Virtues & Vocations: Conversations on Character and the Common Good, Part 10: Educating for Good with Angel Adams Parham

Episode Topic: Educating for Good with Angel Adams Parham 

As part of the Virtues & Vocations series Education for Flourishing: Conversations on Character & the Common Good, we are pleased to welcome Angel Adams Parham, associate professor of sociology and a senior fellow with the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature. Consider how questions of moral purpose and character are integral to education.

Featured Speakers:

• Suzanne Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director and Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns 
• Angel Adams Parham, associate professor of sociology and a senior fellow with the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Virginia

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/2fe818.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Conversations of Character and the Common Good. 

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Transcript

speaker 1 0:06

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to our monthly webinar series, Conversations on Character and the Common Good. This series is part of the Virtues and Vocations Initiative, a national forum housed at the Center for Social Concerns here at the University of Notre Dame, and supported by the Kern Family Foundation. I'm Suzanne Shanahan, and I direct the Center for Social Concerns. I am also the host for this series. Virtues and Vocations seeks to foster a community of practice amongst practitioners and scholars across disciplines who are keen to understand how best to cultivate character and moral purpose in higher education and the professions. This webinar series is one way we facilitate this conversation. Today, we are excited to welcome Angel Adams Parham for a conversation about educating for good. Angel is an associate professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Her research is animated by such questions as what is a good society and what kinds of social arrangements are most conducive to human flourishing. She is author of American Browts, Racial Poundless Sets, and the Transformation of Race. I know I got that word wrong. And co author with Anika Prather of the Black Intellectual Tradition, Reading Freedom in Classical Literature. In addition to this research, she is active in public facing teaching and scholarship, and is the co founder and executive director of NYANSA Classical Community, an educational organization that provides curriculum and programming designed to connect with students from diverse backgrounds, inviting them to take part in the great conversation, cultivate moral imagination, and pursue truth, goodness, and beauty. Welcome, Angel! It's so wonderful to be here, Suzanne. Thank you. So I'm hoping we can jump in and you can share a little bit about your background and how you came to this particular work at the University of Virginia.

speaker 2 2:22

That is a big question. Yeah, that is a really good question. So I guess, this idea of educating for good, that is really thinking through questions of the good life and how that relates to education. I'd have to say that I comment that through an unlikely route which is through educating my daughters at home. So before I came here to the University of Virginia, I was living in New Orleans, working at a small liberal arts college for 18 years. And at the time we decided to homeschool. And so I homeschooled my daughters for about a decade before we moved them here. So how does this relate to, educating for good? So I got started and soon after I got into that journey, I was introduced to classical education and the kind of the whole idea of classical education is educating for truth, goodness and beauty. And, I've been in education a really long time. The only thing I ever wanted to do was be a professor. That, from the time I set foot on college campus, that was the plan. I am so blessed that it worked out. And so education's always been incredibly important and precious to me. But those, that kind of question about Really, what does it mean to be educated and what is an education for? Interestingly, we're not front and center of my professional training as a sociologist. I know you're also trained as a sociologist. Maybe your training was different than mine, but those questions really didn't come up. So when I started educating my daughters and getting introduced to this idea of truth, goodness, and beauty, and the formation of virtue, and then I started reading it was just an endless, kind of fount of just great material and beauty, and it was so refreshing. So initially this was just, I'm reading with my daughters, and we're reading great literature. We're having these philosophical conversations even from when they're in elementary school. And so then I start listening to podcasts from places like St. John's College and just getting more and more drawn in. And then I start asking myself, huh, so this is what I'm doing at home. What does this have to do with sociology? And I think it really came home for me when I picked up a copy of Plato's Republic. And I'm looking at the beginning of it, and Socrates is asking these questions about why we have division of labor in society, why do we create these societies? Why don't we just do everything ourselves? And I thought, I would have been really interested in reading this. when I was a young college student because I was asking those kinds of big questions. When I was in junior high school, I created a society called Arlandia because I just thought I was so sure I could do it better. Like we had all these problems and I was going to figure it out. So that was the beginning of my budding sociology career. But these questions that I was seeing Socrates ask, got at these questions in a different way. And yeah, so anyway, I could go on and on, but. That's how I come to ask some of the kinds of questions that I do now. Do you still think of yourself as a sociologist? That's a good question. I do, but I'm not sure sociology thinks of me in the same way. I think there are probably plenty of people who are like, what is she doing? So I think of myself as a sociologist within, maybe. A certain tradition that maybe just hasn't gotten as much focus there are sociologists who are fairly well known that I would say I feel in very comfortable company with. Robert Bella would certainly be one and in fact now that I'm thinking about it, when you asked how I come to be here, so it was, A little more than a decade ago, I was rereading Habits of the Heart, and there's this appendix Social Science as Public Philosophy. And I came across that, and I had read Habits of the Heart. I had assigned Habits of the Heart. Whatever reason, I don't know if I didn't read the appendix, or it just didn't stand out to me in the same way, but I was re reading it. And it just was so clear to me, this is how I want to do sociology. This is what I'm interested in. Sociology as public philosophy. And I know that's a co authored book, but Bella wrote that up as an art, as a sole authored article. So my sense is that it's coming from him and the way that he talked about transformations in the social sciences, where it used to be that this kind of conversation between social science, history, and philosophy. was not unusual. And indeed, if we think about, some of the classics, the founders of sociology the trinity of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, it can be very hard to tease apart, the history from the philosophy, from the social science, right? They're asking these very Big questions. But Bella outlines how that steadily narrowed and narrowed with the rise of the research university. And I guess I would say I do feel like a sociologist, but I feel like a sociologist out of time, if that makes sense.

