Why Education Is Useless

Chapter One: Humanity

CHAPTER ONE Humanity A SHORT AND EASY WAY WITH EDUCATORS Having led Hillsdale College since 1971, George P. Roche, ill resigned his presidency in 1999. He did so in the wake of allegations by his daughterin -law that he had carried on a sexual relationship with her for the past nineteen years. It did not help matters that after making her allegations she had committed suicide. Hillsdale is an institution beloved ofconservatives such as the writer and television personality William F. Buckley, Jr., former Secretary of Education William Bennett, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and George Will, the columnist and erstwhile lapdog to Nancy Reagan. It is known for its commitment to the principles of free enterprise and limited government and for its corresponding antipathy to doctrines such as multiculturalism and postmodernism, which are said to have corrupted many other campuses. As its website advertises, Hillsdale offers a "traditional liberal arts" curriculum. Whatever the truth of this presidential affair, then-Roche was not talking, at least in public-the allegations were bound to be a huge embarrassment to an institution that had so earnestly professed the purity ofits ideals. Given Hillsdale's trumpeted support of 'Judeo-Christian values," this event might remind one of the spectacular meltdowns in the previous two decades of religious figures such as Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Billy James Hargis, which were also occasioned by accusations of sordid sexual improprieties . Alternatively, one might compare it to the events that led to Representative Newt Gingrich's divorce and to Representative Bob Livingston's resignation from his position as Speaker of the House, in which case it would figure as yet another ironic sideshow to the rightwing attacks that led to the impeachment of that sorry excuse for a liberal , WilliamJefferson Clinton. Times being what they are and the United States what it is, media coverage of the Roche affair was very different from what was accorded CHAPTER ONE ~ I8 to the two great academic scandals ofthe previous decade. The headlines in these cases resulted from renewed attention to the Nazism ofMartin Heidegger, the eminent German philosopher, and from the discovery that an influential Yale professor of comparative literature and literary theory, Paul de Man, had also been tainted by Nazi associations. (When he was ayoung man first trying to establish himselfin the literary world of Belgium, he had contributed articles, including at least one that was unequivocally anti-Semitic, to a collaborationist newspaper.) Mainstream periodicals such as Newsweek as well as journalists such as Jon Wiener, writing for The Nation, a left-wing cult publication to which I confess to being a subscriber, were quick to pounce on the stories of de Man and Heidegger. These stories were taken as evidence that could be used to indict all sorts ofpeople and whole schools ofphilosophy and literary theory, such as the "deconstruction'' closely associated with de Man's name. In contrast, no one in the media, as far as I am aware, took the Roche affair as evidence thatJudeo-Christian values must be fundamentally corrupt or that conservative economic principles inevitably lead people into sexual congress with their in-laws.l Spitting into the wind tends to be a tiresome pastime, and my purpose here is not to bewail the methods, mentality, and ethics of the popular media in the contemporary United States. I also have no interest in rehashing the controversies that arose around these particular figures, which, in the cases of Heidegger and de Man, have already been addressed in numerous works.2 Instead I turn to a question that is more basic, at least in relation to myconcerns in this book. The question is this: why would anyone be shocked to learn that a revered educator may be a horrible person? The response that leaps to mind is that there is a story here because education is meant to make us better human beings. It must represent certain ideals, and those who profess these ideals are expected to embody them in their character and behavior. To most people the very idea of education connotes a bettering of the self distinct from any possible acquisition ofskills. Beyond "mere" training and knowledge, as we might put it, education is supposed to offer students an opportunity for a qualitative enrichment of their character. It is no wonder that people should think in this way, for they have been taught to do so by sappy movies, college catalogues, and devoted teachers and parents, not to mention centuries of...