Craig Vezina Interview with Ben Nelson (abridged), May 16, 2020

Ben Nelson: Liberal arts comes from this ancient Roman ideal that says if you live in a representative republic, if you’re not a subject of a king or a Pope then you need to learn to be free. So, you need to practice the various disciplines or arts that give you liberty and that’s what liberal arts comes from. So, effectively the idea is that as Franklin called it you have to learn practical knowledge that you can apply to various fields because you may be a farmer one day but then a diplomate another day. Or Jefferson called it useful knowledge. When I looked around at what universities were actually doing I realized they weren’t teaching that at all. And given that this was in theory the underpinning of our liberal democracy I thought this was problematic because that universities need to commit to what psychologists refer to as transferable knowledge and what we colloquially refer to as wisdom. Because the dissemination of information can be done fairly effectively on the internet and you don’t really need somebody to read out loud to you a book. You not only do not need it, it’s a terrible way of retaining the information so it’s completely ineffective.

Instead what you need is to apply lessons from one context to a new context. That’s what wisdom is. It’s knowing how to appropriately apply practical knowledge in a novel context, something you haven’t encountered before. That idea can really only be delivered if you have a curriculum that traverses subject matter and ideally culture as well. And that’s just not how universities are set up. They’re siloed so you study economics and they use a certain taxonomy and then you study political science and they’ll teach you the exact same concept but using completely different taxonomy. And so you don’t actually see the connection in thinking frameworks that occur across fields. You have to reform the curricular approach and you’ve got to make sure that you engage students and see that they apply those tools across different subject matter and give them feedback on it. So, when universities talk about oh, we’ll teach you how to think critically and we’ll teach you how to solve problems creatively and communicate effectively. If you actually measure how well universities do at those tasks. They do an abysmal job. And, in fact, science has demonstrated that teaching in subject matter does not provide you critical thinking tools that you can apply to other subject matters. It's just that the brain doesn’t work that way.

So you have to be deliberate or we’re just going to continue graduating people who may be excellent in a particular field but then when it comes time to voting and democracy or figuring out what legislation to back or how to have an interpersonal relationship that works, they won’t be able to take those lessons and apply them. This is why with the assumption that you actually learn in college was kind of yeah, I’m here to get grades and get a certification and get out. And the professors were there to do research and for most of them the educational component got in the way. And administrators were not focused on learning or teaching. It just wasn’t top of mind. And especially back then 25 years ago there was really no pressure to change. And so despite the fact that when I said hey, we should get rid of general distribution requirements. They don’t work. Let’s do a core curriculum. It’s based on systems thinking. No one disagreed but nobody cared. And so it just went nowhere.

It’s fascinating to me when you engage individuals who come from an empirical background as almost anybody at a university does. And this isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact. You can demonstrate empirically how lectures are completely ineffective compared to active teaching. You can empirically demonstrate how far transfer doesn’t work. The literature on this is incontrovertible. And so it’s very hard for anybody and, in fact, very few people argue the other point. There really is not much of an argument for the other point. And in many cases I think people genuinely would like to see reforms of the kind that we’ve done at Minerva that we’re advocating for them to do. But, they fall back on I would love to but, and usually that’s where the finger pointing comes. A president or provost would love to do it but there’s no way you can get this past the faculty senate. Or a professor can do it but the administration would never hear of it. Or outside of the United States when we have these conversations – and we have these conversations globally – it’s oh my god, we would love to do this at the university, but the government won’t let us. Or the government says well, we’re trying to push the university this way but they refused to do it. And so it’s actually interesting that if I were to, and as I do and when I have kind of interactions and conversations with people what is in your heart? What would you like to do? It seems like everyone agrees with us.

It’s straightforward, right. When you go to say something to anybody in higher education and say you know what? Would you like to ensure that your students know the difference between a fact and a claim. I’ve never met somebody who said no. I’ve never met somebody who said I don’t want my students to actually understand the audience to whom they’re speaking or writing and modify what they’re saying accordingly to make it the most impactful.. I’ve never met anybody who said oh, it’s a bad idea when you are trying to solve a problem for you to understand how to get to root cause as opposed to addressing symptoms. So, none of these things are controversial in any way. Nobody disagrees that the approach to actually do that is to engage students and make sure that they actually do practical applications and they do that across field and across context. So this is just like people who are denying vaccines. I’m sure there are some of them out there but in general the science is pretty clear. Vaccinations are kind of important. I think the entire world is waiting for a particular vaccine in this situation.

Yet, somehow despite this collective acceptance and understanding resistance is still there. To me the biggest question is whether or not we are going to as a society get a grip on ourselves. We have been fed and are believing in this trope which is again proven not to be true that certification and branding is all that matters in the world. Who you know, not what you know. You’ve heard that refrain. And it’s nonsense. It’s absolute nonsense. If you look at every transformative figure in history it’s all about what they knew. It’s all about wisdom. You can’t find somebody who doesn’t apply radical different thinking that is not done in posterity. It doesn’t exist. Yet, we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that knowing nothing is fine. You need the degree from this place and you’re branded and that’s fine and the reason you study is in order to get to that next certification and the utility of it is the brand. This is nuts and it’s leading society in a very dangerous way and I think this is evidenced by many geopolitical issues all around the world. So, I am an unabashed globalist. I think that if you lift up a human being somewhere in the world, the world benefits.

The idea that in a world like we live in today it’s something that occurs halfway around the world doesn’t impact somebody else is absurd. And lo and behold while you and I are having this conversation from our homes as opposed to an office, right. This is what is, this occurred in a wet market halfway around the world in a city most people have never heard of. And that event and the reactions of the people in that area, in the provincial government, in the national government and then in governments all around the world contributed to the situation that we are in right now. There is no one culpable individual. It is thousands and thousands of people who made one unwise choice after another. And so for me the concept that we need to focus philanthropy on people who look like us or who come from a particular pet cause of ours, I mean that’s lovely but it’s completely misguided because that’s ultimately not going to be the thing that moves the needle. What moves the needle is when we look at the people who need the most help anywhere in the world and that they can get it from anywhere in the world.

And so when you bring people together with that ethos and you bring them into an environment for which that ethos is primary it’s magical. Now they’ll argue because they come from different backgrounds. And so when we say hey, look at the right problem other people will bring different perspectives and backgrounds to bear on how to get to the right problem. So the amazing thing about what you see is a similar set of tools can be used in very different ways and allow people to reach a very large diversity of conclusions. But we’ve narrowed the conversation, the kinds of conclusions that are plausible and away from the much larger set of conclusions that are certainly false. And that’s really the point of getting an education. It’s not to give you an answer. It's to help you distinguish what could be a set of rational approaches as opposed to the certainly bad ideas. And unfortunately, much of the world lives in that other realm.