Liberal arts, two anecdotes

Later that day a team of workers in cargo pants and black T-shirts began to install yet another sculpture in the center of the quad: this one was a precarious stack of wooden chairs that interlocked legs in an intricate pattern. What was going on here? 

It turned out they were props. It was all for a movie.

Unbeknownst to any of us (at least my colleagues and students who wandered around these new sculptures, angry or bemused), a scene for 22 Jump Street was being filmed on our campus, and they were using our sculpture garden as a typical college setting. Only it wasn?t typical enough?there weren?t adequate sculptures for it to really look like a college quad. And apparently one of these simulacral sculptures (the rumors were beginning to circulate), would be destroyed in the making of this scene. (Car chase, wreck.) In order to make a college, you?ve got to break some art.

The next morning when I took my Literature & Environment students outside for class, we noticed that all the maroon Loyola signs had been concealed, and industrial-blue signage that read Metropolitan City State College was displayed liberally throughout the quad. We were now sitting in a newly renamed Meditation Sculpture Garden (stressed by the subtitle ?Quiet Zone?). It was a surreal class that morning, discussing the Oxford English Dictionary?s definition of ?wilderness? while stern grips and sweaty set assistants bustled around us, clamping things down and positioning hidden clusters of spotlights, making our college campus into a more dazzlingly authentic looking place for higher learning. Jean Baudrillard eat your heart out.

Having recently made it successfully through the tenure application process at my university, I decided to quip on twitter that I had been promoted to associate professor of English at Metropolitan City State College. And my friends and followers favorited, retweeted, and congratulated me?in earnest or ironically, no way to tell. Twitter, like so much of the Internet, can be impressively tone deaf.

2.

Last weekend I listened to a Diane Rehm Show podcast called "Worries About the Future of Liberal Arts Colleges." Among some of the more insightful examples and expected axioms offered throughout the program, I was struck the absence of a certain phrase: critical thinking. This phrase has been used to the point of exhaustion to describe something inestimable about liberal arts education, and has become something of a placeholder to describe without describing what college is good for.

Critical thinking: it's something ubiquitous on syllabi (especially for first-year courses) as a learning objective or assessable outcome, but something equally difficult to pin down or articulate with any exactitude. What is critical thinking? Well, you know it when you see it?or when you do it. Or maybe you recognize when it isn't happening, because you notice that everyone is acting like robots (like docile robots, anyway). Whatever it is or is supposed to be, it's a phrase that usually gives me the creeps, because when I hear it or see it, it's often in the service of something mandatory, obligatory, required?it's a rhetorical tic that becomes ritualized and normalized, and is often uttered in the context of drawn-out committee meetings to nodding faculty. In short, the phrase often comes to mean the opposite of something produced by sudden break, rupture, or flash of insight (critical is etymologically related to crisis). 

But so the point is that "critical thinking" as a phrase often gets trotted out in rote ways, as a vague aim of a certain kind of pedagogy. If you put someone on the spot and ask what it really is, you will likely induce some incredible facial expressions that veer between puzzlement and horror, depending on the person. "You know, it's like, thinking critically about things!" Needless to say, this sort of response doesn't win accolades in terms of definitional clarity.

Still, it was odd to suddenly not hear this phrase (or at least, not as a recurring trope) on a radio program focusing on the value of liberal arts education. It was as if all the prior repetitions and insistences had set it (i.e., "critical thinking") up for all too easy dismissal. The guests on the show discussed liberal arts in terms of creating "well rounded" subjects individuals, but not one of them pressed the point that education might actually involve developing a critical stance toward the world. (Save maybe Catharine Bond Hill of Vassar, who kept trying to steer the conversation back to economics.) Because that's really what critical thinking is, isn't it? It's being able to have?and hone, and articulate?a contrary attitude toward things in society or culture that seem totally fucked up to you but toward which most people shrug and go about their business.

Critical thinking is a comportment toward the world as it is, with a mind to changing it for the better. Isn't this what we hope for out of college education, at its best? That students will, in learning about the world from a range of disciplinary perspectives, actually want to change it for the better? Because if so, then all of the rampant and tepid talk about higher education in terms of professionalism, technological proficiency, vocation, career training...this is all a lot of very dull resignation, a stoical attitude that things are basically set in stone now, and all we can do is shape ourselves around the mold. Oh, and make sure you get some critical thinking along the way; tick that box.

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