An Education With Impact | Higher Ed Gamma – Inside Higher Ed

Most quotations about cynicism reek with scorn. Oscar Wilde called a cynic a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. The comedian George Carlin reportedly claimed that if you scratch a cynic, youll find a disappointed idealist.

Synonyms of cynicismdistrustful, disparaging, contemptuous, suspicious, sarcasticare uniformly negative.

In fact, however, cynics are rarely disappointed. If you believe that higher education, like most other institutions, is motivated by narrow self-interest and that its claims to higher values are often shams, the facts, more often than not, will prove you right.

Take one recent higher ed conversion experience: the abrupt turn against standardized admission tests. There are certainly reasonable arguments against such tests: that the tests replicate income distribution, measure test-taking ability rather than content knowledge and skills mastery, stigmatize less privileged students, and are of limited value in predicting college success.

But theres also no doubt that the eliminating the tests increases an institutions applicant pool and therefore makes that school seem more selective. It also reduces transparency in admissions, making the process even more of a black box and giving admissions officers greater leeway in shaping an entering class however they wish.

I certainly lean in favor of the cynics.

Or take another examplethe proposed University of Austin and its claim that we need a new, fiercely independent institution that will resist the illiberal culture of political correctness and intellectual uniformity that supposedly prevails at most colleges.

Perhaps this initiative is better understood as the cynical pursuit of a particular market niche: a small, selective liberal arts institution, located in an attractive, rapidly growing city, that can tap into funding from conservative foundations.

From my perspective, another win for the cynics.

The problem with cynicism is not that its incorrect but that it leads, almost inevitably, to passivity and resignation. Homer Simpson gave vivid expression to this attitude when he told Lisa and Bart, Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try.

The alternative to cynicism is not credence or trust but, rather, taking active steps to address the genuine academic challenges that higher education facescurricular incoherence, narrow overspecialized courses and academic unintelligibility, among others. We need to do much more, especially in the humanities, to introduce students to the life of the mind and the culture of ideas and arguments that lies at the heart of the academy.

Thirty years ago, Gerald Graff called on professors to teach the conflicts: to integrate major debates inside and outside the academy into the curriculum. Graffs point, more true today than when he published Beyond the Culture Wars in 1992, is that as society grows more heterogeneous, the possibilities for achieving consensus diminish. This reality makes it more imperative that students learn how to weigh evidence, think critically, formulate arguments and take part in serious intellectual conversations and debates that will not necessarily result in agreement.

Yet what are the arguments that undergraduates should enter? Even in 1992, some of Graffs suggestions didnt seem especially compelling. Should we teach the great books? King Lear or King Kong? Plato or Puzo?

Still, Graffs insistence that students engage in fundamental intellectual debates strikes me as right on target. More than at any other time in my academic career, big questions are squarely on the table both in the academy and in the popular press, and our challenge is to get students to grapple with conflicting ideas and assumptions.

So what are some of the issues worthy of serious intellectual engagement? Several strike me as obvious.

We live in cynical times. Snark, irreverence and spitefulness pervade public discourse. Grumblers, faultfinders, contrarians, sourpusses and cantankerous, petulant, surly grouches are omnipresent. Scoffers, skeptics and scowlers prevail.

Higher education has been a particular target for cynics, who argue that academic rigor and diversity of opinion are in retreat and that our colleges and universities have become bastions of political posturing and indoctrination.

Humanists, in particular, have a special obligation to resist this kind of cynicism, which has contributed to the view that our disciplines range from the antiquarian to the arcane and the irrelevant, and that we are little more than pompous, pretentious pedants, posturers and poseurs.

Even if we cant defeat the culture of cynicism, we can, we must, make our classes cynicisms antidote. And the way to do that strikes me as self-evident: lets engage our students in tackling the biggest humanistic questions of our time. Isnt the humanities mission to produce graduates who value and take part in the life of the mind?

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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An Education With Impact | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed