consulting services for Chinese universities to improve their campus information and data management system and to optimize their teaching, operating and management environment, creating a "smart campus"; and tailored job readiness training to graduating students. For more information, visit the company's website at ir.chinaliberal.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This document contains forward-looking statements. In addition, from time to time, we or our representatives may make forward-looking statements orally or in writing. We base these forward-looking statements on our expectations and projections about future events, which we derive from the information currently available to us. Such forward-looking statements relate to future events or our future performance, including: our financial performance and projections; our growth in revenue and earnings; and our business prospects and opportunities. You can identify forward-looking statements by those that are not historical in nature, particularly those that use terminology such as "may," "should," "expects," "anticipates," "contemplates," "estimates," "believes," "plans," "projected," "predicts," "potential," or "hopes" or the negative of these or similar terms. In evaluating these forward-looking statements, you should consider various factors, including: our ability to change the direction of the Company; our ability to keep pace with new technology and changing market needs; and the competitive environment of our business. These and other factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statement. Forward-looking statements are only predictions. The forward-looking events discussed in this press release and other statements made from time to time by us or our representatives, may not occur, and actual events and results may differ materially and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions about us. We are not obligated to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of uncertainties and assumptions, the forward-looking events discussed in this press release and other statements made from time to time by us or our representatives might not occur.

Investor Relations Contact

China Liberal Education Holdings LimitedEmail:ir@chinaliberal.com

Ascent Investor Relations LLCMs. Tina XiaoEmail:tina.xiao@ascent-ir.com Tel: +1 917 609 0333

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View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/china-liberal-holds-omo-teaching-seminar-with-beijing-foreign-studies-university-to-explore-new-teaching-environment-models-301331323.html

SOURCE China Liberal Education Holdings Limited

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China Liberal Holds OMO Teaching Seminar with Beijing Foreign Studies University to Explore New Teaching Environment Models - Yahoo Finance

Liberals vs. conservatives

Conservatives cant give up on colleges | July 1

Columnist Michael Andrews is correct to observe that throughout America, college faculty are politically far more liberal than conservative and that students routinely become more liberal while in college. He is incorrect, however, to attribute this to a a left-wing political infiltration by faculty who then indoctrinate students. Instead, it is a product of differing thought processes for liberal versus conservative decision-making in general. It is not at all limited to the political arena. In fact, differing political viewpoints are not a cause; they are a result of broader philosophical differences. Without regard to political affiliation, a conservative, by definition, wants to keep things as they are. A conservative in the apolitical sense typically bases his or her preexisting doctrine of what is right on religious dogma or cultural tradition.

On the other hand, a person thinking liberally in the apolitical sense does not begin with a preconceived notion of what is right. Instead, a reverence for the scientific method of discovery, truth and an open mind are the cornerstones of liberal thought without regard to political affiliation. Liberal thinkers do not ask, What is right? Instead, they ask, What is? The answer does not need to fit into a preexisting value system. It is what it is.

Given that a mission of a university is to discover and promulgate truth and knowledge, it is not surprising that liberal thinkers are more common than conservative thinkers. It isnt that universities recruit liberals and indoctrinate students. It is the pursuit of truth and a welcome acceptance of change that attracts and develops them. Faculty are disproportionately liberal because they seek truth and discovery and they are not averse to change. It just so happens that also makes them, on average, more liberal than conservative in politics, also.

Alan Balfour, Temple Terrace

Elsa blows past | July 7

That was one nasty hurricane we had, must have blown 20 mph. If not for the constant chirping of my phone going off alerting me how bad it was going to be, I would have missed it. Next time I will be better prepared and have my phone turned off.

