Oakeshott and Liberal Education

In 1975, Michael Oakeshott wrote On Human Conduct, a major work of political philosophy. In this work he distinguishes two ideal types of human association, which he calls civil and enterprise association. These forms of association represent two distinct ways in which people might live together. In 1989, just before Oakeshott’s death in 1990, Timothy Fuller published a collection of Oakeshott’s essays about liberal education, entitled The Voice of Liberal Learning. These essays set out a vision of liberal learning that is deeply countercultural in our moment.

As far as I know, nobody has related the categories of civil and enterprise association to Oakeshott’s ideas about education, but doing so can help to clarify the character and purpose of universities. Liberal education flourishes when the university is understood as a kind of civil association. Enterprise association, in contrast, tends to tie liberal education to ends that distort its essential character.

To explain the differences briefly: in civil association people are free to choose their own purposes, to explore their individual interests, and to pursue the intimations suggested by their experience. This kind of association requires some basic ground rules, or a rule of law, but does not ask everyone to pursue the same end or set of ends. It is a framework in which students and teachers alike are free to find a “centre for their intellectual affections,” to borrow a phrase from Oakeshott.

Enterprise association, in contrast, requires that associates corporately pursue a substantive purpose. This is the most common mode of human association, and it occurs whenever there is something to be achieved that requires more than one person to do it. We get together to pick up the neighborhood trash; establish a corporation to pursue a business interest; work as a committee of citizens to pass a zoning law; throw a party. The end is clear, the roles of the associates are defined, and the association ends when the goal is attained. The relationship of these people is defined “only by specifying the object, the purpose, or the interest in terms of which they are related,” as Oakeshott writes in On Human Conduct.

Depending on the situation, either enterprise or civil association may be a more fitting mode of association. In constructing these ideal types, Oakeshott does not say that one is good and the other bad. They stand as two opposed poles of political experience, and every human association is a blend of the two types. But he does point out that enterprise association, because it is so natural, tends to predominate. Enterprise association can also exhibit certain controlling, not to say tyrannical tendencies, if pursued too far. Who, in enterprise association, has power to determine the end pursued? Is it the associates themselves or a designated committee of just a few—the vanguard of the enterprisers? Who determines what the associates do and when they do it? Must there be a mission statement, and what happens if there are dissenters? Can someone manage to exit from an enterprise association, or is he trapped?

Transposing this basic framework to the contemporary setting, one observes that universities often justify their activities in terms of extrinsic “enterprising” purposes. They do this in at least three ways. First, and most commonly, they speak in terms of basic practicality: universities aim at developing “skills” in students, thereby producing more valuable laborers and increasing the potential earnings of their graduates. Second, universities claim to transform the world, addressing social justice needs or reforming our “broken” politics. Third, they craft inspirational mission statements that are supposed to guide their activities.  All these endeavors are undertaken within the “practical mode” of experience, as Oakeshott might have explained it. In this mode, we must have a concrete reason for everything we undertake; activity without a clear and defined end seems nonsensical.

In the first of these three ways of thinking, liberal education is straightforwardly cast in terms of outcomes. Liberally educated graduates will have better critical thinking skills, will write lucidly, speak more clearly and persuasively, and “relate” better (whatever that means) to diverse constituencies of people. One of my favorite gambits in this discourse is to say that liberal education helps graduates to think “outside the box.” One college explains that it wants to cultivate students who not only think outside this famous box but transform the box itself. As a spokesman writes, “maybe you just need a bigger box or to not be in the box.” Or “[m]aybe the box doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s a sphere or something else.”

I know it isn’t nice or charitable to poke fun at silly, vacuous statements like these, but I think they exhibit either a misunderstanding of liberal education or a corruption of it for the purposes of success and profit. As Timothy Fuller has explained, “we must resist diversion into merely practical, vocational defenses for [liberal education]” because “even if they accurately describe some advantages that go with being liberally educated, they obscure the experience itself.” Of course, I have sympathy for administrators who must explain liberal education to people who have never experienced it, and therefore do not understand it. Sometimes it is necessary to speak the language of the practical world to carve out a place for something that is an intrinsic good. The problem is that in repeating such half-truths we may come to believe them, and in doing so we revert to the “practical” mode where everything is justified by future outcomes and, ultimately, by the hope of money, honor, and power.

