This is all to say: I’m doing fine. I’m young. And I’m blissfully unaware of any indicators that I’m transitioning into a life befitting of a middle-aged, conservative, Midwestern dad.

Now let’s talk about golf.

Golf is just like wearing socks and sandals, and you really shouldn’t knock it until you’ve tried it. It’s relaxing. It provides the perfect combination of excitement and challenge. And it makes you look athletic and daring and a little bit sexy. And golf is great, too!

Whenever I get out on the links (which, to be honest, has been just once this year), I’m hit with an entirely distinctive set of phenomenal experiences. The arrhythmic chop and clink of clubs making contact at the driving range. The sputter or electric whine of golf carts I won’t be riding. The earthy-sweet smell of what I assume to be grass, or aerated soil, or some lovely chemical product that keeps the fairways and greens absurdly green and lush. I’m also hit with a number of philosophical musings that I feel almost compelled to share with my polite scramble-mates, but that I’m mostly able to hold in — to myself — to reflect on quietly later as I chisel away at something large and wooden and utilitarian in the garage.

Unlike those fortunate golf partners, though, I consider this Substack to be a more or less captive audience. (I mean, you signed up to hear me wax philosophical.) So I’m going to finally sketch out several of these thoughts for your consideration now. Like the part of the course I’m usually playing from, they’re rough, sketchy, and I sometimes get lost in them. So instead of the philosophy of golf, or even a philosophy of golf, I’m just going to call these, collectively, some philosophy of golf.

Here we go.

The course as microcosm, a reflection of man’s alienation from, and at-home-ness in, nature.

Karl Marx (every golf-dad’s favorite philosopher-economist to love to hate) talks about the activity of building or making — of carving our world out of the natural world through the creation of a built-environment — as one of our human capacities with the most potential for both flourishing and alienation. If he’s a distraction, ignore Karl and just go with me on an imaginative description of the fine line a golf-course developer must do.

Like a pioneer, perhaps the closest human approximation of pre-industrial man in the modern world, the developer seeks to shape nature to his (and our collective) end. And he can do this using nature’s own forms, tools, and structures. Water, sand, grass, and soil form the material out of which a course is made, though in a form more intricately designed and manicured than virtually any other public space. As with other habitat(ion)s, this can be done more or less “naturally.” Man, part of nature, intentionally reshapes nature, and can do so in cooperation or in defiance with the natural world. He can do it in ways that are complementary and mutually beneficial, or aggressively, imposing — through chemistry and through earth-shaping implements — a design that’s utterly indifferent to the environment it’s meant to imitate.

Courses, then, though they all aim to simulate a (carefully crafted) natural setting can be expressions of natural beauty, imprinted with human design, or as alienating as a concrete parking structure, a deserted shopping center, or the type of soot-breathing institutionalized factories Charles Dickens and co. decried. Golfing the full eighteen can be an experience almost as rich and powerful as a meditation on a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem:

The “worldliness” of the fairway, it’s anthropological achievement as a human condition.

Continuing on this line of thought (profaning classic philosophical literature by means of analogy), the fairway of a golf course represents what Hannah Arendt calls the “human condition” of “worldliness.” Nature, in this context, is redefined in terms of — as an extension of — our human capacity to create (though perhaps not, as she thought, to create ourselves). The golfer is homo-faber par excellence. [Man I hope the editor of an imprint of some obscure french literary press is reading this…I’m on a damn roll here…]

The other day, while golfing, I observed an entire family of deer — a doe, two yearlings, and, later, a young buck — walk, soundlessly, through some long grass not twenty yards off a tee box. The violence of a driver striking a ball from a tee seemed not to faze them. They barely looked up when we started down the cart path. These deer had come to inhabit a world of manufactured nature, they represented a humane, tamed form of nature; a picture of it on which neither we, nor they, had very much to fear from each other at all.

If you’re one of the six subscribers that have made it this far (or one of the lucky internet randos the algorithm delivered, which…welcome by the way), I’ve got one last reflection for you.

Golf as culture borne of leisure, golf as useless activity enjoyed for its own sake.

There’s no real reason to golf. Weirdly, that’s the point. It’s honestly not that relaxing, and there are far better ways to rest and recharge. Sure, you can network along the way, or strengthen a bond of civic friendship, but that’s hardly a whole reason to hit a round. Instead, golf is one of the few examples of pure leisure left in our society, and it even preserves some of the aristocratic trappings of cultures where this class of activity was far more fundamental (for better or worse). It’s structured activity, the point or purpose is simply to hit the ball into the hole, then to do that again, and again, then again six or fifteen more times. The ultimate point, though, is contained in the pointlessness of this activity. The goal of this action is transcended by a goal one cannot directly aim at: the pure, whole, enjoyment of the thing for-its-own-sake.

Alright. That’s all. There’s more to be thought, I’m sure, though I’ve got no more to say. This is a more than adequate sampling of the quasi-contemplative stream of consciousness I indulge during my annual or bi-annual golf outing.

If for some reason you’re still reading (and even moreso if you sort of liked this post), let me know what are some other sports, activities, hobbies, or jobs that could use some philosophical reflection. It’s mostly what I’m up to these days, and I wouldn’t mind taking on a few more of these sort of subjects.

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What, you may ask, is the purpose of such a creation? Why invent a mechanical duck whose sole purpose is to convince onlookers that it can do something that it really cannot? Well this, it turns out, is the precise question I’d love to pose to Sam Altman…

Replicants & Robots

Richard Sennett, in his 2009 book, The Craftsman, makes a distinction that’s really stuck with me. So much so, that I’m starting to notice how it shapes, at a subconscious level, how I think about AI Chatbots like “Claude” and “ChatGPT.” Here it is:

A mirror-tool—my coinage—is an implement that invites us to think about ourselves. There are two kinds of mirror-tools. These are the replicant and the robot. The modern name for the first comes from the film Blade Runner, which features copies of human beings. The perfect women created in Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives are also replicants. In the real world, pacemakers for the heart serve as replicant machines, providing the energy charge needed for the heart to function as it should biologically. All these artifices mirror us by mimicking us. By contrast, a robotic machine is ourselves enlarged: it is stronger, works faster, and never tires. Still, we make sense of its functions by referring to our own human measure. (Sennett, The Craftsman, pages 84-85)

First off, the notion of a mirror-tool is, itself, an interesting category. Many tools are useful because they supplement our abilities, or do things that we cannot, in principle, do. There is no purely human equivalent of sawing wood, it’s not like we started doing that with our hands only to realize “Wait a minute, doing this with a sharp-toothed metal blade would be faster.” Similarly, fire-starting implements — matches, flint, even friction based wooden contraptions — these are all tools that perform a basic function that we, as human beings, fundamentally cannot.

Now, let me say from the outset, and with no disrespect to Sennett, I think the way he goes on to develop and illustrate the distinction is a bit underdeveloped, and possibly even confused. The term “replicant,” along with his first two examples, give the impression that such machines are meant to mimic human behavior in some systematic, possibly interrelated way. You’d think the paradigm cases would be machines that bear the semblance of human beings at a fairly high level. But the case he immediately gives us — a pacemaker — challenges that interpretation and muddies the water a bit. His illustrative cases of “robots” — a term that’s been more consistently applied to anthropomorphic, (semi)autonomous machines throughout history — are even more confusing (he offers for our consideration the iPod, and its “memory,” as imitating our own memory, but in a larger scale).

Take, for instance, George Moore’s 1893 invention, the “Steam Man.” With a thoroughly anthropomorphic design, one might assume Sennet would classify it as a “replicant.” But it doesn’t mimic biological function in any natural way. And it’s most impressive ability was to “walk” continuously at a speed much faster than an ordinary gait without “getting tired.” Add to this the fact that machines with “bodies” and “faces” have, historically, been what we refer to as robots [[think of how you can “transform” yourself by saying “I. am. a. robot.” and moving your limbs, stiffly and at odd angles]], and you might worry that the distinction just collapses entirely.

But wait….(!)

I’m convinced there’s a deeply important distinction behind the language here, and I think we could muddle our way through without abandoning the terminology altogether. Here’s how…

• A robot is a machine designed to perform a specific task as a means to some end the designer/user has identified and deemed useful. Robots do not generally mimic the mechanics of human action in their final form, nor are they typically designed with anthropomorphic features.

Here are two robots:

• A replicant is a technological tool designed to imitate and perform some fundamentally human function, and usually more than one. Replicants are often designed as part of exploratory research, aimed at understanding (and sometimes replacing) human actions or biological processes. If it has a face or a humanoid body, if it “speaks” or responds to input with human-like gestures or emotive noises, it’s probably a replicant.

Okay, so the pacemaker still technically counts, but now it’s not a paradigm case, like the subjects of the movies Blade Runner, The Stepford Wives, Ex Machina, or M3GAN. On this way of carving up the distinction (which, by the way, allows for some overlap and somewhat fuzzy boundaries), it’s easy to see why the life cycle of innovation often involves the creation of a replicant and the gradual removal of human limitations and inefficiencies until we’re left with a robot that has a very specific purpose and a narrowly defined scope. Sennett’s example of this process involves Vaucanson (the ducksh*t guy again), who created a humanoid replicant who could “play the flute” by producing variable airflow with it’s “mouth.” The replicant was useful only as a carnival prop, but the underlying mechanism, which used complex, highly manipulable levers to produce tension, was eventually used to make a robotic loom that could weave far more efficiently than weavers previously could by hand.

Replicants and the Narcissistic Impulse

We are obsessed with replicants. But why?

Here are some of the seemingly endless examples of such machines being produced, filmed, and put on the internet.

Part of the reason is surely evolutionary. Our cognitive capacities developed in such a way as to be highly sensitive to agency, broadly construed. The caveman who mistook every tenth rock for a lion was far more likely to survive than his friend who mistook every tenth lion for a rock. I’m no expert, but I suspect this is why we see faces in electrical outlets, and why my son always wanted to know if anthropomorphized objects in the stories I’d tell him, like talking trees, “…had a face, and eyes, and a mouth.” (A bit redundant, but I get it.) This capacity may also go deeper than mere psychology into the territory of moral psychology. Emmanuel Levinas theorized that perception of the face of the other was an inescapably moral event. I don’t claim to understand the theory (I’ve only heard about it in passing), but it’s an example of a philosopher who thinks that “the eyes are the window to the soul” is more than just metaphor.

I think a big part of the reason we’re obsessed with replicants, though, is simple narcissism, in the classical sense.

We like to see representations of ourselves in many forms — in mirror-tools as in mirrors — and the ability to replicate animation, in addition to mere visual likeness, impresses, delights, and terrifies us.

I’d love to see the statistic on how many science-fictional narratives — be they literary, cinematic, or whatever — are essentially a retelling of Frankenstein with a replicant taking place of the monster. I bet it would be an impressive percentage. I bet it would strongly support my argument… … …

It seems that the imaginative frontier conceptualizes technological progress in fundamentally human terms, which is a way of allowing ourselves to relate to the machines, to make them intelligible, and to start to form judgments about their risks, benefits, and capacities. Innovation often follows suit.

But the most useful innovations quickly depart from these anthropomorphized replicants, honing in on a much more specific task, and building efficiencies around it. Papermaking (according to Sennett) used to be terrible, smelly, and unsanitary work involving the fermentation of hand-pulped wood. When wooden “robots” were introduced to remove the least dignified of the steps involved, workers tended not to gather in the streets like the newly unemployed weavers had.

“Artificial” “Intelligence” and the Future of Human Thought

Here’s the payoff. I hope it’s worth it. (At the very least, don’t forget, you now know about a hilarious historical moment where the general public was transfixed by a golden duck pretending to take a poop.)

We seem to be stuck in the replicant phase of the AI revolution, or, at least, most of us general users do. One reason for the sycophantic design choices — like the decision to allow chatbots to become porny, and all platforms to start adopting social-media-like feedback loops — is because, for the vast majority of us, AI is still just a bit of an oddity, an amusing mimicry machine that’s able to perfectly and completely hide its inner-workings behind a screen to magical effect.

I think this is also what’s behind the sentience debates and the specter of “general intelligence.” Keeping in mind I’m no expert in computer science (though I do know a thing or two about hylmorphic ensoulment), these things — along with the ghost stories of the AI apocalypse and the singularity — are suspiciously like us, telling ourselves spooky stories around the campfire, titillating ourselves (or a massive customer base) with a machine we explicitly designed to deceive us into thinking its not the thing that it is.

{{NB: I’m not arguing that AI isn’t dangerous, doesn’t pose a threat, and/or isn’t unprecedented in various ways. Indeed, I think what’s so interesting about AI is how quickly it’s been adopted and integrated into virtually every aspect of our lives, and how it uses ordinary language to allow non-specialists to essentially program complex computing processes. It’s amazing. It is unprecedented. It’s surely dangerous. But the AI apocalypse, if it comes (and I hope it doesn’t), will not properly be described as a replicant takeover, but as the rather ordinary foolhardiness of a handful of people who let their ambitions for power, wealth, and fame back them into a series of ethically bad business decisions.}}

What, then, are we to do? First, and most importantly, I think we should learn how to use AI thoughtfully. I use it for all kinds of things, but I reflect during and after new use cases. I notice how it changes and shapes my writing process, for instance, and have identified only a handful of tasks I’m willing to let it help me with. And these are processes I’d decidedly not describe as replacing “cognitively sophisticated” or “intellectual” work in any interesting sense. I ask AI to break down my writing sessions into chunks, to remind me about what I said I’d do during that process when I get lost in the weeds, and to give me rather generic “You got this” type motivation when I know I’m obsessing over a detail I need to just let go. In an ideal world, Claude would just answer my emails, or, better yet, do the dishes and mow the lawn.

I think we also need to watch carefully to see what the use of AI is replacing or revealing. Just like no papermaker really ended up thinking that tending to the fermentation tank was a dignified and essentially human aspect of their job, I suspect we’re going to end up learning that lots of work we’ve dressed up as “knowledge work” is actually rather rote and mechanizable. Perhaps the widespread existential crisis we’ve been experience as a desire to find meaning and purpose in work can be explained by the fact that we slowly turned ourselves into mental robots over the past fifty years, and maybe there’s greater creativity and agency in the work that lies on other side.

