In the following lecture, Professor Richard Bulliet discusses transformations in Europe during the period of 1500 – 1750:
Archive for July, 2018|Monthly archive page
Richard Bulliet on Transformations in Europe, 1500-1750
In Academia, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Teaching, Western Civilization on July 18, 2018 at 6:45 amReview of Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education”
In Academia, Economics, Humanities, Scholarship on July 11, 2018 at 6:45 am
This review originally appeared here in Cato Journal.
Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University who has spent over 40 years in school. “The system has been good to me,” he confesses. “Very good. I have a dream job for life.”
He’s also a shameless traitor to his profession and guild, a critic of the system that’s afforded him a life of leisure and affluence. That’s a good thing. We need more honest critiques of the higher-education boondoggle from privileged insiders. As an economist, moreover, he argues from data and facts, not feelings or emotions. He’ll undermine his own best interests if statistics lead him inexorably to positions at odds with his personal welfare.
The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money hits bookshelves amid reductions in government spending on universities due to budget shortfalls in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The chorus of complaints runs something like this: “Legislators don’t realize what goes on in the university; they don’t understand what it takes to teach and research; they don’t know what I do to earn my pay; they don’t appreciate how important education is to our state; they can’t competently assess my everyday work.”
But Caplan understands these things, having spent his entire career as a student or a professor at major research institutions. The argument against educational excess is more credible coming from an academic, like him, who’s complicit in its harms.
Caplan’s chosen title (with subtitle) says it all: His target isn’t the acquisition of knowledge (it’s good for people to learn), but the wasteful, exorbitant system that in many cases impedes rather than facilitates the acquisition of knowledge. Five provocative words on the book’s opening page—“there’s way too much education”—are predicated on the proposition that learning and education are distinct, that garnering credentials does not correlate with increased erudition or competence.
It’s no secret that the costs of higher education have been rising steadily for decades. Universities have long been reallocating resources away from basic classroom instruction and towards amenities, administrative payrolls, athletic programs, student services, and construction projects. The ready availability of federal student loan money has enabled colleges to hike tuition and fees, forcing students to shoulder heavy, often unmanageable debt burdens. As a result, the artificially inflated price of a college degree is greater than the actual costs associated with teaching and research.
Caplan believes enough is enough. “The heralded social dividends of education,” he insists, “are largely illusory: rising education’s main fruit is not broad-based prosperity, but credential inflation.” He boldly submits that “the average college student shouldn’t go to college.”
Objections to these strong claims are predictable: don’t college graduates earn more money than those without a college degree? The answer, of course, is yes. But that’s not the full story.
Caplan explains that the primary value of a college degree is in its “signaling” power. That diploma on your wall doesn’t tell employers how much you know or what skills you have attained. Rather, it signals to them your tenacious character and work ethic. Finishing college proves you have the wherewithal and discipline to claw your way to the top. The problem, of course, is that an abundance of earned bachelor’s degrees diminishes their value while graduate degrees become the substitute marker of distinction. If you aren’t learning practical skills as you chase multiple degrees, you and the institutions funding your education (likely the government) are just dumping money to jumpstart or advance your career, in which case all this spending seems, well, inefficient and unnecessary.
Courses in college aren’t intrinsically valuable. You can spend months on YouTube watching recorded faculty instruction at Yale and Stanford, learning vast amounts of information, but no one will hire you for that effort. After all, you’ve gained no credential. On the other hand, you could sit through college classes that don’t interest you, excelling on exams but forgetting the tested material as soon as the class ends. You will be no wiser from this experience. Employers know that and don’t care. They don’t hire students for wisdom or knowledge. They hire students with a record of demonstrated success.
Caplan emphasizes the importance of “conformity” to the signaling model. Employers and teachers share a key preference: they generally favor cooperative and dutiful personalities over lazier and more disagreeable alternatives. The ability to fit in, to adapt to different social settings, tends to impress business leaders. College grades reveal temperaments, dispositions, traits, and priorities—they demonstrate whether a student conforms to expectations. Formal education isn’t the only way to demonstrate conformity, but, in Caplan’s words, it “signals a package of socially desirable strengths.” He adds, “If you want the labor market to recognize your strengths, and most of the people who share your strengths hold a credential, you’d better earn one too.”
Caplan sensibly advocates vocational training as an institutional corrective, but has little workable advice for people pursuing certain vocations. Someone who wants to be a teacher must earn the necessary credential; someone who wants to be a lawyer must attend law school. Whether these credentials are needed at all—that is, whether they are suitable prerequisites that adequately prepare students for the everyday practice of their desired vocation—is a significant question warranting extensive debate, but regrettably it falls outside the scope of Caplan’s project. His substantial case against education might leave you wondering, at any rate, why he thinks universities can effectively provide vocational training at all. If they’re so bad at what they do, why would they shine at this new task?
There’s also a “presentist’ element to Caplan’s thesis. Universities weren’t designed to prepare students for vocations outside of medicine, law, or the clergy. Until late in the 20th century, you didn’t need college to compete on the job market. Universities have a complex and chaotic history that makes undue emphasis on workforce training seem shortsighted. The number of students attending college to advance innovative research or otherwise contribute academically to the sum of knowledge remains low. The central purpose of the university isn’t served by the current form of higher education in which a premium is placed on employment outcomes. Caplan isn’t trying to remake higher education or return it to its medieval roots, but by inflaming passions at least he might redirect attention to the central mission of universities: to educate and spread knowledge.