speaker 1 8:19

That's great. I love that. A sociologist out of time. So I'm thinking about how students respond to this way of thinking. There are probably many students than you encountered when you were in New Orleans and now at the University of Virginia who wouldn't have much background in classical reading and thinking. I'm also thinking about a class I had last week. I had them read Sandell's Justice, which I think of as a very digestible read, summarizes a lot of material in an incredibly intuitive way, and half the class said, oh, I don't read philosophy. And I yeah, so just thinking about how do students respond, both as you imagine K 12 population, but then also college students for whom this may not be part of daily conversation or experience.

speaker 2 9:14

Yeah, I think that's a really good question. So I will start with the K 12 and then go to the college students. For K 12 students, most of my experience has been in the classical world. And so I'd say there, it's a little different because you start early having these conversations, right? And I think that's really where it is, right? So the students that you're encountering. I think have been shaped by a fairly fragmented understanding of certainly the academy and of what an education is. Like you go to this subject and then that subject and that subject. So I just think it depends on how you are formed as a student. And so if early on you're formed with this idea that we are going to ask these big questions, then it's not going to be strange. So I have For college students, yes, it can be strange because if they're coming to a sociology class, then they're expecting a certain version of what sociology is. Certainly, if you're doing a theory class, you might be able to ask some more of these big questions, I should hope so. But I guess the way that I approached it is most students of sociology are really interested in justice, which is why you have them read Sandell's book, right? They're concerned about inequality. And so my way of thinking about it is if we're interested in justice, shouldn't we have some conception in mind of how we would know whether what we're seeing is just? And so then that opens the door to at least considering different conceptions of justice and to doing some readings from different perspectives. And so I just, say, we're connecting this to what you're already interested in. The other way that I've found to do it, especially when I'm teaching classical sociological theory, Is I will say, there are key themes themes about, say transition from tradition to modernity, the emergence of the self, right? There are some of these kind of classic themes that will always come up in a social theory class. And I just add one more, and that is for each author, what is their conception? of the good life. And it may not be explicitly stated. It may be in their critique of society that you can draw out what is their conception of the good life. Or another way that I will put it, what is their understanding of human flourishing or happiness? So I think by adding that one question in, It allows us to leave, what has been a classic question in the philosophical tradition in the West going back to antiquity. And so that helps us to build that bridge back. But, of course, again, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim were often citing Those ancient classics. And so they did not rigidly separate themselves. And so I just claim that as part of the tradition.