All this, of course, sidesteps hard questions about the intentions and character of the Alt-man and his peers, the attention-miners who are capturing and weaponizing them, and the rising generation we’ve largely given up on forming. But those are questions I’m not particularly well-suited to ask or answer at the moment. I’m hoping some of them have already been treated in a letter I’ve been meaning to read for a while…

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¹ Apologies to my mom, who is one of (if not) the most loyal reader I have for the crude wordplay in this section. But, in my defense, the language is even bawdier in Richard Sennett’s well-respected book, which is where I was introduced to what he dubbed “The Shitting Duck.”

In this fantasy, you stand up from your desk and yell “I quit!!” — which startles Linda so badly in the cubicle adjacent to yours that she lets out a tiny, involuntary squeak.

Then, your stunned coworkers watch with growing envy as you loosen your tie and walk confidently — oh, so confidently — out the glass door attached to the glass cage of an office building, and you don’t stop walking till there’s soil beneath your feet and sun falling across your face. Until you’re surrounded by chirping birds and maybe a cautious deer that looks up and freezes, then snuffs loudly (for a deer) and flicks her tail before quietly putting her head back down to eat from the ground, but never quite takes her eye off you.

You dig.

You plant.

You build.

Roll credits.

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Reframing Work

I’ve spent the last two weeks living out my version of this fantasy: taking a traditional building class in rust-belt Ohio, learning how to read wood grain and coax rough hewn timber into intimately connected joints and pockets. I’ve sweated the sweat of a day’s honest labor (and then some). I’ve collapsed, satisfied, into my bed at the end of the day, my own pockets somehow filled with tiny chips of wood, my own joints feeling a bit too intimately connected.

I’ve learned a lot — far too much to fully have processed, let alone share in a few brief paragraphs. About myself, my values, my assumptions about work and its outputs. About the world of man (“homo faber,” as Arendt would say); about our built environment and self-containments.

I’ve also learned about what draws people like me to take on such Thoreauvian experiments. People who voluntarily agree to spend three weeks in a crumbling heartland city, learning to use antiquated hand-tools that are slower and far more difficult to master than their self-powered counterparts, and who find, every day, another small revelation buried deep in “the perfect timber within.” (It’s a timber-framing in-joke. You might not be authentically enculturated enough into a romanticized version of working class America to understand…)

I think many people take on elemental work like this — work that contrasts in almost every possible way with their everyday jobs — as a way of realigning and recalibrating their worklife. And my experiences suggests, two weeks in, that…well, it more or less works. But while the craftsman inside of me has been busy carving up timber, the philosopher has also been at work, trying to build a theory about how and why it works, to construct a portable edifice of thought (a mobile-home-of-thought, if you will); something beyond the nascent skills and fully developed stiffness to take home with me.

Here’s a partial sketch, the first draft of...

…A Blueprint

1. Manual work (craft, physical labor, the trades) cannot be faked, nor can one reap the benefits of such labor unless they acquire and exercise the relevant skills.

We’re so used to “faking it,” even while we’re “making it,” that we long for work that can show us how to be accountable to ourselves. We so often feel like imposters in our jobs that we’ve invented a syndrome to capture the feeling into pathology, so we can release it through meditation, positive self-talk, and therapy (all good practices, by the way, and each of which I recommend in their appropriate place). David Graeber talks about bullsh*t jobs, about work we do that’s so pointless that the real job becomes hiding this fact from ourselves and our superiors. I think he’s right that such work, however much of it we find ourselves doing, degrades and deforms our souls.

That’s partly why craftwork feels like “real work,” and, by contrast, illuminates the aspects of our jobs that feel like busywork, make-work, work that’s a copy of a copy of the original. “Did I do this right?” Isn’t a question I have to carry with me after hours, ruminating on it in the moments before I drift off to sleep. There’s a straightedge that will tell me. There’s a “square rule” that I’ve followed or I haven’t. And if I somehow hide the truth from myself, fudging a sixteenth of an inch here or two degrees of an angle there, the master in the workshop will reveal it in a check without a word. “Getting away with it” in the moment just means the beams, sill, and posts won’t fit together on raising day (a far more public stage on which to fail).

It’s not that this allows me to achieve perfection in each instance, craftwork also reveals this possibility to be a fantasy, but it provides a measure of the fruits of my labor, a snapshot of my current skill set, and — when assembled regularly — a timelapse, a moving picture, representing growth, progress, and development.

Matthew Crawford captures this beautifully in his contemporary classic, Shop Class as Soul Craft:

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. (Page 15)

2. Such work manifests the good at which it aims directly. The distance between effort and end is reduced greatly. The purpose of one’s work is necessarily ready-to-hand.

We throw around a lot of words in theorizing about work. (And by “we” I mean “philosophers,” and by “philosophers” I mean “me.”) But the reason is because the richness of the subject demands it. For instance, I strongly believe in drawing a distinction between the purpose for which one works, and the meaning of the work. (Meaning-fulness is yet another concept, and I’m going to sidestep that for the moment.) One may have any number of purposes in working — to feed a family, to increase scientific knowledge, to use one’s mind in a satisfying and enjoyable way, etc. — but the purpose of one’s work (the primary purpose, you could say) is largely dictated by the nature of the work itself. A car salesman’s purpose in chatting about interior features is to sell the car. A banker’s purpose in evaluating an investment is to see whether the potential returns are worth the risks in making it.

Much of work today is so abstract and fragmented that it’s not even clear what the purpose of one’s individual job really is. Even when it’s supposedly clear — “My role is to manage a dynamic team of engineers and designers to make sure products are market ready by launch using a cascading KPI model of productivity management” (or whatever) — it’s not always guaranteed that this is your actual purpose. Especially within large and complex organizations, one can often legitimately ask whether they’re really performing some essential task related to the company’s mission, or whether they’re really there to take the fall for middle management, to boost the ego of someone a little further up in the hierarchy, or to serve to answer or preempt a PR question about the company’s values.

Professors, for instance, are purportedly employed to teach undergraduate students, mentor graduate apprentices, and add to the repository of knowledge through disciplinary methods. But, as I’ve argued in a recent article in Notre Dame Magazine, the line between actually teaching and merely performing that role is fine, fragile, and increasingly less clear.

But what about craftwork? The product is a thing with an unambiguous function; a house provides shelter from the elements, a pair of leather boots protects our feet from the elements. And the reason to produce these — the purpose — is inherent in that function. So much so that we actually call these things “goods.” I’m not saying all such products are good, full stop (we could imagine an artisanal napalm factory, for instance, or a blacksmith that specialized in implements of torture), but there’s never a question, for work of this type, about whether it’s serving any purpose, or about what that purpose ultimately amounts to in the real world.

3. Craftwork allows one to inhabit the world on a human scale, and to participate in its creation. It is the process of cultivating “at-homeness” by contributing to a built environment within which communities are formed and against which human lives are lived.

Because this type of work wears its purpose on its sleeve, so to speak, it also lends itself far more easily to descriptions of life in which its products have real (sometimes simple, often essential) meaning. If you build a table, you’re creating an essential place of communion, deliberation, and festivity. It doesn’t stretch the imagination to see a future owner — likely someone in close enough proximity to yourself that you probably know them — using and enjoying the piece.

I often think about this when students say they want to “help people” or “make the world a better place.” This is often the socially acceptable wrapper for professional ambition that’s steering them toward a high-status, highly compensated industry like consulting or investment banking…and I think they almost always mean it. What I sometimes want to tell them, though, is:

“Can you imagine a more direct and satisfying way of doing this than to keep your neighbors warm while putting food on the table for your own family? What could be more helpful or good than crafting a structure for generations of families who will cherish, share, and pass on it as an inheritance? If help and betterment are the main motivation driving you in work, find something useful and inauspicious. Settle down in a community you can afford, and afford to build up. Engage in the real politics of city council meetings, neighborhood block parties, and nonprofit service. Have seven kids before you’re thirty-five. Help those tiny little people. For those to whom you’re the whole world, it’s pretty easy to make that world a better place.”

[End of speech.]

Needless to say, this is a noble purpose. It’s value obviously transcends monetary gain. It’s work, and work that is real.

The Tools I’ll Bring Home With Me

Of course, the beauty and the tragedy of an experiment like mine is that it doesn’t last forever. At the end of the week, I will drive straight across the state of Ohio (without stopping if I can possibly help it) to my actual home in South Bend. While my future is a bit more nebulous [[I. can’t. wait. to. say. more.]] many of my classmates will be returning to the jobs they left behind. Their world will have remained largely unchanged in their absence. Like Henry David Thoreau leaving Walden Pond, we’ll reenter lives our experiments aimed to transcend. So what will we have gained?

First (and this doubles as my advice to any of you out there considering such an experiment), we will (hopefully) leave with a finer-grained vision of what aspects of our worklives are already balanced. When frustration is solidifying into burnout, it can feel like the problem with our work is that it’s just everything, all the time, all at once. But going on a journey has a way of making you see the ordinary (the mundane, the everyday) anew.

Secondly, and equally importantly, I’ll spend time revisiting the moments of greatest satisfaction. I may even journal about it because I am a sensitive artist. What felt like pure relief while I was in the workshop? Like reuniting with an old friend? Like finally letting some aspect of my personality out into the light of day again? By tuning into these experiences, I can further discern the path forward. How can I make my work — whatever that is — more real? Or, in some cases — like mine — how can I go out into the world again and find some work that is?

Finally, and lastly (one might say: ultimately), I’m going to bring some literal tools home. A chisel and a framing square and an insane confidence in my ability to recall and apply the knowledge and know-how I’ve been building these past few weeks. The kind of foolhardy attitude that will allow me to accomplish my first minor failure — all on my own, in the privacy of my garage — and begin the cycle of humiliation, submission, and triumph that can eventually make master craftsmen of us all.

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Footnote: (*) you’re bored and understimulated; you’re stressed and overstimulated; you don’t think you’re living up to your potential; you have a sneaking suspicion that your efforts are meaningless, or worse…

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1. What is our contemporary culture’s relationship to work?

2. How does our understanding build on — or depart from — important historical conceptions that held sway until quite recently?

3. What do I want my relationship to work to look like?

4. What are the philosophical ideas I’d need to start the process of (re)integrating work into my vision of a life well-lived?

So, indulge me, if you will, in this exercise.

Welcome to Philosophy 201.

PHIL 201: Work, Meaning, and Happiness

Unit 1 - Work: What is it, and what’s it for?

Lecture 1:

Here are your readings:

• Raymond Geuss, A Philosopher Looks at Work (Chapter 1)

• James Suzman, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (Whole book)

• Gary Gutting, What work is really for (New York Times Op-ed)

There are many places to start in defining “work.” Raymond Geuss’s treatment may be the most natural place to start for the philosopher, but it’s dense and highly theoretical. In class, I started with the first chapter, contextualized Guess’s definition in class (and complicated it). So after that chapter, I’d recommend reading through Suzman’s illuminating historical survey of the subject. As with any “deep history,” I approached the book skeptical of its ability to make good on the promise to give a complete picture of such a vast subject in a single volume, and my skepticism grew when I realized the entire first half was devoted to a study of the pre-history of work (Suzman, an anthropologist, is clearly most confident in this topic as his own area of expertise). But my understanding of work in later historical epochs compounded based on this foundation, and I’ve found myself returning to this book time and again to situation my understanding of contemporary work in a richly detailed history. In my view, there’s no better place to begin.

Assignment: After reading Gutting’s op-ed, try to outline his central claims. What is his view about the relationship between work and leisure and other intrinsic goods? Why does he think liberal education is essential in a capitalist society that wants to “get work right?”

Extra credit: Read my paper, written with Claire Murphy, on how we should think about defining work in relation to human flourishing.

Unit 2 - Philosophies of Work

Lecture 2:

Readings:

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Excerpts)

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Sections I. - IV.)

• Firmin DeBrabander, Should Work be a Passion, or Duty? (New York Times Op-ed)

Of the major philosophies of enduring influence, I think virtue ethics (including stoicism) dominates in its value for thinking about work. There are many directions one could go, of course, and here the most obvious absence is the many contributions from utilitarianism (so consider that a side quest if you’d like to explore more).

Of these readings, I think Arendt needs the most context. She is the most interesting thinker to come out of mid-century existentialist thought. Far more readable than Heidegger, and more insightful than Sartre or even de Beauvoir, Arendt considers work and labor from a critical and historically-informed philosophical point of view. I was surprised to see Augustine and Aristotle among the most cited figures in early footnotes, but even more surprised by how seamlessly her treatment of their ideas illuminated the contemporary “human conditions” of labor, work, and action. (For a compelling introduction to her historical context and some important contemporaries, I’d also recommend The Visionaries.)

Assignment: We ask much of our work in the contemporary world. We want jobs that are not just dignified, but interesting, meaningful, and a source of personal growth. As Studs Terkel put it, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Write 400-500 words answering the question: What are you looking for in your work? And when have you come closest to finding it? Is there anything in the philosophy of Aristotle or Arendt that leads to to reconsider the role work currently plays in your life?

Unit 3 - How we suffer

Lecture 3:

Pick a Path

Status Anxiety

• Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety)

• Arthur Brooks, Success Addicts (Article from The Atlantic)

• George Saunders, The Semplica Girl Diaries (Short story originally published in The New Yorker)

Burnout

• Byung Chul Han, The Burnout Society

• Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

• Derek Thompson, Workism is Making Americans Miserable

• Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (Uncanny. Absurd. Hilarious. Puzzling. This short story is a profound reflection on the American work ethic and its limits. If nothing else, read it so you can use the Bartleby’s catchphrase when you “can’t even” anymore: “I would prefer not to.”)

Unit 4 - Revaluing the work of our hands

For this unit, pick one of the following two books to read and reflect on:

(1) Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

This book is a classic of the genre, and for good reason. Though you could simply read the article its based on if you’re pressed for time, it’s one of the rare book-length expansions that I think is well worth the effort. Crawford is a keen observer of his own varied experience with work, which ranges from blue-collar work as an electrician to so-called knowledge-work, veering into intellectual work in academia and then thought-leadership before circling back to the satisfaction of mechanical work with his decision to open his own motorcycle shop. The book also does triple duty: In addition to an essayistic introduction to various forms of contemporary labor, Crawford provides a critique of contemporary work that illuminates the ethic behind contemporary corporate life. He also draws on just enough classical sources to model how a conception of good work might be tied back to historically important ideas that go all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy. It’s a short and compelling read, light enough to take along to the beach but intellectually substantial enough to merit careful highlighting and marginalia.

