One may wonder if there is a role for higher education in so revanchist a vision as I have been outlining in the prior numbers of this series. We are to fill homes full of old furniture and young children, start private clubs and societies and reading circles all of which subsist upon tradition, and build schools and train governors and parents to educate children on a small-scale, humane, classical manner. Universities are in our age often the public face of the rejection of the Permanent Things – even if an abhorrence of the Past And Ever-Present is common, even ubiquitous, elsewhere, in schools, the media, and so forth, it is most pointed and most articulate in the Universities. The rebels of ’68 are the Professors of today, and are too hidebound for their junior colleagues, let alone the student body.
Yet when we find a wild, overgrown, thorny, fruitless tree, we should ask many questions prior to acting upon it – what is this tree? Why is it so worthless, and even invasive and destructive? What are its advantages? Can it be salvaged? If not, is there anywhere else we might plant such a tree, to grow its fruit?
Why did the medieval found universities? They were a peculiar zone between church and state, if one is to trust a common view, articulated by Newman amongst others; they were places submitted to God, but not strictly ecclesial institutions; their role was largely one of the Higher Teaching. All subjects gradually found their place in the University – it was a universal institution.
But there is another body to consider, which was coterminous in many medieval universities, and is now a distinct “name” – the College. The college was a body of scholars gathered to study and spur one another on. These admitted junior scholars as time went by, forming a mixed body of the seeker, the acolyte, and the master.
This leads to a confusion of terminology when considering what institutions we might wish to build. When Newman wishes to define a higher education institution that can serve as a traditional “composter”, a finisher of mind and manners, all in his case with a Catholic emphasis, he uses the term University – like his own Oxford, and the Catholic University of Dublin he is founding. Yet when Babbitt or More discuss the same concept, they invariably use the term College, from the American concept of the small liberal arts college. Newman is cautious about the newfound interest in research as a focus of the University, as the University is a place of teaching. Babbitt and More are outright hostile to most manifestations of the research mindset in the College, considering research to be the business of the University! The terms are at points inverted depending upon which side of the ocean you fall.
If we say the University is the body which teaches all subjects, and the College is a subordinate body of scholars, we can see a complementary pairing within the new institution. It is this that I wish to explore as a subject for our building.
The schooling discussed in the previous essay in this series took education to the age of, say, 14 or 16 for most children, or perhaps a little older. It was a topic-based learning, generalist, based on a classical canon, with a lot of scope for individual projects and emphases. It aimed to provide a basic cultural grounding for all children of the nation, watering their imaginative and moral taproot.
Most pupils of our Schoolroom finish their education in their mid-to-late teens, heading off to professional, trade, or service work. They have received their cultural dowry, and settle into adult life. What need has the intelligent but unintellectual engineer for a four-year college course? Callings can be partially exclusive; some plumbers will benefit from higher education, some will benefit from reading Great Books in their spare time, and some won’t, Accepting the essential material inequality of persons – in the positive sense, that people do not have equal skills or giftings or callings – releases us from encouraging the future actuary into a costly finishing school they will largely resent.
This affirmation of different vocations does not just benefit the person, it benefits our putative University. The University can be an outrageously elitist and demanding environment – if its role is explicitly to finish and furnish an intellectual elite, rather than be a general certificate granter and shared social experience for the upper half of 18-year-olds. Indeed, if its role is that, it must be elitist and demanding. Anything less is definitional failure.
Only a very few students will go from the Schoolroom to the University, then. The number will depend on a variety of factors, but 10% of the population is surely as high a number as is viable for the task we have in mind. With that in mind, we can turn to the two practical questions: what is to be taught, and what shall the institution look like? To answer these, let me propose two Universities of the Imagination – a vision, or a single iteration, of the general proposal.
