9/11 and the Academy

Responses in the Liberal Arts and the 21st Century World

Mark Finney, Matthew Shannon, Mark Finney, Matthew Shannon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030164188
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030164195
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This book explores the impact of September 11, 2001 upon interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy in the liberal arts. Since "the day that changed everything", many forces have transformed institutions of higher education in the United States and around the world. The editors and contributors consider the extent to which the influence of 9/11 was direct, or part of wider structural changes within academia, and the chapters represent a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives on how the production and dissemination of knowledge has changed since 2001. Some authors demonstrate that new forms of inquiry, exploration, and evidence have been created, much of it focused on the causes, consequences, and meanings of the terror attacks. Others find that scholars sought to understand 9/11 by applying old theoretical and empirical insights and reviving lines of questioning that have become relevant. The contributors also examine the impact of 9/11 on higher education administration and liberal arts pedagogies. Among the many collective findings is that scholars in the humanities and critical social sciences have been most attentive to the place of 9/11 in society and academic culture. This eclectic collection will appeal to students and scholars interested in the place of the liberal arts in the twenty-first century world.

© The Author(s) 2019

Mark Finney and Matthew Shannon (eds.)9/11 and the Academyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16419-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Setting the Unsettled: An Introduction to 9/11 and the Academy

Matthew Shannon¹

(1)

Department of History, Emory & Henry College, Emory, VA, USA

Matthew Shannon

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

“Any great disturbance in the world of action or of intellect produces very noticeable effects upon the methods and controlling thought patterns of historians” (Nichols 1948, 78). It seems suitable, as it was for Eric Foner in his 2003 essay on September 11, 2001, or “9/11,” to open with a quote that rings true, not only for historians, but for most social scientists and humanists. The authors of the following collection of essays find that 9/11 affected, though rarely dictated, the “thought patterns” of scholars in the “liberal arts” fields for nearly two decades. During these years, 9/11 moved from event, to memory, to history, though such categories are quite permeable. One thing is certain amid uncertainties. As Foner wrote years earlier, “September 11 is a remarkable teaching opportunity. But only if we use it to open rather than to close debate. Critical intellectual analysis is our responsibility – to ourselves and to our students” (2003).

This book turns President George W. Bush’s assertion that 9/11 was “the day that changed everything” into a question and directs it toward the academy. A range of interdisciplinary scholarship, most notably the six-volume collection The Day That Changed Everything? (2009), has found that Americans responded to those 102 minutes on September 11 by altering the practice of politics, entertainment, religion, philosophy, law, business, psychology, and education. This volume’s focus, by contrast, is on the production of critical scholarship and creative pedagogies since 2001. These functions of the academy remain vital, particularly because the events of September 11 came to most Americans in the form of “9/11,” an unsettled, or “unmastered” history. Gavriel Rosenfeld draws on scholars of Germany to define “the concept of an ‘unmastered’ past” as “a historical legacy that has acquired an exceptional, abnormal, or otherwise unsettled status in the collective memory of a given society” (2009, 126–127). This introduction draws on Rosenfeld to demonstrate that, while most histories are never settled, events such as 9/11 require, more than others, multiple settings to comprehend.

The most literal setting for the book is the liberal arts as they are taught and studied at colleges and universities across the United States. But what is meant by “liberal arts,” or “liberal education?” Here it refers to a liberality in one’s approach to academic inquiry. In a university setting, this means engagement with different disciplines and methodologies; critical inquiry into individuals, societies, and texts based on empirical and/or theoretical rigor; and a belief in praxis, or a fusion of thought and action. In other words, pluralism of the mind and curiosity about the world.

This definition is different than others. Many onlookers associate liberal learning with medieval universities, the seven original liberal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), and the Renaissance-era rediscovery of the classics in Europe (Colish 1997; Pedersen 1997). Many others think of a tradition-bound form of learning rooted in a homogenizing set of “western” texts and geared toward elites with the aim of graduating “generalists” rather than “specialists” (Jones 2016). These are simplistic generalizations, and as Jones notes, rather than a rigidly defined curriculum or a gatekeeper of tradition, liberal learning has continually changed over time and thrived in American higher education.

Beyond broad surveys of higher education in the twenty-first century (Bastedo et al. 2016), writers offer a diverse array of arguments about the liberal arts in higher education. Some authors focus on accessibility and democratization (Delbanco 2012), while others tout the “life changing” impact that small colleges have on the lives of students (Pope 2012). Some employ the “crisis” paradigm (Blumenstyk 2014), and others offer “defenses” (Zakaria 2015) to the challenges of neoliberalism, anti-intellectualism, and STEM education (LaCapra 2018). While humanists (Nussbaum 1997, 2010; Roche 2010) and social scientists (Morson and Schapiro 2017) make cases for liberal learning, recent popular books have come from unlikely sources. In 2017 venture capitalists (Hartley 2017), strategic innovation consultants (Madsbjerg 2017), and journalists (Anders 2017; Stross 2017) penned calls to keep the humane around for the technology boom.