speaker 1 12:25

Great. How do you connect these questions to more contemporary themes, happenings, politics, readings, because I know Both in your K 12 work, but your work with more contemporary students, it's not as if you're only reading Aristotle and Plato, you're reading many more contemporary pieces, and how do you bridge that gap for students? Yeah,

speaker 2 12:54

I think an example here, I can go just right to the core of my scholarly area of interest, which is race, and so people might think race, that has nothing to do with any kind of classic tech, like why, you bring up Aristotle, huh? In fact, I just got finished putting The final touch is on an essay that will come out hopefully in the next year or so and it's all on racialization so it's for historical sociologists and our understanding of race and our study of race. And it's absolutely connected because what I argue in that piece, and this is unusual, right? So you ask do I identify as a sociologist? I absolutely do. But in a way that is, is it has a different approach to it. But when I argue in this piece, I think all sociologists of race should be attuned to. I said, we always talk about race as a social construction. It's not something that just exists out there, right? It's something that is constructed by human societies. It differs across time and place. This is what we teach. However, we do not really Think about or examine very closely where it came from. And in order to really understand that, I would argue we need to look to a past before there was a racial system, before we really looked at the world through racial lenses, or another way I put it is before the racial imaginary. And Antiquity is actually a really good place to find what the world could look like before the racial imaginary, and so I draw on the work of classicists. I do look at some of those ancient texts, and I am not original in that. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, who is getting the attention he so richly deserves. He wrote about this a hundred years ago. In Africa and the world he has a chapter where he talks about this and he says, I'm not seeing these rigid racial categories when I look at Herodotus or when I look at Homer. It's just not there. And he spells it out. He says, I'm looking at these texts and this is not the way the world was just naturally set up. So I, in the essay that I wrote, I recapitulate and then add to what Du Bois did. And I said, really sociologists of race should be very well schooled. And at least, be able to have a conversation with classicists. It doesn't mean you're going to be an expert, but you should be conversant with the primary text in English translation, of course and with classicists and the work that they're doing, and then I move into the medieval period which is where you start to see some of the raw materials for what will become A racial system emerging, particularly in the stigma and the violence against Jewish people and Muslim people in Christian Europe. Some of those raw materials you start to see, and then with the rise of the slave trade, and so on and so forth. So that's an example where if I'm teaching the class, no, it's not going to be that 90 percent of it's going to be on the ancient world, but I might spend the first. Week or two on the ancient and medieval worlds and text and, trying to set the stage for understanding where this idea of race comes from,

speaker 1 16:34

right? That's a super helpful example. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your pedagogy and work with students and I, there are two things I'm hoping we can talk about. One is I've heard you describe sort of service learning community engaged work you did with students in New Orleans and how. You created an alternative. To the traditional, a student is here to save the day and help people in need, bringing their beneficence and their knowledge and all their wonder to something else. I wonder if you could talk about that and then pivot to. this class you're teaching around these big questions at UVA now, but maybe you could start with this engaged class because I thought it was a wonderful example.

speaker 2 17:19

Okay, so I think, do you have in mind the community host program? Yes, the

speaker 1 17:23

community host program.

speaker 2 17:24

Yes. Okay That was fascinating. And I only did it for a couple semesters. I'd love to be able to do it again. It's a tricky one though. It has, you have to have just the right elements, I think, to pull it off. So the idea was exactly as you said, I wanted the purpose of the community engagement. is for students to really see in the community what they're studying. So I was teaching classes like social problems, social inequality, and so on. But I wanted them to get beyond, like you said, the, potential savior complex, or I'm coming in with all of the knowledge to help the poor people. So the idea was so at the time, I should back up to say I was living I and my family were living in a largely low income Black and Hispanic neighborhood had its share of challenges. And we went to a church that was deliberately cross class and cross race and it was very unusual. You had everything from People who had not completed high school, people who had GEDs a few professors it was really quite a mixture. And so because I lived in that neighborhood and went to that church, I had friends from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. And some of them were women, who had grown up in, in either in that community or similar communities had their families and were just pillars of the community. And I thought, they are really the experts, right? I did not grow up in this kind of situation. I had pretty stable, I'd say modest, but pretty stable background. This was still new to me as well. And so I thought, why don't I consider them as co instructors? And for some students, their option, they could opt into it. They didn't have to do it. But instead of doing the, 15 or 20 hours of service. What they would do instead is go to the home of one of these women and go to, I think it was five different sessions, and stay for a few hours and just talk to them. So if we were studying education, you were going to speak with your community host about their education, their experience with the educational system, and so on and so forth, and the topics would change every week. So students, would go to the neighborhood, some initially felt uncomfortable going to the neighborhood or to the home, but they caught over that. The host would often feed them, just really make them at home. And basically they were not there to serve at all. They were there to listen, to be hosted. And it was a pretty formative experience. So in their reflections, I definitely got the sense and I asked at the beginning of the class I said, how many of you have what you would consider to be genuine friendships with people across class lines, really, they're not serving you at the cash register wherever you're not serving them, and very few did and you know unless it might have been family members or something like that. And so I remember one in particular, one reflection of a young man. And he said, is this ever, am I going to be able to do this again? He said, the only reason I met someone like this young, this woman and the woman who was his community host had been formerly homeless. At the time she was doing just fine. She had her two children, but, had gone through some pretty difficult times, but one of the friendliest, most beautiful people. And he said, the only reason I know her and really got to know her is because of this class. I would have to really fundamentally change. The whole structure of my life to generate, relationships like this. And so that's what I was after is I really wanted them to see more from the inside out and to sit and be humble at someone else's feet. And it was beautiful. It was really beautiful.

