Classic Kirk Essays
The Loss of an Object
Russell Kirk’s Introduction to Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning (Gateway Editions, 1978)
For a quarter of a century, higher education in America has been sinking lower. This book, of which the first part is chronological in scheme, gives a mordant account of that decline. I have endeavored to express myself graphically, through episode and vignette. In the latter part of the book, concerned with renewal, I permit some cheerfulness to break in.
Since 1953, the year in which my chronicles commence, I have written much about tendencies in American education. In my National Review page, “From the Academy,” I have written at least once every month about this process. For thirteen years I touched upon it in my syndicated newspaper column. I have discussed many textbooks in my lengthy reviews for America’s Future, Inc. My essays on colleges, schools, and educational theories have appeared since 1943 in a congeries of periodicals, among them The New York Times Magazine, The Intercollegiate Review, Fortune, The Journal of General Education, Society, Modern Age, Catholic Mind, Teachers College Record, Catholic World, Education, The Student Government Bulletin, Triumph, The Harvard Educational Review, The Lamp, The Political Science Reviewer, Annals of the American Academy, Law and Contemporary Problems, America, Imprimis, Social Thought, Christianity Today, Prospect, and The Month. For seventeen years I have been editor of a small quarterly concerned with the higher learning, The University Bookman. Also, I have lectured upon educational subjects to more than three hundred university and college audiences. Much of this speaking and writing has been woven into the fabric of this book. My hope is to assist in the recovery of reason and imagination in our higher learning.
My title has been chosen after deliberation. What does this word “decadence” mean? My favorite definition is that by C. E. M. Joad, in his book Decadence: a Philosophical Inquiry (1948). Decadence occurs, as Joad tells us, when people have “dropped the object” that is, when they have abandoned the pursuit of real objects, aims, or ends and have settled instead for the gratifications of mere “experience.” In society, the characteristics of decadence are luxury, skepticism, weariness, superstition; also, in Joad’s words, “a preoccupation with the self and its experiences, promoted by and promoting the subjectivist analysis of moral, aesthetic, metaphysical, and theological judgments.” By this definition, the higher learning in America is decadent, having lost object or end—which point will be made clearer in the following chapters.
Well, then, from what has the American higher learning fallen away? What object did we drop? Strange though it may seem nowadays, time was when certain ends, classical and Christian, were acknowledged generally in American college and university. From the first, the American college prepared young people for certain professions; yet this training for a vocation was not itself the end of the higher learning.
It is true that no one institution ever perfectly attained those ends, and that there has been much shoddiness on various campuses for a great while. Still, the existence of ends was recognized, once upon a time.
Those ends or objects had been Plato’s in the first Academy. According to Plato, the ends of education are wisdom and virtue.
Thus the higher learning, formerly, was an intellectual means to ethical objects. The disciplines of college and university were intended to develop a philosophical habit of mind, in John Henry Newman’s phrase, “of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.”
With this high aspiration there was mingled on the American campus, from the first—and for that matter, at Oxbridge and the Scottish universities, too—a large element of professional training, for the ministry, teaching, the bar, the practice of medicine, and sometimes other vocations. But it was assumed that the ethical and intellectual disciplines must inform such professions, and that mastery of arts and sciences was not inconsonant with mastery of an occupation. The founders of American colleges and universities, and the great majority of professors, took it for granted that wisdom is objective, and that virtue is objective, and that the mission of the higher learning is to pursue these objects, whether through humane studies or through the learned professions.
Decadence occurs, as Joad tells us, when people have “dropped the object” that is, when they have abandoned the pursuit of real objects, aims, or ends and have settled instead for the gratifications of mere “experience.” In society, the characteristics of decadence are luxury, skepticism, weariness, superstition; also, in Joad’s words, “a preoccupation with the self and its experiences, promoted by and promoting the subjectivist analysis of moral, aesthetic, metaphysical, and theological judgments.” By this definition, the higher learning in America is decadent, having lost object or end…
It is otherwise now. I am not implying that we Americans began to neglect these ends merely a quarter of a century ago. Of course the process of falling away commenced long before 1953; my point is that we have suffered the practical consequences of dropping the object, since 1953. The old pattern was beginning to fall apart at Harvard College seven decades ago, when Irving Babbitt published his book Literature and the American College (1908). Babbitt’s defense of academic leisure, in the final chapter of that slim book, suggests the understanding of learning’s ends as they were perceived before the First World War—and as they still are perceived by some of us.
