The Skeptic's Way

By Michael S. Russo

 

I’ve been teaching philosophy now for over 20 years, and it always amazes me at how gullible students are.  Every year when teaching my philosophy of Leadership course, I come in the first class and inform the students—in a very bad Irish brogue—that I am Fr. Liam McCarthy from County Gallway in Ireland.   I then go on with the prepared script:

 

“Dr. Russo, I’m afraid, has been deemed ill-suited to teach this class and I’ve been asked to take his place.  What I plan to do is examine the leadership styles of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, his blessed Mother Mary, and the saints and martyrs of the Catholic Church, including, but not limited to Saints Perpetua and Felicity, St. Odo of Cluny, and, of course, the blessed Barengarius of Tours.  Our text will be the Bible, which I plan to teach to you in the original Greek.  Many of you, I fear, will not do well in this course, because you are weak of mind and prone to the frailties of the flesh.  I want you to know that I have no problem failing every one of you, if you fail to meet my exacting standards.  Does anyone have any questions?  Good.  Then let’s begin our class with a prayer taken from the Catholic rite of the dead.”

 

I say all this with a perfectly straight face, while at the same time trying to the best of my ability to maintain something like a Barry Fitzgerald-style brogue from The Quiet Man.  It’s a ludicrous performance, and no one with any sense at all could possibly believe that Fr. McCarthy could be real.  But the students all do.  And when I can no longer sustain my performance, break out in laughter, and inform them that they’ve been had, most of my freshmen still don’t know how to react:  They sit paralyzed for some time, trying to figure out how they could have believed something so patently absurd to be true.

 

I know what you’re thinking: how stupid can these freshmen be?  But they’re not stupid at all.  In fact, only honors-level students take my leadership class.   And I would bet that, if you were in this class, you would buy into the reality of Fr. McCarthy, even with his abysmal brogue and his absurd 1950s Catholic worldview.   You would accept that Fr. McCarthy is for real, because, like most human beings, you’ve been trained to accept many things on faith that you have no real evidence for at all.  

 

For instance,
 

• you believe that you were born in a certain place at a certain time to certain parents. 
• you believe that the world you experience with your senses exists as you perceive it.
• you believe that this planet that we are on is part of a larger universe that is very, very large and contains many other solar systems.
• you believe in God and that when you die your personal identity will live on in some form.
• you believe that when you look into the mirror every morning that the person you see staring back at you is the real you.

Unlike the reality of Father McCarthy, these are all somewhat plausible beliefs, to be sure.  You’ve probably embraced many of these beliefs most of your life and people that you trust and love undoubtedly hold to them as “gospel truth.”  But how do we really know that any of these so-called “truths” are actually true at all? 

 

Mind Games

 

Let’s play a few mind games.  For these games to work, you’ll have to put aside all the beliefs about your life that you have taken for granted are true.

 

We can start with your experience of reading this very text.  Your assumption, I’m sure, is that you, __________________ (fill in your name), are sitting down in front of your computer reading the words that appear on the screen.  But can you really be certain that this is what you are actually doing?  Haven’t you had the experience of thinking that you were enmeshed in some activity—hanging out with your friends, visiting a strange, exotic place, making love to a desirable partner, only to wake up and discover that everything you thought was real was actually nothing more than a dream?  But while you were dreaming, the dream seemed totally and completely real to you, didn’t it?  Well, how do you know that something similar is not going on right now?  Perhaps instead of reading this text on your computer, you are, in fact, in deep REM sleep, dreaming about reading this text.  Can you really be 100% certain that this is not the case (remember, while you are in a dream, everything seems completely real to you)?

