I watched Prague the other night, a Danish film from 2006. Beautifully evocative of the Czech Republic as Kundera writes of it, where the totalitarian past broods over the present like a drab sky, the film studies a number of relationships between people who have difficulty connecting. In the subplot, the protagonist, Christoffer, and a young woman he finds living in a house he has inherited, attempt to converse. He speaks English, hoping she will understand, but she knows only Czech. Their conversations begin in absurdity but progress somewhat beyond it into a common moral understanding that I’ll not detail—you should see the film. I bring it up because it dramatizes conversation lacking a common tongue, and that seems to me to describe the contemporary conversations about university life with which I am most familiar.

As Wendell Berry puts it, in his famous essay “The Loss of the University”:

That the common tongue should become the exclusive specialty of a department in a university is . . . a tragedy, and not just for the university and its worldly place; it is a tragedy for the common tongue. It means that the common tongue, so far as the university is concerned, ceases to be the common tongue; it becomes merely one tongue within a confusion of tongues. Our language and literature cease to be seen as occurring in the world, and begin to be seen as occurring within their university department and within themselves. Literature ceases to be the meeting ground of all readers of the common tongue and becomes only the occasion of a deafening clatter about literature. Teachers and students read the great songs and stories to learn about them, not to learn from them. The texts are tracked as by the passing of an army of ants, but the power of songs and stories to affect life is still little acknowledged, apparently because it is little felt.¹

For the past five years I’ve had the privilege of teaching an honors seminar called Great books. It isn’t a traditional “Great Books” course; if I tried that I’d face the fact that my students had already read and digested most of the books on the syllabus before, some of them in high school. That wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but it would make of the class a different kind of work from the work my predecessor (who created the course and managed it differently from the way I do) and I, have thought the course should enable. I stress the fact that my predecessor and I agree about ends, differing only as to means and that partly—my predecessor assigned modern books, and I do the same.

Here’s a link to my syllabus. I’m aware of several arguments I might have with colleagues and students about whether these books are “great,” but these don’t seem fruitful to me. I choose books I think have something to teach about the moral and spiritual universe we inhabit as humans in the twenty-first century, and not as a secondary thing, have an ability to suggest connections between thoughts and other thoughts, between thought and the world. I ought, therefore, to have strong beliefs about the American university tradition of liberal education—and indeed I do have such beliefs. I think I continue to use the Great Books appellation for my course because the Great Books idea opposes itself to literary criticism, Berry’s buzz of talk about books. Still, much of Berry’s essay makes me uncomfortable.

Start with the common tongue. Western scholarship hasn’t had a common tongue since the death of Latin. Francis Bacon revised and Latinized his 1605 Advancement of Learning in 1623 as De Augmentis Scientiarum, writing for the ages; but learning had already begun to fragment into vernacular disciplines in Bacon’s lifetime. And as for today, a colleague reminded me recently that since universities became multiversities in the last century it no longer makes any sense to speak of any university as possessing a faculty. What we have is a collection of faculties who mostly don’t talk with each other and compete, not always politely, for resources and prestige—indeed most university departments are rife with faction. And none of this reflects the so-called incommensurability of academic disciplines that became a cliché of the learning industry in the nineteen nineties. Behind it is ordinary human mendacity, the reality expressed in the truism sometimes attributed to Henry Kissinger that adademic disputes are as vicious as they are because the rewards are so small. I ought to agree with Berry’s lament for the common tongue, but I mostly don’t.

The latest addition to my book collection is a copy the 1975 Princeton edition of Constantine Cavafy’s Collected Poems. It’s a dual language edition. I love dual language editions when I can read the translation and the translated together. I can do that with German and some other modern languages. I’m not up to modern Greek, though I searched for a copy of this particular edition of the Keeley and Sherrard translations of Cavafy because I like some of the poems in this edition better than I like the translations of the same poems that appear in the 1992 revised edition. My real point is that we live in an age of translation, and that’s not anything new. We live in an age of translation because printed books made possible the common reader, made me possible. And that process was well underway in Francis Bacon’s time. One of Bacon’s contemporaries was John Florio, whose translations of the Essais served as my introduction to Montaigne when I was a college sophomore. It makes more sense to me to say that universities are engaged in a work of translation than to speak of professing in a common tongue.

I’ve said that printed books made me possible as a common reader. I should add that printed books have enabled my particular set of tastes and prejudices, my interpretive frame, as well. Deconstruction has made me suspicious of such frames and points to a difficulty that is not resolved simply by a dialectic of the sort I desire for my class at best, where individual views are subject to correction by other individual views. A dictum of Cardinal Newman’s may perhaps indicate why.