John Spengler, Spring Hill

Academy of the Holy Names is too woke, not Catholic enough, lawsuit says | July 6

Thank you for publishing the story of Barbara and Anthony Scarpo suing the Academy of the Holy Names for the return of their past financial donation of $1.35 million by accusing the school of being too woke. That is exactly why its so important to support your local newspaper. Its extremely important to know who is trying to control whom in our local community. Years ago Nelson Rockefeller asked my father, who was active in Republican politics, to support him in his first run for governor of New York. My dad declined, not because of policy positions but simply because he was leery of supporting anyone with so much money. I am today amazed how prescient was my dad in realizing the power of money to crush integrity, whether it be in the secular or the religious sphere. This whole incident is the mirror image of Gov. Ron DeSantis trying to withhold money from state universities if they dont teach what is approved by local politicians! Lets hope the leaders of our state university system have as much gumption as those at the helm of the Academy of the Holy Names.

Jeanne Fischer Zylstra, Temple Terrace

Bidens fantasies about a new new deal are a mirage | July 2

I am one of the moderate and conservative voters that columnist Jonah Goldberg references (according to The Pew Research Center study) who are responsible for Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 election. As a lifelong Republican, I had previously only voted for one Democratic presidential candidate John Kennedy when I was 18 years old. I am not and never was a Trump fan, although I agreed with many of his accomplishments as president, but I could not support the man for the person he is. I believed Joe Biden was sincere when he said he wanted to bring the country together and cross the aisle to do so, if needed. His was the message that this country needed and still wants. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when he rapidly changed courses and shifted closer to the progressive left wing of his party and its agenda. Both parties have left and right extremists and unfortunately their voices are the loudest. They both need to remember that, in studying the results of the 2020 presidential election, the quiet middle-of-the-roaders make the difference. We will be voting in 2022 and 2024.

Liz Gauntt, Tampa

Trump Organization, CFO face fraud charges | July 2

It should come as no surprise that the indictment of the Trump Organization and its CFO did not charge Donald Trump personally. His record of avoiding culpability is well documented. Early in Trumps business career, he was sued by the Justice Department for discriminatory rental practices when African Americans were systematically excluded for consideration as prospective tenants. The case was settled, and no admission of guilt by Trump was required. As president, Trumps abuse of power led to little more than two benign impeachments and a bruised ego. For those who believe this is some sort of lucky streak, you have not been paying attention. Trumps schemes are his craft. They include his relentless campaign to subvert the Constitution, which left unchecked poses more of an existential threat to the republic than our geopolitical adversaries.

Jim Paladino, Tampa

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How liberals and conservatives think | Letters - Tampa Bay Times

Former history teacher and Fox News contributor Leo Terrell fired back Tuesday at liberal actor John Leguizamo's profanity-laced rant against critical race theory opponents issuing a challenge to the Hollywood celebrity on "Fox & Friends"to debate him on the topic.

NIKKI HALEY CALLS FOR EVERY GOVERNOR IN AMERICA TO BAN FUNDING FOR CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN SCHOOLS

LEO TERRELL: I think he's absolutely wrong. Why should we listen to an actor? Is he qualified? Is he a former professor? Is he a lawyer? Why should 340 million Americans, parents, teachers, students listen to him? He's not qualified to give his opinion on critical race theory. He's not qualified to talk about whether or not it's taught. And he's more than not qualified to claim that it's just a legal theory. It's a base of conclusions without supporting facts. His acting platform does not qualify him to tell parents and teachers and students that critical race theory does not exist.

...

I'll tell you exactly what my problem is, not only as a former school teacher, but as a lawyer, a civil rights lawyer, a person who deals with the issue of racism. Critical race theory is not a program, a discipline, a principle grounded in fact. It only tells you a conclusion. It tells you that white people are privileged, black people oppressed. It doesn't tell you the why, the how and everything else. It takes a part of history when we first became a nation and then apply it to everyday life. It ignores the progress in this country.

So there's no facts. And I challenge John, the "Ice Age" cartoon character, to debate me and tell me what facts he has.