 

Let’s try another mind game, just for fun.  Once again, you are reading this text, imagining that what you are experiencing is real.  But I’m here to tell you that the you that you think is you is not really you, and the world that you think is really real is not real at all.  You are actually a being of a much more highly evolved species than homo sapiens (You have a body only about 4 feet tall, four fingers on each hand, a huge cranium to support your impressive brain, and no icky genitalia, since reproduction of your species is done purely through mental contact).  Every 150 years members of your species go into a coma-like state, called “The Phase”  in order to regenerate, and remain in this state for about five years.  During that time, it’s not uncommon for beings like yourself to imagine themselves as completely different sorts of creatures on strange new worlds.  For example, while you are in your coma-like state, you’ve imagined yourself as _______________ (fill in your name) living in a place called ___________ (fill in your town and country), on a planet called Earth, in a period described as the early 21^st century.  You’ve even created a bizarre physical form for yourself that is totally unlike the “real” form that you actually possess (pubic hair…yuck!).  The further along you are in The Phase, the more elaborate the dream becomes until you no longer even begin to question that it’s real.  You establish relationships, develop a career, beget children, etc.  But—and here’s the kicker—you are now approaching the end of your five year sleep cycle and very soon will be ripped from the fantasy reality that your mind has created.  When that happens, everything you experience in that dream-like state will become nothing more than a vague memory that you will eventually forget completely as you resume your “real” life. 

 

I know that you are probably thinking that both scenarios that I’ve described are completely implausible.  You know exactly who you are, and you know damn well that what you are experiencing at this very moment is precisely what it appears to be.   But can you really be certain that is the case?  In fact, the “certainty” that you possess about just about every aspect of your life is actually more like a belief or conviction—something that ultimately can’t be proven or disproven.  You could, in fact, be sleeping or you could be an alien creature in comma-like state.  How could you ever prove that you’re not?

 

The Way of the Skeptic

 

What’s the point of all this, you’re probably asking by now?  The point is to set you on a path that some philosophers have called the ultimate road to self-realization.  It’s called the path of skepticism, and its practitioners—called, not surprisingly, skeptics—argue that true liberation comes from embracing the uncertainty inherent in human life.  “Dubito”—I doubt—is the motto of all skeptics, and a truly radical skeptic doubts every aspect of his experience. 

 

The way of the skeptic is the opposite of that of the dogmatist.  Dogmatists believe they have certain knowledge about the nature of reality, the right way to live, how to organize society, etc.  Their supposed certainty leads to conflict with other dogmatists who also believe that they hold the truth. Aggression, violence, war, and genocide are the end results of embracing a philosophy that holds that one’s own truth is absolute and everything else is error, lies, and heresy.

 

The skeptic, in rejecting the idea of universal or transcendent truth, avoids the tension and conflict that the dogmatist inevitably experiences when his views run counter to the views of others.  When the skeptic encounters someone with an alternative perspective on reality, he simply acknowledges the beliefs of the other and moves on humbly and graciously. He doesn’t get angry or frustrated, because he has no personal stake in the debates dogmatists love to have among themselves.

 

The total suspension of judgment that the skeptic has about what is true or false leads to a kind of inner peace that dogmatist can never possess.  Things may “appear” or “seem” to be true to the skeptic, but when he’s shown that this is not the case, there’s no psychic rupture that occurs within him.  His beliefs are recognized to be beliefs, and nothing more, and when new beliefs come along that are superior to the ones he’s previously held, he’s capable of embracing them with a cognitive flexibility that the dogmatist could never even imagine.

 

Not convinced?  Try suspending judgment for just a week on matters that you’ve always assumed to be true.  For just a week, instead of reacting dogmatically when your beliefs encounter opposition, make an effort to remain open to conflicting viewpoints.  You just might find that your life has become much more pleasant by giving up some of your certainty about the truth…and you also might find that the world around you becomes a much nicer place as a result.

___________________


Dr. Michael S. Russo is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Molloy College in New York, the manager of The Sophia Project, an online repository of educational resources in Philosophy, and the author of That's Right: An Introduction to Ethical Theory.  He can be reached at mrusso@molloy.edu.



10 Days Alone with the Mind

by Michael S. Russo

 

I’ve been practicing various forms of Buddhist meditation now for about 7 years, but I’ve always thought that Vipassana (aka Insight or Mindfulness Meditation) made the most intellectual sense to me. About five years ago I picked up a copy of The Artof Living by William Hart, which described the Vipassana technique taught by Burmese meditation teacher S. N. Goenka.  That led me to some of Goenka’s own discourses, which I found extremely compelling.  I later discovered that Goenka founded about two hundred centers for the teaching of Vipassana all around the world, and that one of the largest of these centers in the U.S.—the Vipassana Meditation Center—was located only a few hours away in Shelburn, Massachusetts.

