In the most recent issue, Paul Johnston has a terrific review of Nicholas Humphrey’s new book, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. In Soul Dust, Humphrey explores what scientists call the “hard problem”—how it is that the brain, with its axons and neurons and synapses, gives rise to that most seemingly immaterial of phenomena, consciousness. This is a question that has plagued biologists, philosophers, and psychologists (of which Humphrey is one) for quite some time.

Though Johnston is skeptical of several of Humphrey’s major claims, he applauds the psychologist for “drawing on sources outside the usual purview of scientific or even philosophical discussions of consciousness.” More specifically, he thanks Humphrey for including material from the humanities—the films of Woody Allen and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance—as evidence for how consciousness feels and what it means.

In light of this, here’s a short list of some other literary works that take up the hard problem of consciousness. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two book reviews in the June 7 issue of the New Republic that may be of interest to Commonweal readers. The first is “The Border Crossers,” Peter E. Gordon’s terrific and comprehensive review of John Connelly’s book From Enemy to Brother:  The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965. Connelly is a frequent Commonweal contributor, and an excerpt from his book appeared in our March 24 issue: “Nazi Racism & the Church: How Converts Showed the Way to Resist.” (Another Connelly article relevant to this book, and this review, is his 2008 piece “Reformer & Racialist: Karl Adam’s Paradoxical Legacy.”)

According to Gordon,

It is one of the central lessons of Connelly’s book that the bonds of empathy that made Nostra aetate a historical possibility are far more fragile, and less expansive, than one might care to imagine…. The history of Nostra aetate, writes Connelly, may stand as an instructive lesson on both “the sources but also the limits of solidarity.”

The book sounds fascinating; the review itself is good material for reflection. Here’s Gordon on Connelly’s exploration of the phenomenon of “border crossing” — the conversion of Jews to Christianity, and their vital role in overcoming Catholic anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism:

Although he readily acknowledged his Jewish heritage, [John] Oesterreicher insisted that his efforts to dismantle Catholicism’s tradition of anti-Jewish prejudice represented the genuinely Christian vision.

But it is the major thrust of Connelly’s book that this was not so: Christian empathy toward Jews did not spring spontaneously from Christian sources, he argues, nor did it spring from Judaism. It emerged instead only from the experience of crossing, such that the other could persist within the new self. The Church, Connelly suggests, would not have been capable of coming to this vision without the curious doubling of identity that was brought into its sacred walls from those who, by birth or by faith, would have once been considered outsiders. And if this is true, then the facts of Oesterreicher’s biography hold stronger explanatory weight than his own statements to the contrary. The transgression of borders may leave marks that even the transgressor will not care to acknowledge.

Gordon also comments insightfully on Connelly’s recourse to Scripture:

As a historian, Connelly tries as much as he can to avoid making theological statements of his own—but occasionally one catches sight of a different scholar, who seems drawn to Scripture as the moral standard by which the actions of the Church may be judged deficient. Connelly never openly acknowledges the use of this higher measure, as it would stand in conflict with the imperatives of modern historicism, for which there can be no transcendent norm. But history is only enriched when it opens itself to other modes of thought. This, too, is a kind of border-crossing, and its conflictual energies may help to explain the considerable drama of Connelly’s book.

The other review I’m recommending goes deeper into Scripture scholarship: “The Jew Who Would Be God” is Peter Schäfer’s take on Daniel Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. Schäfer (author of The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other) accuses Boyarin of too little research and too much conceit:

He does not even bother to mention the relevant literature. Instead he pretends to have invented this wheel, and attributes the discovery of the pre-Christian binitarian Jewish theology to himself.

Much careful chapter-and-verse analysis follows, which you may read for yourself. Allow me to skip ahead to one more pithy assessment from Schäfer of The Jewish Gospels:

Boyarin’s book leaves the reader irritated and sad. It has very little that is new to offer—and what appears to be new is wildly speculative and highly idiosyncratic. Even judged by its commendable intentions—to win over dogmatic defenders of the perfect uniqueness of Christianity or Judaism—it is disappointing. As the younger Talmud professor in the acclaimed Israeli movie Footnote says to his hapless student, “There are many correct and new aspects in your paper—only what is new isn’t correct and what is correct isn’t new.”

