LET'S BE REASONABLE

Why colleges and universities should cultivate reflection and analysis.

Marks, a political scientist, professor of politics, and blogger for the conservative magazine Commentary, is dismayed at criticism of liberal arts institutions coming especially from conservatives. Much as Allan Bloom did in The Closing of the American Mind, Marks, who has taught at private colleges, defends liberal education, aiming his book at readers “looking for an alternative to the despair that passes for realism in our understanding of the present and possible future of college.” He underscores the importance of teaching critical thinking, decrying the “bland and scattered justifications” that liberal arts colleges fashion to define their mission, instead offering another: “to cultivate in our students an experience of and a taste for reflecting on fundamental questions, for following arguments where they lead, and for shaping their thoughts and actions in accordance with what they can learn from those activities.” Drawing on such expected thinkers as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Robert Maynard Hutchins—and privileging a curriculum based on “the study of old books”—Marks posits that “the highest aim of liberal education is not a set of skills but a kind of person.” That person must be initiated into a community of individuals “who pride themselves on following the evidence and arguments where they lead, and who share at least provisional standards for evaluating evidence and arguments, even in matters that can’t be definitively settled.” The author discusses efforts by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement to enlist anti-Israel support among students as presenting just such an unsettled matter. With little knowledge of the complexities of Middle Eastern politics, students, Marks asserts, cannot reasonably evaluate the claims of any speaker “who aims at conversion”—at odds, he argues, with the university, “which aims at reflection.”

A thoughtful but not groundbreaking contribution to debates about the value of higher education.