In 1992, Gerald Graff, a distinguished English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a book called Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. His aim was to enrich the teaching of literature by making it a ground for intellectual contention. I admired the book, and still do, but for one reservation: when two critics put forward differing interpretations of a text, the text too often recedes into the background. The critics themselves take center stage. So a dialogue between, say, Walter Jackson Bate and Paul de Man on an ode by Keats might well bury the poet beneath professorial gab. With a bit of adjustment, however, a turning of the gear a half inch or so, we can adapt Graff’s method to the present. Doing so would, I think, revitalize college education, which I fear has sunk into conformist doldrums. It could put an end to classroom silence based on fears students have that they might be saying the wrong thing. It could likewise revitalize how we in the larger culture talk about political and social issues. Teaching the conflicts won’t solve all the problems of the world, but it might help us crack the dogmatic crust that seems to inhibit us almost everywhere.
As it is, people who disagree often find that they cannot talk to one another, especially about sensitive subjects. Abortion, race, immigration, trans rights, Israel and Palestine, electoral politics—many of us are unable to exchange ideas about these matters with anyone who disagrees with us. Still, our future would look a lot better if we could, and teaching the conflicts might help us get there. Every assignment we professors make should allow students to see matters from at least two sides. No Karl Marx without a generous helping of Edmund Burke. No Michel Foucault–style determinism without exposure to an articulate apostle of human freedom. Ralph Waldo Emerson would be my choice. His observation that he hates “the builders of dungeons in the air” is a good place to start a dialogue with Foucault. I’m not endorsing conflict of interpretation, the way Graff did, but rather conflict between contrasting visions of what life is and how to live it well.
For my part, I follow William Blake’s 1793 declaration of prophetic independence, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he writes, “Without Contraries is no progression.” Blake was a proponent of what he liked to call “Mental Fight,” the peaceful contest between ideas, images, voices, and values. The opposite of this Blake called “the war of swords.” He abhorred violence and believed that we should work out our differences through strong intellectual contention. He wanted to see contraries in conflict with each other: that was the road of peaceful progress. He would have liked a phrase that the American literary critic Kenneth Burke used to characterize his intellectual aspirations: ad bellum purificandum, or “toward the purification of war.” Burke and Blake both feared that a society that fails to work out its contraries peacefully, through intellectual struggle, ultimately will resolve them through warfare.
Blake believed that the culture of 18th-century England had gotten stuck. It had become inert, sterile, and bland because the dialectic—the play of opposing intellectual forces—had gone dead. The greatest literary minds of the past generation were prone to the belief that all the major questions had been settled, and that what was needed most was affirmation. The ruling sentiments of the period were perhaps embodied in a line of Alexander Pope’s: “True wit is nature to advantage dress’d / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.” We know what’s most worth knowing—we know Nature; we know God. The objective now is simply to express what we know—what everyone knows or should—in the most artful and memorable terms. Pope takes up this task with true genius. Samuel Johnson, who adored Pope, wrote that we do not need to be informed so much and so often as we need to be reminded. What is it that distinguishes the work of Shakespeare above all other dramatists? He gives us what Johnson called “just representations of general nature.”
In a word, Johnson and Pope advocated socialization. The American philosopher Richard Rorty held that that means acquiring socially approved vocabularies. The religious leader teaches us how to talk about faith, the professor about achievement and success, the counselor about mental health, the doctor about physical well-being. Early in life, we listen to these figures, and usually our first reflex is assent. We’re becoming socialized. I think even Blake would agree that socialization matters. Spend half an hour with a radically unsocialized person and you probably will, too.
Yet there’s another phase of growth that we might call “true education.” Here we learn that the socially instilled ways of seeing life may not be the best ways. We learn that capitalism, which we have perceived as a natural and inevitable form of economic life, has its shortcomings: it can create bitter poverty even while it generates wealth; it can ravage the environment. We learn to examine our commitments with a critical eye. Socrates (reported by Plato) endorses this form of learning with a simple but profound observation: the unexamined life is not worth living.
In true education, we don’t just probe the shortcomings of our own way of seeing and saying things; we explore alternatives. Say, for example, that you adhere to a progressive view of history, built on works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Walt Whitman, and more recently by Steven Pinker. Then you happen to read something by Arthur Schopenhauer, who holds that history progresses nowhere; it’s simply a litany of repeated brutalities. It’s up to you to ponder these contrasting visions and make up your own mind without foreclosing the possibility of changing it later.