For three years, I’ve been trying to find the 12 days needed to do one of the retreats offered by this Center, but my work schedule always got in the way.  Then one of my colleagues, Janet, happened to tell me that she had a wonderful Buddhist retreat experience at—you guessed it—the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburn, Massachusetts.   I promised her that I would commit myself to doing a Vipassana retreat the first chance I got.

This semester I was on sabbatical, so it seemed like the ideal time to do the retreat thing, if ever I  was going to.  I certainly experienced some degree of trepidation at the thought of having to meditate continuously for 10 straight days (the hour and a half I spend at my local zendo once a week is normally more than challenging enough for me), but I signed up online for the first available course that they had, which happed to be May 1-12.

What impressed me most about the ethos of the Vipassana Centers started by Goenka is that the programs they offer are completely free.   Donations from senior students pay for the retreats of newbies like me.   Those same senior students volunteer to act as servers for those on retreat, providing meals and keeping everything running smoothly.   The goal is to allow anyone who is interested to experience intense meditative practice without having to worry at all about mundane concerns.   It is a testament to the sincerity and idealism of Goenka and his teachers that they are willing to offer the dharma for free when so many other places are charging abundantly for similar experiences.

I arrive at The Vipassana Meditation Center at about 2pm on May 1^st, after a leisurely drive from New York.  The place was attractively situated amidst rolling wooded hills and was extremely well maintained.  I was shown to my room, which thankfully was a single, and I couldn’t have been happier with it.  The main house, the dining room, the dormitories and the meditation hall exuded a kind of orderly tranquility that certainly is conducive to meditative practice.    The sexes are strictly separated, so I can only speak about the men’s facilities, but I’m assuming that the female quarters are similar to those of the men. 

One thing that was evident to me immediately was that this was a place that was in serious expansion mode.  Hundreds of meditators come each month to do the ten day meditation course that I was there for.   Apparently, enough of these meditators liked what they experienced enough to provide millions of dollars to upgrade the facilities.  While I was there, the Center was building a teachers’ house, a second women’s dormitory and finishing work on their new pagoda.  Again, this growth appears to be a testament to the positive benefits that participants have experienced through the meditation technique practiced at the Center. 

Before embarking on ten days of “noble silence,” I had the opportunity to chat with some of my fellow male meditators.  I was struck by the fact that almost two-thirds of the men that were present seemed to be in their mid-twenties (the rest averaged in age from about 30-70).  The ones I chatted with seemed bright, enthusiastic, and sincere.  Some had done numerous Vipassana retreats before this one; others were coming for their first experience, inspired by the benefits reported by trusted friends and family members.   

After chatting for about an hour, we were asked to proceed to the meditation hall, where our retreat would officially begin and all conversation and contact with one another would end.  Two preliminary requirements had to be gotten out of the way, before the course could begin.  First, we all had to agree to stay for the full ten day period of the course and to strictly abide by the code of discipline (sila) that is at the heart of all Buddhist practice.  This included:

1.       abstaining from killing any being

2.       abstaining from stealing

3.       abstaining from all sexual activity

4.       abstaining from telling lies

5.       abstaining from all intoxicants

These rules actually make considerable sense if one considers that the goal of a Vipassana retreat like this one is to purify the mind, and one’s mind can hardly be purified if one is going around stealing or lying.  In fact, it’s fairly easy to keep all these rules while on the retreat,  though admittedly some would be rather hard to put into strict practice in one’s normal life.

