I have, relative to my own age and experience, long been a critic of academia. Just the other week, a friend reminded me of a late-night frustrated rant delivered in graduate school about the seeming hopeless prospects laid before us. Not only our chances to find meaningful employment, I claimed, but the whole structure is crumbling. The problems are entrenched in its very structure: it has become irredeemably ordered toward expedience, technical training, empty credentialing, pseudo-professionalism, consumerism, and disdainful of the methods through which true intellectual habits are formed, for these all are inconvenient to its model.
But worst of all, the gears of academia’s modern mechanism grind down those who most love its true (if largely abandoned) purpose: the pursuit and teaching of the truth. Many good professors stay in their positions despite academia: they love teaching and seeing their students get it; discovering truths new to themselves; being in a community of the like-minded. But to see these goods realized often requires a Herculean effort. Burdened with apathetic students and bureaucratic headaches, they are left with too little time. Job security eludes many, and most attain it only by sacrificing even more time to tasks even more tedious.
What are we to do? Give up and allow ourselves finally to become naught but ground-down dust—or abandon the academic intent altogether? Or… might we do something else? I believe in the third alternative. Allow me to explain; and allow me to be so audacious as to use poetry in offering an explanation of re-thinking education.
The Purpose of Education
Controversy over the topic of academic freedom seems to arise every so often. In recent years, the controversy has mostly concerned the policing of language and adherence to ideologies concerning individual identities. Popular figures—mostly those who have suffered somehow at the hands of relevant censorship—have made names for themselves by railing against this restriction of intellectual freedom. But the proponents of academic freedom often champion it as a kind of absolute principle. Behind their advocation stands a belief that, on a level playing field, truth will win out over falsity, and, therefore, academia should be a place where any idea can be stated.
But the “level playing field” does not ever exist. Culture shapes students long before they enter the university and tends to maintain a hold on their thought throughout as well. Moreover, even in the university, we live not by intellect alone. A professor may have weak arguments, but a cool, commanding air about him; and he may be handsome. The other, meanwhile, might have the best reasoning, but be physically ailing, old, unrelatable. To which will the typical eighteen-year-old be more drawn?
Many academics accepted (contrary to the spirit of intellectual inquiry) that the academy was a place in which they could freely pursue whatever theory they wished. To be sure, intellectual inquiry demands a looseness with respect to restraint. But it does not merit total absence of any restraint. It requires an antecedent purposiveness: that of being-towards-truth. Put otherwise, freedom without purpose is not really freedom; and academic freedom not ordered towards the pursuit of truth (and the willingness to admit fault or uncertainty) is not a freedom anyone should possess.
In the absence of this unifying pursuit (behind which absence there lies another story too long to tell here), the “university” (to which name it no longer merits a claim) turns to purposes inhuman and inhumane: primarily, the diversion of its resources into the training of functionaries. This perversion of aim runs deep. It infects university presidents and deans, board members and trustees, hiring and curriculum committees, and branches out systemically through every vein of the increasingly-bureaucratic institution.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats 1919: ”The Second Coming”
W.B. Yeats’ poem—perhaps his most famous—“The Second Coming” expresses this reality, most especially in its first stanza. The university has lost its center and all culture falls apart. If governments and corporations seem increasingly totalitarian, this comes as a response (a poor one) to an anarchy in the human soul: a loss of principle and a corresponding loss of order. The world seems bleak… and we lack the education to make it right again. Many, I think, anticipate the “rough beast”—war, plague, famine, destruction of all civil order; a purging fire—with trepidation, anxiety, but also a sense of relief. Let it all be over.
Slow Build of a New Approach
Like many, I do not find myself often brimming with optimism about the world. Things do, indeed, appear bleak. But it is historically myopic to believe this bleakness an abnormality. If we find the world seeming dark today, perhaps this is because we have never been able to see so much of it in so short a time. All the worst news rains down upon us in a constant barrage. Tragedy, strife, and suffering can be delivered instantaneously around the globe.
Good things, on the other hand—truly good things—take time for their fruits to ripen. As such, we can seldom see them at an instant. We must observe them closely and across months, years; perhaps even decades or centuries. The immediacy of the bad and the long, slow unfolding of the good, no doubt, frustrates our contemporary minds. Habits of immediate gratification have seized us all. We lack the patience to wait and watch, to see the good through from seed to fruit. But our impatience is unbecoming. The realization of the good is and ought to be slow.
Why “ought”? Perhaps that assertion evokes a knee-jerk reaction, an objection. But from where? What within us objects to the notion that the good ought to be slow? Most likely, it arises from that aforementioned habit of immediate gratification. Yet do we truly see the good of things gained immediately? Or do we not, and rightly so, appreciate more the things hard-won? Deep and abstruse philosophical questions emerge here: questions concerning act and potency, virtue and human habits. We’ll not tackle them at the moment (for, indeed, they cannot be tackled at a moment—for understanding them is a true good). Succinctly stated, however, the world which we inhabit requires toil by its nature. It is fitting that we toil to bring forth the good. We may not like this truth; but we will be much more at peace with the world if we recognize and accept it.
Doubtless, we find ourselves frustrated with the state today of academia. We want a quick solution—just as we might wish to become healthy or virtuous or more learned ourselves tomorrow. Perhaps it seems the most expedient path to recovery lies with the already-extant institutions. Universities have buildings, of course, and funding, and faculty; accreditation and curricula, degrees and name-recognition. But they no longer have credibility because they no longer have purpose.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas 1947: “Do not go gentle into that good night”
And purpose, of course, is also a true good. We cannot “hand it back” to the university, held as it is by the perverse order entrenched in every level of its existence. Purpose in education must be grown again, slowly, painstakingly, day by day, month by month, year by year.
Put otherwise, the answer is not, as Dylan Thomas would have it, to “rage against the dying of the light”; but neither is it to “go gentle into that good night”. The sun is setting on the university, and it may be a long darkness to follow. But there will be a dawn, and we, in the meantime, may hold a candle. One flame may beget another, and that second beget a third, and so on—but we should not try burning down the house just to make a briefer, brighter light. An educational institution cannot be created in a single day. We have our purpose. But we will build that fire slowly.
Help Keep the Flame
Alright—just as I am not often brimming with optimism, neither am I often this melodramatic. The flame is a metaphor, of course, for what I hope the Lyceum Institute is, and will be. And, of course, I hope that you will help keep it going: either by donating or, even better, by supporting us through enrollment (or purchasing our “manifesto”). Re-thinking education requires a slow building of habit. We are planting the seeds. We hope you will help us bear the fruits: this year and next, this decade and the following, throughout this century and beyond.
