Reconceiving Classroom Models and Publics

MacIntyre’s chapter offers the valuable reminder that the university need not look tomorrow as it does today, and that the University’s methods for creating and distributing knowledge have changed profoundly over their history. I wonder about ‘university’ structures outside of the Western tradition: MacIntyre’s return to 13^th century pedagogical methods seemed profoundly conservative, almost as conservative as my own acceptance of the current university model, yet reaching beyond our own cultural traditions for innovative approaches to help address issues of university-public relations seems like an alternative and viable application of MacIntyre’s larger proposition concerning the re-conception of the university.

I take issue with MacIntyre’s proposed conflict model, not because there is no place for such styles within a diversity of postsecondary institutions, but rather because the atmosphere he proposes would work only for certain students and risks exclusivity: reams of psychological and sociological papers suggest that a primary reason why more women don’t run for elected office is precisely because women find the confrontational structure of modern western politics rebarbative. I feel the same way about this model of classroom discourse.

To MacIntyre’s credit, he recognizes that universities using the constrained disagreement pedagogy would need to teach their students to establish ironic distance from the subjects they discuss (232). This presumes that the issues relevant for inquiry in the university could or should be objective, but some topics such as race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. are inherently personal; MacIntyre identifies valid issues with the current incarnation of the liberal university, but it does allow for the genuine examination of subjectivity and identity politics, an allowance that may not be possible in the post-liberal, confrontation school in inquiry. Furthermore, the ironic distancing of students from issues of identity would be easier for some (white, male, and heterosexual) students than for others. I won’t accuse him of utopianism, just circuitousness. Why return to worn paths when bushwhacking is so much more interesting? Isn’t intellectual inquisitiveness central to the nature of the university?

I wonder if the demoralizing perceived distance between the university and the public that MacIntyre identifies is bolstered by feelings of disappointment that increased access to the university for communities (or publics) it has traditionally excluded has still failed to translate into the osmoses of ‘knowledge’ into the larger society or the rectification of society’s ills. Education has become profoundly more accessible to and inclusive of the ‘public’ since the Ancient Greek, Medieval, and Enlightenment cultures that MacIntyre lauds, yet it appears that the gulf between the ‘public’ and the university has remained, if not expanded, even with greater access. Perhaps the element of this equation that requires further examination is not the university and its structures, but how academia constructs the ‘public’ it refers to. It often seems like when we use the term ‘public’ we mean “those nonsensical people who for whatever insane reason don’t follow ‘our’ logic and enact behaviours/beliefs/policies we strongly disagree with, all while undervaluing our research and interests”. Perhaps this is too glib, but if ‘public’ is by definition inherently oppositional to the university, then the inevitable gap between the two should not be so disturbing.