Category: Education

A notable excerpt from a recent interview with Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason, about his new book The Case Against Education over at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

[Education] needs to be either useful or enjoyable. And for most students, these subjects are neither, unfortunately. There is an enormous gap between the education that people receive and what they actually use in most of the jobs they have. I mean, there may be some small amount that they’re able to glean from it. But most of the stuff, right after the final exam, they’ll never need to know again. And if these are required classes that the student was not interested in, and they just took those classes to get the diploma, then that seems wasteful from almost any point of view.

Reading against the backdrop of my own (granted, idealistic and humane) view of university education, I find this passage to be a pretty cynical take on undergraduate learning—one driven by mere preparation for a particular job, characterized by acquisition of a fleeting collection of facts and not by cultivation of assiduous, liberal habits. The interview even veers into callous psychologizing: “Most kids are philistines—they are that way deep in their souls.” Yikes.

I could lay out my own arguments against weaponizing student boredom for the elimination of arts and humanities requirements, but in lieu of my own prose, I’ll simply turn to the closing paragraphs of Flannery O’Connor’s “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade,” an essay published in Mystery and Manners:

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

I won’t deny that there are real problems in higher education, including required classes that “students typically … come to view as impositions to “get out of the way”” and “the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the “practical” enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy.” The impulse to calibrate a curriculum around what students “actually use in most of the jobs they have” seems misguided, as does a case against education grounded in eighteen-year-old antipathies. Our task isn’t to consult these antipathies; it’s to reform them.

The bulk of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, as it appears on the shelf, consists of articles about Latin words themselves: an entry for nam, another for ponere, and so forth. In addition to these volumes that chronicle Latin’s many words, the Thesaurus also publishes an Index, a reference work for the various abbreviations used in Thesaurus articles and (more importantly) for the editions and sources of texts cited in the dictionary. As the preface to the Index explains:

The Index should enable every user of the Thesaurus to identify and locate all passages cited. Its abbreviations have been adopted by a large number of publications in the field of ancient philology. As an added benefit, the Index offers a concise overview of nearly all available Latin texts of antiquity, from both literary and non-literary sources. It may be useful, therefore, to consult the Index even independently of the Thesaurus itself.

The first edition of the Index was published in 1904. The present on-line version is based on the revised printed edition of 1990, edited by C. G. van Leijenhorst and D. Krömer. Here newly available texts have been and will continue to be incorporated, as will changes in any of the abbreviations used in citing works (you can also download the Addenda Indici here). New editions which do not require any changes in these abbreviations will normally not be mentioned in the Index. It is assumed that the reader is aware of them.

This summer, the editors of the Thesaurus have produced an on-line version of the Index, which has the double benefit of allowing easier updates and of facilitating access to this great resource. As the text above states, the Index is indispensable for deciphering the Thesaurus, but it can also be helpful to consult if you’re just looking for, say, a reliable edition of Apuleius or a quick summary of the works of St. Ambrose.

As is the case with the Thesaurus, the Index takes some getting used to: it uses its own conventions for alphabetizing, numbering, and so forth. (You can read an in-depth explanation of these conventions at the Thesaurus website.) To help scholars excavate its information, I’ve written up some basic tips here along with an example explanation of how to read the Index’s listings for Vergil, shown in the screenshot below:

The Index presents information five columns. The first three columns provide basic data about authors and their works: the first columns gives dates (if known), the second gives the name of an author or text as written in Thesaurus articles, and the third gives alternative naming conventions (in the case of changes during the compilation of the Thesaurus). For Vergil, the first column shows his birth in the year 70 (signified by the asterisk) and his death in the year 14 (signified by the dagger/obelisk). Using the information from the second column, we might cite a line from the Aeneid as VERG. Aen. 4, 134 or one from the Georgics as VERG. georg. 3, 13. (Note: Your browser may not have rendered the author’s name in small capitals. Also, the numbers provided in the second column of the Index are the final line/paragraph/locus of that particular work — e.g., the last line of the Aeneid is 12, 952.)

For those getting into the nitty-gritty of a particular text or author, the fourth and fifth columns may be of interest. In the fourth, one finds explanations of the sources and other relevant information about the texts, for example that the eclogae of Vergil are also called the bucolica and that the fragmentary text of the epistulae ad imp. Augustum is preserved in Macrobius’ Saturnalia. And in the fifth column, one finds information about the various (and most reliable) editions.

Like the Thesaurus itself, the Index conveys lots of specialized information for several authors, including cross-references to the Beuron Vetus Latina citations and relevant translations to and from ancient Greek works. To learn more about this more technical material and to see a list of abbreviations for frequently cited editions, consult the extended “Directions for Use.” But the simplified instructions above should give you a decent grasp of the Index and help you use it as an authoritative and comprehensive reference for the available Latin texts from antiquity.

I find nearly all editorial writing about waves of unruly campus activism frustrating because even the most regrettable and objectionable episodes are ultimately isolated events. Blips on the radar of American higher education, a system that includes twenty-plus million students attending nearly five thousand degree-granting institutions. Over at Crooked Timber, Corey Robin seems to share these frustrations about essays of this genre and their limited, un-representative subjects:

I’ve tended to stay out of these debates of late, in part because they mostly don’t speak to my experience of campus free speech. Our challenge at Brooklyn College has never really been how to keep speakers off campus; it has almost always been how to get them on campus.

I’m writing some thoughts about the topic here only because one recent essay spoke directly to my own anecdotal experience as a university educator. In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald cites the Facebook protestations of Columbia students against the university’s Contemporary Civilization course as examples of the “tantrums” and “victimology complex” at the center of campus activism. Having taught four sections of this very class during my doctoral work at Columbia, I am struck by the disconnect between the vitriolic language of this virtual shouting and the unfailing civility of each and every student I ever taught in my analog, low-tech classroom. These outraged Facebook posts, in other words, in no way reflect the consistently mature, critical, intelligent discussions I witnessed among my Columbia undergraduates.

Perhaps this rift shouldn’t surprise me. It is obvious to anyone who has ever read Facebook, Twitter, or even the comments on Mac Donald’s essay that the technological ease and pseudo-anonymity of on-line writing brings out our least charitable selves. I imagine the hostility on campus catalyzed by social media is a phenomenon parallel to the technology-enabled “smug style” that pervades America’s mutually incomprehensible political parties.

Connecting the dots, Nicholas Carr explains in a recent essay at the Boston Globe how Facebook’s goal of “universal self-expression”

reinforces the idea, long prevalent in American culture, that technological progress is sufficient to ensure social progress. If we get the engineering right, our better angels will triumph. It’s a pleasant thought, but it’s a fantasy. Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures: negotiation and compromise, a renewed emphasis on civics and reasoned debate, a citizenry able to appreciate contrary perspectives. At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.

Civics and reasoned debate. Appreciating contrary perspectives. Self-examination. The well-honed, time-tested technology for effecting these outcomes is the seminar table, not the news feed.

But those who write fiery op-eds denouncing the excesses of campus culture continue to blame studious humanities seminars—rather than algorithmic feeds that reward bombast—as the engine of campus incivility. Mac Donald, with Columbia in her crosshairs, demands that professors “start defending the Enlightenment legacy of reason and civil debate.” What more, really, can we ask of the very educators who are already teaching Mill’s On Liberty, Plato’s Republic, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to over a thousand Columbia undergraduates every year? If the caustic Facebook posts she cites and my own intellectually robust classroom sessions are any indication, perhaps she should demand more defense of civil debate not from faculty but instead from Mark Zuckberburg and Jack Dorsey.