Arendt against the Politicization of the University
Peter Baehr
Introduction
True to her vocation, Hannah Arendt approached the world of teaching and learning from the standpoint of politics. But that very stance harbored a paradox. It was a mistake, Arendt believed, to politicize education because politics and education are contrasting realms of human action. For Arendt, education is a sphere created to protect children from the demands of the adult world while incrementally introducing them to it. Moreover, the education of children requires something more than teaching prowess and a mastery of the subjects taught. It requires authority: the responsibility of adults to instruct the young, establishing limits and formulating guidelines that will enable them to grow securely into the world. Politics, by contrast, is a sphere of freedom, risk, and uncertainty fit only for adults. It requires not authority but rather the equality of citizens to be seen and heard in public and, thereby, to participate in shaping the commonwealth. As she puts it: “Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian.”1
Beginning with birth, the original emergence of newness that Arendt calls natality, learning is a lifelong process, active so long as persons retain their curiosity and wits. Education, on the other hand, “must have a predictable end” and in “our civilization this end probably coincides with graduation from college rather than with graduation from high school.”2 College students and all others in institutions of higher learning are not children. However, they are already fellow citizens. Arendt agrees while re-stating her view that mixing politics and education corrupts both activities. I return to this point below in the section on “The School and the ‘Social.’” First let us look at the situation of children at school and the location of the school in Arendt’s triadic topography of political, social and private realms.
The Child at School
In “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt lists three “ruinous” assumptions of modern pedagogy.3 The first is the notion that children should be encouraged to occupy and manage a domain free of adult interference. Animated by a “progressive,” romantic spirit, such lofty laissez-faire approaches aim to liberate the young from fusty constraints. Instead, they abandon them to a new kind of social tyranny. In a contest between a child and adults, the child can at least rely on the understanding and solidarity of other children. Not so in relation to a group of peers where the majority or leader of the majority rules. The result is “either conformism or juvenile delinquency, and . . . frequently a mixture of both.”4
If the first pernicious idea about education concerns children, the second has to do with teachers. Modern pedagogy increasingly assumes that mastery of any particular discipline—math, languages, the various sciences, and so forth—is secondary to the method of teaching per se, a method that can be applied to all subjects willy-nilly. But where teachers are generalists frantically trying to keep one step ahead of their students in any particular area, the child’s education is bound to suffer, bereft of the authoritative guidance of teachers who really know their stuff. Such negligence is aggravated by a simplistic view of learning, the third damaging idea undermining the relationship between adults and children. In this view, the “basic assumption is that you can know and understand only what you have done yourself.” By substituting doing for learning, academic study is downgraded to vocational proficiency and specialization.5 The effect is to narrow intellectual horizons just at the stage when they should be expanded, and to buttress the misconception that education must be a pleasurable, playful activity to facilitate the natural spontaneity and exuberance of the child. That view, apparently so caring, is in fact deleterious to the child’s growth as a person and as a citizen because it fails to prepare juveniles for the adult world of work that, far from being playful, is characterized by hard graft, diligence, stamina, and all manner of restraint.
In this nexus, parents have important duties to discharge. They must shelter children from the storms of the world and from the klieg lights of political exposure; such protection is what the privacy of the family home, in principle, affords. Equally, parents have an obligation to shield the world from children, channeling their raw energy into civilized habits of respect and self-control. Natality is, doubtless, a thing of wonder, but the new beginning that is the child is just as capable of unleashing chaos into the world as it is of revitalizing it. Parents are further required by the state to send their children to school and this typically means a public institution. States assume this right of compulsion because while parents are already citizens, children are citizens of the future.
Distilling “the essence of the educational activity,” we can say it is the adult responsibility “to cherish and protect something—the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new.”6 Education is conservative or, rather, conservationist in these respects. But it is not, any more than parental authority, the model for the realm of politics. Politics is an activity that takes place between formally equal adult citizens who are able to bear the burdens of being seen and heard in public. In politics, conservation alone, were it even possible, would lead to entropy and annihilation. For the frail human artifact that Arendt calls “the world” to persist, it requires actions that constantly recreate it, and thus transform it , under unforeseeable conditions.