(2) Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

Richard Sennett was Hannah Arendt’s student, and his writing is even more accessible without losing historical or philosophical depth. In “The Craftsman,” Sennett examines the history of craftsmanship and defends this form of work against the two thousands year old philosophical bias toward intellectual and contemplative work. I couldn’t put it down, and I haven’t read a more enlightening perspective on the relationship between humans and machines (robots and replicants), despite the fact that Sennett was writing more than a decade before LLMs were even on the horizon.

Unit 5 - The end of work (revisited)

Lecture:

Readings:

• Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

• Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game

Both of these books ask readers to consider the sources of ultimate value in life, and both do so, in part, by considering evolutions in the authors’ relationship to their own work.

• And pick one of these novels:

  • Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

  • Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

  • Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

• Bonus: This short piece on meaningful work by the philosopher Andrea Veltman.

Assignment: If someone were to write a biography of your life — your life’s story — thus far, how would your work factor in? Is this the story you want to be living? And, if not, in what ways would you like it to change?

Here are the titles and authors of all the books referenced in this article, for quick reference:

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Will We Ever Learn?

Notre Dame Magazine, Summer 2026

The first is a piece I’ve been working on with Jason Kelly and John Nagy at Notre Dame Magazine. I’ve long admired this venue for its substantive exploration of all sorts of contemporary issues; it’s one of the absolutely best periodicals published by a university, and writing to its audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers is an opportunity and a gift. The piece brings together and builds on many of the issues I’ve been considering here on Substack over the past few years, but has benefitted from the eyes of careful editors and an amazing design team. I hope you’ll check it out in print or online via this link, and I’d love to hear your comments here if you do.

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ThinkerAnalytix and God and the Good Life

An Ed-Tech Implementation Case Study for Teaching Critical Thinking in Large Lecture Classes, Teaching Philosophy

I’m also glad to see this second project out there in the world. This is a paper I wrote in collaboration with Aidan Kestigian of Thinker, an EdTech platform designed to teach critical thinking through argument mapping, that follows and carefully details a three-year intervention in my God and the Good Life course. If you’ve ever taught large lecture courses, you know how difficult it can be to redesign any aspect of the course, and I wasn’t sure — at the outset — whether an innovation at this scale could be undertaken in such a short period of time. The results were incredible, though, and I hope the lessons we learned along the way (including a few hiccups and mistakes instructors can learn from) can help other instructors make good on the promise to teach "critical thinking,” which — as my coauthor points out in a recent op-ed with a colleague I recently did a podcast with — isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds.

For those with university credentials, access to the article is available here. For those without, just leave a note in the comments or drop me a line at paul [dot] blaschko [at] gmail.com and I’d be happy to send you a copy.

1. Timber Framing

In July, I’m heading back down to Steubenville to take a class on timber framing at the College of St. Joseph the Worker. I visited the college earlier this spring, on a trip to the New Polity conference with the family, and was delighted to meet its founder, Jacob Imam, some faculty, and a few students. It’s truly a remarkable place where students learn trades alongside the liberal arts, and I’m convinced they’re onto a substantively distinct model of higher-education, and one that’s much needed in the contemporary world. The trip will give me more time to workshop ideas with some visionaries reimagining the relationship between work and learning, and it will also give me some time in the workshop where I’ll literally be learning how to build structures that can last the test of time…

2. Six Months of Sabbatical

After thirteen years in the “grindset,” I’m stepping off the treadmill for a few months. Between now and December, I have only two questions to answer every morning when I wake up: (1) What author will I be learning from today? And (2) which house project does Shayla want me to tackle next? Here are some potential answers (in no particular order):

• John Henry Newman.

• A walking path for our raised bed gardens.

• Richard Sennett & Hannah Arendt.

• Refinishing the deck in our backyard.

• Stripping wallpaper and repainting our bedroom.

• Thomas Merton or A. G. Sertillanges (but not both).

  

3. Our Great American Adventure

In the spring, we’re taking the show on the road. Literally.

30 colleges and universities.

17 by RV.

5 children under 10.

2 insane parents.

1 key question: Where is higher-ed changing lives through liberal arts style curriculum, while seriously preparing students to flourish in their worklives?

Program your VCR. Set your TiVo. Like and Subscribe. You’re not going to want to miss this lovely chaos.

4. Pub Date for Worklife

It’s here! (Or there! In the future, but determinately so!) The scheduled publication date for my new book is May 18, 2027. Mark your calendars! (But also, don’t worry: I’ll remind you.)

(^ Fictional rendering of the actual table of contents.)

Bonus Thing (#5.): Staying Up Late

This fall, I’ll be on the joke writing team for a nationally broadcast late night show. This one I really can’t talk about, but I assure you: It’s gonna be far less impressive (and far more hilarious) than it sounds.

John Henry Newman believed that universities exist to promote the moral and intellectual formation of their students. He also believed that most of this formation was possible when you gathered a group of young people together, assigned them “tutors” who were recent graduates themselves (rather than permanent faculty with PhDs or even MAs), and set them on a course of study and self-discovery through dialogue. Because of this, Newman thought that the residential requirement of universities was non-negotiable. (“What’s this ‘University of Phoenix Online,’ you speak of? There’s really no sense in which such a thing could exist…”) While fans of the Liberal Arts™-style branding like to point out that this is why Newman would be so critical of credentialism, they sometimes neglect to mention that it also made him deeply skeptical of specialized research, lectures and formal examinations. To make the point, Newman goes so far as to ask whether a university really even needs faculty to perform its function.

Ever the polemicist, Newman claims in Discourse 6 of The Idea of a University that if he “had to choose between a so-called University, which dispensed with residence and superintendence…” (can’t you just hear the edgy British sarcasm?)

…and a University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years…I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that University which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun.

A university without students is a contradiction in terms. A university without faculty? Well, according to some prominent critics of higher-ed, that might actually be preferable to the current state of affairs…

2.

In an article first published in Persuasion (which the Chronicle of Higher-Ed then re-published, but behind a paywall), William Deresiewicz traces many of the ills facing higher-ed to universities’ obsessive focus on prestige publication. The argument is pretty clear from the title of CHE’s version alone:

Deresiewicz is the latest commentator to have stumbled on an insight that the most recent Doctor of the Church articulated clearly and more than one hundred years ago: universities exist to cultivate the hearts, minds, and souls of our students. Research is a nice-to-have, but only insofar as faculty can resist the temptation to turn it into a distraction or, worse, and end-in-itself. The existential threat to higher-education has been hiding behind the mask of academic status, prestige, and the newly invented industrial notion of “knowledge creation.”

“Teaching is hard,” Deresiewicz (under)states:

Most faculty do not know how to do [it]. Most college teaching is mediocre at best and often far worse. This is not a guess or an impression (though I’ve seen enough of it myself). In The Amateur Hour, a history of college teaching in America, Jonathan Zimmerman lays out the gory details. We’ve had the same problems, for the same reasons, with the same failed solutions, since the emergence of the research university: professors neglecting instruction; enormous lecture courses (and tedious discussion sections); contingent and underqualified faculty; students feeling bored and cheated; resistance from faculty to supervision, evaluation, or change; innovations, often based on new technology, rolled out with large claims; and no improvement ever. The reason for this last is clear. Under the research model, faculty are incentivized to do a single thing only: create knowledge. Publish or perish. When good teaching happens, it happens by accident, and often at a cost to one’s career.

It’s worth noting the irony in where this argument is coming from. Deresiewicz is one of the loudest voices publicly championing teaching. He’s also one of the only public figures I’ve seen criticizing what many see as the ineffective incentive structure of the status economy of peer reviewed, publish-or-perish research production. But, even though he has the experience to speak credibly here, he hasn’t, himself, been in a full time faculty role in almost two decades.

Tenure was invented to protect faculty from retaliation for criticizing university’s failures of self-governance, but most such criticism today comes from outside the academy. Today, tenure is often seen as an honorific bestowed upon the basis of outstanding research. And when it is invoked in the name of “academic freedom,” it’s typically claimed as a right to special protection from administrative action in response to public pressure for borderline disrespectful, irreverent, or sometimes simply unpopular ideas. I’m not arguing that such invocations are entirely off base, but we should recognize that they’re only in the neighborhood of where our core conception of academic freedom lives. It’s a bit like the way “freedom of speech” or “freedom of expression” is misunderstood in popular discourse, then: none of these were meant to bestow blanket immunity from negative consequences for individuals to speak their mind. Even if the value behind such uses is, generally, one a healthy democratic society should adopt, we need to distinguish carefully between what these are freedoms from and what these are freedoms for.

3.

After several delays, Harvard’s faculty recently voted to institute what is, effectively, a mandatory curve. Professors will now only be permitted to issue A grades to a small percentage of their students. Ostensibly, this was in response to an internal report published by a committee earlier this year that revealed that over 60% of grades received at Harvard in recent years were As. In response to this “grade inflation,” the faculty decided to implement this “deflationary” policy.

While many rightly point out that Harvard is not representative of institutions of higher education (the average community college has a far better claim on that front), it is part of an elite league of colleges that has an outsized influence on what institutions of higher-ed aspire to be. Rightly or wrongly, experiments and policies adopted at Harvard are often exported across higher-ed. Look at the strategic plan for most liberal arts institutions in the country, and nine-times out of ten you’ll find a document that looks like it could have been produced by copying Harvard’s into ChatGPT with the prompt, “But make it about us.”

Students, understandably, are not happy about the policy.

We can easily imagine the frustration of these students, many of whom worked from a very young age to learn exactly how to perfect their performance in “the grading game.” We can concretely imagine the negative effects they anticipate: stress, anxiety, courses that feel more like intellectual marathons. I predict more adversarial and nitpicky office hours, a lot more cheating and AI use, and the emergence of a dog-eat-dog competitiveness that might just eradicate camaraderie and cooperation. We can empathize with the student who asks: Why must some of us fail just because most of us are clearing the highest bar of success?

If they could organize, the students might write a document that included passages like this:

…perhaps the strongest conclusion to come from our deliberations is that the evaluation of [learning] should be based on benchmarks for quality that do not use comparison-based standards.

Distribution-based criteria that rely upon comparisons of [students] to other [students] insinuate a competition among [students] for good placement…This competition runs counter to the collegiality that defines the [community] of the University and obscures the true value of [instructors’ evaluations of student work].

An alternative approach would establish…standards or benchmarks against which [students] are assessed…[Under this system, students] are not assessed in terms of other[s] but in terms of expectations.

We’d probably find it reasonable to have a standard where all students “could achieve a standard based on absolute expectations,” especially given the presupposition of the effectiveness of the admissions process. Students were selected to attend the school because they were extremely high performers. Why should they then be penalized for joining a community of gifted students like themselves?

Interestingly, the passages and quotations above are all taken, verbatim, from a report by Notre Dame’s Ad Hoc Committee for the Evaluation of Teaching (always a committee). The only thing I changed was systematically substituting instances of “faculty” for “students” and “teaching” for “learning,” etc. Most astonishingly in this context, though, is what the committee presented as a knock-down argument for reform in the comparative model used to evaluate teaching. Based on the old, norm-referenced curve distributing relative scores of quality, 75% of faculty necessarily fell below the standard for excellent teaching. But using the new distribution, based on an absolute threshold of quality, we proudly explained that 78% of instructors between 2010 and 2017 would meet or exceed the expectations for “excellent teaching.” The number of “perfect,” 5/5 evaluation scores faculty received shot through the roof.

Notre Dame isn’t Harvard, and hasn’t yet attempted a deflationary experiment. (I hope we never do.) But the point I’m trying to make here is that faculty ought to apply the same logic to grading as we do to the evaluation of our own teaching. Deflating students’ grades while inflating our own isn’t fair. And all the complaints faculty have about reducing the value of their teaching to a single metric — on a number that sometimes feels arbitrary or biased, often selects for things other than excellence, and always feels too coarse-grained and imperfect to hang something as important as the future of our work lives and careers — apply at least as well in the context of contemporary grading practices.

4.

So, perhaps we should consider Newman’s thought experiment anew, in the context of our own inflationary struggles.

What value would be lost, from the point of view of a university’s mission, if we stopped all research, quit giving exams, or even gave up the faculty-centered model of education altogether? The answer, of course, is that much would be lost. But would it be as much, for our students, as the complete breakdown of collegiality and wellbeing?

If Newman is right that the cultivation of the mind and heart of the human person depends more on intellectual community (especially with one’s peers) than it does on studying this or that specialized field of knowledge, then the answer should be clear (and humbling) for university faculty. Strip away the research imperative (which seems to be in decline across the country even as we speak), and what justification remains for faculty as a professional class? Content delivery? A motivated grad student or adjunct can take care of that (and, overwhelmingly at places like ND and Harvard, do). The personal and pastoral care of our students? We’ve already outsourced this, in its entirety, to “res life” and other counseling and wellness professionals. Committee work? No one in their right mind would argue for this one.

What can’t be replicated — what has never been replicable — is the presence of a human being who is visibly, relationally, and genuinely accompanying students in pursuit of understanding within the context of a flourishing intellectual community. The good news is that this is the work that many of us signed up for, the work we envisioned when we were admitted to graduate school, the work we all admit — at the end of the day and in unguarded moments — has the biggest and deepest impact on the lives of real human beings.

So: no, we should not dispense with faculty, or research. But we need to remember why Newman thought a university run on the tutorial model could exist even without faculty, while a university without students was a contradiction in terms. Our research universities have been systematically selecting against this sort of relational, communal model of learning, though they continue setting precedents for much of higher-ed. So my challenge to my fellow faculty is this: let’s think beyond the arms race of mutually inflationary evaluations, and let’s resist the temptation to wield grades as an instrument of disciplinary control. Instead, let’s take up the Newmanian call: let’s teach in a way that makes the life of the mind look like something worthy of our students’ aspirations.

