The characteristic gift of a university is the gift of an interval. Here is an opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of at once acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here is a break in the tyrannical course of irreparable events; a period in which to look round upon the world and upon oneself without the sense of an enemy at one’s back or the insistent pressure to make up one’s mind; a moment in which to taste the mystery without the necessity of at once seeking a solution. And all this, not in an intellectual vacuum, but surrounded by all the inherited learning and literature and experience of our civilization; not alone, but in the company of kindred spirits; not as a sole occupation, but combined with the discipline of studying a recognized branch of learning; and neither as a first step in education (for those wholly ignorant of how to behave or think) nor as a final education to fit a man for the day of judgment, but as a middle. This interval is nothing so commonplace as a pause to get one’s breath; … it is not the cessation of activity, but the occasion of a unique kind of activity. …
In short, this period at a university may not have equipped him very effectively to earn a living, but he will have learned something to help him lead a more significant life. [Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, Yale UP, 1989, pp. 101-103]
What, then, is the chief end of a college of arts and sciences? Why, to enable a body of senior scholars (the professors) and a body of junior scholars (the undergraduates) to seek Wisdom—and through Wisdom, for Truth.
The end is not success, pleasure, or sociability, but wisdom. This wisdom is not the same as facts, utility, training, or even knowledge. No college can confer wisdom, but a good college can help its members to acquire the means to pursue wisdom. Wisdom means apprehension of the human condition, recognition of reality, and the experience and possession of high knowledge—together with the power to apply experience and knowledge critically and practically. … I endeavor to present to you a model college that might help to make the acquisition of wisdom less difficult than it is at present; a college some of whose graduates might be philosophers (lovers of wisdom), and many of whose graduates might be, at least, men of right reason, humane inclinations, and sound taste. [Russell Kirk, “The Revitalized College: A Model,” Education in a Free Society, edited by Anne Husted Burleigh, Liberty Fund, 1973, pp. 133-134]
I recommend that we do whatever is in our power to restore a general consciousness that the aim of higher education is the inculcation of an understanding of moral worth, achieved through right reason. … For what gives a man dignity, what makes possible a democracy of elevation, what makes any society tolerable, what gives leaders their right to office, what keeps the modern world from becoming Brave New World, and what constitutes real success in any walk of life is the attainment of moral worth. [Russell Kirk, “The Revitalized College: A Model,” Education in a Free Society, edited by Anne Husted Burleigh, Liberty Fund, 1973, p. 139]
The college should reaffirm that the end of a liberal education is an ethical consciousness, through which the student is brought to an apprehension of the enduring truths that govern our being, of the principles of self-control, and of the dignity of man.
The college should make it clear that this ethical end is sought through an intellectual discipline, exacting in its character, which regards “useless knowledge” as infinitely more valuable than simple utilitarian skills.
The college should return to a concise curriculum emphasizing religious knowledge, moral philosophy, humane letters, rhetoric, languages, history, logic, and the pure sciences.
The college should set its face against amorphous “survey courses,” “general education,” and similar substitutes for really intellectual disciplines. Such a smattering produces only that little learning which is a dangerous thing.
The college should turn away from vocationalism, resigning to trade schools and industrial “in-service training” what the college never was founded to undertake.
The college should abandon its attempt to encroach upon the specialized and professional studies which are the proper province of the graduate school and universities.
The college should say less about “socialization” and “personality building” and more about the improvement of the human reason, for the human reason’s own sake. …
The college should endeavor deliberately to keep its student body within reasonable limits, its humane scale being one of its principal virtues.
The college should emancipate itself from quasi-commercialized programs of athletics, an expensive and often anti-intellectual pastime in which it cannot compete successfully with Behemoth University.
The college should reduce to a minimum the elective feature in its curriculum, for one of the college’s principal strengths was formerly its recognition of order and hierarchy in the higher learning, and the undergraduate ordinarily is not yet capable of judging with discretion what his course of studies ought to be. …
The college should inculcate in its students a sense of gratitude toward the generations that have preceded us in time and a sense of obligation toward the generations yet to be born. It should remind the rising generation that we are part of a long continuity and essence, and that we moderns are only dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants. This consciousness lies at the heart of a liberal education. [Russell Kirk, “The Revitalized College: A Model,” Education in a Free Society, edited by Anne Husted Burleigh, Liberty Fund, 1973, pp. 152-155]
At its core, a college should be a place where young people find help for navigating the territory between adolescence and adulthood. It should provide guidance, but not coercion, for students trying to cross that treacherous terrain on their way toward self-knowledge. It should help them develop certain qualities of mind and heart requisite for reflective citizenship. Here is my own attempt at reducing these qualities to a list, in no particular order of priority, since they are inseparable from one another:
1. A skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past.
2. The ability to make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena.
3. Appreciation of the natural world, enhanced by knowledge of science and the arts.
4. A willingness to imagine experience from perspectives other than one’s own.
5. A sense of ethical responsibility.
These habits of thought and feeling are hard to attain and harder to sustain. … It is absurd to imagine them as commodities to be purchased by and delivered to student consumers. Ultimately they make themselves known not in grades or examinations but in the way we live our lives. [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, pp. 3-4]
In the ideal college, there would be no credits, no degrees, and no required courses. A person would learn what he wanted to learn. …
The ideal college would be a kind of educational retreat in which you could try to find yourself; find out what you like and want; what you are and are not good at. People would take various subjects, attend various seminars, not quite sure of where they were going, but moving toward the discovery of vocation, and once they found it, they could then make good use of technological education. The chief goals of the ideal college, in other words, would be the discovery of identity, and with it, the discovery of vocation.
What do we mean by the discovery of identity? We mean finding out what your real desires and characteristics are, and being able to live in a way that expresses them. You learn to be authentic, to be honest in the sense of allowing your behavior and your speech to be the true and spontaneous expression of your inner feelings. [Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971, Penguin, 1993, p. 176, https://www.slideshare.net/imbangjtrenggana/abraham-h-maslow-the-farther-reaches-of-human-nature-penguin-nonclassics-1993]
[In our ideal university,] no degrees would be given or diplomas awarded. The college would exist to serve students truly seeking knowledge, not those seeking only a degree or other meaningless relics from the current system.
Neither courses nor teachers would be organized by departments or divisions. Quite naturally, some range of interests in the faculty would be deliberately sought, but the artificiality of departmental lines would be avoided. Note: The fact of departmentalization for administrative purposes is not the great evil; it is the spirit of intellectual departmentalization that we would seek to avoid. …
No grades in the usual sense of that term would be given, except at the request of the student or his parents (or some person or agency providing the student with financial assistance). We suggest this arrangement not because we are opposed to competition for excellence among students, but because the real purpose of education is for each individual to make the maximum progress possible for that person—for this, relative judgments are not significant. …
We are not opposed to fun—we just don’t believe that it is the business of the college to organize, sponsor, or finance it.
The college would not take responsibility for the general lives of its students; it would not serve in loco parentis. Some colleges might choose to do so (for a price), but not this one. [Benjamin A. Rogge and Pierre F. Goodrich, “Education in a Free Society,” Education in a Free Society, edited by Anne Husted Burleigh, Liberty Fund, 1973, pp. 89-91]
[W]e must somehow free the colleges from the burden of vocationalism by having other social agencies do whatever may be necessary to fit people into jobs. … or if [taken care of] by the colleges, at least outside the curriculum. …
We must so reform the curriculum, methods of teaching, and examinations, that we do not mistake the B.A. degree as signifying either a completed liberal education or adequate preparation for earning a living or living a happy life. It should signify only decent preparation for the continuing task of adult education.
