Experts are Not Enough: Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University College Movement, and the Corona Crisis
There is an old story originating on the Indian subcontinent usually referred to as the Blind Men and the Elephant. My Dean likes to refer to it in her talks about our unit of Leiden University — The Leiden University College. She uses it to explain our Liberal Arts and Science Programme thematically focused on Global Challenges to parents, visitors, and — yes — to our colleagues in more traditional institutes during her tours of the Leiden University, all of whom are often more familiar with traditional ‘mono-disciplinary’ programmes of study. Particularly, this analogy shows why complex global challenges require interdisciplinary approaches and open critical discussion between people of different expertise and experiences in life.
Sadly, when a global challenge comes stampeding into our lives, it seems that the response is often to close up, centralize, and ‘trust the authorities and experts’. We cannot possibly trust the peasants and the dilettantes with something as complex as exponential growth charts and data (skills that every undergrad at our college usually possesses after their first year). I mean, do you even have a publication in an internationally peer reviewed publication on public health approaches to pandemics? If not, why are you even talking?
This is a terrible impulse, and we should resist the urge to entertain it. University Colleges train us to do so, and how to have constructive synthetic conversations across domains.
The Blind and the Corona Virus
In the story a number of blind men approach an Elephant for the first time, and each approach it differently. Some approach what we would know to be the Elephant’s knee, ear, trunk, tail, or tusk and exclaim with great confidence that which they have discovered about the large complex creature. Some believe it to be a snake, or a tree, or a rug, or a rock. It varies by version of this story. But only through some form of synthesis could each of them come close to what, we, the outside viewer know to be the truth.
The Corona virus is our elephant, and only an omniscient being would know its nature and measure. Our epidemiologists, economists, medical researchers, public health specialists, microbiologists, public administration scholars, political scientists, and sociologists… etc are our blind (wo)men approaching a complex global problem from their own place vis-a-vis the elephant. As a consequence, they keep missing out on key details. The job of governors (be they ourselves, in charge of our own lives, or those actually running our governments) is to make decisions in the face of these complex problems. We need to know about the sociology, character, values, and culture of the people around us or that we govern and take that into account in light of expertise from specialists looking at various pieces of any particular elephant.
Epidemiologists know quite a bit about how diseases spread, but they know very little about the tendencies, character, culture, economies, and politics of societies that they study — nor the feedback systems among them when hit by a epidemiological shock (like Corona). When systems interact, things get complicated.
For instance, this problem is why macroeconomics is such a troubled area of study. The macroeconomy is connected intimately to everything else in a complex system. It resists reduction to simple mechanisms. The marcoeconomy is an elephant. And that elephant is one major part of a much larger elephant that is this crisis. The Corona crisis is a supraeconomic species-level global challenge.
And, at the very least, it’s probably worth taking the time to reflect that it was the experts and the authorities that knew about this crisis and our lack of preparedness for years, and who, indeed were perfectly content to let us sleepwalk into the potential end of our way of life with half-truths and ill prepared systems. Many of us left a class, a dinner date, a meeting with colleagues completely unaware that we might never see a classroom, go out to dinner, or meet with colleagues in close proximity for potentially more than a year. Our experts nestled in expert-led policy making bureaucracies with publications on managing global health pandemics did not see a reason to warn us.
I think we have good reason to believe that our authorities need more active and robust attention, and maybe even help from the rest of us in figuring out this problem. And, when we think of the interdisciplinary approach aimed at creating unity from a diversity of perspectives that is the core of the University College curriculum — with it’s broad non-specialized programme of study — we find a culture uniquely geared towards addressing this challenge and those like it.
Interdisciplinarity and Diversity
So, what the parable, a good deal of research, and university initiatives argue is needed is interdisciplinary cooperation across disciplines, subfields, and perspectives on the common ground of good sense, rather than disciplinary specific standards. That requires openness and participation. It requires all the skills of discussion, argument, critical thinking, mathematical literacy, and character that we like to believe that our institutions of education foster when producing citizens.
The University Colleges are Liberal Arts and Science institutions that focus on inter and multidisciplinary curricula unified by an ethos of synthesizing and internalizing the knowledge of that study. These colleges are founded on taking the idea that different approaches are key to understanding any problem seriously. They recommit to the list of attributes that we often say that we wish higher education to foster: Things like Intelligence, wisdom, communication skills, critical thinking, and citizenship.
My own college, the Leiden University College, is primarily oriented towards interdisciplinary approaches to global challenges — including global public health threats. This probably has something to do with why this project exists. But it also puts me in a position to note how incompatible much of the discussion has been (even sometimes even inside my own institute) with this ethos.
People who truly believe that global challenges require engagement from multiple perspectives cannot then sit back and say we need to leave this civilizational challenge to epidemiologists and public health experts. This is not because there is anything wrong with public health experts. Some of my favorite colleagues are public health experts.
The problem with public health experts in a complex global crisis is that the issues go beyond the purview of expertise and intellectual biases of those experts and their discipline. This is not unique to them. This is a problem with disciplinarity generally in the face of complex issues, and the worrying ossification and reification of disciplinary custom that can become blinders to basic critical thinking. Too often, within disciplinary silos, basic assumptions go unchallenged.
This can be particularly bad within organizations where career incentives, hierarchical organizations of authority and communication, and a variety of other organizational problems can render a collective of the greatest minds, woefully inadequate to the task. Our national health service is not incompentant in the Netherlands. Indeed, it is a world class organization with world class experts. But then again, this is also a statement that is true of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Adminstration (NASA) and they killed two shuttle crews and lost their shuttle programme because the greatest experts on earth couldn’t work together to challenge assumptions and givens.