Participants also have to agree to follow the Vipassana method taught by Goenka and refrain from any other form of worship or spiritual practice during the ten days of the course.   Finally, each individual also has to agree to abide by the fairly strict schedule set up by the Center, which includes about 9 hours of group and individual meditation per day:

4:00 am                        Morning wake-up bell 

4:30-6:30 am              Meditate in the hall or in your room 

6:30-8:00 am              Breakfast break 

8:00-9:00 am              Group meditation in the hall

9:00-11:00 am            Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions 

11:00-12:00 noon      Lunch break 

12noon-1:00 pm        Rest and interviews with the teacher 

1:00-2:30 pm              Meditate in the hall or in your room 

2:30-3:30 pm              Group meditation in the hall 

3:30-5:00 pm              Meditate in the hall or in your own room

5:00-6:00 pm              Tea break 

6:00-7:00 pm              Group meditation in the hall 

7:00-8:15 pm              Teacher's Discourse in the hall 

8:15-9:00 pm              Group meditation in the hall 

9:00-9:30 pm              Question time in the hall 
        9:30 pm               Retire to your own room; Lights out 

Each person attending the course probably would find some difficulties with different aspects of the schedule. Certainly, the amount of continuous meditation required would discourage all but the most determined individuals from even attempting the course. Waking up at 4am is also no great pleasure. One also has to contend with the having no real meal after 12:00 noon (new students get a tea break at 5pm, where they can eat some fruit, but senior students can only have water after their noon lunch). I personally didn’t find abstaining from real meals at night too difficult, but I know that for some of my fellow meditators this sort of abstinence may have been a bit challenging.

The meditation schedule itself varied very little during the course of the ten days. At exactly 4am the gongs chimed to wake us up and we were expected to be meditating by 4:30 sharp either in the meditation hall or in our rooms. There were three formal group sittings each day that lasted about an hour. Each sitting began and ended with an audio chant from Goenka and instructions on how to proceed. Hearing Goenka’s voice for the first time reminded me a bit of Bella Lugosi and I had to refrain from chuckling at the thought of that. I personally found all the chanting and the repetitious instruction a bit tedious at times, but I know that many of my fellow meditators got much more out of these than I did.

 At the end of the evening, we were able to relax (a bit anyway), while watching a video of Goenka’s daily dharma talk. Unlike the audio instructions, these dharma talks are actually very inspiring and I could understand why so many people feel that no one else could teach the method of Vipassanaa quite like Goenka. Although he looked a bit like an older Jonathan Winters, Goenka’s teaching method is actually quite good. At the end of each talk, I felt I understood exactly why I was doing what I was doing each day and how it fit in with the teaching of the Buddha.

For the first four days, meditation practice basically focused on what Buddhists call samadhi—attempting to achieve some degree of mental concentration. For the first three days all we did was focus on the experience of air flowing in and out of the nostrils (or “no-strils,” in Goenka’s audio instructions). On the fourth day, there was a liberation of sorts, when we actually started the practice of Vipassana per se by moving from the rings of the nostrils to the area between the nostrils and the upper lip. The idea was to focus on a very small area of the body and try to detect as much sensation as possible in that area.

 By day two I thought I would go out of my mind from all the meditation I was doing and the thought that I still had eight days to go. My knees were also killing me from sitting on a cushion in the half-lotus position for far longer than my body was used to. I was determined, however, to tough it out, no matter how crazy the monkey mind got or no matter how severe the pain in my knees was. But by day four, I knew that there was no possible way that I was going to be able to remain absolutely still and not shift my position on the cushion at all during the formal meditation sessions. This would be required beginning on day five. So I asked the assistant teacher if I could move to a chair, and he agreed.

The practice of Vipassana itself was actually quite interesting. Beginning on day five we began to scan our bodies “from head to toe; from toe to head.” The idea was to become aware of sensation in every part of the body. At first I was a bit dubious about this practice, because I could only feel sensation in about half of my body parts. But by day seven I was feeling sensation in every part of my body (although my ears, surprisingly, were trouble throughout the ten days of the course).  
It might seem somewhat ridiculous to spend so much time searching for sensations in the body, but this is the heart of the practice of Vipassana or mindfulness practice. As one becomes aware of sensation, one also becomes aware of the most important insights attained by the Buddha:

 

• Dukka (suffering): that attachment to pleasant sensations in the body or aversion to unpleasant sensations is the cause of all of our misery in life. If we can just treat all these sensations with equanimity, liberation from suffering occurs naturally.
• Anicca (impermanence): sensations arise and fall away. There is nothing permanent about any sensation, so there’s no use clinging to them as “mine” or “belonging to me”. This leads one to understand the basic impermanence of everything in reality, including oneself. 
• Annata (no self): there is no permanently enduring, independent self. This realization is the highest wisdom a Buddhist can achieve and is the key to ultimate liberation.

