By STEPHANIE BLOCK
Memoirs of a Happy Failure, by Alice von Hildebrand with John Henry Crosby, St. Benedict Press (2014); hardcover, 180 pages; $19.95 at https://tanbooks.benedictpress.com.
Who in his right mind would teach at an inner-city college?
That question often comes to mind as one reads the — sometimes hilarious — efforts of Dr. Alice Jourdain von Hildebrand to bring common sense and fundamental philosophical grounding to the young people of New York City who attended Hunter College and took her classes.
It was an uphill battle. Lecturing about the hierarchy of being and that man’s ontological position is higher than an animal’s, a zoology major protested: “I can prove to you scientifically that there is no essential difference between a man and a pig.”
Professor Jourdain patiently listened to arguments about the comparative intestinal length and brain weight of pigs and human beings. After many eloquent words, Professor Jourdain asked her student how long he had been attending evening classes.
“Seven years,” he answered, “and I hope to graduate next year.”
“You mean to say that for seven years, you have curtailed your evening meal and gone home very late, costing you sleep, and that after making all these sacrifices, you will graduate with the conviction that you are no better than a pig?” (p. 127). Evidently, that was the case.
There was nothing for Professor Jourdain to do but to love and care for “the miserable garden” to which she had been assigned (p. 85).
Some students came into her classes with psychological problems. Many were broken and lost. One who routinely walked her to the subway station — an appreciated kindness as some New York City neighborhoods can be dangerous — became infuriated by a bright, winter moon whose beauty Professor Jourdain had admired. The student raised his fist and lamented that God “was capable of making the moon, and I cannot!”(p. 40).
Nor were the students the only challenging aspect of her tenure at Hunter. As Professor Jourdain’s courses became increasing popular, so did her reputation as a Catholic. “Well, your teaching is strongly marked by your Catholic background,” the president of the college complained.
“You now find yourself in a secular institution which has another approach to philosophical problems and I personally think that you would be more effective and happier in a Catholic institution.”
When Professor Jourdain observed that “the objectivity of truth and of moral values was a highly respectable philosophical position defended by the two greatest ‘pagan’ philosophers, Plato and Aristotle,” the president squirmed and insisted that it was her approach that was “tainted by Catholicism and that was objectionable in a secular institution” (p. 79).
This charge was to plague her throughout the more than three and a half decades she taught at Hunter, assisted by numerous student conversions, one after another “surprised” to discover truth. Despite great pains to demonstrate its objectivity from a purely philosophical context, when one student objected to her “spreading Roman Catholicism,” another found those to be exactly the words she needed to hear to overcome anti-Catholic prejudices (pp. 172-175).
Obviously, only someone who was deeply persuaded that great good would come from teaching in such a place could withstand daily frustration, calumny, and discouragement. Memoirs of a Happy Failure is a stunning tribute to that idealism. When Alice Jourdain von Hildebrand looked back on her professional life and asked herself if she had to live it all over again, would she change that approach to teaching, as so often she was told she ought, the unhesitating answer is “no.”
Armed with “uncompromising devotion to truth, a passionate desire to share with others what I myself have received, [and] an absolute refusal to compromise for the sake of worldly advantages,” she took on the lion’s of secularism and made scores of spiritual conquests (p. 183).
“How I wish I could convince the administration of a school like Hunter,” she writes at the end of her Memoirs, “that there is a tremendous demand for teachers who courageously stand up for the objectivity of truth.
“There are things which do not change, which have an absolute and transcendent validity, and which every person has the right to know. Religiously, morally, humanly, and politically our great country can only hope to survive if it stands firmly on the ground of truth and gives its children the bread for which they hunger. This is the great task of education.”
Amen.
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