Listening: an antidote to the modern University’s incoherence
By Dominic Burbridge, The Public Discourse.
Our universities are struggling under competing epistemological trends. Teaching students to master these requires developing their power to listen.
In his recent book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre writes that “so many of us lead potentially incoherent lives, lives that remain as coherent as they are only because and so long as certain questions go unasked, certain issues ignored or avoided or suppressed.” The modern university is one institution in which this unasking is especially entrenched. To understand this pervasive neglect of questions, we must appreciate that the modern university is in fact comprised of three distinct “universities,” each vying for the loyalty of students and insisting on a questionable epistemology. Call these the University of Rationalism, the University of Revolution, and the University of Subjectivism. In response, we must develop—or rather recover—a fourth university, the University of Listening.
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