Few indeed there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of instructors, or will do any thing at all, if left to themselves. And fewer still (though such great minds are to be found), who will not, from such unassisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a self-esteem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will not be reminded from time to time of the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imperfect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and irregularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle which they exhibit.²

While I should like to second Newman’s endorsement of instructors, I’ve cited this passage mainly in order to illustrate what it seems to presuppose: namely that the university is a sort of encyclopedia of received knowledge, the common tongue again. In Newman’s view, universities exist to diffuse and extend knowledge rather than advance the same. As he avers in the preface to The Idea of a University, “If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students.” Newman didn’t understand science or entirely approve of it, albeit he pays considerable lip service to science in The Idea of a University.³ But the terms he articulated for peace between science and theology at Dublin in 1854 leave no room for the intellectual ferment that would take place in British universities a mere generation later, as students like the young Alfred North Whitehead of Cambridge were reading and reacting to continental thinkers.⁴

As co-author of the modern Principia Mathematica, Whitehead could cite personal experience for his claim in later years, in a lecture that came to be printed as the epilogue to Modes of Thought, that “[t]he task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue. The future is big with every possibility of achievement and of tragedy.”⁵How very different from Newman! Whitehead was one of the inventors of the modern research university, one of the great progressive institutions of the last century, a commonwealth in whose environs every entity from the teaching hospital to the department of classics could be thought to serve enlightenment, the expansion of knowledge and human liberty, and the relief of suffering. A healthy set of connections seemed to exist between universities and the world of work. In the latter decades of the last century universities became loci of social adjustments which not only advanced the aspirations of women and minorities but also enlarged our conception of the world and changed much of what universities, themselves, profess. The university, as a cultural entity, has been one of the large creative engines of modern life, and that’s what we stand to lose if present trends continue.

For universities are now in trouble, indeed. Somebody or other writes an op-ed or a magazine piece attacking academic tenure fairly regularly these days.⁶ There are several new books out defending the humanities,⁷ which are everywhere being marginalized, and/or indicting administrators and administrative systems that are re-shaping universities on corporate business models. Most of my friends who are still teaching are not having any fun, and the future looks bleak to many young academics. Stanley Fish, hardly a nostalgic defender of the academic past, reacted to a number of reader comments to posts about Academe on his “Opinionator” blog last year. Here’s how he sums them up. “The perspectives represented were various, but they converged on a single judgment: the academic world is marked by venality, pretension, irresponsibility and risible claims . . . . [T]he comments I received come from readers of all political persuasions and from both inside and outside the academic world, about which almost no one had a good thing to say.”

Present day universities seem to have lost sight of their mission. At worst they seem to be characterized by faculties who disdain teaching and consider that their “work” is research (much of which doesn’t deserve the name), by research enterprises whose integrity is being progressively corrupted and eroded by corporate funding, by students who consider that their “work” consists of binge drinking, date rape, and plagiarism, and by administrations whose concern is chiefly with bottom lines, exploitation of student athletes, and the latest US News rankings. Most academic optimists, and some pessimists as well, at least in America, seem to think that reform can be achieved by some sort of cultural reaffirmation of the historic purposes of the modern liberal university. That seems an exercise in futility in our present profoundly anti-intellectual circumstances. When Berry wrote “The Loss of the University” he could still (in 1984) call for such a thing, but he has more recently achieved notoriety by taking his books and papers back from the University of Kentucky to protest its present administration’s leadership.⁸ Narratives of historical decline are generally odious, but I’m thinking American universities may be in a decadent phase. Academic freedom is all but lost. Formerly great public universities, like Kentucky, seem to be sliding into the near criminality that characterizes the worst for-profit corporations. It’s a situation that ought to embarrass us as Americans, and the saddest thing is that it doesn’t.

I may quit teaching after this year. As an adjunct I have no power, though I’ve never needed any. I love the work and my students, and I’ve always thought I’d continue as long as my mental faculties remained intact. But I’m beginning to think perhaps I should stop while I still have some respect for what I have done with most of my life—to say goodbye, as Cavafy wrote in a poem I love, to the Alexandria I am losing.

Notes

¹Wendell Berry, Home Economics, Counterpoint (Berkekey, CA, 1987) 79.
²See the online Newman Reader, The Idea of a University, Discourse 6, section 10.
³See his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent as well as the relevant sections the Idea of a University, especially Part 2, sections 7 and 8.
⁴See Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Johns Hopkins UP (Baltimore, MD, 1985) 91-145.
⁵Modes of Thought, Free Press (New York, 1968) 171.
⁶Such as this one: Megan McArdle, “Tenure: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone,” Atlantic, July 21, 2010.
⁷For example, see Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Twilight of the Humanities in the Corporate University, Fordham UP (New York, 2008), Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, Norton (New York, 2010), and Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton UP (Princeton, NJ, 2010).
⁸See Cheryl Truman, “Wendell Berry pulling his personal papers from UK,” Lexington Herald-Leader, June 23, 2010.