Interview: Wilfred McClay

The following transcript comprises From the Academy publisher Jenna A. Robinson’s recent conversation with Wilfred McClay, the Victor Davis Hanson chair in classical history and Western civilization at Hillsdale College. The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jenna Robinson: Today, I’m joined by Professor Wilfred McClay, historian, author, and one of the nation’s most compelling voices on the purpose of liberal education at a time when higher education is increasingly framed as job preparation, when artificial intelligence promises to automate more of the thinking we once believed to be uniquely human. Professor McClay has consistently reminded us of the deeper, formative aims of the liberal arts. Our conversation today will explore how educators can rekindle students’ excitement about reading, reasoning, and seeking wisdom and why these pursuits matter more, not less, in a technological age. Professor McClay, thank you for being here.

Wilfred McClay: Thank you, Jenna, for having me. I’m a great admirer of you and your work at the Martin Center. What a great outfit you are, and just keep up the good work.

Jenna Robinson: Thank you so much. We will. As you know, many students today see college primarily as job training. What is lost when the liberal arts are reduced to a credential rather than a formative experience?

Wilfred McClay: Some of it’s so obvious, and yet it needs to be said, that you’re missing out on the breadth of knowledge that helps you acquire an appreciation of beauty, of the pursuit of truth, of the highest thing. It’s sort of saying that [the liberal arts are] for later, if ever; the first thing to do is to take care of one’s job prospects. And the fact is that most college educations don’t do much in that department. But we are now in a world where the workforce [and] the description of jobs is changing by the day, by the minute, and so a certain amount of agility is the quality that’s really needed. That is to say: skills that are generalizable.

But that’s not all it is. Liberal education is not just skills education. It is the introduction to the tradition that made us, that made us who we are and what we are, and it’s an exercise in self-knowledge. All of that’s being foreclosed. Let me give you an example. I’m in the middle of doing a new edition of the textbook Land of Hope that I did on American history. And one of the things that we’re doing, much to my happiness, is inserting lots and lots of maps. One of the things I have discovered [about] young people today is they really don’t know how to read maps, and sometimes their parents don’t. It’s just an obsolete skill made obsolete by [the] GPS that everybody carries around on their phones. Well, there’s a big difference between learning how to go from point X to point Y in the way that the machine tells you  and having a whole sense of where those two places [are], how they fit into a larger scheme of things, the grid, the overview that a map gives you. A map tells you [that] you may be going from Baltimore to Washington, but it shows you all of Maryland, all [of the] northern Chesapeake Bay, the whole context of the geography that you’re going through. And that’s a different kind of knowledge that’s not strictly instrumental. If all you care about is getting from point A to point B, then maybe you’d be content with the GPS version, but [you’d] never get to know the whole geography, the whole city, the whole state, the whole region, and have a feel for that, for the place that you actually live, if you don’t really learn how to use a map.

So we’re doing a lot of maps in the new edition, much to my pleasure, and that’s just an analogy, but I think it’s a useful one. Liberal arts give you a breadth of knowledge, properly done. It’s skills, but it’s also that kind of knowledge base that is a great place to pivot from to any endeavor that you might undertake. I actually think that the decision to focus on “practical” education is about the most impractical thing one can do at this point, because who knows what’s going to be practical. I remember my son was in school a while ago. They insisted all [the students] know a word-processing program, “WordStar.” I don’t know whether you’re even old enough to remember WordStar, but WordStar was this clunky thing that, by the time a mouse and graphic interface became common, was useless. All of that effort learning the particularities of WordStar was a waste. It may have taught him something about how coding operates. But I think it was just some “practical” thing that the principal of the school latched onto as a way of keeping our kids in step with technology. I think that part of education in the future, and really beginning now, beginning yesterday, should be to give us the ability to resist technological domination. Technological enslavement. Make our tools work for us rather than us working for them.

Jenna Robinson: That’s a great point. And I love maps, too, by the way. I remember getting them in the National Geographic—the really big ones you could fold out—and poring over them for hours as a kid.

