Thanks Ray,
I found myself in almost complete agreement with Mr. Sexton. I want to read
the entire essay.
I think I've seen a print version of Currents before in the library. This
is very relevant to some of the very topics discussed here.
Glenn
----- Original Message -----
From: "UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: [UC] RE: I Respectfully Decline [Was: JOIN UC NEIGHBORS FOR
CIVILIZED CONVERSATION]
KAREN ALLEN wrote:
My question is this: What is meant by "cilvilized" an "uncivilized"?
in my inbox today I found an interesting and relevant essay that may help
answer this question. it appears in this month's Currents (a journal
published by CASE, Council for Advancement and Support of Education):
THE CRISIS IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE
Can higher education help keep complexity
and nuance alive?
by John Sexton, President of New York University
it's here: http://tinyurl.com/33d27a
but since it requires membership to read, I'll paste the essay below.
since it's also long, here's an excerpt, what I think are the core ideas:
There is an urgent agenda to pursue: the genuine
incubation, preservation, and creation of knowledge, the
nurturing of a respect for complexity, nuance, and
genuine dialogue -- not only on campus, but beyond the
campus gates.
Dialogue within colleges and universities is
characterized by a commitment to engage and even invite,
through reasoned discourse, the most powerful challenges
to one's point of view. This requires attentiveness and
mutual respect, accepting what is well founded in the
criticisms offered by others, and defending one's own
position, where appropriate, against them; it is both the
offer of and the demand for argument and evidence. We
must have more than information to address our problems;
we must have the humility to understand that although we
may arrive at wise conclusions, we will never achieve
absolute certainty.
- - - - - - - -
THE CRISIS IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE
Can higher education help keep complexity and nuance alive?
by John Sexton
We are witnessing today an increasingly impoverished quality of what is
said by our political leaders in the public forum. Candidates for public
office now relentlessly employ slogans, talking points, simplistic
messages, and attack ads. Most political conversation amounts to dueling
talking points. Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they
bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted.
Let's face it: The purpose of most political speech is not to persuade but
to win, be it power, ratings, celebrity, or even cash.
By contrast, marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a
different position is a lost art. Honoring what's right in the other
side's argument seems a superfluous thing that can only cause trouble,
like an appendix. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion
cocoons that seem impervious to facts.
Yet the issues we face today must be viewed from multiple perspectives and
do not have one single definition, let alone a single resolution. How do
we provide quality health care at low cost to all citizens? What does it
take to reduce the achievement gap in education? What needs to be done to
overcome racism, sexism, homophobia? How should we treat new immigrants?
DOGMATISM RUN AMOK
As an information surplus develops in this halcyon era of Internet
communications, the frequent absence of accountability combines with an
absence of formal checks to make it possible for pseudo facts to spread
like wildfire. This presents even the intelligent and the rigorous with a
serious sorting problem. One unsurprising response to this barrage of
undifferentiated information is a kind of nihilism about knowledge that
leads almost inexorably to an equation of fact and opinion and the
reduction of argumentation to assertion.
What are these trends in our public discourse that create a wasteland of
dogmatism and bode so ill for elevated and enlightened discussion?
First, at least at the national level, political leaders often participate
in the public discourse defensively --
that is, they worry about expressing a provocative thought at the wrong
time or uttering a disastrous slip of the tongue, especially with cameras
ever present to capture the controversial statement or the gaffe. The
danger, of course, especially given the trend toward dogmatism, is that
our national political conversations will become more and more carefully
scrubbed, driven by focus-group-tested advertising campaigns.
Second, in such a context, policymakers and candidates often incline even
in private conversation toward stating positions in simplistic and extreme
terms to avoid conceding ground as they wrestle with each other for public
positioning and ultimate outcomes. When polarization becomes the rule,
participants feel little trust in each other, have less faith in the
willingness of others to listen, and constantly fear being caricatured as
weak or indecisive. The result: a lamentable decline in the willingness of
our political leaders to engage in honest, open, and probing discourse in
search of public policy solutions to the most vexing issues of the day.
Third, when the consequence of the binary choice is pure red or pure blue,
the purest (that is, the most extreme) elements of red or blue care most
intensely about its outcome -- and, in the case of victory, they wield
disproportionate power. This raises the stakes, especially for those at
the red or the blue extremes. And, of course, it creates a mutually
reinforcing interaction with the dogmatism I have described, constantly
entrenching and escalating it.
