Martha Nussbaum's ivory tower

For the non-academic layperson it might come as something of a surprise that liberal arts education is in crisis, not just in America but also across the globe. Rising education costs, the onset of a more corporate mentality within colleges, and the preoccupation with developing practical job skills in a recession have led to reductions or outright elimination of traditional liberal arts departments like classics, German and philosophy at some universities.

Martha Nussbaum's book, like her Free Library lecture last month, warns of dire consequences not only for the humanities but also for democracy in general. Liberal arts education, she argues, is the engine of democracy; materialism is the enemy. In that case, she says, we need to divest ourselves of economic growth models of education, which breed uncritical thinking and deference to authority. Instead we must emphasize a Socratic pedagogy that's balanced with a cognitive-moral emotionalism, and promote a global citizenship capable of seeing the world and people in manifold and complex ways.

As manifestos go, Nussbaum's is unfortunately quite pedestrian, even timid. It addresses symptoms of the crisis without adequately investigating its origins, nor does it offer a specific plan of action.

The last 20 years have seen a plethora of books sounding alarms on this subject: The University in Ruins, The Last Professors, The Unmaking of the Public University, to name but a few. Each of these investigates with more depth and complexity the history behind the present crisis. Yet Nussbaum drew upon little of this literature in her examination of the topic.

Romano's dreary introduction

Nussbaum was not helped by the presentation format. She was introduced by her fellow philosophy professor, the former Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano, who engaged in the dreary business of laudatory academic introductions. (She's one of academia's great stars, currently a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, raised on the Main Line in the 1950s, etc.)

Nussbaum would have been better served by a more Socratic format: either an introduction that challenged her argument better, or a conversation, a dialogue, between her and Romano. Romano possesses the intellectual gravitas to engage in such a format, and based on evidence of old interviews on Youtube, Nussbaum is a more effective speaker in a dialogic format.

More to the point, such a format would have lent credence to her argument that Socratic pedagogy is the superior model for liberal arts education. But instead of being challenged to examine and defend her own arguments— the essence of good intellectual theater— Nussbaum merely summarized her book in front of a passive audience.

Covert elitism

The Q & A session after the lecture brought a bit more intensity to the talk: One could feel and see Nussbaum's mind working with greater precision at depth. However, in the end she was just answering questions and the result wasn't very interesting.

Indeed, a bit of Nussbaum's Aristotelian elitism emerged during the Q & A when she asserted that university philosophy departments were the "good soldiers" in the fight for humanistic learning. In her book, she recommends that Catholic colleges in the U.S. provide perhaps the best model for Socratic pedagogy because they require at least two semesters of philosophy. Implied yet not stated is the idea that literature departments and Great Books / General Studies programs (like those at Columbia and Temple) aren't the best means to deliver Socratic values. I would think that if Nussbaum wanted to demonstrate the necessity of the humanities for democracy, she would have considered a more egalitarian departmental model at a public— not Catholic— institution.

In the end, Nussbaum's talk was more monologue than dialogue, more Aristotle than Plato, more telling than showing, more nostalgia than realism, more jeremiad than manifesto. Perhaps this type of argument is what will save humanistic learning in the 21st Century. It felt more like a eulogy to me.♦


To read a response, click here.