There is enormous pressure today for traditional conservatives (or anyone critical of progressivism) to write their names in the black book of the New Right and acquiesce to a politics of populist rage and federal overreach. Elizabeth Corey explains to James Patterson why she will instead engage in the quieter, more respectable task of cultural transmission and tending to her little platoon.

Related Links

“A Quiet Refusal to Compromise,” by Elizabeth Corey, Law & Liberty
“Beautiful Losers,” by Elizabeth Corey, Public Discourse
“Interpreting the New Right,” by John Grove, Law & Liberty

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring series commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. Today, my guest is Elizabeth Corey. She is a professor of political science at Baylor University, where she’s also the director of their honors program. Her area of specialization is conservative political philosophy, especially the work of Michael Oakeshott. She has published widely, and today we will be talking about two of her more recent essays. The first is “A Quiet Refusal to Compromise,” for us here at Law & Liberty that she published this past February, and more recently a piece named “Beautiful Losers” for Public Discourse.

(01:18):

Dr. Corey, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Elizabeth Corey (01:21):

Thank you, James. It’s great to be here.

James Patterson (01:23):

So let’s start with the slightly older essay, “A Quiet Refusal to Compromise.” You describe in its opening paragraph a sense of amazement and dismay when beholding the changes of American conservatism this past decade. And you also describe how you had a particular point of view or a privileged vantage point. So tell me about this experience and why amazement and dismay.

Elizabeth Corey (01:50):

Well, I think let me start with the other part of your question, which is the privileged vantage point, which is that I’ve been around this world for a really long time, more and less engaged. My dad has been involved in intellectual conservatism since the 1950s. And so it’s been in the water really for me for these last 50 years. And so I would go to Philadelphia Society meetings and work at Heritage. And so I’ve had a lot of experience in these institutions and understood them to be more or less a kind of unified front. And what I’ve seen in the last 10 years or so is a real change there from a kind of intellectually focused conservatism toward a much more activist conservatism, which as an Oakeshottian, as I proudly claim to be, is not at all what I understand conservatism as consisting in.

(02:44):

So there was this turn, obviously in the Trump years, you will know this very well. And the first Trump term and then the rise of these new institutions. And I just thought this is a very different vision of conservatism than the one I’ve grown up with. And it is, in a way, I think a certain kind of betrayal of the essence of what conservatism was prior to say about 2015.

James Patterson (03:07):

You mentioned at the beginning of the essay, a book I don’t think we’ve talked about on the podcast, but we reviewed, John Grove wrote the review of Furious Minds by Laura Field. I wrote a review for Civitas. I think I was more favorably inclined. What is it that you noted about what Field described? What is it that she observed? And maybe what were your disagreements or agreements with her?

Elizabeth Corey (03:31):

Field’s book is interesting. I actually didn’t read it. I listened to her read it on an Audible.

James Patterson (03:36):

Wow. She did the audio?

Elizabeth Corey (03:38):

She did do the audio.

James Patterson (03:39):

Oh, that’s a lot of work.

Elizabeth Corey (03:40):

It’s a lot of work. But it was interesting to me because what was conveyed in the Audible book was a lot of tone that didn’t maybe necessarily come through in the book itself. I mean, it was very clear to me that she was disdainful toward the people she was talking about. She had a lot of sort of political differences with them from the very beginning. She’s quite progressive. She thought the conservatives … She was interested in the conservative world. Obviously, she went to UT Austin and was around the Straussian conservative world. So she had a privileged place to look at that world, but nevertheless, it was clear to me that she was critical from the outset. So I was interested in that, and I noticed the tone, but it didn’t make me think everything she was saying was wrong. So took it with a grain of salt.

(04:31):

I mean, a lot of the things she described were things that did happen over the past 10 years. And so it was a kind of report with an agenda. And John Grove did a great job of laying that out in a much more careful way than I can here. But it was a way of bringing to the fore, okay, here’s what’s happened over these past 10 years. And that’s what got me thinking, okay, well, most of what she reported did happen. And it’s why I and many other traditional conservatives feel ourselves a bit alienated from the contemporary conservative movement.

