R.V. Young
North Carolina State University
The Universities and the Transmission of Culture

Cleveland Regional Meeting of The Philadelphia Society
September 21, 2002

            “A culture,” writes Christopher Dawson, “is a common way of life – a particular adjustment of man to his natural surroundings and his economic needs.”[1]  Even as a farmer cultivates a field in order that its soil nourish those plants that serve his specific purposes, so mankind shapes the realm of specifically human experience in ways that meet basic needs and enhance human dignity.  Those achievements and undertakings that we may call “high culture” – music and sculpture, painting and poetry, scholarship and science – are manifestations of the most exalted and distinctive features of human nature: intellect, imagination, and moral and spiritual consciousness.  “The formation of a culture is due to the interaction of all these factors,” Dawson adds; “it is a fourfold community – for it involves in varying degrees a community of work and a community of thought as well as a community of place and a community of blood.”[2]  To address the transmission of culture is thus to consider both the continuation of a sufficient way of life and also the preservation and development of those arts that express the uniqueness of human capacity and aspiration.

            The role of a university in handing on culture is not as straightforward as it may at first seem.  In the view of Cardinal Newman, a university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge.”[3]  In the printed text both “teaching” and “knowledge” are in italic, but for our purposes, it is “universal” that requires emphasis: culture, if we recall the analogue of agriculture, seems to be local and particular.  Just as we think of this particular crop growing in this particular field – corn on a plain in Iowa, pinot noir grapes on a hillside in Burgundy – so we think of cultures as emerging among a particular people or ethnic group living a common life in their own locale.  These specifications correspond to Dawson’s communities of blood, work, and place.  Observe that I have, however, omitted his fourth category, a community of thought.  It is thought that pre-eminently separates man from the beasts that perish by allowing him to transcend his physical and temporal condition by means of memory of the past, understanding of the abstract, and contemplation not merely of the future but of eternity.  It is in this realm of thought – of intellectual knowledge – that the university has a part in the transmission of culture.

            Still, if we adhere to Newman’s view of the university, further difficulties remain.  He continues by maintaining that “its object is, on the one hand, intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than the advancement.”  On this basis he denies that the university is involved either with “scientific and philosophical discovery” or “religious training.”[4]  Every culture we know has a moral and religious component, and the university is not necessarily so severely debarred from these activities as Newman insists; still, the teaching of universal knowledge and the formation of moral and spiritual character are not wholly compatible enterprises.  Moreover, in cultures sophisticated enough to generate institutions such as universities, scientific and philosophical discovery are undoubtedly elements in the continuing development of a culture viewed in the aspect of a community thought; and, although modern universities have become preoccupied with research, rather than with teaching students, this is an unhealthy development, which undermines the primary purpose of a university.  It is perhaps only as a channel for the diffusion and extension of knowledge that Newman’s “idea of a university” serves the transmission of culture as Dawson defines it, and there will always be some tension between the culture of a particular society and the dedication of the university to teaching universal knowledge.

            Given the modesty of the task, it is remarkable how poorly the typical contemporary university succeeds in its part of the enterprise of handing on the cultural tradition of the West.  That universities should be principally concerned with the culture and civilization of the Western world is self-evident, since the university as an institution emerged from European Christendom and has only spread and prospered where this civilization has exerted substantial influence.  The university holds as its central preoccupation knowledge; its major concern should then be to acquaint its students with the cultural inheritance that makes universities and their intellectual concerns feasible and profitable, to provide an understanding of the resources and limitations of this culture, and to set it in an historical and political context. 

            Today, as we cross the threshold of the twenty-first century, universities are not merely failing to fulfill these tasks; they are in numerous instances actively subverting them.  Many students emerge from baccalaureate programs not merely ignorant of the history, philosophy, and literature of the Western world; their minds have actually been clouded with hazy and inaccurate impressions of the course of events in the development of European and American civilization, and they are equipped with a repertoire of simplistic clichés in place of a genuine knowledge of Western ideas and institutions.  For example, most graduates – if they give the matter any thought at all – will take it for granted that the Spanish Inquisition was responsible for more tortures and executions than any other agency in history, but they will never have learned that Europe was severely threatened by the aggressive, expansionist policies of the Ottoman Turks well into the seventeenth century.  Most university graduates will have a vivid sense of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade with its notorious Middle Passage, but they will be unaware that the overwhelming majority of the African slaves were not captured by Europeans but sold to them by other Africans.  Our graduates will entertain the vague notion that all social arrangements before the publication of The Feminine Mystique and Sexual Politics were uniformly designed for the oppression of women and may properly be deemed “patriarchal.”  Should these graduates have studied the plays of Shakespeare, there is a fair likelihood that they will have learned that The Tempest is propaganda on behalf of European colonialism, and that King Lear is largely a tragedy of the title character’s incestuous desires for his daughters.  Our graduates will believe – again if they consider the matter at all – that St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic philosophers were chiefly engaged with such questions as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  The officers of “student government” will have spent large sums of money from student fees engaging concerts by fashionable rock ‘n’ roll groups – this will also have been the fare on the student radio station – while the students will have been taught that the unique painting, sculpture, and music of the Western world are no greater achievements than African tribal masks or Balinese folk drumming.