Some commentators, like Stacey Smith (2001), argue that Arendt’s severance of education from politics is implausible. If one of the purposes of education is to prepare children for the common world they will renew as adults, and if that common world is one in which citizenship is a prominent feature, then educators would seem duty bound to prepare students for citizenship. And nothing can facilitate that more than nurturing “capacities with which to judge and, consequently, to speak and to act in a public manner that approximates fullness rather than partiality of perspectives.”7 It is one thing—a bad thing—to subject students to the partisan attitudes of their teachers. It is quite another thing to expose the young to a variety of standpoints that, by osmosis even more than by instruction, communicate the plenitude of the public world. By bringing the young into contact with multiple kinds of life and experience, by cultivating their imagination and reflection, and by affording them opportunities of embryonic practice in citizenship through “school governance, community service and broader political forums,” the school is well placed to create the conditions of representative thinking and an enlarged mentality that Arendt saw as the bedrock of political judgment.8
Stacey Smith’s argument, I suggest, is less a refutation of Arendt than it is an intelligent fleshing out of her contention—somewhat cryptic as stated—that educators are obliged to prepare youth in their transition to a world of joint responsibility where citizenship is at the core of that obligation. We can grant that while still recognizing the limits of political education in schools. Participants in the mature public space are subject to onerous tensions: active citizens must, among other things, “be willing to risk disclosing their unique perspectives while restraining themselves from expressing their full singularity;” they must make judgments, sometimes “taking controversial positions” while avoiding “attempts to coerce others through assertions or logical demonstrations of incontestable truth and certainty.”9 These tensile balances, rare enough in adults, are hardly to be expected of school students.
The School and the “Social”
Around the time that “The Crisis in Education” was published, Arendt became embroiled in a major controversy over school integration in the American south. In “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959) and in answers to critics, Arendt agreed that judicially mandated segregation was wrong and that the American government was right to “abolish laws enforcing discrimination.”10 On the other hand, she opposed any law, federal or state, that forced school integration onto parents. Such coercion impinged on their social and private rights to choose which school was best for their children. As always, when children are the issue, Arendt repeats her demand that adults protect them from obligations the young are simply not ready to assume. Watching scenes on television of frightened children thrown into the midst of violent protests prompted her to ask indignantly: “Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?”11
“Reflections on Little Rock” adapts a distinction formulated in The Human Condition (1958) among three realms of human action: the public, social, and private spaces. Politics, we saw previously, takes place in that sphere of public participation governed by the principle of equality, a status that comes with being a member, a citizen, of a polity. The social sphere is animated by a contrasting principle: discrimination; it is the space of “free association and group formation,”12 in which we choose our friends, our occupations, and, according to our means and preferences, our neighborhoods. Generally speaking, like mixes with like. We associate with people of a similar class, manner, educational, ethnic, and linguistic background—in short, with people who share our interests, employment, and inclinations. Think of a women’s reading group, a law office’s annual dinner, a house of worship, or a trade union meeting. The private realm is different again, “ruled neither by equality, nor by discrimination,” but by intimacy:13 the affection we feel for friends, our families, those we love and care for prompts us to give them special consideration. And such affection, and the action that flows from it, turns not on people’s social function or their political standing but on the uniqueness they have in our eyes. For this reason and others, the prohibition against marrying a person of a different race—miscegenation—was, for Arendt, an outrage that dwarfed the matter of school segregation.
Arendt acknowledges that public institutions are a broader domain than strictly political ones. A bus, train, theater, museum, and many other things that people need to pursue their lives and conduct their business all fulfill a public function; they are thus subject to the principle of equal treatment. A public service that discriminates against American citizens is subverting its very rationale. Schools are a more complex case, and not only because they draw on federal subventions; schools straddle public, social, and private dimensions. The federal state has a right to “prescribe minimum requirements f or future citizenship” and to “support the teaching of subjects and professions which are felt to be desirable and necessary to the nation as a whole.”14 But this prescription concerns only the content of education “not the context of association and social life which invariably develops out of [the child’s] attendance at school.”15 These social contexts are diverse.16 Private as well as public schools exist. Some schools cater only to girls, others just to boys. Some schools proclaim a specific religious affiliation. Parents also have rights and these derive from the private and social realms. As Arendt puts it:
To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association. As for children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and social life, and while such conflicts are common in adult life, children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them.17
Were Arendt a “Negro mother,” she would never put her child into a school where it was expressly unwanted, subjecting the child to aggression and humiliation. She would further be appalled at a federal government that turned children into a siege engine of reform. And if Arendt were a “white mother,” aside from also seeking to protect her child, she would assert her right as a parent to decide “in whose company my children received its instruction,” a right that is “challenged only by dictatorships.”
