Review Essay
Copyright © 2014 Missouri State University
ISSN (Print) 2159-9823
ISSN (Online) 2374-894X
Review Essay
Robert J. Topinka
Northwestern University
Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life
David D. Cooper
East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014
The ten essays in David D. Cooper’s Learning in the Plural: Essays
on the Humanities and Public Life cover two decades, cross multiple disciplinary boundaries, and combine intellectual history, practical pedagogy,
soul-searching memoir, and peevish polemic in pursuit of one question: Can
civic engagement rescue the humanities and promote the public good? The
answer that emerges in these essays, the earliest of which was first published
in 1993 and the latest in 2013, is a cautiously optimistic “yes.” But the value
of this book for academics and educators in the humanities will be less in
finding the answer than in following Cooper’s pursuit of it. The book presents a considered reflection on his forty-year career as an academic trying
to revive the humanities as a tool for democratic practice in the context of
disintegrating communities, growing generational barriers, and overwhelming academic torpor.
No clean resolution to the humanities crisis arrives at the book’s
conclusion, and the pedagogical, political, and intellectual strategies Cooper
advocates and advises tend to shift gears and double back even as he drives
ahead. One could call this inconsistency; and indeed readers in search of a
unified overarching argument – a manifesto for civic engagement in the humanities – will come away disappointed. But those interested in following
a generous scholar and committed pedagogue in pursuit of the practices that
might best promote civic engagement will find in the lucid prose of these
essays the performance of democratic public commitment. After all, as Cooper argues, democracy is a fractious practice, not a blueprint to be followed.
The journey is the metaphor to which Cooper most frequently returns to describe the practice of deliberative democracy. As Julie Ellison
suggests in her foreword, the core of the book is captured in the anecdote
that anchors the 2003 essay “Bus Rides and Forks in the Road: The Making
of a Public Scholar,” in which Cooper narrates his mid-1970s bus commute
from Rhode Island College to Providence College and finally Brown University, which took him through “working-class neighborhoods” and past “blueblood mansions” on a journey through the varied landscape of the academy.
With this anecdote Cooper invites readers to think of practices over products, of civic engagement over personal achievement. The bus journey’s
itinerary also charts the book’s itinerary, raising such questions as how dif110
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Topinka
ferences in class and fractures in communities affect access to education,
how academic fashions stray from promoting civic engagement, and how
those academics who strive to bring communities together must struggle
against institutional pressures and the demands of careerism. Against these
trends, Cooper advocates an engaged professoriate. For Cooper, this means
that humanities scholars ought to defend the liberal arts as the pursuit of the
public good through the promotion of civic literacy, which will in turn help
to generate stronger communities supported by a more resilient democracy.
In practice, this means jettisoning the abstractions of high theory in favor of
community engagement and abandoning the pedagogical model of the “sage
on the stage” in favor of student-centered learning.
As variations on these themes, the essays can be read chronologically, but they need not be, as each chapter has its own unique purpose and
standalone argument. The 2008 essay “Four Seasons of Deliberative Learning,” for example, will appeal to readers interested in practical and portable
classroom techniques. Yet Cooper still fits the chapter into his broader reflection on civic engagement, writing that between 2002 and 2005, he “set
out on a systematic journey to incorporate deliberative democracy and deliberative learning practices into a sequence of three new courses I developed”
(p. 123). Cooper describes and quotes from assignments his students produced, explains daily classroom activities and the purposes they served, and
offers his reflections on the limits and merits of his approach. In other essays, such as “Academic Professionalism and the Betrayal of the Land-Grant
Tradition” and “Moral Literacy,” Cooper writes in more general terms about
such issues as the status of academic theory (and here as throughout the book
postmodernism comes under harsh criticism for its focus on abstraction over
engagement) and the purpose and promotion of literacy.
Cooper is at his best when his writing reflects the pedagogic practice he advises. In “Believing in Difference: The Ethics of Civic Literacy,”
Cooper deftly weaves extended quotations from Lorraine Hansberry, Robert
Coles, and others (John Dewey is a key figure in other places) into an essay
that is less Cooper’s individual argument than his part within a chorus of
voices. What emerges is a thoughtful exploration of the varied expressions
of his key theme of the moral and ethical commitment to civic engagement
and deliberative democracy. In essays such as these, Cooper is less the sage
on the (authorial) stage than he is a collaborator with the reader in the pursuit
of the public good.
However, Cooper is not always so generously collaborative. His
broadsides against postmodernism are likely to rankle some, in part because
few postmodernists are likely to recognize themselves in the picture Cooper paints: practitioners of “hard-line multiculturalism” (p. 92) who scoff
at the very notion of community and glibly reject civic engagement as the
machinations of power. Of course, it is possible to read Cooper’s polemic
against postmodernism as the performance of deliberative democracy, where
literacy requires agonistic advocacy for that which will promote the public
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Review Essay
good. But when Cooper repeatedly rails against the postmodernist-driven
expansion of the canon, claiming that it “completely camouflages the deeprooted elitism that remains the cultural condition of the modern university”
(p. 74), one wonders whether Cooper has not missed an opportunity to find
common ground. After all, expansion of the canon is nothing if not an effort to expand the communities deemed worthy of scholarly attention. By
dismissing canon expansion as the exploitative maneuvers of the elite and
missing the civic potential embedded within it, Cooper commits the same
mistake for which he faults the postmodernists.
Of course, it is important to keep context in mind here, and Cooper
includes the original publication date next to each essay for a reason: The
postmodern turn was at its apex (or, for many, at its nadir) during the 1990s,
when many of these essays were published. Seen in that context, Cooper’s
critique is an important corrective to the worst excesses of polemical postmodernism. And, admirably, Cooper does not attempt to evade critique himself. He routinely questions his own thinking and admits to his own troubles
navigating the precarious passages in his journey as a scholar dedicated to
the public humanities. Indeed, by foregrounding the date of each essay,
Cooper also foregrounds the crucial principle of ongoing self-reflection in
the service of civic engagement. Taken together, then, these essays consider
the resonances of history, confront the roadblocks of the present, and chart
the routes that might lead to a more civically engaged, ethically committed
future for the humanities. Humanities scholars might not always take comfort in Cooper’s portrayal of them in this book, but they will certainly find
resources for rethinking and, one hopes, reviving the relationship between
the liberal arts and public life.
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Author
Robert J. Topinka is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication Studies at
Northwestern University. He holds an M.A. in Rhetoric and Composition
from the University of Kansas. His research interests include the history of
cities, modernity, and democracy. His work has appeared in Mediterranean
Studies, Foucault Studies, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
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