Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on Academe’s ‘Factional Disputes and Ideological Scandals’)

“These continuous factional disputes and ideological scandals were a form of spiritual luxury that satisfied the higher cravings for polemic, gossip, and backbiting without taking the baser shape, so noticeable in the larger universities, of personal competition and envy. Here, living was cheap and the salary range was not great. The headships of departments were nominal, falling, by common consent, to the member with the greatest taste for paperwork. Such competition as there was centered around vying for the better students.”—American novelist, essayist, and memoirist Mary McCarthy (1913-1989), The Groves of Academe (1952)

It's been more than 70 years since Mary McCarthy’s satire on higher education appeared, and the issues embroiling these schools—divestment in Israel, DEI, to name a few—would have been utterly foreign to the novelist who viewed with such a jaundiced eye life among students (her bestseller The Group) and faculty members (The Groves of Academe).

But academic politics remains as powerful a force as ever—perhaps even more so than it was in her time, consumed by the 24/7 news cycle in a way it never had been when she wrote.

In retrospect, the Fifties looks like a golden age of fictional treatment of college and university life. Over in England, just after publication of The Groves of Academe, Kingsley Amis reaped comic material from a hapless lecturer in medieval literature in Lucky Jim.

But it’s a novel that came out at the start of the decade, C.P. Snow’s The Masters, that may have the most resonance in the current American academic environment, with a plot that centers on the scheming and plotting in selecting a new head of an imaginary college (clearly inspired by Snow’s time at Cambridge).

Especially after last year, it might be said that “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” for anyone hoping to fill a similar role at any American college or university.

Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Universities and ‘The Object of Learning’)

“It is the object of learning not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of individual men, but also to advance civilization; and if it be true that each nation plays its special part in furthering the common advancement, every people should use its universities to perfect it in its proper role. A university should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time.” —Woodrow Wilson, 28^th President of the United States and Princeton University President (1856-1924) , “University Training and Citizenship,” The Forum, September 1894, reprinted in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: College and State—Educational, Literary and Political Papers (1875-1913), edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William Dodd (1926)

Quote of the Day (James Bryant Conant, on Diversity of Opinion in Higher Ed)

“Diversity of opinion is not only basic for the welfare of our universities but for that of the entire nation.” —American chemist, educator and diplomat James Bryant Conant (1893-1978), “Education in a Divided World” (1949), in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse, edited by Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender (2008)

Quote of the Day (Hanna Holborn Gray, on Free Speech on Campus)

“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom." — Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago, quoted in Geoffrey R. Stone, “Free Speech on Campus: A Report from the University Faculty Committee,” Huffington Post, Jan. 6, 2015

(The photo of Ms. Gray accompanying this post, taken in 1989, comes from the University of Chicago.)

Quote of the Day (Richard Hofstadter, on the University and the Human Mind)

"A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind."— Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970), “Columbia University Commencement Address in the 214^th Academic Year,” delivered on June 4, 1968, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse, edited by Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender (2008)

Today, my alma mater, Columbia University, holds its commencement exercises. I wish the graduates—indeed, every graduate of every institution of higher learning—luck this month.

In the meantime, the rest of us would do well to ponder these words of Richard Hofstadter. That spring, the university he loved so well had been rocked to the core by unrest. His address was an attempt to remind all sides about the essentials of education that aimed to be truly "higher." What he said hasn’t lost relevance, all these years later.

Quote of the Day (Saul Bellow, on an ‘Open Channel to the Soul’)

“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”— Nobel laureate Saul Bellow (1915-2005), foreword to Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987).   

Quote of the Day (“First Things,” on Columbia Univ. and Religion)

“A standard-issue elite university with the otherwise stultifying homogeneity of the dominant secular and progressive mentality moderated by New York City, where anything can be found, including intellectually serious forms of Christianity and Judaism. Students involved in Catholic organizations or the Campus Crusade for Christ are more likely to draw a shrug than a cold shoulder. As one student reports, ‘I became more religious during my time [here].’ An opportunity for an excellent education in an urban culture too busy to harass students with serious convictions.”—“Degrees of Faith: A First Things Survey of America’s Colleges and Universities,” First Things, November 2010

Reading the first half of the first sentence, I chuckled at what appeared to be another reflexive bashing of liberals at First Things, a monthly ecumenical journal of “religion and public life.“ It was founded by the late Catholic convert, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, and though its contributors include Orthodox, Jewish and Protestant viewpoints, it still often reads as a sort of Catholic counterpart to Commentary. Too heavy a dose of this and I start reaching for a copy of the reliably liberal (or, to use the word preferred by adherents, “progressive”) America or Commonweal; then, after awhile, I go back to First Things for relief, then repeat the cycle. (It's always good for the left hand to know what the right one is doing, and vice versa.)

But as I finished this excerpt from this magazine's survey of “the place of religion—or lack thereof—on American college campuses today,” I felt a distinct sense of déjà vu. I was glad to see that not much had changed at my alma mater.

I went through 12 years of Catholic elementary and secondary schools, but my knowledge not merely of religion but also of my own faith deepened while attending Columbia University some three decades ago. The in-depth immersion in the foundation texts of Christianity, as part of the required Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities requirements, made me feel, like the anonymous student quoted here, more rather than less religious—certainly an unexpected outcome in this seriously secular institution.

Reading Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels of Mark and John from end to end, rather than in the short excerpts heard at Mass on Sundays, brought me face to face, as I never had been before, with the unexpected connections—and the surprising differences—among these works. Moreover, the treatment by my professors—close, respectful, but without advocating one faith or another (or, indeed, atheism)—also convinced me that there is a way to educate students about these works without resort to proselytizing.

In this same First Things survey, Columbia places sixth among institutions “least unfriendly to faith among the top secular schools." That sounds like damning with faint praise, but—at least in my time at the school—it was accurate.

Elsewhere in this November issue, Columbia is mentioned again—or, rather, its interdenominational chapel, St. Paul’s, is, in Joseph Bottum’s essay “Mandatory Chapel.” St. Paul’s is listed, along with similar institutions such as Syracuse’s Hendricks Chapel and Pittsburgh’s Heinz Chapel, as being reminiscent of “Jefferson’s Monticello meets the Pantheon, by way, probably, of Latrobe’s 1806 cathedral for Baltimore.” That sounds snarkier than it really is, about a beautiful little spiritual oasis amid a big city and a smaller—but still significant—admittedly secular institution.

Quote of the Day (James Piereson, on Columbia University’s Core Curriculum)

“If the objective of a liberal education is to identify the permanent and perennial issues in the midst of flux and change, then Columbia’s Core serves that purpose more directly than most alternatives. In judging the two curricula, one does not face a close call. Columbia and Harvard are playing in different leagues. If it were a football game, Columbia would beat Harvard by several touchdowns.”—James Piereson, “Columbia Beats Harvard,” The New Criterion, September 2010