âAny great disturbance in the world of action or of intellect produces very noticeable effects upon the methods and controlling thought patterns of historiansâ (Nichols 1948, 78). It seems suitable, as it was for Eric Foner in his 2003 essay on September 11, 2001, or â9/11,â 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 âthought patternsâ of scholars in the âliberal artsâ 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, âSeptember 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 â to ourselves and to our studentsâ (2003).
This book turns President George W. Bushâs assertion that 9/11 was âthe day that changed everythingâ 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 volumeâs 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 â9/11,â an unsettled, or âunmasteredâ history. Gavriel Rosenfeld draws on scholars of Germany to define âthe concept of an âunmasteredâ pastâ as âa historical legacy that has acquired an exceptional, abnormal, or otherwise unsettled status in the collective memory of a given societyâ (2009, 126â127). 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 âliberal arts,â or âliberal education?â Here it refers to a liberality in oneâs 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 âwesternâ texts and geared toward elites with the aim of graduating âgeneralistsâ rather than âspecialistsâ (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 âlife changingâ impact that small colleges have on the lives of students (Pope 2012). Some employ the âcrisisâ paradigm (Blumenstyk 2014), and others offer âdefensesâ (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 âliberal educationâ as the combination of a âphilosophical thread,â or the âspirit of critiqueâ that one finds on campuses more often than convention centers, and a ârhetorical threadâ that asks students âto appreciate or to participate in traditions of compelling cultural interestâ (Roth 2015, 4â5). 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 âglobal learningâ in a way that linked âAmericaâs promiseâ in the aftermath of 9/11 to a âliberal educationâ (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 âinterdisciplinaryâ implies âan integrative and reciprocally interactive approach that actualizes a synthesis of diverse disciplinary perspectives.â This can, at times, lead to the creation of new disciplines, or what Christine Muller describes in her chapter as an âinterdiscipline.â While liberal educators have for many years placed this idea at the center of unified core curriculum sequences, the so-called âmenuâ general studies model is more âmultidisciplinaryâ in that it introduces students âto knowledge that is drawn from diverse disciplines but the research questions and methods stay within the distinct boundaries of each discipline.â This book is a multidisciplinary collection of chapters, most by interdisciplinary scholars. But the book is the result of a âtransdisciplinaryâ project that spanned nearly five years, beginning with the original conference, and saw âmembers of many disciplines together conduct research that addresses a holistic phenomenonâ to offer âa common conceptual-theoretical-empirical structure for researchâ (Fawcett 2013, 376â377). In this case, the focus was on the academyâs 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 pressureâsome caused by 9/11 and others less directly relatedâhave come to the university and altered scholarly considerations and work environments. That pressure has resulted in calls for ârelevance,â whether to the national security state at a time of âcrisisâ 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 timeâthe terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and their aftermathâthe 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 âfar settingâ 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 ânear settingâ refers to a more recent historical moment that began, not with a âhistorical ruptureâ in the 1960s, but with the ârearranged worldâ that followed (Varon et al. 2008, 3). It was the late twentieth century world that informed the academyâs 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 momentsâreal and perceivedâin U.S. history.
The question of ...