The importance of education beyond the job market

Kicking the can: Mainstream conservativism is necessary for strong liberal politics

William F. Buckley was one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century, and I agree with him on very little. Buckley made a career of pushing back against liberalism on TV, in prose and most famously in the publication he founded in 1955, the National Review. He constantly questioned the wisdom of progressivism, despised communism, was a dyed-in-the-wool advocate of laissez-faire economics and called for society to embrace a common set of morals.
He was viewed as the intellectual conservative icon of a generation. This did not, of course, mean that Buckley was immovable—in fact, after writing a particularly nauseating piece entitled “Why the South Must Prevail” in 1957, Buckley eventually changed his views, becoming a staunch opponent of George Wallace and an admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr., pushing for a national holiday honoring the latter.
Vigorously opposed to anti-Semitism, he was instrumental in helping to root it out in the mainstream Republican Party and refused to employ anyone with such beliefs. Buckley was correct when he wrote, in the mission statement for his newly founded magazine, “Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas—not by day-to-day guesswork, expedients and improvisations….A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is—dare we say it?—as necessary to better living as Chemistry.”
In short, Buckley was a perpetual thorn in the side of those in power, asking them to question themselves and their beliefs, reminding the nation that there can be a dark side to progressivism.
We liberals, especially the more radical variety, need and deserve pushback from our stodgier counterparts. Many of us believe our ideas to be unconditionally right and thus beyond reproach, dismissing dissenters as ignorant or greedy. Instead, we must be willing to hear and accept criticism and to shape our raw ideas into something workable and necessarily non-utopian. Conservatives provide the pushback against “guess work, expedients and improvisations” that we need, and instead of rejecting out of hand a preference for a more static set of rules we should carefully measure new ideas against existing ones, always asking whether we are truly improving.
Policy can almost always be improved by conservative input and criticism. Social Security, while undeniably a boon to the average American and a matter of life and death to many of our poorer citizens, may go bankrupt in a matter of years thanks to a lack of foresight in its funding scheme. Here at Bowdoin, the conservative impulses of many students and administrators have questioned the wisdom of divestment. While divestment is a very nice idea, it is simply a proposition of financial martyrdom with no realistic end goal. Do we really think that society can simply quit using fossil fuels?
Of course, conservatives do not have the monopoly on asking tough questions and thinking about a policy’s implications far down the road. But they are historically very good at raising an argument where no self-respecting liberal is willing to do so—generally out of fear of being labeled uncaring or ideologically impure.
Implicit within this argument is the notion that progress will always win out over conservatism, and thus conservatism is only valuable as a foil for progressivism. That’s clearly a problem. So it is paramount to draw a distinction between radical conservatism and mainstream conservatism. Radical conservatism includes the Tea Party and the religious right—political groups that wish to apply antiquated rules to modern society. I say “radical” not because all members of those groups are particularly extreme, but because they agitate for a wholesale shift in the status quo, just like “radicals” on the left. Mainstream conservatism, in the tradition of Buckley, President Eisenhower, and (dare I say?) Mitt Romney, exhorts society to go slow and to think about all the implications of change. The message is “let’s not stray too far from our base principles” rather than “we must unconditionally adhere to the ideas of our society’s founders.”
Will the urging of conservatives always or even often lead progressives to change their minds? No. This is historically evident. Some questions raised by conservatives are brought up and then, gradually, resolved. We appear to be at the tail end of assuaging doubts about marriage equality, for instance. The involvement and influence of conservatism in public discourse tempers public policy and helps us understand precisely what we’re doing. As Buckley said of his magazine, and perhaps of conservatism in general, “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.”
As much as we might be inclined to forge ahead, having voices like Buckley’s are indispensable to the responsible development and implementation of ideas—lest we wantonly legislate from the heart and end up in an inelegant, broken dystopia. I would exhort conservatives to be heard, and I would expect any progressive with a modicum of intellectual honesty to engage. If we cannot defend our ideas to naysayers, we cannot expect to defend them against the harsh realities of the world.

