Martha Nussbaum reminds us of the words of Cicero:
I keep thinking of Cicero’s acerbic commentary on philosophers who refuse to serve the public realm: “Impeded by the love of learning, they abandon those whom they ought to protect.” Even worse, he accuses them of arrogant self-indulgence: “They demand the same thing kings do: to need nothing, to obey nobody, to enjoy their liberty, which they define as doing what you like.” It’s difficult not to hear that voice in one’s dreams, even if one believes, as I do, that writing itself can serve the public good.
She then introduces us to Abbott Gleason’s book Liberal Edcuation. Abbott was a scholar of Russian who left the academy to run the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center and then, after two years returned to the academy. In Liberal Education he tells his story and in the process takes some pretty hard shots at the academy. Nussbaum writes:
But why the academy? Gleason’s portrait of that life…is far from rosy. He trenchantly puts before us so much vanity, so much anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, so much disdain for the legitimate demands of students, that the reader begins to wonder why he didn’t run screaming away. He’s particularly rough—rightly—on Harvard, where both professors and students alike operated (and maybe we should use the present tense!) on an unearned assumption that they were indeed kings and that they would rule the world with their superior endowments.
And yet, there is just the delight of finding something out and teaching it to others. It’s deeply moving to see Gleason find, slowly, the subject that grabs his passions and, ultimately, sustains his life. Moving, too, to find that he connects his curiosity about Soviet history with the capacities for self-criticism and self-change that he slowly developed, and with his evident capacity for thinking critically and creatively about academic institutions. (He almost became provost while I was at Brown, but withdrew from the final group of two because of a health issue.) In the final chapter, he talks about his current struggle with Parkinson’s disease. As his body increasingly eludes his control, there is still the abiding pleasure of doing some work every day, learning just a bit more, being just a bit deeper as both thinker and person. He’s still getting a liberal education, and that, in the end, he suggests, is what life is really about.
I like what Nussbaum and Gleason have to say, but the world of academic life and public service that they talk about seem so distant from the academic world and the real life in which most of us live. Gleason criticizes Harvard from within the elite world of Harvard. Nussbaum talks about public service in terms of leaving a cushy post at the University of Chicago (or some other university) to serve the Obama administration.
I wonder just how many readers of The New Republic can relate to all of this?
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