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Acton Institute, Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Association for the Study of Free Institutions, Atlas Network, Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Eric Claeys, George Wythe, Grotius, Hayek, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Law School, Legal Education, Lyn Stuart, National Association of Scholars, Robert P George, Sir Edward Coke Fellowship, Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, Thomas Jefferson, William “Bill” Pryor

Making Legal Education Great Again

In America, Civics, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy, liberal arts, Liberalism, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on August 30, 2017 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here and was published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Legal education has become a surprisingly regular topic of news media for several years now. Most of this commentary has focused on enrollment and matriculation problems, bar passage rates, accreditation standards, student debt, and the job market for recent graduates. These are pressing issues that raise vexing questions for law school administrators, and they warrant the attention they’ve received.

Little attention, however, has been paid to curriculum, except as it pertains to those issues. And not just curriculum, but subject matter within the curriculum.

There are certain subjects—let’s call them “the permanent things”—that always have and will interest scholars of the law because of their profound influence on legal norms and institutions: history, philosophy, literature, and theology. Whether they belong in law schools or some other department, whether they prepare students to become practice-ready or not, these topics will remain relevant to subsequent generations of jurists and legal scholars. There will be a place for them somewhere within the world of legal learning and letters.

Law school faculty and research centers have expanded over recent decades to include studies of these humanistic fields. As long as these fields populate law school, there’s a felt need for rigorous liberal education in them.

Ordered liberty in the United States has historically rested on a commitment to religious faith and pluralism, fidelity to the rule of law, and traditional liberties grounded in the conviction that all humans are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. These values characterize the American experiment. Our society is built on them, and its continued vitality depends upon maintaining and promoting our commitment to them.

Yet these values are ridiculed and attacked in universities across the country. When they’re taught, they’re often treated as products of a morally inferior era and thus as unworthy of our continued respect. And because these values aren’t seriously or rigorously taught, students lack working knowledge about them and are therefore unprepared for the kind of civic engagement that young people desire and demand.

A decline in civic education has caused misunderstanding and underappreciation of our foundational norms, laws, and liberties. Religious liberty is mischaracterized as license to harm and on that basis is marginalized. Economic freedom is mischaracterized as oppression and is regulated away. Well-positioned reformers with good but misguided intentions seek to fundamentally transform the American experiment from the ground up. They work to limit foundational freedoms and increase regulatory power.

Without well-educated lawyers and civil servants equipped to resist these reformers, the transformation of America will result in the destruction of the freedoms enabled by our founding generation. We cannot allow this to happen. The Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty at Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, for which I serve as executive director, therefore seeks to educate the legal community in such areas as natural law, natural rights, religious liberty, economic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association and assembly, and other liberties that find expression not just in the American but in the larger Western jurisprudential tradition.

I define “legal community” broadly to include law students, law professors, public policy institutes, political theorists, judges, and businesses in addition to practicing lawyers. Because my center is housed in a law school, it’s well positioned to instruct future lawyers while bringing together faculty from different disciplines who are steeped in liberal education.

Numerous organizations promote these values in the political arena, but few attempt to reconnect foundational values with the law. The Blackstone & Burke Center aims to fill this gap by bringing together scholars and students committed to American constitutional government and the common law foundations of our cherished liberties. Our target audience will include law students, judges, and civics groups.

For law students, we offer the Sir Edward Coke Fellowship. We’ve accepted our inaugural class of fellows, who, beginning this fall, will study formative texts in Western jurisprudence in monthly seminars that supplement their core coursework. Next semester, we’ll read and discuss works by Aristotle, Grotius, Hayek, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Robert P. George. The center will be a key networking opportunity for fellows seeking careers at foundations, think tanks, universities, and public policy organizations.

Fellows will also help to organize a judicial college for state jurists. Thanks to the Acton Institute, Atlas Network, and the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, the Blackstone & Burke Center possesses the grant money needed to host its first judicial college in October. Professor Eric Claeys of Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University will direct this event, the readings for which include selections from not only cases (old and recent) but also Aquinas, Locke, Blackstone, and Thomas Jefferson. The readings for judges are extensive, and the seminar sessions are meant to be intensive to ensure that judges get as much out of the experience as possible.

The center will also provide basic civics education to local communities. For several years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute issued reports on the poor state of civic literacy in the United States. The National Association of Scholars recently issued a detailed report on the inadequacies and politicization of the “New Civics.” The current issue of Academic Questions, moreover, describes the sorry state of civics knowledge in the United States and the tendentious methods and institutions that teach political activism rather than deep learning.

