Community and University Knowledge
Yesterday I went to the monthly meeting of the Academic Health Center's Community Campus Network. The theme was “Eminence Credentialing: Establishing the Credentials of Community Elders". It was announced as a panel discussion concerning how "universities must be guided by communities and embrace community Elders in university settings". Participating Elders came from the Powderhorn/Phillips Cultural Wellness Center and the Woodlands Wisdom program.
This is such a complicated subject, and I am far from having a settled opinion. My own cultural and intellectual beliefs come largely from the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and the scientific method (I'm a biophysicist). These beliefs include the importance of democracy, the general goodness of scientific progress, the ability of young people to challenge elders with evidence and argument, the importance of being able to reject received authority, one person one vote, etc.
Yet my belief system - or at least the ways it plays out in practice - is incomplete and certainly not totally successful:
- Not all intellectual disciplines are as successful as the natural sciences, even though they copy our style.
- Even the sciences are not totally reliable, as witness the back-and-forth of seemingly well-designed medical studies on diet, wine, estrogens, etc.
- Traditional medicine, disdained until recently, has shown that it knows of some drugs and procedures (esp. acupuncture) that are undeniably effective.
- Traditional wisdom can give new paths to healing and emotional stability. Note the PBS special on The New Medicine that just ran.
- "Modernism", at least in the extreme form it tends to take these days, leaves a lot of Americans behind, and tends to distort those who keep up. See Peter Levine's blog on Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods.
- Although I believe that there are empirical measures of scientific truth, there is little basis for asserting that non-scientific aspects of our modern Western culture are intrinsically superior to those of more traditional societies. Perhaps the commonalities in moral teachings of the world religions provide some standards of comparison.
Universities get particular attention because we are the standard-bearers and standard-setters of our society, and we are more open than most institutions in society to discussion of those standards. If people from other cultures challenge what we teach and how we do research, are they challenging the basic values of our society, or just how we implement them?
I expect to get deeper into this.