“Some of the duties that Plato assigns to his ideal ruler would seem to belong in our day to the higher institutions of learning,” Babbitt wrote then. “Our colleges and universities could render no greater service than to oppose to the worship of energy and the frantic eagerness for action an atmosphere of leisure and reflection…. We should make large allowance in our lives for the eventual element of calm, if they are not to degenerate into the furious and feverish pursuit of mechanical efficiency. The tendency of an industrial democracy that took joy in work alone would be to live in a perpetual devil’s sabbath of whirling machinery and call it progress. The present situation especially is not one that will be saved—if it is to be saved at all—by what we have called humanitarian hustling…. If we ourselves ventured on an exhortation to the American people, it would be rather that of Demosthenes to the Athenians: In God’s name, I beg of you to think.’ Of action we shall have plenty in any case; but it is only by a more humane reflection that we can escape the penalties sure to be exacted from any country that tries to dispense in its national life with the principle of leisure.”
By “leisure,” Babbitt meant opportunity for serious thought and contemplation. On the campuses of 1978 there is plenty of opportunity for hustling or for idleness, but the claims of true academic leisure seem forgotten. Much more has been forgotten, too, especially the notion of the philosophical habit of mind. In 1952, Gordon Chalmers, then president of Kenyon College, foresaw most grave consequences to the person and to the republic, should higher education slide into technological hustling for some and into a lazy egalitarianism for others. Canon Bernard Iddings Bell, sometime president of St. Stephen’s College, though dissenting from Chalmers’ ideas in part, was gloomier still in his prognosis. And other voices, among them Robert Hutchins’s, were raised in warning against the general drift of America’s higher learning.
These vaticinations occurred about the time of our watershed year of 1953. Already university and college had been flooded with military veterans encouraged, regardless of talents, to enroll in college under the “G.I. Bill of Rights.” Already, for the first time in the country’s history, the number of students enrolled in state universities and colleges exceeded the number enrolled in independent institutions.
That was in the green tree; now we are in the dry.
Nowadays, twenty-five years later, with campus enrollments generally static or declining, disillusion with the learning allegedly higher has become widespread among students, among professors, among the general public. What went amiss? I set down below, tentatively, certain principal afflictions of American higher education during this past quarter of a century.
First, purposelessness: loss of the objects of wisdom and virtue, the old ends of formal education. The place of these was usurped by confused conflicting claims and hopes: college as mere socialization and sociability (“an introduction to middle-class conviviality and middle-brow culture,” Christopher Jencks puts it); college as boring means to job-certification; college as temporary sanctuary for the aimless and the neurotic; college as a huge repository of “facts” and specialized undertakings; college, presently, as refuge from military conscription; college as an alleged instrument for elevating the “culturally deprived” or “minorities”; college and university simply as an industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people at good salaries, supplying “research” services to the state or to private industry, furnishing public entertainment through quasi-professional sports and other diversions.
Second, intellectual disorder: all integration and order of knowledge in flux; the cafeteria-style curriculum, presently becoming the “open” curriculum; “discipline” reduced to a devil-term; the swelling empire of Educationism, formerly called pedagogy, with its frequent contempt for “subject matter”; the popularity of soft and often shallow “social science” degrees; the repudiation, by a growing number of professors and students, of the traditions of civility and of all concepts not born yesterday; the compartmentalizing of knowledge, leading at best to the development of elites unable to communicate one with another; the retreat of able or clever professors into “research,” as distinguished from teaching; the substitution of ideological infatuation for the old philosophical habit of mind, particularly in the ‘Sixties; and Joad’s “preoccupation with the self and its experience,” by contrast with the old concern of the higher learning for order in the soul and order in the commonwealth.
