The Schooled Heart: Moral Reformation in American Higher Education

Notes

191 Notes INTRODUCTION 1 See the editorial “Intimidation at Columbia,” The New York Times, April 7, 2005, A22, along with the response of Daniel Pipes in “Conservative Professors Hard to Find,” New York Sun, April 12, 2005. This recent controversy at Columbia perpetuates a larger, ongoing debate. See Sara Hebel, “Patrolling Professors’ Politics,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2004, along with Jeffrey Selingo, “U.S. Public’s Confidence in Colleges Remains High,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 2004. Despite the latter article’s self-congratulatory title, the article itself reports that 51 percent of the respondents to a professionally designed poll “agree” or “strongly agree” that “colleges and universities improperly introduce a liberal bias in what they teach.” 2 See Richard Rorty, Julie A. Reuben, and George Marsden, “The Moral Purposes of the University: An Exchange,” The Hedgehog Review 2 (2000): 106–19; as well as Stanley Fish, “Why We Built the Ivory Tower,” The New York Times, May 21, 2004, A23. 3 See Derek Bok, Universities and the Future of America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990). 4 To cite four examples, see Alexander Astin, “What Higher Education Can Do in the Cause of Citizenship,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 6, 1995, B1; Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Clas- 192 Notes to pp. 2–8 sical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); William Galston, “Can Patriotism Be Turned into Civic Engagement?” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2001, B16–17; and Harry R. Lewis, Excellence Without Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). 5 Some have accused Bok of providing but a shallow corrective for the ills he diagnosed. For example, John W. Donohue in “Three Cousins of Harvard” says of Bok’s work that “President Bok often seems to be gazing upward at a Platonic world where the university exists in ideal form” (America, November 17, 1990, 369). Later, Donohue states that “Bok’s call for a ‘revival of moral education’ is an admirable conclusion, but the case made for it is pallid” (370). 6 See Bok, “The Demise and Rebirth of Moral Education,” in Universities and the Future of America, 55–78 for a useful summary of this important history. For a larger historical account, see Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Mark Noll, “Introduction: The Christian Colleges and American Intellectual Traditions,” in The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America, ed. William Ringenberg , 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 17–36. 7 Reuben, Making of the Modern University, 1–2. 8 Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1994). 9 For a more detailed account of “epistemological crisis,” see Alasdair MacIntyre’s “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” in Why Narrative: Readings in Narrative Theology, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 138–57. 10 Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1968). 11 See Mark R. Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Bruce Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation (Albany: State University of Albany Press, 1990). 12 Schwehn, Exiles from Eden, 4. 13 For most of the twentieth century, the modern university retained the notion that democratic polity is morally superior to nondemocratic polities. Increasingly, and not surprisingly, however, such commitments are regarded as pragmatic commitments or articles of faith rather than reasoned or principled commitments. See Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 175–96. 14 For a good example of such thinking, see Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), the most popular moral philosophy textbook Notes to pp. 8–10 193 of the nineteenth century. Wayland, an ordained Baptist minister, was president of Brown University, the first Baptist university in North America. 15 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity...