Wikipedia U by Thomas Leitch

Author:Thomas Leitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Coda: Britannica versus Liberal Education

Critics of Wikipedia commonly assume that the values they see as under attack by its spread and influence are straightforward, consensual, and unproblematic. But generating a list of explicit and implicit values imperiled by Web 2.0 reveals a surprising lack of congruence between these values and the values of liberal education today. The academy has not set itself against any of the values implied by Keen’s critique of Wikipedia. And it has endorsed a number of them—aesthetic taste, authorship and accountability, originality, professional expertise, deep thinking, perhaps even personal rectitude—more or less explicitly. But its relation to most of them is far more equivocal and has become ever more deeply equivocal since the Renaissance. Liberal education embraces neutrality and freedom from error in principle while tolerating widely divergent and often logically contradictory views in practice. The value the academy attaches to selectivity and elitism, to institutionalization and stability, is complicated in every case by its openness to self-criticism and the contradictory impulses it incorporates within itself. Liberal education shuns absolutism. It is most comfortable with nonabsolutist values like taste, expertise, accountability, originality, and critical thinking. But to the extent that these values, or any others, threaten to become absolute, they become suspect. The editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica might like to believe the values of traditional references and liberal education are congruent. But they have actually been very different ever since schools began taking their models from Plato and Aristotle—and especially from the subversive method of Socrates—rather than from the philosophers before them.

Critics of liberal education could plausibly offer several explanations why this should be so. In “Web 2.0,” Keen cites Karl Marx as a symptom of the problem and Christopher Lasch and Oswald Spengler as diagnosticians. Perhaps the contemporary university is overrun by Marxist utopians promising self-actualization to the masses. Perhaps its embrace of intellectual pluralism is a cover for an indiscriminate and licentious embrace of personal narcissism. Perhaps the crisis in higher education is an indication of broader and more baneful cultural crisis or a further indication of the decline of the West.

But there is a more likely explanation for the discord between the values of Britannica and those of liberal education that Keen overlooks. This explanation concerns the most problematic of all the virtues ascribed to traditional elitist culture: communitarianism. Keen quotes a 2006 speech by Jürgen Habermas to help make his case against Web 2.0: “The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.”65 It is worth asking who Habermas’s “we” is. Society at large? Web users? the academy? intellectuals? The view he takes opposes “contributions by intellectuals” to “decentralized access to unedited stories”—informed opinion versus unfiltered mass opinion—in absolute terms. But the college classroom is precisely the place that these opinions enter into dialogue, not just occasionally but foundationally. Liberal education may grow out of the kind of

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