Wilfred McClay: Oh, me, too. I just love them, and I’m fortunate that way. But I think other people would love them if they could be brought to learn how to use them. They really don’t know how to use them. I hear this from teachers all the time. Not to dwell too much on maps, but I think maps are a nice metaphor for what liberal education accomplishes. There’s another metaphor that comes to mind. I don’t want to preempt all your questions, but it’s a movie called The Matrix. The idea behind that, of course, is a dead rip-off from Plato’s Republic and the “Allegory of the Cave,” which is a parable of all education, but especially liberal education. As you know, [in the cave] people are tied down, and they only see these flickering images on the wall and mistake them for reality. In the same way, in The Matrix [there’s] this sort of computer-generated simulation of reality, and it’s a great climactic moment, the battle to escape from that. I think that’s part of what liberal education needs to be more than ever—to get us to the point where, rather than having experts and machines make all our decisions for us, we can stand on our own two feet. Use our own judgment, live our lives with our intellect and emotions and all of our soul engaged in it. That’s, I think, part of the battle.

I have good friends in Oklahoma, where I used to teach, who had these great dinner parties. But at the beginning of the dinner party, they tell everybody, put your cell phone in this basket, turn it off, put it here. You’re going to attend to one another, listen to one another. There will be no intrusions, and even doctors have to turn off their pagers. So that’s another way of expressing that we have to clear ourselves of what I call an enslavement to technology, and obviously AI was just the latest iteration.

Jenna Robinson: How can universities make a compelling case to students and parents that the liberal arts are not in tension with career preparation? Specifically, what would you say to students who want to be engineers, statisticians, or data scientists?

Wilfred McClay: It is hard to break through the expense of college education, which didn’t exist to the same extent when I was in college. I went to a private liberal-arts college, St. John’s in Annapolis, and I paid my way. You can’t do that today. With [for example] Davidson in your area, you accumulate this enormous debt and then [are] burdened by that for much of your early part of your adult life, which is happening all around us. So it was a less expensive proposition. Now there is an argument, a strong argument, that “this is so expensive it’s got to pay off, and we’re going to do what we can to make sure [it pays off]. And, yeah, it’d be great if Junior could take English courses and learn how to do the opening lines of Beowulf in the original Old English and all these sort of ‘frivolous’ things that the humanities do. But we can’t [afford] that.” I’m sensitive to that argument as a parent whose kids have gone to college, we’ve done it. We’ve gotten through, and I’m very happy that they both got a strong liberal-arts education, and as parents we encouraged them.

So what do you say? Well, I’ll add one other thing: When I taught at the University of Oklahoma, I taught honors courses in which some of the best students were double-majoring in petroleum engineering and classics. And they would double because they knew, they understood, that a straight-line tech education, STEM education, professionally oriented, vocationally oriented, was not going to fulfill everything they wanted of it. Some people don’t need persuading. They know already that a strictly vocational approach to education is not going to tell them things about how to live.

But there’s one other problem I would be remiss if I didn’t mention. That is the way the humanities are being taught and being studied and being practiced. It’s a disgrace. You know, you have people teaching in literature departments who hate literature or whose purpose is to reduce literature to politics. And they’ve made the joy, the beauty, the wisdom of the humanities nugatory. They’ve just dismissed it. So I think you see that you need a new generation of professors. Of course, there are very good professors who do the right kind of thing. And I had some of them as colleagues. I had many of them as colleagues. There are institutions that are upholding the idea that truth and beauty are part of what an education should be about. But, you know, in many cases, it’s parents as much as the young people themselves who feel that they need to go down this road of technicality. And I can’t tell you how many students over the years that I’ve known who majored in something they didn’t really want to major in and then discovered that there was no work in that area that they trained for, anyway. So we can’t predict the future. It’s so hard to know. For example, there’s a real crisis among young law-school graduates, because so much of the work of a legal office can be done by AI that some jobs are disappearing, and this is true in a lot of different professions. It’s going to happen. I can say that I wish it wouldn’t happen, but I think it’s pretty certain that it will.

And that raises the question of how we prepare people for that kind of world, the vague outlines of which we can see but the details of which we don’t know yet. And it’s a source of a lot of interesting conversations over lunch, let me tell you, because we’re all wondering, Whither education with AI? Just to give you one example that for me is existential: I’ve always relied on paper assignments to evaluate students’ work, and now that’s really becoming very problematic. I think our students at Hillsdale are less inclined to cheat than any students I’ve ever seen. But you almost can’t help it. If you go on the internet and type in a book, there will be a little AI box right next to you offering to summarize it so you don’t have to read. You know, I don’t think I could have resisted that when I was under the gun and had to do a term paper in college. So there’s a lot of that. But it isn’t the end of the story. There are still ways that we can teach, that we can evaluate learning, but it may not be through the conventional means. I will never give another take-home exam, and most people I know have sworn it off. Some people will, just because they don’t want to change and they’re set in their ways. I think that’s too bad. You’ve got to respond to circumstance, for the students’ sake, too, because if you let them take a shortcut that’s going to not challenge them and not teach them anything, you’ve shortchanged them in a profound way.