As the holder of a Ph.D. in English, I commend the colorful chapter “Nourishing Mother” to the skeptically inclined humanities professor who stands ready to accuse Caplan of prizing social and economic returns over the immeasurable effects of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, historical, or theological inquiry. The scholar of arts, society, and culture may be surprised to find a useful ally in Caplan, although his discussions of “high culture” and “taste” may irritate English professors, who will quickly recognize how little Caplan understands their discipline.
It’s obvious that higher education in its current manifestation is financially unsustainable. Something has to give. Skeptics should read The Case Against Education with an open mind and an eye toward the future. Caplan is heavy on issue-spotting but short on solutions, but he provokes difficult conversations that are long past due.
Session Twenty-Six: Richard Bulliet on the History of the World
In Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Pedagogy, Teaching on July 4, 2018 at 6:45 amHere, in the twenty-sixth lecture of his course, The History of the World, Richard Bulliet discusses conclusions regarding the History of the World to 1500 CE and presents themes for a forthcoming course regarding the History of the World after 1500 CE:
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 
American Government, An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government, Antonin Scalia, checks-and-balances, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Federalism, James McClellan, Jeff Sessions, Law and Liberty, Liberty Fund, Liberty Order and Justice, Natural Law, republicanism, Rule of Law, separation-of-powers, Sir William Blackstone
A Better Sort of Constitutional Learning: James McClellan’s Liberty, Order, and Justice
In American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Britain, History, Humanities, Law, Philosophy, Scholarship on July 25, 2018 at 6:45 amThis piece originally appeared here in Law & Liberty.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions not long ago characterized the office of sheriff as a “critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.” This plain statement of an incontrovertible fact should not have been controversial. Yet with clockwork predictability, social media activists began excoriating Sessions for his ethnocentrism.
Even those who should have known better—Bernice King (daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.), the NAACP, college-educated personalities in the Twittersphere—piled on the criticism, accusing Sessions of racism and suggesting the term “Anglo-American” was a dog whistle for white nationalists and the alt-Right. It was another sign of how uninformed many in our society have become, and of how name-calling and crude labeling have replaced constructive dialogue and civil conversation in the political sphere.
Fortunately, there’s a good, levelheaded primer for understanding the basic framework of American government that teachers and other leaders should recommend and assign to our ignorant masses: James McClellan’s Liberty, Order, and Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government, which the Liberty Fund published in 2000.
McClellan, who passed away in 2005, was a proud Virginian who taught at several universities, including the University of Virginia, and was, among other things, the James Bryce Visiting Fellow in American Studies at the Institute of United States Studies (University of London) and president of the Center for Judicial Studies at Claremont McKenna College in California. He was also for a time a senior resident scholar at Liberty Fund.
Liberty, Order, and Justice is McClellan’s best known work. It maps the history and philosophy that shaped the U.S. Constitution and its amendments and is separated into seven parts, each appended with primary sources that are reproduced in full or in part: Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the English Bill of Rights, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, the Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan, the Northwest Ordinance, and many others.
As a straightforward overview of the seminal concepts that characterize American government—separation of powers, republicanism, federalism, checks and balances, rule of law—this volume could serve, and probably has served, as the principal textbook for a high school or college course. The “Suggested Reading” lists at the end of each of its sections provide more than enough supplemental material to round out a semester of comprehensive study.
A work of such breadth and scope is impossible to summarize. McClellan begins with British history, in particular the emergence of Parliament, the evolution of the common law, and the development of legal doctrines and principles that responded to changing circumstances. He discusses the differences between the French and American Revolutions, and their respective effects upon the imaginations of Americans who were alive at the time. He devotes an entire section to the Philadelphia Convention, which he says, perhaps overstating, was “often more like a gathering of polite friends than an assemblage of angry political zealots.”
McClellan’s chief concern is federalism, a principle that appears throughout. He highlights disagreements between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, warning that “we should not presume that the Anti-Federalists were wrong.” He adds: “The inquiring student, having examined the debates thoroughly and objectively, may well conclude that the Anti-Federalists were right about certain matters.”
Lest his readers get lost in the historical and conceptual details, McClellan prefaces each section with the heading “Points to Remember,” followed by numbered outlines of central facts and themes. This feature enables easy memorization and study—another reason the book is suited for the classroom.
For the most part, McClellan recounts historical events dispassionately, and lays out influential concepts with no personal pique or ideological bent. Only occasionally is he tendentious, and then only subtly so. For instance, his judicial hermeneutics seek out authorial intent, thereby rejecting textualism and signing on to a now passé version of originalism. “The basic interpretive task,” he submits, “is to determine the intent of the Constitution, laws, and treatises, and to construe all instruments according to the sense of the terms and the intentions of the parties.”
This statement might have made Justice Antonin Scalia unhappy.
He’s also skeptical of natural law, stating:
This statement would have made Justice Scalia happy.
McClellan calls Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England a “great compendium of learning,” a term of endearment that applies equally to Liberty, Order, and Justice. The two have a similar aim: to synthesize disparate principles into a coherent treatise and to explain the origins and foundations of the current legal and political order. In a different age, when information wasn’t immediately available and students couldn’t google their way to quick answers, this book might well have become as important as the Commentaries.
Its cheerful conclusion, at any rate, seems naïve in our present moment: “What we have offered you in this book is the basic structure of America’s constitutional order. It is up to you to preserve and improve that structure; and you have a lifetime in which to work at it.” Were he alive today, McClellan might not be so optimistic.
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