David Michael Miller
In a blog a couple of weeks ago I made the point that Gov. Scott Walker's lack of a college degree was not the most important reason that he shouldn't be president of the United States.
That particular blog got a lot of hits, and I got quite a bit of feedback both supportive of my point and not so much. In fact, my own mother, who I mentioned in the blog alongside Paul Allen, Woody Allen, the late Sen. Paul Simon and other successful and thoughtful people who did not have degrees, wrote to say that while she appreciated the shout-out, she objected to being mentioned in the same blog-breath as Scott Walker. Okay, Mom. My apologies. I meant no disrespect. That blog had unfortunate timing as it got posted on the day the story broke that Walker had tried to repeal the Wisconsin Idea. He subsequently lied about his role in that while he threw his own appointees under the bus, revealing more unflattering things about the man's character. And after that Walker went to London to try to create some notion that he knew anything about foreign policy because he met with the prime minister regarding cheese trade. When he got pulled off-message with a question about evolution, he "punted on that one." All of which leads me to beg to revise and extend my remarks about the value of a college education. I continue to believe that a college degree is not necessary to be a thoughtful, intelligent and successful person. I continue to believe that attacking Walker on that point is bad politics, as it feeds into the notion of a "liberal elite," which Walker himself wasted no time exploiting in an interview last week. And nobody can seriously believe that if Walker had just gotten a few more credits at Marquette and picked up his piece of paper that he would have been a different person. He just would have been a cunning politician with no soul and a college degree. And speaking of cunning, allow me to digress into a little paranoia right here. Since no one can explain why Walker stopped just short of getting his diploma, is it crazy to think he did it intentionally with the idea that some day it would allow him to stand out and actually make him more appealing to the majority of Americans who also didn't attend or complete college? No, that's crazy. Okay, back to reality. The problem with Walker's intellect isn't that he's not smart. He is very smart. The problem is that his intellectual practices are exactly the reverse of what we're supposed to have picked up in college. Look, nobody remembers anything they learned in school from kindergarten on. Or more precisely, we quickly forget content. What you learn is what you use. So, I learned how to read and write in English, and I can do that. But I studied German and can't speak more than a word of it because I never used it after I left school. I can't remember anything about calculus, but in truth I didn't know anything about calculus when I was taking calculus. More to the point, a good education is supposed to develop habits of mind. We should have respect for facts and good arguments and some ability to spot flawed reasoning when we hear it. We should practice intellectual honesty, which is to say we shouldn't make arguments that we know to be based on cherry-picked facts or bad logic. And, here's the hardest part for most of us: We should be intellectually supple, ready and able to change our minds in the face of good arguments that challenge what we believe about a topic. Basically, we should come out of college less sure about what we know, but with an appreciation for all that vast knowledge out there that we can't possibly ever acquire. Far from feeling superior or becoming elitists, we should feel the full weight of our ignorance and spend the rest of our lives cheerfully trying to narrow the gap between what we understand and what there is to understand by just a fraction. And all of that -- what is sometimes called "intellectual curiosity" -- can be acquired without getting a college degree. But going to college can help develop it. And that's the problem with Scott Walker. He won't, for example, accept the overwhelmingly persuasive scientific arguments in favor of evolution or the human causes of global climate change. And at the same time he is dead certain about policies that have been shown to be shaky at best, like the notion that a right-to-work law will help our economy. In other words, the man is skeptical about things he should be sure of and sure of things he can't prove. The problem with Scott Walker is not that he didn't pick up a diploma or that he's not smart or that he's not an "intellectual." The problem with Scott Walker is that he apparently never developed the habits of mind that make someone thoughtful, regardless of their last grade achieved.