So one of the things that I think we should do more of, and I have a number of reasons, is have more [conversational teaching]. This is not for people who teach lecture courses with 300 students. That’s the kind of thing AI can probably do better and for a lot less expense. But, you know, conversational teaching, teaching in seminars, where you’re actually engaging students in an oral way, not in a form of papers that may or may not have been prepared with the help of artificial means, but in conversation, in presentation. I didn’t use to do a lot of presentations, and then I found that, especially in the last ten years or so, a lot of students simply don’t know how to do a presentation of things. They’re used to pointing to something on the internet and not expressing it in their own terms, their own style, [in a way] that is approachable to an audience. So I’m doubling down on conversation. I’m doubling down on memorization. [There is a] required American history course here [at Hillsdale], and every student takes it, and I make them memorize the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and they have to come to my office [to recite], and obviously that takes time. But, oh, it’s such a good thing. It’s not the sum total of what we need to do, but I think it’s part of what we need to do.

I’m a great fan of Michael Oakeshott, the philosopher, and he says that conversation, a word that has a very rich meaning for him, is the thing more than reason, more than our inventiveness, that separates us from the beast and the barbarian. Now I think that goes a little far, but I think it is the ability to have someone else listen and then respond and then respond to the response, like a volley in tennis, that’s one of the things that you can’t really learn from a machine. I know there are computers that can sort of pretend to be [intelligent], and some people have fun with it. That’s not really a conversation, since AI is really just a kind of application of everything in the database that it’s drawing on. Not your own mind, not your individual intellect, not your moral imagination. So we need to be aware of the need to develop those things, those human fundamentals in every sense of the word “fundamental,” those foundational human capacities, which means a lot of other things come along with that. Cultivate the art of listening to others, the ability to hear opinions different from your own, and to enter into them, and not necessarily in a completely wide open way. You can have your convictions and bring them to the discussion. But hear the other person’s idea. This notion of viewpoint diversity, which I’m for—the word, the term, is a kind of arid term compared to what I’m talking about, right?

Jenna Robinson: You’ve written about the moral and civic purposes of higher education and of education in general, and I think what you’re saying really ties into that, because, in order for students to get moral and civic formation out of education, they really have to internalize what they’re learning. They cannot phone it in. What are students’ responses when you do things like make them memorize and do things that are forcing them to internalize knowledge and capacities? Are they receptive to that? Do they understand that that really is the purpose of education?

Wilfred McClay: I think they are surprisingly receptive to it. I started doing it when I came to Hillsdale. I didn’t at the University of Oklahoma, and I’m still in touch with a lot of my students from there. When I tell them [what I do now], they say, “Why didn’t you do that with us? That would have been great.” And so I think there is actually a hunger for “rote” memorization. One of the great thudding cliches is the concept of “critical thinking.” I wish I could banish that, at least put it out of commission for thirty years or so, because how can you think critically about something you know nothing about? You need to learn some things first. You need to know some things. You need to have your own database in order to have the tools to bring to bear on something to be critical of it. It’s kind of an evasion of one of the chief goals of education, which is the inculcation of a certain educational content. What does the Constitution say about X, Y, or Z?—instead of, “Well, I think the Constitution makes everything slow and tedious, and you’ve got all these contending factions, and why don’t we just give the president all the power to smooth things out?”

I do think that with that particular example, the Constitution and civic education, it’s a great thing. It’s a great thing. I’m involved with the Jack Miller Center, which is kind of obsessed with this issue, and rightly so. But as I always say to my colleagues, it’s one thing to teach the principles of the Constitution. It’s another thing to look at the history, look at the way the Constitution has been employed, has been beaten up (in some cases), and how you’re to respond to those kinds of things as a citizen, within the scope of what we’re granted and what is required of responsible citizens. Some of the advocates of civic engagement, as you probably know, promote “action civics.” And there’s something to this, you know, every lie has a little bit of truth. And the little bit of truth is that people do learn profound lessons by activity, like in a kinetic way, and the best example of that is a jury. I don’t know whether you’ve ever served on a jury. It’s a very interesting experience that everyone should have, because one of the things you see is that people rise to the occasion. People see, like, “Oh my god, we’re in this room with all these people who have never had a serious thought in their lives and don’t have the attention span to follow the legal arguments.” Turns out, despite what we expect, they rise to the occasion more often than not.