Which allows me to offer one final internal recommendation before you head off to the New Republic: Rand Richards Cooper’s review of Footnote is here.

[Please read Edward Wheeler’s fine reflection before you read this.]

Two thoughts on democracy and community. First, GK Chesterton says somewhere that tradition in the democracy of the dead. Second, the rap group De La Soul rightly proclaims, “Neighborhoods become ’hoods when people ain’t neighbors.” We can’t take democracy seriously if we don’t take tradition and community seriously. And in order to take these seriously, we also need to take history and hope seriously. Thinking about Moses is a good place to start.

Among their myriad gifts, the essays in Marilynne Robinson’s latest collection, When I was a Child I Read Books, stress the importance of stories and the importance of imagination. The stories we tell about ourselves form who we are and how we relate to others. By necessity, our stories are selective, and one reason to read is to broaden our sense of the limits of our own stories. In the West, the Biblical narrative is one of the most important stories we have for understanding who we are and how our communities have formed. And Moses, needless to say, plays a big role in the Biblical narrative. In two extraordinary essays – “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism” and “The Fate of Ideas: Moses”  – Robinson helps us understand the Pentatuch anew. “Moses (by whom I mean the ethos and spirit of the Mosaic law, however it came to be articulated) in fact does not authorize any physical punishment for crimes against property. The entire economic and social history of Christendom would have been transformed if Moses had been harkened to only in this one particular” (101). Robinson’s Moses is not the Moses of conquest or punitive laws. Her Moses is the protector of the poor. And as for the supposedly punitive and blood thirsty ancient Israelites, Robinson reminds us, “Every negative thing we know about [the Israelites in the Old Testament], every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgment. … The preserved and magnified their vision of the high holiness of God by absorbing into themselves responsibility for their sufferings, and this made them passionately self-accusatory in ways no other people would have thought of being” (111).

Such self-scrutiny is in short supply these days, alas. Read the rest of this entry »

Awhile ago, I wrote about David Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court. Stacton was an incredibly prolific and versatile author: he wrote historical fiction and poetry, Westerns and murder mysteries, even some gay pornography. In a 1963 Time article, Stacton was listed as one of the ten most promising young American writers of the time; others on the list included Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joseph Heller, and Walker Percy. Fate has not been kind to Stacton. His novels have long been out of print, and few people (including myself) have read anything beyond The Judges of the Secret Court.

Stacton fans now have reason to hope, however. Several of Stacton’s novels have now been made available through the Faber Finds imprint, which Faber & Faber has launched in the hopes of “bringing great writing back into print.” Two of Stacton’s novels–The Self-Enchanted and A Fox Inside–are now available in print-on-demand or ebook format, and more titles will appear in the coming months. (Thanks to Robert Nedelkoff for the heads up.) Faber Finds already includes hundreds of books, everything from W. H. Auden’s edited collection of Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets to H. G. Wells’s Utopian novel Men Like Gods to Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights. It’s a wonderful initiative, one that will hopefully give neglected writers like Stacton a chance to find new readers.

Marilynne Robinson is an eloquent polemicist. I nod in agreement with her prose even as I half wonder over the target of her attacks. Every essay in her new collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, asserts the mystery of divine creation and admits no place for the reductive force of modern “scientific” atheism. Amongst other things, she redefines Calvinism, offers a contrarian view of the strictures of Mosaic law, and dispels Eastern establishment condescension towards a Western upbringing. Many of her paragraphs offer sentences that might serve as “points for meditation.” My subject here is human nature, which I will define for these purposes as the difference between a world in which there is a human presence and one in which there are no creatures more like us than the apes. Marilynne Robinson, much like her narrator, Rev. John Ames, in Gilead, is a superb monologist.

Her essay, “Imagination and Community,” won me over in its first paragraph. “Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library. I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly, I wonder how many of them I ever will read. That has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.”