The second way of casting the tendency toward enterprise association occurs when people speak not in terms of skills but rather in the subtly Marxist language of “changing the world.” Because things are so bad at present, the thinking goes, universities must effect positive transformation in the lives of students and in society. Such general exhortations about the goods of change are ubiquitous and are exemplified in the following statements from Temple University. “Because the world won’t change itself,” writes the university’s anonymous corporate voice, “Temple students . . . are driven to work for the greater good. Our faculty and staff are thought leaders and game-changers who empower Philadelphia and the entire Temple community, both local and abroad, to keep learning and keep building. Collectively, we understand that if we keep going, anything is possible.” Who could be against this? Thought-leaders, game changers, the greater good, and the possibility of anything!

Alongside this desire to change the world goes a desire to impose certain patterns of thought upon those who live and work in universities. Oakeshott would have abhorred the idea that professors and students should undergo “trainings” in such things as diversity, equity, and inclusion. Training is something for dogs and horses, he might have said, and it is directly opposed to the liberation that liberal learning offers. The university’s aim is not to promote a common purpose or understanding but to facilitate the self-understanding of individual persons. These people may of course choose their own purposes, and they may ally with others to engage in or even promote certain kinds of understanding and study. But it is a corruption of the enterprise to claim that assent to a contentious political doctrine is the price of admission to a university.

Third and finally, a mania for mission statements exemplifies this enterprising way of understanding universities. Once again, the thinking is that we cannot do anything until we know what it is for. But anyone who has read Oakeshott carefully will see that trying to ground or justify an activity in a mission statement is to proceed exactly backwards. This is perhaps Oakeshott’s most famous insight, clearly expressed in his essay, “Rationalism in Politics.” To wit: it is a misunderstanding to imagine that a concrete manner of activity can be distilled into principles that then turn around and guide that activity. A political ideology is not “directive” but rather a mere abridgement, which emerges from the practice of politics.

Likewise, a university mission statement, at its most coherent, summarizes what is already going on among teachers and learners. What tends to happen instead is that administrators believe (and perhaps they are not entirely wrong) that they must justify what they are doing at the outset—mostly to the outside world and especially to donors—by providing a succinct statement of purpose to be put in a pocket and consulted when needed. I have even discovered a website that promises, unashamedly, to help in the construction of university mission statements. It offers a “word cloud” highlighting the most common or relevant terms one could choose for such a statement. These words include “research,” “knowledge,” “students,” “global,” “international” and “community.” Here is a representative sample of such a statement: “Our mission is to lead global debates in areas including education, climate, the economy and industry. We do this through pursuing outward-looking blue skies research, collaborating with international research and business partners, and creating learning environments that pursue knowledge from a global perspective.”

Again, it is easy to mock such endeavors, and Oakeshott would certainly have found them wrongheaded. I think they betray either a failure of self-confidence in those of us who inhabit places of liberal learning or the capture of many universities by politics and careerism. It is certainly true that the great majority of what takes place in universities is not liberal education in any sense Oakeshott would have recognized. But this does not mean that those of us who share Oakeshott’s understanding must capitulate to the ethos of the day by justifying our activity through mission statements, practical outcomes, and political change.

In his 1974 essay, “A Place of Learning,” delivered at Colorado College, Oakeshott described the threats facing liberal education. But even though such education occupied an increasingly marginal place in the larger university, he characteristically did not despair. He advocated not “a grand gesture of defiance” but instead “a quiet refusal to compromise which comes only in self-understanding. We must remember who we are: inhabitants of a place of liberal learning.”

Fifty years on, liberal education is simultaneously more marginalized (especially in the educational “establishment” of mainstream universities and colleges) and yet still alive. It is thriving in classical secondary schools and small American liberal arts colleges, especially religious ones. It flourishes in online discussion groups and in fellows’ programs around the country. And, of course, every university is likely to have at least one or two professors—and often many more—who understand their vocations as enjoying and passing on an intellectual tradition.

Given this situation, however, I think the right way to think about universities is as civil associations, not enterprise associations. Those who agree with Oakeshott are likely, as I am, to believe that the heart of the university experience lies in distinctively liberal education. But many others understand universities in the ways I have described above—either as institutions that promote worldly success or as quasi-political actors attempting to change the world. Therefore, seeing the university as a civil association, not a purposive enterprise association, does not mean that universities will return to fostering liberal education as their primary aim. My hope is more modest: that civil association can accommodate the different and sometimes opposed purposes of vocational, political, and liberal education.