Third, gigantism in scale: the Lonely Crowd on the campus of Behemoth University. “It is not good to be educated in a crowd,” wrote Lord Percy of Newcastle, rector of Durham University, about 1953—and he was thinking of English schools with a few hundred pupils. A crowd readily becomes a mob. Culturally rootless, anonymous, bewildered, bored, badly prepared for higher studies, other-directed, prey to fad and foible, presently duped by almost any unscrupulous or self-deceived ideologue, a great many of the students at Behemoth U. came to feel defrauded and lost; only the more stupid did not suspect that anything was wrong with their condition. “We don’t want to be IBM numbers!” was the cry of the first wave of rioters on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, the “multiversity.” Impersonal dormitories like slum tenements, blaring with television sets and hi-fis, became teenage ghettos, the worst conceivable places for Babbitt’s “atmosphere of leisure and reflection.” I have touched upon these troubles in an earlier book of mine, The Intemperate Professor (1965); I will have more to say about them in this book. The effect of this inhumane scale upon professors and instructors, souring their tempers and frustrating their intellects, has been as disagreeable as its effect upon the rising generation—and perhaps more ominous.
Fourth, the enfeeblement of primary and secondary schooling, so that the typical freshman came to enter college wretchedly prepared for the abstractions with which college and university necessarily are concerned. The level of even functional literacy has been declining from a variety of causes, among them the triumph (now being undone, slowly) of “look—say” methods of reading-instruction over phonetic teaching, and the supplanting of books and periodicals by the television. An affluent society, luxurious, skeptical, weary, and superstitious, preoccupied with the self, victim of subjectivist analysis, no longer expected very much from public instruction except sociability and night basketball games.
With this drift coincided the ascendancy of the Instrumentalist theories of John Dewey and his colleagues in Educationalism, concerned chiefly with adjustment and some future egalitarian society, contemptuous both of oldfangled right reason and of prescriptive ways. The average teacher of the public-school apparatus had been badly taught himself, in high school and in teachers’ college, and his pupils were automatically promoted and graduated. Despite the brummagem product of the schools of the ‘Fifties, by 1953 most colleges and universities were ready enough to accept high-school graduates with a “C” average and few questions asked; while America’s general prosperity made it possible for a far larger proportion of young men and women, or their parents, to bear the increasing costs of spending some years on a campus—a phenomenon of mass enrollment in higher education never encountered anywhere before. Lest anyone be passed over for lack of money, presently governmental grants and loans were offered lavishly to practically any young person whose parents could meet, or evade, a means test.
Thus, in the prophetic rhetoric of Edmund Burke (so much reproached by Tom Paine for this), learning came to be trampled under the hooves of the swinish multitude. It is not possible to make scholars of teenagers who have no proper foundation of school learning and who, often enough, feel understandably an aversion to classrooms, after thirteen years of compulsory attendance; it is difficult enough for a college to make of them even potentially useful employees.
Here I have chanted only some stanzas of the Iliad of our educational woes; more lamentations will be encountered in later chapters, but also some glimmerings of reinvigoration. I have suggested above some of the principal phenomena of the decadence of our higher learning. These have been proximate causes of our educational troubles; yet also they have been consequences of deep-seated misunderstandings of what the higher learning is all about. Those powerful misconceptions have not been peculiar to the United States of America: since the Second World War, they have been operating with equal force in Britain, Germany, France, and other countries. (These errors are even more saddening in Europe than in the United States, for in Europe there existed an older and more complex tradition of higher learning to break down.) I have in mind two fallacies particularly.