Here I found a declaration that confirmed in me the joy of buying and possessing books: as if in a purchase one acquired not just the substance of the book but established an intimacy with its author and its characters. Robinson is not writing about collecting or acquisitive greed, but community; in the filling of bookshelves with volumes we are expanding our connections to others. “I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.”  A little later she goes on to say: “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”

I puzzled over this quotation: “We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.” All the force of this assertion lies in “articulable” for language, she argues, is the great communal enterprise; in making articulate the imagination we build community in our lives: “the more generous scale at which the imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be.” What Robinson doesn’t work out is the relationship of the community of language users to “reality itself.” Is she asserting that we make sense of the world we perceive only in the functioning of our language? If so, this is a profound rhetorical assertion: her essays then, in welcoming us into her extended community, seek to establish a sense of reality by articulation of her vision. These essays, as they are exercises in the imagination, determinedly, are “real” refusals to reduce the human to the material. Her great novels, Housekeeping, Home, and Gilead, do this more so. To understand writing, fiction and essays both, in this way is to understand language sacramentally – an outward sign of the conferring of grace

In Gilead, John Ames reflects on his role as preacher. He says, “A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation . . . There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought – the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.” So they are, the essays in When I Was a Child I Read Books.

In Rose Tremain’s historical novel Restoration, two characters discuss the importance of background to a painting’s overall effect. Even in a portrait, where the viewer’s attention is drawn primarily towards a single central figure, background is crucial:

[the background] must flatter. More, it must lend permanence to the life of the sitter, no matter how brief his actual existence may turn out to be … a picture must be composed so that no part of it is ‘dead,’ so that, wherever the eye wanders, there is interest, whether it is in the detail on the hilt of the sword or a minutely rendered rowing boat on a distant Arcadian shore.

In discussing the relationship between foreground and background, Tremain isn’t just speaking of painting; she’s also talking about the historical novel. We read historical novels, after all, not just to experience the actual or imagined existence of their characters, but to see how these characters grow out of—and, in interesting ways, depart from—their particular historical moments. In other words, it’s not just that we have interest in the “detail on the hilt of the sword”; these details are part of the reason that we read historical novels in the first place. Hence the complaints of anachronism that have plagued the genre since the time of Walter Scott: “Jacobite hilts weren’t like that at all!”  Read the rest of this entry »

I have been rereading Anna Karenina ( the Constance Garnett translation) and had to stop over a chapter that connected a recourse of novelists and theories of mind. The scene is one in which Anna’s husband, Alexey Alexandrovitch, visits a lawyer (unnamed) to begin divorce proceedings. The lawyer is carefully described: [he] was a little, squat, bald man, with a dark, reddish beard, light-colored long eyebrows, and an overhanging brow. He was attired as though for a wedding, from his cravat to his double watch-chain and varnished boots. His face was clever and manly, but his dress was dandified and in bad taste. Now this seems indirect style, that the judgment of the last line is that of Alexey Alexandrovitch (not of the narrator’s) who is acutely aware of his exposing his own dignity to ridicule – hinted at earlier in his reluctance to have his name publicly announced in the lawyer’s reception room. Disapproval and condescension suffuse the description.

The tension, that arising from Alexey’s forced need to open his inmost grief over his wife’s infidelity to a lawyer beneath him in station, works itself out in a peculiar snapping up of moths and a telling dance of the eyes. The lawyer precedes his discussion with Alexy by surprising him with an adroit capturing of a moth: The lawyer, with a swiftness that could never have been expected of him, opened his hands, caught the moth, At the end of the interview, in the one moment we have access to the lawyer’s inner thoughts, he says to himself that he gives up catching moths, finally deciding that next winter he must have the furniture covered with velvet, like Sigonin’s. His abandonment of one sort of predatory delight is occasioned by that of another: the lawyer, we gather, anticipates the size of the fees that he will capture from having Alexy Alexandrovich in his hands, in a reversal of positions of authority. Moths seems particularly suitable images here: they threaten domestic fabric, their harm comes by expectation, the change to velvet upholstery (financed by the expected fees) will obviate the need to be vigilant.

The capture of moths brackets a technique everywhere evident in Tolstoy: the revelations of the face and eyes, that is the communication that occurs without words in conversations and this chiefly mediated through the eyes. As I was reading this, I happened to see an episode of Charlie Rose’s show that focused on the brain, in particular the psychology, neurophysiology and the genetics of autism. In the course of the discussions, the researchers gathered around Rose’s table agreed that the chief manifestation of autism is the inability of one so affected to create a mental map, a theory of mind, for those with whom they have relationships. Quite simply those with autism do not look in the eyes of another person and cannot anticipate the path or greater map along which a conversation might go. Hence they remain disconnected, isolated, not able to enter properly into dialogue.