James Patterson (05:07):

Yeah. I suppose I appreciated it just for the creation of a sense of network and bringing together different groups that people maybe didn’t understand to be so affiliated, but it definitely has a point of view. That is definitely true. There’s a passage in the essay that I was not prepared for. And it is a passage you quote from William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating.” So you already know from that it’s going to be good. And this is the passage: “There is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind,” he writes. “Which takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief since it is a never failing source of satisfaction. Life would turn to a stagnant pool where it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men, the white streak and our own fortunes is brightened or just rendered visible by making all around it as dark as possible.” How do you see this passage playing a role in understanding contemporary conservative changes?

Elizabeth Corey (06:16):

That passage spoke to me because it seems to me what I often read in contemporary conservatives now is a kind of anger, a kind of willingness to call out enemies, really just an adversarial posture that Hazlitt names. And let’s be clear, there’s something absolutely right about what he says. It’s wonderful to be on the right side of something with a tribe who agrees with you. And so to have somebody or to have a set of institutions that you can say, “Well, these are worthy of hate or worthy of disdain,” is a kind of bonding in a strange way for the people who are on the right side. So when I especially read things written by a lot of people from Claremont, I just think there is such a vitriol there. And that was what got me thinking about the Hazlitt essay, that there’s a kind of energy that this vitriol gives, this being on the right side of the culture wars.

(07:18):

And I think that does explain some of the energy on the right, that it’s not so much about this constructive vision of conservatism, which I would like to put forward, but it’s hating the right people in the right way. And I get that. I mean, I understand there are things that we ought to oppose and to resist for sure, but I don’t think that is the essence or the core of a conservative disposition. Or if it is, that’s not a conservatism that I want to be part of.

James Patterson (07:45):

A friend of mine who is admittedly on the left summed it up as “To own the libs shall be the whole of the law.”

Elizabeth Corey (07:52):

Exactly.

James Patterson (07:53):

Yeah. So what is this participating in the permanent and stable, intrinsic goods you described? This is the conservatism you believe in. So what does that look like?

Elizabeth Corey (08:02):

Well, for me as a university professor, it’s pretty clear. It is a kind of cultural transmission of all that’s good to the young. I mean, in a way, I know that sounds a little bit idealistic, but there’s a wonderful book I’ve recently read by Roger Scruton. It’s called Culture Counts. And he’s essentially making an argument that our job as conservatives is to preserve and to share a cultural tradition that consists in things like literature, art, poetry, philosophy, music. I mean, all of these things which are in danger of being overlooked by contemporary culture. And that to me is the essence of this conservative disposition. I mean, I could say more about that with respect to Oakeshott, who’s also very good on these things, but this kind of Scruton-Oakeshott vision of culture is at the center of conservatism is really a vision I think needs to be expressed and also put into practice.

James Patterson (09:02):

You actually make reference also to the great Josef Pieper on the idea of leisure. So actually, please do go into detail about what you think this looks like. What is it that’s outside of the world of friends and enemies that we can engage in a form of a leisurely development of traditions or even of the perfection of the human intellect?

Elizabeth Corey (09:26):

Yeah. I mean, it’s absolutely outside the world of friends and enemies, but it’s also outside the world of work and practical achievement. I mean, this is perhaps the Oakeshottian in me, but there’s this notion, especially with people like Oakeshott and Scruton, that there’s a realm of experience that doesn’t fall into the friends and enemies dichotomy, that it is somehow outside of all the practical things we ordinarily do. I mean, Oakeshott’s great on this in particular in so far as he has this idea that experience takes place in certain modes. So most of the time we’re involved in the practical mode of getting things done, doing things that need to be taken care of, doing politics—politics falls into practice. But I think Pieper, Oakeshott, and Scruton would all say, well, there’s this other realm of, as Pieper would call it, leisure, which is where culture takes place, which is where reading and philosophy and thinking and conversation and friendship and all these intrinsically good activities take place.