A liberal curriculum should, therefore, include no vocational instruction; nor should it permit any subject-matter specialization. In a liberal college there should be no departmental divisions, no electives … The faculty should comprise teachers all of whom are responsible for understanding and administering the whole curriculum; lectures should be kept to a minimum … ; the basic precept of pedagogy should be the direction of the mind by questions and the methods of answering them, not the stuffing of it with answers; oral examinations must be used to separate facile verbalizers and memorizers from those in whom genuine intellectual skills are beginning to develop and whose minds have become hospitable to ideas. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 112]
The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. …
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. … It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world, and it preserves the zest of life by the suggestion of satisfying purposes. …
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. Fools act on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge without imagination. The task of the university is to weld together imagination and experience. [Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Williams and Norgate, 1955, pp. 139-140]
We tend not to remember, or perhaps half-deliberately to forget, that college was once conceived not as a road to wealth or as a screening service for a social club, but as a training ground for pastors, teachers, and, more broadly, public servants. Founded as philanthropic institutions, the English originals of America’s colleges were “expected,” as [Samuel Eliot] Morison put it, “to dispense alms to outsiders, as well as charity to their own children.” Benjamin Franklin, founder of the University of Pennsylvania, who was both a conservator and renovator of the Puritan tradition, put it this way: “The idea of what is true merit, should … be often presented to youth, explain’d and impress’d on their minds, as consisting in an Inclination join’d with an Ability to serve Mankind, one’s Country, Friends, and Family … which Ability should be the great Aim and End of all learning.” [Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, 1749] [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, p. 65]
[B]y failing to reconnect their students to the idea that good fortune confers a responsibility to live generously toward the less fortunate, too many colleges are doing too little to help students cope with this siege of uncertainty. One of the insights at the core of the college idea—indeed of the idea of community itself—has always been that to serve others is to serve oneself by providing a sense of purpose, thereby countering the loneliness and aimlessness by which all people, young and old, can be afflicted. [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, p. 148]
Ortega saw that the university had to be restored to its cardinal function of “enlightenment”; that its task was that of imparting the full culture of the time, and revealing to mankind, with clarity and truthfulness, the gigantic world of today. [Mission of the University, 1944] … The university had to reassert itself “as a major ‘spiritual power,’ higher than the press, standing for serenity in the midst of frenzy, for seriousness and the grasp of the intellect in the face of frivolity and unashamed stupidity”. [Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy, George Braziller, 1967, p. 53]
Our people should be able to look to the universities for the moral courage, the intellectual clarity, and the spiritual elevation needed to guide them and uphold them in this critical hour. The universities must continue to pioneer on the new frontiers of research. But today research is not enough either to hold the university together or to give direction to bewildered humanity. We must now seek not knowledge alone, but wisdom.
This is what the University Grants Committee of England meant when it said, “Here arises the responsibility of the universities. They are the inheritors of the Greek tradition of candid and intrepid thinking about the fundamental issues involved in the life of the individual and of the community, and of the Greek principle that the unexamined life is no life for man.”
Candid and intrepid thinking about fundamental issues—in the crisis of our time this is the central obligation of the universities. This is the standard by which they must be judged. This is the aim which will give unity, intelligibility, and meaning to their work. This is the road to wisdom. Upon that road the American university will regain its own soul and bring hope and comfort to a distracted world. [Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, pp. 100-102, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
If the university is not the temple of the intellect, then it is not a university. [Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death, U of Chicago P, 1985, p. 6]
A university’s greatness consists in its being the intellectual forum of the community, the place where the basic issues of its culture are fruitfully debated. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 37]
Whatever its contribution to vocational education, the university should be the society’s specialized organ of critical self-scrutiny. It is only when the university functions primarily as a port of entry for aspirants to the higher reaches of the social system that it loses its critical function; for aspirants do not criticize, they accommodate. [Edgar Friedenberg, The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms, Beacon, 1965, pp. 197-198]
No matter how wide the doors are thrown open, how many new accommodations are built, how much scholarship money is voted by Congress and the states, the terrible fact remains: The American university exists to shape candidates for the jobs of the American commercial-industrial system. It is a professional and vocational institution, not truly an “educative” one. It is a place where one spends four or more years mechanically earning the right to fill the better available jobs. It is education for society as it now stands, rather than for the ideals of a society as it might better be. … [T]he aim of the whole process gets lost—namely, the best possible development of the student. Alas, this inner development is not really measurable, quantifiable, or visible. And so, the hard reality loses out to the paper tiger; the symbol becomes the thing; the administration of education becomes education. [Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy, George Braziller, 1967, pp. 18-19]
Now, as then, most students have no clear conception of why or to what end they are in college. Some students have always been aimless, bored, or confused; others self-possessed, with their eyes on the prize. Most are somewhere in between, looking for something to care about. …
[E]very college has an obligation to make itself a place not just for networking and credentialing but for learning in the broad and deep meaning of that word. It means that all students deserve something more from college than semi-supervised fun or the services of an employment agency. [Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Princeton UP, 2012, p. 24]
[T]he object of the university is to see knowledge, life, the world, or truth whole. The aim of the university is to tame the pretensions and excesses of experts and specialists by drawing them into the academic circle and subjecting them to the criticism of other disciplines. Everything in the university is to be seen in the light of everything else. [Robert Hutchins, The Learning Society, Mentor / New American Library, 1968, p. 135]
Education is the deliberate attempt to form human character in terms of an ideal. … To formulate, to clarify, to vitalize the ideals which should animate mankind—this is the incredibly heavy burden which rests, even in total war, upon the universities. If they cannot carry it, nobody else will; for nobody else can. [Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, pp. 104-105, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
Related:
– What is the reality of the university?
– What is education for? What should the goals of education be?