How might we accomplish this change in thinking? First, we must understand the character of civil association. People in civil association are “not partners or colleagues in an enterprise with a common purpose to pursue or a common interest to promote or protect . . . [they] are related in terms of a practice." Here a practice is understood as a set of moral conditions that has "no intrinsic purpose.” It is “formal” not substantial. Oakeshott describes this as analogous to speaking a common language. Nothing about being conversant in a language prescribes what is said; but anything that is said obviously uses the language itself. The language therefore implicitly structures the association.

In a moral practice, then, people “speak” a common moral language—knowing what to say and what not to say, what is in and out of bounds, what is appropriate, and when. Here people are “formal equals,” left free to engage in the “miscellaneous, unforeseeable choices and transactions of agents each concerned to live the life of ‘a man like me’ . . . the objects of whose loves are as various as themselves, and who may lack any but this moral allegiance to one other.”

If we transpose this idea to universities, it implies that there ought to be a common moral language of civility among colleagues—and not only among colleagues in single departments or schools. I do not mean here just some kind of “politeness,” though this is certainly a good thing. Rather, such civility entails respect for colleagues, not just in terms of their academic excellence but insofar as we also respect their diverse, self-chosen purposes, which we likely do not share. Radically different enterprises go on in any large contemporary university. Engineers and computer scientists are engaged in preparing people for careers in industry; women’s studies departments and schools of social work have distinctly political aims; art departments are doing something else altogether; people study our food supply and the environment with the aim of making policy changes.

None of the things I have been describing is what I have chosen to do. And from the perspective of Oakeshott’s vision of education, none of these is the liberal learning he valued so highly. Yet I think we must recognize that these are studies with a place in the university as it exists today, and that many people wish to teach and learn such things.

But in the same way, the humanities and humane social sciences, with their less directly practical outcomes, must also be given a place and respected in their turn. I have sometimes heard science professors object that reading “all those long books” is pointless, when there are abridgments that “get across” the main points, as if Plato’s Republic is just a set of bullet points dressed up in a lot of meaningless dialogue. This betrays both a lack of understanding and a lack of respect for a kind of learning that is different from what scientists do. The danger is that if such persons are in positions of administrative authority, they might try to eliminate or “downsize” those departments whose value they do not understand. In other words, to think of universities as enterprise associations is potentially to mistake your particular vision of academic life for the whole of what goes on in a university.

To return to civil association: this mode of association offers a model for seeing universities as places where many people, and many self-selected groups of people, pursue a variety of interests that cannot be collapsed into one or a few main projects or emphases. This is why enterprise association, with its focus on sets of political or practical ends, is the wrong way of thinking about university education. Diversity trainings, the promise of career success, and political activism are all ways of harnessing an institution to extrinsic ends; but leaders of universities should not compel everyone to assent to these purposes. Civil association, writes Oakeshott, “is a moral condition; it is not concerned with the satisfaction of wants and with substantive outcomes but with the terms upon which the satisfaction of wants may be sought.”

In the university as civil association, the distinct good of liberal education can be recognized as at least equally valuable among all the goods that a university pursues. I personally think that liberal education offers the best good, though I know that this view will not be shared by many of my colleagues. But if the university as a whole is understood as civil association, we may have some hope that liberal education will be protected and fostered alongside all the other things that are going on.

Is this enough? Partisans for Oakeshott’s vision of liberal education (and I admit that I am one) may find such a state of things inadequate. Oakeshott himself straightforwardly argues that liberal education is not just one among many other things that may happen to be going on. In contrast to other pursuits, liberal education offers a complete escape from practical life and a liberation from the hic et nunc. It provides a philosophical way of thinking about the whole of life, with a perspective that no other pursuit can match.

Put differently, liberal education can explain what is going on in business schools; but business schools cannot in turn comprehend liberal education. In this sense liberal education is, indeed, superior. And my hope is that small colleges and other non-academic associations will continue to orient themselves entirely toward such education. But in the modern university as a whole, I believe the confident pluralism offered within civil association is the only way forward. As Oakeshott observed in 1974, and as is true in 2024, “[t]he engagement has survived. We do not yet live in the ashes of a great adventure which has burnt itself out.”