(10:27):

And that is not the world of friends and enemies, and that’s also not the world of total work. So these men are sort of charting out an area of life that escapes the practical and the political. And that’s actually, I think, the job of the university to preserve, although even the universities are dragged into this in all kinds of ways that we’ve seen over the past 20 years.

James Patterson (10:50):

Yeah. The conservatism that was regnant before this kind of fighting, bristling, frothing kind of conservatism was the conservatism of Mitt Romney firing people, everyone an entrepreneur, and a lot of green eyeshade talk. And that was as much of a problem as the kind that we’re dealing with now because leisure looks like a waste, no?

Elizabeth Corey (11:18):

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, there are lots of ways I think conservatism can go wrong. I mean, one is focusing solely on economics, although we can never ignore economics, but the other is focusing solely on war and friends and enemies and culture war. Part of this, James, comes from my own family experience of realizing that if I am to go forward in life as a happy person, I’m going to have to deal with people who are very different from me and have very different visions of a flourishing life. And as conservative as I may be, I’ve got to be frankly pluralist in understanding that not everyone is like me. And that’s where I think a lot of contemporary conservatism goes wrong, that you need to be like me and know if you’re not, I will also force you to be. So that’s where, I mean, Laura Field takes that to an extreme vision, but I think she’s not wrong in saying there’s a lack of understanding of what pluralism means in this new conservatism.

James Patterson (12:21):

Yeah. In fact, your account of amazement and dismay has been pretty much my own. That’s actually how I opened my review of her book was that what made me so sympathetic to the voice in which she gave the book was my own feeling over the last 10 years of what is going on. I can’t believe this is happening. But for me, and this is an interview of Elizabeth Corey, not of me, so I will not carry on about post-liberalism too much. But for me, that strikes me as not even really conservativism anymore. It’s a kind of like right-wing social engineering to quote … What was that? Who said that in the presidential nomination? Was that a …

Elizabeth Corey (13:02):

I can’t remember, but …

James Patterson (13:03):

It was Newt Gingrich.

Elizabeth Corey (13:04):

Yeah.

James Patterson (13:05):

And so can we even call some of this conservatism anymore?

Elizabeth Corey (13:10):

Well, it seems to me to be something more like … I mean, it has new names now. I mean, it is post-liberalism. It is national conservatism. And I’ll be completely straight with you, James. I don’t follow the details and the intricacies of all those movements. I do to some extent, but I couldn’t have an interview with you about them. I assure you know them much better than I do, but I do know …

James Patterson (13:34):

It’s good for your mental health that you preoccupy yourself with the better things in life.

Elizabeth Corey (13:39):

Well, I mean, I think again, that the essence of … And then this is where the piece ends up in the “Quiet Refusal to Compromise” peace ends up, which is to say that the truly important things in life are these kind of conservative activities of love and friendship and family and civic institutions. And that’s something I think that’s being overlooked in the contemporary talk about conservatives. Everything is national. Everything is about President Trump and do we like what he’s doing or do we not like what he’s doing? But I mean, I would turn our eyes back to the local and to say, look, there’s a ton of stuff to be done here in our own little platoon, I mean, to use a familiar phrase. I mean, there are church vestries and civic institutions and school boards, all this sort of thing that if we get caught up in the national vision of politics as the most important, then we’re not going to be thinking about those things and those things need attending to.

James Patterson (14:34):

A big part of, I think what contributes to the demand for the national is to direct attention constantly to the content that these people are generating. So it’s like and subscribe, hit the bell icon, here’s a link to my Patreon, please purchase my Patriot merch. It’s elements to all of this that I think a lot of people overlook that there’s a certain degree of mercenary quality to this where it’s a business too.

Elizabeth Corey (15:04):

Absolutely. It’s interesting to me because that has infiltrated not only the political realm, but also the academic realm. There’s this sense, and I’ve talked about this a little bit before, that what our job is now as university professors is to make a name for ourselves and to put ourselves out there and to brand ourselves in a certain way, which to me is really repellent. I mean, not that you don’t want to be out saying things and doing things and writing things, but this notion that you yourself are the focus is a kind of weird perversion of the academic life. It’s like if you imagine a priest doing that, you would think that’s not the nature of the priesthood to do this kind of self-promotion and this branding. But increasingly, it does look to me like that’s what we’re supposed to be doing or that somehow the social media ecosystem pushes us toward that.