I have several friends who are federal judges, and they say, “Oh, I would always trust a jury more than I would a bench trial,” which means more than they trust themselves. I’m not saying we take seventh and eighth graders and make them jurors. But they need to understand the neutrality of the law, what it means to live under law, [which] is something that’s very abstract until you have to apply it in a real circumstance where it can be a painful thing. Billy Budd is a great novella by Herman Melville. The good guy ends up being punished because it’s the law. So students can learn some things from literature, but the experience of actually serving in a capacity of responsibility is different. I think we need to find ways to make our young people have more of an experience of what it means to be a responsible, rational person, an adult even.

Jenna Robinson: You just mentioned, when you were talking about juries, the capacity for attention. And I think we know that attention is an essential precondition of deep learning, especially in the liberal arts. And today, with all the devices we’ve got that are beeping and buzzing and demanding our attention, we live in an age of distraction. Information overload. How can institutions, how can professors, respond to that and cultivate the habit of attention?

Wilfred McClay: That’s very tough. I don’t want to exaggerate the problem, but I think it’s fair to say that an awful lot of students just don’t really know how to read. They don’t really know how to read deeply. And so whenever I can, where I teach at Hillsdale, I have the students look at primary sources. And I spend a lot of time with just a few sentences saying, “Look, what does it mean?” Like in the book Genesis, we teach the creation. And I said, “What does it mean that ‘God speaks the world into being’? What does that mean?” Even kids who have been Sunday-schooled up to their eyeballs, when you ask them that kind of question, they don’t know what to say. It takes a little bit of time to get them to understand that these texts are so rich, there are depths within depths within depths. Learning to read that [way] with a select number of things, that can begin to develop if not a habit, at least a capacity to read carefully more and more. That’s one idea about attention. And, you know, I’m so against digital everything, and this is one of the reasons I wrote my textbook Land of Hope. I wanted to write a book because, as you know, it’s no question whether reading comprehension is better from a screen or a [printed] text. We know, and yet because of cost-benefit analyses made by other self-interested parties, texts have been increasingly going away, students have been sent towards tablets. That’s another thing. People, young people, don’t build up personal libraries. I think book reading and attention cultivation go hand in hand. I’m not saying I’m against Kindles. I don’t like them, but I will use them. And we’re having this conversation thanks to digital technology. But in terms of what you asked about attention, deep attention, deep commitment to the subject and/or person in front of you. The cult of multitasking has kind of eroded that to the brink.

And it’s so funny. I remember when I was a kid, my mother used to say, when they introduced instant replay in football and baseball, this is going to have bad effects on young people, because they’ll think, when they’re watching for the first time, “Oh, I don’t really have to pay attention, because the instant replay will give it to us.” She was right. That’s another thing: to do things in the classroom to cultivate the sense that you want to get it in one. You want to get it in the first try. You want to be listening. That’s the disposition you want to bring up, right?

Jenna Robinson: What’s a good book for college-level liberal-arts students to read first that will get them started in lifelong liberal-arts education? What will light that spark?

Wilfred McClay: There are so many possibilities. A terrific book that young people love—and it’s the 100th anniversary [last] year—is The Great Gatsby. I’m a historian, not a literature [professor], but it’s a beautifully written book with beautiful language. I don’t know that that’s the best choice, but it is one that I would choose, [that] I know they would read. They enjoy it. They love the book. There are a number of others I could say, but that’s really accessible, and it’s important. One thing I don’t ever want to be heard saying is that bad education, the bad state of the minds [of young people], is their fault. I think it’s our fault. It’s the fault of the older generation: an indifference to the effects of everything that comes along, whiz bang, especially if it can be a sort of artificial babysitter, like a television or computer.

Jenna Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and publisher of  From the Academy. Wilfred McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson chair in classical history and Western civilization at Hillsdale College.