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Heilbrun Report from Sidney Kasfir

Tiv ihambe figure

My Heilbrun project is about this piece of African art history and the connectivity among its various elements. One might call it a triage between the British colonial government's collecting policies as a part of Indirect Rule, the objects their colonial officers collected, and the museums in England that received and catalogued them. Among these two stand out, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the British Museum in London, both with large ethnology collections and curators eager to acquire specimens from Africa.

 A Department of Anthropology was founded in the Nigerian Colonial Service in 1925, as part of the implementation of Indirect Rule. The policy of Indirect Rule as proposed by Frederick Lugard made it possible for a large colony like Nigeria to be administered by only about two hundred officers, but it was important for them to collect information on the subjects in their charge. Consequently, short training programs were set up  

Death of the Jukun King diary entry

These diaries and letters provide a unique point of entry into much larger issues, such as the Tiv witchcraft and cannibalism accusations based on a fundamental misunderstanding by early colonial administrators. They had learned of the power of the mbatsav, a senior men's secret society, and took literally what they were told about the mbatsav consuming the bodies of their victims. There ensued a long and drawn-out government investigation in which many ritual objects said to be used by the mbatsav were confiscated by the Abinsi Provincial Administration and divided equally between the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers. Capt. Abraham, acting as the collector and facilitator in these transactions, believed at the time that the Tiv really did practice ritual cannibalism and it was only much later in the 1950s that he changed the record to reflect the fact that this was indeed "metaphorical" (ie, soul-destroying) eating.

Tiv ax collected by Balfour 1930

This is but one of many examples and I offer it here as a revealing detail of this three-sided story of how African art came to be represented in Western collections. I plan to return to Oxford in April to continue my work there on this multi-year project. At the moment I am trying to decide whether the book should make the ethnographer-collectors or the curators the organizational focus.

Sidney Kasfir

Heilbrun Fellow 2013-14

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The University in Crisis, Part II

SUMMARY REPORT

Emory University Emeritus College

Interdisciplinary Seminar:

The University in Crisis

Fall, 2014

January 8, 2015

PART 2:

TRADITIONAL LIBERAL EDUCATION AND ITS VALUES UNDER THREAT

The second main concern raised in the seminar was the future of liberal education in American universities, which is increasingly under siege in all but a precious few institutions, and sometimes even in elite and expensive private institutions where it would seem to be most likely to flourish.

The readings on this general theme pointed to the erosion of a species of higher education that has been distinctive, indeed unique, to American culture. Based on wide exposure to different disciplines and ways of knowing, liberal education aims at the holistic development of the human person through a non-specialized course of study across the arts and sciences. In the words of Michael Roth, the President of Wesleyan College, it is "a broad education that sets the foundation for a lifetime of learning" above and "Beyond the University" - his title for the book that turned out to be central in our discussions.

What is the Point of Liberal Education in the 21st Century?

Deborah Ayer, Senior Lecturer Emerita in the Department of English, posed this question as the topic for a seminar that struck to the heart of the matter; she also set the readings for the session, and moderated the discussion that ensued.

Certain chapters of Roth's Beyond the University helped us remember how tightly our ideal of a liberal education is interwoven with other strands of American intellectual and cultural history. One of these was Jefferson's Enlightenment belief that the health of a democratic republic depends on the education of its citizens, which means that even common people should be exposed to something beyond simple vocational training. Another such strand was the Emersonian conviction, seen best in "The American Scholar" (1837) and "Self-Reliance" (1841) that education should lead to a transformation of the self and thence of society and culture. American higher education is of course also heavily indebted to John Dewey and the tradition of American pragmatism (as seen in the works of Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, and William James), in which higher learning should aim at more than just individual growth, but social good as well, especially insofar as it helps overcome "a certain blindness in human beings" that prevents us from understanding, tolerating, and even appreciating the very diverse experiential reality of others, and thus allows us to prevail over our "hideous ancestral . . . cruelties" (in James's words).

This grand tradition, so quintessentially American at its core, is under threat from several powerful ideas.