James Patterson (15:56):

I’ve actually not thought of that, but it is true, right? The development of a personal brand in academia and it really runs crosswise with the calling to form students and civic virtue and intellectual virtue. What has it done to education that we have to live that way?

Elizabeth Corey (16:16):

Well, I think it’s a terrible tragedy in a certain way. I mean, in so far as university incentives now are to, as I’ve just been saying, to brand yourself, make a name for yourself, put yourself out there when actually, what are we supposed to be doing? We’re supposed to be teaching students. I mean, yes, we are supposed to be publishing and doing our own writing, but really the enterprise is about the care and nurture and development of these young people. And increasingly, it seems like that is almost a side activity of a lot of universities. I mean, when you hear about professors coming in and saying, “Well, I want to teach one-one,” or, “I don’t want to have a teaching load. I just want to do my research.” And I just think that’s, “why did you get into this?”

James Patterson (17:00):

It’s a shame. And one of the funny developments that I’ve seen, especially people who do more quantitative work, is that the potential for artificial intelligence to do that work much more effectively might mean that their research value goes down because the rate of research goes up. And so now they’re going to be stuck with all these students to teach, and that’s not why they got into this business.

Elizabeth Corey (17:24):

I know. I mean, I’ve actually heard people say all this AI stuff could be really, really good for the humanities, because that’s the one thing that AI can’t do, which is to read, to think, and to speak in a seminar. You can write a paper with AI for sure in the humanities, but if I’m sitting around with a classroom of young people and we’re talking about a text, it’s very clear to me whether they’ve read and whether they have anything to say, and AI can’t help them there.

James Patterson (17:53):

Yeah. And even when it comes to research, AI can’t go into the archives, right?

Elizabeth Corey (17:59):

Yeah, absolutely not.

James Patterson (18:01):

We need to upload it to one of those scary robots, but even then, I’m not sure if they know what to look for.

Elizabeth Corey (18:05):

Yes.

James Patterson (18:07):

Let’s turn to your piece in Public Discourse, which very provocatively titled “Beautiful Losers.” So this raises the first question, which is what makes a beautiful loser beautiful and what makes them a loser?

Elizabeth Corey (18:20):

Yeah. Well, you can thank RJ Snell for pointing me to this because I actually didn’t know, as I say in the first line, I didn’t know what that meant. And he said, “Well, I was accused the other day, RJ said, of being a beautiful loser.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know what that means.” And he explained it to me. And of course, what is meant by it is somebody who is not interested in fighting the culture wars and nevertheless has a kind of beautiful vision of what human life can be. You can imagine the philosopher who is interested in just in pure philosophy or the literature scholar who’s interested in expounding Shakespeare. Those people are not necessarily engaged in political battles and hopefully they’re not actually. And so from the perspective of the culture warrior, they’re losing or they’re not even engaging. And there’s something from the … I use this other ideal type, the scrappy warrior perspective that says, “Well, you’re not doing what is responsible and necessary in our age.”

(19:18):

You’re just opting out and you’re teaching your philosophy or your literature or whatever it is you’re doing that’s not political. And it’s seen as a kind of abdication of responsibility. And I want to say no, actually those people I think are doing what is most necessary, which is to rejuvenate and preserve culture and to share it with students. And now for me, I always talk about students because I’m in a university, but there are other ways of doing it. I think a lot of the priesthood could be a kind of beautiful losing. I think parents who are taking care of children in a sense would be seen as this simply because they’re not engaged in battle. And that to me is better placed to be than the warriors. Not to say that there aren’t fights to be fought, but I think we overestimate the times in which we need to be engaged in battle.

James Patterson (20:07):

Yeah. You say warrior, the term that you use for the critics of beautiful losers such as, I suppose us, is the scrappy warrior. There’s just a kind of respect in the word scrappy, and you say that his or almost always his vision is so dark. So why is it so dark and why is it so often his and very rarely a her?

