higher education

At first blush, Jose Luis Vilson’s book does not seem to fit well in a discussion of theological graduate education. After all, he is a middle school math teacher in New York City, concerned with the Common Core State Standard and bulletin boards (112-14). As the subtitle suggests, the book is narrative, a conglomeration of stories divided into three parts and chapters with titles that evoke emotion but do not lend themselves to a chronological flow or pattern. Given Vilson’s predilection for poetry and music, this is both understandable and welcome. The stories within each part jump around chronologically, but the three parts seem to revolve around Vilson’ own educational journey, his journey as an educator, and his journey as an educational activist. What comes through in each section is Vilson’s passion for education done well and his story-telling skills, both of which make the book a compelling read.

As a sixty-something-year-old white guy who grew up in the South, our narratives, while similar at points, diverge greatly. Vilson’s stories of the tensions in his Dominican-Haitian upbringing, his frustration on what to do with the rat in the bathtub, and his encounter with a racist English teacher in high school fill in gaps in my own story. But he also challenges my story and makes me uncomfortable. I was bothered when he called George Zimmerman a child murderer (149), not because I thought Zimmerman was innocent but because I do not usually think of seventeen-year-olds as children. I do not enjoy being made to feel uncomfortable, but I need to be challenged. Other references to New York City politics, secondary school board issues, and rap music sent me to Google and to Vilson’s blogs and speeches.

Yet many of the secondary-education issues Vilson raises resonate in graduate theological education as well. How do we assess student achievement? In the midst of our clamor for accountability, how do we keep our focus on students? What is the role of technology in the classroom? Does teacher presence really matter?

The most compelling issues raised in the book are highlighted in the subtitle: race, class, and education. In a field where old white guys dominate (graduate theological education), how do we open and maintain a dialogue on the issues of race and class? Do we wait for people of color to broach the subject, or as Vilson’s white friend Chris suggests, do we who are white speak up so people of color do not have to (148)? The answer is obvious.

The book incorporates several events in Vilson’s life that are preserved digitally. I suggest reading “How to Drop the Mic” (157-168) and then watching Vilson’s speech at the Save Our Schools March, or reading the following chapter on teacher voice and then watching Vilson’s TED talk (both can be accessed at https://thejosevilson.com/).

Vilson’s parting words challenge me: “If you can’t teach, then do. Something else is preferable. But if you can’t do, then don’t. As a teacher, I’m in charge of believing you can – so do. If you plan to do, then do this. Go hard or go home” (215).

Steel includes in this work both recommendations and critiques that follow from his conviction that educators can and should take up the study of philosophy in their classrooms, which in this discussion is K-12. Using a foundation of classical Greek philosophy, the author takes up five themes in the book: (1) a survey of current ideas about how the pursuit of wisdom is or is not part of education; (2) a retrieval of ancient and medieval ideas of wisdom and the search for wisdom; (3) a critical examination of educational trends and practices and the barriers they create to the pursuit of wisdom; (4) use of ancient and medieval thought to assess current educational movements that aspire to promote wisdom; (5) a survey of movements understood as contemplative pedagogies and some cautions about their limitations. Finally, he indicates his own proposal for this project.

Steel critiques current educational practice along lines that many readers will find familiar: emphasis on assessment, stress on global competition, and pursuit of technological expertise without concern for ultimate ends. All of these, he argues, have not only been mistaken for the ideal goals of education, they militate against the real goal – the pursuit of wisdom. Steel prescribes these as essential for the attainment of wisdom: schole (leisure) leading to theoria (seeing) the ultimate good through the experience of metaxy (an experience of tension as one reaches from ignorance toward the Supreme Good, ultimate truth, or being as such). Taking from Plato the movement of ascent and descent as essential to reaching toward wisdom, he emphasizes the necessity of “dying to self and all that is not wisdom” (4). Steel is thorough in explaining his viewpoint in relationship to a host of educational greats: Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Pieper, and Bloom, to name but a few.