Elizabeth Corey’s powerful and beautifully rendered essay seeks to clarify the nature of the (modern) university and the community it occasions. The primary aim of her effort, as I understand it, is to develop a more effective defense of liberal education against managerial approaches to its operations; in our present moment, Corey shows, we are confronted with various and undesirable manifestations of the dominant view of the university as a business enterprise or training ground for “changing the world (the latter raison d'être often articulated and advertised in the service of the first, i.e. to attract and appease consumers and patrons, students and donors). The essay is thus concerned with understanding in the service of persuasion: how, Corey asks, might we clarify the nature of liberal learning to persuade those not yet or never to be intimately acquainted with liberal learning of its value, and the need to preserve or restore its autonomy?

Corey’s understanding and experience of the liberal arts is Oakeshottean: liberal learning is conversational and affords liberation from the here and now. The university is the place that occasions this great and untimely conversation, one that occurs between students, teachers, and their predecessors and through which we gain understanding of ourselves and our world to lead more intelligent and meaningful lives. Because liberal learning is a distinctive practice and mode of association (and experience), Corey invites us to utilize Oakeshott’s distinction between civil vs. enterprise association from his On Human Conduct to further illuminate and defend liberal education and the university in which it takes place.

I am compelled by Corey’s account of liberal education and agree with her that the dominant contemporary tendency to stress the practical, financial, vocational and political benefits of liberal learning (within and at the heart of the university) distorts its true character and encourages governance that jeopardizes its value. I note also that Corey’s recommendation to describe the university as “civil association” is, in certain respects, modest: she admits that “partisans of Oakeshott’s vision of liberal learning” may find this representation “inadequate” insofar as it belies liberal education’s promise to offer “the best good” rather than one good among many. Likewise, Corey does not pretend that the transposition of Oakeshott’s civil vs. enterprise association typology from the sphere of the modern political state to higher education is seamless. What “civil association” as a framework does promise, Corey argues, is a way of generating a “confident pluralism” within and towards the university that recognizes liberal education “as at least equally valuable among all the goods that a university pursues” (6). “Civil association” encourages pluralism because in this kind of association, in Oakeshott’s formulation, each member regards others as equal and respects their self-chosen purposes; the rules or laws ordering relations between members in civil association are not instrumental to achieving a particular purpose but rather create conditions of “civility” or prescribe norms of conduct that enable each to pursue their own purpose.

There are several aspects of Oakeshott’s original articulation of civil vs. enterprise association that do not map on easily to the realm of education, but I take Corey to be doing something other than arguing for a perfect analytical framework or scholarly equation. I do not therefore offer a systematic or comprehensive review of Oakeshott’s ideal typology in what follows. Rather, I focus on the absence, in Oakeshott’s “civil association,” of a common purpose: this is an essential element of his ideal type, and it plays a crucial role in Corey’s argument; it is also the source of my doubts about the suitability of “civil association” for illuminating and defending the university today.

While I share Corey’s desire to carve out and protect the freedom of teachers and students within the university to pursue their own self-chosen purposes, I am not persuaded that we can describe or defend the university without centering, articulating and confidently defending its essential purpose, which is to say the common purpose that binds together its members and which everyone entering the university freely chooses to adopt as their own. We will (and should) argue about what that purpose is, and we must find illuminating and persuasive ways of distinguishing between the university’s essential purpose and other (more practical, vocational, urgent, diverse) purposes nested within but not essential to the university, which direct some but not all its members. An implication of my insistence on common purpose is that the university’s rules or laws must be evaluated in terms of whether they advance or detract from the shared purpose of its members. Heated debates about whether a university’s rules, required training programs, or governance serve the institution’s purpose will invariably ensue. I do not think we can or should avoid these debates. To make them intelligent and productive, however, we must confront head-on rather than side-step the question of our common purpose.

Oakeshott developed his civil vs. enterprise association ideal-typology to illuminate the modern state and the distinctive relationship between citizens within it. Unlike in “enterprise association,” where members voluntarily band together to achieve a common purpose and govern their association with rules geared towards achieving that purpose (OHC 112), in “civil association” citizens finds themselves in relationships of political equality governed by lex, i.e. non-instrumental laws or rules that maintain formal relationships between persons (civitas) without determining each person’s purposes or actions within that civic order or association. Members in enterprise association express their freedom by determining their own purposes and joining (and retaining the freedom to exit) an association organized to advance their chosen purpose; the mode of governance in enterprise associations is “managerial” and rules are created to respond to contingent circumstances pursuant to the association’s purpose (OHC 117). By contrast, civitas or members of civil association enjoy civil freedom because they are related to each other “solely in terms of their common recognition of the rules which constitute a practice of civility” (OHC 128), with “civility” referring to norms of conduct that enable each to carry out their own self-chosen purpose(s) while respecting each whose “loves are as various as themselves” (OHC 129).

