Below are some provisional thoughts I'm still working through about attempts to transplant John Stuart Mill to the contemporary university system. As a Victorianist (albeit not a philosopher), I'm always a bit cautious about using nineteenth-century thinkers to solve or provide analogies for twenty-first century problems, as opposed to engaging with them as sounding boards. In this case, I'm mostly interested in everyone's obsessive turn to On Liberty, which is not about university instruction, and their avoidance of the Inaugural Address, Delivered to the University of St. Andrews, which is. The problems here are somewhat different than (but overlap with) those posed by Newman's Idea of a University, which I discussed several years ago. Warning: quite long.
In the introduction to his collection of nineteenth-century responses to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), Andrew Pyle points out that “[w]herever one looks in On Liberty, one finds problems rather than solutions. All that can be said in Mill’s defence is that he faces the real problems, and faces them with courage and integrity.” [1] Indeed, one of the problems raised by On Liberty would appear, oddly enough, to be its omnipresence when it comes to discussing speech on university campuses, given that OL doesn’t address how Mill’s theories would operate in a university setting…while his Inaugural Address, Delivered to the University of St. Andrews (1867) does. But what does Mill think about how free expression works in the specific context of a formal university program? This is not to say that OL doesn’t anticipate certain aspects of the IA, however, even if only in throwaway lines. Before we can propose a university along MIll's lines, in any event, we should probably ascertain what Mill would have thought such a university was.
In OL, Mill argues that “[n]obody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way. It is for him to find out what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to his own circumstances and character.” Mill distinguishes between those who are in the “taught and trained” stage (that is, those who haven’t been exposed yet to the key aspects of those “ascertained results”) and those who have reached “the maturity of his faculties” (that is, those who are educated adults capable of analyzing “recorded experience”). This actually raises a bit of a problem: what does Mill think a "youth" is? (The term overlaps but is not synonymous with "child.") A society with insufficient respect for knowledge will become a “collective mediocrity”—his assessment of nineteenth-century England and the United States—where “[t]heir thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers.” (One fears that Mill would have some sharp things to say about the intellectual effects of Twitter.) While Mill celebrates the importance of everyone following the beat of their own drum, he is doubly emphatic that societies stagnate unless the “sovereign Many have let themselves be guided […] by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.” But the Many have to learn how to recognize those Few in the first place…
Similarly, the IA suggests that “[a] modest deference, at least provisional, to the united authority of the specially instructed, is becoming in a youthful and imperfectly formed mind”; however, “when there is no united authority” (on religion, in this case), it is important to “keep, at all risks, your minds open” (83). Now, "youthful" seems to pretty explicitly refer to people of college age--so, late teens to early twenties. The “deference” is not permanent, but instead marks the student’s recognition that they are not yet advanced enough in knowledge to contest “united authority.” Again, the reason for studying science is that “unless an elementary knowledge of scientific truths is diffused among the public, they never know what is certain and what is not, or who are entitled to speak with authority and who are not: and they either have no faith at all in the testimony of science, or are the ready dupes of charlatans and impostors” (41-42). Part of the ideal job of university instruction, indeed, is to give students sufficient education to form an “enlightened public,” which is “a body of cultivated intellects, each taught by its attainments in its own province what real knowledge is, and knowing enough of other subjects to be able to discern who are those who know them better” (18). To be a student is, in part, to realize that you have not yet sufficient knowledge to judge who knows more about what; the educated person knows when they should defer to someone else on topics concerning which they have a basic familiarity, but no expertise. Note, though, that the opposite of undergraduate deference is not a fixed position, but an “open mind.” We shall return to this in a bit.
