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From The Multiversity: The New Paradigm

Posted By Lee Trepanier On July 31, 2015 @ 6:42 am In Education & Liberal
Learning I No Comments

Saginaw, MI
This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can
teach us about today's public multiversity,, the modern university with its
many colleges/ departments/ and other administrative units that play
multiple functions and roles in our society.

What I have been proposing so far has been a paradigm for the
multiversity to adopt for its students, faculty, and administrators: to pursue
truth instead of disseminating it; to acquire the ability of how to learn
rather than showing how to teach; and compelling the various communities
that compose the multiversity to answer the question what type of human
being it ultimately wants to cultivate. From Plato we see that education is
fundamentally a personal encounter between teacher and student as a type
of periarogSf from Aristotle we perceive the value of prudence as the
principle to organize the multiversity's mission; from Augustine we are
confronted with the question about what should be the object of our love;
and from Aquinas we recognize the need to synthesize the various
traditions that exist in today's globalized world. These concepts of
periagoge, prudence, love, and synthesis should be the core values of the
multiversity that can have an actual impact on the lives of students which
the multiversity supposedly serves.

Plato teaches that we first must be open to the possibility that truth exists
and find within ourselves our desire to search for it. Although truth
manifests itself in a variety of forms - mathematics and the natural
sciences, the humanities and the arts, and even in pre-professional
programs like business, the health sciences, and education - the first task
of the teacher is to cultivate wonder into the student. General education
curriculum consequently should be designed to prompt this sense of
wonder for truth, in all its forms, for students; and administrators should
encourage students that genuine wonder comport with rather than is
contrary to utilitarian outcomes. For it is wonder, not passion, that provides
us a sense of perspective of how little we know and what we should
appreciate in the world. By contrast, passion is to ask us to control the
world and model it after our own ideas of what truth is. Wonder is different:
it allows us to step outside of ourselves and see where we belong, and how
little truth we ever will obtain, in our fleeting existence.

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But wonder needs to be balanced with prudence, for we have to act wisely
to avoid the various pitfalls to which the multiversity can fall prey.
Aristotle's concept of prudence allows the multiversity to do this by
providing a type of pedagogy of both theoretical and practical reason that
students require. Prudence also can direct the other activities of the
multiversity, scholarship and service, in a manner that is consistent with its
mission of cultivating a certain type of human being. This, in turn, leads the
multiversity to answer the question what should its students, faculty, and
administrators love as a community. This is the topic that Augustine
answered, and, although his theological answer would not be suitable for
the multiversity, it raises the most important question for the institution:
what does the multiversity love the most?
Because of the diversity of higher education institutions in the United
States, even among multiversities themselves, there is no need to impose a
single, normative standard on the type of human being the university
should cultivate. But the question has to be asked and, more importantly,
answered in a way that has a practical impact on the lives of students,
faculty, and administrators. Education jargon like diversity and student
empowerment often translate into ideological indoctrination rather than a
Thomist attempt at synthesis or an Augustinian examination of one's own
interiority. Students could be asked to wonder if a genuine engagement is
possible on the basis of reason rather than ideology between western and
non-western civilizations. Unlike ideologues, who claim to know truth, the
teacher for Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas know that they are at
best mid-wives to it. The most they can do is encourage the student to
reflect upon his or her own interiority to discover wherein truth resides.
Truth is not simply knowledge-transfer, although, admittedly, this is
required but should not be simply reduced to this methodology. Teaching at
its best is a dialectical enterprise in a community of students and teachers
with administrators trying to make the conditions of periagoge, prudence,
love, and synthesis possible.
The question of scale therefore is paramount for the multiversity. Without
the luxury of billion-dollar endowments or wealthy clienteles, most
multiversities have to balance the ideals of periagoge, prudence, love, and
synthesis with the social reality of poorly-prepared secondary students and
the economic reality of continual state defunding. For remedial education,
online and hybrid courses with mandatory tutorial sessions could be
considered; for general education courses, a class size of no more than
thirty; and for elective, seminars-style be encouraged (and for the truly
exceptional student, there is always the independent study tutorial). With
the exception of remedial courses, general education and seminar classes
would be a mixture of both the theoretical and practical; and those in the
seminar electives of their majors would remain together as a community in
their junior and senior years.
Departments would take precedence in the academic direction of their
programs with the colleges and other administrative units playing a

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supporting and coordinating role, For example, departments, not

administrative units, would determine how to assess students and what
constitutes success or failure. Academic centers, interdisciplinary majors
and minors, and other free-standing academic units would either be
abolished or embedded within an academic department; and the power and
staff of college deans and university provosts and presidents would be
greatly diminished, or, at least, excluded from the academic operations of
the multiversity,

Such an arrangement would prevent the common occurrence that the

academic community becomes rearranged every time a new administrator
comes to power, for a dean often is promoted to provost after a new
academic center is established; and a provost becomes president after two
or more centers are built, regardless of their academic value (or, if you
prefer, similar ideas like service learning, leadership training, competency
education, and such). And once the dean has left, another one has taken
his or her place and implemented a new set of ideas, abstracted from the
reality of the classroom and campus life, in order to move up the
administrative food chain,

There is not necessarily the fault of the administrators, for the multiversity
has no guiding principle or useful paradigm to help them make their
decisions except for vague and therefore meaningless slogans, like
^something more, something better" or ^advancing knowledge,
transforming lives," Perhaps per/agoge, prudence, love, and synthesis are
not right principles for the multiversity - for there may even be better ones
out there - but they are at least connected concretely to the reality of how
one learns and thereby gives direction to students, faculty, and
administrators of how to do their jobs. After all, genuine learning is difficult,
if not impossible, for students; and teaching, even among those who do it
well, is ultimately a mystery for faculty; but establishing the conditions for
these activities to transpire is perhaps the most demanding task of them all
and belongs to realm of the multiversity's administrator,

Lee Trepanier is a Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State

University, More information about him can be found at
http://svsu.academia.edu/LeeTrepanier,

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