Almost as a complete reverse of this is the technique so effectively used in this scene by Tolstoy. Consider the following excerpts:

Alexey Alexandrovitch, following the lawyer’s movements with wondering eyes . . .

Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced at his face, and saw that the shrewd, gray eyes were laughing, and seemed to know all about it already

The lawyer’s gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they were dancing with irrepressible glee, and Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that it was not simply the delight of a man who has just got a profitable job: there was triumph and joy, there was a gleam like the malignant gleam he saw in his wife’s eyes.

He let his eyes rest on Alexey Alexandrovitch’s feet, feeling that he might offend his client by the sight of his irrepressible amusement. ,

he went on, stealing a glance now and then at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face, which was growing red in patches.

“It may be obtained if you give me complete liberty of action,” said the lawyer, not answering his question. “When can I reckon on receiving information from you?” he asked, moving towards the door, his eyes and his varnished boots shining.

The force of the power struggle and the defeat of Alexey Alexandrovitch is expressed not so much in the dialogue but in the recognition of the meaning of the look or the gaze. In this the whole hierarchy of class structure, the sense of humiliation and of triumph, and the vulnerability of Alexy Alexandrovitch are revealed. The latter’s attitude towards his wife is conditioned by the eyes. He sees Ana as the lawyer sees him. The two characters have clear mental maps and theories of mind that allow them to understand each other beyond words. And then the dancing moth of domestic destruction can go on flying, and its processes work to their tragic conclusion.

I have a letter published in the June 2012 Harper’s, regarding the Elisabeth Badinter article I blogged about here a while back. I sent 700 words and they published 70. Chopping up letters is an editor’s prerogative—and I should know—so I’m not put out about that, although it would be nice if more of the published words had come directly from my letter, or if the point I was making had been preserved a bit more faithfully. Since that post of mine prompted many comments, I thought I’d share the letter in full here. It’s a rewrite of the blog post, but I think it does a better and more concise (though obviously not concise enough) job of making my point – which is not “How dare Elisabeth Badinter say mean things about breastfeeding/La Leche League!” but rather “This essay is so cheaply provocative and poorly argued that I’m surprised Harper’s published it.” (That’s why I wrote about it here at Verdicts; it’s the journalism I was criticizing.)

The letter is after the jump. A couple other observations first: mine is one of four letters published in response to Badinter’s article. The first and longest is, appropriately, from a La Leche League leader, pointing out some things Badinter got flat wrong about the organization. The fourth is from someone who thinks Badinter’s piece was “excellent” but didn’t go far enough. And the second makes half of a point I read several places, including the comments on my post, in response to the article. I say “half of a point” because the letter begins, “Badinter neglects to mention that the infant-formula industry stands to lose much of its $8 billion in global annual profits if women abandon the bottle for breast milk.” True enough. But the reason this is particularly relevant to Badinter’s piece is that—as commenter Sarah Blain noted here—“The author is an advertising billionaire, heir to and partner in Publicis, Nestlé’s advertising agency.” The letter Harper’s published did not point that out, at least not as edited. I confess to finding that slightly fishy, since they must have received at least one other letter making that connection (if women like Blain followed through on their promises), and there was no shortage of comment elsewhere on the conflict of interest behind The Conflict.

That connection did not initially strike me as something Harper’s should have felt obliged to disclose when they published the essay – there are a couple degrees of separation between Badinter and the infant-formula industry, and it’s not as though she needed that connection to motivate her to write some contrarian claptrap about mothering. The financial benefit, after all, is pretty direct: underinformed prattling about breastfeeding might sell formula, but it definitely sells books. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a relevant point. It certainly helps me understand how Badinter came to approach the subject of breastfeeding from the angle she did. (As Blain put it: “There are so many interesting things to say about mothering infants, but when Bandinter talks, all I hear is ‘buy Enfamil.’”) One of the odd things about the essay was that she wrote as if it were established that bottle-feeding is the normal way to nourish a kid, and breastfeeding was some weird thing a bunch of women invented in the ’50s to make mothering harder. Her perspective is very much that of the aggrieved formula manufacturer: “It seems to make little difference,” she sniffs, “that there is now a wide variety of formula available, that it is more and more like breast milk…” Well, it does make a difference for her argument, in that it demonstrates that even formula companies now admit that “breast is best” and that breast milk should be given priority as a matter of health, not just parenting style.