Against these alarming trends, my center organized and hosted a reception featuring a U.S. Library of Congress interactive Magna Carta exhibit, which was displayed in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court for three weeks and now remains in the possession of the Alabama Supreme Court Law Library. The reception included prominent judges, business and university leaders, lawyers, and the general public.

For example, Chief Justice Lyn Stuart of the Alabama Supreme Court and Judge William “Bill” Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals delivered remarks about Magna Carta during the reception, and young people conversed casually with judges about the legal system, federalism, and the challenges and opportunities facing the legal profession in the 21^st century. This fall, the center is cosponsoring an event with the Foundation for Economic Education on the campus of Auburn University to explore the relationship between law and markets, and I hope to see as many high-school students as college students in attendance.

Legal education is strikingly different today than it was when Thomas Jefferson apprenticed under George Wythe, or when Abraham Lincoln read law before receiving from a county circuit court certification of his good moral character, then a prerequisite to practicing law.

Nevertheless, legal education looks much the same as it did in the late nineteenth century, when Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School, instituted a curriculum, pedagogy, and case method that came to characterize “the law school experience.” If there’s been a paradigm shift, it’s been toward more practical aspects of legal education such as clinical programming. Yet many lawyers remain ignorant of the history and philosophical conventions that shaped their profession over centuries.

The Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty is a modest corrective in that it doesn’t seek to remake legal education or demolish longstanding practices and procedures in one fell swoop. Rather, it does what it can with the resources and tools available to strive to renew an America where freedom, opportunity, and civil society flourish. In the long run, I think, these reasonable efforts will have powerful effects and far-reaching benefits, both within the legal academy and beyond.

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Auburn University, Garbage Collection, Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Menger, Mises

The Dirty Business of Government Trash Collection

In Austrian Economics, Economics, Essays, Humane Economy on November 25, 2015 at 8:45 am

This article originally appeared here at Mises Daily.

I moved to Auburn, Alabama, in January 2013. I love Auburn.

It’s been nearly ten years since The Wall Street Journal profiled the Mises Institute and claimed that Auburn was an ideal spot for studying libertarian ideas and the Austrian tradition. I don’t know how much has changed since then, but I arrived in Auburn expecting a free-market sanctuary, a veritable haven where the ideas of Menger and Mises and Hayek were in the air and imbibed by the majority of people who weren’t members of the Auburn faculty, and even by some who were.

Once settled in Auburn, I realized I’d been quixotic and naïve. Even before national media picked up the story about the officer who spoke out against his department’s ticket and arrest quotas, even before the city of Auburn squeezed out Uber with severe licensing regulations, even before Mark Thornton highlighted the Skyscraper Curse in town, there was the matter of my trash bin.

I bought my house from a relocation company, the previous owner having been assigned a new position in another city. He was, this owner, in a hurry to move. Before he left town, he and his family rolled their trash bin to the side of the home, away from the street, where the garbage collector refused to retrieve it. They had stuffed the bin with garbage: food, paper, cardboard boxes, dirty diapers, and other junk. There was so much trash in the bin that the lid wouldn’t fully close. It looked like a yawning mouth. The house was on the market for approximately eight months before I purchased it, and I assume the bin had been sitting there, at the side of the house, the entire time. Naturally it had rained during the last eight months, so, with its half-open lid, the bin was flooded with soupy garbage and untold parasites. And it reeked.

The City enjoys a virtual monopoly on garbage collection; it tacks its fees onto the City’s water and sewage bill. The few private garbage-collection companies in town service mostly restaurants and businesses: entities that simply cannot wait a week for garbage pickup and need a service provider capable of emptying whole dumpsters full of trash. The City does allow residents to opt out of their collection services, but this only masks soft coercion with an illusion of consumer choice.

Government opt-out clauses are malicious precisely because of the impression that they’re harmless if not generous. Contract law is premised on the principles of mutual assent and voluntary agreement. Government opt-out clauses, however, deprive consumers of volition and bargaining power. They distort the natural contracting relationship by investing one party, the government, with power that the other party cannot enjoy. Not contracting for services is not an option, and government is the default service provider that sets the bargaining rules; the deck is stacked against the consumer before negotiating can begin.