 

I have to confess that there were times I thought that I would go crazy with all the meditation we had to do. As Goenka predicted in his video dharma talks, days two and six were particularly difficult for me. By the end of day two, and after 18 hours of meditation on the breath, it began to dawn on me that I still had eight full days to go (believe me, that realization was not a happy prospect for me, especially given the pain that I was experiencing in my knees each time I sat on the cushion to meditate). But there were also moments of peacefulness and serenity that I’ve never experienced before in my life that enabled me to deal with the arduousness of the experience. 

 

On days 9 and 10, while I was sitting in my 3 x 4 foot meditation cell in the new pagoda, I even experienced jhana states that I couldn’t even imagine while doing my less intensive zen practice. My normal practice is one of dealing with the aversion that the meditation produces in me; the idea that meditation could also produce extremely pleasurable states was certainly not part of my own reality as a meditator. Of course, once I experienced the total absorptive quality of these states, it was almost impossible for me to treat then with the equanimity that was expected. But that, I suppose, was a good lesson for me too.

 

Although I was relieved on day 10 when “noble silence” ended and I could converse during certain periods with my fellow meditators, there was definitely a part of me that misses the focused atmosphere that continuous silence produces. Some of the younger guys—the meditation hot shots, who unlike me, had absolutely no trouble sitting on a cushion for hour upon hour without moving—couldn’t wait to talk with one another about their experiences on the retreat . Surprisingly, I think that I would have been perfectly content to have continued the silent atmosphere that pervaded the Center for the previous nine days. It was certainly interesting, however, to hear the personal stories of my fellow meditators, all of whom struck me as even more sincere and intelligent than I had initially thought. That there were so many young people who were willing to put aside their normal lives to practice intensive meditation for so long a period also gave me hope for the future of our species. 

 

As for what I got out of my own Vipassana experience, that’s difficult to say at this point. I certainly think that the retreat pushed my own meditative practice into a more focused and serious direction than had been the case before. Several people told me that I seemed much calmer after the retreat. If that was indeed the case, it was a transient effect and didn’t last all that long.  

 

In the end, however, I was just happy to know that I could make it through an experience like this without going completely insane. Being totally alone with one’s mind is an experience that most 21st century people try to avoid at all costs. I may not have made friends with my own” monkey mind”, but, after 10 days alone with the old fellow, it was certainly nice to know that the two of us can get along well together under the right circumstances. And that insight alone made ten days of pain and suffering well worth it for me.

 

___________________

Dr. Michael S. Russo is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Molloy College in New York, the manager of The Sophia Project, an online repository of educational resources in Philosophy, and the author of That's Right: An Introduction to Ethical Theory.  He can be reached at mrusso@molloy.edu.

Occupy Wall Street Forum - The Final Word

Dr. Peter Fallon, Professor of Media Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago, offers his insights on the Occupy Wall Street forum held at Molloy College in November. As always, Peter's analysis is provocative, thought-provoking, and definitely worth reading. Peter also managed to capture the only footage we have of the event on his trusty flip video camera:

Read Peter Fallon's Blog Post

Occupy Wall Street Forum at Molloy College

Here are a few shots from the Occupy Wall Street forum that was held at Molloy College on November 16th. The event probably raised more questions than it resolved, but it definitely got people talking about the issues driving the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Catch 22

I'm reading Catch 22 again for the fifth time. In the event that you're not into mid-twentieth century absurdist fiction, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller centers around the lives of a group of World War II fliers, whose job is to bomb targets in Italy. The man character, Yossarian, has decided early in the novel that he has had enough and wants to be grounded. The only problem is that, in order to be grounded, you have to be crazy. Yossarian, whose nerves are shot from the stress of warfare, seems to fit the bill, but there's a catch, of course -- Catch 22:

Yossarian...decided right then and there to go crazy.