University Students, Faculty, and Administration
Ideas about primary and secondary schooling did not exhaust Arendt’s thoughts on education. During the 1960s and the early 1970s, she wrote about the university. The catalyst was campus radicalism, part of a broader social movement of civil rights and anti-war protest sweeping across America and Europe. Arendt also touched, if far more briefly, on a process that had been gathering pace ever since the end of the Second World War: the tendency of universities to adopt a research-intensive model of education and to apply it across all modes of scholarship. Its fruits were a proliferation of privately and publicly funded research institutes, a demand for academic “relevance” and a related expectation of enhanced academic productivity (papers, books, and grants).
Arendt’s appraisal of student radicalism was ambivalent. She praised the students’ moral seriousness and sense of urgency. Their “sheer courage” and “appetite for action” to bring about social and political change were nothing less than “astounding.”18 So, too, was the international dimension of student protest; conditioning it, she surmised, was the fear of nuclear destruction and a widespread revulsion against the “anonymous power of administrators,”19 the bureaucratic “rule of nobody,” that infuses the institutions of mass society. Arendt also defended the student movement and the ’68ers especially against charges of “fascism.” That incendiary accusation said more about the critics’ loss of nerve and their annoyance at having their work disrupted than it did about the current scene. No mass parties backed the students, nor did the latter possess paramilitary organizations or leaders of the appeal of Hitler and Mussolini.20 The detractors’ emotional spasm reminded Arendt of another grand failure of political judgment: the “enthusiastic welcome” of the outbreak of the First World War from 1914 to 1918 received from European intellectuals.21 Now, Arendt hinted, many intellectuals were gripped by another kind of hysteria, this time of fear rather than bellicose rapture.
Yet if the student movement displayed a wild grandeur, it also incubated reflexes that Arendt found disturbing. A fascination with theorists of violence was bad enough; far worse was the eruption of real violence, a development she attributed to the arrival of Black Power on campus. Black students, unprepared for university study, had an interest in lowering academic standards; supine administrations too readily acceded to their demands.22 A weird, nihilistic strand of despair was evident, too, especially in Europe; it was as if students, sensing impending defeat, actually wished to provoke it so they would still be seen as actors of sorts. “The conviction that everything deserves to be destroyed, that everybody deserves to go to hell—this sort of desperation can be detected everywhere, though it is less pronounced in America.”23
No surprise, then, that the ideas of the students were often confused and that the “theoretical sterility and analytical dullness of this movement are just as striking and depressing as its joy in action is welcome.”24 Anti-colonial rhetoric combined Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and bowdlerized Marxism in an incoherent hodgepodge. Slogans invoking the “Unity of the Third World” were absurd. “The Third World is not a reality but an ideology,” Arendt stated baldly.25 When asked to explain that provocation, she declared, “Asia, Africa, South America—those are realities” and each is internally heterogeneous in its history and culture. Lumping together a Chinese worker and a Bantu tribesman, and telling them that they lived in the same Third World, would be met with incredulity by both.26 Victims of European dictatorships would be similarly surprised to hear of something called “bourgeois freedom,” a linguistic conflation persuasive only to people—“innocent children in the West”—who have never experienced serious oppression. “From the fact that communist governments today do not respect civil rights and do not guarantee freedom of speech and association it does not follow that such rights and freedoms are ‘bourgeois.’”27
The students’ attitude to their own habitats—colleges and universities—was no less problematic. Arendt declared repeatedly that the student revolt was a reflex of much that it criticized. Students objected to the politicization of the university by government, but they were busy politicizing it themselves: for them, knowledge was valuable to the extent that it was useful, capable of empowering the downtrodden or liberating the self. The demand for practical relevance from university courses, the febrile mission to “change the world,” mirrored the instrumentality of business corporations and governments; it also legitimated the desire of university administrations to take knowledge out of the ivory tower, apply it to society at large, and channel more resources into professional schools. Student protests thus contributed to the growing marginalization of the humanities, perceived as antiquated and irrelevant when contrasted to the youthful, activist social sciences. Young people in revolt thought that they were the enemies of a crass and commercial society. Yet the consumer society, like the students themselves, had little time for durable things; fashion and obsolescence lie in the very nature of commodity production. In contrast, the assumption behind the humanities is that they deal with “thought-things” of perennial or at least lasting importance. Arendt even asserted that student “demands to have instruction in civil warfare [was] the answer to the social sciences’ ‘manipulation,’ the social engineering.” She concluded that the students were actually “a product of the social sciences; they only have a different goal.”28