Fallacy I is the notion that the principal function of college and university—if not the only really justifiable function—is to promote utilitarian efficiency. The institutions of higher learning, according to this doctrine, are to be so many intellectual factories, delivering to society tolerably-trained young persons who will help to turn the great wheel of circulation, producing goods and services. For what is man but a producing and consuming animal? Modern society has a formidable burden of “welfare” cases, adult and juvenile: very well, let the colleges and universities produce more masters and doctors of “social work.” Modern states require nuclear weapons of terrible power: very well, let colleges and universities produce more specialized technicians and “research scientists.” Why this archaic muttering about “wisdom” and “virtue”—mere words? Who needs moral imagination? We won’t buy that. Thus college and university grow more scientistic, rather than more scientific.
John Henry Newman encountered this mentality in the university before the middle of the nineteenth century. “The various busy world, spread out before our eyes, is physical, but it is more than physical,” Newman said in reply to a pedant who would have expunged the spiritual and the humane from the higher learning; “and, in making its actual system identical with his scientific analysis, such a Professor as I have imagined was betraying a want of philosophical depth, and an ignorance of what a University Teaching ought to be. He was no longer a teacher of liberal knowledge, but a narrow-minded bigot.” Amen to that; yet the Benthamite concept of the university has borne down most opposition.
To the masters of the modern nation-state, this utilitarian notion of the higher education is peculiarly attractive: the university and the college exist to “serve society” or “serve the people”—that is, to labor as bondservants to the political apparatus, whether in Soviet Russia or in these United States. Dante’s exaltation of the university as a third authority in the world, equal to imperial power and to papacy, is forgotten except so far as it is utilized by ideologues who mean to use the university as an instrument for preparing their own path to political dominion.
Also this utilitarian notion seems congenial to the greater part of the modern public: for it promises practical success, good salaries and preferment for offspring, social mobility, the allurements of the snob-degree and the country club. Only when these promises go unfulfilled do the majority of citizens question the utilitarian hypothesis.
The “service university” steadily has grown more servile for the past quarter of a century. In 1953, the president of a very large state university declared unabashedly, “There is no program to which this university will not stoop if the public seems to desire it.” The more the higher learning stoops to satisfy this or that demand of commercial interest or of political expediency, the less time and money remain available for the university’s genuine purposes.
Fallacy II is the notion that everybody, or practically everybody, ought to attend college. This misconception grows up from what Henry and Brooks Adams called “the degradation of the democratic dogma,” the extension of political forms to the realm of spirit and intellect. If higher education is a good thing for some folk, like lobster or air-conditioning, why isn’t it a good thing for all folk? Why isn’t the higher learning a natural right? Why isn’t it free to all? There even have been recommendations by educationists that the higher learning, or at least two years of it (sometimes styled “the thirteenth and fourteenth grades”) should be made compulsory.
This fallacy is bound up with what Ernest van den Haag calls “America’s Pelagian heresy.” In the fifth century, Pelagius argued that all mankind would be saved eventually, through natural goodness, without the operation of divine grace. The modern American, Professor van den Haag suggests, believes that all his countrymen will be redeemed soon, through formal schooling, without the operation of thought.
This illusion has propelled into college and university masses of young people who have very little notion of why they are there. To cope with these crowds of bored and unqualified “students,” college and university must stoop very low indeed: they must make large concessions to the “counter-culture,” many or most of their charges manifesting no interest in real culture. Sham courses and sham curricula are introduced, as busy-work—not very demanding busy-work—to suit the meagre aptitudes of the pseudo-students who will not study anything which challenges their intellects; for, as Aristotle wrote, true learning always is painful. Standards for admission and for graduation are lowered extravagantly, so that no one who bothers to enter a classroom occasionally will be excluded from the benefits of this learning, allegedly higher; “grade inflation” plagues even reputable old colleges and universities, for isn’t one student as good as another, or maybe a little better?
The true student and the true professor are submerged in this academic barbarism, but the only escape for most of them would be to abjure the Academy altogether. Then what would they do with their lives, and how subsist? For both the political bureaucracy and the bureaucracy of business and industry demand a bachelor’s degree, or a master’s, or a doctor’s, as a prerequisite for the more satisfactory forms of regular employment.
