The Politics Of Higher Education
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
In an opinion piece that The Wall Street Journal published at the opening of the last academic year (August 27, 2016), Robert J. Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, had this to say:
“A university should not be a sanctuary for comfort but rather a crucible for confronting ideas….What is the value of an education without encountering or debating ideas that differ from the ones that students bring with them to college? The purpose of a university education is to provide a critical pathway by which students can change the trajectory of their families, and can build healthier and more inclusive societies.”
For Zimmer, liberal politics seems to trump wisdom.
“Change the trajectory of their families.” That may be the first time we have heard those exact words. To question accepted wisdom is old cant, dating back to Emile Durkheim and John Dewey, if not John Locke. Anyone steeped in a classical education would argue to the contrary, that the purpose of education is to recover and convey to the student the best that has been thought and practiced in the past and which he may build upon for the future.
So it has been in antiquity, in the Academy and the Lyceum, so too in the High Middle Ages that produced the cathedral schools which laid the foundation of the academic institutions we know today as Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris.
If Robert Zimmer were serious about diversity, he would welcome some diversity in his faculty, in the spirit of Robert M. Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, who made room for Mortimer Adler, Yves Simon, and Leo Strauss. Yet because of opposition from the faculty of philosophy, Hutchins was never able to secure a regular appointment for Jacques Maritain, considered to be one of the foremost Catholic philosophers of the 20th century.
Diversity seems to be the objective of those who do not value their own culture or recognize that it is threatened by a massive influx of alien peoples from the Middle East and Africa.
Catholic higher education, once the bastion of liberal education for many, is under threat as the secular Leviathan has pulled many off course. Approximately 200 institutions of higher learning in the United States are still nominally Catholic. They were brought into being as an option to the purely secular or materialistic philosophical perspective that dominated higher education at the time of their origin.
Sadly not all have remained steadfast to their founding principles. It may be that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Catholic philosophy, yet it was recognized by the founders of those colleges that some philosophies open one to the Catholic faith while others close it off as an intellectual option.
The college that Robert Hutchins was denied at Chicago took form in the rejuvenated St. John’s College, Annapolis, and a number of Catholic colleges followed suit. A classical education makes a difference. When Catholic colleges stressed the importance of philosophy and theology (sometimes eight courses in each over a four-year period), that curriculum gave its students an edge over others, and often led to leadership positions in the larger academic world.
A contrary example is provided by a professor of ethics at a major state university who confessed that until he was in his sixties that he had never heard of the Stoics.
Political control of the universities is control of the culture. Western culture, which Remi Brague calls “an eccentric culture” and, in his words, “the greatest culture the world has known,” even if compromised by modernity, is still worth defending. The sources of that culture date to Greek and Roman antiquity. One can begin with the Pre-Socratics, but certainly one has to become acquainted with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, and their commentators through the ages. No one can master it all, given the vastness of the literature, but one must know something of Augustine and Aquinas to appreciate Dante, Shakespeare, Browning, Yeats, or Goethe, let alone to understand what the Renaissance and Reformation were all about.
Need it be emphasized that the Catholic faith is not a Kierkegaardian leap into the dark? Catholicism is not a fideistic religion. It demands and has rational preamble. Probing the depths of Catholicism is a lifelong process. There is always more to know. Important is the presence of Catholic literature in the home. Books by Belloc, Chesterton, Dawson, T.S. Eliot, Gilson, Pieper, and A.G. Sertillanges should be part of any family library.
The faith, as practiced, can also be learned from its illustration in novels. We see this in works of authors such as Leon Bloy, Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, George Bernanos, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. For the study of Islamic culture, one might add Ignaz Goldziher’s Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law.