A political theorist who objects to politicization is an oddity only if we forget one vital fact about Arendt: her belief that the conflation of ideas, principles, and spheres of conduct is the cause of much contemporary confusion. For that reason, Arendt went to great efforts to distinguish totalitarianism from dictatorship, labor from work, earth from world, education from learning, and so forth. Politics, too, requires a sense of discrimination. For Arendt, political activity outside the university by students was in principle legitimate. For instance, taking time off classes to participate in a general election. But politicization of the university itself was doubly destructive. The disruption of classes obviously impedes learning. It is also self-defeating:
[Universities] make it possible for young people over a number of years to stand outside all social groups and obligations, to be truly free. If the students destroy the universities, then nothing of the sort will any longer exist; consequently there will be no rebellion against society either.29
Education would, of course, continue, but outside the universities, in research institutes dominated by government and private interests. Vocational and professional training would be left untouched. Is this what the students wanted? Arendt doubted it.
Her reflections on student revolt prompted Arendt to delineate a “twofold task” of universities: first, “to educate” students and take on the role of “a functional part of society”; second, to carry out research
where knowledge for its own sake is pursued—for no other reason than that we want truth. (And not values. To create values for society and play “the conscience of society”—what arrogance. Society either has a conscience or it does not. . . . We can examine values, conscience, etc. but not provide it.)30
Enquiry that is oriented to truthfulness is not a political matter; on the contrary, it is one that occurs “outside the political realm . . . [and is] one of the various modes of being alone.”31 Arendt glosses:
Outstanding among the existential modes of truth telling are the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality of the historian and the judge, and the independence of the fact-finder, the witness and the reporter. . . . These modes of being alone differ in many respects, but they have in common that as long as any of them lasts, no political commitments, no adherence to a cause, is possible.32
It transpires that to tell “the truth . . . is the only responsibility of intellectuals, insofar as they are intellectuals.” Once they step out of the role of truthtellers, and engage the world as opinion-shapers or partisans of particular interests, they act as citizens rather than intellectuals. Then they can claim no legitimate authority for their views and actions other than being a member of a polity. They certainly have “no right to claim” that because they are intellectuals, they are the “conscience of society.”33 She recalled that when American scientists convened to discuss the whys, hows, and wherefores of making the hydrogen bomb, they met as a small scientific club concerned with scientific questions. Yet shortly after their discussion began, differences appeared of a highly political kind, concerning the weapon’s potential for deterrence or destruction. “And the moment responsibility appeared, the political man prevailed.” The “special responsibility” of intellectuals, “lies in giving the facts of the matter, after which they resume their roles as judging citizens like everybody else.”34
Alas, university education was not only being politicized by students and by governments. Faculty research was becoming ever more banal. She observed tersely in her notebook, “The masses of papers suffocate scholarship and originality. The ‘public or perish’ device was first only comical and vulgar; today it is a clear danger to all serious effort.”35 Today, we think of authors in terms of creativity and productivity; we understand their function from the point of the subjects themselves. But Arendt reminded her students that an auctor in the Roman era was a person who initiated a project, for instance the construction of a building, as distinct from the architect and craftsmen who carried it out. From the Roman perspective, then, the criterion of authorship was not simple productivity; it was the contribution a person had made imaginatively to “the world.” Authors, in that sense, “enriched, enlarged the world we live in.”36 Unfortunately, few modern academics make a similar contribution.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 173.