One begins as a body of alienated scholars meeting in a pub’s backroom in medium-sized city. Some may work in academia; others do not. Yet they desire companionship – fellow brains to drink beer and argue minutiae with. The scholar searches the small things of the world – the volume of angels, the location of subatomic particles, the effects of money supply – not truly because these things have practical outputs (though they do), but because the scholar has so large a scope of mind they are able to properly magnify the minute. It turns out, in long experience, that many lenses are better than one – focussing ever more light on to the target. And the beer is good, too.
This body desires more than mere companionship, or intellectual stimulation – they share a common goal. They desire to love the Good. They desire to uphold the Permanent Things which make humans truly human. They love the intractable realities of the earth, and the transcendent flights of Dante and Thomas and Spenser and Lewis. They know that there is no production of new knowledge in the Humanities, and that Deconstruction is the errand of a fool or a monster. They desire the fellowship of like minds, but also to build together – to declare to the world that God is on His throne, Beauty still exists, and that the cow and the buttercup are still stubbornly Real and refusing to be Gnosticised away by our new mystics.
But what happens if some neonates want to join this fellowship? Ought they be expected to be as competent, as developed, as rounded, as the rest of the rebel band, all from Day One? Of course not – they require a finishing education, a final transmission, so that they might contribute and receive fully. How is this to be provided? Well, most naturally by a sort of apprenticeship to senior scholars. Here we have the College, on its way to becoming a University; it begins for “collegiate” purposes, but expands into a teaching role. How might this development continue?
As they gain followers, this new College will outgrow the pub backroom. Perhaps the landlord will be sad to see them go; perhaps his pub was a “Moon Under Water”, full of little communities and good conversation. More likely, now, he will miss the cash but feel relieved at the sight of those pretentious so-and-sos leaving, never to return.
Where next? Perhaps, first, a hired room – but the chairs are hard and the hall draughty. Next there is the friend’s dining room, but that is quickly overcrowded. This pilgrimage seems endless and doomed to disappointment. Even their success seems to be cursing them.
Yet something deep abides in this wandering company. There is a belief that in a gathering of the humble wise – bearing a never-extinguished flame of tradition – there is something sacred. The spirit of the land, the gifts that God has given a people, the hope of the future, have all settled upon this scruffy academic rabble, the leavings of their profession, whose loyalties and recalcitrance has led to their isolation. Yet when they are together, or when they exchange letters or share manuscripts, there is a transformation – the spirit flares alive, the genii hove close and whisper in each ear, and the lares of Troy come closer to their new homeland. Indeed, not only the small gods travel with the company – their forefathers too, carried on their backs, borne forward by pietas.
Eventually perhaps they pool money to set down a lease on a space, or they are able to gather funds from one of those last few eccentric rich who put their money to the use of the Common Good. They move in to an old and roomy three-storey cottage by the half-demolished city gate, and promptly tear down the modern stud walls and rip up the rough-wearing polyester office carpets. Good old furniture is scavenged from garages and charity shops. A grandfather’s dark-stained bookcases are set beside some solid pine shelves to begin the Library. There is an eccentric vow made that every one of the half-score offices (some very small, by necessity) shall have a deep, richly-coloured wingback chair – and the subscription is raised. There is a kitchen, a tearoom, and one teaching room (at the back, with one grimy window facing on to the courtyard; the dozen junior scholars don’t need amenity!). Naturally, everything leaks.
But it is a small slice of Permanence. The streets outside cannot imagine the utter, intentional irrelevance of proceedings inside. They would mock at the idea of the junior scholars paying their College membership fee to sit in a dark room listening to wildly gesticulating Classicist teach them about ancient reading habits. Yet something is happening in this seeming irrelevance – not just the building of an ark of wisdom, but also the sending out of doves.