One of the difficulties of moving from the IA to modern universities is that Mill’s understanding of a university only very partially describes facts on the ground in nineteenth-century Britain and really does not exist now. It is perhaps helpful to keep in mind that Mill himself never went to university, which raises some awkward questions about directly applying Mill, whether on education or politics, to pedagogy or curriculum design. Alexander Bain (whom we’ll meet again in just a bit) groused that Mill “had no conception of the limits of a University curriculum.” [2] Mill delivered his address in the midst of debates over university reform, including “relevance,” subjects, and admissions, but his arguments in the IA really haven’t changed much from “Civilization,” published in 1836. Notably, he is actually closer to the traditionalists in some respects than to the reformers. His ideal university would teach Greek and Latin languages, literature, and history, with no modern languages (“modern” in nineteenth-century academic parlance denoted anything after antiquity). “History” would be the philosophy of history and historiography, with no equivalent to US History to the Civil War or suchlike, although it might still include “ecclesiastical history” and the “history of moral philosophy.” The natural sciences would also play a prominent part, as would philosophy and political economy.
Mill’s ideal university would be explicitly non-vocational: “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood” (5). This was a boringly conventional argument for the mid-Victorian period, with the proviso that unlike some of its other popular proponents, Mill was not interested in a curriculum infused with religious faith. [3] Students who wanted to train for professions would study those subjects in specialized institutions. Moreover, students should to the university having picked up modern languages and basic historical knowledge on their own steam (20-22)—a somewhat, shall we say, unusual proposition. Although Mill correctly notes that Scotland encouraged a much wider range of students to attend universities, with the necessary result that they needed to do a fair amount of remedial work (10), he does not use the realities of Scottish university education—where modern English literature was on the program and where mid-Victorian calls for a greater emphasis on the classics were vocational (Greek and Latin were necessary to succeed on the civil service exams[4])—to challenge the foundations of his own arguments. (In other words, while cutting-and-pasting himself, Mill forgot to reread On Liberty.)
Alan Ryan has tartly observed that “[w]renching Mill’s Address out of historical context is not fruitful.” [5] Mill would, in all likelihood, not consider any modern university, no matter how prestigious or perhaps Great Books-y, an example of his ideal. He would eliminate all “applied” programs (e.g., engineering, accounting, business, probably computer science), the English and foreign language departments, the performing arts departments, and quite possibly political science (he’s dubious that as of the mid-nineteenth century, politics can really be resolved into a “science”; this is what history professors are for [67]). He would probably not be on board for anthropology in its current iteration. While all the “studies” programs and departments would also go, he would frown at those whose objection to them was “you’ll be serving cappuccinos at Starbucks afterwards”; remember, Mill’s university is not vocational, and it is not intended to prepare you for any profession. Finally, Mill would not consider church-affiliated institutions (especially ones with faith clauses) to be real universities. (John Henry Newman here enters to complain loudly.)
Moral of the story: Mill’s understanding of what a real university education ought to look like only partly resembled real university educations in the nineteenth century; and, as Bain grumpily indicated, Mill’s understanding of what a real university education ought to look like was (and is) not remotely workable. Other than that…
So, in effect, we're stuck having to ignore most of what Mill actually had to say about what a university education ought to look like. That leaves us to do a lot of extrapolating.
As T. H. Irwin argues, Mill’s theory of ideal democracy was rooted in his understanding of Athenian government, in which “decisions by ordinary citizens were not necessarily decisions by the ignorant or uninformed or irrationally prejudiced”; an Athenian citizen was accustomed to hearing the most informed and skilled politicians of the time debate, and therefore “learned how to distinguish good advice from bad.” [6] This is one of Mill’s running themes: he believes that the general public need to learn from the guidance and example of what, in “Civilization,” he calls “the leading intellects of the age,” whether that be political deliberation, literary judgment, scientific discovery, or the like. The classics model how to “do it”, as it were. Undergraduate education equips you to recognize who those intellects are. (Remember that one of the great failings of the USA, from Mill’s point of view, is that Americans had no grasp of intellectual superiority, and no way of cultivating it.) One of the advantages of a classical education is that it exposes the student to “the way to investigate truth,” meaning “[t]o question all things; never to turn away from any difficulty; to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people without a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism, letting no fallacy, or incoherence, or confusion of thought, slip by unperceived; above all, to insist upon having the meaning of a word clearly understood before using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assenting to it; these are the lessons we learn from the ancient dialecticians” (32-33). This is quite an arduous regime. How does speech at the university appear to fit into this process?