speaker 1 21:30

I love this example especially in the context of a sociologist, sociology class called Social Problems, right? The kind of objectification of these phenomenon and a particular lens that students are bringing to them that's probably profoundly incomplete yet what is the basis of much law and policy moving forward, right? So how do they get that sense of. Almost moral imagination to walk alongside another. I think it's just a really beautiful example. Maybe you can talk about your question oriented around big questions and how you came to this and why you find it so powerful. Both as an educator, but also as a scholar, because it seems so well aligned with the kind of scholarship that you do. Sure.

speaker 2 22:18

Yeah, so I have a first year seminar called Seven Great Questions, and this is just a gift that the University of Virginia has given faculty to be able to be part of a first year seminar program, and to create a class that doesn't have to be, Rigidly restricted to the discipline. So I'm taking full advantage of that. And so the seven great questions I'll just say what they are first. What is justice? What is freedom? What is happiness or human flourishing? What does it mean to be educated? What is science or knowledge and how should we use it? How do we live well with the stranger? And I am forgetting what is a good society? So those are the seven questions. And those questions some of them are just really foundational questions Freedom, justice and then the one about how do we live well with a stranger is one that is more sociologically driven thinking about difference of various axes that I thought would be important. The one about being educated is one where I'm hoping that all of us can be more self reflexive about what is this whole enterprise that we're engaged with? And then the science knowledge question also Comes, I'm thinking about, say, Max Weber's Science as a Vocation and just thinking about especially through the classical sociological theory, the idea of science loomed large in the whole creation of the discipline. And, there are just different ways of thinking about what science is. Is what it consists of. And so I thought that was an important one. And so that's where the questions come from, that I think several of them are just really foundational to what it means to be human. And then some of them are a little more targeted in terms of thinking about sociology as a discipline.

speaker 1 24:12

And the students in the class, are they sociology majors or are they from across campus?

speaker 2 24:18

They are from everywhere. Okay. I don't think I've had any who are planning to be sociology majors at all. No, they're from STEM. They're from humanities engineering just about anything that you could imagine the students.

speaker 1 24:33

Can you talk a little bit about what are amongst these questions, ones that students really latch onto and seem to motivate them in their own thinking. Good

speaker 2 24:46

question. Which ones? I'd say the two questions of freedom and flourishing or happiness. Especially the happiness question, and that's a classic question what is the happy life or the good life? That's one where students really do wrestle with that. And the freedom question too, because the assumption about freedom is it's, having the, restrictions, Lifted so that you're as autonomous as possible. And it's very intimately tied to the idea of happiness or flourishing. Because often I think, especially young people, there's a sense that the more freedom I have, the happier I can be. But there are really, rival understandings of what it means to be free and what it means to be happy, going back into the tradition that are very foreign to students. So I'll ask questions like. Okay, but if happiness is really just anything, what if there's a woman who thinks that her happiness Isn't partying every night, drinking as much as she can, just is she really happy? And so then I'll get if that's what happiness is for her, and I'll just keep picking at it and picking at it. And just asking more questions to help us get behind, I think, the messages that our society sends us because students are incredibly resistant to the idea that there could be any kind of non relativistic way of approaching that question, right? It has to be that however I define happiness is happiness for me. And so that's one that I really enjoy engaging in, but on the other hand, another thing that's been really fascinating is that I will, we have some stories where that I use where, there's this idea of a perfect society. Everything is just halcyon and beautiful and wonderful. And I say, would you, are you ready to sign up? You want to go? None of them want to go. No one wants to sign up for, this life that's free of struggle or friction and where you have just plenty, which I find fascinating. And so they're very resistant to that too. They say, this is just not real. And I say, let's say it is real. Let's say that, when you walk out that door, if you walk out the door on the left, you're going to enter in. And, all of your needs will always, you will have. as much of whatever you want as possible. And what they get to is that there's no satisfaction in it, that you actually need some struggle to kind, you need something to work against within reason, obviously, right? If you're really can't eat or, something like that. But I think that helps them to start really getting behind this idea that. A glossy views of happiness or, whatever I want to make it is not quite it that there are some objective dimensions there that would make for a more or less happy life.

