THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I recently asked the students in my “Writing about Literature” course to compose a short essay by applying the criticisms made by Romantic writers and poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel T. Coleridge – and their modern defenders – against the purely rational society that modern people have inherited from their Enlightenment ancestors.  I asked, what would those authors say about a modern university?  In assessing the responses, it is probably a good idea to correct for the fact that students frequently write or say what they imagine the instructor wants to read or hear and for the tendency of contemporary college students to take things with alarming literalness.  Nevertheless, the responses hold out some interest.

One student wrote that, “A learning environment should be a place where inspiration can occur.”  I assume that the statement implies its logical complement – that in the existing college or university, such an environment is not present and inspiration is a rare occurrence.  Indeed, the same student continues, “A modern university usually consists of bleak looking buildings containing piercing white painted classrooms with rows of chairs and drowsy students sitting in them.”  It is not just the architectural environment, however: “Students are seldom paying attention to whatever the professor is droning on about.  They are constantly using their mobile devices or doodling in their notebooks.”

A student with an ROTC affiliation wrote that, “It is quite ironic how kids get themselves into huge amounts of debt to learn in a place that is practically incomprehensible.”  The statement might be naïve and self-exculpating – an expression of bewilderment made by someone out of his league intellectually.  A more generous and at least as plausible explanation would be that no one has ever offered this student a definition of higher education or any convincing idea why he should submit to it.  Naturally, in that case, he would be confused and disoriented.  The same student concluded that, “The setting is not appealing to young minds let alone professors…  It is sabatoshing [sic] our drive to learn.”

The aesthetic insipidity of our state colleges and universities, whose facilities nowadays look like the lobbies of mid-priced travelers’ hotels, is a recurrent topic in the batch of responses to the assignment.  A third student wrote, “Modern universities usually consist of classrooms with neutral, bare walls and neutral chairs facing a whiteboard and a projector, a setting that resembles an office cubicle.”  She followed up with a rhetorical question: “How are they going to learn the right emotions?”  Indeed, what are the right emotions in response to the lobby of a mid-priced travelers’ hotel?  I suppose that the right emotions are no emotions whatever.  Better to check one’s Twitter account on one’s cell phone.”  A fourth student wrote: “At a modern university students don’t have much opportunity to culture themselves and encounter other points of view.”  Again, there is a better interpretation of the statement than that the student has not been paying attention because she is self-absorbed.  Modern colleges and universities might really be cultureless places.

Proponents and architects of the relentless diversity regime on campus, and of a mandatory universal curriculum, should pay attention to what a fifth student wrote: “Learning is more than just regurgitating facts that are heard and disposing them after they aren’t needed anymore.  Learning should be about broadening the mind to different ideas and gaining knowledge that can be applied to situations later in life.”  The modal verb in the second sentence tells us that, in this student’s experience, the higher learning, so-called, entails “ideas,” but no “different ideas.”  The statement, far from being naïve, is dead-on accurate.  A palate of sameness has drained the individuality from subjects and made all courses in the humanities into a mass of politically correct blandness.  Students resent the insipid course-regime.

A sixth student wrote, “There is nothing more robotic then the daily routine of a college student.”  College, according to this student, “is a place of uniformity that doesn’t stimulate the mind.”

A seventh student, unusually competent in his grammar and vocabulary, and an outstanding thinker in his group, writes in actual paragraphs.  It is worth quoting him at length: “Our universities… stress a mode of thinking which revolves greatly around science and reason.  In modern society one sees an increase in materialistic values, reliance on technology and immersion in the virtual rather than the real.  This overlaps into university education as well…  It should not be said that science and reason have no place in the world, but it should be understood that science and reason alone do a poor job of describing our world and its inhabitants.”  The same student concluded that, “If one were to ‘fix’ the modern university, one would have a very difficult time of going about this.”  Yes.  Our civilization is in a fossilized state.  Everything has transformed into lifeless stone.  The only solution is to cart the mass away, but the horsepower requirement for doing so is dauntingly large.

— Comments —

C.S. writes:

Prof. Bertonneau,

You wrote,

Our civilization is in a fossilized state. Everything has transformed into lifeless stone.

How apt!

If this college student would offer his own clumsy thought, it would be to say that our modern university cannot be a fossil because like every other conceited novelty it never lived, and never grew. Only a tradition can be said to fossilize: even when no longer vital it still leaves some beautiful imprint, some ruin, some ancient custom. Where will our drywall and glass universities be in a hundred years? In a thousand? They will be little more than the dust out of which they were briefly molded, neither growing nor petrifying, but thankfully dissipating. These are little more than poor replacement organs for the poisoned ones of old Christendom, and propaganda organs at that. Nothing ages faster than the future, and nothing holds on to life like the past.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

The “Radiant Future,” which always turns out to be as dark as night, is also always dead before it gets here.

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