Kicking the can: Laws should regulate only harmful religious action, not thought

To effectively govern a civil society, people develop sets of laws by which all members must abide. We start with the obvious ones: Don’t kill and don’t steal.
From there, we work through the particulars and derivations of those rules, outlawing assaults and deciding that some forms of theft (grand theft auto, bank robbery) are worse than others (palming a pack of gum). We regulate substances, trade, education and relationships, presumably in the hope that such guidelines or restrictions will make people’s lives easier and more productive.
As the body of laws grows, some laws that burden one group of people over another and compel them to do something contrary to their beliefs or heritage develop. At that point, we have three choices. First, we can say tough beans and enforce compliance. Second, we can re-evaluate the necessity of the law. Third, we can make an exception.
The trend in the United States has been towards the third option. In 1993, Congress passed the federal version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in response to the State of Oregon’s refusal to extend unemployment benefits to two American Indians. The State of Oregon refused on the grounds that the American Indians had ingested peyote, an illegal drug, during a religious ceremony.
A Supreme Court decision—penned by Antonin Scalia—upheld Oregon’s judgment. The RFRA passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. After another Court decision limiting the scope of the RFRA to federal laws under the 14th Amendment, 21 states have passed their own versions of the RFRA with varying degrees of fidelity to the original law.
The primary function of the law is to prohibit the government from “substantially burden[ing]” the free exercise of religion, even with a law of “general applicability,” unless the government could show both that the law is pursuant to a “compelling government interest” and that the law is the “least restrictive” method of furthering that interest. That is, it must withstand “strict scrutiny,” the most stringent test for evaluating the constitutionality of a law.
The first test of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment went in front of the Supreme Court in 1878 in “Reynolds v. United States.” In Reynolds, the Court upheld an anti-bigamy law, worrying that if it granted a religious exception to the law then religious convictions would trump societal and governmental authority and every citizen would “become a law unto himself.” The Court was right. Civil society does not function well when citizens can opt out of certain rules.
However those rules should not be too onerous. We should heed John Stuart Mill’s declaration that “the only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute.” That is, it is antithetical to our notions of liberty to restrict behavior that does not do harm to others.
Disfavored behaviors tied to certain religious beliefs, such as the use of hallucinogens, should not be legislated against so long as they do no harm to the public. If we are to permit an exception to a law on religious grounds, we ought to strike down the law altogether.
Seeking to control every aspect of life is illiberal, and we ought to avoid it. Otherwise we might, out of respect to religious freedom, end up with a body of laws with so many religious holes it it that it resembles Albert Hall in “A Day in the Life.”
Lacking a definition of religious liberty in the Constitution, in the Reynolds case, the Court turned to a law passed in the Virginia House of Delegates and drafted by Thomas Jefferson to define the term. It found that the limit of religious liberty came and government could interfere “when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.” This should continue to be the standard against which religious liberty is measured. Obviously, the government cannot turn into the thought police, but society can and must regulate behavior in a measured and uniform way.
In a later letter, Jefferson wrote that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions” and that he and the nation would be steadfast in defense of a citizen’s right of conscience but that “he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.” We must write our laws precisely and with a light touch so that they do not require religious exemptions and we must be careful to regulate action, not thought.
Where we are inclined to offer an exemption, we should ask one question: Are we as a society comfortable extending this right to all, regardless of religious belief? If we answer yes, then we should realize that the law has no place in a liberal society. If the thought makes us shudder, we should consider the law one of Jefferson’s social duties, against which an individual’s claim to a natural right might be harmful to others and thus must fail.

Kicking the can

The importance of education beyond the job market

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

David Steury

Columnist

March 27, 2015

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s presumed candidacy for president recently set off a discussion about the utility and necessity of a college degree. Walker never graduated from college, choosing to run for public office before finishing his degree.