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The conclusion of this dialogue is that teaching is impossible, and the argument is no ancient clickbait. Augustine really believes, as a matter of philosophical pedagogy, that it is not possible to “learn from words,” which is his operational definition of teaching. (Perhaps you’ll see already the special relevance and implications for AI, but hold that thought because it’s gonna get weirder.) The argument reveals what’s plausible about the claim, in part by revealing it to be more modest than it sounds at first. Here’s my reconstruction of the argument:

1. While we can know things on the say-so of others, knowledge doesn’t entail understanding. In my case, for instance, I know that atoms are the “basic building blocks of matter,” that knowledge was transmitted from a science teacher I had in middle school, and can be reinforced at a moment’s notice by a quick Google search. But I must admit: I do not understand it, and I don’t even really know what it means. If I had to try to explain it, and I’ve tried in conversations with my kids, anything I said would be about as accurate as just saying, “Well, because that’s the way it is.”

2. Understanding requires an “inner act of seeing.” Excuse the ocular metaphor, but it’s how Augustine describes it. The phenomenon itself, though, is familiar as a necessary step in understanding. The lights turn on and you see it, everything is illuminated; you get it, you grasp it, or it all falls into place; you have an epiphany or an “aha moment,” and finally see the big picture. This is understanding, not mere knowledge, and it goes far beyond simply being able to affirm whether a certain claim is true.

3. So while it’s possible to prompt someone, direct their attention, or trigger inquiry, no one can, from the outside, produce understanding, which is what learning ultimately aims at. 

Now for the real action of this essay, and let’s start by dunking on the bots.

The argument works beautifully as a tool to put AI Chatbots in their place. Sure, Claude can reflect your thoughts back to you. He (she? It?) can calculate word frequencies, recycle phrases and then act as a digital parrot speaking through one of the windows you have open. But it can’t really produce understanding, nor can it have anything like understanding, at least in the human sense. Generative AI, whatever else it can do, cannot teach, any more than those old Skinner Boxes could teach. (If you got that reference, +100 points…for knowing what Substack is. If you didn’t, look up “Skinner Teaching Machine” on the Google and tell me we haven’t been having all the same Ed-Tech debates since 1950.).

Unfortunately, the argument works just as well for all of us “meatbags” (a term I’m told has been growing in popularity amongst rogue agentic AI). If learning requires an “inner act of seeing,” if that’s something that only the learner can do, then why should it matter if the “teacher” is a Skinner Box, Chatbox, or a meatbag? None of these can truly instill understanding. None of these can truly teach in Augustine’s sense.

I actually agree. If teaching is a transmission of knowledge, then we’re all cooked in the same pot. But here’s Augustine’s (teenager’s) most brilliant move. The so-called teacher, according to the father-and-son-duo, does have a distinctive role to play in learning, and that is the role of the educator. An educator is a guide, a companion, and a model. An educator’s goal is to put the student in a position where they can “see for themselves.”

Education takes place when students are given regular opportunities to explore, grapple with, and test out knowledge that is just outside their comfort zone. To complete this process successfully, a student needs a set of intellectual virtues -- curiosity, clarity of thought, intellectual rigor, love of the truth -- some of which may be modeled and taught in the process of education itself. A true educator beholds-with her student, rather than attempting to infuse his brain with information. And dialogue is the central mode in which this process is embodied. Dialogue provides for the regular engagement of ideas just outside one’s comfort zone, and for the regular feedback necessary to connect up new knowledge with one’s existing knowledge base. And it does all of these things (ideally) in an environment in which students are comfortable enough to take risks, and to build the intellectual skills and virtues they need to learn.

This type of education is what I’d describe as formative education. It’s guided learning on the path towards understanding. It’s something that, characteristically, has required all manner of intellectual virtue, like a love of truth and wisdom, humility and conscientiousness, and, above all, care for the soul of one’s student. These aren’t things that AI can embody. You’re as likely to learn from a Chatbot as you are to get pregnant or fall in love watching pornography (if you’ll excuse the crass, but shockingly illuminating analogy). So then why is higher-ed in such a tizzy? If we’ve been providing a good that can’t be automated for hundreds of years, if we’ve perfected this craft and created tight-knit communities of discourse and understanding, if we’ve learned to reliably cultivate the intellectual virtues underlying the relational conditions necessary for learning, then why would we fear the mimicry machine? 

Well, and here’s where I’ll try to alienate everyone in my core audience: We’ve been trying to turn ourselves into teaching machines (and our students into learning machines) for well over a hundred years.

It always drives me nuts when university missions include “production of knowledge” or “transmission of knowledge,” especially when this is the only normative epistemic term in the whole thing. I’d argue that knowledge alone — at least if the sort contemporary universities are interested in fabricating at scale — is more or less useless for the average person, or worse. Give a college student a collection of facts wrapped in a deeply contentious, disciplinary “theory of everything” and pretty much the only thing you’ve put them in a position to do is ruin thanksgiving. If knowledge is the only thing transmitted — I imagine it oozing out under doors from science labs and exploding in infrared bursts from the mouths of professors, like sneezes during Covid — if there’s no attempt to situate it within a tradition that aims for understanding or wisdom, well, then we really aren’t much more than GPTs, combining and recombining words, and then teaching them to students like passwords that unlock that sweet atomic unit of intellectual achievement: credit towards the ol’ GPA.

I think this picture of the university is presupposed by self-proclaimed pedagogues as much as it is by the cranky professors who complain about, and then ignore, them. Don’t get me wrong, I think the people staffing centers of teaching (and/or learning) excellence are doing better than 90% of us. (They actually care to articulate standards as something to hold themselves accountable to.) But often the ideal I extrapolate from the workshops they put on is one where knowledge is transmitted more effectively, with more precision, according to learning goals that can be measured through armchair social science conducted by complete amateurs (us). Let me reiterate: this is better than the default academic’s view, which is — apparently — that knowledge is like a virus that just kind of spreads from genius to genius, that most students aren’t capable of becoming infected, but that somehow sitting through hundreds of instructional hours will still somehow Improve Their Lives Greatly.

In a way, this is an argument against knowledge-first education, and I understand that this is a parochial view. It’s also one that — were it realized in an institution — would require practices and standards of excellences developed through experience, it would require seeing teaching as a craft, and one shaped heavily by the needs and culture of the community in which it’s practiced. (Side note: this is why I think “classical education” and Great Books Curriculum are, far from some sort of silver bullet, probably even less likely to succeed on the franchise model of education we’ve unconsciously adopted than the “training and orientation, but cool” approach pedagogy experts seems to be advocating. I told you, I will alienate everyone.)

For those of you still with me, let me leave you with a provocative question rather than trying to “sum up” or “conclude” anything (can winding rants have conclusions?)

It seems plausible to me that ChatGPT is a better, more Socratic personalized tutor than most professors if your aim is to acquire, reorganize, present, or otherwise “transmit” knowledge of the sort academic disciplines prize above all else. Suppose, with me for one moment, that that’s right. Suppose the brick-and-mortar university still has something to offer, and suppose that that’s right value depends essentially on the community it houses or constitutes. What would effective (transformative) learning look like in such a place? In other words: What aspect of “teaching” can’t be automated, and is it plausibly the role of universities to offer such instruction?

In any case, I want to completely set aside any pretense of humility for the next ten minutes of your time so I can share, honestly, the pride in accomplishment that I feel on this, the absolute last day of this episode in my teaching career. I want to — as my friends in Minnesota might have put it, though without the embarrassment or passive aggression — “Toot my own horn.”

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Let me start by acknowledging, even apart from the performative humility above, that there’s a certain paradox for me in taking pride in metrics. I teach my students, constantly, to beware of the status anxiety, value capture, and achievementism that comes from equating excellence with any quantifiable measure of performance. I also write about it here. And I take a certain pride, to be honest, when the value of my effort is less than fully visible in terms of the incentive structures and games within which I operate. To quote the founder of one of the great philosophical schools of our time, “Man, this ain’t my dad, this is a cell phone…I’m not a part of your system.”

Now, let me set that all aside for just a moment.

This semester — all semester — has been a bit of a “mountain top experience” for me. I learned that term on retreat when I was younger, as a reminder not to expect the “honeymoon phase” to last forever, and I try to keep it in mind every time I feel like things couldn’t possibly be going better. In the past, I’d get attached to that feeling and start panicking when it would go away. I’d feel the withdrawals of my success between projects or in their growing period, and I’d look to fill it with all manner of ego-expanding plays for attention, like Facebook histrionics and humblebrags, or brashly sh*t talking over drinks or in a group chat. I would be “Thrilled to announce” anything that smelt of prestige or honor. I even spent almost a whole year producing viral TikToks…(remember that “era,” me?)

So this past semester, I was, for the first time in a long time (possibly ever), able to simply “enjoy the ride.” I didn’t know why so many projects were coming to fruition at the same time, or why opportunities kept falling into my lap. I kept feeling like a sense of greater connection in the classroom and beyond it; I felt genuinely excited at my colleagues’ achievements and was able to rest easy in my own. Most importantly, I felt pure joy when I saw my students succeeding, and — while I hope I had something to do with any of that success — I felt secure enough to simply marvel and celebrate, a feeling I’ve gotten more and more used to as a father of beautiful, intelligent, and charismatic children.

In retrospect, “connecting the dots,” I recognize something providential in this episode; something grace-filled; something operating far beyond my capacity or pay grade. Like a child at his father’s bent knee, hammering the final wall of a small birdhouse, I felt pride in my agency without any illusion that the new home was a pure expression of my work and mine alone.

Further, I started sharing these moments with friends and colleagues, many of whom collectively create the conditions for any of the success that I experience. And, most importantly, I started sharing them with Shayla, who creates the foundation and supports the ceiling for all our shared endeavors.

About a week ago, after I decided to step away from Notre Dame and take on a project bigger and more ambitious than I’d ever dreamed possible, my students sent me a sixteen-minute video filled with gratitude and encouragement. It meant as much to me, professionally and personally, as any honor I’ve ever received. And Shayla and I watched it through twice, tears streaming down our faces, gleaming visibly by the soft glow of my iPhone’s screen as they fell silently into the soft darkness of our pillows.

I’ve told my students a thousand times that learning isn’t about the final grade. Nor is teaching about the relative and subjective quality captured by things like student evaluations. Still, grades can mean something — they can capture something — and it’s not always a mistake to see in them a reason for pride and celebration of a job well done.

Risking any credibility I’ve ever gained in incorporating humility into my public or teaching personas, then…“I’m thrilled to announce” the results of this, my final semester teaching at Notre Dame. With gratitude to Shayla, my family and friends, and every single student whose hard work and character these numbers and comments reflect and represent. (And, of course, Claude.ai, whose design skills rival those of the most talented freshman design major I’ve ever encountered; where would we be without you, Claude.ai?)

1. “Paul’s honesty and willingness to engage with difficult, pressing questions are among his greatest strengths as an instructor — particularly in a philosophy course, where that kind of openness is essential. His ability to address profound topics in a casual, approachable way made me feel more supported and willing to participate than I ever have in a classroom setting. As a junior, this was the first course in which I voluntarily spoke up in class. Most of all, I found Paul to be an exceptional professor because he leads as a genuine, authentic person first. This is a rare and undervalued quality in academia, and one I haven’t observed many other professors intentionally cultivate. It created an environment where students felt safe to think out loud, take intellectual risks, and truly engage with the material.” — Work, Meaning & Happiness §01 student, Composite 5.0

2. “Professor Blaschko is an amazing, impactful professor, and Notre Dame is losing a staple of the undergraduate experience. This course of his is a real gem and manages to bridge the divide between where most college students are in their lives and philosophy itself. That’s something rare, and I suspect future classes’ experience of the intro to philosophy requirement will not be as meaningful without him. Give this man tenure, pay him whatever he needs.” — God & the Good Life student, Composite 5.0

3. “Professor Blaschko has a unique gift of relating difficult concepts and ideas to students in a language that’s easy to understand. His humor mixed with passion and deep knowledge of philosophy has made someone like me — who previously had no interest in it — read about philosophy in her free time. This class has had an incredible impact on my life, and I believe it’s caused me to re-evaluate my routine, values, and career aspirations so that heaven, not work, is my ultimate goal. The discussions of this class is what I hope comes to mind when I think of my Notre Dame education.” — Work, Meaning & Happiness §01 student, Composite 5.0

4. “Paul did an amazing job at personally connecting to a lecture hall of hundreds of students. I felt he personally engaged very well and simultaneously pushed us to think more deeply on the given content while also developing our unique stances. His lighthearted demeanor made me feel very comfortable in the class. For me GGL embodied what learning should truly be — a place where you can engage with peers and faculty without necessarily worrying about the grade. Paul’s primary focus was our well-being and philosophy, not some stupid letter grade.” — God & the Good Life student, Composite 5.0

5. “Everything. Paul takes so much time to meet with us, is constantly available for coffee, asks insightful questions, gives the best feedback I’ve ever seen in any class, and genuinely cares about his students. I believe he is doing the real work, the real research, into how to meaningfully direct all of our lives. Paul is one of the best professors I’ve ever had and I’m so grateful to be in his class. He is a role model in living well with his family and career. His network is exceptional but he doesn’t sacrifice any deep thinking. He is truly amazing.” — Work, Meaning & Happiness §01 student, Composite 5.0

6. “Professor Blaschko is a truly excellent instructor. I had heard as much and trusted him with my Monday morning time slot — the wisest registration choice I have made yet. He helped me start off every week in a positive, contemplative frame of mind. His lectures are incredibly engaging, and he shows a passion for philosophy that is infectious. Good luck enticing future students into philosophy majors and minors without him. Professor Blaschko, if you are reading this, thank you for everything.” — God & the Good Life student, Composite 5.0

7. “Paul, I think you might be the only professor at ND who actually reads all of these, so I want to respect your time. The course was excellent. Each reading perfectly expanded upon the next and the argumentative essays and application reports made me better at disassembling arguments and helped me discover new philosophies and viewpoints. All of these were incredibly applicable to my working life, as I constructed a notion of each job’s virtues and vices that I can augment with experience in these fields. Everyone in the class was brilliant and you brought them together wonderfully in discussion. Thank you.” — Work, Meaning & Happiness §01 student, Composite 5.0

8. “The assignments were incredibly engaging, particularly the philosophical application reports, which challenged us to experiment with meaningful changes in our lives related to course content and reflect on those experiences. This kind of active, personal engagement with the material is rare and difficult to fully articulate. The level of meaningful learning I experienced in this course is difficult to describe. I genuinely believe every Notre Dame student should have exposure to this type of course — it addresses something our community is missing and has the potential to fill that gap in a profound way.” — Work, Meaning & Happiness §01 student, Composite 5.0

9. “Professor Blaschko is my favorite professor I have had at Notre Dame. His passion and drive to connect with his students, unpack the mysteries behind hierarchy, work, and power, and uphold Sheedy’s mission in everything he does is incredible to witness. Most philosophy professors have you read and analyze literature from a thousand years ago and understand why it was important at the time. Professor Blaschko has taught me how the meaning of work has shifted over time, why dated perspectives on work are important now, and why it is important to understand differing perspectives on what ‘good work’ is before entering the workforce ourselves. Particularly at a university that prides itself on business students ‘growing the good,’ I feel his role was monumental in establishing what ‘good’ even means. Aimless work is unproductive work. Why have the vague goal without defining its components?” — Work, Meaning & Happiness §02 student, Composite 5.0

10. “Professor Blaschko is such an amazing professor, leader, and mentor that I am not sure I can express it in this statement. I have learned so much in this course through every lecture, assignment, and discussion. Professor Blaschko takes the time to clearly understand every student and to provide extremely valuable feedback that has helped me to rethink my entire career and meaning of work in my life. Professor Blaschko is the type of professor that makes Notre Dame what it is — and this university, the philosophy department, and the Sheedy Family Program will not be the same without him.” — Work, Meaning & Happiness §02 student, Composite 5.0

Thank you.

