The Schooled Heart: Moral Reformation in American Higher Education

Introduction: Retrieving the Tradition, Remembering the End

1 Introduction The title of the volume you hold in your hands discloses our answer to a controversial question, a question that stands at the center of many debates about the nature and purpose of the modern American university . That question, quite simply, is this: should moral education figure centrally, or at all, among the purposes of the modern university? To that question, we offer in what follows an unequivocally affirmative response. The highest and best purpose to which the modern university can direct itself is nothing short of the moral formation of its students, or what in another time might have been called the schooling of the heart or the tutoring of the affections. We regard this question as foundational within contemporary higher education, while acknowledging that others may not immediately see it so. The truth is that in contentious debates about large issues, the cacophony of claims and counterclaims most noticeably heard often drowns out attention to more basic questions responsible for dividing the ranks. Thus, disputes about one thing are often, at heart, disputes about another thing. For instance, recent and heated disagreement about the extent to which the classrooms of American universities are biased sMichael D. Beaty and Douglas V. Henry Retrieving the Tradition, Remembering the End toward a politically liberal outlook—significant as that question may be—almost uniformly passes over the question of whether or not bias of some sort is avoidable or desirable.1 Similarly, contentiousness in response to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s concern about its members’ use of “hostile or abusive” nicknames, and more specifically its proscription of Native American mascots, invariably failed to rise above banal judgments about “political correctness.” In both these and many other cases, assumed but unstated answers to the question of whether or not moral formation ranks among the university’s defining tasks are operative, and most of the time, uncritically so. We contend that intelligent, discerning judgments about the “little” questions within American higher education are impossible in the absence of a clear understanding of the “big” questions about the proper nature, identity, and purpose of the university. To be sure, we acknowledge those who continue in the vital tradition of scholars attentive to the place of moral education among the aims of the university, but predictably they fail to speak univocally about the issue. In response to the animating question of this volume, some leading American intellectuals, Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, for example, answer forcefully, “No, the modern university’s purpose is not to engage in moral education.”2 On the other hand, former Harvard president Derek Bok has argued that it is imperative for America’s colleges and universities , especially its elite research universities and private liberal arts colleges, to recover the practice they once pursued with great vigor—the moral education of their students.3 He argues that the nation’s colleges and universities should serve the common and public good, not only by giving students the knowledge and information they need to compete in a highly information-driven, technological society and global market, but also by teaching them to think critically about the ideals of Western democracy and the moral demands of both global and local citizenship. Indeed, Bok calls upon the nation’s elite universities to set the example by including in their curriculum the elements of a moral and civic education necessary to produce graduates prepared to fulfill their moral and social responsibilities. Bok’s exhortations have been echoed by numerous other educators and social critics over the last decade or so.4 Yet while we are in sympathy with Bok’s admonition that America’s most prestigious universities must reclaim the task of moral education, we contend that a recommitment to this task on the part of America’s institutions of higher learning is far more difficult than he admits.5 This is because, in general, the nation’s colleges and universities, and certainly most of their faculty, remain largely committed to the ideas and practices that displaced moral education during the last century. We are also convinced that Bok’s recommendations for moral education, considered in 2 Introduction themselves, ineffectually address the problems he identifies and thus would merely perpetuate them rather than offer a suitable solution. From the outset, then, we confess that we aim to offer a significant contribution to the recovery of...