The ability to examine your socialization and do it in thoughtful ways marks the beginning of true education. This is the moment in schooling when the individual comes to the fore. When I make this transition, I stop caring almost exclusively what they think and begin to care about what I think. I never stop caring about collective views: they form the environment in which I’ll conduct my intellectual and practical life. But I stop letting myself be ruled by social consensus. I think for myself.
American universities often continue the work of socialization that begins in the lower grades and proceeds through high school. It was once the case that college students got the chance to look at their lives and the world they inhabit with a newly critical eye. Independence mattered. You had to learn to be yourself. The word education comes from the Latin verb educere, meaning “to lead out of.” Professors used to lead students away from socially insinuated values—not necessarily to reject them, but to consider them from a distance. Now, I fear that we are failing to embrace this project. Overall, the prevailing sentiment on college campuses reflects that of Pope and Johnson: we know what’s true. We need to dwell on that truth, maybe even elaborate on it, but one thing we do not need to do is follow Blake’s advice and engage with it in mental fight.
I do not wish to blame anyone on this front, least of all students. It’s been said that a teacher who gets angry at students for their shortcomings is like a physician who gets angry at his patients for becoming ill. Today’s students are in a tough spot. From what I can tell, to gain entry to the University of Virginia, where I teach, or a comparable school, they must please everyone at all times and never do anything wrong. They must get all A’s, glean stellar recommendations, engage in the right activities, score the best internships. (Do you notice that many students don’t have remunerative summer jobs? They have steppingstone jobs, and they have internships, many internships.) To get into UVA, moreover, they must please a lot of people who, as far as I can see, have become ever more homogeneous in their values. The teachers tend to be liberal, concerned with issues of race and gender and sexuality, though not so much with class. Most of our students’ high school teachers have been through education schools. To hear my friend Lyell Asher tell it in his searing sequence of talks on American universities and what ails them, education schools are intellectual deserts. They are also—Asher is resolute on this—indoctrination factories.
Maybe so. First-year students at UVA have had little or no encouragement to engage in mental fight. Instead, they have been encouraged to believe that the major questions have been posed and answered. They have not considered the strong possibility that without contraries there is no progression. We need to urge them to take such a view.
I love our students. They tend to be well mannered, kind, thoughtful, generous, just, and honest. They are also highly socialized. Oversocialized in some cases. How could they not be? From early life, they’ve been faced with the injunction to succeed in the world. To be admitted to UVA, they must be good at everything. Our students studied ferociously hard in high school and received straight A’s or something close to it. We teachers have the luxury of teaching what we love. We get to do the thing we’re naturally good at all day—and sometimes late into the night. But our students, whatever their talents and inclinations, have to be good at everything. Love English but have a little (or a lot of) trouble with math? You’ve got to buckle down and master calculus—and I mean master it, for only A’s will do.
They’ve got to behave themselves, too. One injudicious Instagram post or TikTok video could stir real trouble. Yet they must post. They must maintain an online presence, for the lack of one is seen as a social affront. Getting something wrong online, however, has resulted in students’ losing admission to college. There may be good reason for this; there may not be. The point is that students have to be cautious. They have to play by the rules, or at least seem to, and that can be even more taxing.
In their pursuit of perfection, they tend to judge themselves harshly. The result, as copious studies have shown, is a vast upsurge in anxiety disorders. In a recent book of mine, The Age of Guilt, I described this in Freudian terms. I talked about the superego, the inner agency that, usually operating unconsciously, rewards and punishes us—mostly the latter—to the extent that we live up to the highest standards. I believe we live in an age of the superego. Understandably, this can manifest in students’ being hypercautious, resolutely guarded, unwilling to take chances. Embracing consensus offers them a way out. The values that they bring to college are often progressive in nature, yes. But the ideals that superego-driven people embrace are almost accidental: they might be liberal, or they might be conservative.
Conservative observers often say that universities and their students have been captured by the political left. Some of them have been, but most are simply mired in conformism. They hold their views lightly. They know the price of being independent, and of sounding off, and they don’t want to pay it. But the price for conformity can also be high. Aristotle said that all people desire, by nature, to acquire knowledge. He should meet our students. They are smart but radically incurious. They don’t love learning for the pleasure of learning. And why should they? Learn too much and you are likely to fall out of step with the generational parade marching on to victory, or at least to a good job, a house, and a fully paid-up insurance policy.