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Vita

Commencement at Notre Dame is my Super Bowl. Ask my friends in the philosophy department office. I’ve never missed an opportunity to share in the festivities of commencement, and I feel equal parts proud, mournful, and sentimental every year. I’ve often thought, if I feel even 10% as proud of my students as their parents do (even 1%), that means I’m more than filled with pride, completely and entirely, every single year.

I love ritual of it. Carefully straightening gowns, pinning caps in place, and making sure every part of the regalia is perfectly in place, even though the regalia itself is literally laughable in its style; even though there’s not more than two people in the whole stadium who could tell you, definitively, the precise angle at which one ought to position one’s mortarboard; even though a PhD “hood” is a hood in absolutely no sense of that word. A cap and gown is almost like a wedding dress in this way. It’s a type of garment meant for a single use, its meaning lies almost entirely in the communal context in which it is worn.

I love the joy. Crowds of people bursting at the seams with love and pride, ready to clap at the slightest opportunity; strangers shaking hands and knowing the significance of everything this occasion means to each and every student; sudden outbursts, screams and sometimes airhorns, as one beloved child, sibling, and friend walks across the stage after another, and then another, and then another.

I even love the sadness that’s mixed in. The tears of joy that are also tears of gratitude and even tears of real grief. If college has delivered on a fraction of its many promises, commencement is a real loss of community, comfort, and love. I tear up whenever I hear the ridiculous pomp and circumstance song or the fight song, even if they’re low quality recordings played over cheap speakers (especially then). I can’t imagine what I’ll do when the time comes for my children to graduate.

Part of the beauty of Notre Dame, in my opinion, is how much ownership and pride we all feel for this place. Notre Dame is so many things to so many people. It’s an academic institution, a nonprofit enterprise, a four-year home for thousands of students, and a place for research, learning, and, of course, football. I sometimes caution my students that they should be skeptical anytime anyone -- especially an employer or any entity that will one day see you as a potential donor -- claims to be “a family.” But I think this is because that word has a deep, sacred meaning, and that, even metaphorically, we should never say more than we really mean. But Notre Dame has been a family to me over the thirteen years I’ve been blessed to spend on campus, and so many people here -- my graduate student colleagues and my professors, then my coworkers on the staff, then my faculty colleagues, and even, and especially, my students and the alumni I’ve had the privilege to meet -- have come to be so much more than friends.

This year I can say, with all my graduating students: “Notre Dame has been my life. Now it’s time to see what’s after that.”

Dolce

I don’t know which is the most photographed university in the world, but Notre Dame has to be in the top 10. (Equally impressively, Matt Cashore has to be responsible for more than 50% of these, even if we factor in photos taken throughout its more than 150+ year history.) But I can almost promise that the best photograph anyone has ever seen of Notre Dame is the one they took themselves. I have one that my mom took of me and my siblings in front of the main building. We’d pulled over for gas in a small city in Indiana, only for my dad to say, “South Bend…it’s so familiar. Wait, I think this is where Notre Dame is!”

I took one myself, after I graduated my PhD program (during my transition from postdoc to staff, before I eventually became faculty). It’s the one I go to whenever I want to share my image of Notre Dame. The Notre Dame I see and have come to know and love.

It’s Notre Dame at sunrise, across Lake Mary from the center of campus. I remember holding my breath long enough to get a clear shot in the sub-freezing temperature. I remember looking at it and thinking, “Damn. This is gonna get a lot of likes. Hashtag no filter.” (It was a different time in my life…)

Spes

Perhaps the thing I love best about commencement, though, is the commencing. Every other year or so, I have a conversation with someone about why commencement is such a backward-looking affair. “Commencement” means to “send forth,” so why are we waxing nostalgic on all the wacky traditions and deeply personal moments of connection for ninety percent of it? Yes, there are speeches about how there will be struggles and victories after college (usually delivered by someone who’s experienced more of the second than the first), but much of the celebration itself is a celebration of what’s been, not what’s to come.

Here’s my theory on that.

Hope is not a purely forward-looking thing. It can’t be. Looking forward without looking back would be like handing someone a blank sheet of paper and saying, “Don’t forget your map.” Hope is built on the past, or, perhaps, builds on it. We are everything we’ve done thus far, which is why we aspire to do more, and do good. We already know that life is filled with struggles, because we’ve struggled. Some of us have struggled mightily during our time on campus. I’ve faced depression and serious episodes of anxiety over the years here. I’ve been blessed to then been in a position to walk with students going through the same.

The other day in office hours, a student asked me, with tears in her eyes: “How do you know that what’s next will be okay? How do you know you’ll be happy and content.” My first response was knee-jerk, though true: “I don’t,” I said. Because I didn’t. But then, on a moment’s reflection, I said, “But I know I’ll make it through. I’ve been through life alternating changes before, and so have you.” The only difference between us, and I finally believe this, is perspective. The tunnel always ends. We always find the light. And in the darkness, in the moments when that’s hardest to believe, we always have each other. We have our families and our “family.” We have what we’ve been and seen and know and love. We have our mother.

So I’ll say it, abandoning myself to the beautiful ridiculousness of tradition and ritual:

Love thee, Notre Dame.

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This morning I sent an email I never thought I’d write to my provost’s office. After 13 years, having built two of the most powerful communities I’ve ever been a part of with colleagues I’ve come to love dearly, I’ve decided to decline Notre Dame’s gracious offer of reappointment for next year.

Academia thinks in centuries, plans in decades, and operates on one-to-two year horizons. So it’s important for both parties to give each other as much notice as possible about what the coming year holds. On January 23rd of this year, I was offered another appointment in the philosophy department, teaching my beloved “God and the Good Life” class and “Work, Meaning, and Happiness” for the Sheedy Family Program. For a few years, though, I’ve been mulling new projects and different directions. I’ve had several opportunities to pursue them over the past year, but the logistics hadn’t quite lined up. Until now.

Why now?

The last couple years have been a time of intense discernment for me. Institutions are complex, and getting a read on Notre Dame’s mission, strategic plan, and my ability to contribute to it is something I’ve been considering carefully as winds have changed.

The truth is that the work I most want to do — the book I’m finishing, the questions I’m most alive to, the communities I most want to build — is pointing me somewhere new. When I wrote The Good Life Method, it opened doors I hadn’t expected. The Worklife manuscript I just finalized with my editors at Princeton UP has clarified for me what I actually think about work, vocation, and human flourishing. And that clarity, paradoxically, has helped me see that the next chapter isn’t the one I would have written for myself five years ago.

There’s a Benedictine idea I keep returning to: conversatio morum — ongoing conversion, a commitment to keep being formed rather than to “having arrived.” (The monastic equivalent to the “It’s the journey, not the destination” cliche, but in Latin, so: fancy.) I’ve found it’s easier to believe in that principle when things are comfortable. Living it out, when it means genuine change, is another matter.

What’s Next?

There’s another Benedictine principle, stabilitas loci — stability of place, and, at least in the near term and insofar as we can manage, our family plans to stay in South Bend, a community that has given us so much with so many dear friends that we love.

Workwise, I have a number of exciting opportunities that I’m exploring at the moment. I consider myself more than blessed to have the options set before me. Until July 1st, though, I’ll be hunkered down in my office doing the work of transition; handing off the Sheedy Program, the Dept. of Ed. grant, and ensuring — first and foremost — that the students of Notre Dame are taken care of (in any way I can support) for the fall semester and beyond.

Oh, and Shayla has a few projects for me around the house. “Real work,” she calls it. Tending gardens and refinishing my first pit area. Figuring out what to do with those concrete stairs that have been crumbling in front of our house. After all, we’re gonna need those firmly in place for the next fifty or so years — for the adventures that are to come.

The buzz around this thing has been almost deafening; students have been performatively cringing on Social Media, and faculty have been shaking their heads in disgust. The general sentiment being: This is not Notre Dame. This is not what college is about. This can’t be the future of higher education….But what this Substack Post presupposes is…maybe it is?

Hear me out.

I’ve argued in this newsletter for months (which feels like years, or even decades) that higher education is in dire straits, and that is showing up in grading and student engagement (and elsewhere). AI is unmasking a problem that’s been bubbling beneath the surface for as long as there have been universities, but, more recently, since the research enterprise has truly replaced teaching within the corporate mission of elite schools. Harvard published an internal report this spring wondering why their classrooms were almost completely empty. Yale published an open(ish) report last week trying to grasp at all the possible reasons nobody (including their own students) trust them. (But it also included twenty or so very confident recommendations, so I guess we’re just supposed to…trust them?)

So maybe this student just has the guts to say what everybody knows…even as we’re all trying out absolute best to engage in collective denial.

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*****

Yesterday, in the last meeting of the Sheedy Program’s “Investing and the Good Life” for the year, I listened to Brad Gerstner talk about AI and the future of, well, everything. I’m used to talks like this, and even more used to rolling my eyes at them. But Gerstner was careful in his predictions (which can’t but be incredible, given the facts). He was precise, both in his analysis and evaluation. He wasn’t overly optimistic, or blind to the challenges that are to come. He was also credible. He invented “Trump Accounts” (though not originally by that name) and worked for 5 years — under Biden, then Trump — to achieve one of the rare bipartisan, high-impact pieces of legislation passed in the last decade.

You can hear some of the highlights of Gerstner’s talk (in a different context) here:

Though he wasn’t naive (or as obscurantist as almost any other investor in AI I’ve ever heard in person or online), he was, certainly, optimistic about the coming AI era. I found myself increasingly persuaded throughout the talk, but toward the end I took two steps back. During Q&A, I was able to ask Brad to help me think through the question I care more about than anything at the moment. Here’s my question:

Suppose we divide skills into two buckets: those that we would cognitively offload if we could, like mere number crunching, and those that we wouldn’t want to offload even if we could, like having deep dialogue, considering whether to believe in God, or appreciating great works of art. How do you think about what we put in the second of those two buckets? Because I see so many AI advocates essentially arguing that superabundance is coming, that AI will be able to do everything, but…what are we even hoping for? It can’t just be an infinite cycle?

I won’t even try recreate Gerstner’s response. It was lovely and convincing and provocative, but I don’t want to do him the disservice of trying to just recapture it from memory 24 hours later. What I will do is share what I took away from that response. Essentially: AI is helping to reveal what belongs in each of these buckets, and it’s also revealing what we’ve already started to put in these buckets. Yes, dialogue and big questions will also be in the "distinctively human” bucket, but there are probably even more activities, projects, and even work that AI will give us access to. In the same way that we eventually had to let go of card catalogues, we may eventually have to “let go” of some of the types of work we currently think are essential to learning. We might have to “let go” of old ways of doing things that still feel relatively new. Organizing lecture notes into study guides was part of what it meant for me to study in college, it was an essential part of the learning process. But if an AI-agent make that process more efficient? Well, whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I think, depends on what else we choose to spend our time on.

The thing I love most about the controversial email that student sent out (and there’s only a couple things I love, and plenty of things I don’t particularly care for) is the way it articulates the value proposition of an elite education. The author doesn’t question the $90k per year price tag. Nor does he suggest that students can’t learn, or find meaningful connections on campus. But notice what he claims he and his classmates are all (knowingly) paying tuition and fees to be able to do: to get a degree, to find a network, to enjoy college, and — instead of studying, organizing, or managing the insane schedules put upon them by coursework and deadlines — to do “literally anything else.”

I disagree with much of what our friend, Caden, wrote in his provocative guerrilla e-advertisement. There’s much about his credential-centric view of the value of college I think is just wrong. I don’t see an appreciation for the distinctive value of a true liberal arts education. And he and I may or may not agree on what the ideal purpose of a university education is in contemporary society.

But if I were a student having received this email — noting that it does not claim, at any point, to be a tool for academic dishonesty — I don’t know. I’d probably sign up for a trial.

After all, it apparently only takes 2 minutes to get some more information…

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It’s the collective nightmare of all Notre Dame students: a failing grade.

But that’s exactly what our University received last semester on its “free speech report card.” According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Notre Dame ranks in the bottom 20% of universities nationwide when it comes to issues of free speech and free expression. While we aren’t alone at the bottom — Barnard, Harvard, U Penn, NYU and Columbia received similarly dismal rankings — the shock was enough to make waves in the Notre Dame network, both on and off campus.

The report was so starkly at odds with our self-image that initial responses, including ours, were largely skeptical. For instance, one headline-grabbing finding reports that “24% of Notre Dame students find it acceptable to use violence to stop a disagreeable political speaker.” Given the mild-to-neutral political climate among most students and in most classrooms on campus, many of us found this simply too hard to believe. And if a wild claim like that formed any part of the basis of the failing grade, it almost felt safe to assume bad intentions were somehow skewing the data collection or analysis. “We didn’t opt in to any class with this FIRE organization,” we thought. “Maybe they’re just another political organization trying to grift off widespread ill will toward elite institutions; maybe the rankings are just ragebait.”