And then there was that bizarre quotation from “AlternaMoms.com.” As I wrote in my blog post, I had never heard of or seen that website when I read the essay. I did finally look it up, and it’s not exactly the Huffington Post. It is, as you might expect from the name, very low-tech and low-profile. Why would Badinter ever have found it in the first place? Perhaps it has something to do with the “I boycott Nestle. Ask me why” button featured on the homepage? (That button, by the way, leads to a broken Geocities link. Yes, Ms. Badinter, you really have your journalistic finger on the pulse of modern motherhood.)

Anyway, as I said, my letter is below (first as published, and then as written). The magazine world and the blogosphere have moved on, because Time, ever classy, is marking Mother’s Day with an even more provocative and totally clueless cover story about breastfeeding. I will send you over to my sister’s blog to read more on that, since this is really her beat. I love her suggestion for an article that might actually be worth reading: “WHY CAN’T WE GET OVER OUR BREASTFEEDING HANGUPS, WHICH ARE TRUTHFULLY FAR CREEPIER THAN BREASTFEEDING?” Word.

My letter as published in Harper’s: Read the rest of this entry »

Henning Mankell, the Swedish mystery writer, appears to have brought his dark, gifted and melancholic hero, Kurt Wallender, to a tired end. One wonders if the burden of success – and the Wallender series has been very successful – increased the desperation with which the detective in the Ystad police force approaches the solution of his last case. Mankell has, over the course of ten Wallender novels, established himself as far more than a writer of police procedurals. (His web site details his other books, his work in the theater and his social activism in Mozambique and South Africa.) His dedication and creativity appear inexhaustible, just as Wallender heads, exhausted, to something like oblivion. How does a writer continue to sustain such a success as Wallender in terms of the expectation of readers?

My reading life will suffer a real loss now that there will be no more of Kurt. The complexity of his character, developed over so many books, his unsparingly revealed weaknesses, and strengths, and the dense family web of relationships in which Wallender operates push the genre into serious fiction. Renewing his acquaintance (Almost ten years separate this Wallender title from its predecessor.) brought home just what good company Mankell provides.

The plot of The Troubled Man centers on a missing persons inquiry; Haken von Enke, who is to be the father-in-law of Wallender’s daughter, disappears. Haken has had a long, apparently distinguished naval career, and just before his disappearance confesses to Kurt, in most ambiguous terms, a fear for his life just as he is about to conclude an investigation into espionage that had occurred some twenty or more years before. The disappearance leads to the suspicious death of Haken’s wife, lengthy interviews with Haken’s former naval associates, a trip to Berlin and an interview with a former CIA operative. All this results in a deviously complex story of spying and counter-spying, one that ends in surprising – and bloody – revelations. As is every “who-done-it,” the energy of the plot comes from the procedural, the clues sorted, the interrogations made, the puzzle pieces to be fitted, but this novel is as much a meditation on mortality and life’s significance as it is about deceit and betrayal.

Wallender is troubled: he suffers from lapses of memory, from acute diabetes that sends him into shock. The great love of his life, Baiba, makes a last, surprise visit to him, announcing her own imminent death, The single assurance in these grim days appears in his granddaughter and his increasingly strong relationship with his daughter Linda. But here too, his former wife, Mona, intrudes as she collapses more and more under the weight of her addiction to alcohol. Without giving the climactic scenes away, I can say that the story’s conclusion is a decision about a life’s achievement, the accounting for what one has done and failed to do, in the time allotted.  Again, the burden of discovery and concealment falls on Wallender, who struggles, despite his successes, with the larger failure of his bodily frame.

There is a grimness in the final few pages; the valediction is an assertion of privacy, almost a warning to the reader that any more novels about Wallender would constitute a breach in confidentiality. Leave him alone, Mankell says. He refuses to offer any more to a demanding public, and he makes an assertion about the integrity of his own creation. There is in this something entirely understandable and something that points to other burdens, particularly the art of writing fiction. It appears to Mankell as a god-like power to create life, sustain it, and then, at will, end it.  These final paragraphs stamp the Wallender series and lift it to a consideration of the limits of realism and the nature of artistic creation. We are forced to ask in the largest sense, “Who done it?”