2 Ibid., 192.
3 Ibid., 172.
4 Arendt, “Crisis,” 178. See also Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. P. Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000), 231–46, 242–43.
5 Ibid., 179.
6 Ibid., 188.
7 Stacey Smith, “Education for Judgment: An Arendtian Oxymoron?,” in Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. M. Gordon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 67–91, 79.
8 Ibid., 88.
9 A. Schutz, “Contesting Utopianism: Hannah Arendt and the Tensions of Democratic Education,” in Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. M. Gordon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 93–125, 101.
10 “The real issue is equality before the law of the country, and equality is violated by segregation laws, that is, by laws enforcing segregation, not by social customs and the manners of educating children,” Arendt, “Reflections,” 244. On Arendt, education, and the Little Rock imbroglio, see Anya Topolski, “Creating Citizens in the Classroom: Hannah Arendt’s Political Critique of Education,” Ethical Perspectives, 15, no. 2 (2008): 259–82, 272–74.
11 Arendt, “Reflections,” 236.
12 Ibid., 239. See also 240, 242–43.
13 Arendt says “exclusiveness” (she also says affection) but this is misleading because all three realms—political/public, social and private—are exclusive in different ways. A women’s reading group by definition excludes men. States (mostly!) exclude noncitizens from voting in local and general elections.
14 Arendt, “Reflections,” 242.
15 Ibid.
16 Arendt says that the school is a public and a social world simultaneously. As such “the school is to the child what a job is to an adult” but with this decisive difference: while the choice of jobs and their related associations is a matter for adults, the choice of school is made by parents for children (Arendt, “Reflections,” 242).
17 Ibid.
18 Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 104–98, 188; “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary,” in Crises of the Republic, 201–33, 202–3.
19 Ibid., 178–80.
20 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch 1950-1973, Vols. 1 and 2, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper: 2002), 714.
21 See “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century,” in Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress: Essays and Lectures (Series: Subject File, 1949-1975, n.d), Image 26. She added: “Fond memories of this moment. (Marianne Weber),” possibly an ironic allusion to Max Weber’s impassioned support of the war.
22 Arendt, “Violence,” 120–21.
23 Ibid., 207.
24 Ibid., 206.
25 Ibid., 123.
26 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 210. “Countries of the South,” the favored contemporary expression for postcolonial societies, is no better on this score, according to Albert Memmi. In lieu of more plausible alternatives, however, Memmi resigned himself to “Third World” because “the mechanisms governing decolonization, like those governing colonization, are, aside from local differences, relatively uniform” (Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized, trans. R. Bononno [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008]), xxi.
27 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 221.
28 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 702.
29 Arendt, “Thoughts,” 208, emphasis in the original. See also Arendt, “Violence,” 189–90.
30 Hannah Arendt, “Intellectuals and Responsibility,” in Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. Essays and Lectures (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975, 1967, n.d.), Image 1.
31 Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 223–59, 255.
32 Ibid.
33 Arendt, “Intellectuals and Responsibility,” Image 2.
34 Ibid., Image 1. It is worth noting that while truth-telling—the job of academics and intellectuals—is different from political judgment—something that all citizens are capable of exercising—both activities are nullified by ideological or formulaic thinking. Scholarship is destroyed by it because ideology is interested only in facts that perform a political service; it is not interested in truth itself. Ideology is also inimical to “representative thinking,” the ability, evoked by Kant, to “think in the place of everyone else” and thus to “enlarge” one’s mind and imagination (Arendt, “Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future [New York: Penguin Books, 2006], 237). Such comprehensiveness requires impartiality, a commitment that is not the same as objectivity; for whereas “impartiality rests on our ability to see the world from different points of view that are themselves partial in the double sense of being incomplete and self-serving, objectivity presumes we could stand outside the world as if we were not part of it” (Peter Euben, “Hannah Arendt on Politicizing the University and Other Clichés,” in Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. M. Gordon [Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2001]), 175–99, 193.
35 Arendt, Denktagebuch, 703.
36 Arendt, “From Machiavelli to Marx,” in Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress: Essays and Lectures (Series: Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975, 1965, n.d.), Image 2.