Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.

Martha C. Nussbaum Harvard Univeristy Press, $26, 328pp.

Martha Nussbaum, one of our most distinguished philosophers and classical scholars, has fashioned a "report card" on contemporary liberal education: not failure, certainly not a "gentleman's" C (politically incorrect), perhaps not A+, but very much alive and lively in an astonishing array of academic settings. Her reassurance about the vitality of liberal arts is particularly striking coming as a classical defense of liberal education because it would seem that it is precisely the classical that has been eroded by contemporary interest in non-Western culture, African-American studies, women's studies, and gay studies. To external critics, none of these educational turns, fashions, or fads look at all like the traditional classical curriculum, for example, "the Great Books" (from Sophocles to Shakespeare to - well, maybe T.S. Eliot). Nussbaum assures us that despite apparent change the spirit of liberal education remains strong.

Unlike most philosophers setting out to prove a case, Nussbaum actually cites empirical evidence. She has personally tracked the practices of liberal arts teachers in such varied settings (among others) as Bentley College (essentially a business school), Notre Dame (a Catholic university), Brigham Young (Mormon), Randolph-Macon (small residential), University of Pittsburgh (large, state-related institution with significant commuter population). At each of these institutions, she salutes individuals and/or programs which challenge students to think openly and creatively, to resist the "idols of the marketplace," to make up their own minds. The new - supposedly anticlassical - curricula do exactly what one hopes the liberal arts will accomplish: liberation of the human mind.

That at least is one version of the liberal arts. In his meticulous and indispensable study of the history of the liberal arts tradition (Orators & Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education), Bruce Kimball delineates two strikingly different ideologies of "the liberal arts." The oratorical liberal arts emphasize the tradition, recovery of a civic value. The philosophical liberal arts opt for the critical, continual re-examination of inculcated cultural assumptions. Kimball distinguishes an artes liberales tradition (orators) and the "liberal free" tradition (philosophers). It is the "liberal free" tradition that Nussbaum finds healthy and well on campus.

Nussbaum's nominal hero, representing the "liberal free" liberal arts, is Socrates. Chapter 1 is titled "Socratic Self-Examination" and the teachers and programs singled out for praise in one way or another replicate the persistent questioning of the great Athenian "gadfly." "The central task of education...is to confront the passivity of the student, challenging the mind to take charge of its own thought." To that end, "tradition is one foe of Socratic reason." So much for right-wing critics who think that "liberal arts" is just all those dead, white, European males so long (too long) revered by the "classical curriculum." The other "foes" of Socrates are those left-wing progressives who view "reason" as the claptrap invention of male hierarchy. Nussbaum is firm in upholding universal reason as the great device for the critical appraisal essential to the liberal arts (in their liberal-free guise).

I am deeply sympathetic to Nussbaum's views, and I offer hearty congratulations to all those present-day gadflies out on the front-line classrooms, yet there are limitations to her Socratic overlay on higher education. Socrates is never without his ironies! I point to two significant ironies: Socrates' distrust of "professors"; Socrates' civic piety.

It is not incidental that Socrates practiced his critical art in the market place, in the gymnasium, and at drunken feasts. It was Plato who invented the (our) academy, a sheltered spot for philosophers to practice their trade. Socrates believed that in the search for wisdom the best he could do was confess his own ignorance while querying merchants, generals, poets, religious prophets and what-all for any scraps of wisdom they might have come upon. What Socrates seems to have distrusted most were the Sophists, those who professed to have a knowledge or skill which they could pass on for a fee to willing pupils. Socrates would be amazed - probably amused - that there are Socratic-like professors, that is, certified and tenured gadflies.

It is also not incidental that when push came to hemlock, Socrates refused to go into exile. In the Crito he imagines the Athenian laws speaking to him as the mother and father who shaped him and whom he could not now flaunt by abandoning the city. Nussbaum's text shapes Socrates in terms of the later Stoics who advocated an ideal of the universal citizenship of reason and humanity beyond the confines of Athens or Rome.

One problem with Socrates plus higher education is that for us higher education is through and through institutionalized. Higher education is the Academy - a place set apart with professional standards, tenure, credentialing, certification, and so on, none of which makes much sense in the Socratic life-search for wisdom. Are professors specially qualified, more than poets, politicians, or people of practice to offer a "guide to life"? A second and contrary paradox is that Socrates does not seem (at least in the Crito nor in his life practice) to have been a proto-Stoic universalist. To be sure, he was critical of Athenian torpor, but he seemed to believe that the problem was not discovering the truth of reason above, but in waking up the embedded pieties of the existing polis. In sum, Nussbaum's Socratic ideal - noble as it is - either does not sit easily with the institutional reality of higher education, or Socrates' allegiance of a sort to an embedded civic wisdom does not sit well with Nussbaum's fundamental critical transcendence of tradition in the realm of reason. We should bless our Socrateses in and out of our colleges and universities, but the issues of higher-education-as-institution go beyond (or below) the great gadfly.

Dennis O'Brien is the author, most recently, of All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago Press).