(1) Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul - by William Deresiewicz - 0 views
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In today’s installment, William Deresiewicz—inspired by a student’s legacy—analyzes an important new trend: students and teachers abandoning traditional universities altogether and seeking a liberal arts education in self-fashioned programs.
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Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible.
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Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education.
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These come, as far as I can tell, in two broad types, corresponding to the two fundamental complaints that people voice about their undergraduate experience
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The first complaint is that college did not prepare them for the real world: that the whole exercise—papers, busywork, pointless requirements; siloed disciplines and abstract theory—seemed remote from anything that they actually might want to do with their lives.
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Above all, they are student-centered. Participants are enabled (and expected) to direct their education by constructing bespoke curricula out of the resources the program gives them access to. In a word, these endeavors emphasize “engagement.”
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A student will identify a problem (a human need, an injustice, an instance of underrepresentation), then devise and implement a response (a physical system, a community-facing program, an art project).
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Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”
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Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.
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that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense.
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That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.
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I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.)
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They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for.
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what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends
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The Catherine Project sees itself as being in the business of creating “communities of learning”; its principles include “conversation and hospitality, “simplicity [and] transparency.” Classes (called tutorials, in keeping with the practice at St. John’s) are free (BISR’s cost $335), are capped at four to six students (at BISR, the limit is 23), run for two hours a week for twelve weeks, and skew towards the canon: the Greeks and Romans, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Dante and Cervantes (the project also hosts a large number of reading groups, which address a wider range of texts). If BISR aspires to create a fairer market for academic labor—instructors keep the lion’s share of fees—the Catherine Project functions as a gift economy (though plans are to begin to offer tutors modest honoraria).
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As Russell Jacoby has noted, the migration of intellectuals into universities in the decades after World War II, which he documented in The Last Intellectuals, has more recently reversed itself. The rise, or re-rise, of little magazines (Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review then; n+1, The New Inquiry, The Point, The Drift, et al. now) is part of the same story.
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a fourth factor. If there are students who despair at the condition of the humanities on campus, there are professors who do so as well. Many of her teachers, Hitz told me, have regular ladder appointments: “We draw academics—who attend our groups as well as leading them—because the life of the mind is dying or dead in conventional institutions.” Undergraduate teaching, she added, “is a particularly hard pull,” and the Catherine Project offers faculty the chance to teach people “who actually want to learn.
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I’d add, who can. Nine years ago, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. … The problem is that their engagement with language … often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.” By now, of course, the picture is far worse.
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The response to the announcement of our pilot programs confirmed for me the existence of a large, unmet desire for text-based exploration, touching on the deepest questions, outside the confines of higher education
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Applicants ranged from graduating college seniors to people in their 70s. They included teachers, artists, scientists, and doctoral students from across the disciplines; a submarine officer, a rabbinical student, an accountant, and a venture capitalist; retirees, parents of small children, and twentysomethings at the crossroads. Forms came in from India, Jordan, Brazil, and nine other foreign countries. The applicants were, as a group, tremendously impressive. If it had been possible, we would have taken many more than fifteen.
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When asked why they wanted to participate, a number of them spoke about the pathologies of formal education. “We have a really damaged relationship to learning,” said one. “It should be fun, not scary”—as in, you feel that you’re supposed to know the answer, which as a student, as she noted, makes no sense
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“We need opportunities for reading and exploration that lie outside the credentialing system of the modern university,” he went on, because there’s so much in the latter that cuts against “the slow way that kind of learning unfolds.”
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“How one might choose to live.” For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight.
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I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity
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The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.
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That is why it’s crucial that the Matthew Strother Center has no goal—and this is true of the Catherine Project and other off-campus humanities programs, as well—beyond the pursuit of learning for its own sake.
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This is freedom. When education isn’t pointed in particular directions, its possibilities are endless
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The term “deep state” comes from countries like Egypt and Turkey where the security services acted for many years as a shadow government. The United States has never had a deep state in this sense, except in the fevered imaginations of the MAGA right. It does have a permanent civil service that operates at federal, state, and local levels, and it is these that have become a regular conservative punching bag.
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The Loper Bright decision invalidated a rule issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service requiring Atlantic fishing boats to carry, at their own expense, inspectors judging compliance with rules against overfishing. In ruling in favor of the fishing companies, SCOTUS invalidated the Chevron precedent entirely. This decision built on the same narrative feeding the Project 2025 plan: the administrative state had grown into a monster that made decisions harming the well-being of citizens without any fundamental democratic accountability.
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The second initiative was the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision issued in late June that abolished the 1984 Chevron Deference precedent. Chevron Deference provided a rule under which the courts would defer to the expert opinions of executive branch agencies in situations where a Congressional mandate was ambiguous or unclear, and the agency position seemed reasonable.
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At the heart of the conservative critique of the administrative state lies a vision of democratic government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in which citizens would deliberate together on policies, and would themselves be responsible for carrying them out much as one imagines occurred in the proverbial New England town hall.
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The problem, however, is the extreme complexity of the tasks that modern government is expected to accomplish.
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None of these functions can be performed by ordinary citizens; they must be delegated to experts whose life work centers around the complex tasks they perform.
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While some local issues could be settled on a local level, modern government does things like manage the money supply, regulate giant international banks, certify the safety and efficacy of drugs, forecast weather, control air traffic, intercept and decrypt the communications of adversaries, perform employment surveys, and monitor fraud in the payment of hundreds of billions of dollars in the Social Security and Medicare programs
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Substantial delegation is therefore necessary. Some conservatives believe in a Constitutional “non-delegation doctrine,” but Congress has been delegating responsibility for complex tasks ever since Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was given the job of cleaning up Revolutionary War debt by the first Congress of the United States.
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Nor is it the case that the people’s elected representatives have no means of monitoring and holding accountable the bureaucracy they have created. There are both ex ante and ex post methods for doing this
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There are, in other words, a huge number of mechanisms by which the political layer can control the administrative layer
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The problem in these cases was not, however, an out-of-control bureaucracy exerting unaccountable power over citizens. The problem was a failure by plaintiffs to make use of the specific powers—the checks and balances—that the system made available to them. The failures of the early Trump administration to get its way cited in Project 2025 were largely due to the inexperience of that administration’s political appointees.
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Removal of the property qualification for voting by most U.S. states in the 1820s vastly expanded the franchise to all white men. Politicians soon discovered, as they subsequently did in other new democracies, that the easiest way to get people to the polls was to bribe them—perhaps with a bottle of bourbon, a Christmas turkey, or a job in the post office. Thus began what was known as the patronage or spoils system, under which virtually every job in the civil service was given out by a politician in return for political support
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The American patronage system was hugely corrupt, and provided opportunities for state capture by big business interests like the railroads that were spreading across the country. Congress did not want to give up its patronage powers, but eventually passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 that created a U.S. Civil Service Commission and established the principle of merit as a condition for hiring and promoting bureaucrats.
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it was not until the time of the First World War that a majority of federal bureaucrats were appointed under the merit system.
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The fundamental problem with a new Schedule F, as noted in my previous post, is that it will return the country to the period before the Pendleton Act, when political loyalty rather than merit, skill, or knowledge will be the primary criterion for government service
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It took President Trump nearly four years (and 44 cabinet secretaries) to rid his administration of seasoned professionals and replace them with loyalists like Kash Patel at Defense or Jeffrey Clark at the Justice Department. This gives us a taste for the quality of officials who are likely to come in under a revived Schedule F. The doors to patronage, incompetence, and corruption will be thrown wide open.