Of course, pundits and everyday Americans alike asked whether the president should have a college degree in this day and age (the last president to only have a high school diploma was Harry Truman). However, those voices were vastly outnumbered by Walker’s supporters, who took the opportunity to lament the fact that a bachelor’s degree is considered a necessity for many occupations.

On the one hand, they have a point—it is terribly elitist to explicitly or implicitly require an academic qualification for an elected position that represents the whole of the United States. But it is not his lack of a college degree that should disqualify Walker from the White House. It is the utter contempt that Walker and many of his supporters have for the most respected system of higher education in the world that makes him a uniquely terrible candidate for the Oval Office.

When defending the liberal arts, we often point to the value that graduates of schools like Bowdoin add to the workforce. In a world that increasingly calls for technical skills, our alumni, administration, and faculty laud the liberal arts for preparing students to be versatile members of the workforce. Liberal arts students are praised for being “quick learners” and for their ability to “think critically” in the workplace.

That is all well and good, but it is a poor defense of academia and the liberal arts in particular. Education cannot be wholly about vocation. This, in particular, Walker does not understand. As part of a Walker-backed budget proposal, the charter of the University of Wisconsin had to be amended to strike the parts about seeking to “improve the human condition” and the “search for truth,” to be replaced by merely meeting “the state’s workforce needs.”

The ensuing dustup caused Walker to claim that the changes had just snuck their way in there, but clearly either Walker or one of his staffers thought they were a good enough idea to insert into the proposal.

The utility of education, and in particular the sort of “impractical” education offered by Bowdoin and its peer schools, cannot be confined to the workplace. To claim that education should exist merely to enable the next generation of worker drones to be more productive worker drones not only cheapens education, but also cheapens millennia of scholarship in the search for truth and meaning.

It shows immense disrespect for the giants upon whose shoulders we stand to claim that academia should turn its focus to workforce needs alone. Of course, we can all agree that people should have a skill that can get them ahead in the world and that a certain degree of vocational education is necessary for a productive and successful society.

But we should all also agree that while an understanding of the Federalist Papers helps very few job seekers, it helps us to be better citizens and voters. A deep understanding of history or the natural sciences or the wonders of mathematics may not always be the hard skill that we need, but it certainly helps us to navigate the world.

As we get older, many of us will have children. At that point, it will be our duty to impart our knowledge and values to the generation that will replace us. Our academic engagement will help us to present our children with a nuanced view of the world. When they ask us difficult questions about events yet to occur, we will be able to present a reasoned answer. Just as we are now taught, our children will be able to understand rather than to blindly follow.

A purely vocational notion of education does little to further our ability to understand where we came from and where we’re headed, and it does not encourage us to be valued members of a society in any way besides contributing to the GDP. (It must be noted that all of the benefits of education I mention theoretically contribute to GDP indirectly.)

Civic engagement, self-examination and cultural understanding are values that must be taught by parents or by the educational system. An academy that teaches the values of great artists, thinkers and scientists will help our civilization achieve its full potential.

Very few people would truly embrace the idea of an educational qualification for higher office. If Bill Gates announced tomorrow his candidacy for the White House, none would criticize his lack of a diploma. Being elected governor of one of the 50 states is no small feat, and especially considering Walker’s considerable accomplishments, his lack of a B.A. certificate hanging in his study should not disqualify him from the presidency.

However, his evident lack of understanding of why the academy exists is alarming, and Walker’s positions are exemplary of the anti-intellectualism that pervades certain circles in our country. Every member of society can derive value from learning for learning’s sake. Perhaps Walker should think about improving the nation’s secondary education systems and making higher education more accessible rather than attempting to eviscerate American learning.
Plato, whose writings helped form the basis of modern Western civilization, envisioned a society headed by the “philosopher king.” He would be dismayed that we are contemplating the elevation of its antithesis to our highest office.

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