What are universities for? There may be more answers to this question than there are academics in a typical philosophy department. And surely we do need different answers according to who asks the question. The challenge to justify the existence and importance of my academic activities has confronted me increasingly through my career so far. As a postgrad student, I might have encountered it mostly when talking with family, friends and neighbours, but as a lecturer, I confront it when I’m encouraging students to apply to my university or programme, when I stand up to teach on a Monday morning, and when I apply for research grants.
Is there a core insight about the point of universities that would provide compelling answers for all who might ask the question? An ideal answer would shape my teaching practice at every turn, implicitly colouring the curriculum as well as being made explicit; the same answer would give force to my grant applications and delightfully intrigue friends and family about “what I do”. I believe the answer is something to do with open-minded critical thinking.
Critical thinking connects teaching, research and administration. In teaching, it calls for structure, balance and diversity to inculcate a system of ideas and perspectives. In research, it’s about disciplines that allow our understanding to be transformed into conformity with the way the world really is. And in administration, it’s crucial so that the tail doesn’t wag the dog (as a former colleague used to say): critical thinking in the office can nurture critical thinking elsewhere. ‘Critical’ means discerning, almost penetrating; it has a lot more to do with critiquing than with criticizing. Today, I want to focus on the teaching and learning functions, and particularly on curriculum design.
Open-mindedness is only meaningful when someone has a structured mind. An infant may keep its eyes open and get all kinds of sensory impressions, but a really open mind is one that holds diverse beliefs and ideas with justifiable degrees of confidence, perhaps very few of them unshakeable. W.V.O. Quine’s ‘web of belief’ metaphor [1] is apt, recognising that while some guiding beliefs must be well protected from disturbance by new experiences or information, there is no rock-bottom absolute foundation on which a person builds up their understanding of the world. But open-mindedness also concerns plausibility. An open-minded person pauses to consider the implications of the day’s news stories, but doesn’t often pause to wonder whether arithmetic really works, or whether he is dreaming. And so a university curriculum can shepherd students towards established wisdom and knowledge while nurturing the habit of imagining that things might yet be otherwise. Questioning everything means hypothesising, however vaguely, that anything might be different. But we can generally only question one thing at a time, and so there must be an order to our open-minded inquiry. One has to start somewhere.
Second, then, criticality comes from order and balance. When I have the privilege of designing a module from scratch, there are decisions to make about the order in which topics are presented, and sometimes a whole theme by which to structure the course. The sources I choose for readings and exercises can always be criticised in some way or other. If I seek geographical balance, I may not sufficiently have nurtured open-mindedness about gendered perspectives, or power relations, for example. We can’t take a view from nowhere even in choosing the criteria on which to order and balance our teaching. So it remains crucial to leave space for students to bring their own perspectives and readings, to draw attention as best we can to absent voices, and above all to foster openness to new ideas and perspectives.
Third, criticality calls for diversity. When I taught classes in Value Studies, I tried to draw attention to differences of worldview or opinion in the texts we read, and sometimes within the class itself, to help students not only empathise with the ‘other’ but also articulate critiques. When I teach Statistics, there are alternative paradigms for inference, each with its pros and cons. And every discipline has its historical and philosophical roots, where there is ample diversity of paradigms. There is also an underlying challenge of social diversity, as foregrounded by the movement to ‘decolonize the curriculum’. Acknowledging a diversity of perspectives in appropriate ways is often challenging. I found this when I taught philosophy of mathematics – a field where mainstream resources focus on white European (and, indeed, perhaps predominantly Christian) male thinkers, and it’s not clear how to locate missing voices.
A previous Christian Foundation Strategy document at my university said that “critical thinkers are what keeps a society free and… a university’s primary purpose is to nurture such thinkers” [2]. The goal of nurturing open-minded critics fits with this claim. The societal context of a university is paramount, after all, and needs emphasising when we state its purpose. In this regard, I’m inspired by a recent call for critical thinking to be approached pedagogically in ways that are more human, imaginative and constructive [3]. But we must also, as Christians, be ready to challenge assumptions that religious framings of knowledge are more restrictive than secular ones. There is no view from nowhere: criticality itself is nothing without a place to stand, and a cultural context.
[1] Quine, W.V.O (1951) Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60: 20-43.
[2] Stuart, E. (2019) “Christian Foundation Strategy”. University of Winchester [accessed 30/6/2021]. p. 4.
[3] Standish, P.S. & Thoilliez, B. (2018) ‘Critical Thinking in Crisis: A Pedagogical Reconsideration in Three Movements’. Teoria de la Educación, 30: 7–22.
[Views expressed here are his own.]
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