For Corey, “civil association” promises to illuminate two essential features of liberal education: its non-practical orientation and the freedom required for and produced through liberal learning. Members of a university, however, express their freedom also and crucially in a way that resembles enterprise association: the university is an association that members voluntarily choose to enter and from which they may freely exit. Specifically, the university is a community of teachers, scholars and students who freely choose to enter a partnership with each other for the shared purpose of learning and teaching. In the only mention of the university (of which I am aware) in Oakeshott’s discussion of different kinds of partnership in On Human Conduct, he classifies the university as “universitas” (199) which in the Middle Ages designated “a many joined in the pursuit of a common substantive satisfaction” as distinguished from “societas,” denoting a “multitude of men” formally associated through “moral” (i.e. not prudential) rules or laws (217). Oakeshott traces his civil vs. enterprise distinction to these historical designations, and while the modern university may contain a mix of different kinds of partnership, the “pursuit of a common substantive satisfaction” may still be the essential glue that binds us together and according to which we must organize our relational activity. I would suggest that it is, and that we must find the confidence to identify and defend it.

In our current moment, there is increasing (and often top-down or bureaucratic) pressure to make a case for why what we are teaching or learning is useful, with usefulness understood narrowly in economic, political or social terms. As Tyler Austin Harper has recently argued, administrators “concerned with public-facing diversity data” attempting to persuade “debt saddled student customers” alongside departments competing for scarce resources encourage these utilitarian appraisals and defenses of the university’s purpose. For Harper, the humanities have accelerated their own existential crisis by attempting to defend their purpose in these narrow utilitarian terms. Because the humanities “have a hard time mounting a credible case that their disciplines catapult graduates into six-figure salaries,” what they “can offer their young charges—who grow more progressive by the year—is the promise that their majors can help them understand power and fight for equality.”

In her essay, Corey has considered the benefits of describing the university according to an Oakeshottean ideal type that disavows a common purpose. What I see animating both Corey and Harper’s interventions, however, is a commitment to what today will appear to many as a paradox: a “useless” purpose. The shared purpose that binds together members of a university is difficult to define because, as Corey has explained, those pursuing degrees in engineering have different purposes than those pursuing a philosophy degree, and some disciplines are more obviously “useful” or practical than others. If a narrowly-defined utilitarian purpose is not and cannot be what defines the university (and this is certainly part of Corey’s argument), we may still – and I believe we must— identify and defend the purpose that does bind together otherwise diverse members within the university, understood as a distinctive place and enterprise.

We must, in other words, distinguish between different kinds of purpose and confidently defend the purpose that all members of the university do in fact share. Oakeshott is helpful on this point: in any enterprise, he explains, the common purpose animating the association “may be simple or complex, clearly identified or vaguely imagined; its achievement may be a near or a distant prospect, or no prospect at all, but an interminable engagement in the continuous promotion or protection of an enduring interest. The response sought may be that of others not thus associated (as a productive enterprise seeks buyers or consumers), or it may be an enjoyment of the associates themselves” (OHC 114, emphasis mine).

Even the engineering student, who may enter the university with an eye to a practical or vocational future benefit, is also there to gain understanding and to enjoy four years of freedom to devote to learning, ideally without the distractions and responsibilities of the practical world to which she must return. The university provides a place for this distinctive and secluded occupation, and the rules that govern it must facilitate both the engineering student’s and the philosophy student’s singular opportunity to dive deep into their subject. The university provides a place where every student may forget, if only briefly, the urgent pressures that will otherwise drive them. My sense is that the promise of a reprieve from the demands of the here and now for the sake of knowledge and understanding, and the invitation to live a more meaningful and intelligent life, are more attractive sales pitches than we’ve been encouraged to assume. They also have the benefit of being true. Whether the material and political conditions exist (or can be created) to allow students and scholars to heed their call is a different question, but I do not think we can defend the university, and certainly not the liberal arts, without sustaining and advertising this ideal, without standing by and for our common purpose.

