- The Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education (St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy
- and Public Affairs), by Gordon Graham (Charlottesville VA and Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005). 295 pp.
DAVID M. WHALEN is Associate Provost and Professor of English at Hillsdale College.
With something of J. Alfred Prufrock’s bewilderment and exhaustion, we have “known them all, already, known them all” —the stories, that is, of academic horrors and tyrannical, radical ideologies hijacking higher education. Certainly, leftist politics are thoroughly “in possession” of campuses throughout Europe and America, and notions that thoughtful scholars would lately have considered affronts to intelligence and civility now have entire departments dedicated to their “study.” Nevertheless, the exhaustion with these stories is real and may point to something more than our being surfeited with them. It may imply an underlying recognition that something deeper or more perilous (if such can be imagined) has gone wrong. Higher education suffers, at its center, from a teleological vacuum. We have lost any coherent idea of its purpose. Even so political a wrangle as recent disputes between the U.S. Department of Education and the regional accrediting agencies amply illustrates that we lack anything like a general understanding of what higher education is supposed to do, how to evaluate or recognize its successes or failures, what means of funding are appropriate to it, or even whether it is worth the expense and time it requires. Of course conflicting opinions about all these things exist in cacophonous abundance, but the problem is not simply a lack of consensus. It is deeper yet. Western culture has taken a peculiar turn in the last century-and-a-half, resulting in proclivities of thought and imagination that render us largely incapable of comprehending one of our own, most venerable institutions: the university.
Those habits of thought and the turn they bespeak—commercial, utilitarian, and scientific or quantifying—have so shaped the imagination that other categories of thought or value seem now quaint or self-refuting. If, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, then to the modern imagination every institution looks like a business, and every human relationship corresponds to the logic of contracts. One sees this instantly in the language used in common discourse. Virtually anything from lawn care to international relations is discussed in terms of outcomes, deliverables, productivity, value added, maintenance, costbenefit, maximized returns, and interest. So, too, even the language of romance: people “invest” in their relationships, have “productive conversations,” spend “quality time” (i.e. low investment, high-yield), are “on the market,” and have relationships that “go bust.” When we bring this language and thought to higher education, the result seems at once ordinary yet distorted: students become customers; courses have content; content is packaged and delivered; institutions are accountable; institutions generate outcomes; and outcomes require quality control. No wonder, then, that for us higher educa tion is not just a problem; it is a mystery.
Gordon Graham’s The Institution of Intellectual Values, the fifth volume of General Editor John Haldane’s St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs is an antidote to despair as it effectively—and patiently—reasons around the limits of contemporary thought, restoring to modern view those goods of higher education that tend to escape notice in a commercial age. Graham (Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen) fills the teleological vacuum with ends or purposes for higher education that are rooted in the realities of man’s intellectual being without ignoring the particular historical conditions in which that being now operates. The volume’s subtitle, “Realism and Idealism in Higher Education” alludes to Graham’s intent to avoid the dichotomies characterizing most discussions of the subject. On the one hand, there are modernizers who consider themselves realists or pragmatic progressives. These modernizers tend to embrace business models and reforms like outcomes assessment in the name of (often governmental) accountability. On the other hand are traditionalists who consider themselves the guardians of an ancient educational ideal, an ideal uncorrupted by crass commercialism or utilitarianism and free of state or bureaucratic interference. Graham eschews both of these houses. From the outset, he argues, the state has had much to do with higher education; there never was a time when universities were free of such interference. From the outset, again, universities consciously prepared students for professional lives and activity; there never was a time when John Henry Newman’s “knowledge for its own sake” was the sole end of either teaching or research. Likewise, regarding the tendency to organize, manage, and evaluate universities along lines originating in modern business, Graham concedes that “Important social and economic changes have brought it about that much of the style of the modern […] university, both of management and presentation, is appropriately modeled on commerce and industry.” Thus Graham declines to shrug off everything advanced in the name of realism. Nevertheless, he insists as well that the so-called “realists” are themselves dangerously and unwittingly unreal. They stumble fatally when they “think that the spirit of commerce and industry should, or could, enter into the conception of [the university’s] principle purpose as well, that, so to speak, the heart of the university must itself be adapted to the corporate image.” There is something, then, essential to the university that realists and corporate educational models fail to grasp.
