opinions about the good life on UNC's campus
The Raleigh News & Observer wrote about UNC’s School of Civic Life in a way that isn't directly about the controversies surrounding the school. Most of what I'd seen before had been, first, about the way that the school was set up in response to conservative political concerns and, more recently, about the school's possible mismanagement especially around hiring, and the subsequent report that UNC commissioned about it.
What's interesting about the article is that it's more about what students are getting out of the school's courses, and it's somewhere between neutral and positive overall. What comes through in the article is that the interviewed students are into the topics of their courses at UNC, courses like "Pursuing the Good Life." That's an engaging topic; it's one I discuss in my own ethics courses. This semester in particular my students seemed engaged by the question of whether certain life conditions, like a traumatic childhood, would make the good life simply inaccessible to someone. (I said a bad enough childhood could make it impossible to have the good life, but it might still be possible to have a good life.) So I agree that this is a topic that students engage with, and it's a worthwhile topic to teach.
I teach the topic of the good life as part of an introductory ethics course, coming from a philosophical perspective and drawing on philosophers who talk directly about that topic. It's a philosophy course (albeit an introductory one), my PhD is in philosophy, and anyone who gets a decent grade in my course probably understands some philosophical positions well enough to apply them in a more advanced philosophy course.
Students do inevitably share their opinions in courses like this. But what makes it a course instead of a conversation in a classroom is that I treat their opinions as attempts to say something true, which means that their opinions can also be wrong, and I try to show how they are, and invite them to do the same to me, to each other, and to themselves.
On the topic of the good life, for example, if someone said that the good life is one where a person makes a lot of money, I can argue in several ways that making a lot of money is neither necessary nor sufficient for a good life. Is that just my opinion, or are these philosophical arguments drawing on expertise? I can also make the case for how making money is part of the good life. Achievements, for instance, are part of a good life, perhaps even a necessary part because humans want to set difficult but achievable goals and then work towards them, and making money could be, for some people in some circumstances, an achievement. That's an argument that draws on other philosophical arguments. But money is a funny kind of achievement because money is almost entirely a means to get other things, not an end in itself, and it's maybe incoherent to make a means into the end of one's entire life because, if our lives are to have an end, it should be self-sufficient and not an instrumental one. That's also deriving from philosophical arguments. So in response to the opinion that a good life is one in which a person tries to make a lot of money, there's philosophically a lot to say that isn't just agreeing and disagreeing with the opinion.
My concern with teaching courses on, say, the good life, or on other big questions that transcend students' subjecct-matter interests, is to know that the relevant expertise is. Faculty should make an effort to connect their courses, whatever the topics, to big questions that students will find engaging, either because they already find the questions engaging or because they will as they learn more. But if something is taught in a university course, there needs to be something that can be taught, not just opinions that are shared by people who happen to be in the room. Opinions are a way for students to connect themselves to the big questions of a course, but opinions should not themselves be the content of the course or else what's being taught is how to offer and listen to opinions. That's a skill, maybe even a skill that one should develop during college if not before, but it shouldn't be the primarily learning outcome of a course with no others.
The worst kind of discussion is one where the lecturer/teacher/leader starts with a question, big or small, then asks the audience to share what they think the answer is, maybe clarifies and adds to what each person says, but never contributes significantly more to the conversation than just clarifying what others say. If the facilitator doesn't have expertise to share, then they're extraneous to the conversation: most adults have been facilitating our own conversations for decades. If the facilitator does have expertise, then I want to hear it.
For big-questions courses, what kind of expertise can the instructor have? Philosophy isn't the only subject that can bring expertise to bear on the big questions. I can think of several departments that could teach a course on The Good Life (polisci, religious studies, English, psychology). And several departments probably shouldn't (physics, math, electrical engineering). And some departments would be interesting to argue about (biology? econ?). But, regardless of the kind of expertise, if there's no expertise, then it probably shouldn't be a university course at all. And if there is expertise--even if that expertise sounds like mere opinions to those who haven't given the topic much thought--the course should be taught by someone with that expertise.
One of the courses discussed at the end of the article highlights my concern. Mine isn't a concern with that course per se, since I don't know anything about it beyond what's in the article. But this is a concern that I developed by observing a civic discourse course taught at Duke on a related topic. This course got great reviews. My former students who took the course told me that it was obvious that the faculty member was himself politically and religiously conservative, but he took great pains not to say what his own opinions were in class and to be a neutral facilitator of conversations, to the extent he could, which students respected even when they could see through it.
Students learned in that course to talk and listen to each other. Which, again, is an important skill that should be developed in many courses, regardless of topic. But the facilitator who taught the course explicitly claimed not to have any expertise on any of the topics of the course. An instructor can certainly teach by asking questions in a way that moves a conversation in the direction they want, but even Socrates, the most famous of the just-asking-questions philosophers, interjected lots and lots of mini-lectures into his series of questions. (Socrates himself also denied having any expertise, but no one believes him, and he was also very obviously not both-sides-ing his conversations, and he certainly wasn't simply teaching everyone to listen respectfully to opposing views.)
The student interviewed at the end of the article makes just the point that I've been worried about, when talking about her experience in one of the courses:
She would rather this material be taught “by someone who is more in touch with the struggles and effects of slavery, someone who is more aware and empathetic toward how hard that period of time was and how complex it is. It can’t just simply be debated.”
