…summarizing the claims of others, sticking with a summary to unpack its key implications and premises, weighing evidence, spotting and identifying contradictions and non sequiturs, telling stories and devising examples that exemplify one's point, generalizing one's conclusions, and many other practices that come into play in every field. (p. 22)
Graff argues that facts alone are uninteresting, and that school is not about learning mere facts. Rather, academia is about organizing facts, as evidence for and against positions, and about presenting them as part of arguments.
This is all well and good, but it downplays an important point. A large part of what scholars do is pose and settle questions about facts. It isn't enough to point out that the settling process necessarily involves argument; that's true, but it is also much more than argument. Graff's list of tasks that make up argument does not include measuring or observing, together with all the supporting activities (such as calibrating instruments) which accompany observation. Graff frequently mentions Dickens' Gradgrind in the course of disrespecting mere facts, but before all is said and done, there has to be something to talk about. Much of scholarship is devoted to settling just such questions of fact and their causes.
There is a second theme in Graff's argument, which gets even greater emphasis. That is academia's insularity, its unwillingness to make its way of thinking readily available to people outside the scholarly world. This shows up first as a failure to explain the taken-for-granted assumptions of scholarship to students. As a result, students shuffle from class to class, getting different stories from instructors whose perspectives vary widely. Students thus become confused and indifferent to learning. Rather than learning to learn via a process of ever-improving argument, they learn to trot out whatever flavor of wisdom each professor seems to want. The result is that, in a world where argument rules, nobody flunks for agreeing with the teacher.
What is missing, in Graff's view, is explicit consideration of the assumptions that all the disparate recondite scholarly perspectives have in common. These are just the acceptance, even celebration, of argument which Graff is endorsing. Because no one explains these assumptions, the scholarly view of argument and its value remains esoteric and inaccessible to students.
Graff has a second thread in his theme of making the esoteric familiar: the permeability of the boundary between scholarly discourse and the talk of the larger world. Graff is actually hopeful about this; he sees a steady decrease, in the last half-century or so, of academic isolation from the general public. Partly, he thinks, this a matter of a more "intellectuals", by which he means people such as journalists and policy analysts who argue in public for a living. Partly, it's because academics recently have been addressing questions of broad import, rather than narrow technicalities.
We have then, two important contrasts in academia. First, there is the contrast between things known and questions still unanswered, the settled vs. the unsettled. In this view, scholarship is the settling process. Second, there is the contrast between the esoteric and the familiar, the problem of taking the little-known and making it known better and more widely. These contrasts are two different things. One can know the answer to obscure questions quite unproblematically, and one can be puzzled about very ordinary everyday phenomena. It's important to keep the two contrasts distinct.
But wait! (as we say in the argument trade), there's more!!
A third contrast runs through Graff's discussion, as it does through almost all discussions of different kinds of scholarship. This is the contrast between work focused on describing and analyzing things vs. work focused on recognizing, appreciating, and emulating worthy performance, whether aesthetic or moral. Graff understands this distinction very well; he once wrote a book about the history of literary scholarship in which that contrast was a major theme.
It's tempting to think of this as the distinction between the sciences and the humanities, but that won't do. There are many strands of work in the humanities concerned primarily with good description and analysis, rather than aesthetic impact or moral import. Much work in history and philology is of this sort. Conversely, aesthetic and ethical considerations play an important intrinsic role in the sciences.
So we have three pairs of contrasts, which can be summed up in two tables:
Descriptive, analytic:
|
Familiar |
Esoteric |
|
|
Settled |
People have elbows |
Properties of rare earth elements |
|
Not settled |
Cause(s) of Alzheimer's disease |
Normative, evaluative:
|
Familiar |
Esoteric |
|
|
Settled |
Shakespeare wrote great poetry |
Publius Clodius Pulcher (ca. 92 - 52 BC) was not a good leader. |
|
Not settled |
Was the invasion of Iraq justified? |
In "Measure for Measure", is Isabel's acceptance of the Duke's proposal proper? |
Thinking about these contrasts makes it clear that there are some important differences among scholarly approaches. Some focus first on descriptive and analytic work, and on settling unsettled questions. Stereotypically, this is what white-coated scientists do in their laboratories, although it can certainly be found in the humanities as well. It isn't difficult to find proponents of this approach down-playing the importance of either undergraduate teaching or "popularization". Nor is it hard to find resistance to the notion that research should be, in some sense, "improving". A great deal of the heat generated by post-modern approaches and the opposition to them has stemmed from the idea that the nature of "improvement" is far from settled or clear.
Another scholarly approach focuses on making the esoteric familiar; in a word, teaching. There is nothing more important, or more valuable. But there are at least two ways to accomplish this. One way opens and expands the familiar to include things that were formerly esoteric, so that we learn about other ways of doing things, of other parts of the world and how they work. Another way finds purported commonalities in all things, and organizes an efficient and comprehensive understanding of those commonalities while ignoring everything else. The first approach seeks to open restaurants of many ethnicities in every neighborhood. The second approach notices that there are only a handful of basic diets in the world (e.g. beef and potatoes, rice and beans, ham and cheese) and creates an efficient restaurant industry with a few global chains, one serving hamburgers and fries, another other serving tacos, and so on.
A third scholarly approach focuses on unsettling the settled, especially on the evaluative side. The point of this is to raise questions about conventional technical, aesthetic, or moral assumptions. Often, this is done as part of an effort to make the esoteric familiar. Sometimes, it is done as part of an attempt at moral or aesthetic reform.
It's clear then, that even within the frame of assumptions about the value of argument, there are lots of different ways of arguing. As a result, some arguments are tangled, as each party argues in a different fashion, or at cross-purposes with others.
It's also easy to conflate these contrasts in the different ways, and so slip into a view of the situation which is distorted. Often, for example, we tend to think that someone explicating a relatively obscure point is also advocating it as a course of action. Often, this is true-- but not always. If it's important to understand and summarize someone else's argument carefully, then these simplifications (Graff would call them reductions) can help keep things straight. Conflating the contrasts in different ways makes for a very subtle kind of disagreement.
Keeping the contrasts well separated is something that scholars strive for as a matter of ordinary good practice, and this often leads to trouble from partisan audiences. Social scientists, for example, often run into trouble because they seek to describe and analyze (and often only describe and analyze) what some want to condemn or celebrate. The attempt to analyze is often seen as disrespect or worse. There can be no doubt that this process has severely hampered progress in the social sciences.
An analogous problem arises in the arts and humanities when an artist or scholar seeks to represent a stigmatized perspective or activity sympathetically, in the interest of making the esoteric familiar. Often, the attempt is seen as advocacy. Conflations of this kind often lead to what Graff calls "anti-intellectualism"-- that is, condemning either the settling process or the exposition process (or their practitioners) as part of a disagreement over evaluative positions. But this sort of hostility has stemmed from intellectuals as much as from others; think of Auden and his "thou shalt not sit with statisticians", or Wordsworth's "We murder to dissect"
There are then, a variety of perspectives living "the life of the mind" and they are frequently in conflict with one another. Graff has often argued that "teaching the conflicts" is a good way to help defuse them, as well as educate. I think he's right. I think it helps to describe and analyze them too. A natural history of scholarly conflicts (of which this note is part) is a necessary part of the larger effort.
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