In "The Assault on American Excellence" , Anthony Kronman, the former dean of Yale Law School, argues against academia's alarming lurch towards egalitarianism and makes the case that higher education must again prioritize individual excellence in order to preserve our democratic project. RealClearBooks recently interviewed Kronman on what has gone so wrong in education and the humanities, and why, perhaps, "aristocracy" is not such a bad word.
RealClearBooks:What was your goal in writing "The Assault on American Excellence"?
Anthony Kronman: I wanted to put together and explain in one coherent package my deepening concerns about a number of different movements on American campuses that have accelerated over the last half-dozen years or so, that put the core values of liberal learning in jeopardy. That was one objective. A second was to do what I could to restore to a position of recognized value and importance to the humanities as a family of disciplines. The politicization of campus life, which is the principal subject of my book, has hit the humanities hardest, and had the most damaging affect them. If the book is a defense of anything at all it is a defense first and most significantly of the calling, the mission, the vocation of the humanities.
RCB: In the past five years, many thinkers have written on arguably illiberal trends on American campuses. Most attention has focused on how changes in higher education threaten free speech and risk damaging mental health. What do you think this picture misses? What is new about your argument?
Kronman: First, and perhaps most emphatically, the damage this does not only to the intellectual culture of our colleges and universities themselves, but to our democracy itself. One of the central points of my book is that our American democracy, which is vibrant, rambunctious, full of energy and controversy – it has been from the start – depends for its long-term health on educated citizens and leaders who possess the discipline, the tough-mindedness, the independent-mindedness that is required to take a larger view of matters and not to be swept up in the partisan passions of the moment, or carried along in a demagogic tide. We need this today as much as we ever have. And one of the principal responsibilities of our college and universities is to prepare, educate, young people for positions of active leadership in public life. And if it fails to train them in the discipline of open mindedness and tough mindedness, of the intellectual resilience which leadership in the wider political and social world requires, then higher education is failing in one of its principal responsibilities to the American order. I emphasize that in my book to connect what’s going on our campuses with the disorders in the larger society itself.
Another point that I emphasize in the book, which is the most controversial claim I make although honestly it seems to me to me pretty common sensical, is the following thought: We all accept without any hesitation the notion that excellence is a perfectly appropriate term, concept, idea when we apply it to limited, well defined activities like learning a foreign language, mastering algebra, or calculus, acquiring a basic factual knowledge of American history. These are delimited tasks and some people perform them better than others. Some people get As on their French finals, and others get Bs or Cs. I know from my own experience. You feel no awkwardness saying: “Susan is an excellent student of French or Greek”, or “Bill is a master of mathematics”. But when it comes to the larger comprehensive task of living a rich and fulfilling. curious, alive, mindful, self-reflective, self-critical life, there we balk and hesitate and say, “Gosh, who’s better at that then anyone else?” People follow their independent paths and it would be ridiculously presumptuous to say that some people are better at the work of being human than others. But if you pause just a minute and ask yourself what a liberal education is for, the classical answer has always been: it’s not just to train students in particular narrow disciplines but to educate them more broadly for life. To give them the equipment, not just knowledge but the qualities of mind and heart that they will need to live as large and energetic and fulfilling lives as they can. And I believe that old message is still a good one and without it the Humanities in particular lose one of their principal functions or responsibilities. But if you say just that of course you imply that this work of advancing in the enterprise of human living, that that work is one that some people do better at than others, they get more out of their education than others—that would be a simple and perhaps less controversial way of putting it. Some undergraduates get more out of a liberal arts education than others, what does that mean? It means they wind up with more expansive powers of observations, judgment, appreciation, reflection. This is all a little vague and I mean it to leave it vague because the idea of excellence in living doesn’t come to a single narrow point. There are lots of ways in which people can live excellent lives. There’s plenty of room for diversity here but the idea itself still has merit and content. But the egalitarian thrust of the political demands that have been made with increasing insistence on our colleges and universities in the past six or eight years are hostile to this idea which grades people according to their accomplishments not in merit but in something much more general and inclusive.
This whole idea of excellence in living—which has been at the center of the work of the Humanities for a very, very long time—that whole idea has been put under a cloud of doubt and suspicion by the egalitarian assault on education, which this book is written against.
RCB: In your book, you refer to school’s promoting this free mindedness and individual excellence as part of the “aristocratic principle” of American higher education. Why do you call it aristocratic? How is this aristocratic principle coming under attack?
Kronman: I was warned by several of my friends not to use the word, but I decided to use it for a couple of reasons. First of all, I wanted to revive a much older tradition of usage which goes all the way back to the American founding—I’ll say a word about that in just a second—and I also wanted to make my point as strongly and sharply as I could, so I will admit to having had a polemical purpose in mind in using the word.
But first, with regard to reviving an older usage. Thomas Jefferson, America’s greatest democrat or at least our founding Democrat, used the expression “aristocrat” freely and confidently in his writings about education. He always qualified it with the adjective “natural” to distinguish his notion of aristocracy from the kind that comes to mind when you think of the lord and ladies of the manor lounging around, obscenely entertaining rich visitors. He loathed that and properly so. That’s profoundly un-American. But he was just as emphatically in favor of the idea of a natural aristocracy, of virtue and cultivation, which he believed had to play a decisive role as America’s leadership class in the new democratic republic he’d helped to get launched. He believed that it was the job of education to find and train them to cultivate a natural aristocracy. I use the word to invoke Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and all the others who used the word aristocracy with no embarrassment at all. I want to draft them onto my team.