That leads us to another problem. In IA, as elsewhere, Mill rejects the model of instructor neutrality when it comes to arguing in favor of their own opinions; the point, rather, is that while the instructor should feel free to “enfor[ce] by his best arguments” his position that such-and-such is true while such-and-such is false, “it is not the teacher’s business to impose his own judgment, but to inform and discipline that of his pupil” (79). The instructor is supposed to present all available arguments fairly, but not pretend that they have taken no concrete position themselves. Now, when “speech” is discussed at all in the IA, it is the instructor’s speech which is in question. Students appear to spend all of their time reading and cogitating, not orating. When the question of politics arises, for example, Mill argues that while the university cannot say that such-and-such a political affiliation is right or wrong, it “can supply the student with materials for his own mind, and helps to use them” (67)—that is, a university education introduces the student to the “meaning” (68) of history, insofar as it relates to political deliberation; to “the civil and political institutions of their own country” (69); to political economy; and to law. Again, it does not do so completely, but rather “implant[s] a desire to make further progress” (75) and “direct[s] the student to the best tracks and the best helps” (75). The difficulty here, that is, is that Mill doesn’t envision students speaking, even though he would have known about university debating societies, philosophical clubs, and so forth. We know that in reality, students were happily writing and speaking away to each other on controversial issues, religion being a particularly hot-button topic. But, if I'm following him correctly (because the reasoning seems a bit sketchy), as Mill envisions it here, students should not be told what to think about controversial topics, yet are temporarily expected to defer to those teaching them how to think (and, in the case of specialist knowledge, to learn how to recognize expertise and treat it accordingly).
Still, Mill’s students are not themselves imagined speaking to each other in class, let alone talking back to the instructor, and given that Mill may have been more familiar, anecdotally speaking, with English rather than Scottish pedagogy, this is not surprising. Victorian expectations for how and when a student might speak in class are very different from ours and varied between types of institution; in the case of the “catechetical college lectures” offered by Mark Pattison in the 1840s, for example, the student was there to “translate and construe extracts from the prescribed text,” not to engage in the kind of more freeform discussion we might expect in a contemporary classroom. [7] Pattison’s practice was standard. Montagu Burrows, in his guide to studying at Oxford, was quite blunt: the tutors’ lectures involved the students “construing” and the instructor “correcting, questioning, and illustrating,” or more occasionally “lecturing” on a topic “more or less catechetically…” [8] Students would not utter a single peep at a Professor’s lecture (and, notoriously, at Oxford and Cambridge it was not mandatory to attend them). Similarly, under the individual tutorial system, students were not exactly there to argue with their instructors, as J. A. Symonds’ memories of his sessions with Benjamin Jowett indicate.[9] Nineteenth-century Scottish universities seem to have expected more active participation from undergraduates [10], but even then, subjects were often restricted: Alexander Bain’s classroom “cross-examination” system, for example, was very narrowly focused and not the sort of thing likely to produce political excurses.[11] The German seminar did not reach the UK until the twentieth century. In general, it does not seem to be the case that either faculty or students (let alone Mill) expected the quasi-Socratic model of academic discussion that we have today, despite experiments being made in that direction elsewhere at the same time (and imported to England by the twentieth century).
This is where the problem of generalizing from OL to twenty-first century American universities lies--namely, ongoing questions about Mill's understanding of the relationship between undergraduate and professorial authority, of how students learn, and of the relationship between classroom instruction and other forms of campus engagement (which Mill leaves just about entirely alone). There are a number of points at which Mill’s positions would appear to sit awkwardly with everyone’s assumptions about campus speech, and it would probably behoove us to think them through in greater detail. For example, Mill is hardly going to stop a student from talking (because free expression), but it is not clear that he thinks students are particularly qualified to say anything useful (because incomplete education). More seriously, it is equally unclear what Mill would think about students “having” a political identity, as opposed to analyzing multiple political options. Again, it’s not as though Mill would stop said students—but he might certainly think their commitments premature. But how does that square with the reality that many of our students are eligible to vote, and so therefore…need political opinions? (What “tracks” and “helps” will they get in most majors? Are they to somehow acquire them in lower-division GE courses?) In addition, one must take into account Jill Gordon's argument that Mill does not actually believe that truth emerges from anything resembling a “marketplace of ideas”; instead, he “puts the highest value on the speech of those who are least numerous and/or who have the least power in society at any given time.” [12] There are many ways of extrapolating from that political position to an academic context, none of them entirely transparent.