But something about these findings struck a nerve. Even if we were being forced to take the course, and even if the grade seemed obviously unfair, we just couldn’t shake the confidence hit of seeing an “F” on a report card with our name on it. We decided we had to investigate. At the time, we, the authors of this piece, were covering the value of free speech and protected disagreement in God and the Good Life; one of us was teaching it, and the other two were taking it. We figured there wasn’t much to lose in doing a deeper dive to see if we could cut through the hype.

Here’s what we found.

Prima facie reasons to suspect FIRE’s analysis don’t lead to any damning or discrediting evidence (in other words: it’s not just smoke, there really is some FIRE)

FIRE is an independent organization, and it gives itself substantial latitude in interpreting the data it collects. Their “grades” for free speech and the rankings that come with them are calculated using a “weighting” system that could, in theory, be manipulated; the descriptive analysis they provide in their report is, to a significant degree, subjective. Each “group” of questions — e.g., self-censorship reports or administrative policy — counts for a different percentage in the final calculation. To stretch the analogy (perhaps too far), FIRE not only gets to decide what the most important assignments are for universities to complete, but it also gets to decide how much each counts toward the final grade.

But a close examination of the organization and its history gave us little reason to suspect a politically biased agenda. FIRE is a libertarian organization that, according to The New York Times, has a long and bipartisan track record of defending speech across ideological lines. It has advocated for conservative professors and progressive institutions. While Columbia and Harvard are low in FIRE’s rankings, the organization alternated between defending these schools’ right to express their political views free from federal pressures from the Trump administration and critiquing apparently illiberal policies within them. So whatever else there is to say about FIRE, we have to admit that they have a reputation for consistency and do pretty well on transparency with regard to their mission. And while it’s true that the organization received money from the Koch Institute, it’s also been supported by the center-left Knight Foundation. It’s known that donors (who all have the option of remaining anonymous) do not systematically skew toward one side of the political spectrum. None of these factors “cancel out bias,” but neither do they suggest the profile of a transparently ideological organization using polemical interpretation of data as a wedge.

Further evidence of their credibility comes from the fact that FIRE’s data set — which they made available to us upon request — looks pretty clean. FIRE contracts with a nationally known and respected polling organization to collect its data. We poked, prodded and even did a bit of scouring, especially Matthew, with the help of an unnamed but very popular economics professor. And we didn’t find anything in the data to be concerned about. In fact, once inside the set, we found plenty of nuance and insights FIRE could have weaponized but didn’t. Self-reported attitudes from Notre Dame freshmen over time, for instance, point to some surprising, statistically significant trends. But the data here was merely suggestive, and FIRE wisely, in our opinion, seems to have held back from drawing conclusions that could have made even more provocative headlines, at least until they have a bigger data set.

Tolerance of violence isn’t actually the main story at Notre Dame, but there are still plenty of issues to address

Once you reverse engineer the interpretive layer FIRE uses to translate its data for public discourse, we found that our failing grade is at least something to keep an eye on. In our reading, the unique story that emerged about Notre Dame is not one of violent unrest or civil disobedience, but quiet self-censorship and a subtle but powerful fear of open dialogue.

The starkest statistics about Notre Dame students favoring political violence (listed as “Disruptive Conduct” in FIRE reports) weren’t substantiated on a comparative and granular level. Notre Dame places 35 out of 257 schools in the category, so unless there’s a major drop-off in the top 30 — a drop-off so significant that we’d probably be able to see the smoke rising over neighboring universities in Michigan and Ohio — there’s no reason to think Notre Dame contains sleeper cells of explosive activism or is somehow a powder keg of political animosity.

The University’s greater weaknesses evidently lie in failures of courage on a smaller scale. Notre Dame ranked 158 out of 257 in self-censorship, with religious peers like Villanova noticeably outperforming us and some state schools like Purdue, just down the road, basically setting the curve. When it comes to political openness (which you’d expect to be closely correlated with self-censorship), we rank even worse at 203. We believe that dismal performances in these, largely individual measures, compound: even if the Main Building isn’t at risk of burning down anytime soon, it does seem like we’re harboring a culture of caution and false consensus that can only make the institution more anemic over time.

In search of a more complete picture

With regard to political openness (asked in the form of “Do you find it uncomfortable to have an honest conversation about X on campus”), Notre Dame stacks up poorly against both Catholic and geographic peers. Notre Dame students were less likely to have an honest conversation than Villanova and/or Purdue students on questions of abortion, the Israel-Palestine conflict, transgender rights, gay rights, affirmative action, immigration and racial inequality.

These are arguably some of the most contentious social-political issues of our time, so Notre Dame’s unique avoidance of these discussion topics is perplexing, especially given its prominent political posturing on issues like bipartisanship, shared inquiry and civil discourse.

If differentials were attributable to religious emphasis or Catholic culture, then supposedly Villanova should not consistently perform better; similarly, if attributable to geography and international breadth, Purdue shouldn’t. Why are Notre Dame students being more fearful of engaging in honest discussion is a question that remains to be answered.

Similarly, Notre Dame students find themselves withholding opinions in class more than their average peers. When asked if they find themselves self-censoring during in-class discussions, over 70% of Notre Dame students responded that they self-censor twice a month or more, with more than a quarter reporting that this happens multiple times a week or more. This sort of behavior is obviously a stumbling block to proper intellectual formation and healthy dialogue, and it’s also getting worse. Not only does Notre Dame score approximately 6% worse on self-censorship, but the proportion of students who self-censor rose 14% from just last year, illustrating the growing challenge the University faces with encouraging students to share their viewpoints in and out of class.

There are many hypotheses as to why this is the case, each with some plausibility from the armchair. Perhaps the progressive Catholicism in Notre Dame’s leadership since Fr. Hesburgh has had a neutralizing effect on the more intellectually conservative faculty it used to draw, and perhaps the lack of such expression at the front of the classroom has had a chilling effect in the seats. Or perhaps it’s a bit of the opposite, and perceived pressures to show deference to traditional (even magisterial) authority have had a chilling effect on the fast-growing segment of faculty and students who are more secularly disposed. Is it the small size of our school and less metropolitan locale? Or — as we hypothesize and aim to test — does this climate reflect a combination of factors that includes the professional aspirations of the majority of Notre Dame students and the ways political dialogue has become associated with high professional and economic risk in recent years?

Regardless of the cause (or causes), there is certainly room for administrative growth, as well as faculty and student-led efforts to improve. Breaking down barriers to open dialogue — or even just working on the small habits and virtues necessary for it — can have a cascading effect across campus. Much of the problem — self-censorship and a fear of political openness — really is problems that are mainly “in our own heads.” And if we’re willing to reestablish strong norms that reward rather than punish political and other forms of civil discourse, we could be the Notre Dame we present to the world. The Notre Dame Fr. Jenkins defended at university functions and in The New York Times. The Notre Dame Fr. Hesburgh described as:

“A crossroads where all the vital intellectual currents of our time meet in dialogue ... where every sincere inquirer is welcomed and listened to and respected by a serious consideration of what he has to say about his belief or unbelief ... a place where the endless conversation is harbored and not foreclosed.”

Paul Blaschko

Assistant teaching professor, philosophy

Director, Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise and Society

Notre Dame Ph.D. class of 2018

Matthew Deahl

Class of 2029

Joseph Dachnowicz

Class of 2029

March 2

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

Thanks to the editorial team of The Observer for publishing this, to this semester's GGL class and several faculty who provided comments on it, and to Matthew Deahl and Joseph Dachnowicz for their ongoing efforts to carry the torch on this one. It's an important issue everywhere, but it's one that I suspect will require nuance, local knowledge, and a growing awareness within our campus community to actually address. I'm grateful to be part of this project.

“We see from evaluations that your students love you at this school,” he begins, but you can tell from his tone that this is apparently grounds for suspicion. “And we see that they’re apparently motivated to do the work, and see it as relevant and useful.”

You’re confused. These are goals of yours, but it’s clear that things aren’t going the way of a congratulatory announcement.

“In fact, they seem to enjoy the teaching so much, that virtually none of them skip class, virtually all of them complete multiple rounds of revisions on their assignments.”

“Yes, and I’m proud of that,” you say.

“Well that’s the problem,” he finally says. “Your students are all succeeding.”

The notion that learning entails or requires suffering is an old one. Perhaps old enough, and so widespread, that we shouldn’t even call it a notion. Learning requires discipline. It’s paradigmatically serious. It’s no time for distraction, which joy must always be.

In the old days, we celebrated this ideal by hitting our students. Like, hitting them. With actual sticks (or rods or switches or whatever). When I see this depicted, in film or old timey magazines or whatever, I totally get it. Teaching requires attention, and small amounts of pain can focus the mind. But I, like any sane or healthy person, recoil at the means employed. First of all, it’s barbaric. Physical violence, we know, needs to be contained commodified under very certain parameters to be broadcast on national television. There’s no place for violence in personal relationships. Secondly, though, I see it as cheating. An instructor with a switch is lazy where they should be the most involved; coercing attention through threats is like fishing with dynamite or winning with steroids. It’s a shortcut that leaves everyone worse off.

So why is it that we still believe that learning requires pain? Why is it a heuristic for quality if everyone “fears” a certain professor? Why do we make design decisions in our courses based not on any principled goal, but on a rough estimate of how much stress a slightly above average student can tolerate? And why — for the love of god — must some students fail for me to feel like a man and for everyone to get their money’s worth?

The practice of sorting students into categories is often traced back, in America, to Ezra Stiles, a president of Yale in the late 1700s. In order to facilitate inter-institutional communication, students were described with one of four Latin phrases: "Optimi" (best), "Second Optimi" (second best), "Inferiores" (less good), and "Pejores" (worst). These labels were tied to quartiles, with the — baffling to me — assumption that for every optimi, there must be an inferiore in the crowd. For every “second best,” someone’s got to be “the worst.”

Over the years this system started to be used across institutions (mostly divinity schools, at first). When they started grading eggs in the middle of the twentieth century, instructors followed suit, apparently deciding that stamping letters onto the crown was a bit more dignified.

One lie that we’ve told as educators over the years is that it matters in some absolute sense to rank and distinguish. (My suspicion is because a hierarchy of status is all most academics can truly be said to produce.) We almost never push ourselves, but knee jerk meritocracy is where we go if anyone ever does. “Employers need to know! Grad schools!”

But our own grad admissions largely ignore GPA, and I’ve yet to meet an employer who was concerned to know precisely how much introductory philosophy one of my students has relative to the others who were forced to sit in the same room at the same time in a given semester. In fact, competitive employers of the type who’d plausibly care about relative rankings are, increasingly, recruiting students in the spring of their sophomore year, with the arms race only accelerating. From there, they’re assigned to communities of practice, taught the industry relevant skills, and then ranked, filtered, and processed accordingly (or spat out upon the earth). I’ve heard that people expect recruiting season’s moving into fall of sophomore year by 2027. How long before employers figure out that they can save themselves (and their students) an enormous amount of money just by going all the way back to high school? (If I was an employer in an industry requiring technical specialization, I’d ask students to send me their college acceptance letters. That’s all the information I can really usefully get about them anyways.)

Sorting and ranking isn’t inherently bad, as tools of a well functioning meritocracy or for some other useful or noble purpose. But something’s not being inherently bad doesn’t make it inherently good, let alone necessary. The truth is: It’s laziness. Why try to engage and get to know your students when the switch is close at hand? Why articulate measures and goals we could all understand (including our students), rather than obfuscating, inspiring vast amounts of distress and suffering, and then look proudly at each defeated freshman and sophomore who failed to qualify for this honorific or develop a modicum of intellectual curiosity.

It’s lazy, and it’s shameful. And it’s what the vast majority of us are doing in higher-ed, even as each update proves that the machines will beat us at virtually any status sorting intellectual game we devise.

Henry David Thoreau quit his teaching job two weeks in because he was unwilling to administer corporal punishment. His outraged community demanded that he do what he was being paid for: “Just hit the little bastards till they learn, Henry.” According to lore, he lined his students up in an arbitrary order when pushed by his supervisor. He slapped a few of them at random (perhaps to show the performative absurdity if the practice), let them all go, and apparently decided “teaching” wasn’t for him.

He went on to found his own school, and his innovative practices included taking field trips to observe nature.

But I just can’t stop thinking of those poor, uneducated kids. Wandering around in the vast earthiness of creation with no one to beat the knowledge in.

This week I’m preparing remarks for our next installment in the Sheedy Program’s “Dinner & Dialogue” series at Notre Dame. These monthly events provide our whole community (about 105 students at the moment) with sustenance, physically and intellectually, and form the basis of our distinctive community life. Once per year, during “Junior Parents Weekend” (JPW), we invite our Shuniors (the “junior” equivalent of “Sheeniors,” which we’ve committed ourselves to, hard) to invite friends and family to join us.

We all know what a rich and meaningful dialogue is. Conversations we desperately don’t want to end. Discussions that last (too) long into the night. Soul-bearing exchanges where we feel, for a moment, like someone sees us, our whole selves, as we really are. People often assume that such conversations just happen. They are beautiful, love, fortuitous and fleeting. But in my experience, they usually don’t. This is good news, though, because the same reason they’re rare is the same reason they don’t need to be. Meaningful dialogue occurs when a set of conditions are present, and while these conditions rarely “just happen” in everyday life, they are conditions we can intentionally create through skill-building, practice, and cultivation of a disposition to recognize and take advantage of them.

That’s what these dinners are really about.

“Don’t just study business. Find meaning in it.”

The Sheedy Program sits in a space that universities sometimes struggle to inhabit. On the one hand, students are deeply interested in business, markets, investing, entrepreneurship, management, consulting, and professional life. On the other hand, they are asking the deepest human questions, and examining them with an appropriate intellectual seriousness: What is work for? What is a good life? What should I be trying to become?

Those questions belong together, but it’s not always clear how or why.

I’m an academic. And I work in a tradition, philosophy, that’s been represented since half a century BC by characters who concentrate so hard they fall into wells, or ride in balloons till their heads are literally in the clouds. So I know that higher-ed right now is not especially well known for serious engagement with real world problems.

