New York Diary

the new and the old

Are universities (and other institutions of learning - Medieval monasteries, yeshivot, perhaps even prep schools) necessarily conservative in nature?

This is a conversation I've had several times in the past few weeks. It all began architecturally: I suggested to H that the new residential buildings at Cornell are monstrosities that look unfinished. They have a kind of fake-brick siding that doesn't meet up at the edges, which I hate; I may have said, "Forget the siding--they should just make them of real brick." But perhaps I actually suggested that they should be made of stone. Certainly, I made it clear that anything with even minor pretensions to permanence should be built from a medium that could age well.

H averred. There might be other benefits to Cornell's building choices, benefits that have little or nothing to do with their looks but everything to do with aging well. For example, he said, it might be convenient and intelligent to think about moving or modifying these buildings in the medium- or even near-term. Maybe a university does itself a disservice if it isn't adaptable (here we're still talking architecturally). Universities are always on the cutting edge of research; they grow and change quickly as they discover new things; and they're the home of the stereotyped ivory-towered liberal who is the vanguard of a new morality, a new set of ideals, a new way of life (and here we are suddenly talking politics). The modular dorm may be both an artistic reflection of this fact and a practical way of letting the university change its space to better serve new ideas, new experiments, new students.

Let us put aside the virtues of Cornell's new west campus dorms (if any virtues there be) in favor of a different question: When did it happen that the university became a stronghold of the liberal crowd? I mean, the first modern universities were theological in nature, a natural outward expansion of the monastery-as-repository-of-knowledge way of doing things. Such institutions were necessarily conservative, by virtue of expounding an eternal and unchanging worldview (even if the details were as-yet-unknown). If God made the earth to be the center of the galaxy, it's a good bit harder to make the jump-shift to heliocentricism than it is if previous (merely human) scientists made some incorrect assumptions.

But there are other reasons that universities, even secular universities, might be generally presumed to be conservative. First, they are places where the old teach and have power over the young. Unrestrained twenty-year-olds might be young and idealistic and likely to (try to) change the world, but we may be forgiven for thinking that twenty-year-olds who are awestruck by their brilliant (septuagenarian) history instructors, who worry (at least a bit) about their grades from said instructors, and who must attend class most days and buckle down to work on serious term papers and theses, might be somewhat more restrained in their radicalist tendencies.

Second, the university is an established institution with a very respectable place in modern society. When one tries to get into a good university and to get out of it again with a good degree in order to get a well-paying, respectable job, one is doing exactly the sort of thing that the government wants and has always wanted from its people. This does not represent a radical break from society or even a minor threat to established social mores; indeed, it is a pure case of working within the system. Most people who go to universities are still planning to travel an old and well-trodden path.

And finally, the nature of imparting knowledge as such--even merely man-made, man-discovered knowledge--seems inherently conservative. Whether I'm telling you God made it this way or nature evolved this way, whether X is Absolutely True or merely taken to be true because it's the best explanation we have, the university is a place where students sit down and are lectured on the wisdom of their forebears. Some young people may not respect their elders--or their elders' values--but you'd think that students at top universities would be some of the first to recognize the worth of older wisdom.

Despite all of this, though, for some time now universities have been hotbeds of liberalism, of reform, of novelty, and occasionally of radicalism, both in this country and abroad. In America, this is evidenced by an intriguing split: universities and churches, once bosom-buddies, now find themselves reliably on opposite sides of nearly every social issue to rise to public importance.

P & P (boyfriend and girlfriend) suggest that the new liberalism makes a kind of sense given the post-Enlightenment (and particularly 20th-century) focus on academic research. The main goal of academics, after all isn't to impart knowledge anymore. Rather, it's to make new knowledge. Academia, they say, is all about the new these days.

P & P have a good point. But perhaps we'd do well also to consider an argument put forth by J, a correspondent of mine from Florida. She suggests that greater educational opportunities for people from all backgrounds--a thing H, P & P, J and I all agree to be an unequivocally good thing--has helped to do away with a rhetoric both of social superiority and of leadership, character, and moral formation in the academy. Back when the members of the student population were being groomed by their rich, Senatorial, businessmen fathers to be rich Senators and businessmen themselves, college was largely about instilling a certain character into young men and providing them with a successful and aristocratic social network. Students like this are still very much in evidence in our most elite universities--but there are lots of other types, too. Now, students are as likely to aspire to professordom as to public service in the established government; the professor is no longer "merely" educating next year's leaders, but is rather a leader in a field him- or herself. In the meantime, students are taught the excitement of academia as much as (or probably more than) the duty of public service. Getting back to P & P's point, students are not merely made aware of new discoveries, but are encouraged to take part in them as well--and not as hobbies or interesting pastimes, as in the old tradition of the recreational scientist or the war-fighting poet, but as a full-fledged professional with the possibility of major awards and popular recognition (apparently called "the Einstein effect" these days). In other words, it's not just the professors who privilege their research more highly than their teaching--the students do it, too.

For J, the movement away from grooming university students for public service and worldly success is a good one. Divorcing the academy from the church, first, and from the government, later, has given it a new independence and has led to many great scientific and technological advancements. J only wishes this whole grooming-for-power thing was done away with once and for all.

From my end, I am left with a question: But where would those kids go? It is true that research and teaching are two very different functions. It is also true that many of our greatest research institutions in America appear to milk their undergrads for money in order to support their deservedly-renowned research functions, without giving a fair return of knowledge for dollars; Cornell, for example, puts 400 students into introductory physics classes--and uses the tuition payments to fund Mars Rovers. (Don't get me wrong--the Mars Rovers are awesome, and somebody ought to be paying Steve Squyres an amazing sum for his efforts--but it probably oughtn't be, in part, students who think they're paying him to teach their astronomy classes when he's just earned the right not to teach for a long while.) But if the academy should rightfully become the home of research and discovery exclusively, leaving all that conservative good-grooming, old-style education stuff for somebody else, then we need to ask who is prepared to take on that function in today's world. As it is, we could do worse than letting our future world leaders putz around for a few formative years in the presence of some of the most profound, interesting, and intelligent new discoveries, and discoverers, that there are.

posted by Skay @ 9:58 PM