Seymour Hersh was on Cortland’s campus on Tuesday. The day’s events were well-attended, and Hersh provided his audience with a unique and powerful perspective on Iraq and other matters, as you might expect. The talk was part of a college-wide effort to improve "intellectual climate" (a topic I think I’ve written on here before).

No doubt improving intellectual climate is an unenviable task. I’m really not sure how you do it as I’m not really sure how to define the problem. Basically, there is a perception, on the part of faculty and administrators, that students are not engaged in important political and cultural issues. At least for faculty, I imagine that most of this perception is based upon observation in the classroom. I’m not pointing this out to suggest that the perception is wrong; it’s just interesting to connect disengagement in the classroom with intellectual disengagement.

I think about this in terms of my own experience. I was bored probably 95% of the time I spent in a classroom as a student K-Grad school. Maybe more. Grad school the boredom ratio was probably 70%, so that brought the overall score down a little. I was never much of a joiner; I’m still not. One of the most appealing things for me about being an academic is that generally I’m working on my own. I don’t think I’m alone in higher education in feeling that way. So I didn’t much care for school; I didn’t attend class very often, and when I did I wasn’t "engaged;" I didn’t join student groups or "get involved." Maybe I missed out…who knows. That’s not the point. I’m not holding myself out as a model either. My point is that my lack of engagement in the institutional practices that are meant to stimulate (or is that simulate?) intellectual behavior did not mean that I wasn’t intellectual.

Then I think about that internet-thing. There’s more intellectual activity going on there that interests me, more interesting folks for me to interact with if I wish, than I could ever find on campus. Obviously there was a time when the campus was a necessary physical location for intellectual behavior. The books and journals were there. All the intellectuals that you might have daily contact with worked there.

In short, the campus is no longer necessary as a physical site for intellectual behavior and increasingly cannot compete with the broader, distributed resources of virtual communities. When you factor in the corporate-administrative-bureaucratic shape of higher education, the campus does become more plainly what it always fundamentally was: a housing and processing center for the production of professional workers. And who would want to spend any more time at such a place than one absolutely had to?

Now some will tell you that face-to-face experience still counts for something. And I am one of those people. It’s not a matter of better or worse, just materially different. The campus cannot compete with the net, but it can be otherwise. That is, it can offer what the web cannot in its immediacy of experience.

In my view, while singular events like the Hersh talk are useful, fundamentally what you need to do to improve intellectual climate is have students practice intellectual behavior on a regular basis. That is, we need them to write and talk to one another every day about cultural issues that concern them, and approach these topics drawing on the intellectual practices they learn in school.

If only there were a way that we could get students together in relatively small groups (say 20 or 30 or so) and meet a couple times a week to discuss intellectual issues….

Yes, so the point is that it is a failure of pedagogy and curriculum, which is not to place the blame solely on myself or my colleagues. We clearly live in a society that does not value intellectual habits. Broadly speaking, most Americans, including college students, have little interest in being intellectual. Given that situation, academics need to meet students where they are. Unfortunately, I think, as a group, academics are too focused on content/information and the curriculum is overly structured. The result is that students play a very small role in their own education.

No answers today. I’ve gone on long enough. The bottomline, IMHO, is that while the "problem" of intellectual climate may be endemic to the culture at large, a college’s best answer to this challenge lies in a careful examination of its core practices and institutional structures.