When we speak about accomplishment in a particular endeavor we use the term “expertise.” The person who acquires the skills or bodies of knowledge we say is an expert. And that implies nothing about the quality of their temperament or soul. They just happen to have an expertise. A technical facility, if you will. The word aristocrat connotes a wholeness of character or being. It refers to the overall integrity of the person and not some particular attribute or asset or skill that they possess. And it’s that excellence with respect to wholeness of character that I wanted to put it at the center of my book. For better or worse, there is no better word to convey that thought than the old-fashioned word “aristocrat” that Thomas Jefferson used for exactly that same purpose.
RCB: So how is this principle of education, and its ability to promote democracy under assault? What are the trends on campuses you see that threaten this tradition of higher education?
Kronman: I have a long chapter in my book on diversity and I take my readers back forty years to the decision in Bakke against the Regents of California, in which the Supreme Court held that the University of California could not employ explicitly race based criteria in an affirmative action program that the University of California at Davis had set up to give members of disadvantaged groups wider access to its medical school programs. What the University of California at Davis did was to set aside a certain number of spots in its entering class and say: these are for minority applicants only. And the Supreme Court said you cannot use race in that explicit way; it violates the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution. But if your goal is to create an intellectually diverse student body and you feel that you need to use race and ethnicity as one of the factors to be taken into account in composing that intellectually diverse group, well that’s ok. Just make sure that you’re not creating a quota system in a roundabout way. And every college administrator in the country who wanted to do something reasonable and responsible to repair the great historical injustice that had led to the inclusion of our campuses in significant numbers of blacks and Hispanics and others, understood that it now had to be done in a roundabout way through a program that purported to be aimed at diversification, but was really aimed at advancing the cause of racial justice in America. I wish, I’m speaking for myself now, I wish the Supreme Court in Bakke had said, fine, there is tremendous historical injustice here that needs to be remedied or repaired, and if you feel that the best way of doing that for some reasonable period of time—let it be ten years, let it be twenty years, let it be fifty years—if you need to have an affirmative action program of this kind, great. But they didn’t do that. What they did was to push the pursuit of racial justice undergrounds and to fuse it with the idea of diversity so that as a result group membership on the one hand, racial and ethnic group membership in particular, came to be fused with the idea of intellectual diversity on the other. And that imported into the academy a kind of group mindedness which encourages students and faculty to identify themselves and one another first and most importantly with their membership in one or another racial or ethnic group, and to associate the beliefs they hold and the positions they’re responsible for, for either advancing or protecting, with their group membership. That corrupts at its root the individualistic spirit of free inquiry which is indispensable to the whole of higher education, but in particular to the humanities, where students, coming from whatever backgrounds they are, ought to ask themselves: what do I, this curious, puzzled, anxious, excited, uneasy, striving, ambitious late-teenager, early young person, what do I make of my complex inheritance? Rather than being automatically funneled into a slot according to race, ethnicity, or gender.
You might say that is awfully extravagant, does that really happen? Is that the mood on our campuses today? Here’s an illustration from just last week from the Yale campus. I was reading the Yale Daily News which is our student edited newspaper, the oldest in the country. There was an opinion piece by a first-year student, a young woman who had been on the Yale campus for three or four weeks at this point. She described an experience she’d had a few days before going to a meeting at the Asian American Culture Center on campus, accompanied by a gay friend of hers—not Asian himself—who offered to accompany her on the long walk to her destination because he was going onto another meeting somewhere else that was close by. When they got there, he went in with her and sat around for a short period at least, and in her op-ed she goes on at some length about how uncomfortable it made her to have a non-Asian white guy sitting in the circle, in her circle, with a group of other Asian students. The essay was a plea to be allowed to have her own separate little space, for her and her fellow Asian American students. And I thought boy, that is so antithetical to the spirit of education and of curious open-minded friendship that students on Yale campus ought the encouraged to form and indulge—and that she would feel this way after less than a month on the campus. That this should be her default, to me that spoke volumes about a transformation of the culture in the bad way that I’m challenging in the book.
So, if my readers think I’m exaggerating, read the Yale Daily News, or any other student newspaper, to get a flavor the drift of things on our American campuses. Students are being encouraged to separate off into their small little identitarian silos and to form small insular platoons with their own programs, grievances, complaints. And I just think that’s terrible. I think it strikes at the very heart of the spirit of liberal learning which is essential to the cultivation of all those qualities of mind and soul.
RCB: Where do we go from here? Are there policy solutions, or should colleges independently alter their current direction?
Kronman: I think what we need most of all is intelligent leadership. We need for the presidents of our colleges and universities to have the nerve to defend the values of their institutions, and not to capitulate to the tide of egalitarian sentiment, which is demanding that our educational practices be reimagined and remade in the light of democratic values, which however essential they are off-campus, do not belong at the very heart of the educational enterprise itself. That’s a difficult thing for a college president or dean to say these days, but until they begin to say it, we’re going to continue to slip into a politicized campus environment which does damage to our schools and also, for the reason we were exploring earlier in the conversation, to the larger democracy, which depends upon the production of a leadership class that consists of something more than technical experts; that consists of young men and women with the breadth of vision, the largeness of soul, and the independent mindedness to lead this complicated and, at the moment, fractured country towards something resembling a greater degree of cohesiveness and productive unity in the years ahead.
