Friday January 28, 2022
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings from the dead of winter. There may not be enough cold for the good of the planet, but it’s pretty obvious that those of us in Cleveland are not going to be sunbathing anytime soon. Which means doing Zoom meetings because of a virus is also sort of cozy, still.
We continue with the “Friday Lunch,” a CWRU tradition since 1989. I would like to think we’ll be able to have some in-person meetings sometime during the term, but it doesn’t look like a discussion with people eating lunch in relatively close quarters is a good idea yet. For now, we’ll continue presenting experts from campus and sometimes beyond to discuss important issues for the university, local community, nation or the international stage. Friday’s discussion is about the university itself: one of the core issues about liberal arts education.
This Week’s Program
Michael Clune begins his new book, A Defense of Judgment, by phrasing the question in terms of teaching literature – but it applies to education in the humanities in general. In his words:
“Professors of literature make judgments about value. Literary scholars – like art historians, musicologists, and classicists – say to our students: These works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, insightful. They are more worth your time and attention than others. Such claims are implicit in choosing what to include on a syllabus. And yet for several decades now, professors have felt unable to defend those claims. So we pretend we’re not making them. We bend over backward to disguise our syllabi, articles and books as value neutral, as simply means for our students to gain cultural or political or historical knowledge.
“But this stance is incoherent. It’s impossible to cordon off judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise.” Nevertheless, “powerful barriers to acknowledging the central role of judgment in our professional practice have arisen over the past half century.”
Professor Clune considers a series of standard objections to “experts” making judgments. Many of the objections to judgment are grounded in ideas about equality and of academic and other critical analysis as being “elitist” or biased in a range of ways. Yet, he argues, the cost of rejecting all such judgment is to leave judgment in practice to consumer preferences in the market. His enterprise of rescuing judgment faces many pitfalls, on the right and left-hand sides of his path. Yet, as he argues, it’s hard to see a path for the study of humanities that does not involve judgment. What are aesthetics without judgment? What can one learn from studying literature, and why would you want to?
In his book Michael develops some answers that we might find useful for thinking both about liberal education and about how we personally engage with the liberal arts. Join us as he shares his thoughts.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcsf-mqrjwjHtYw6GIfcoouMVhnv-NhWHXR
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Michael W. Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include Writing Against Time and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s, Salon, and Granta, to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is currently Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University, and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
February 4: Cognitive Decline and the Workplace. With Sharona Hoffman, J.D., Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Law.
February 11: What, if Anything, Have We Learned From Cybersecurity Regulation So Far? Wtih Tom Alrich, consultant on cybersecurity regulation especially for the electric power industry.
February 18: TBA
February 25: TBA
March 4: The Present and Future of Cryptocurrency. With Peter Zimmerman, Ph.D., Research Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
March 11: Spring Break
March 18: Inflation. With Mark Sniderman, Ph.D., Executive in Residence and Adjunct Professor of Economics, Weatherhead School of Management; former Executive Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
March 25: Covid-19 Through Covid-22: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same? Wtih Mark Cameron, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.
April 1: The French Presidential Election. Wtih Patrick Chamorel, Ph.D., Senior Resident Scholar and Lecturer, Stanford in Washington, Stanford University.
April 8: TBA
April 15: TBA
April 22: TBA |