"You're wasting your time," Doc Daneeka was forced to tell him.

"Can you ground someone who's crazy?"

"Oh, sure. I have to. There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy."

"Then why don't you ground me? I'm crazy. Ask Clevinger."

"Clevinger? Where is Clevinger? You find Clevinger and I'll ask him."

"Then ask any of the others. They'll tell you how crazy I am."

"They're crazy."

"Then why don't you ground them?"

"Why don't they ask me to ground them?"

"Because they're crazy, that's why."

"Of course they're crazy," Doc Daneeka replied. "I just told you they're crazy, didn't I? And you can't let crazy people decide whether you're crazy or not, can you?"

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"

"He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.

"Can you ground him?"

"I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."

"Then why doesn't he ask you to?"

"Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."

"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

"That's all. Let him ask me."

"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

"No. Then I can't ground him."

"You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane then he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

When I first read this book at the age of 20, of course I found it hysterically funny. But a 20 year old foolishly believes that he has ultimate control over his destiny, and this delusion prevented me from understanding just how damned profound this book actually is. Now that I'm a world-weary, middle-aged cynic, I realize that there are Catch 22s at work around me all the time.

For example:

1) You have to keep consuming to keep the economy alive. But if you keep consuming you won't have any savings. If you have no savings, this will mean that you have no disposable income to spend. And, if you have no disposable income to spend, this will seriously hurt the economy.

2) Republicans and Democrats are both responsible for the mess we are in and both parties have sold out to special interests. We should, therefore, vote for politicians running on some other party line to break up the monopoly that these parties have on the political process. But, if you "waste" your vote on a third-party candidate, you are all but ensuring that a candidate you really hate--who by coincidence will either be a Republican or a Democrat--is certain to get elected.

3) It is wrong for the Chinese to adopt a way of life that will cause harm to the planet. But the Chinese are simply adopting the American way of life that we continually argue should be the norm for every country. So every country should do what we do, but, if it did, the planet would die.

4) Of course, the members of Occupy Wall Street have the right to protest. This is America, after all, and Americans are guaranteed the right to freedom of speech and assembly by the United States Constitution. However, if protests are effective, then they create a public nuisance, and therefore must be stopped at all costs.

5) If faculty member X would just stop criticizing the administration and do his own thing, he would no longer be the object of retaliation. But, if faculty member X stops criticizing the administration and does his own thing, he can't be living up to his contractual obligations as a faculty member, and, therefore, has to be "corrected" (i.e., retaliated against)....Ok, this one is a bit personal, but it does seem to fit the theme, doesn't it?

What Joseph Heller understood is that capricious autocrats don't simply want compliance from those they seek to control. They have to break their wills as well. And the best way to do this is to increasingly remove any sort of freedom that individuals have -- especially the freedom to protest or dissent. If no matter what a person does the are going to suffer for it, eventually you have a situation in which people become so neurotic and insecure that simply in order to survive they turn into mindless cogs in the machinery of the bureaucracies in which they serve.

I've always known that Catch 22 was a wonderfully written novel, but only now do I grasp that it also provides a template for understanding the human condition in the 21st century. If you haven't read this book, I'd urge you to pick it up immediately. It may not help you to escape from the Catch 22s at work in your own life, but it will definitely make you realize that to be considered insane in a totally insane world is actually quite an amazing achievement.

The University as Corporation

If you took a stroll through the small Catholic college where I have been working for the past 16 years, you probably wouldn’t guess that what is going on here is indicative of a very disturbing trend in higher education—the relentless corporatization of American education. As you walked through our campus, you’d probably think to yourself that surely Catholic colleges like this at least must be immune to the pressures that other colleges face to compete as business entities, pursuing the ever dwindling numbers of students who can afford to pay their bloated tuitions.