Elizabeth Corey (20:34):

Well, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for the question of sex. I mean, why is it more male to be this way? Except that in my experience of men and women, that men are often more spirited. They want to get out there and do something, especially young men. It’s interesting. I have some young men students who say they’re involved in a world of sort of political activism that just valorizes a kind of doing things and doing things and even fighting. And so women aren’t inclined to fight usually, or if we do, it’s not the kind of fighting men do. It’s much more insidious. I feel like there is a gender difference here, and I’m not sure quite what it is. I mean, there are a few women I can think of who like to be out there battling. Helen Andrews is one.

(21:24):

She doesn’t pull her punches. Maybe somebody like a Candace Owens is willing to do this, but most women are involved in other things and not the kind of scrappy warriors that say Christopher Rufo is.

James Patterson (21:38):

So despite the emphasis on action or fighting, I guess I said action, I thought of the distinction that Hannah Arendt makes between the active life and the contemplative life and the human condition. I mean, it’s not her originating it, but I think her discussion here is really useful, but we can leave that to the side. This isn’t an Arendt question. There is something very weak about the scrappy warrior. They’re very regularly victims and they’re always being wronged by others and events. So does that not make them beautiful losers?

Elizabeth Corey (22:13):

Well, maybe, except that I think they think they’re in a righteous crusade. I mean, certainly the Chris Rufo stuff with DEI, I mean, I have to admit that there are aspects of that, of his anti-DEI crusade that I’m grateful he succeeded in. I mean, these last few years in a university have been utterly different in terms of DEI than they were say in the late teens. I mean, even at a place that is as conservative as Baylor, we were regularly given trainings and told about diversity and this sort of thing. That stuff is gone. That is absolutely gone. So was it necessary for him to stamp it out in this kind of activist really loud way? I’m not sure. I mean, to be fair to him, it may be that that was the only way forward, which was to try to ruin it. I mean, what I guess I would say is on the DEI stuff, I mean, there was a middle position.

(23:13):

I mean, that’s one nobody really, really takes up. I mean, it’s either you’re pro-diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you’re against it. And I actually want to say there’s some good in that movement, and that’s what the warriors don’t seem to understand, that there was a reason that that movement became so prominent and that it was so much supported by so many people. Did it go too far? A hundred percent it did. But now in saying we can’t even really use the word diversity in a university, that seems to me to be too far in the other direction. So there’s this tendency, I think, to kind of ricochet from one extreme to the other. It’s either you’re a leftist activist or you’re a new right activist. And as a professor, and you are one too, you cannot be in that position. You have to be in some kind of position where you’re taking the full measure of possible opinions into account.

James Patterson (24:04):

And that’s perhaps what makes a sort of non-political conservatism so hard for someone on the new right to comprehend where occasionally you need to hang up the arms and think about why you’re doing what you’re doing and maybe consider how best to talk to the people across from you about that subject matter. And what’s so important about the teaching element is that it breaks down these assumptions people have about each other, especially I’m sort of known as a conservative being at the University of Tennessee, but I make it a point not to fight the students in the classroom. I mean, the last thing that I think would be useful for bringing these students the education they deserve.

Elizabeth Corey (25:00):

I quite agree. And it’s not just students. It’s also, I think what offends me about the strident tone of somebody like Rufo is that I guess I wonder, have you ever known people who are not like you that you must work with anyway? If you’re in a university, it’s very likely as a conservative that you’re in the minority. And so you have to learn to get along with people who have very different political views from yours. I was talking a little bit earlier about this notion of pluralism. The world is not like you. And if you’re going to be at an institution that is not strictly speaking conservative, then you’ve got to be able to understand these other perspectives. And I think that’s where a lot of the new right tends to go wrong. They are surrounded by people who think the way they do, certainly in a think tank, that’s easy to have happen, but they never need to encounter the very different visions of the world that other people hold.

(25:52):

And I can’t afford to do that because my colleagues are not all conservative. In fact, a lot of them are not at all. So I think it’s a sort of, how to put it, constrained, constricted view of what the world really is.