Bear in mind, too, that Mill and his contemporaries alike would most likely be puzzled by a free-wheeling classroom discussion in which the students were going on about anything related to their own politics, as opposed to, say, in a group tea with the tutor, or a student writing society; our expectations have changed considerably. If we accept that, for Mill, “[t]hose who correctly hold true beliefs are convinced not only of the veracity of their convictions, but also the falsity of competing claims—one must be aware of why one’s beliefs are entitled to their veracity, particularly in light of one’s own unrelenting fallibility” [13], we still don’t know what that means in the context of contemporary classroom instruction. (Even Mill points out that this doesn’t make much sense in mathematics.) Nor do Mill’s expectations for instructors necessarily parse, as it’s not clear (hey, that’s coming up a lot) what positions he thinks they’re going to argue for in the classroom--and, as I said, he's opposed to the "my students can't tell what I believe" model of the purely "neutral" instructor. A contemporary political position? A religious position (which would not be remotely shocking in a nineteenth-century university, but would probably not go down so well today at any secular campus)? A scholarly position? All of the above? Given that today’s universities are very different from what Mill has in mind, and given that today’s classrooms are also very different from what Mill has in mind, and given that today’s students are again very different from what Mill has in mind, perhaps it might be best to approach Mill as raising helpful questions, rather than solutions...
[1] Andrew Pyle, “Introduction,” Liberty: Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill (Bristol, 1994), vii.
[2] Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill. A Criticism: With Personal Recollections (Longmans, Green, & Co., 1887), 127.
[3] E.g., Noel Annan, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses (Chicago, 1999), 53-54; William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago, 2006), 455-56.
[4] Sherry Booth, “A Moment for Reform: Rhetoric and Literature at the University of Glasgow, 1862-1877,” Rhetoric Review 22.3 (2003): 377-78.
[5] Alan Ryan, “J. S. Mill on Education,” Oxford Review of Education 37.5 (2011): 665.
[6] T. H. Irwin, “Mill and the Classical World,” The Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. John Skorupski (Cambridge, 1998), 433.
[7] H. S. Jones, Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge, 2007), 37.
[8] Montagu Burrows, Pass and Class: An Oxford Guide Book…, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1866), 55. John Henry Newman’s lecture “Discipline of Mind” (1858) similarly identifies the lecture as “catechetical”: “He tells you a thing, and he asks you to repeat it after him. He questions you, he examines you, he will not let you go till he has proof, not only that you have heard, but that you know.”
[9] J. A. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, ed. Amber K. Regis (Palgrave, 2017), 428.
[10] A. B. McKillop, Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (McGill-Queen’s, 2001), 25.
[11] Andrea Lunsford, “Essay Writing and Teachers’ Responses in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Universities,” College Composition and Communication 32.4 (1981): 437-38.
[12] Jill Gordon, “John Stuart Mill and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” Social Theory and Practice 23.2 (1997): 240.
[13] Brandon P. Turner, “John Stuart Mill and the Antagonistic Foundation of Liberal Politics,” The Review of Politics 72.1 (2010): 45.
In the nineteen fifties at the University of Edinburgh I rememeber the tutorials(involving about twelve students)were silent-in honour of the inculcated obedience from the previous schools, except for the voices of north american students-who were on GI Bill grants and anyway only had the fees of £50 a year to pay.
It was a revelation for the scottish students that one could speak up, and did immense harm to the silent ethos. I think this had been going since the start of tutoriala. it remained a taboo to speak out in lectures.
Posted by: demonax | August 27, 2017 at 06:57 AM