Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Friday, November 14, 2014

The Human in University Education

by Paul A. Bové

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS - November 13th, 2014

LET ME BEGIN by explaining the aim of my title. I assume that two of the most important and closely tied purposes of a research university are the production and reproduction of knowledge, which goes hand in hand with the training of a new generation of scholars, researchers, and artists. We might say that these purposes rest on other more fundamental values, or we might say that they rest upon the claim that knowledge in and of itself is the highest value. Universities might serve truth aspirations, or social and political institutions, or aim to provide the practical wisdom needed to organize a sustainable civilization — or all.
Often, universities (and when I say universities, I mean research universities) seem to have only two objects of study: the natural world, and the human ­— with the latter often placed within the natural world. Chemistry studies carbon, for example, and enables invention, which remakes nature — think plastics or graphene. Psychiatry studies what its modern founder called the soul (psychē) — what contemporary practitioners call “mental behaviors.” Art historians study the technical details of visual objects and their creative processes, sometimes hoping to explain the nature of beauty, the place of art in human life processes, and/or the orders of culture. Of course, I could mention many other fields of study and research, some of which would intensify the divide between human and nature (e.g., quantum gravity) while others would close the gap (e.g., nanotechnology in medicine.) Things seem to have changed little since 1956, when C. P. Snow first made his general point about the existence of two cultures, one scientific and one humanistic. According to Snow, members of the science tribe could not speak to members of the literary tribe, and they did not share the same worldview. Snow’s claim was always overstated; and newer sciences that merge the human and the hard sciences — such as genetics and “digital humanities” — make it impossible to take what Snow said too literally.

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