            Now for the bad news.  If every humanities department in every university were reformed overnight and staffed with learned scholars committed to the exposition of Western civilization, the problem would not be solved.  We have heard a great deal recently concerning the assault on traditional core courses in places like Stanford and the University of Chicago.  This is an important issue, but we should not forget that the vast majority of baccalaureate degrees in the United States are not issued by Stanford, Chicago, and their peers, but by large land-grant universities and other state institutions of “higher education.”  Such institutions should not be dismissed, because they provide for genuinely able and dedicated students who, for reasons of social or economic situation, are not likely to turn up at elite colleges an equality of opportunity that is itself crucial to American culture.  These campuses are dominated by the faculties of engineering, textiles, agriculture, education, business, and the like, and their “core curriculum” has never been more than a smorgasbord of distribution requirements.  At my own university, for example, a student majoring in, say, Parks & Recreation Management, may fulfill his university humanities requirement (two courses in literature or history or one of each) by taking – as a random possibility – Studies in Fiction, which will frequently be confined to nineteenth- and twentieth-century short stories, along with a course on economic conditions in Southeast Asia in the eighteenth century.  Even in humanities departments, increasing emphasis is laid upon courses of study designed to prepare students for specific and immediate employment.  Hence English departments are commonly offering degrees in technical communication, composition theory, and the like, which feature courses in such things as document design, on-line research, website construction, and media studies.  One of the least edifying spectacles in the contemporary university is the sight of self-proclaimed radicals complacently permitting university curricula to be determined by the employment interests of multi-national corporations.  The American university, as it is currently constituted, will graduate ladies and gentlemen of cultivated imagination, intellectual refinement, and moral reflection only adventitiously; for it is contrived to produce “guys” of both sexes who at work will churn out processed words like so much processed cheese and spend weekends engaged in conspicuous consumption at the mall – while holding impeccably correct political opinions.  Such is the result of abandoning the ideal of equal opportunity for all students who can benefit from college and make an appropriate contribution to society, in favor of attempting to provide higher education for everyone, which in practice amounts to providing for almost no one.

            But there is more.  Suppose that we could, again overnight, eliminate the careerism, the ignorance, and the smug self-righteousness of the faculty along with the glorified vocational-school mentality of the administration.  The university would still have difficulty with the transmission of Western culture, because the most resourceful and dedicated teachers conceivable cannot unfold the riches of history’s most diverse and sophisticated civilization to individuals who – in frighteningly large numbers – are essentially illiterate.  Please be assured that I am not now offering hyperbole or metaphor.  The typical American undergraduate has never read a serious book – fiction or nonfiction – on his own outside an academic setting.  Avid readers are those who have developed a taste for Stephen King or Tom Clancy.  Our typical undergraduate, without recourse to Cliff’s Notes or a film version, would be unable to summarize the plot of Cymbeline even with a thoroughly annotated edition and several days to do the job.  He certainly could not explain the main points of the argument of Milton’s Areopagitica or Hobbes’s Leviathan.  A long poem in English – Paradise Lost or The Prelude – would be as impenetrable to most undergraduates as the Latin text of the Aeneid.  Our students have read so little and know so little about the history of both politics and ideas, that they lack the vocabulary or the intellectual context to find their way through a sophisticated piece of writing.  This same ignorance cripples their own efforts at composition.  Even those whose writing is not marred by an excess of errors in grammar and mechanics lack a grasp of English idiom and write their native tongue as if they were foreigners.  Again, a want of sufficient vocabulary and intellectual context disables their efforts to form their responses into articulate concepts and coherent arguments.  To conclude, our primary and secondary schools are catastrophic failures: until high school graduates can read and write maturely – at least in English – there is practically nothing universities can do that will ensure the existence of a cohort of citizens sufficiently cultivated to confront thoughtfully and confidently the challenges facing our own nation and Western civilization as whole in the coming years.  With the exception of rare colleges and universities and unusual situations within the others, the transmission of culture is likely to be impeded rather than advanced by universities for the foreseeable future.