But, in the Corona crisis we are all the shuttle crew, and ultimately there is no branch of experts in existence capable of fully understanding and optimally engaging in data-driven policy effectively of a crisis of this magnitude themselves. They need help.
Good (Global) Citizenship
And help comes from an engaged citizenry. Particularly citizens with the ability to understand and participate in the discussions relevant to the crisis, understand arguments and assumptions, and know how to challenge and discuss them. There is no telling where the best insight will come from. Maybe someone reading this is destined to put together a couple pieces and reach some key insight that moves us forward in this crisis, or even saves lives — if only they would invest their attention on being that public citizen.
There is an extra duty in a crisis for those of us who have been educated on the public’s dime. It is unseemly to receive subsidized education (and even be deemed an ‘essential employee’) and then to just sit back during a crisis, hoarding you gifts, talents, and skills like so much toilet paper, or doing one’s best to ‘not let a crisis go to waste’ by padding one’s CV with long-run largely retrospective research projects. This is especially so as job security is often much higher for the higher educated than for others in society, even though the rest of society did pay the taxes that fund our public education system.
Crises are the moments that test just whether or not we live up to our self-image. Crises clarify and present challenges the response to which tell us who we really are, beyond the stories we tell ourselves. It remains to be seen if the University College Movement can bear fruit in this crisis, but I believe it has a unique potential to do so.
Corona Crisis & Democracy
Flowing from our discussion of citizenship during the Corona crisis, one cannot ignore the dangerous reversion to technocratic liberal calls to ‘trust the authorities’ and ‘listen to the experts’ in ‘data driven policy’ that seems to imply to the very aristocratic authoritarianism that enlightenment liberal democracy allegedly sought to overthrow during the so-called Age of Revolution.
To suggest that we should have policy driven by data we are not allowed to see (RIVM rejected my requests to even have the raw data used to develop the tables in their daily PDF briefing this week, much less the key population statistics they were putting into epidemiological models.), led by experts that only other people similarly trained are permitted to question, and where we are expected to just give our governors the benefit of the doubt that they have our best interests at heart is aristocracy if not hagiocracy. If this be the brave technocratic scientific future it sure looks much like the way things worked in the 16th century. It’s also a breeding ground for groupthink and insiderism that is corrosive regardless of the benevolence of intentions.
Perhaps I am naive, but my understanding of the strength of a free society composed of free individuals — for whom a liberal arts education is intended and which it empowers — was overthrowing rule by aristocrats and high priests of revealed truth. We democrats (small ‘d’) — I thought — believed not in rule by experts and technocracy but by the power of open discourse and examination by civil society. We do not keep people in the dark because the dumbest of us might have a bad idea, but we shine light because sometimes key insights come from the most unlikely places. Is not that how we claim to gain strength, wisdom, and superior problem-solving out of diversity? There is certainly plenty of science to back up that position, and plenty of examples of how it has worked. Anyone reading this on a tablet is benefited from such problem-solving creativity right now.
Academics, educated citizens, and entrepreneurs have been contributing to this crisis and have almost without fail been ahead of the experts and authorities on this crisis. I do not think that this is an accident. I think it is because the way I have been talking about the strengths of a free society, the way to address complex challenges, and even the arguments in favor of something as humble as liberal arts and science education embodied in the Dutch University College movements is correct, and our instincts too often during this crisis are wrong.
To stress, There is no reason to see malevolence in our authorities manner and actions. Governors and authorities are overwhelmed and suddenly, exactly when they need it most, understandably feel that free society, patient leadership, delegation, and the democratic spirit are indulgences that we can ill afford. They have so much to do, and so much they have to keep track of already. How can they possibly invest resources in managing the rest of us? This is an understandable human impulse. It is wrong, though. And up until a few days ago before everything changed, pretty much everyone I knew more or less recognized that it was.
We must do better
So, we in society and we in the University College movement can do better. Many of us have the time to do so as well. With the Corona-crisis upon us, and various types of lockdown the reality some of us have time to reflect on the things that really matter. Family, friends, life itself: Our obligations to each other. Many of us see the absurdity of our sacrifices for highly specific long term plans that can be turned upside down by a microbe.
It is worth reflecting that this crisis is in part upon us because we have been complacent, and have allowed our societies to become fragile, to push further and further into the wild places of our habitat to generate dangerous pathogens at an every increasing rate, and that as citizens of nations and the globe we have some role in that.
That’s the spirit and the ethos of liberal education, critical thinking, ethical and moral reasoning. And, if we use it in our communities we can push to understand and to help us find the best route through the acute global crisis we are facing.
We would do well to do more to engage the crisis in real time by writing parliamentarians, writing for newspapers, blogs, and social media about our insights. We would also do well to use this crisis to practice the approach to scholarship, the life of ideas, and engagement we so often preach.
It’s more than the right thing to do. It’s probably also the practical thing to do. Because following closely on the heals of the Corona-crisis is going to be a second economic crisis that currently looks likely to be worse than that experienced in living memory. Recent history suggests that liberal arts programmes, the humanities, and social sciences are incorrectly not deemed essential during economic down-turns. Indeed, even with modest austerity recent moves in higher education across the rich world has been targeting these programmes. Raising the profile of what we have to offer in this crisis by any means necessary is not only a public service, but a service to the liberal arts and sciences themselves in the Netherlands and beyond.
So, what are we going to do?
Please see the original version of this post and others at the The Corona Kremlinologists project webpage