First, however, it would be mistaken to regard Graham as simply striking a balance between extremes. Though he describes his project as a fruitful dialectic between realism and idealism, he does not in fact set up a middling, compromising (nor compromised) notion of higher education. His astute analyses of social, economic, and demographic realities and their bearing on contemporary education establish Graham’s credibility as a genuine realist, though of a different sort. Even while this credibility is becoming manifest, however, he engages readers in a tutorial about fundamental human goods or “values”— values not as diluted moral sensibilities, but as that which is valuable, desirable, and good in itself, inextricably bound up in eudaimonia or human flourishing. The terms used above, “heart” and “principle purpose,” give away what is actually being attempted: a restoration of telos, an ascertaining of principle as discoverable in present circumstances. Graham disavows Newman’s formulation of “knowledge for its own sake,” but his defense of intellectual understanding as an inherent component of human welfare achieves much the same point and even mirrors Newman’s famous “liberal learning/bodily health” parallel: “If we take,” says Graham, “the promotion of welfare to be a justifiable end for human endeavor on the grounds that welfare is to be understood as nothing other than a central part of human flourishing, we can equally well argue for the promotion of understanding, on the grounds that it too is an aspect of human flourishing. A concern with welfare is a concern to ameliorate the human condition from the point of view of suffering and hardship; a concern with understanding is a parallel concern to ameliorate the human condition from the point of view of ignorance and misunderstanding.”
With patient argument Graham forces home observations that cut across the grain of pragmatic and utilitarian assumptions. There is, for instance, no realistic or coherent basis on which to disregard “intellectual enrichment” in favor of economic enrichment. If higher education is to have a concern with wealth creation, it must concern itself not just with the means of achieving material prosperity but with ends—what one does, values, or rises to with one’s material prosperity. Thus, things like the humanities and traditional academic studies “are not bought with a richer society’s wealth, but are themselves part of it [emphasis his].” Moreover, the value of such traditional studies is not primarily in providing “transferrable skills”—critical thinking, clarity of expression, and so on—as these can be learned by other means. “Their point,” Graham explains, “is to enrich the mind, and their value lies in the success with which they do this [. . . .] It follows that their peculiar powers of intellectual enrichment lie in their content. It is not that they provide occasions for thought, which they do, but that they provide the most worthwhile objects of thought. It is here that the rationale of university education properly so called lies; it is a source of wealth per se [emphasis his].”
Graham moves carefully through his arguments, pulling the perhaps unwilling “realist” inexorably along. He does not presume his readers are already sympathetic with traditional conceptions of liberal learning or humanistic inquiry. On the contrary, the book is crafted with the limitations of the modern imagination squarely in view. Yet Graham neither condescends nor preaches; he makes plain that human prosperity embraces much more than what Ruskin called “the goddess of getting on” and that aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural goods, intangible though they may be, are entirely proper to the university.
In several ways Graham’s effort is a contemporary parallel to Newman’s great nineteenth- century The Idea of a University. Graham explicitly acknowledges this relation while departing from Newman in several particulars. Like Newman, his overarching task is to explain, illustrate, and defend the central importance of understanding (or knowledge) and intellectual culture in its own right. But it is the peculiar, contemporary attenuation of intellectual culture that Graham especially addresses. The “non-productive” nature of university education renders it incompatible with or irreducible to the business analogues so often applied to it. Students are not primarily customers, despite the effects of student evaluations and the elective system. Outcomes assessment and the various forms of academic audit instituted in Britain (and on this side of the Atlantic) not only mistranslate teaching into production and outcomes, but fail to address the most important matter of all—the value of the subject taught: “Any subject, in fact, could meet [assessment] requirements. Courses in astrology could state aims and objectives, methods of study, and transferable skills, and could be assessed according to how they achieved them. The gross intellectual defects of astrology would not be revealed in this way. If this is correct, it implies that the system of academic audit is seriously inadequate with respect to the purposes of universities, and, I think, any educational enterprise.” Even in his treatment of higher education finance in Britain, Graham’s focus remains on the very nature of the university and its proper autonomy. In contrast to much British academic opinion, Graham cautions that extensive government support of academia leads both to a loss of autonomy and to the creation of a perverse mechanism whereby the comparatively worse off subsidize the education of the comparatively better off. These are not popular positions in universities—at least among faculty and administrators—but the economic logic compels.