Fourth, in this high-stakes world, intense partisanship thrives, as the
relatively minor shifts in the electorate create potentially seismic
shifts in policy by virtue of the small margins between victory and
defeat. Such an environment elevates the importance of party loyalty in
the service of maintaining power, because in a bipolar nation the thought
of reds taking over from the blues, or vice versa, is seen as
apocalyptically significant. The consequent insistence on fidelity
fertilizes dogmatism. And the emphasis on party loyalty breeds the
suppression and punishment of internal dissent within the party and the
proliferation of litmus test positions as a party creed--a dead weight on
the richness, variety, and capacity of the public discourse.
HIGHER EDUCATION'S NECESSARY ROLE
Our great colleges and universities can and must be in the forefront of
reversing the trends I have described. But this is not a simple tale with
an ending in which universities play the hero. Make no mistake about it:
Precisely at this moment when research universities are needed as an
antidote to public dogmatism and to what I call a "coliseum culture," in
which audiences are fed spectacle over substance, they themselves are
increasingly threatened. As complex arguments and reasoned nuance are
devalued in favor of the simplistic and the dogmatic, the very basis of
research universities is devalued and subverted.
By their nature, research universities deal in complexity; their essence
is the testing of existing knowledge and the emergence of new knowledge
through a constant, often vigorous but respectful clash of a range of
viewpoints, sometimes differentiated from each other only by degrees. In
nurturing this process, research universities require an embrace of
pluralism, true civility in discourse, a honed cultivation of listening
skills, and a genuine willingness to change one's mind.
In this way, research universities can offer a powerful reproach to the
culture of simplistic dogmatism and caricatured thought in a model of
nuanced conversation. Our colleges and universities must extend their
characteristic internal feature, the meaningful testing of ideas, so that
it becomes an "output" that can reach into and reshape a wider civic
dialogue. And these institutions must invite the public into the process
of understanding, examining, and advancing the most complex and nuanced of
issues with an evident commitment to take seriously the iterative and
evolutionary encounter of a stated proposition with commentary and
criticism about it.
Of course, in this process, so familiar on our campuses, views are held
strongly and defended vigorously. The embrace of the contest of ideas and
tolerance of criticism does not mean a surrender of conviction. Informed
belief is fundamentally different from dogmatism, just as the search for
truth is very different from the quest for certitude. Dogmatism is deeply
rooted in its dualistic view of the world as saved/damned, right/wrong, or
red/blue -- and it claims certainty in defining the borders of these
dualistic frames. But within the university, conviction is tempered: The
discovery and development of knowledge require boldness and humility --
boldness in thinking the new thought and humility in subjecting it to
review by others.
We must however, take care to resist any tendency toward dogmatism within
the walls of our institutions. So we must insist on a pervasive, genuine,
rigorous, civil dialogue. Silencing of viewpoints cannot be tolerated, and
disciplinary dogmatism must be challenged.
Dogmatism on campus must be fought if universities are to be a model for
society. Silencing any view -- in class, on campus, or in civil
discourse -- must be shamed when it occurs, and those who seek to silence
others should be forced to defend their views in forums convened, if
necessary, especially for that purpose. Above all, we must not let our
institutions be transformed into instruments of an imposed ideology. There
is instead an urgent agenda to pursue: the genuine incubation,
preservation, and creation of knowledge, the nurturing of a respect for
complexity, nuance, and genuine dialogue -- not only on campus, but
beyond the campus gates.
Dialogue within colleges and universities is characterized by a commitment
to engage and even invite, through reasoned discourse, the most powerful
challenges to one's point of view. This requires attentiveness and mutual
respect, accepting what is well founded in the criticisms offered by
others, and defending one's own position, where appropriate, against them;
it is both the offer of and the demand for argument and evidence. We must
have more than information to address our problems; we must have the
humility to understand that although we may arrive at wise conclusions, we
will never achieve absolute certainty.
Higher education has a dual role in the civic dialogue, as a rebuke to
simple-mindedness and as a model of how things can be done differently. In
preventing the collapse of civil discourse, the university simultaneously
will safeguard itself from the concomitant effects of a society that
disregards the reflected thought, reduces the interchange of ideas to the
exchange of sound bytes or insults, and often shrinks the arena for
discussion to a constricted, two-dimensional space.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
[aka laserbeam®]
[aka ray]
SERIAL LIAR. CALL FOR RATES.
"It is very clear on this listserve who
these people are. Ray has admitted being
connected to this forger." -- Tony West
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