The Loss of the University

The Loss of the University by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry argues that the university has lost its unity by dividing knowledge into isolated specialties with private, technical languages. Necessary specialization becomes destructive when workers no longer understand the whole thing they are making or accept responsibility for its effects. Since universities shape human beings, not merely trained employees or citizens, their purpose must be the development of fully human, responsible heirs of culture. This requires a common tongue through which disciplines, students, graduates, and the public can understand and judge one another. Specialized language, Berry contends, hides work from public scrutiny and permits irresponsibility. Agricultural researchers, for instance, may pursue more productive dairy cows while disregarding the ruin of dairies and farmers, protected by jargon that neither colleagues nor affected people can understand. Professing should mean confessing openly before one’s neighbors; professional language that obscures meaning becomes a cheat, hiding place, or ambush. Literature suffers when the common language becomes merely one departmental specialty. Teachers and students then study songs and stories as objects of analysis rather than learning from them. Language does echo within itself, but it must also return to worldly things, where words and facts are verified by experience. A word such as “tree” joins personal memory, inherited culture, and the actual tree; reducing it to a fact, a mere sign, or cultural history destroys this human relation. Book learning has boundaries and requires humility, silence, discipline, and attention to the world. Education must address both making and judging. Every artifact, whether poem, farm, or hospital, should be judged not only by technical standards but by its human quality and suitability to human and natural neighborhoods. Modern education instead produces specialists and careerists, often without concern for the consequences of their work. Career preparation narrows curricula, lowers standards, treats students as customers, and assumes that young people already know what they need to learn. Against this model, Berry proposes an education founded on “the Principles of every thing,” or the trunk from which branches of knowledge grow. Knowledge should be understood as a tree of life and of the knowledge of good and evil: divided subjects remain connected, and to ignore their connections is to destroy the whole. A broad core should begin with letters and numbers, then include history, literature, philosophy, foreign languages, biology, chemistry, and physics. Trade methods and technologies belong properly in apprenticeships, not in the central curriculum. The aim of schooling is to prepare people for life, not for a supposedly predictable career. Teachers must assume the adult responsibility of deciding what the young should learn. They cannot evade it by giving children premature “freedom” to select career tracks, which actually confines their later choices. Teachers necessarily work amid ignorance because neither they nor students know the future life for which students are being prepared; this uncertainty makes broad education more necessary, not less. Failure in school should be honestly recognized, but it must not be confused with failure in life, since schools have limited standards and the world may reverse their judgments. Berry calls for high, common standards throughout education. Standards should not be lowered to fit poor preparation, because doing so prevents both learning and teaching. Writing, for example, must be judged for form and quality in every discipline, not only in composition courses. Standards must also be fair to individuals rather than adjusted for categories or groups; the purpose is to recognize and promote good work. The university must also ask whether what it teaches is true and what its knowledge does in the world. “Objectivity,” when it means studying a subject without caring about its relation to truth, other subjects, or lived consequences, is a false virtue. Literature cannot be adequately taught merely as literature, aesthetic artifact, or historical evidence, especially when works make claims upon belief. The Bible, for example, cannot be usefully taught while ignoring its claims to truth. Great writings are known through imagination and belief, not through a willed suspension of disbelief or detached analysis of what others once thought. Imagination is not separate from reality: it is active in the world, corrected by experience, and itself corrects experience. Works of imagination endure by proving valid under experience, judgment, and later imagination. This broad criticism belongs to everyone and must connect literary, historical, agricultural, scientific, and moral judgment. A healthy university therefore must examine the truth it teaches, the lives of its graduates, and the effects of its work on communities, literacy, public honesty, pollution, soil erosion, and the understanding of the sciences. Though such questions cannot be answered exactly, asking them would restore a unifying purpose.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Essay, Educational Criticism, Social Criticism · 8,754 words

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THE PREDICAMENT of literature within the university is not fundamentally different from the predicament of any other discipline, which is not fundamentally different from the predicament of language. That is, the various disciplines have ceased to speak to each other; they have become too specialized, and this overspecialization, this separation, of the disciplines has been enabled and enforced by the specialization of their languages. As a result, the modern university has grown, not according to any unifying principle, like an expanding universe, but according to the principle of miscellaneous accretion, like a furniture storage business.

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higher education · university reform · educational philosophy · critique of academia · liberal arts · student debt · corporate influence · institutional decline · community · learning · teaching · intellectual life

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