The onus, moreover, is on the consumer to undo a contract that he’s been forced into, rather than on the government to provide high-quality services at competitive rates in order to keep the consumer’s business. Opt-out clauses make it difficult for the consumer to end his relationship with the government provider, and they force potential competitors to operate at a position of manifest disadvantage.

My wife and I took turns calling the City to ask about getting a new trash bin. No amount of cleaning and sterilization could rid the current bin of its stench. We couldn’t keep the bin inside our garage because of the oppressive odor. We left voicemails with different people in different departments at the City, begging for a new bin and explaining our situation, but our calls weren’t returned. There was no customer service of the kind a private company would have. After all, there was little danger of losing our business: the City was the service provider for nearly every neighborhood in town because of the difficulty private companies had breaking into a market controlled by government. We were, for now, stuck with the City’s inefficiencies and unresponsiveness. With much persistence my wife was eventually able to speak to an employee of the City. She was informed, however, that we could not get a new trash bin unless ours was broken or stolen. That stunk.

I learned in time about other drawbacks to our government-provided garbage service. During the holidays, collection schedules changed. When my wife and I lived in Atlanta and used a privately owned garbage company, our collection schedules never changed. Our collections were always on time. Our garbage collectors were kind and reliable because, if they weren’t, I could hire new collectors who would materialize in my driveway the next morning with shining smiles on their faces.

It’s simple enough to follow an altered holiday schedule, so that’s what we did in Auburn, only the collectors declined to follow that schedule themselves. After Thanksgiving, when trash tends to pile up, we placed our trash bin out on the street according to schedule. So did our neighbors. Yet nobody picked up our trash. Our entire street tried again the next week, on the appointed day, and once again nobody picked up the trash. A concerned neighbor called the City, and we were able to remedy the now-messy situation, but not without spending time and energy that could have been channeled toward better things.

When I was a child my brother and I were tasked each year with clearing trees, weeds, and shrubs that were growing along the pond in our backyard. We would pile sticks and sawed-up tree trunks and other debris on the curb of our driveway, along with bags of grass clippings, and our garbage collectors, who worked for a private company, would always pick up these items without question or complaint. We were so grateful that sometimes we’d leave them envelopes with extra cash to express our thanks.

In Auburn, however, I was once unable to squeeze an additional garbage bag into our trash bin, which was full, so I rolled the bin to the street and placed the additional bag beside it. I then lumbered inside for my morning coffee, when all of a sudden the garbage collector drove up and parked beside my bin. I watched from the window as he descended from his truck, shook his head, climbed back into his truck, picked up a pad and paper, and began scribbling with his pen. The next thing I knew he was issuing a yellow citation for an alleged infraction. It turned out to be a mere warning, but it indicated, right there in bold letters, that the next time we did something so egregious as putting our trash out for collection without using the bin, some repercussion — I forget what — would visit us.

When I think about the things the garbage collectors would remove from our driveway in Atlanta — an old door, a broken toilet, a malfunctioning lawnmower — I marvel that the City requires you to purchase tags at the Revenue Office if you wish to place things like dryers, water heaters, refrigerators, or microwaves on the street for garbage collection. Yet I remain optimistic, and not only because Joseph Salerno is coming to town to hold the newly endowed John V. Denson II chair in the Department of Economics at Auburn University.

I’m optimistic because I see some positive change. We recently organized a garage sale and came to discover, two days before the big day, that the City required a permit for such events. This time when we called the City to ask about the mandatory permit for garage sales, we received good news: those permits were no longer required as long as we conducted the sale in our own driveway. However minor, that’s progress. Perhaps it’ll spill over into other sectors of our little local community. Until then, War Eagle!

[UPDATE: Two weeks after the Mises Institute published this piece, the City showed up on my driveway, removed the old trash bin and replaced it with a new trash bin. Causation has never been established, but coincidence seems unlikely.]

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Aristotle, Austrian Economics, Ayn Rand, Carl Menger, Edward W. Younkins, Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society, Hayek, Human Action, Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Objectivists, Toward a Synthesis of Aristotelianism and Austrian Economics and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism

Flourishing and Synthesis

In Uncategorized on February 6, 2013 at 8:45 am

The following review first appeared here in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society: Toward a Synthesis of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism

Edward W. Younkins

Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2011

That Edward W. Younkins is well and widely read is apparent in light of the diverse, mutually illuminating subjects he brings together in this short but impressive book: Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and the Austrian economists Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard. These thinkers, and the schools they represent, are participatory, not wholly separate or distinct, in their celebration of capitalism. Each thinker has, to be sure, his or her own colorful methodologies and idiosyncrasies; but the differences among them are often overstated and under-analyzed, or treated with such closed minded certainty that insistences on ideological purity preclude searches for significant commonalities.