WATCH THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW BELOW:

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Leo Terrell rips liberal actor's critical race theory rant: 'He's not qualified to give his opinion' - Fox News

In the past, Ive been deeply drawn to a common claim made on behalf of liberal education: that it offers a superior preparation for the uncertainty and contingency of the postgraduate futures facing graduates. Countless institutional websites and college administrators reassure prospective students and their parents that liberal-arts graduates are better prepared for the uncertain world of tomorrow. Classic arguments favoring open-ended exploration over instrumental teaching, such as Abraham Flexners 1939 essay The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (recently republished with a new introduction), remain sentimentally popular in academe. Im still emotionally attached to these narratives, but they have so many problems that Ive come to question their value or at least their accuracy.

The first problem is that the idea is a rephrasing, in contemporaneously acceptable language, of a very old notion of the liberal arts. The medieval European understanding of liberal arts, based partially on a reinterpretation of classical ideas, suggested that elites needed an open-ended education based on the trivium and quadrivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) because, as rulers, they would face complex and unexpected problems, whereas others only needed an introduction to practical arts relevant to specific repeated labor.

Reorienting this proposition around uncertain futures doesnt get away from the uncomfortable hierarchical implications still embedded in it. The hidden proposition seems to be that its fine for petrochemical engineers to just learn petrochemical engineering, but that future politicians, leaders, policy makers, artists and so on need to learn in a more flexible and less prescriptive way. But if the underlying point about uncertain futures is true, then we should draw the opposite conclusion: The people who may need liberal arts the most are the petrochemical engineers, or anyone else who works in a field that could shift dramatically based on deep structural changes in the economy or in the ongoing material conditions of human life.

Once you see it that way, you recognize that either everyone needs liberal arts or no one does. If liberal arts and preparation for uncertainty are synonymous, it cant possibly make sense to limit that training to future leaders or a small elite. If everyone needs it but what we mean by liberal education is only accessible or comprehensible to students with special or privileged preparation, then were lying or confused about our proposed linkage to uncertainty.

Which is the next problem. The linkage of uncertainty to the liberal arts also depends on a caricature of vocational or pre-professional pedagogy by faculty and other higher-education professionals who have limited experience with those practices. Liberal-arts faculty can be surprisingly incurious about how teaching actually happens in educational settings different from their own in programs allegedly too instrumental, too fixed, too rigidly tied to a single profession or job. In some cases, faculty who identify as doing liberal arts are transposing an objection they have to the professional practices, outlooks, or ideologies of the end products of some courses of study with the structure and nature of the pedagogy in those courses of study.

I may have an issue with the dispositional outlook of many professionals holding an M.B.A., but I have not carefully studied whether what I take issue with is rooted in what and how they learned on the way to that degree. Only rarely do we get a specific enough look inside some aspect of professional or vocational training to see a connection between a professions questionable practices and the questionable things taught to those professionals say, for example, the connections between police training on the use of force and the actuality of the use of force by contemporary police. Pedagogy is hard to witness and analyze wherever it happens, whether were interested in a class on electrical wiring or English literature.

This point leads to my deepest concern about uncertainty and liberal education: Our assumptions about how to teach to uncertainty are mostly unexplored, and the empirical evidence of whether we do so successfully is debatable. To the degree that we are successful, we dont really know why. Arguably, the capacity to navigate uncertainty has less to do with student learning than with the social capital and economic resources available to our graduates. This is where preparation for uncertainty lives alongside other reassuring concepts like resilience, emotional intelligence, or grit. These concepts may not be measuring teachable skills or habits of mind so much as access to money and social networks. Dealing with rapidly changing conditions is much easier if your parents can help with the rent or if you know someone who can get you in the door in a new line of work after your current gig closes down.

Still, let us suppose that liberal education of the kind offered at highly selective private colleges and research universities offers a good example of curricular structures or pedagogies that prepare graduates to anticipate and endure uncertainty. What exactly are those structures and practices, then?