Written by the sixteen-year-old Mozart with a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, “Il sogno di Scipione” was performed by the Gotham Chamber Opera at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, April 11-21. I caught the next to the last performance. According to the conductor’s notes (Neal Goren), “The vocal writing is far more virtuosic than in any of Mozart’s other work, even such throat-twisters as Mitridate, which was composed one year earlier. Two of the tenor roles and all three soprano roles call for effortless high C’s and relentless vocal agility. I can think of no other opera in the entire repertory with such uncompromising technical requirements.” That didn’t stop the director (Christopher Alden) from putting his very young singers through all sorts of acrobatic stage business as they sang their endless da capo arias, quite beautifully too. One gorgeous soprano (Marie-Eve Munger) changed her entire outfit down to bra and panties six or seven times during one of her numbers. The only moment of rest in the opera was during the overture. From the start you see a handsome, young dude sleeping (Michele Angelini, our Scipio). Then you realize there’s a beautiful woman in bed with him. Toward the end of the overture you realize there’s a second woman in the bed. They’re the goddesses of Fortune and Constancy come to woo Scipio. While Fortuna sang her florid clothes-changing aria, Constanza (Susannah Biller) silently did a whole yoga routine (very creditably!) and Scipio humped a pillow. One of the tenors (Chad A. Johnson) played a one-legged war hero, the ghost of Scipio’s ancestor, Scipio Africanus, I imagine. All the time he was flopping around the stage (even with only one leg he was required to do a heck of a lot of “action”) I couldn’t figure out how he/they did it. It was only at the curtain call that I realized that he really is one-legged! Or was it all merely un sogno or via some high-tech whizardry?

Mozart wrote the opera in 1771 for the ordination to priesthood of his patron, Sigismond, Count Schrattenbach, but poor Siggie died before he could be ordained. Mozart then offered it for the installation of Archbishop Colloredo, but it apparently wasn’t accepted. (Imagine such entertainment today, let’s say, for the celebration of Cardinal Dolan’s elevation to the College of Cardinals.) The world premiere of “Il sogno di Scipione” was in Salzburg in — get this — 1979! It was wonderful to see so many young artists so accomplished as singers and actors. Ironic when the operatic audience here and elsewhere is generally so old. Is that supposed to cheer us up or fill us with envy?

Higher education is much in the news these days. The New Yorker has an article about Stanford’s relationship with Silicon Valley. Frank Bruni worries about philosophy majors finding jobs, and Charles Morris worries that college is becoming a luxury item. In the latest Commonweal, Denis O’Brien reviews Andrew Delbanco’s latest book. (Delbanco’s book was on my to-read list before I read O’Brien’s review, and the review only made me want to read the book more.)

Part of our problem in talking about “college” is that it has become an umbrella term for a vast array of post-secondary education. A student studying information technology at a land grant Midwestern state university is in college, as is a student studying art history at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Students enrolled in two-year associate degree programs to become physical therapy assistants are in college, as are students enrolled in four-year business degree programs at Catholic universities in the northeast. Colleges are public and private, residential and commuter, sectarian or non-sectarian, for-profit and not-for-profit. I think this diversity is a great asset, and it makes American higher education unique in the world. Yet we should be clear students who attend these various schools are not looking for the same thing in their “college experience.”

Of the four different educational scenarios I’ve just presented, my guess is that the most difficult one to justify is the student who chooses to study art history at a small liberal arts college. Indeed, if your reason for attending college is to get a “good job” afterwards, spending a significant chunk of your college education studying the Parthenon frieze or the competition for the doors of the Florentine baptistry or the shift from abstract expressionism to pop might seem like a waste of time and money. Given the high cost of college, people need good reasons for choosing a broad liberal arts education. (And here, when I say “broad liberal arts education,” I mean studying English literature or classics or biology or mathematics or history, subjects that are not direct training for a career.)

The best justification I’ve read for such a choice comes from Mark William Roche’s book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Read the rest of this entry »