James Patterson (26:07):

It’s partly a technological story too, right? Where it’s become easier for people to close off from their immediate physical community and concentrate on developing a kind of ideological community that then engages in endless forms of purification. And just recently, there’s been a dust up among what we would consider Christian nationalists. Stephen Wolfe, of all people, is now considered insufficiently Christian nationalist because of a rejection of Hitler, which is an odd, not exactly the best proponent of any version of Christianity, Hitler. And so that’s one thing to watch, but then there’s an entire other world on Blue Sky where the distinctions that people on the left are making boggle the mind of most like Bernie Sanders voters. So is this perhaps that people are dedicating too much time to a way of life that drives them crazy?

Elizabeth Corey (27:12):

Yeah. It’s funny that you bring up this problem because I’m teaching a small Witherspoon class through the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton of high school students. And the topic of our conversation is what does it mean to be part of a community? How does community and civil society contribute to a kind of authentic conservatism? And we’re reading Robert Nisbet who wrote The Quest for Community in 1953, as you will know, and he lamented the loss of community back then. And I asked my students, I said, “Well, why do you think it is that it is so hard to find community now?” And they said, “Well, it’s because we look for community on the Internet and we look for people who have views that are like ours.” But what our conversation went on to reveal was that when you find community of that sort, you’re only finding a tiny little slice of the person.

(28:04):

I mean, you’re showing your face on a screen and then you’re sharing certain views that have to do with things that other people are interested in that forum, but it has nothing to do with you as a whole person. And that’s a real contraction of human life to imagine that our so-called friends who ideologically agree with us on the Internet are real community. That’s just the barest sort of most scanty vision of what community can be.

James Patterson (28:33):

You said prior to us recording that one thing that’s contributed to you sort of disengaging from the minutia of these online fights, which are now half my research area now, is that you were writing a book. So this is the first I’ve heard of a new Elizabeth Corey book. So why don’t you tell the listeners what it is that you’ve been up to?

Elizabeth Corey (28:57):

Well, I, in a way, retreated from the world for a little while to write a book. It was nice. About 12 years ago, I wrote something for First Things and it was a little essay called “Learning in Love,” which was more or less my explanation of how I got into academia and what it was to learn that the intellectual life wasn’t simply this kind of thing you did and took tests and were graded on, but it was actually this kind of intense conversation with mentors and peers. And I said that had been absolutely formative for me in terms of why I’m in a university now. And I wrote that 12 years ago and I just kind of thought about it ever since. And I decided that I wanted to write a book about the sort of effective aspect of education by which I mean affections and care and love and friendship.

(29:52):

And so I wrote a book about what it was to pursue an intellectual life with other people and the importance of that. I mean, I think there are a lot of ways you could criticize contemporary academia, but one thing that hasn’t been said is that what students are looking for, I think, is a kind of knowing each other and being known in classes where you talk about serious and important things together, and it’s almost a kind of intellectual friendship. So the book is about that. It’s also about a lot more than that. It’s about the educational philosophy of Oakeshott. I used Gabriel Marcel and some other sort of interesting philosophers to talk about my vision of education, but basically it’s about why do we do this and why do we do it not alone?

James Patterson (30:40):

Yeah. And so I guess some of the targets here would be the things that we mentioned a little earlier, like the over-professionalization of curriculum, but also these sort of ideological tests to ensure that curriculum or faculty match a kind of vision of the administration and diversity, equity, and inclusion. So does this mean no more 500-person gen ed courses?

Elizabeth Corey (31:10):

Well, ideally it would. I mean, I’ve been fortunate to teach for the last 20 years in an honors college, which I’d explain it to parents as a small liberal arts college within a big university, which is essentially what it is. We’re about 1,400- and a 20,000-person university. And so what that allows us to do is to have small classes, small seminars where we know those students and they know us and they know each other and we get to know them as people. And we have intense conversations about not just the texts we’re reading, but about their lives. And that to me is a very small, it’s almost a boutique understanding of education, but it is the best model for liberal education that I know of. And there’s really no other. I mean, and especially with respect to teaching students how to write, how can you teach them in large classes?

