Problematizing Higher Education

I find myself a bit at a loss this morning trying to write my first post in a long while. This is partly due to my being ‘out of the game’ for a while, but partly because my vocational shift brought with it quite a shift in the focus of my attention. It is not that my interest in religion as a subject has dissolved, but that most of my waking hours are spent thinking about not about the structures of religion, but the structures of higher education and their effect on the students operating within them.

I also find myself, for the first time, at a university which places very little value on the liberal arts & humanities. This has been an extremely strange experience for me, as I find myself surrounded by very bright people who tend think only in extremely pragmatic and black/white terms. This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, as it stands – the trouble is that they see no value in that which is non-scientific or non-empirical, or what they label condescendingly as the “subjective” rather than the “objective” (a categorical distinction which I find holds no merit and which I feel confident I will write several posts about).

What I am curious in understanding more about (and getting feedback on) is what I perceive as a giant, gaping hole in our current system of higher education. That hole is the distinction between the experiential reality of students and the “academic education” they receive at university – a distinction which I find does not hold, but which the university tends both to assume and support. [I should note that I find the entire concept of “education” to be philosophically slippery and intriguing and will probably write on that as well.]

About three weeks ago I went to a talk by the provost of my current university who said, quite explicitly, that faculty are completely oblivious to what happens in the lives of students (he was speaking specifically of their social lives) and that, in fact, they prefer it to stay that way. About a week later, a dean was addressing a group of undergraduate students, and said how wonderful it was that all facets of the university rallied behind the goal of becoming a major research institution.

Perhaps I perceive something that isn’t a problem, but most students who I have spoken with tend to disagree with both statements and, in fact, resent them being made (as do I). And in both situations, the problem seems to be the same: that when the university is structured around faculty research and money, the university ceases to be an institution of higher education and is simply another scientific commodity on the open market. To me, this is as much as issue of education, as it is an issue of social justice and civic responsibility.

To be honest, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think I am, in some sense, beginning to clarify and problematize the situation as I see it.

I will end with this. Husserl argued that one of the tasks of phenomenology is to overcome and replace the narrow definition of experience as simply the reception of empirical data – as well as to clarify all the different forms of experience. In a sense, what Husserl argued is that lived experience is much more rich and nuanced than simply looking at sensory impressions (what has been called ‘the myth of the given’) and making judgments based on them. To expand this concept in a much more Heideggerian direction: hermeneutical interpretation is not A form of life but is THE form of life. We are always already interpreting each part of our lives in relationship to itself in the continuum of our ever-present and ever-expanding history.

My university (as many are) is structured on quite dangerous and detrimental criteria regarding how and why students learn. One of those criteria is: what happens in the classroom is completely and utterly disconnected to what happens in their lives. And yet if I take any part of phenomenological hermeneutics seriously (which I do), any such distinction is destined to be false and, ultimately, damaging to students and the communities of which they are a part. This must change.