It’s not easy to get my students—who live in fear of embarrassment—to open up, take chances, and say what they think. Doing so requires that we introduce a fundamental shift in the way students think of education. Most students do not conceive of school as a place where they can be changed, learn who they are and what they value, and aim themselves toward higher goals. Instead, schooling manifests itself as a series of obstacles to be overcome in order to achieve success. Thoreau’s Walden is an essay subject or a quiz topic rather than a viable call to change your life. When they arrive at college, students are not expecting life-transforming pedagogy. They’re expecting new challenges, new tests they can and must pass. The professors in this new dispensation are no longer figures of wisdom, much less charismatic guides. They are authorities—sometimes amiable, sometimes less so—who stand between the student and success. There still are, of course, exceptional students, intellectual questers determined to overcome themselves. And students sometimes do get caught up in their professors’ authentic enthusiasms. But mostly the quest for success supersedes the quest for change; socialization supersedes education.
Today’s students do very little serious reading. In high school, they often succumb to the lure of SparkNotes and Shmoop, and when college comes, they can’t unhook themselves. As one student told me, “I came geared to do all the reading, and never miss a class, and be involved in a real education. But there were simply too many other good things to do.” True. Colleges look more and more like retirement communities for the young. Plenty of leisure-time activities, plenty of gyms, lots of clubs, no end of fun. The internet opens a world of constant recreation as you click from a salty diversion to a sugary one and back again. We all do this to some degree. Most of my students, raised by the internet, know no other way.
Reading, real reading, goes on in solitude. Keep it up for an extended period, reading the best books—the ones that have lasted—and changes occur. You will find yourself developing what American literary critic Lionel Trilling called an “opposing self,” meaning a self that is a few steps beyond the reach of social dogma. We can turn to books when we need to understand complex phenomena that seem inadequately explained by the round of professional explainers, influencers, and hot-take artists. You can create the space for the opposing self by reading. Once established, the habit of reading will offer you refuge.
People who have not cultivated that opposing self—the self in potential opposition—will not be able to get away from the herd. They will not develop a taste for contrary views that might nudge them off the path to success. They’ll be skeptical about any kind of education that upsets their socially insinuated ideas—and when pushed too far by forms of dissent, they will rebel. Off then to the department chair, the dean, the human resources office. Such students will be happy if the process of socialization they experienced in high school continues into college. They’ll be skeptical about education. They will want a curriculum that emphasizes achievement and success over self-transformation.
Independent thinking isn’t a mere luxury for the educated few: it’s a human necessity. The world changes, and we must change in response. Innovations in art, science, and thought are necessary if we are to thrive as a nation and a species. Those who push us forward are the innovators, the free thinkers, the individualists. Heavily socialized people may be fine teatime companions, but they will not invent new worlds. Blake knew this.
How does life look to the proponents of extended socialization? It no doubt seems that we are in a state of emergency. Dangers crouch on every side. Conflict, maybe serious conflict—and not of the intellectual kind—seems imminent. Under wartime conditions like this, nuance must go. Instead, we teach commitment, allegiance, alliance. We teach unanimity of thought.
Free speech is the fundamental principle of education—but socialization often questions the right to speak out. Is it possible that in this place and time, the cultivation of righteous values, rather than the cultivation of lively, irreverent thoughts should be at the core of the university’s mission? Maybe, but it will take more than the daily cacophony of political invective to pry me from my commitment to free speech and forms of education that pivot on open enquiry. “People grieve and bemoan themselves,” Emerson wrote, “but it is not half so bad with them as they say.” Human beings need to learn how to think for themselves.
Some professors prefer socialization to education, but I believe that many, maybe most, prefer lively conversation. They thirst for spirited give and take. Why do they—why do we—often not find it?
We professors sometimes think of our classrooms as dyads: there is us and there is a single body, the students. But this ignores a third presence—the lives students live as a group outside class. Our courses take place in campus buildings, yes, but they also take place online, where students praise, blame, denounce, and sometimes excommunicate one another. They listen hard in class, taking the measure of other students. Who is admirable? Who is “problematic”? Who harbors unacceptable views and needs to be shunned? Even to be friends with a problematic student is to put oneself in social jeopardy. In a March 2022 op-ed published in The New York Times, UVA undergraduate Emma Camp suggested that, rather than dogmatic professors, the main source of inhibition in class is a student social milieu dominated by overly certain social justice apostles. She described the experience of speaking against the prevailing tide:
The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.
I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group—and then I wasn’t.
The antidote to socialization lies in teaching students to be aware of, and respect, intellectual conflict. As I suggested earlier, no Foucault without an equal dose of someone like Emerson. We must develop the tensions between thinkers and identify overlapping themes in their texts. Our students must learn to engage in the civilized mental struggle from which true autonomy of mind is born. Too often we ask students to have opinions on what they’ve read in class without exposing them to competing ideas. You can’t assign this or that radical text and simply ask students how they feel about it. Most of them don’t have the intellectual resources to disagree with the formidable Michel Foucault. But offer them a counterpoint, and they might.
