I have to admit that a great deal bothers me today, and much of it has to do with higher education. This is only partly because I have returned to school to pursue a Master of Sacred Theology degree. It is also because I have 10 nephews and nieces, and a legion of younger relatives, godchildren and assorted friends’ offspring to worry about – to say nothing of worrying about a country which, at least according to its government’s founders, requires an educated electorate for its ruling machinery to work right.
The fight over Confederate statues might seem to have little to do with the upcoming canonisation of Blessed John Henry Newman, but it does in a sense. One of my ongoing internet hobbies is to look up the websites of the Classics and Religion departments of universities and colleges. Happening upon those of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I noticed both contained departmental statements against the apparently controversial statue of a Confederate soldier on campus that has stood there for over a century. Both attacked the hapless image as a symbol of white supremacy.
Now, regardless of what one thinks of Confederate statues in general or this one in particular, the hypocrisy in the statements made me gasp. What do the universities in this nation think they themselves are? Nothing more than entryways for admission into what passes for the American elite – an elite bankrupt in morals, ideas and everything else.
I have never in my life heard more stupidities uttered than in history classes in American universities. Inaccuracies, fabrications, and worthless opinions built thereupon. Whenever I read an academic book attributing all historical actions to “structures of power”, I feel like flinging the thing out the window, and yelling: “You mean like classrooms, where grades are dependent upon agreeing with the instructors’ moronic views?” If I did not value higher education immensely, I would not have gone back to school; but I thank God I could do so overseas.
Worse, the erection of “safe spaces”, wherein college children are sheltered from disturbing ideas or behaviour, seems calculated to breed a race of arrogant, entitled, illiterate and obedient Eloi (although lacking even the beauty of HG Wells’s future race of human beef-cattle). Any students who do not appreciate this Brave New World of an education industry are soon made to feel outcast or else punished by faculty and/or classmates.
One might wonder where Blessed John Henry Newman fits into this sorry mess. Well, in 1853, having been invited by the bishops of Ireland to serve as founding rector of the nascent Catholic University of Ireland: to sell the scheme, Newman delivered a set of discourses and wrote some essays which were gathered into a book entitled The Idea of a University. It being assigned reading here, I have done so – and two points jumped out at me.
The first is the distinction he makes between the work of a university – passing on standard and received knowledge – and that of an institute or academy, dedicated entirely to research and making new discoveries in various fields. We often attempt to combine the two, with the result that neither is done well. The explosion of PhD candidates teaching in universities means that undergrads receive whatever specialised fragment of knowledge the teaching assistant is trying to tease into a thesis. So instead of “British Literature in the 19th Century”, as the title of the class might lead the students to assume they are getting, they will come away with “A Feminist Reading of Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth” instead.
But that is a relatively minor sin compared to the greater one that Blessed John Henry reveals. In 1853, he was put to it to prove that theology belongs in the university – any university – as a necessary branch of learning. To prove his point, he essayed a satire in which a university was founded that would teach about everything except Man: “Human exploits, human devices, human deeds, human productions, all that comes under the scholastic terms of ‘genius’ and ‘art’, and the metaphysical ideas of ‘duty’, ‘right’ and ‘heroism’” should be taught as the result of purely physical causes – or in modern terms, economics and our famed “structures of power”.
What was satire in the 19th century is a dull and stupid reality in the 21st – having long since banished God from the university, those in power have banished the human spirit as well. It is now up to parents and students either to find better places of learning than the mainstream can offer, or else to accept that entrance into the elite rather than education is all that the major universities can offer. Most of them can’t even give you that for your four years and thousands of dollars wasted.
Charles A Coulombe is an author and lecturer based in Los Angeles
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