The ideas championed by these thinkers are not only reconcilable, Younkins suggests, but complementary and profoundly, sometimes intimately, connected. “By combining and synthesizing elements found in Aristotle’s writings, Austrian Economics, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, and in the writings of neo-Aristotelian classical liberal philosophers of human flourishing,” Younkins explains, “we have the potential to reframe the argument for a free society into a consistent reality-based whole whose integrated sum of knowledge and explanatory power is greater than the sum of its parts” (16). In an era of groupthink and infighting among those who profess individualism and liberty, reason and freethinking, the clarification of intersections between various lines of individualist thought is happy indeed. It’s refreshing to read a book that aims to build rather than demolish, coordinate rather than exclude. Differences of opinion are important, and there are certain issues on which reasonably and rationally minded people—Aristotelians, Objectivists, and Austrian economists included—will disagree. But differences of opinion are not all that matter.

Truth matters; knowledge matters; the future matters. To the extent that this book integrates the shared ideas and vocabularies of different thinkers, it, too, matters a great deal. It is, after all, through shared ideas and vocabularies, arrived at independently, over time, in disparate times and places, that individuals glean and confirm truth. Younkins seeks, to this end, nothing less than a reevaluation of existing paradigms in pursuit of perennial themes reflecting and describing truth. His is a work of synergy and fusion; his is a work of revivification.

Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society opens with a “Preface” and an “Introduction” written by Younkins. Readers of this journal will not find anything original or surprising here. These sections, while noteworthy, merely lay the foundation for what is to come. They contain no footnotes, but provide extensive recommended reading lists and summarize unifying premises among the book’s principal foci: Aristotle, Rand, Menger, Mises, and Rothbard. In sweeping strokes, Younkins explains that later thinkers depended upon and revised earlier thinkers—that Rand, Menger, and Mises, for instance, borrowed from Aristotle even as they modified and reworked Aristotle. In conjunction with the “Conclusion,” which recapitulates the most important theses and arguments of the book, these sections “bookend,” as it were, the more substantive, detailed, and thorough chapters. Read the rest of this entry »

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A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Adam Smith, Aristotle, Bartholomew Fayre, Ben Jonson, Benjamin Franklin, Bible, C.S. Lewis, Canon, Capitalism and Freedom, Cervantes, Chaucer, Cleanth Brooks, Confessions, Critique of Pure Reason, Dante, Descartes, Discourse on Method, Don Quixote, Edmund Burke, Ethics, For a New Liberty, Freud, Hayek, Hegel, Hobbes, Ideas Have Consequences, Individualism and Economic Order, James Burnham, Joseph Conrad, Joyce, Kant, Leviathan, Locke, Lolita, Lord Jim, Lyotard, Machiavelli, Meditations on First Philosophy, Michael Oakeshott, Milton, Milton Friedman, Mises, Murray Rothbard, Nabokov, New Testament, Nicomachean Ethics, Norman Mailer, Ohio, Old Testament, Plato, Politics, Pragmatism, Proust, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, Sherwood Anderson, Socialism, Spinoza, Suicide of the West, Summa Theologica, Swann’s Way, The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Moviegoer, The Naked and the Dead, The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Politics of Prudence, The Postmodern Condition, The Prince, The Quest for Community, The Republic, The Screwtape Letters, The Sound and the Fury, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Well Wrought Urn, Thomas Aquinas, Two Treatises of Government, Walker Percy, Western Canon, Western Civilization, William Faulkner, William James, Winesburg

My Reading List for 2013

In Arts & Letters, Books, Creativity, Fiction, History, Humanities, Law, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 12, 2012 at 8:45 am

Editorial Note (April 15, 2013): At this point in the year, I have already discovered flaws in this list. For instance, I gave myself two weeks to read Augustine’s Confessions and one week to read Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. I should have done the reverse. Summa Theologica may have required more than two weeks to read, since I found myself rushing through it, and it is not a book through which one should rush. My schedule has forced me to speed read some texts in order to avoid taking shortcuts. Some of the texts on this list will therefore appear on my list for next year, so that they get the treatment and consideration they deserve.