Many of us would answer critical thinking (which may be an equally leaky terminological boat). Wed likely assert that critical thinking suffuses our institutions in such a way that their graduates learn to view the world around them skeptically and provisionally, and that this in turn prepares them to adapt rapidly to changing economic and social conditions (and to help lead or direct processes of change for others). The major problem with this answer is that any curricular structure, any pedagogy, can likely and perhaps justifiably claim to be producing critical thinking and hence to be preparation for uncertainty. Its so truistic and underspecified that its hard to be satisfied with it as an answer. Possibly, we could decompose critical thinking to far more specific epistemological and methodological commitments in various academic disciplines: the scientific method, thought experiments, close reading, etc., and get a better account of how to teach skepticism, provisional truth-making, and so on. Possibly.

But are the graduates of any kind of higher education dispositionally or technically more able to cope with uncertainty? The Covid-19 pandemic combined with the instability of American political life has been an interesting test case for this question. Id say the evidence of the past year and a half is inconclusive. Educated professionals may have weathered the economic disruptions of the pandemic fairly well, but that is mostly a material byproduct of the work they do and the technologies they are accustomed to using, pandemic or otherwise. These professionals adapted to masking and social-distancing quickly, but that may have been as much an act of sociopolitical affiliation as an ability to adjust habits. How well they coped in terms of mental health is still an open question.

Who is adapting best to uncertainty in the political sphere? Many educated professionals, especially those who identify as liberals or progressives, have self-reported in the last year that they feel completely incapable of adapting to the politics of this dangerous moment in American history. As they should.

I believe in what Helga Nowotny calls the cunning of uncertainty and accept her argument that everyone rich and poor, college educated in a liberal-arts curriculum, or high-school educated in a trade can and should live with and even embrace that cunning. By cunning, Nowotny means that uncertainty is an irreducible part of human life and the physical universe, and that we should follow where it leads us. Just so. I also believe in what the economist John Kay has called obliquity: that in a very concrete and empirical sense, many of our most cherished goals and values are achievable only if we do not try to achieve them directly. Tell me you want to be happy in life, and I will, following Kay, tell you that you should not try to be happy. The road to happiness involves long detours through unknown and unexpected pathways.

At the same time, we can and should be reducing uncertainty where it has been engineered on purpose, where it is used to produce insecurity and precarity for the benefit of a few. It is one thing to try to prepare students for the broad reality of uncertainty as Nowotny describes it, or to orient them to the oblique routings between an educational present and lifelong aspirations. It is entirely another to deploy the rhetoric of uncertainty to naturalize the unstable labor markets of the early 21st century.

The uncertainty of those markets is a product of the credulous and wholly ideological celebration of creative destruction and disruptive innovation by the oligarchs of our present American moment and their courtiers. There is nothing inevitable or natural about the proposition that industries, workplaces, and communities should expect to be discarded at any moment by private equity firms, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, or crony capitalists. The proposition that training for uncertainty means accepting the need to change everything about your skills, values, aspirations, and material situation at a moments notice because a few people with extraordinary wealth and power have almost incidentally destroyed your status quo is not the cunning of uncertainty but the craft of exploitation and domination.

For the same reason, we should not have to adapt to a rising authoritarianism or a capricious pack of liars doing whatever it takes to hold to power. We cannot and should not build a political system that is so stable that it banishes contingency and forbids contention but neither should we accept that our political tomorrows must be arbitrary and that the well-educated should be prepared to adapt to life under any form of sovereignty, however awful or destructive.

Maybe a liberal education is, or could be, about embracing uncertainty where it is generative, necessary, and useful. But in the rush to reassure current applicants and anxious families that our students will be prepared to dance nimbly into an uncertain future, we are not only dangerously incurious about whether thats actually true we are offering a form of unwarranted benediction to the engineered precarity of our present moment. Inhabiting the foundational uncertainty of the universe is one of the deepest challenges of human life. If we have insight into that, good. If we dont, lets work to develop that insight. But we mustnt confuse this work with the drive to normalize the insecurity of our present moment. Our educational job there is different: We must teach our students to reject that project entirely.

A version of this piece originally appeared in the authors newsletter, Eight by Seven.

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An Unconvincing Argument for the Liberal Arts - The Chronicle of Higher Education