Thus nearly half of the mass of American high-school graduates proceed to a year or more of “higher” education; nearly a quarter of the rising generation obtain, eventually, some sort of college diploma. A great many are schooled; very few are educated. And who recalls Alexander Pope’s admonition that a little learning is a dangerous thing?
Fallacy I and Fallacy II, allied and intertwined, arise naturally, if banefully, from the soil of twentieth-century industrial democracy. The true higher learning is a garden plant, requiring nurture and protection. But if the Garden is not cultivated, soon we find ourselves in the parched Waste Land. This book is about the Waste Land of Academe nowadays, and about the Garden of intellect and imagination which still may be refreshed.
At this point, more than one reader may mutter, knowingly, “An Elitist!” Living as we do in an age of ideology, nearly all of us are tempted to believe that if we have clapped a quasi-political label to an expression of opinion, we have blessed or damned it; we need not examine that expression on its own merits. In educationist circles, “elitism” is a devil-term, for isn’t everybody just like everybody else, except for undeserved privilege? The degradation of the democratic dogma is fixed upon the mind.
But actually, I am an anti-elitist. I share wholeheartedly my old friend T. S. Eliot’s objection to Karl Mannheim’s theory of modern elites. I object especially to schemes for the governance of modern society by formally trained specialized and technological elites. One of my principal criticisms of current tendencies in the higher learning is that, despite much cant about democratic university and college, really our educational apparatus has been raising up not a class of liberally educated young people of humane outlook, but rather a series of degree-dignified elites, an alleged “meritocracy” of confined views and dubious intellectual and moral credentials, afflicted by presumption, puffed up by that little learning which is a dangerous thing. Elites govern us even in America—through the political structure, through the media of communication, through the public-school empire, through the very churches. Such folk were in George Orwell’s mind when he described the ruling elite of 1984: “made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.”
It is not at all my desire that university and college should train up such elites. What I am recommending in this book is a mode of higher education which can leaven the lump of modern civilization—which will give us a tolerable number of people in many walks of life who possess some share of right reason and moral imagination; who may not know the price of everything, but may know the value of something; who have been schooled in wisdom and virtue. I am suggesting that college and university ought not to be degree-mills: they ought to be centers for genuinely humane and genuinely scientific studies, attended by young people of healthy intellectual curiosity who actually have some interest in mind and conscience. I am saying that the higher learning is meant to develop order in the soul, for the human person’s own sake. I am saying that the higher learning is meant to develop order in the commonwealth, for the republic’s sake. I am arguing that a system of higher education which has forgotten these ends is decadent; but that decay may be arrested, and that reform and renewal still are conceivable.
The more people we have who are liberally educated and scientifically educated, the better. But the more people we have who are half-educated or quarter-educated, the worse for them and for the republic. Really educated people, rather than forming presumptuous elites, will permeate society, leavening the lump through their professions, their teaching, their preaching, their participation in commerce and industry, their public offices at every level of the commonwealth. And being educated, they will know that they do not know everything; and that there exist objects in life besides power and money and sensual gratification; they will take long views; they will look backward to ancestors and forward to posterity. For them, education will not terminate on commencement day.
What I am recommending . . . is a mode of higher education which can leaven the lump of modern civilization—which will give us a tolerable number of people in many walks of life who possess some share of right reason and moral imagination; who may not know the price of everything, but may know the value of something; who have been schooled in wisdom and virtue. I am suggesting that college and university ought not to be degree-mills: they ought to be centers for genuinely humane and genuinely scientific studies, attended by young people of healthy intellectual curiosity who actually have some interest in mind and conscience.
Once upon a time, said Socrates, men would accept truth even if it came from a stick or a stone; but now people ask you who you are when you presume to utter truth, and what may be your motives. So I set down here something about myself. My own adventures and misadventures in the higher learning will intrude from time to time, throughout this book, both because we ought to write about what we know and because my experiences in this domain, if not representative, at least have been variegated.
