Second Meeting of MSC Spring 202

Second Meeting of MSC Spring 2022 What Do Colleges and Universities Owe Democracy?

What are the constituent groups, and how does the institution differ from each? Governing Boards, administrators, faculty staff, students, alumni, communities, states, countries.

Why is change slow for universities and why would this be a good thing? Who should decide changes in: curriculum, programs, or mission?

control of the creation of ideas—whether by a majority or a minority—subverts the ideal of conscious social reproduction at the heart of democratic education and democratic politics. As institutional sanctuaries for free scholarly inquiry, universities can help prevent such subversion. They can provide a realm where new and unorthodox ideas are judged on their intellectual merits; where the men and women who defend such ideas, provided they defend them well, are not strangers but valuable members of a community. Universities thereby serve democracy as sanctuaries of nonrepression. In addition to creating and funding universities, democratic governments can further this primary purpose of higher education in two ways: by respecting what is commonly called the “academic freedom” of scholars, and by respecting what might be called the “freedom of the academy.”[1]

The ideal mutiversity would “avoid undertaking tasks that other organizations can discharge equally well”…and commit itself to supplying only those demands for knowledge that are consistent with “the preservation of academic freedom, the maintenance of high intellectual standards, the protection of academic pursuits from outside interference, the rights of individuals affected by the university not to be harmed in their legitimate interests, [and] the needs of those who stand to benefit from the intellectual services that a vigorous university can perform.”[2]

In her Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform In Liberal Education, Martha Nussbaum maintains that:

when we ask about the relationship of a liberal education to citizenship, we are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. We are drawing upon Socrates’ concept of “the examined life,” on Aristotle’s notion of reflective citizenship, and above all on Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an education that is “liberal” in that it liberates the mind from the bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world.[3]

In order to foster a democracy that is reflective and deliberative, rather than simply a marketplace of competing interest groups, a democracy that genuinely takes thought for the common good, we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs. It is not good for democracy when people vote on the basis of sentiments they have absorbed from talk-radio and have never questioned.[4]

From an address by W. Churchill to the House of ·Commons on a Parliament Bill on 11/11/47:

many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.[5]

In his “Democracy and Educational Administration,” John Dewey maintains that:

it is a form of idolatry to erect means into the end which they serve. Democratic political forms are simply the best means that human wit has devised up to a special time in history. But they rest back upon the idea that no man or limited set of men is wise enough or good enough to rule others without their consent; the positive meaning of this statement is that all those who are affected by social institutions must have a share in producing and managing them. The two facts that each one is influenced in what he does and enjoys and in what he becomes by the institutions under which he lives, and that therefore he shall have, in a democracy, a voice in shaping them, are the passive and active sides of the same fact.

The development of political democracy came about through substitution of the method of mutual consultation and voluntary agreement for the method of subordination of the many to the few enforced from above.[6]

The term ‘democracy’ comes from two Greek words: demos (the people) and kratia (power or authority). Thus it is where “the people” decide (and can change) who governs. A direct democracy would be one where they people govern. Here is a more detailed characterization (there are so very many….)

Who are "the people? Is “equality” important (and in what sense/aspects)? In her Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale, Debra Satz maintains that:

every society depends on its members having the capability to behave in ways that realize that society and reproduce it in their actions, preferences, and habits of mind. In particular democratic societies depend on the ability of their citizens to operate as equals. This means not only that in such societies people have equal rights, but also that they see themselves as having equal basic rights, understand and act on the requirements of justice, and accept that they and others are self-authenticating sources of claims who do not need to ask permission to have and make demands.^{^[7]}

What is necessary for democracy? Are they all necessary? Are they jointly sufficient?[8] Would it be better to think of them as aspects or general characteristics of democracies rather than as defining features?

Is education (liberal/civic sufficient)? Is a commitment to equality necessary/sufficient (must it be actual or can it be commitment to an ideal)?

freedom of assembly and speech (and can it allow for restrictions on hate speech),

freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty,

Notes: [click on the note number to return to the text for a given note]

[1] Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1987), pp. 174-1

75. Emphasis (bold) added to passage.

[2] Ibid., pp. 189-190.

[3] Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform In Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1997), p. 8.

[4] Ibid., p. 19.

[5] W.S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 v. 7, ed. R.R. James (N.Y.: Chelsea House, 1974), p. 7566.

[6] John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” in John Dewey: The Later Works v. 2, ed. JoAnn Boydston (Carbondale: SIU Press, 1987), pp. 217-225, p. 218.

[7] Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2010), p. 185

[8] The distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions may be made in a number of ways. Necessary conditions may be described as “those which must be there for an event to occur, or for a concept to apply” (thus paying your parking fines is necessary for graduation); while sufficient conditions are conditions such that the event must occur, or the concept must apply (thus a direct double shotgun blast to the head is sufficient for death). Note that conditions may be sufficient without being necessary (as in the example), and that necessary conditions need not be sufficient (as in the example). An alternate way of drawing the distinction is to say that “p is a necessary condition for q” means “if q is true, then p is true” (symbolically q ® p), while “p is a sufficient condition for q” means “if p is true, then q is true” (symbolically: p ® q).