Other influential voices are university presidents and professional organizations. Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, defines a “liberal education” as the combination of a “philosophical thread,” or the “spirit of critique” that one finds on campuses more often than convention centers, and a “rhetorical thread” that asks students “to appreciate or to participate in traditions of compelling cultural interest” (Roth 2015, 4–5). This allows room for the specialization and broad-based training needed for a humane, attentive, and innovative society. Other voices capture the diversity and relatively recent democratization of the liberal arts. Educators such as Carol Geary Schneider have, since the 1990s, ensured that diversity informs the mission of the American Association of Colleges & Universities (Schneider 2013). The AAC&U has, in the twenty-first century, broadened its understanding of diversity to promote “global learning” in a way that linked “America’s promise” in the aftermath of 9/11 to a “liberal education” (Hovland 2014).

Central to any definition of the liberal arts is a nuanced understanding of how various disciplines relate to a curriculum or, in this case, an area of inquiry. The term “interdisciplinary” implies “an integrative and reciprocally interactive approach that actualizes a synthesis of diverse disciplinary perspectives.” This can, at times, lead to the creation of new disciplines, or what Christine Muller describes in her chapter as an “interdiscipline.” While liberal educators have for many years placed this idea at the center of unified core curriculum sequences, the so-called “menu” general studies model is more “multidisciplinary” in that it introduces students “to knowledge that is drawn from diverse disciplines but the research questions and methods stay within the distinct boundaries of each discipline.” This book is a multidisciplinary collection of chapters, most by interdisciplinary scholars. But the book is the result of a “transdisciplinary” project that spanned nearly five years, beginning with the original conference, and saw “members of many disciplines together conduct research that addresses a holistic phenomenon” to offer “a common conceptual-theoretical-empirical structure for research” (Fawcett 2013, 376–377). In this case, the focus was on the academy’s paths to and from 9/11.

While there is tremendous variation in the chapters that follow, the authors collectively make two points about the intellectual and professional trajectories that flowed to and from 2001. The first is that various forms of external pressure—some caused by 9/11 and others less directly related—have come to the university and altered scholarly considerations and work environments. That pressure has resulted in calls for “relevance,” whether to the national security state at a time of “crisis” or to private industry in a neoliberal historical moment. While this benefitted some fields, it worked to the detriment of others. The second point is that an effective way to respond, not only to these pressures, but to the societal and intellectual need to understand 9/11, is through an integrated and pluralistic approach to learning. Because 9/11 is unsettled, the setting for studying it must include myriad modes of inquiry, multiple voices, and critical scholarly perspectives. 9/11 and the Academy explains why, by addressing what might be the most important event of our time—the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath—the liberal arts continue to enrich higher education, stimulate critical discourse, and remain vital to the United States and the world moving toward the third decade of the twenty-first century.

1.1 The Far and Near Settings of the Post-9/11 Academy

In addition to the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the relationship between 9/11 and the academy sits in two additional settings: the far and near historical settings. The “far setting” refers to the period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century that witnessed the development of the modern university in the United States. The “near setting” refers to a more recent historical moment that began, not with a “historical rupture” in the 1960s, but with the “rearranged world” that followed (Varon et al. 2008, 3). It was the late twentieth century world that informed the academy’s encounter with 9/11 as much as the circumstances that subsequently emerged in the early twenty-first century. In both settings, liberal learning has been at the center of some of the most significant rupture moments—real and perceived—in U.S. history.

The question of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Setting the Unsettled: An Introduction to 9/11 and the Academy
• 2. Changed Worlds? American Studies, Trauma Studies, and September 11, 2001
• 3. Psychology Confronts 9/11: Explanations, Shortcomings, and Challenges
• 4. Religious Studies and September 11, 2001: Religion and Power in the Ruins
• 5. Media Studies: Why 9/11 and Digital Media Pose New Problems and Opportunities for the Study of News
• 6. Spectacle, Trauma, Patriotism: Media and Media Studies in the Aftermath of 9/11
• 7. Studying the Presidency After 9/11: Re-considering Presidential Character in Domestic and International Contexts
• 8. Re-inventing the Heart of Darkness for the Twenty-First Century: African Studies and the War on Terror Since 9/11
• 9. Growth and Uncertainty: The Impact of 9/11 on Intelligence and National Security Studies
• 10. International Education in the Twenty-First Century: Lessons Learned from 9/11 and Cautious Hope for the Future
• 11. Teaching 9/11 in the Core Curriculum
• 12. 9/11 and the Memory “Boom”
• Back Matter