Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life by David D. Cooper (review)

David Cooper’s Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life is an extremely interesting book on several levels. As a well-written and thoughtful engagement with the most important issues humanists have encountered since the early 1990s, it yields pleasures whether appreciated synchronically or diachronically. While each of the chapters is substantive in itself, their cumulative evolution may be most compelling. The essays (which have all been published elsewhere) appear in two sections, “Believing in Difference” and “Education for Democracy,” which roughly reflect what Cooper sees as the dominant questions of the 1990s and the 2000s in humanistic theory: pedagogy and curriculum.

Two themes dominate these essays: the tensions of professionalism in higher education and the struggles over democratic community. Concerning the former, Cooper thinks, as many do, that we have lost sight of the priorities of academia and that the last 20 years has seen the unfortunate fruit of seeds planted long ago.

The Land-grant college was supposed to offer an alternative that embodied a passionate feeling for democracy, access and education pragmatism: the open road of American higher learning, egalitarian, energetic and free . . . . Barely a generation separates Morrill’s Land-Grant Act, passed into law in 1862, from Thorstein Veblen’s early twentieth-century attacks on university administrators he called “captains of erudition” whom he blamed for turning universities into professional/commercial bureaucracies fundamentally no different than banks and breakfast cereal manufacturers obsessed with profit, status and prestige.

(69–70)

In Cooper’s vision of civic life, the humanities bear a special responsibility and thus a special measure of blame:

The power of the humanistic disciplines . . . lies in their capacities to bridge private lives and public obligations—the inner and outer worlds—and enrich moral life while simultaneously shaping a personal identity responsive to the commitments and responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy. That power has steadily waned during the last two decades only to be replaced by a corrosive academic professionalism that threatens to turn the academy... into “a place for faculty to get tenured and students to get credentialed.”

(87)

Humanists, he acknowledges, spend a good deal of time on critique of various kinds of oppression and injustice in society and culture, but they do so from a professional setting that is itself riddled with contradictory motives and interests:

Professionalism [is] an ethical condition, an ethos, and a process of socialization and cultural differentiation that leads to, and legitimizes, institutional meritocracy, monopoly, exclusion, privilege and the special perquisites accorded to title, status and rank; that is, authoritarian social forms totally anathema to the land-grant ethic of egalitarianism. . . . Professional and vocational practices—what Bruce Wilshire calls “academic rites of purification and exclusion” (1990)—support an academic meritocracy that undermines the populist mystique inherent in the land-grant mission.

(72–74)

For everything from the publication necessary to not be fired after seven years to becoming an academic superstar, he wonders if we value publication over the wider world of engaged scholarship and service.

Interdisciplinary scholarship . . . has given way to a species of metacritical discourse practiced by a fairly tight circle of theoretically inclined, annoying self-referential, and unwriterly academic superstars whose work remains cloistered in the netherworld of advanced graduate theory seminars convened at advanced humanities institutes, marooned on lists of works cited or in the reduced fonts where academic immortality resides, cryogenically suspended in databases.

(63)

Of course, he does not usually name names, and it is unlikely anyone he might name would recognize themselves in this description. In general, he thinks the solution lies in service learning—preparing students for, and accompanying them on, reflective engagements with people and organizations outside the academy. In these engagements he sees the flowering of the democratic promise of liberal, nonvocational education, as students actively create discursive and symbolic connections among people who have a stake in social and political...