I was born almost literally in the railroad yards outside Detroit—fifty yards from the station, to be precise. My father was a locomotive fireman who had attended only primary school; my mother, who read poetry, had been graduated from high school. No one in my family, so far as I know, ever had attended a college—except for my grandfather on the distaff side, who had studied music for a few months at Valparaiso University.
The Great Depression descended upon us about the time I began reading newspapers, and it was not long before our cash resources were reduced to a twenty-dollar bill which my mother concealed in her copy of The Light That Failed. I attended our town’s public schools, then sound. I went to college only because no gainful employment could be found for me during the Roosevelt Recession, and because, mirabile dictu, I won a tuition scholarship to Michigan State College, a land-grant institution of which some account will appear in following chapters.
When I was graduated from Michigan State, hard times still lay upon the country. For lack of alternative, I proceeded to graduate study—at Duke University, which handsome institution conferred upon me a scholarship with a stipend of four hundred and fifty dollars, most of which went for tuition. I became a master of arts before America entered the Second World War; worked for a few months at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge plant; and then spent four years in the army.
While a sergeant in a desert, I wrote my first long essay about schooling. “A Conscript on Education,” which was published in The South Atlantic Quarterly at the beginning of 1945. Glancing over this piece now, I find that I have not altered my convictions. The year 1944 was a time of what Benda called “the treason of the clerks.” In America, then, their treason was against learning. The cleres, the intellectuals, seemed patriotic enough- super-patriotic, indeed. It was the life of the mind to which they were false. Those particular professors and writers and politicians are dead now, but they have their counterparts in this decade.
Professor George Boas, of Johns Hopkins, was very willing to sacrifice other people’s educations and lives. “If training men in trigonometry and physics and chemistry, to the detriment of the humanities, will win the war, then for God’s sake and our own, let us forget our Greek, our Latin, our art, our literature, our history, and get to business learning trigonometry and physics and chemistry,” that professor of philosophy wrote. He was suffused with enthusiasm for one crowded hour of glorious life: “All the learning in the world,” he declared of the soldier, “is not worth the experience which he will gain from his military career; and if he is killed, at least he will not have asked someone else to die for him.”
Some educators looked upon this crisis and the anticipated postwar reorganization of the higher learning as a golden opportunity for federal renovation of America’s educational muddle. James Bryant Conant and other university presidents viewed with rapture the munificent federal grants-in-aid proposed for veterans who might wish to attend college after Armageddon. Alexander Meikeljohn wrote in The New Republic, “The federal government should bargain with existing colleges for the education of young men and women in time of peace just as it is now bargaining for the education of soldiers in time of war.”
Scribbling atop a sand-dune, with little lizards crawling over my pages, I replied to these gentlemen and scholars. I offered some criticisms of American education more mordant than those by these writers, but I concluded that their cure was worse than our disease.
“Is there virtue in federal money to reform a system of education?” I wrote in 1944. “Will not academic competition for public favor be supplanted only by competition for federal favor? What reason have we to suppose that the machine of state at Washington will have as much sympathy with liberal learning as have the regents of a state university or the directors of a private college? Significantly, federal grants for education thus far have been for vocational training. The more distant the source of the money expended, the more need a legislator or a director feels to justify his action as ‘practical.’
“Can the federal organization be more discerning in education than are most of the intelligent citizens of this nation? The humanistic revival so recently gaining strength may be overwhelmed by a centralized utilitarianism. Here lies the great menace of this emergency to education of the future. Our need for speedy training of unusual numbers of men and women in technical skills for this hour of need may make us forget that man does not live by the lathe alone; and our overanxious desire to educate the discharged veteran, our blind faith in the efficacy of federal intervention, may make us forget that knowledge resides not in the state, but in the man. Regeneration of education must come from within; and it must be a training of men, not of units of manpower.
“Selfishness, pedantry, and folly in education, as in other concerns, can be remedied only by reformation of opinion, not by fiat. To institute a system of liberal learning, the man and the crowd must believe in a humanistic education; otherwise federal billions are of no avail. Criticism of our educational institutions by students and citizens and trustees and legislators, as individuals, can make schools worth attending and the new life worth leading. To resign the management of our educational programs to bright young men on the shores of the Potomac would be a betrayal of the intellectual trust which men of vanished ages have bequeathed to us.