speaker 1 28:04

As you describe this and I've seen the syllabus, which is just phenomenal. I can't help but think this is a fairly transformative engagement. But as you said, you've only taught it a couple of years, so a couple of unfair questions, if you could just speculate on. Do you think that kind of first year engagement changes in some way, however small, their trajectory at UVA? And do you think these are, if you will, touchstones that they can return to throughout their time at UVA and beyond, that this is somehow creating an internal. infrastructure that they can use to support decisions, ways of thinking, moving forward.

speaker 2 28:51

That is the dream, Suzanne. Is that happening? I don't have the data. I do want to follow up and ask students though. So that is on my radar screen to see if it made any impact. I can say that there have definitely been some students who I can see from them coming to my office hours, from them asking deeper questions, some students have said things like, wow, this really makes me rethink a lot of what I was planning to study. So I have had those conversations, students coming after, especially after we had a conversation of what does it mean to be educated. And saying, wow, I just, I really need to think about this some more. So there's definitely been those kinds of conversations that make me think, it is really getting students where they live and making at least some of them think through more carefully. I'll also say that I build into the course, what's called a commonplace book. And the commonplace book is an intellectual journal carried out in a very specific format. And what I tell the students at the beginning of the semester is I say, I'm well aware that students probably forget 85 percent of, what happens in the class. Maybe they want to forget the professor, but one thing that they will have at the end of my class is this intellectual journal. And it is filled with. Quotations from great writers that they have reflected on, that they have thematized, themes of freedom and justice and, whatever else might come up. And so my hope is that even if they don't feel like They've been particularly touched then that they will at least keep this commonplace book as something to look at. There was this time when I did read all of this great writing and I wrote about it and I had some thoughts about it and here it is. So that's one way that I am hoping it might make a difference. But I will also say there are also students who I had no indication that there was any impact whatsoever, who didn't speak at all for an entire semester. I don't know what that means. That could mean a lot of things. I guess you'll just have to stay tuned.

speaker 1 31:16

That's great. You mentioned one of the questions is about living with strangers. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of civic friendship? I know it's something you've talked about and written about. This seems an important moment for civic friendship. How do you think about this?

