Even more on a North Korean at Columbia University

I can’t resist mentioning one final time the sad experience of Yeonmi Park , the North Korean defector who went on to study at Columbia University and ended up feeling she’d wasted her time.

I have been reading the German literary critic Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence. What Meaning cannot Convey (2004), and came across this discussion of the appropriate role of education today:

If…confrontation with complexity is that which makes academic teaching specific, then - instead of attributing meaning and thereby providing solutions - we should seek to practice our teaching, as much as possible, in the modality of lived experience (Erleben). For good academic teaching is a staging of complexity; it is drawing our students’ attention toward complex phenomena and problems, rather than prescribing how they must deal with them. In other words, good academic teaching should be deictic, rather than interpretative and solution-oriented. But how will such a deictic teaching style not end in silence and, worse perhaps, in a quasi-mystical contemplation and admiration of so much complexity?…..[The answer involves] the never-ending movement, the both joyful and painful movement between losing and regaining intellectual control and orientation - that can occur in the confrontation with (almost?) any cultural object as long as it occurs under conditions of low time pressure, that is, with no ‘solution’ or ‘answer’ immediately expected. (p.127-128)

Well, it seems obvious to me the academics at Columbia, like elsewhere, seem to be trading in complexity for simplicity. They prefer to teach clearly interpreted scenarios not open-ended uncertainty. Under political pressure to narrow the gap between the ‘ivory tower’ of academia, which, as Gumbrecht puts it, functions ‘under conditions of low time pressure’, in other words, under pressure to make themselves ‘useful’ in a time of crisis, academics no longer have faith in the importance of functioning within a social space in which ‘no “solution” or “answer” [is] immediately expected.’ (128)

Gumbrecht goes on to discuss how his assertion parallels that of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who characterizes the university as a ‘secondary social system,’ that is, ‘a social system whose function should be the production of complexity - in distinction from and in reaction to most other social systems, which Luhmann saw as being oriented toward the reduction of complexity offered by their environments.’ (129). Gumbrecht also cites a Max Weber essay from 1917, in which Weber urges academic research to be about ‘“unpleasant facts,” counterintuitive insights, and improbable findings’. (129)

This is no longer the role of academia. Too much offense will be caused by willful intellectual peregrination., too much damage to others’ self-esteem.

It also goes without saying that as the Internet is now a principal arena of social discourse, and this medium cannot tolerate complexity of thought, what is also happening is that academia has assimilated itself to the same crude protocols.

in other words, academia is in the process of giving up its role as a ‘secondary social system.’ But what we need - as a matter of life or death - is just such a space dedicated to the exploration of complexity, a space where solutions and answers in the real world are not forthcoming. A space in which Yeonmi Park might have been able to develop here newly and painfully won capacity for critical thinking, and insatiable appetite for freedom of expression.