“In this war, fought in the name of liberalism, very few think of liberalism of knowledge. We need an Epictetus to remind us that freedom of the mind is more important than freedom of the body. If our thoughts are not liberal, we shall not know how to rule, once we find ourselves the masters of the world’s destiny. More important still, we shall find the taste of victory bitter, for the emptiness of our minds will be the more unendurable, once the hot excitement of battle has passed. The time has gone by when we were compelled to fight for our bread. Now when, at last, we have the leisure and the wealth and the power to spread knowledge and truth, we are in danger of turning to Mammon rather than to Minerva.”
It seems to me that what I predicted in 1944 has come to pass nowadays. This book describes the process.
Promptly upon being discharged from the army in 1946, I was drafted into the department of the history of civilization at Michigan State College, potential instructors with master’s degrees from decent universities being then as scarce as they are now redundant. I taught classes with as many as a hundred students, while the bulldozers roared outside the classroom windows, clearing the ground for buildings to accommodate the new Lonely Crowd of Academe.
The usual pressures to obtain the doctorate being applied to us instructors at Michigan State when the flood of post-war enrollments diminished, I escaped from the empty drudgery of the usual American doctoral candidacy by going overseas to St. Andrews, the oldest of the Scottish universities. In 1952, I became a doctor of letters of St. Andrew’s. My second book, The Conservative Mind (my St. Andrews dissertation), appeared after I had returned to Michigan State. Being much published now, I might have risen in the Academy—publication, of whatever merit, being a sure road to advancement in the American university. Instead of accepting preferment, I resigned my post in 1953. My reasons for that decision are mentioned in the second chapter of this book.
Since then, I have subsisted chiefly as a man of letters, one of a dying breed: a mode of existence precarious for those not given to writing salacious novels. I have been visiting professor, over the years, at various colleges and universities, never lingering longer than three months consecutively on any campus; and I have lectured on more than four hundred campuses, I suppose, since my books began to be published. Thus I have been enabled to visit a wide diversity of institutions, and to judge them, I hope, impartially and independently. I have taught, on big campuses or on small, history, politics, literature, that vague subject “humanities,” and some other subjects; I have edited two serious journals; I have been consultant to various educational foundations and publishers. Such are my principal qualifications for writing this book.
The swift passage of the years has left me rich only in doctorates honoris causa, wife and daughters, and friends. Having refused to run with the intellectual hounds of our time, or to ride the crest of ideological waves, I distinctly am not a member of that Establishment now so widely reviled. In educational theory and practice particularly I have been one of a forlorn and proscribed remnant—which I do not lament, being by nature a member of the Opposition. I have digressed at such length chiefly to suggest that my educational notions scarcely can be characterized as those of a Privileged Elitist or an Effete Snob. Judge them, if you will, by their independent merits or demerits.
Not long ago I spoke at a reputable liberal-arts college on the subject of the order and integration of knowledge. There came up to me after my lecture two well-spoken, well-dressed, civil graduating seniors of that college; probably they were “A” students, perhaps summa cum laude. They told me that until they had heard my talk, they had been unable to discover any pattern or purpose in the college education they had just endured. Late had they found me! Where might they learn more? I suggested that they turn, first of all, to C. S. Lewis’ little book The Abolition of Man; then to Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge and to William Oliver Martin’s Order and Integration of Knowledge. They went off in quest of wisdom and virtue, of which they had heard little at their college, and I have not beheld them since. I trust that they have read those good books and have become members of that unknowable Remnant (obscure but influential as Dicey’s real shapers of public opinion) which scourges the educational follies of our time.
This episodic history of mine is meant to attract more such recruits to that Remnant. There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes, T. S. Eliot wrote. Like the Seven Against Thebes, we educational renewers may be avenged by our children. In the realm of ideas, an Object that has been dropped may not be lost irrevocably.
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