speaker 2 31:33

This comes out of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and I mean he treats many different kinds of friendships, civic friendship is one of them, and basically what he's arguing is that concord or some kind of sense of friendliness is necessary for If you're going to have a political community, it's very hard to have one without that being there. And it's interesting because he says, There are limits. He put it at about 99, 000 people in a political community. He's yeah, above that, I don't really see that you could have this kind of civic friendship. So Daniel Allen and her work she's a political philosopher and she has a book called Talking to Strangers, where she draws very extensively on this notion of civic friendship and on Aristotle's conception of it. And so at the end of the book, what she does to make it real, at the time she was in Chicago, and she says, okay, let, where would be, the boundaries of the 99, 000, and starts up in her neighborhood and goes out in concentric circles. And I think we could all do something like that, right? So it might be hard to conceive of everyone in the U. S. as a, But you might start where you are and go, depending on how densely populated, I don't know within a three mile radius, a five mile radius, who's there? How do I relate to these people? The reason I think This idea of friendship is an important metaphor for how we think about citizenship, is when I think back to the foundational question of solidarity within social solidarity in sociology, this is one of the big questions, especially with it. The Industrial Revolution and urban migration, the big question was, how do we have any sense of social solidarity? How does this work? And there are many metaphors that are given, right? You've got organic versus mechanical solidarity, right? So you have the kind of this mechanistic picture, and then you've got this Oregon type one that's more like a body more contemporary work. You've got Putnam's social capital bridging and bonding social capital, which brings in this kind of economistic, picture. So it's interesting how we create these various metaphors for thinking about what is it that binds us together. Friendship used to be the dominant metaphor. And then it dropped out of favor. In modernity, and I am arguing, that we need it back because what friendship does is I think part of the problem is that the English language is not, it doesn't have as complex an understanding of it as the Greek language does. And so for us, it's I have Facebook friends and I have, friends I go to the movie with, right? So the idea of civic friendship is a different category of friendship. But it's still a form of friendship. And when I think of that, like a friend, even a civic friend, you're thinking of a person, an embodied person a relationship that's very different than if you're thinking about how do I build my social capital? Those are two fundamentally different kinds of relationships. I also think of Martin Luther King Jr. Would talk about when he was working with people in the civil rights movement, he would say, and under incredibly hostile circumstances We're not thinking of these folks as enemies. We are thinking about how to transform enemies into friends. And he did draw explicitly on Greek thought when he was talking about that. So in other words, I think that it's quite conceivable to think in terms of civic friendship during incredibly hostile times. It doesn't get much more hostile than fire hoses and, Vicious dogs being set on you and, just all the horrors of what was going on in the 50s and the 60s, and yet King was able to speak in these terms of friendship. And he didn't mean, a facile notion of friendship. He's talking about this deeper kind of civic friendship.

speaker 1 35:50

This is I find this very interesting and I think that one of the things I'm trying to think through is how we connect this then to the notion that you talked about with community hosts, right? In Danielle Allen's, there's a somewhat of a geographic metaphor. Can you be friends with people whose circumstances you don't really understand? And what kind of challenge does that pose to civic friendships? So certainly, if I take myself and I experiment, geographically in this region around South Bend. There are probably lots of circumstances I can't truly understand. I have not personally experienced them, nor have I engaged them in any substantive way. Can I have civic friendship? Is it, my desire to be a civic friend, or do I need a deeper level of understanding for that civic friendship to be effectuated, operative, of value?

speaker 2 36:49

Yeah, good question. So part of what Alan talks about in that book is the need for new habits of citizenship and new spaces for cultivating Civic friends. So I do think you're tapping into something real there, is that the way our lives are set up right now, we are incredibly segregated, not only by race, but also by class. And so I think you're right. It's very hard to conceive of how you could be civic friends, if you are so radically separated from people who are experiencing a different way of living, different challenges, different reality and I do think that's where the community host idea is incredibly helpful. It's incredibly helpful, because rather than it being, there's It's a way of people coming together closer to being equals rather than, like I said, serving or a sense of superiority, however hidden it may be. But yeah, I do think you have to create spaces and ways for people to interact and have real relationships across difference, and it's not easy. It's not easy. I have experienced that in the church that I was part of in New Orleans. It was a struggle. You, people tend to segregate out into their class, where the middle or upper middle class professionals, that I feel more comfortable with. So it's a work that has to be, you have to be diligent about it.

speaker 1 38:20

Great. Yeah, I'm just thinking again, in the spatial metaphor. And I walk to work and I'm about a mile and a half from Notre Dame's campus. And in that set of concentric circles, there are probably a range of socioeconomic classes, but the road I take is only one socioeconomic class. And I think that's part of the challenge in our daily life is, as you're saying who is it? that we have the most interaction with, and under what circumstances, I think is really important to thinking about the friendship. I wanted to talk a little bit about the association of classical education with a conservative line of thought and the extent to which you and your own work find a way to move beyond the traditional politics of classical education and how you think about it.