The art of conflictual teaching entails choosing the right texts. And here an important phrase from William James arises: “living options.” Professors need to select readings that offer viable opposition to one another. I’m far closer in temperament to Emerson than to Foucault, but in Foucault I see a plausible version of experience and a potential map for the art, or craft, of living. If you are teaching Emerson’s work and cannot find any plausible texts to oppose it that you feel contain living options, then you are an Emerson fundamentalist. You’ve become, in a certain strange way, a socializer. Crucial to this form of pedagogy is the imagination to seek out texts that collide in a civil and fruitful way.
How might one teach the conflicts in class? In a word, softly.
I teach a class on Jane Austen and the Romantics. A Romantic, perhaps, is someone who wants to be elsewhere, someone who wants to be otherwise. In his great short lyric “London,” Blake tells us that he sees three zones of social failure: the treatment of children, religion, and erotic life. As a Romantic, he wants to take us elsewhere, to a better place. Blake seeks to break up the “mind-forg’d manacles” and create a fully renovated society, full of renewed people. Yet the wish to be elsewhere or otherwise can take many forms. A Romantic often yearns for self-transformation, sometimes gradually, more often quickly, at the speed of thought. The work of Keats and Shelley could easily help one understand any hunger for the radical transformation of the self.
Jane Austen is implicitly skeptical about Romantic transformations. She does not care to ask herself whether she likes life as it is or not. Gender, but also I believe disposition, inclines her to create characters who seek their happiness in society as it is. Readers of Pride and Prejudice will recall the brilliant scene in which Elizabeth Bennet takes on the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lady Catherine has come to tell Elizabeth that under no condition is she to marry Lady Catherine’s nephew, the wildly wealthy Mr. Darcy. Lady Catherine is rude, overbearing, and obnoxious. Elizabeth cannot respond in kind—considerations of social rank make it impossible. But Elizabeth thrusts and parries like an expert fencer, obeying every rule of decorum, and subtly, shrewdly putting Lady Catherine to flight. By contrast, when Blake dramatizes a confrontation, he often presents it as all or nothing. In Blake’s poem Milton, Milton gets into a wrestling match with his archfoe Urizen, a figure who represents tyranny, reductive empiricism, hatred for the imagination. It’s winner take all. In Austen, it’s winner take some—enough to live and thrive, but not enough to change the larger world, or to dramatically transform one’s self.
Austen is in many ways—though not all—a conservative. Blake is a revolutionary who prefers mental fight to violent overthrow. There is a fertile conflict between the two, subtle and indirect as it can be. And once we understand the terms of that conflict, fresh questions arise. Which one is closer to your own vision and values? Which best reflects what you believe—or what you will likely believe in the future? We read works of imagination. And then, having brought their values to the fore, often through conflict with another text, we work toward belief. To put it another way: first we read texts, then we ask them to read us.
To be sure, I often teach works that contain more potentially flammable visions. I like to teach a class on Milton and Whitman. I do so from a political vantage, seeing Whitman as an archetypal progressive, a breaker of boundaries, an opener of new roads. Milton, by contrast, is an archconservative, someone who brilliantly dramatizes the allure of order, degree, and hierarchy. Few students have trouble entertaining Whitmanian values. What 20-year-old isn’t attracted to freedom? But with Milton, matters change. He believes that people can be happy only when they are installed in a hierarchy. We should revere what is above us and care for what is below. Milton’s views of hierarchy implicate religious, political, and family life. Reading these two poets side by side offers plenty of illuminating conflicts.
My hope is that helping students learn the arts of amiable opposition will put them in a position to savor civilized conflict in the political and social world. I want them to see that those who think differently from them are to be listened to and learned from. Students who emerge from an education in civil conflict will become citizens who won’t need to shout down speakers, cancel their opponents, or become confused and upset when they hear ideas they don’t concur with. They’ll understand that the future of our democracy is based on dissent within the context of a powerful commitment to unity. They will not hate their adversaries. Their response to what they see as an outrageous opinion will begin not with condemnation but with inquiry: What made you come to think that? Why do you hold that opinion? When the nation comes to contain a significant quotient of such people, our addiction to noisy, pointless invective will begin to dwindle. We’ll be on the road to what Richard Rorty called “achieving our country.” Democracy starts in the classroom. (Tyranny and rank division can, too.) Let’s have a society where we are all devoted to avoiding sword law and affirming the play of different voices and views. Let’s remember what Blake told us: “Opposition is true Friendship.”
