Anthony T. Kronman, former dean of the Law School at Yale, makes a laudable attempt to revive this Great Conversation approach in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman’s focus is on the humanities, and his appraisal is blunt: humanities professors in our finest colleges and universities have collectively blown it, cowering in the face of the German “research ideal”:
This damage was not the result of an attack from without. It was not caused by barbarians crashing the gates. It was a self-destructive response to the crisis of authority that teachers of the humanities brought down on their own heads when they embraced the research ideal and the values associated with it.
According to Kronman, the Academy is a mess, elevating what Max Weber dubbed the “Vocation of Scholarship” as the measure of all things. From graduate interns through veteran professors, specialized research has long since eclipsed the importance of teaching. Tenure and rank promotion are tied closely to peer-refereed publications in discipline-specific fields. While Kronman acknowledges great gains in the hard sciences, and much new knowledge in the humanities as well, he contends that the perennial questions of the human condition are relegated to the periphery in the university today. He supports this indictment with twenty pages of anecdotes.