2013 will be a good year for reading. I’ve made a list of the books I’m going to undertake, and I hope you’ll consider reading along with me. As you can see, I’ll be enjoying many canonical works of Western Civilization. Some I’ve read before; some I haven’t. My goal is to reacquaint myself with the great works I fell in love with years ago and to read some of the great works that I’ve always wanted to read but haven’t. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everybody ought to read these works, but I do think that by reading them, a person will gain a fundamental understanding of the essential questions and problems that have faced humans for generations.

Some works are conspicuous in their absence; the list betrays my preferences. Notably missing are the works of Shakespeare and the canonical texts that make up the Old and New Testament. There’s a reason for that. I’ve developed a morning habit of reading the scriptures as well as Shakespeare before I go to work. If I’m reading these already, there’s no need to add them to the list, which is designed to establish a healthy routine. What’s more, the list comes with tight deadlines, and I’m inclined to relish rather than rush through the Bible or Shakespeare.

Lists provide order and clarity; we make them to reduce options or enumerate measurable, targeted goals. Lists rescue us from what has been called the “tyranny of choice.” Benjamin Franklin made a list of the 13 virtues he wished to live by. What motivated him is perhaps what’s motivating me: a sense of purpose and direction and edification.

At first I wanted to assign myself a book a week, but realizing that some works are longer or more challenging than others, that as a matter of obligation I will have other books to read and review, that I have a doctoral dissertation to write, that the legal profession is time consuming, and that unforeseen circumstances could arise, I decided that I might need more time than a week per book depending on the complexity of the particular selection or the busyness of the season. Although I hope to stick to schedule, I own that I might have to permit myself flexibility. We’ll see.

For variety—and respite—I have chosen to alternate between a pre-20^th century text and a 20^th century text. In other words, one week I might read Milton, the next Heidegger. For the pre-20^th century texts, I will advance more or less chronologically; there is no method or sequence for the 20^th century texts, which I listed as they came to mind (“oh, I’ve always wanted to read more Oakeshott—I should add him. And isn’t my knowledge of Proust severely limited?—I’ll add him as well.”). It’s too early to say what lasting and significant effects these latter texts will have, so I hesitate to number them among the demonstrably great pre-20^th century texts, but a general consensus has, I think, established these 20^th century texts as at least among the candidates for canonicity.

I have dated some of the texts in the list below. Not all dates are known with certainty, by me or anyone else. Some texts were revised multiple times after their initial publication; others were written in installments. Therefore, I have noted the time span for those works produced over the course of many years.

One would be justified in wondering why I’ve selected these texts over others. The answer, I suppose, pertains to something Harold Bloom once said: that there are many books but only one lifetime, so why not read the best and most enduring? I paraphrase because I can’t remember precisely what he said or where he said it, but the point is clear enough: read the most important books before you run out of time.

Making this list, I learned that one can read only so many great works by picking them off one week at a time. The initial disheartenment I felt at this realization quickly gave way to motivation: if I want to understand the human condition as the most talented and creative of our predecessors understood it, I will have to make a new list every year, and I will have to squeeze in time for additional texts whenever possible. I am shocked at the number of books that I wanted to include in this list, but that didn’t make it in. I ran out of weeks. What a shame.

Here is my list. I hope you enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Problem with Legal Education; or, Another Piece About the Aimlessness, Pointlessness, and Groundlessness of Law School

In Arts & Letters, Humanities, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Teaching, Writing on July 27, 2011 at 2:23 pm

The latest issue of Academic Questions (Summer 2011: Vol. 24, No. 2) devotes most of its content to legal education. Published by the National Association of Scholars, Academic Questions often features theme issues and invites scholars from across the disciplines to comment on particular concerns about the professoriate. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the NAS.) Carol Iannone, editor at large, titles her introduction to the issue “Law School and Other Tyrannies,” and writes that “[w]hat is happening in the law schools has everything to do with the damage and depredation that we see in the legal system at large.” She adds that the contributors to this issue “may not agree on all particulars, but they tell us that all is not well, that law school education is outrageously expensive, heavily politicized, and utterly saturated with ‘diversity’ mania.” What’s more, Iannone submits, law school “fails to provide any grounding in sound legal doctrine, or any moral or ethical basis from which to understand principles of law in debate today.” These are strong words. But are they accurate? I would say yes and no.

Law school education is too expensive, but its costs seem to have risen alongside the costs of university education in general. Whether any university or postgraduate education should cost what it costs today is another matter altogether.

