I graduated from college a couple years back, and my university experience was a dud. There was no real fellowship or a genuine love for ideas, neither was there a circle of wise men, or even a decent place to get a drink. Every day I walked on that campus I couldn’t help but laugh that people actually believed this is where wisdom had taken up residence.
Most of my instructors tacitly assumed that ideas and historical events only bored and tired their class, and they were not mistaken. Around the university, critical thinking was regarded as an unpleasant activity that could only be sustained for a limited period of time—something akin to yard work or church service—and the minute class ended, everyone dropped even the pretense, uniformly reverting back to the world of pure un-thought. In any given class, probably no more than 5% of the students had any business being there at all.
I have excellent ears, and I never heard a single conversation of any substance conducted, impromptu, outside the classroom, among the students. Not one. I even used to record, surreptitiously, some of the more surreal exchanges I’d overheard just to document the inanity. I must have rolled my eyes so many times I’m surprised someone didn’t take me for an epileptic. Eventually, I stopped listening altogether and spent my time on campus in the library, creating my own instructors from the writings of men worth listening to.
And that is where, at least in the humanities, a world of genuine meaning opened up for me; where I discovered Eric Voegelin and Kenneth Clark, Jacques Barzun, Chesterton and Emerson, William James and Harold C. Goddard and William Auden and a thousand other men (and women) of enduring wit and erudition whose ideas will be with me for the rest of my life.
Alan Bloom was entirely correct about what has befallen the university: the natural sciences sail along along with great aplomb, but the humanities are a shipwreck–and Oprah is just the tip of that iceberg. Perversely, I would say that for a man or women whose heart is genuinely touched by the love of wisdom, the university is about the last place on earth to find any, love or wisdom.