But you’d be wrong.

My college, like most other colleges in the United States, has bought into the mistaken notion that the students at our institution are customers whose whims must be catered to at every turn and that the faculty are troublesome laborers who really don’t know what’s best for the students (but who are arrogant enough to presume that they do). The trend towards corporatization has been going on for some time now in our country, but never has it been so intense as it is right now. The economic crisis that has hit the world, and is beginning to impact higher education, has provided college administrators with all the justification they need to run their institutions according to business models that ultimately will do little more than make college education in this country even less effective than it already is.

This corporate approach to higher education plays out in practical terms in the daily life of the academy in a number of key ways:

1) Since the academy needs to ensure ever increasing enrollment numbers, it promotes only those programs that are marketable. Unfortunately, programs like philosophy, art, theology, sociology, history, and most other liberal arts disciplines don’t fit the idea of what a marketable discipline is and so basically these programs are left to die like unwanted step-children. They are drained of funds, marginalized in the academy, and generally treated as burdens, rather than as assets.

Just to give you some idea of just how unimportant the liberal arts are considered these days, a colleague told me recently that at his institution (No names, please…Let’s just say that it’s a very tidy Catholic College in Rockville Centre) the Director of the Library made a decision to cull the philosophy section of books that she deemed uninteresting or irrelevant to make room for more important materials. She didn’t consult the members of that department or ask for their input in any way. She just had one of her employees—a staff member who knows absolutely nothing about the discipline—chuck any boring old philosophy books that he thought should go. Since he apparently thought that all philosophy books were boring, he gleefully tossed boxes of books in the most capricious manner possible (For some reason, he seemed to have it in for poor Emmanuel Kant). On the positive side, at least there was more room for more “relevant” materials for students.

2) Since the students are the customers, their interests—however ill-defined these might be—drive the curriculum. In the old days, when getting a college degree actually meant something, faculty determined what general education courses were necessary in order to produce graduates who could read and write at fairly high levels and who had some degree of cultural literacy and critical thinking abilities. In practice, this meant that students at most reputable colleges and universities in the United States were required to take healthy doses of literature, art, philosophy, history, and the like. And the result was that we produced the “greatest generation” of Americans—those men and women who went to college in the 1940s-1960s and who made the United States the economic envy of the entire world.

Today general education requirements are determined by college administrators, many of whom know very little about real pedagogy, because they are so far removed from the classroom, and who are motivated solely by what will get students to attend their institution. Since most students want to (1) graduate as quickly as possible, (2) take courses only in their major area of interest, and (3) have little use for—or at least think they have little use for—classes in the humanities, there is pressure placed upon administrators to prune their general education requirements down as far as possible to try to attract these students.

Even when they are allowed to exist, humanities programs often become service programs for more “marketable” professional programs. So instead of taking a class in Shakespeare or Chaucer, students take more “practical” liberal arts classes like “Writing for Business” or “The Literature of Healing” or “Children’s Literature for the Teaching Profession.” In effect, what this means is that American college students are no longer receiving liberal arts educations at all; rather, they are receiving the shallowest kind of vocational training imaginable. And this kind of training—despite what college students themselves might believe—won’t serve graduates well when they get out into the real world and discover that they are really not all that marketable in their chosen field and ill-prepared to do anything else.

3) Since faculty are basically treated as laborers, they must be controlled by management and prevented as much as possible from “corrupting” the rest of the academy with their foolishly naïve ideas about education. Faculty are therefore left out of discussions about the mission and direction of their intuitions, and are paid lip-service when it comes to curriculum issues. What administrators do—and I’ve seen this at work in far too many institutions—is magnanimously ask faculty for their input on vital matters, and then proceed to do exactly what they planned to do anyway. “Well, we did consult with the faculty,” these paragons of democracy will often reply when confronted by angry faculty. “What more could they possibly want from us?”