speaker 2 39:14

Yeah. It's been a wild ride, I would say. So if you're just thinking about, as I said, the idea of an education, we're at the center of it. The goal is to cultivate truth, goodness, beauty, virtue, and wisdom in our students. Really hard to see. Who would not want that for their child, right? No thank you, not interested in truth, goodness, or beauty, don't particularly want wise children. If you're just thinking about that, there really isn't anything politicized about that. I think what has happened is that it has, I will say this though, I do think there is a kind of built in conservatism to classical education, but not in the sense of our current politics I do make a difference between Maybe classic conservative values and our current unhinged politics that are called quote unquote conservative, which I don't think are the same thing. So I think By venerating tradition, which a classical education is going to do, there is something inherently conservative in that, that we do see value in these old books, that we do think we should read them, that we do think that there is, like I said, it's not just every kind of life that is a good life, like there actually should be some boundaries. So there's a bit of a conservative tendency in that However, again, I separate that out from what happens in the political realm and what's being called conservative right now, and that is used in some very injurious ways. And what has happened, though, is that it's become politicized in the culture wars, and you will sometimes then get families coming to classical education as a way to shield their children from the culture wars or from their conception of culture wars. And so then what happens is you get this, Even more polarized landscape of families and politics and so on. And so this is part of the problem. But there is no reason for that. The other thing that has been an issue is that it's been criticized as being, effectively Eurocentric and, just not relevant to anyone of color, which is where I will bring in the idea and the understanding that actually, it's really going back to a kind of many of the classics of the Mediterranean crossroads, where you have many different kinds of people appearing on the scene. And if you think about it that way, there is incredible cultural richness. Ethnic richness. And so it's all in the way that you frame it. However, the way I frame classical education is very different than the way I would say many in the mainstream movement frame classical education. And so this is where you get into the struggles. I don't think it has to be politicized the way it is. I don't think it has to look in one particular way. Culturally. But that is what has been on offer to the vast majority of people.

speaker 1 42:36

When you think about you started by saying who can argue with truth, beauty, and goodness, right? Don't we all want that of our children? Why do you think in higher education, classical education is still, whether it's conservative or liberal universities, why is it still a challenge, right? That's and that, increasingly there's a push toward more vocational. Students are coming in very pre professional career focused. Education is much more instrumental, extractive. How do we see that tension? And Are you an advocate for more classical education or are you doing your thing and that's where it stays? You're in charge, you can do anything.

speaker 2 43:30

Here, I think you're getting at kind of the classic liberal arts, and many people will draw a distinction between the movement of the classical K 12 movement and then the more traditional study of the liberal arts. They're not completely separate, but they're a little different. And. Yeah, there's been some really devastating data about the precipitous fall of liberal arts majors and study and departments. And so yes, why is this such a challenge? I think there are many different aspects of it. Part of it does have to do with the rising cost of higher education, which is just incredible. Astronomical. And I think people are asking for if you're going to be charging this, we're going to need to see what the return on investment is going to be, right? But then I also think that there's a misconception that if you study a traditional liberal art, like English or philosophy or history, you're going to be unemployed and bagging on the corner, because it's, you can't possibly support yourself with one of these impractical areas of study. And that doesn't seem to be true. There are plenty of businesses that really would like liberal arts grads, and they make that clear. I've had this conversation with my students. And they are just convinced and they told me, yeah, if things were different, I'd major in English or I'd major in philosophy, but I have to be practical. I need to get a job. Sometimes their parents are pressuring them to have the practical major and job. So I think that's part of the issue. Now, As to what I, what my perspective is, if I could wave a wand and we did it the way I thought, I would say, I would take a model that had very robust liberal education as a foundation and still had, very particular majors so that you could still get your engineering degree or your nursing degree or your computer science degree, whatever it might be, your business degree but that you'd have a very robust foundation in the liberal arts, that you would be asking these questions like the seven great questions course, that you would be reading Classic text. Because I think that's part of, sometimes people enter college and they feel, you have a very narrow sense of who they are, of what's possible, a very limited imagination. And sometimes, asking those big questions and reading those great texts is what can help them to rethink. And to think differently. That's what I would say, and I also think it's important in that it also helps to really fill in again a shared cultural reservoir, which we are finding. Fast losing, right? You can't know that anyone else has read the same text that you read. St. John's College is the gold standard where there are no majors, right? You just go in and you read from classic texts from antiquity through the 20th century. Everyone reads the same thing. So if you're a first year student, I know exactly what you're reading this year. So that may be too extreme for most places, but some kind of sweet spot. Where it is a case that maybe for the first, two, three semesters most of the students are reading the same text or from the same collection of texts so that there's a little more kind of consensus across years and across disciplines, that there's some foundational conversation that we have in common.

speaker 1 47:12

Thank you. Maybe we should give you the magic wand. A question from the audience in a recent article, you mentioned the hyper competitive structure of the university and how you advise young graduate students who are eager to craft a life of the mind. Can you say a little bit more about where you think higher education can change or shift to make possible good academic lives?