Like Newman’s Idea, Graham’s Institution is divided in roughly half, the first half being an extended argument about the nature of universities, and the second half a collection of topical essays and addresses on university subjects ranging from “The prospects for elearning” to “Spiritual values and the knowledge economy.” These essays remain inquiries, not polemics, but the cogent observations and arguments about such practices as elearning, libraries-as-information-systems, and research funding are not likely to comfort those who find current academic trends a boon or a blessing. The strongest of these essays illuminate the place of disciplines (the humanities) and values (specifically spiritual ones) in an age ill-equipped to accord them much relevance. Echoing writers as diverse as Matthew Arnold and Walker Percy, Graham points out that “The human and social sciences, however interesting and invaluable their results may be, study human beings as objects. This inevitably excludes the point of view of the human being as subject—what it means to be a human being. The importance of the humanities, by contrast, resides precisely in their power to illuminate this meaning.”
Perhaps the most intriguing of these essays considers the role of an institution’s religious foundation in a modern, secular context. Here Graham’s ranging argument dismantles several popular notions—the concept behind a “knowledge economy,” the Rawlsian notion of the state as a suitably neutral agent (in a pluralistic society) for the management of this economy, and (again) the notion that the value of higher education lies in its creation of commercial or material prosperity. The relevant question becomes, “What does one do with one’s prosperity once created?” “It could of course be spent on personal gratification— more holidays, more visits to pubs and restaurants, more fashionable clothes, computer games, gossip magazines, DVDs, television quiz programmes and so on.” When we have had our fill of pubs, however, it may be that a good life might also include a “cultural infrastructure” in which religion was meaningful. The difficulty here, Graham cautions, is that secular man is unprepared to think religion relevant to either a good life or intellectual culture. Perhaps, however, religion finds an unlikely ally in the natural sciences. In the face of a hubristic, Protagorean culture where man is the measure of all things, these sciences study inescapably real things unmade and unmastered by man. “This is precisely what the religious founders of our ancient universities thought—that in the life of the mind and the explorations of the intellect, we reach beyond the human and begin to see and to appreciate, albeit dimly, the mind that made the world we occupy, a world which we certainly cannot fashion but which, mysteriously, we can hope to understand [his emphasis].” This latter point, made gingerly and briefly (too briefly), raises the fascinating prospect of a form of natural theology for a secular age.
Resemblances to Newman’s seminal work on higher education are many, even if Graham sets aside several of the clergyman’s concerns and differs with him about others. Not only is the structure oddly reminiscent of that earlier classic, but so too is the incisive application of genuine philosophical argument to immediate educational practices and the habits of mind they foster. The greatest— most important—resemblance, however, remains the forceful rearticulation of the essential purposes of higher education—of the inherent value or good of intellectual culture, of learning, of understanding for its own sake. While Graham’s own gritty realism does not permit him to be brushed off as either irrelevant or romantic, neither does his presentation of the case for intellect itself allow him to be dismissed as surrendering to fad and fashion. Others might make his case with less reliance on the language of wealth and value, and still others would amplify arguments having to do with cultural patrimony and inherited wisdom. Few, however, have presented so apt a corrective to the teleological drift in modern academic consciousness. And about such correctives, there can be no Prufrockian exhaustion.