Thought Shrapnel

I discovered this curious article via Arts & Letters Daily which I’ve only recently rediscovered, after I used to visit it, well, daily. The article is a conversation published in The Point between its editors, many of whom attended the Arts and Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. News that they have paused graduate student admissions for all departments, are trying to cut costs, and restructuring caused them to reflect on their own experience, and the importance of a graduate education in the Humanities.

As a graduate of Humanities subjects myself (Philosophy, History, Education) I found it really interesting to read Becca Rothfeld’s contribution. Universities, as I have said before, do not have a right to exist—especially in their current, neoliberal form. That’s not to say I would simply get rid of them, quite the opposite: I think everyone should have space for the kind of contemplation, reflection, and self-development that they can provide.

Although this article is about the US higher education system, my experience is of the UK approach. My parents were paid to go to university, while a generation later I was invoiced a (relatively) small amount for the privilege, and in which now my son is on the hook for a lot more. As other people have said more eloquently than I ever could, this has meant that, over my lifetime, universities have morphed from a public good into a private one. We should do something about that.

Forgive me, Father, for I do not want to have doubts about the academic humanities on the eve of their decimation—but I’m not sure that I will miss the ivory towers when they’re gone, or at least, what I will miss about them strikes me as incidental to their self-conception and their stated aims. I will miss the role they played, often despite themselves, and I will miss the people who populated them, often ambivalently and always in abominable working conditions. And it goes without saying that if the humanities ever ceased to exist, I would not merely “miss them”; I would cease to have a reason for living. But I’m not sure that the humanities could ever vanish—we need them too much, and we perpetuate them too helplessly, just by dint of being the kind of creatures we are—and I’m even less sure that the academy in its present incarnation provides the best forum for their continuation. That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t go to the barricades to protect the ivory tower, now that the philistines are at the gate. Rest assured: I plan to. But I’d rather go to the barricades for something I could stand behind with less trepidation.

What did I love about the university during my decade inside it? I loved the ideal, rarely realized, of an intellectual community—a group of people committed to thinking together rather than competing against one another for a vanishingly small spate of jobs. And I loved the promise, equally notional, that there might be a retreat from worldly preoccupations, a place reserved for thinking, just for the sheer delight of it. Above all, I loved the kind of people the university attracted (and often ended by demoralizing, if not completely destroying): people eager to pore over The World as Will and Representation line by line for over a year, people for whom the life of the mind is a necessity and, more importantly, a joy. And if I didn’t exactly love that academic humanities departments are pretty much the only durable and entrenched institutions in the anglophone world dedicated to the study and preservation of the arts, I knew that it was true. And if I downright hated that so many of us were consigned to conditions of poverty and precarity, I had no choice but to pretend our plight was justified by the project we were jointly committed to maintaining. But was it?

You’re catching me at a moment of acute skepticism. I’ve just returned from teaching at the Matthew Strother Center, a place that’s hard for me to describe in less than half a million words. In brief: five students of all ages and all professions come to a farm in the Catskills, where they stay for a week for free, without their phones or computers. They don’t know in advance what book the faculty will assign them, but they show up anyway. During the day, they work on the farm and attend a three-hour seminar. At night, they participate in “salons”: during our session, we staged a performance of Plato’s Symposium and sang an arrangement that one of the students, a retired choral director and organist in his late sixties, prepared for us. We were not expected to produce anything. The goal was the hardest and best thing in the world: to read a book together and try to understand it.

That book was The Gay Science—which is in large part about the shortcomings of the modern university. Nietzsche describes its resident specialists as “grown into their nook, crumpled beyond recognition, unfree, deprived of their balance, emaciated and angular all over except for one place where they are downright rotund.” I think I know what he means. I’ve taught Nietzsche in the university, and I’ve taught him on a farm in the Catskills, and there is no comparison.

So where does this leave me, a conflicted defender of the university, an academic exile by choice? We need humanistic institutions. The humanities are not the kind of thing we can—or would want to—do alone. But must we content ourselves with the humanistic institutions we have? Yet it isn’t obvious that the model of the Center could ever be scaled up to accommodate a whole nation, and it certainly is obvious that any broadscale change in humanistic education is a lamentably long way off. For now, for better or for worse (and I’m often convinced it’s very much for worse), the university is the best we have. I love it; I hate it; I resent that I need it. I wouldn’t miss it if it vanished—but of course, I also would.

Source: The Point

Image: Alisa Anton