The most serious contemporary challenge comes from what Roth calls "radical instrumentalism," the belief that the main purpose of American higher education is to equip people to play a useful role in the national economy, and that therefore it should focus on developing practical skills that can be monetized immediately upon graduation. This view is in the ascendancy just now because of two factors, the spectacular rise in college costs over the last few decades coupled with high unemployment stemming from the Great Recession.

Another "idea" working subtly against liberal education is the concept of the modern research university.  Following Wilhelm von Humboldt, institutions of higher learning in nineteenth-century Germany operated according to the ideal of pure science, where practical outcomes are secondary to the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself. University education then was not explicitly about the general intellectual preparation or moral training of the individual (tasks relegated principally to the Gymnasium), or even less so about social betterment. The modern American research university partakes of this emphasis when it seeks everywhere to promote specialized research (even, quite often, at the undergraduate level); and because faculty who teach at research universities are ipso facto specialists in their particular disciplines, they are often less inclined (and perhaps even less qualified) to concern themselves with what might constitute a broad liberal education. In such an intellectual climate, in other words, guidance in the Socratic dictum of "know thyself" may no longer play a prominent role.

For some, another factor working against traditional liberal education is what Allan Bloom has termed (in The Closing of the American Mind, 1987), a "disabling relativism," which he sees as the result of the revolutionary campus activism of the late 1960s, when students demanded instruction in courses that were "relevant" to their own concerns. When universities "gave in" to these demands, they put themselves in the position of no longer insisting that students be exposed to the works of those thinkers who addressed the "permanent questions" lying at the heart of a humanistic education, and gave up their collective role as the guardian of Western cultural values.

A final notion working to undermine liberal education is a resurgent class-conscious elitism that says, in effect, that "college is not for everyone" - even in a country that counts Jefferson as one of its founding fathers. Roofers and plumbers have no need of higher education, it says; this assertion is predicated on the assumption that a college education is really all about annual earnings, which would not be greater for a plumber with a B.S. in psychology, for example, or a roofer with a B.A. in philosophy. In this economically class-based view, the few who will benefit from a true liberal arts education will increasingly be the children of the already well-situated, who can afford to pay a high sticker price for the polish and cachet that a "traditional" college experience will furnish their offspring.

These four prevailing mind-sets (and perhaps others as well) challenge our uniquely American tradition of higher education and are present on every campus in the United States, including Emory's. All members of the seminar - not just those retired from the College of Arts and Sciences or Oxford College - agreed that our colleges and universities need to mount a sustained counterattack against all of them. At Emory in particular there is real danger that the ethos of the research university, with its emphasis on specialized research in the objective pursuit of truth, will swamp the very different (and in many ways quite opposed) culture of the liberal arts that is still viable, though far from vibrant, in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. (Those of us with knowledge of both the ECAS and Oxford College felt that Oxford's relative isolation, 37 miles from the Atlanta campus, makes possible a more authentic liberal-arts education there than that which is available around a quadrangle overshadowed by Schools of Medicine, Public Health, Law, and Business.)

There was also concern that, like many other institutions, Emory College has drifted over the last decade or so into making the case for liberal education not on its own merits but on the promise of professional-school admission or lucrative job placement - in effect "caving" to instrumentalism or vocationalism. This can be seen as part of a pattern of thinking that (not just at Emory, of course) turns higher education into a business, makes the university into a corporation, turns students into customers, and regards knowledge as a product. We conclude that it is essential for the University to engage in some sustained, collective thinking about the question that inspired this session of our seminar: What, indeed, is the point of liberal education in the twenty-first century?

The Importance of the Fine Arts to the Educational Mission of the University

If a liberal arts education is finally about intellectual and spiritual growth, then the fine arts must play a central role in the university-wide campus culture. Such was the argument made by James Flannery, Winship Professor of the Arts and Humanities Emeritus, in the very first session of the seminar; it proved a keynote for several other meetings in which the "arts" in the formulation "the arts-and-sciences" were found to be too often devalued as "soft" and nugatory in contrast to the "hard" and essential sciences.

Flannery proposed that we read several chapters of an important book by Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, 2010), and then several shorter pieces of his own dealing with the status of the arts and artists in American higher education.