There is little doubt that law schools are “heavily politicized,” as even a cursory glance at the articles in “specialized” law journals would suggest. These journals address anything from gender and race to transnational law and human rights.

But how can law be taught without politicizing? Unlike literature, which does not always immediately implicate politics, law bears a direct relation to politics, or at least to political choices. The problem is not the political topics of legal scholarship and pedagogy so much as it is the lack of sophistication with which these topics are addressed. The problem is that many law professors lack a broad historical perspective and are unable to contextualize their interests within the wider university curriculum or against the subtle trends of intellectual history.

In law journals devoted to gender and feminism, or law journals considered left-wing, you will rarely find articles written by individuals with the intelligence or learning of Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, or Eve Sedgwick. Say what you will about them, these figures are well-read and historically informed. Their writings and theories go far beyond infantile movement politics and everyday partisan advocacy. Read the rest of this entry »

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Academy, Austrian Economics, Austrian Economics and Literature, Chaos Theory, College, Darwin, Darwinism, Diaphysics, economics, Emergent Orders, Hayek, Humanities, Interdisciplinarity, John Gribbin, Marxism, Mises, Paul Cantor, quantum physics, Recombinant Gene Technology, Spontaneous Order, Stephen Cox, Troy Camplin, UT-Dallas, Western Kentucky University

Interview with Troy Camplin, Interdisciplinary Scholar and Author of Diaphysics

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Communication, Creative Writing, Humanities, Information Design, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Teaching, Theatre, Western Kentucky University, Writing on May 18, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Allen Mendenhall interviews Troy Camplin.

Troy Camplin holds a Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. He has taught English in middle school, high school, and college, and is currently taking care of his children at home. He is the author of Diaphysics, an interdisciplinary work on systems philosophy; other projects include the application of F.A. Hayek’s spontaneous order theory to ethics, the arts, and literature. His play “Almost Ithacad” won the PIA Award from the Cyberfest at Dallas Hub Theater.

Q: Your interdisciplinary background seems to lend itself to commentary on this site. Tell us a bit about that background and a bit about your thoughts on the value of interdisciplinary scholarship.

A: I have an unusual educational background that I only made more unusual in my independent studies. My undergraduate degree is in Recombinant Gene Technology, with a minor in chemistry, from Western Kentucky University. When I am interested in something, I spend all of my time learning about it. So, as an undergrad, I not only learned about molecular biology through my classes, but also in my independent reading. I read the journals and I read even popular works on molecular biology. This led me to John Gribbin’s book In Search of the Double Helix, in which he talks a great deal about quantum physics. I didn’t know a thing about quantum physics, and I really didn’t understand what he was saying about it in that book, so I decided to read his other books on quantum physics, including In Search of Shroedinger’s Cat. I cannot say I understood quantum physics much after reading that book, either, but I was hooked, and read every popular book on quantum physics I could read. In addition, I ran across several other popular science books that introduced me to what would become much more central to my thinking, including Gleick’s Chaos and Ilya Prigogine’s works on self-organization. These provided several of the seeds of my development as an interdisciplinary scholar.

Another element to my interdisciplinary development was a class I pretty much lucked into. Undergraduates have to take several required courses, of course, and one semester I wanted to take a New Testament class with Joseph Trafton (who was highly recommended, and whose class I eventually did take), but it was full. So I took an Intro. To Philosophy class just to get the hours in that section in. By chance I chose a class taught by Ronald Nash—a random choice that ended up changing my life completely.

Nash taught his class using three texts: a collection of Plato’s dialogues and two books Nash himself wrote. One of the books Nash wrote was Poverty and Wealth: A Christian Defense of Capitalism. It was through Nash that I was introduced to free market economics. I was hooked. I read everything I could find in the university library with the word “capitalism” in the title or as the subject. I read Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, Hayek, and a little book titled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand. The latter, of course, led me to Atlas Shrugged, and that led me to the rest of her work. Rand hooked me on the idea of being a fiction writer and made me interested in philosophy. I began reading the fiction writers she loved (and the ones she hated, to see why) and the philosophers she loved (and the ones she hated, to see why). I read and fell in love with Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, Aristotle and Nietzsche. Particularly Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, whose tragic worldviews were deeply appealing to me. Nietzsche deepened my appreciation for philosophy, and introduced me to tragedy. Read the rest of this entry »