The classics really do teach us how to live good and meaningful lives
Jacob Howland, The Dallas Morning News
American colleges and universities face strong headwinds, including skyrocketing costs and a shrinking supply of prospective students. Many are scrambling to reinvent themselves in ways they hope will boost enrollments. But in doing so, some fine institutions have lost their way.
The reinvention of the University of Tulsa, a top-100 research university until two years ago, follows a national trend in emphasizing self-affirmation and job preparation. Our strategic plan for 2017-22, “Building the Foundation for a Great Story and a Greater Commitment,” does not ask, “What do we want students to learn?” but, “How do we want TU students to feel?” The answer is “accepted,” “engaged,” “empowered,” and “self-discovery [sic]”—the pillars of the so-called TU Commitment.
True Commitment, the academic restructuring plan our administrators rolled out this past April, guts the liberal arts and redirects resources to technical and vocational fields. Its governing assumption is that students don’t need or want to study subjects that aren’t obviously useful. Professors now show their commitment by meeting every semester on Continuous Improvement Day, so that they may refine assessment tools that calculate “measurable outcomes” —especially the sort that will lead more or less directly to job offers.
I recently had a strange idea.
What if a university took a completely different tack? What if it rejected the claim that subjects like philosophy, theology, literature and history are basically useless? What if, to the contrary, it insisted precisely on the usefulness of the great books, books like the Iliad, the Bible and The Brothers Karamazov? What if it sought not to coddle students, but to strengthen and toughen them for the challenges of adult life?
Such a university might advertise itself to prospective students as follows:
“We will equip you to weather disappointment, illness and the loss of loved ones, and to make your peace with the inevitability of death. We will prepare you to get back on your feet when injustice or bad luck knock you down, or when you trip yourself up. Here you will learn how to fail, and then fail better, and you will come to value what you learn from failure no less than the satisfaction of success.”
“We will teach you to find meaning and even joy in suffering, particularly the suffering inherent in the confident exercise of virtue and independent judgment. We will open your eyes to the dignity and goodness of human existence no less than to the depredations of ignorance and evil, and to mystery and wonder of life no less than to its hard realities.”
“Above all, we will nurture your capacity to form, in the words of St. John Henry Newman, an ‘instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us.’ We do not promise to make you feel happy. But we will teach you to be happy.”
As strange as this idea is, it has one great advantage as a marketing strategy: It is not false advertising. The classics really do teach us how to live good and meaningful lives. And that is arguably the most useful knowledge one could acquire, even — or especially — in today’s noisy, fast-paced world.
Would this strategy succeed? In an earlier and more sensible epoch, probably so. But ours is an age of cultural forgetfulness and confusion, particularly about the most fundamental matters. Still, it might be worth a try. For many colleges and universities, there’s not much left to lose.
Jacob Howland is a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.