I read with eager interest Elizabeth Corey’s thoughts on Michael Oakeshott and education.  I found the distinctions she made and the analysis of great merit.  I retain, however, some lingering concerns about how adequately liberal education might fare in the course she charts, especially for non-flagship institutions in this current educational environment.

Dr. Corey’s analysis of Oakeshott’s distinction between enterprise association and civil association and his views on education (specifically how to envision the university), is both original and illuminating.  Corey makes good on her promise, showing that universities as enterprise associations are too often focused on skills training, and what Oakeshott identifies as socialization:  “education” to change the world or serve the needs and wants of a society.  Generally, the focus on mission statements (and, one might add, the current obsession with learning outcomes), places the value on practical, usually productivist, outcomes, along with deeply embedded social and political projects.

The model of civil association offers an attractive alternative.  The university as civil association avoids the temptation to empower professional administrators and educational consultants to treat universities as business corporations:  making the important (but not the only) considerations of efficiency and return on investment the determining variables.  Civil association also offers an attractive, one could call it an accommodationist, solution, especially for large institutions with adequate resources.  I’m certainly drawn to allowing multiple and diverse views of the university to live together in harmony, recognizing the variety of types of education and goals that large American universities house today.  And, as Corey notes, this might be the best practical path for survival of a liberal arts education.

My concern is that universities and colleges are, at bottom, enterprise associations, though with a particular type of goal or purpose, and that not acknowledging this is likely to lead us, unwittingly, in the wrong direction, particularly for tuition driven, small, private schools and second or third tier state institutions.

Universities and colleges are voluntary associations.  And so, unlike the state (which is a compulsory association not easily left), one need not confront the difficult problem of how to reconcile one’s freedom with one’s obligations to the state.  If one does not agree with the direction and purpose of a particular university or college, one is free to find another.  That universities and colleges are free to choose their own path has resulted in a remarkably diverse set of educational institutions in the United States from which would-be students are able to choose.  Not only is there a wide variety of types of education offered but also a plethora of worthy goals (professional, moral, religious, civic, cultural, etc.) that one’s educational experience may be brought to bear. Civil association makes sense when there is little agreement about overarching goals for the whole community to collectively achieve, and in a context where individuals have put a great premium on self-direction and autonomy.  Here the most appropriate way to relate is to acknowledge the authority of general rules to create conditions of civility among citizens as they pursue their self-chosen courses.

A university is an enterprise association and I believe this is important to remember that to prevent corruption of the university.  However, one needs to be rather careful in how one approaches the nature of the enterprise and the goal or purpose the enterprise might have in mind.

Oakeshott identifies many venues for where learning creatures, such as we are, learn.  The world one inhabits is a place of learning.  However, Oakeshott says, “human beings, in so far as they have understood their condition, have always recognized special places, occasions and circumstances deliberately designed for and devoted to learning,” including the family, school, and the university.  Universities are distinct as places where occupants recognize themselves as “preeminently learners”, where “learning is a declared engagement to learn something in particular”, and where learning is not limited, but is done secluded and detached from “the here and now, of current living” (24).[1]  It is a cooperative enterprise of people in physical proximity to one another engaged in the collective pursuit of learning.

The enterprise or purpose of the university is then, learning; and the activity or engagement is to “learn something in particular”.  If this is the goal, then what does Oakeshott have in mind by learning and what is the “something in particular” he has in mind one is to learn?  Oakeshott’s position on the nature of learning is both quite expansive, yet definable and concrete.  University learning, neither has the specificity of being trained to operate a metal lathe or to debug a software program, or having at one’s disposal the molecular weight of water, the length of a U.S. senate term, or a set of references to display one’s cultural literacy, or even developing the skills to serve democracy.[2]  Nor is university learning unbounded and general.  Oakeshott is rather critical of nonspecific learning: such as learning by following one’s inclination; learning through free discovery, with an emphasis on imagination, creativity, and self-expression (72-73); or the general goals of “improving one’s mind” or “learning to think” (24)