(32:03):

You have to read their work and talk through it with them and talk to them about their ideas. I mean, it is a deeply personal endeavor which can’t be accomplished on the Internet or in a 500-person class. So yes, is it my ideal? Is it always possible? No, but it is what I think we ought to try to aim for.

James Patterson (32:25):

Well, the trouble with teaching students like this is of course that sometimes the students don’t know how to learn. They’ve been sort of squeezed through a lot of institutional testing or they’ve had stressed to them a sense of “if you don’t take a certain curricular path, then you’re going to end up poor.” And I always tell the students that if you want to get a job after college, show up sober and on time.

Elizabeth Corey (32:59):

That’s very good.

James Patterson (33:02):

So one thing that I think really helps the students is to learn what it is to even be at leisure. They’ve never been allowed to experience it.

Elizabeth Corey (33:11):

They haven’t. And there’s so much that’s corrupting, such that by the time they arrive in college, it’s almost as if you have to rescue them from the habits they’ve acquired. And so much of it has to do with this compulsive focus on achievement. I mean, I can’t tell you how many—in the book, I talk about this—how many students said that “I used to love reading. I would read for pleasure. I would read multiple novels. Nobody had to ask me to read. And around middle school, it became something that I just didn’t enjoy anymore because I was always asked to regurgitate on a worksheet what I had just read.” I mean, it took all the joy out of reading. My own 11-year-old is in a class where she’s reading a novel, but she said, “I love the novel, but the problem is the worksheet is asking me for all these stupid little niggly details and I can’t even enjoy the reading of it anymore because I have to report some answer to a question on a worksheet.” And I don’t know how to get around that.

(34:13):

I mean, it’s sort of like you have to have quizzes, you have to have objective tests of are the students doing the work, but there’s something about that that also squeezes the enjoyment out of the reading and the thinking and the talking. And then students just sort of are doing it to please the teachers and to do well and get into the next phase of life, whether that’s college or graduate school or the internship or the job.

James Patterson (34:38):

Another problem with the way that we want to do this, and because I very much sign on to the way that you’re describing this kind of education, is that whereas the worksheet has what you might consider an ROI, like a return on investment. The student has produced evidence of learning. And so you can put that as a metric for assessment on the accreditation file. And if you don’t know what we’re talking about listening to this, believe me, you don’t want to know. It’s the behind the scenes work that so many faculty have to do. But what is actually the thing that you’re shooting for teaching this way is that in 10 years, that student will also still be reading and you will never see that and that will never be on the accreditation file.

Elizabeth Corey (35:29):

That’s right. No, I mean, the kinds of things that I think a real liberal education aims at are not quantifiable. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in rooms where people say, “Well, we’ve got to get our learning objectives set out here.” And I just think I don’t even know what you mean there. I mean, I do, of course, know what they mean, but to engage a class so that you can get them to this place where the proper learning objectives have been achieved is to me to really reduce the experience. I mean, we have no idea what the learning objectives are for reading Dante or for Plato. We hope that we’re giving them … I mean, now here I’ll sound like Scruton, we’re passing on this culture to them such that it becomes theirs and they can enjoy it. It’s a kind of practice in feeling and thinking.

(36:16):

And I’m sad if university education overlooks that or often overlooks that. And I know it does because there’s the enormous pressure of getting students through and out and then into well-paying jobs.

James Patterson (36:30):

And it’s a criteria that you don’t see the humanities criteria exported from economics and to economics and sciences where it’s like, did you transcend subjectivity in your chemistry labs?

Elizabeth Corey (36:47):

I know. I know.

James Patterson (36:49):

Well, this has been a delight and I cannot wait to have you on again, but unfortunately we need to end here. The guest is Dr. Elizabeth Corey. The essays are “Beautiful Losers” at Public Discourse and “A Quiet Refusal to Compromise” at Law & Liberty. Dr. Corey, thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Elizabeth Corey (37:12):

Thanks, James. I really enjoyed it.

James Patterson (37:14):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.