I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I more often hear colleagues scoffing at the study of business (pointing out, for instance, that neither Harvard nor Princeton have undergraduate business schools), than in seeing the incredible social, political, intellectual, and even moral potential in it.

Just after about 400 BC, Aristotle started systematically asking the a question the preceded and would outlast him: Which is better, the life of action or the life of contemplation?

We, philosophers and academics, tend to remember (and loudly proclaim) one part of his answer, i.e. that human beings were designed to think, reflect, and contemplate the immensity of reality. But we forget that, for Aristotle, a crucial aspect of this -- an inseparable aspect -- was engagement in the real world; practicing virtue and gaining life experience to distill, over the course of our lives, into wisdom.

We sometimes read quickly over the passage where Aristotle says explicitly that we conduct inquiry into things like ethics “not so that we might know what virtue is” at a theoretical level, but “so that we might become good.” Or else, he warns: “there would be no benefit in [inquiring in the first place].”

Sheedy students embody what Aristotle is pointing to here. And they do it in a way that enriches the university community today and will one day enrich the world.

Engaging the world through virtuous enterprise, entrepreneurship, stewardship, design, economic analysis, investment and the creation of value…this is what our students strive to do, and will continue to do, it’s something our society desperately needs.

But learning and formation doesn’t happen only in classrooms. It happens in conversation—in the slow, reflective exchange of experience and judgment.

Which brings me back to these dinners.

What real conversation requires

When conducting dialogue training (in class, in the Sheedy Program, or at other universities or organizations), I often ask people to think about the last conversation they had that made them feel seen as a whole person.

Most people can think of one, but not many.

What made it different? Usually some combination of the same elements:

• Trust

• Mutual respect

• Time to think

• A sense that people were speaking honestly rather than performing

We tend to treat these things as accidental, as if they either appear or they don’t. But traditions of philosophy and education going back to Socrates (and Confucius, the Stoics, and more) suggest something else: these conditions can be cultivated deliberately.

One of the most practical ways to do that is through norms.

Norms are simply shared expectations about how we speak and listen. Most communities have them, but they are often implicit and unevenly enforced. When norms are made explicit and practiced, the quality of conversation changes quickly and noticeably.

In our program, students spend time learning and practicing a small set of habits that support dialogue. When guests join us, I usually suggest just three things to keep in mind:

1. Take a few minutes, five or ten, to observe before jumping in. Norms are baked into culture and practice, and they become visible when you’re looking for them. It’s easier to contribute well once you understand it.

2. Start with a genuine question. Not a disguised speech (like the despised sophists might), not a rhetorical move that resonated with you in a cable news interview or on NPR; an actual question you want help thinking about.

3. Speak from experience when possible. Arguments matter, but stories and lived examples often open the space where real thinking can happen.

These are simple practices, but they are surprisingly powerful.

Living together in “a community of speeches and thought”

One of my favorite lines from Aristotle describes friendship as sharing in one another’s perception that we exist—something that happens, he says, intentionally. Here it is:

Perceiving that one lives belongs among the things pleasant in themselves, for life is by nature a good thing, and to perceive the good present in oneself is pleasant. . . Accordingly, one ought to share in the friend’s perception that he exists, and this would come to pass by living together and sharing in a community of speeches and thought— for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of human beings, and not as with cattle, merely feeding in the same place.

That phrase has stayed with me for years. A community of speeches and thought. Not just proximity. Not just networking. Not just exchanging information or feeding at a common trough (no matter how ornamented). Thinking together in a way that makes each person more fully present to themselves and to others.

Universities at their best create spaces like that. But it doesn’t happen automatically. It requires intention, structure, and practice.

That’s what we’re trying to build around the Sheedy dinner tables. And it’s an endeavor I can’t wait to invite more guests and students into.

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In 1930, at the outset of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was stumping for capitalism. As hard as it is to imagine now, Keynes saw a very real possible future at that moment where the United States and Europe would reject the model, or where the growth it generated whole be held back by a fracturing workforce that was starting to envy any model that made the basic necessities into basic rights.

His argument was more ethos than economics and his tone was more prophetic than professorial. Veering from moral philosophy to literature to quasi-apocalyptic scripture, Keynes wanted to make sure the world knew what was at stake, and he made it mathematically evident that economic salvation was just over the horizon.

…[I]n the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still.

By roughly the year 2030, Keynes predicted, advances in technological efficiency, combined with growing and compounding wealth, would mean that work would be optional for the vast majority of Americans. Indeed, instead of redistributing wealth through taxation, we’d be clamoring to redistribute labor. Each person would be given 10 or 15 hours of work per week just so we’d have something meaningful to do.

(And I should point out that, while most of us, in 2025, probably seriously doubt we’re anywhere near this target, not all of us do…)

Shockingly, Keynes spends the majority of his essay worrying about whether a workless future would be bad for mankind, but I kind of get it. I’m the sort of person who (at least sometimes) gets the work itch when weekends don’t pass quickly enough. I sometimes find myself squinting up at my iPhone at two or three in the morning rewriting drafts of a chapter or a Substack. If I don’t have enough work, I don’t just leave (even though no one is watching me and I totally could); I make-work. Sometimes I make far too much of it…All this to say, I sort of get what Keynes is worried about. His question is the more upbeat way of articulating what that Debbiest of Downers, Arthur Schopenhauer, noticed in human nature when he said:

Certain it is that work, worry, labor and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? what would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease…men would either die of boredom or hang themselves…

(Who hurt you on vacation, Arthur?)

Workism Defined

Every couple of months The Atlantic runs the same article. (Not the “Is X a Religion?” where X can stand for Crossfit, “woke” politics, or just really getting into cosplay or something.) The article I’m talking about is the Why-Did-Keynes’s-Prediction-Fail piece. Usually it’s written by Derek Thompson (who I’m still not convinced isn’t Ezra Klein), but not always. Sometimes the article even manifests in entirely different venues, but it’s always the same article and it’s always in The Atlantic (even when it’s not).

Of course, the original Atlantic article by Derek Thompson on Keynes’s failed prediction was by Derek Thompson, and it appeared in The Atlantic:

I have to say, this article is the best article of its kind, and it made a huge splash when it first came out. In addition to eventually becoming a meme of itself, Thompson wrote a book, gives talks, and makes videos about it. The word “workism” has even made its way into the, uh, parlance of our times. In fact, its penetrated so far into the culture that even analytic philosophers — the very last group to know about anything cool and the very first to destroy what’s cool about it — are now using it in academic journals. And, of course, we analytics are doing with “workism” what we do with all wildly implausible and entirely absurd theories: we’re defending it.

Now, really instead of making fun of him, I should be thanking Matthew Hammerton. After all: (A) defending a seemingly indefensible thesis is a methodological move in philosophy as important as the “presumption of innocence” in the adversarial legal system, and (B) we all need theories to dunk on (but I need dunkable theories most of all). In fact, in articulating the view and responding to common objections (both in popular media and implicit in the philosophical literature), Hammerton challenges us to articulate, and thereby examine, the reasons why most of us are happy to nod along with Thompson’s pejorative use of the term he’s just coined.

First things first, then: What is “workism”? Hammerton:

Workism (WK) = “the phenomenon of people making their work the primary source of meaning and identity in their lives.”

• WK is a “totalistic” account that grants that the value of meaning in one’s life and self-conception can, in principle, come from a single source: work.

• WK is a practical stance that “allows work to dominate all other aspects of your life when it comes to deriving meaning and identity.”

• WK is the view that the Good Life (at least for some) consists in a life of work-related achievement, “professional success,” and/or maximizing the impact of one’s work.

Well, when he puts it like that…

If you’re like me, you probably still don’t feel the intellectual pull of workism. But, if you’re really like me, the fact that you don’t is, itself, a puzzle. Because even though I’m not tempted one bit by work-ism, I can’t seem to get enough of work. This puts working in the same category for me as eating more than three brownies at a party and sleeping in instead of working out: I know I shouldn’t love it, but it just feels so good…

When I find myself in this spot, I like to step back and reflect:

1. I believe: X is bad (e.g. excessively eating brownies, excessively snuggling under blankets instead of working out), but

2. I act as if: X is good.

3. So either my belief is false or my action is misaligned with what I know to be true.

In almost all cases, it’s the latter. (Weakness of will is basically a human condition, and there’s generally not a puzzle as to why it happens with respect to a particular good.) But work is somewhat different. Unlike stuffing my face with brownies, work isn’t generally pleasurable (or, at least, it’s not the promise of a near-term dopamine hit that generally keeps me coming back to the office). Also, like exercising in the morning, work is usually quite demanding. It requires skills like analysis and critical evaluation, and even some virtues like patience, persistence, and creativity. We find meaning and purpose in work. Many of our longest lasting friendships are carried on at work. And there are long stretches of work that are, if not electrifying, at least downright enjoyable.

So if work is such a good thing (and I really do believe that, in our world, it often is): What’s wrong with workism?

Spoiler (thought it’s probably too late in the post for that): I’m going to leave this question mostly unanswered here. I, like Derek Thompson, have thoughts. And many of these appear in my upcoming book (teaser below!).

But I want to leave you with a visual depiction of this puzzle and a request for you to explain it to me.

The depiction:

The request: Based on my presentation of it, what — if anything — is wrong with workism? As a colleague put the question to me in conversation the other day: Just because work serves as the “primary” source of identity and meaning in one’s life doesn’t mean it need be the “exclusive” such source (though perhaps my depiction above unfairly suggests this to be the case). I do not think you (or I or anyone) should make work their primary source of meaning and identity. I can’t quite fully explain why. Perhaps you’ll help…?

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The aforementioned teaser (with the aforementioned thoughts in a now-mentioned red box):

Did you enjoy this ride? Please feel free to….

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Universities — like many socially entrenched, essential institutions — move slowly. Sure, there are always “advances” in teaching, research, and learning (though I always raise an eyebrow when these are described as “cutting edge”). Yes, there are “best practices” and “evidence-based” norms, policies, and directives, but, for the most part, the beauty of the college campus is that new ideas and old media are steeped in the same brew. Where else could you find someone writing about quantum physics on a chalkboard? Or what industry lab would be working on training AI to recognize and transliterate handwritten medieval or ancient poetry?

So, too, the public intellectual life of the university, or, at least, my university, is taken up across a mix of formats. There’s student radio, student television, and student theater, but my favorite form has to be our student newspapers, The Observer (and the unofficial, slightly spicier Irish Rover). For whatever reason, these have been the most reliable source, for me, of sophisticated, thoughtful, intellectually engaging student writing. The editors and reporters are talented, and the opinion columnists and letters to the editor are wide ranging and erudite.

So imagine my delight when I found out that not one, but two student opinion pieces published this month engaged with the article I wrote on leisure, culture, and the good life. This beautiful essay, by Erica Dowd, is articulate as any piece I’ve read in CHE or IHE (and more credible than most of those) about the contemporary pressures facing universities and how this has affected students’ experience. I get a shoutout toward the end:

Paul Blaschko, assistant teaching professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, offers a contemporary perspective of incongruities present on Notre Dame’s campus in his piece “Creating a Culture of Virtuous Leisure in a World of Total Work”. He writes, “I think we all know deep down that the ever-increasing pressures to produce, acc­omplish, and achieve are somehow incompatible with the environment we’re trying to create as educators”. Perhaps he would find humor in the fact that my Veblen paper was crammed into a three-hour time frame, as I had an interview scheduled for a coveted junior-year summer internship.

I do, indeed, find humor in that.

The other piece more directly engaged with the same article, albeit from a somewhat more adversarial angle. Senior physics major (and theology enthusiast) Richard Taylor challenges an apparent implication in my essay, i.e. that joining clubs, majors, or programs like the Sheedy Family Program (which I founded and now direct with Chris Hedlin and Brett Beasley) are the best way to commit oneself to an intellectually and morally serious life during one’s studies at Notre Dame. Taylor writes (and I quote at some length):

We cannot live the intellectual life by adding another minor, by applying for another major or by joining another club. Neither do we need to engage in more “academic workshops” or dine in “a room that looks like we’re on the set for ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Downton Abbey.’” We only need to, after a long day of coursework, in the silence of our own cinderblock dorm rooms at our reused desks, take a peek inside a worn-out library book for no other purpose than to satisfy our curiosity. We only need to, on the walk between classes, jot down a note on a cracked iPhone screen of an interesting thought we just had or admire through smudged glasses the sun shining through colorful autumn leaves. We only need to, while getting lunch with a friend and overheating in South Dining Hall, raise a question about the faith or the economy (or even some other far more trivial topic) and stumble together toward an answer.

The pedagogue has the impossible task of getting students to do something only they can do for themselves. Designing programs and curricula to create a culture that fosters the intellectual life at Notre Dame is a noble endeavor which addresses a real problem with our current “achievement” culture. But this is a cultural change which can only really be affected from the bottom up — from the free wills of curious individuals choosing to value truth, because of the joy of knowing, in the leftover time in their schedules and in the conversations with their friends.

The piece was striking for the elegance of its prose: Taylor can somehow construct arguments with clarity and directness in just a few hundred words. I can barely write an email in less than a couple thousand…It was also striking to me because of how much I agreed with as I read it. I nodded along almost to the very end, and, even then, there were really only a couple points of departure.

In my response to Taylor (generously published by The Observer today), I respond thus:

Even if a healthy intellectual culture requires free and active participation on the part of individuals, the conditions for their growth can be actively created and intentionally sustained. Indeed, Taylor’s reasonable suggestion that students can and should decide for themselves to value and prioritize the beauty of reflection and understanding starts sounding like the poetic individualism of Thoreau by the end of his article. We should celebrate our free will and use it wisely. We should recognize and activate our ability to impact our environment and culture. But at the end of the day we are dependent, rational animals, and learning through dialogue is an irreducibly communal endeavor. Even if building, and then inviting students into, communities of learning is — as Taylor implies — really the best an educator can aim to do. It’s also, for that reason, the least we can responsibly aim at.