speaker 2 47:35

Wow, you started with the easy question. It's incredibly difficult at this point because it's not like one university can just change on its own, so I guess I'd make a distinction. In that piece, I might have been focusing more on the graduate students. There's more flexibility for undergrads. In fact, there are new experiments with undergraduate colleges that are more classically oriented around these big questions. If we're talking about undergrads, there's still a fair amount of flexibility. There are still possibilities. We're talking about graduate students, especially graduate students who want to go into academia. That's where it gets pretty thorny because if our department were to start taking, what I think, is a beautiful vision of what the social sciences should be and what sociology should be. If they don't look like all the other sociologists coming on the market, that could be an issue. But even more than that, the whole structure of the thing, from when I went to grad school, it has just been really accelerated. I see the students being pressured intensely. To finish in five years, sometimes which is just a lot, especially if you might need to learn another language or travel across the world, like I know you do international work that's a really tall order to really force someone through in five or six years and the pressure is intense. And so it really works against the life of the mind. I took a long time to finish. I don't know if I should say how long but I took a long time and I changed my mind pretty significantly in the middle of it. And I'm really glad I could change my mind rather than just having to be railroaded into something, right? Yeah. And then when I think about all the richness that has come to my life since I reread that Bella appendix and really started thinking deeply about how do sociology, history, and philosophy work together? There has been a really long Transition period for me of taking seminars in philosophy, right? Studying Dante with a specialist like listening to all kinds of great talks, reading new text it's been a wholesale re education because I didn't have it initially. And so if you want, if you're a graduate student and you haven't had all of that, you'd effectively need a longer time period. And more flexibility and breathing room to rethink and to train differently. And no one university can do that. And so this is the problem. And so I think we can work around the edges. So there are some places that are trying to, reach out to graduate students. With maybe reading groups here and there or summer retreats here and there. I've been the beneficiary of intellectual retreats where you get the readings, say three months in advance, and then you have a two day session where you just go through them and seminar. So I think there are ways to work around the edges to get that done. I don't want to come off as hopeless. And I think people should do it because it, even if it's incremental and it's around the edges, which it has been for me still the blossoming of your, Intellectual life, your personal life, your whole sense of the vocation is just so much richer for it.

speaker 1 51:14

Great, thank you. Another question hello, Notre Dame graduate living in Krakow, Poland. Have the professors heard of Braver Angels? I have civic friends through this organization. Do you know of other organizations that could help people build these kinds of friendships?

speaker 2 51:32

That's a good question. I have heard of Braver Angels. It sounds like really wonderful work in bringing people together across differences. I don't know. You would think I would have done some extensive research on everyone who's doing this kind of thing, but I have not. What I've heard of Braver Angels sounds really promising but I don't have lots of other resources in that area.

speaker 1 51:54

Great. So I just want to end with one final quick question. What would be one book you would recommend to the audience that is not your own but you'd suggest as, A must read.

speaker 2 52:08

Just in general, a must read?

speaker 1 52:10

In general, a must read.

speaker 2 52:13

Oh my word. It's like choosing a baby. Which baby do I choose? Gosh, that's, it's so general. Just a must read in general.

speaker 1 52:26

Or a must read you've read just recently that is now a new must read.

speaker 2 52:32

Okay. Here we go. So it's not a classic text, but it gets us at these questions of the good life. It's called the ethics of beauty by Timothy Patitsas, and he's an Orthodox priest. And he argues that in the West, we have focused of that transcendental of truth, goodness, and beauty. We have focused very much on truth. Somewhat on goodness and almost not at all on beauty. And he starts out by talking about the ideas of justice and trauma from the lens of beauty. And it's fascinating. It's really fascinating. It's so rich. And it's so much out of, the everyday boundaries of how we tend to think in academia. That book, if more of us were reading it, I think we would be on the right road.

speaker 1 53:31

Wonderful. I love that. And so I just want to thank you for spending this hour with us and thank everybody else who joined us over their lunch hour. So thank you, Angel. This has just been wonderful. And now I have a new book to read.

speaker 2 53:43

Yes, I'm very excited. Thank you.

speaker 1 53:46

Great.

speaker 2 53:46

Thank you

speaker 1 53:46

so much.