College and university administrators are also trying to kill off tenure—an important, but misunderstood tool in maintaining the integrity of higher education. I’m sad to say it, but my own college seems determined to lead the rest of Long Island’s colleges in attempting to institute post-tenure review policies that ultimately will destroy real academic freedom. You may not realize this, but tenured faculty members are usually the only employees at a college who can argue with senior administrators about the direction the institution is taking. If tenured faculty, however, have to worry about being put on an administrative hit list—and, believe it or not, these do exist at many colleges and universities—then there will be no one left who will have the courage to argue with senior administrators about policies that might ultimately harm students or diminish the quality of classroom instruction.

So what’s the solution to this problem, you might be wondering? If this really is the inevitable trend in higher education in the United States, what hope do any of us have to save our colleges and universities?

Occupy Wall Street presents one model, and, in fact, college-aged students are playing a leading roll in this movement. You see, what Occupy Wall Street shows us is that corporate institutions really only respond to conflict and tension. You can make all the speeches you want and write all the newspaper editorials your heart desires, but this will not make a corporation change its practices one iota. It’s only when the bottom line of a corporate entity is threatened—or when it receives such bad press that its bottom line might be threatened—that corporations like Exxon or Walmart eventually are forced to do the right thing. The same is true with colleges and universities. The corporate mentality that drives these institutions will only begin to change when the real stakeholders at these institutions—and this basically means students and faculty—apply so much pressure that the administrative bureaucrats who run them are forced to change course.

This natural alliance between students and faculty to reclaim higher education won’t happen any time soon, but it will inevitably happen. Students are becoming more and more disgruntled by the high costs of higher education (see my previous post on this subject) and their inability to find decent-paying work after graduation. At the same time, many college instructors are becoming increasingly embittered by how marginalized they’ve become in recent years in participating in decision-making and shared-governance at their institutions. Eventually, students and faculty will come to see that they need each other to achieve their mutual goals and will be forced to work together in ways that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s.

When this happens, the direction of higher education in this country will change, and change, I believe, for the better. Until then, the corporate model of higher education will prevail throughout the United States, and generations of college graduates will be forced to pay the price for our negligence.

Occupy Wall Street Forum

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011, the Molloy College Center for Social and Ethical Concerns, along with the Departments of Business and Philosophy, hosted a forum on Occupy Wall Street. The event was attended by several hundred students, faculty, and members of the larger community. I'm happy to say that the debate that occurred that night was spirited and engaging, while at the same time extremely civil. To me, this proves that you we can discuss the issues that drive the Occupy Wall Street movement without resorting to simplistic platitudes or nasty name-calling.

As part of the forum, I showed the film, "Why We Protest: Voices from Occupy Wall Street." The film was shot over several weeks in Zuccotti Park and profiles college-aged protesters in an attempt to discern what drove them to become part of this movement. The film captures a snapshot in time that no longer exists now that Zuccotti park has been "sanitized" by the City of New York. Still, I think that what the film shows, more than anything else, is the commitment and tenacity of the young protesters who are at the forefront of this moment.

Occupy Wall Street: A Business Perspective

Read Christopher Salute's Post

It wouldn't take long for anyone reading my faculty blog to realize that my views tend to be somewhat liberal when it comes to economic issues (to say the least!). But I don't ever want it to be thought that I don't appreciate the intelligent opinions of people whose perspectives are markedly different from my own.

I also think that what the American public needs now more than ever is an honest exchange of ideas about the future of our country. So all thoughtful positions should be explored, discussed, and debated--and this is particularly true, I think, of positions that one doesn't necessarily agree with or may even find personally offensive.

Christopher Salute of the Molloy College Division of Business has written a blog post about Occupy Wall Street that deserves to be read precisely because it presents an intelligent perspective on the movement that offers some legitimate criticism. I don't necessarily agree with everything he says in his post, but I know that, if we sat down together to discuss the issues he raises, we could have a civil discussion that might actually lead to greater understanding of these issues on both our parts.

So read his post; comment on it, critique it, praise it...whatever you like. Just take the time to educate yourself on the important issues of the day.

And that, after all, is what being an informed citizen is really all about.

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Join us at Molloy College on Wednesday, November 16th for "Occupy Wall Street: The Meaning, The Movement, The Controversy."