The author states clearly that the pursuit of wisdom in a classroom today is likely to create serious negative pushback from the whole educational establishment. He believes this because he is convinced that only awareness of one’s ignorance makes wisdom possible. Such an experience of ignorance, he argues, is sure to be deeply uncomfortable and even intolerable for today’s students who are trained to attain the “right” answer above all. Such a practice is also contrary, he finds, to the mandate given teachers to produce students who can pass the required assessments. For the most part Steel leaves it to the reader to navigate a second potential problem, the fact that an educational institution may not necessarily agree that assisting students to reach toward the Supreme Good (or some other ultimate) is part of their educational mandate – or is even permissible.

Steel acknowledges that philosophical programs and contemplative pedagogical movements that aspire to facilitate student encounters with wisdom are present. Many of these, he argues, do not reach their essential goal because they are used as a means to some end other than wisdom: health, relaxation, or happiness, for example. According to Steel, “contemplative activity is not a tool for happiness; it is happiness, for it is the highest activity of the best part of the soul in relation to its most sublime object in the Supreme Good” (259). His own programmatic proposal is extremely brief as a proportion of this substantial book and chiefly cites his own experience in teaching Greek philosophy to high school students and using more modern texts such as Walden to encourage a contemplative experience of the world.

This volume will be appreciated by those interested in the intensive application of classic Greek philosophy to current educational practice and to a critique of current contemplative pedagogical movements.

David Watson wades deeply into the various discourses on the state of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK (he also examines HEIs in the US and elsewhere), their problems and their prospects, to examine what HEIs say that they do for and to their most important members, award-seeking students. This self-critical look at what he calls “my trade” is for Watson a matter of the “question of conscience” or higher education’s role in shaping students’ moral and civic character.

This relatively short book consists of eight dense chapters on Watson’s evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the best research literature on what higher education seeks to do through at least five lenses: the “evolutionary” stages of modern university history; the sense participants and observers try to make of them in terms of institutional narratives; the types of “capital” generated by their activities; the chosen pedagogical approaches; and a declared set of “purposes” or intended personal transformations.

Titled, “What Does Higher Education Do? A Historical and Philosophical Overview,” the first chapter uses geography as a metaphor to demonstrate that the claims made by the modern universities (post-thirteenth-century) for their existence are previously laid geographical layers, some closer to the surface than others (1). Watson explores one of the earliest layers of university purposes: “that of maintaining, enhancing, and subjecting to supportive criticism the goal of ethical – especially doctrinal instruction” in Chapter 2 where the book gets its title (22). This chapter is arguably the one most relevant for teaching theology and religion. He traces how the university went from being a place for teaching doctrinal allegiances to being a secular place for personal and collective virtue. With the exception of some seminaries, HEIs today have largely eschewed doctrinal allegiances for a more inclusive ethos that embraces those from many faiths or no faiths at all. This does not mean that universities have become completely secular; to the contrary, the former university Chaplain has now become the Student Life Officer (26-27).

Watson argues that “wariness about moral education” was replaced with a concern that there had been a decline in ethical behavior in business, professional, and political life (32). Therefore, HEIs evolved to teaching for “character.” The remaining chapters explore the other claims made by HEIs for what they do, including preparing students for vocation (43), rounded or “soft” citizenship (58), capability, and lifelong learning (65). The final chapter, “Higher Education and Personal Responsibility,” is Watson’s theory for what higher education should do: prepare students to exercise personal judgment in difficult circumstances, or “cultivate humanity” (100, 108). If taking this book to heart, it would bode well for those faculty members in theological and religious studies in the liberal arts to look critically at what our institutions exist to do and how we participate in that mission.

Henry Giroux’s well-researched Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education is an unapologetic reminder of what is at stake for institutions of higher education and the academy: “Privatization, commodification, militarization, and deregulation are the new guiding categories through which schools, teachers, pedagogy, and students are defined” (36). Giroux reminds us that education is not politically neutral and that neoliberal ideas are driving how and what professors are allowed to teach. According to Giroux, “This pedagogy of market-driven illiteracy has eviscerated the notion of freedom, turning it largely into the desire to consume and invest exclusively in relationships that serve only one’s individual interests. Losing one’s individuality is now tantamount to losing one’s ability to consume. . . Shallow consumerism coupled with an indifference to the needs and suffering of others has produced a politics of disengagement and a culture of moral irresponsibility”(6). Giroux’s concern is that institutions of higher education have moved away from being places of intellectual and civic development and instead have become market-driven businesses. Students and professors are no longer allowed to engage in the art of democracy and ideas, rather students have come to be seen as consumers and professors as cheap labor. According to Giroux, “What is particularly troubling in US society is the absence of the vital formative cultures necessary to construct questioning persons who are capable of seeing through the consumer come-ons, who can dissent and act collectively in an increasingly imperiled democracy” (70).