The Sheedy Program is not a panacea for all the intellectual ills that afflict college students, nor is it even an antidote to all the most serious obstacles to pursuing an intellectual life as part of “the anxious generation.” Instead, it’s a community, intentionally designed and embodied in space and time, that aims at a common good. Much like the Dominican community Sertillanges belonged to, or the faculty of which he was a part, the Sheedy Program aspires to structure our collective experience in order to inspire, invite and convene. And while it started small (with just two faculty and an inaugural cohort of 30 four years ago), we are a community that continues to grow (we’ll have 250+ students participating by 2027), in the hopes of serving as many students as would benefit from it. Looking around — at programs like Glynn, majors like the Program of Liberal Studies and programs like the Sorin Fellows — I’d say the appetite for such communities and the willingness to build and sustain them is already a strong feature of our university’s ecosystem.

(See what I mean about the wordiness problem…?)

In any event: I highlight this exchange (and Dowd’s lovely essay) as evidence that discourse is not dead on college campuses. Thoughtful, philosophical exchanges are still taking place (and on printed pages distributed across campuses), and that’s something to appreciate and celebrate. Indeed, I think the exchange of ideas on these topics is, itself, proof of a thesis Dowd, Taylor, and I can all probably agree on: Intellectual engagement on topics of local significance are at least one essential way to keep learning alive on campus.

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A recent example: The Observer’s editorial board published a remarkable piece defending the Core Curriculum and challenging faculty and students alike to remember why we supposedly value liberal education in the first place. The editors articulate principles of good learning design most professors don’t master until years into the job. Their proposals — though demanding if taken seriously — are grounded in sound pedagogy. It’s definitely worth the four-minute read.

I’ve had my share of frustrations this semester too (more on that in future posts). But I keep coming back to a question their editorial helps sharpen.

What is Grading For?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a shocking report coming out of Harvard that reveals how lost even (or especially) the most prestigious institutions of higher-education seem to be in this moment of disruption and uncertainty. The short version: Students aren’t coming to class, no one really feels like they can say what they think or engage in real dialogue about difficult topics, faculty seem to be handing out As (in 60% of cases) just to avoid igniting some sort of total meltdown.

But I want to dig into this last bit — the bit about grading — more carefully, because it sits at the intersection of two crises: the erosion of classroom engagement and the rise of AI. If AI can already produce credible undergraduate-level work, and if we continue to rely on grades as the main measure of learning, we may soon face a world in which every student gets an A — not because they’ve mastered the material, but because it’s impossible to know what anyone actually knows. As faculty, we’ve long been complaining about the apparent inevitability of this scenario, but the editorial reveals that are students are just as unhappy about the situation. Maybe, just maybe, they’re going to be the ones to help us avoid an AI arms race to mutually assured ignorance. Plot twist.

So what would it look like to take the advice from our Notre Dame students: to return to first principles in teaching and learning. Ask what our courses are really for. Leave behind assumptions about how classes must be structured or how knowledge must be assessed. If we create classrooms that are sites of meaningful learning, confident in our teaching and our students’ investment in their work, the problems surrounding grading, the obsession with grade inflation, and the pressure toward turning universities into academic panopticon…they all start to melt away.

A few definitions

Grading: Assigning a number, or a letter representing a number, to a student’s work product (e.g. homework sheet, a test, a final essay, etc) to communicate one’s (expert) evaluation of its quality.

Assessment: What fancy people (self-described “pedagogues”) call grading, because:

• not all evaluation in the context of a course needs to count toward a final “grade,”

• not all evaluation in a course is represented by (or communicated via) a number or a letter representing a number, and

• the word “assessment” reminds us that one ultimate purpose of evaluation in the context of a class can be to provide students with feedback (i.e. it aims to be formative), rather than merely indicate what skills or knowledge as student has at a particular timeslice (summative).

Differentiation: The practice of separating (ranking) students based on their skills or abilities. This can be done to facilitate level-appropriate learning, and/or to signal (to future professors, employers, grad schools, students themselves) the degree of expertise or competency a student has acquired (often relative to other students in their cohort, or other students of a similar type).

Claim 1: Grading is (just) a measurement system.

Grading is an instrument, not an end. Like any metric, it can be used well or poorly. And like any metric, using it poorly can undermine the very thing it was designed to promote. Economists call this Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

This is worth remembering when we talk about “grade inflation.” In my previous post I noted that roughly 60 percent of Harvard grades are A’s. That sounds alarming, especially given how many students reportedly skip class. Maybe faculty have become lenient or conflict-averse; maybe they fear harming students’ prospects. Or maybe — less likely, but possible — students are genuinely performing well through new learning methods.

Either way, inflation itself tells us nothing definite about learning. It’s a signal that our instrument needs calibration, not proof that rigor is gone.

Claim 2: Differentiation is not necessary for leaning.

Why differentiate? Sometimes we need to rank students by competence — say, when medical schools must identify who’s ready to operate on a brain. But that differentiation should be tied to objective mastery, not relative performance within one classroom.

If every student meets the threshold of competence, all should earn A’s. Ranking them anyway doesn’t improve the system; it distorts it.

Differentiation can make sense in fields that explicitly model competitive environments — business, law, economics — but it’s irrelevant to most learning. Intellectual growth isn’t scarce, and classrooms aren’t zero-sum games. Designing grading as if they were misunderstands what education is for.

Claim 3: Grade inflation is a symptom, not a diagnosis.

Many people worry that grade inflation means college is getting easier. But as Joshua Eyler points out, it could just mean more students are succeeding. Maybe improved teaching and better-prepared cohorts are producing higher levels of mastery.

That said, I doubt most institutions have suddenly become more effective. More likely, grading has grown lenient. But even then, inflation by itself doesn’t justify corrective curves or quotas. When a department mandates a “standard distribution,” and nothing about the teaching changes, it just replaces learning with luck. If everyone can demonstrate mastery, someone will still need a perfect score to earn an A — not because the course was harder, but because the curve required it.

The real question isn’t Are our classes hard enough to yield a normal distribution? It’s Are our classes genuinely challenging and effective? If so, who cares how many A’s appear at the end?

So how does AI fit into this?

AI complicates grading by making authorship uncertain. But the deeper issue is pedagogical. If an AI can ace the assignment, maybe the assignment isn’t assessing what we think it is. If students are being driven, en masse, to AI to complete assignments for core courses, we need to figure out if this is because the core courses are no longer serving their (core) functions, or if students need to be better formed to appreciate and invest in the work those courses are helping them do.

The Observer editors are right: AI forces us to confront the purpose of our courses. Alternative assessments — oral exams, in-class writing, project portfolios — might help, but they aren’t the heart of the solution. The heart is rethinking assignments and assessment itself: designing courses that value reasoning, collaboration, and formation over mere output.

Conclusion

Grading is a tool, not a target. When it works, it helps us measure and communicate learning; when it fails, it distracts us from the thing it was meant to serve.

As we redesign our courses in light of AI, we should keep perspective. Grading is a small piece of the puzzle, not the foundation. The larger work is creating experiences where both students and faculty can recover a sense of what education is really for.

Appendix: A (brief) history of grading in the U.S.*

• 1785: The year Yale’s president, Ezra Stiles, is credited with popularizing the practice of professor’s assigning a grade to represent the quality of a student (and his work) in order to facilitate inter-institutional communication. Grades were initially given in latin to sort students into four quartiles: “Optimi” (best), “Second Optimi” (second best), “Inferiores” (less good), and “Pejores” (worst).

• 1897: Mount Holyoke becomes the first institution of higher-learning to adopt the A - F scale to grade students, which became pervasive in the U.S. in the 1940s. This timeline perfectly mirrors the development of the practice of grading eggs.

• 1900: John Dewey, progenitor of Progressive Education, begins to challenge standardized education and assessment in higher-ed.

• 1920s, 1930s: alternative (mostly narrative based) assessment becomes popular at experimental (progressive) universities like Antioch University (1920) and Black Mountain College (1933).

• 1940s: Colleges founded on or inspired by the great books movement (e.g. St. John’s) take up the practice of narrative assessment (“Don Rags”), even as traditional grading achieves a pervasive and lasting dominance in the landscape of American higher-ed.

• 1960s, 1970s: Experimental and progressive colleges -- Hampshire College, Evergreen State College, Sarah Lawrence College -- gain momentum and flourish for a brief moment, a flash in the pan.

• 1980s: A noticeable decline of institutional commitments to experimental and progressive pedagogy, a rising interest in traditional grading (standardized testing, etc).

• 1990s - today: A noticeable resurgence in the interest of alternative assessment and progressive pedagogy (especially on the part of individual educators rather than institutions) in higher education. Seems partly driven by the looming mental health crisis and an increasing cynicism about grades across ideological camps.

*Note: This history is my synthesis (with some additions) of a chapter of Jonathan Zimmerman’s book (see below).

References/Recommended reading:

• The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America by Jonathan Zimmerman

• Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) edited by Susan Blum

• I Love Learning; I Hate School: An Anthropology of College by Susan Blum

• Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It by Joshua Eyler

• Unmaking the Grade Substack by Emily Pitts Donahoe; Emily is (one of) the go-to sources on alternative assessment and her Substack is an invaluable resource for those interested in it:

Unmaking the Grade

A blog and reflective journal chronicling one educator's experiences with ungrading and other progressive teaching practices.

By Emily Pitts Donahoe

Quiet Revelations in a Committee Report on Teaching

According to a recent New York Times Article, summing up a report written by seven of its own faculty, “…many [Harvard] students skip class and fail to do the reading.”

When they do show up for class, they are focused on their devices, and are reluctant to speak out. Sometimes it is because they are afraid of sharing ideas that others will disagree with. But often, they have not read enough of the homework to make a meaningful contribution, the report continued.

Rampant grade inflation allows them to coast through anyway, it concluded. [Which means that] many students graduate without having benefited from talking very much with their teachers and peers, and they stay stuck in ideological bubbles, unwilling or unable to engage with challenging ideas.”

Rarely in my time teaching in or writing about higher-ed has such an unvarnished picture of our challenges emerged. Nor have I found anyone to be as transparent or blunt as this committee in articulating the elements of the crisis we’re dealing with. Here are just some of the truly surreal things reported in this piece:

• Around 60% of the grades given at Harvard are As (up from 40% in 2015).

• Despite worries about absenteeism, students at Harvard are permitted to enroll in two courses that meet at the same time. (One professor is quoted as defending this policy because prohibiting it “would give students heartburn.”)

• “Many Harvard College students do not prioritize their courses and some view extensive extracurricular commitments as a more fulfilling, meaningful, and useful allocation of their time.”

Almost as surreal as the things reported is Harvard’s response. The Dean of the faculty of arts and sciences acknowledges that the report contains “hard truths about our learning culture.” The article reports that, in response, “Harvard and its professors have been trying to shift the undergraduate experience this fall, to turn its students into more open-minded and academically engaged people.” As an example of this response?

Some instructors now take attendance.

Let me pause at this point to say: I’m deeply grateful for the candor. I’m impressed that Harvard summoned the will to engage in this kind of self-reflection by commissioning the report, and equally impressed by the transparency of the faculty’s findings. The whole article, though, has an almost absurd quality to it. It’s almost as though the only thing allowing us to report on these things so openly is the sense that we won’t be held to account, and that there’s really not much we can do to combat it anyway.

“Class is my lowest priority…”

Earlier this semester, I encountered something in office hours that felt both new and somehow portentous. A student signed up for office hours to argue that my attendance policy was far too strict. I give students two “free” unexcused absences, and make it abundantly clear how they can receive excused absences for things mandated by the university (illness, mandatory departmental exams, job interviews). But I make it very clear that I expect them to attend and participate (I collect small comprehension assignments in every class), and that these are absolute, minimal, non-negotiable requirements. The student listed activities, clubs, volunteer opportunities, and a number of other things competing for their time. I empathized — I wouldn’t want to be that busy — but also pushed back: taking core classes is an essential part of receiving a college education, many of these other activities are valuable but optional. If you can’t balance college clubs with college courses, it seems clear to me what has to give. But the student was unmoved. “I enjoy your class, I think the expectations are fair, I’m learning a lot about philosophy,” he said. “But class is my lowest priority.”

Of course, this stung a bit, and I said so. But I was also more bemused and curious than offended. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get myself in the headspace in the moment. If taking classes is one’s lowest priority at college, then what does one think college is about? We reached an amicable resolution — I told him he’d fail if he didn’t show up to class, and he hasn’t missed a session — but the exchange has stuck with me. How to make sense of this attitude, which I think is by no means unique to this particular student? How to interpret his experience charitably? What does it suggest about where students think the real learning is happening?

“To Think What We Are Doing”

I think we need to take a step back, both from the stunning revelations of the report and from the particular exchanges that might make its findings feel unchangeable. As I’ve argued in another post and in a different context, students increasingly fail to see the college classroom as a site of meaningful learning. We’ve long known that very few students do required readings (studies, like this one, put the number at about 20-30%). Anyone who has taught in a college setting in the last 20 years knows that attention and engagement have declined as absenteeism and distraction have increased. But this is yet another opportunity to ask why. Why is it that students, even those who love learning, really don’t like school?

I have my own theories, which I often go into here on Substack and in talks that I give. But it’s worth hearing our students articulate the reasons, and seeing how our practices (multiplying majors, for instance, or thinking uncritically about curves/differentiation) might be contributing to it. From the article:

Students are left having to find other ways to distinguish themselves, like joining more clubs, taking more courses or having two fields of concentration instead of just one…

The competition for internships and, eventually, jobs in fields like law and finance can be ferocious, they say. So they have no choice but to invest significant amounts of time in clubs that will show off their interests and skills, and differentiate them from all the other Harvard students who are getting A’s.

And they had to master the art of doing it all long before they were accepted to Harvard, they say: It’s what got them in.

Like the student I encountered in office hours, learning — in the classroom — often just isn’t seen as a priority. While some of this might be attributable to “young people these days” and their confounded attitudes, I think we as educators need to do so much more to understand and articulate the roots of this crisis, and then even more to respond in the way we design and deliver our classes.

All this to say: I got there, I understand where my student is coming from. And I’m grateful to this committee at Harvard for looking the problem in the face (and making the report publicly available). But I don’t want the significance (or the sheer incomprehensibility) of these findings to obscure the fundamental point: Students at elite universities do not see college classrooms as sites of meaningful learning, and this is an absolutely existential problem for those of us who teach in them.

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