The Idea of the University: A Re-examination

National Review, June 22, 1992 by Thomas Short

Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, is an eminent and much-honored scholar. His numerous books on theology and the history of Christianity exhibit a depth of erudition rarely seen. In addition, he has done time in administration, as dean of Yale's graduate school. So, who better to address the crisis in American higher education? That Pelikan dares to address that crisis (his own word for it) through a meditation on Cardinal Newman's famous essay "The Idea of a University," is an additional reason to hope that this is the book we've been waiting for. Alas, it is less a prescription for a cure than another symptom of the disease.

Not that Pelikan is one of that dreary gang whose mantra is "race, class, gender." Nor is he to be found among the zany revelers in the higher cobwebs of "post-structuralist" what-not. The former subordinate education to politics and the latter deny any possibility of knowing anything anyway. Pelikan, by contrast, accepts Newman's principle that knowledge is its own end, to be sought without regard to its social utility.

Nonutilitarian education turns out to be the most useful sort, though, especially in teaching citizens to think for themselves. Quoting Newman, Pelikan says that "that training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society." The job of educator, then, is not to reform society but to educate it.

The multiculturalists, Afrocentrists, sensitivity trainers, feminists, and gay-rights activists see it differently. They believe that the purpose of education is to wage war on capitalism and democracy. Unfortunately, rather than assail the PC legions, Pelikan simply ignores them. He fails even to mention radical feminism, deconstructionism, and multiculturalism. Thus, he fails to confront the flesh-and-blood enemies of Newman's principles.

Worse yet, Pelikan dismisses with briefest mention those--such as Allan Bloom, Charles Sykes, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D'Souza--who have identified the academy's barbarians within. In a chapter on "The Storm Breaking upon the University: The University in Crisis," Pelikan admits no crisis at all, except for a crisis, as he puts it, of "self-confidence." His message seems to be that the university's only error is to have taken its critics too seriously.

Like many other scholars and scientists--especially the most successful and best established--Pelikan can pursue his research and teaching barely affected by the disaster spreading around him. He and they occupy an ivory tower within the ivory tower. And the real purpose of his book is to preserve that tower from reformers who might go too far in sacrificing research to better teaching. The importance of research to the life of the university is the major corollary Pelikan draws from Newman's principle--a difference at least of emphasis from Newman's own conclusion, which stressed teaching.

But after adumbrating the obvious implications of those views, what is there left for him to say? Having fled from the university's most dangerous enemies, he in fact is left with little to say. The final third of the book considers the university's relation to society--and ducks all the hard questions.

Affirmative action, for example, is never mentioned, though it is addressed by implication in Chapter 14. Quoting from the public-relations documents of Egyptian, South African, Greek, and Philippine universities, as well as dozens of authors from Tocqueville to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pelikan concludes that "the university must go on being able to identify, and then attract and hold, those relatively few individuals, regardless of race or class or gender, whose |virtues and talents' give promise of advancing knowledge . . ." etc., etc. We can drink to that. But from this book the public will never learn that race has been substituted for ability in colleges and universities all across America, at every level of student and faculty recruitment.

Pelikan's disengagement from the real battle is evident even in his style. He never says anything himself if he can quote another saying it instead or, better yet, Scholar A correcting a comment by Scholar B on a passage from Ancient Sage C, described by D as having. . . The reader feels like a witness to a revolt of the footnotes: tired of being at the bottom of the page, they have clambered up into the text and taken it over. And while there is pleasure in palpating the dense texture of reference piled on reference, often one has to read the same sentence three times before plucking its point out of the medley of voices that express it. This is not writing that is meant to have an effect.

The university is where, as Pelikan quotes Newman, "a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life." But what habits of mind are being formed today? From some professors students can learn to reduce every intellectual issue to a simplistic question of who is oppressing whom. And from many of our best scholars, such as Jaroslav Pelikan, they can learn to enjoy a fool's paradise.