At a basic level, liberal learning is the activity of attempting to critically understand ourselves.  Who am I?  The imperative is to “know thyself”.  Who we understand ourselves to be, Oakeshott insists, is a product of what we have learned to understand ourselves to be.  Being a human being is an historic adventure.   We learn from others, what others have said and understood being human is all about.  The collection of these understandings Oakeshott, somewhat reluctantly, calls a “culture”, or a civilization, or an inheritance, with all its contradictions, fragments, tensions, artifacts, practices, etc.  From this vantage point what is to be learned seems too vast and encompassing to manage.  However, not all in the culture is of equal value.  And, there have been some ways of attempting to make sense of the cacophony of meanings that confront us.  Some explanations have caught-on, and seem to provide a more or less coherent way of seeing the world and understanding the whole and our place in it.  Oakeshott early identified these patterns of explanation as modes in his Experience and It Modes in 1933 (namely practical, scientific, historical modes).  Later, he identified these ways of imagining the whole as voices, in his essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” in 1959.  To the practical, historical, and scientific voices, he added here the “poetic” voice.  Further, there have been great investments in thought to make sense of our world and ourselves:  Oakeshott identifies natural science, languages, literatures, histories, philosophy, social sciences—all “investments in thought” to understand our world and ourselves (32-34).  It is here where the concrete of liberal education appears.

Though each mode, voice, or branch of learning has a similar formal character (each is a kind of language of self-understanding) each also has its particulars (methods, a language, a developed curriculum chosen to best initiate the newcomer to that particular language of self-understanding, etc.) (97).  Oakeshott memorably identified the meeting place for all these explanations as a conversation.  Initiation into the conversation about what it is to be a human being is the heart of liberal learning at the university, through concrete and specific invitations to reflect and think and reformulate one’s own thoughts about this adventure.

Oakeshott has a phrase he returns to often when he talks about liberal education.  Liberal education is a release from the “fact of life” to recognize oneself in terms of a “quality of life” (91). It is in this that the liberating aspect of education clearly appears.  As Oakeshott eloquently describes the freedom felt on that first day as an undergraduate: “Almost overnight, a world of ungracious fact had melted into infinite possibility; we who belonged to no ‘leisured class’ had been freed for a moment from the curse of Adam, the burdensome distinction between work and play.  What opened before us was not a road but a boundless sea; it was enough to stretch one’s sails to the wind.  The distracting urgency of an immediate destination was absent, duty no longer oppressed, boredom and disappointment were world without meaning; death was unthinkable.” (103)

I return, however, to my concern: this brief moment one has as an undergraduate, to be released from “the fact of life”, from practical concerns, to consider the “quality of life”, to explore in very specific ways what others have made of themselves and this world, is too easily eclipsed or silenced by the allure of profession, of power, of status, of wealth.  In short the allure of “the world”—a view certainly I as a young person (and I know others) came already to the university equipped with. The way Oakeshott put it is even more true today in our current media environment.  “The world in which many children now grow up is crowded, not necessarily with occupants and to at all with memorable experiences, but with happenings; it is a ceaseless flow of seductive trivialities which invoke neither reflection nor choice but instant participation.” (41).  I worry that liberal education is not able to answer the seduction of “worldliness” adequately in its language, any more than Socrates was able to convince a majority on the jury in their terms.

Add to this, there are many colleges and universities (some quite desperate) who are struggling with enrollments, budgets, declining humanities majors, etc.  The opportunities to shelter low enrolled philosophy programs under the financial umbrella of a business school, or to preserve a small classics department on purely educational grounds (as Howard University recently has done) are not available.  The temptation to make the “worldly”, short-term financial decision is just too great.

As Oakeshott puts it, “A university needs to beware of the patronage of this world, or it will find that it has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage; it will find that instead of studying and teaching the languages and the literatures of the world it has become a school for training interpreters, that instead of pursuing science it is engaged in training electrical engineers or industrial chemists, that instead of studying history it is studying the teaching of history for some ulterior purpose, that instead of educating men and women it is training them exactly to fill some niche in society” (103)

So, I applaud Corey’s ingenuity and genuine concern for and commitment to liberal education.  I believe different institutions require different approaches to sustaining liberal education, and approaching the university more as a civil association might be the best response for some.  Other smaller institutions need to embrace their enterprise status and regain a vision of liberal education that will allow them to hold firm in the face of strong pressure to abandon their character.  The expansion of possibilities that opened up to me as an undergraduate, to see the world and myself in such different terms, needs to be available to those who have not been traditionally given the invitation, particularly at the less renowned and less resourced institutions that currently make-up the educational landscape.

[1] Parenthetical references are to Michael Oakeshott’s education essays, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

[2] For a thoughtful example of this last goal, see Ronald Daniels’ What Universities Owe Democracy (Johns Hopkins, 2021).