Nussbaum's book is a powerful defense of traditional humanistic education for spiritual, not economic "profit"; she bases her views on Rabindranath Tagore's useful distinction between "moral man" and "commercial man." With Jefferson she believes that democracy is doomed to fail without a citizenry that has been schooled in both critical thinking - for creative solutions to political problems and for resistance to dangerous ideas - and in empathic thinking, the ability to "feel into" the life-situation of persons very different from ourselves. This latter ability comes only through the exercise of imagination, which is the purview of the fine and applied arts. Cultivating the imagination through the arts breeds empathy, allows us to become "intelligent readers of others' stories," and counteracts the institutionalized narcissism of the present age by enabling us to see others not as things but as independent selves - an essential requirement for all of us in a diverse democratic society.  

With Nussbaum's book as prologue, Flannery went on to discuss his own writings, all of which dealt with why an institutional presence for the arts in the life of the University is essential if it wants to achieve the otherwise elusive sense of intellectual community universities usually advertise themselves as aspiring to, but seldom attain. The following are excerpts from a summary Flannery wrote about the overall thrust of these three essays:

The various statements of mine I have shared with our colleagues in the seminar, including, the "Modest Proposal for the Arts" that I wrote for the Emory Report in conjunction with the groundbreaking ceremony for the Schwartz Center back in October 2000, contained my basic thoughts on the marginal role of the arts in relation to the lack of intellectual community at Emory.  That article also concerns the opportunities for the arts as they might help to inspire a more meaningful purpose and relevancy to the liberal arts. In that regard I would particularly call the attention of our colleagues to the connections between these goals and the ideas of Jim Gustafson regarding the need to base education on the holistic nature of human beings, with excellence being defined not through mental activities alone, but rather through activities that involve the whole personality - intellect, body, sensibility and imagination - as an integrated whole.  That ideal, of course, runs entirely counter to the increasing pragmatic and utilitarian emphases of higher education today.

Flannery then turns to a second essay:

In recommending the creation of an "Office for the Arts" serving the entire campus community, I also attempt to deal with the difficulties of the arts themselves in creating a collaborative, genuinely interdisciplinary, and productive community of their own.  In the words of Yeats,"For a people to become a community, they must live like one."  The same axiom applies not only to the arts at Emory but, as the recent Report by the Commission on the Liberal Arts at Emory makes abundantly clear, the guiding ethos of the entire campus.  The Commission recommends several strategies for dealing with the particular lack of an intellectual community at Emory.  These include the establishment of a two-day festival located in multiple, highly visible locations around the campus that would celebrate the accomplishments of faculty members and students.  I would point out that an Office for the Arts could play an important role in realizing this goal.

Finally, Flannery mentions his "letter to Dean Robert Paul from October 2006 which provides a record of the unhappy effort to respond to the designation of the arts as a cross-cutting high priority theme of the 2005 Strategic Plans of the College and the University.  President Wagner, in supporting this decision, went so far as to describe the arts as 'one of the building blocks of who we are and are attempting to become.'" Flannery feels that the "Arts at Emory report commissioned by the Dean . . . fell far short of what was actually needed," and he points to "the extraordinary success of a campus-wide Initiative in the Arts . . . at Columbia University under the leadership of its President, Lee Bollinger.  That effort responded to two of the high priorities of President Bollinger, namely to enable the arts to play an integral role in every Columbia student's educational experience, regardless of their academic discipline; and to promote lifelong involvement with the arts for Columbia graduates as a means to their personal and professional fulfillment."

Flannery concludes by writing, "As I indicated to Dean Paul, the Columbia model would enable Emory to realize the significant investment made in the arts programs already while, in the process, helping to foster the idea of community as envisaged and promulgated by Presidents Laney, Chace, and Wagner for many years. [ . . .]  I continue to recommend the establishment of an Office for the Arts that would serve the entire campus.  I am convinced that it is only by addressing in practical terms the possibilities inherent in the arts that Emory can fulfill its own promise [as a] "real community (rather than a collection) of scholars bound together by their intellectual and human accomplishments."

To be continued...

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Faculty Activities

On Thursday, February 19, 2015 EUEC Member Paul Courtright, Professor of Religion, Emeritus, gave a lecture at Georgia State University.  The title of his lecture was Gazing at Sacred Horror In India: British Colonial Experiences of the Sublime.  A poster for the talk can be seen by clicking here.    

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