This book should be read by anyone dedicated to higher education, but it is especially useful for those teaching in the humanities. Many faculty in the humanities have been forced to sell themselves and their programs in business language to deans and presidents who are under constant stress to find funding, some going as far as finding corporate or wealthy sponsors to fund departments. In such an environment, disciplines such as philosophy, religious studies, and theological studies can be seen as irrelevant and unnecessary. Giroux’s response is to develop critical pedagogies and to encourage faculty to reclaim their roles as public intellectuals. “[A]cademics have an ethical and pedagogical responsibility not only to unsettle and oppose all orthodoxies, to make problematic the commonsense assumptions that often shape students’ lives and their understanding of the world, but also to energize them to come to terms with their own power as individual and social agents” (99). Faculty must model this behavior in their teaching and intellectual endeavors and become “border-crossers”(101). For those teaching in religion, theology, and philosophy, Giroux’s book is important because contemporary higher education classes are where students ask critical questions. Many of their questions are moral and ethical and have political implications. Contemporary humanities classrooms may be one of the only places on campus where students are not told what to memorize or the regulations needed to become better pre-professionals. Giroux forces teachers to think about how they teach and why they teach. For him, teachers have the responsibility to ask students to think and act differently for shaping the world. Giroux’s hope is that teachers will raise up a generation of democratically-minded and justice-oriented citizens.

Henry Giroux’s Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education is a welcome resource for faculty facing retrenchment, a loss of democratic value-based curricula, or who want to better understand how policies, politics, and the economy are connected to the future of higher education. The author provides examples of how faculty and students have responded to neoliberalism and a corporate model of higher education.

Women involved or interested in leadership in higher education will find this book to be at turns inspiring and somewhat painful to read. Any woman who has held a position of leadership likely shares similar stories of personal sacrifice and institutional prejudice; indeed, many of the stories in this book paint a picture of academia as hostile, male territory. Tanya Fitzgerald manages to add a twist to this tale in the way she weaves together stories from her ethnographic research with senior women leaders in universities in Australia and New Zealand. Her work focuses primarily on the trials and triumphs of women as they extend themselves mentally, emotionally, and physically in their jobs, but the book manages to offer a sense of hope in part because the author chooses to frame her analysis around the experiences of Indigenous women. This inclusion and focus gives the book leverage in a field flooded with similar studies. Fitzgerald uses the experiences of these women to show that women’s encounters with academic institutions are best described as “continuous struggle and compromise” (25) that nevertheless opens the way for new ways of conceiving of leadership in higher education.

Fitzgerald teases out the complexities of the tasks facing women who oversee diverse staff, who are expected to “think big” while handling minutia, and who serve as mentors for women wanting to break into the leadership roles. Women’s lives as academic leaders is, in one word, “messy.” Fitzgerald is also appropriately attentive to disciplinary context and institutional climate, and her subjects come across as real individuals in real circumstances. Her overall goal is to push up against the myths that keep women as institutional housekeepers or otherwise limit their potential as leaders (22) and she manages to do that, albeit in a limited and incomplete way that fits with the stories she includes. She is careful not to advance any “grand narrative,” preferring instead to celebrate the individuality of her subjects as they improvise their lives.

The myths being shattered here include the myth of opportunity (which assumes that gender equality is established) and the myth of what leadership ought to look like and how women ought to behave (17). Overall, Fitzgerald paints a picture of academia as a land alien to women and women’s ways of being, so that women who find themselves in position to lead often have to adjust to the rules or courageously make up new rules. Fitzgerald highlights the precarious positions held by women in leadership roles, and she ends on a point of hope that seems a bit of a stretch based on her evidence. Nevertheless, I would recommend this study to any woman (or man) in leadership, either in higher education or the clergy. Although Women Leaders in Higher Education does not focus much on teaching, many women in higher education will find themselves faced with the question of whether to move into administration. This book will shed light on that personal and professional choice.