Mortal Remains
Paying for College
In her August 15, 2020 nytimes.com column, Shawn Hubler writes that in the wake of the coronavirus there is increasing unwillingness of college students and their parents, especially those served by expensive private schools, to continue paying high tuitions for merely online exposure to their colleges. She makes an important point in observing that the virus has simply exacerbated an already existing dysphoria—skyrocketing college costs with increasing questions about the value of a traditional college education symbolized in well-manicured campuses and the old ideal of an edifying "college life."
One wonders, however, what is being sought for which the merely online experience is the final straw of inadequacy. I am not cynical enough to believe there are no serious people left for whom what is wanted in a college education is more than a respectable distraction for late adolescence, or a necessary part of a class distinction, or that what is most desired by all those young and hungry souls dwelling above Cayuga's waters is ideally vocational training. I once knew an old lawyer of the trousered ape variety who told me his University of Chicago degree earned in the Hutchins and Adler days (something I coveted), together with a quarter, was worth a bus ride downtown. But he had lost much of his humanity, and it is a mistake to presume that everyone has.
No, what is sought among those who still have their souls is still "reared against the arch of heaven," perceived as worth paying much for, and placed at what is intuited (despite all reasonable proofs to the contrary) as an unacceptable distance by the fleshless imaging of electronic communication—in much the same way as among the devout the digitized service of divine worship is unacceptable. For the image must in either case have a certain quality to be recognized by the faithful as a medium of participation in the reality it re-presents.
Ape & Entropy
Nearly all the colleges that are now in danger were founded on transcendental, usually religious, ideals (see George Marsden's important treatise, The Soul of the American University, Oxford, 1994), central to which was the belief that all knowledge worthy of the name is founded upon truth (cf. Harvard's motto) and is valuable in itself. As such, it enlarged and cultivated whatever it was in the person that was undying, or had to be thought and spoken of in such terms even by the unbeliever—especially the knowledge that dealt with the kinds of subjects that were penniless abstractions to my lawyering friend—i.e., subjects of the kind listed in the Great Books Syntopicon.
The trousered and skirted apes are now, however, in charge, and the question of what comprises education outside the merely technical fields is a power game dominated by throttlers of free discussion whom even the old-fashioned liberal (there are few of them left) finds repugnant—even though it was he who, dominated by the unwarranted optimism of the liberal ideal, hadn't the strength to close the door upon the impervious ideologues who replaced him.
The resulting deterioration is directly analogous to that seen in the liberalized churches, founded once-upon-a-time on dogmatic belief in the existence of a self--revealed God and the responsibility of man toward him, all of which has now in such places been reduced to a doctrine of general benevolence controlled by the morality of the Zeitgeist, and which hasn't the mesh to hold institutional loyalty any more than its spiritual counterpart in the colleges. The anchorless ideal of modern liberalism, fleshed out in the policies of "inclusivity" as an ersatz substitute for "university," cannot for long hold sufficient loyalty to maintain a very expensive institutional life.
Something like a zero-sum game is afoot in both school and church. There is not enough money, nor are there enough upper-middle-class students to go around for the small, expensive, liberal colleges, just as for the liberal churches there are a limited number of paying enthusiasts for their etiolated brand of "Christianity." The local Congregational church is now an art gallery or a struggling community center, for its people long ago lost enough faith to constitute a "church," just as the broader world is fast losing its faith in what the colleges stopped delivering long ago, but have been lying about believing ever since—that there is an eternal point to education in the arts and humanities.
These schools still have in one fashion or another "truth" on their escutcheons and promised in their advertisements, but it is truth in which they do not believe, much less do they seek it—only question it with no intention of engaging—for they rightly fear that truth in its weight and complexity destroys all ideology, including religious ideology. (The Soviets who read Pravda ("The Truth") were well aware of the irony the title involved, and did not read it for truth.)
Keeping Up the Groves
At the bottom of the decay of both institutions, church and school, is "liberalism," which I would define for this essay as the purported search for truth while denying or radically questioning, which is the same thing, its existence ab initio. St. Anselm, in harmony with the scriptural references to seeking God as life's summum bonum, described the phenomenology of human intellectual development in transcendental terms as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking knowledge, and in this essentially religious idea justified the idea of a fellowship of fellow-seekers that did not presume to have perfectly found what they were looking for, but believed that such seeking, even with imperfect results, had eternal worth—that is, a university of believers which believed something in which it would finally come to the infinitely dynamic rest of eternal life, but could study profitably until then.
Where in the modern college environment, which Marsden characterizes as an apostasy "from Protestant establishment to established non-belief" (and I think we may now confidently add "Catholic" to this) does one find what Anselm said the soul requires, rather than just the mendacious intimations of it suggested in the slick, cheery advertisements of happy (that is, spiritually nourished) students? In "religious" schools? Less and less, for nearly all of those are busy serving two masters, with the results the Lord indicated. Perhaps one might think there is at least a dim intuition of this question behind balking to pay ever-increasing volumes of life's blood for the upkeep of the groves.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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