The trickle of junior scholars leaving the College as they reach maturity will be better-educated than virtually any University student in the country; they will also be, as the modern term goes, “radicalised”. Less into bombing trains, though; more into building families and institutions. Of course the College would eventually register for some figleaf qualification to offer – at great cost in time, with many bureaucratic hoops leapt through. But the real advantage of their “course” would be for its content, not its certificate. Where else could a young student mix so closely with their mentors, drinking as much up in conversation as at al table (and the wine will be good)? Where else offers even a patch on the deep and absorbing curriculum of Great Books, Philosophy, and History? Formal Logic is one core requirement; Latin another. Even the scientifically-minded amongst the junior scholars benefit from the course – rounding as it is, stretching as it is, logically demanding as it is. Indeed, there is a remedial aspect to the College’s course, equipping those previously half-chewed and spat out by the national education system.
Now what should happen if some other proto-College should arise in the same city? What if a few revanchist clergy have begun meeting to study the Summa and Turretin together, and to offer short courses across their churches? What if they come into contact with the College? Ought they fold themselves in? Well – could there not be virtue in multiplying the model? A handsome old Catholic presbytery could be the informal home of a second College – with distinct interests and feel. The long-spare bedrooms could be used for scholars, and the dining table be joysy every evening (even when the priest has other duties to attend to!).
Of course, it might be realised that junior scholars across the two Colleges would benefit from more coordinated teaching – if one College there is an expert on early Christianity and in the other the Doctor-Priest with an expertise in Thomas, a student would surely benefit from both. The teaching plans could be coordinated, without compromising the community of each College. Suddenly, the University proper emerges into plain sight – and a Collegiate University, at that.
Let me describe another model. Let us say some eccentrics buy an old farmhouse and workers’ cottages, with land attached. It has been a holiday rental to now, killed by COVID; or it is one of the many, many farms likely to change hands in the next decade or so due to farmers “aging out”. The farmhouse needs some work, but the cottages are in decent condition.
The eccentrics found a place for teaching Greats and Theology and Philosophy. It is a residential institution, with staff living in the cottages with their families, and students in the rambling farmhouse and a barn conversion (if you have seen one of those three-storey, 8 bedroom farmhouses, you will know what I am thinking about). The students eat together in the big, brick-floored kitchen, warmed by the Aga; they learn together in the one teaching classroom; they have a few small sitting rooms for quieter times. The rugs are old, musty, and heavy. There are little bookshelves dotted everywhere, instead of one larger library. (You will know what is meant when told that a book is in the Attic Nook – and you will perch yourself on the one round-backed wooden chair there and read, free from the cares of the world.)
Of course, just as specific benefits accrue to our city Colleges, so do benefits accrue to our tiny country “University”. The residential community is even tighter than in a Collegiate University; there is space for all to roam and reflect; and there is work to do. An indispensable component of the course the student begins is to leave in harmony with the land. They start with breakfast and the prayer meeting; then to milking cows; then to their course on 20th Century Conservative Philosophy; then to the Translation Class, which today is on Cicero (yes, the tutor is a hard taskmaster!). After lunch a “Fresher” group is taken out to the garden to learn about plant guilds and companion planting, by reference to the annual beds. The mud is still in their fingernails as they return to the Science Primer class. In the winters indoor cricket and table tennis tournaments occupy many evenings; in the summer, field sports. Have you ever played rugby from 6 til 10.30, as the light drops away, before falling exhausted to the grass? Perhaps here some kindly tutor’s wife will bring out a case of ale.
The students, as they graduate, will know from growing trees and pouring concrete for new shelter foundations and growing steers to maturity how long any healthy building project takes. They will have learned how long it took for Greece and Rome, for China and Japan, to build stable and lasting civilisations; they will know how long it must take us, in the face of the coming RAN. They will be realists – but hopeful ones. Creation will outlive us all, til the very End. The small apples will keep growing. The Farm University sows the seeds.
What stop us from building such institutions? Money – and courage. Money is an obvious practical impediment. What pious Kings and Countesses live to found civilisational institutions now? Our new plutocrats prefer technology to people, and spend their charity accordingly. Yet many things can be accomplished without money, but with courage – and sometimes the two go together.
Who will be the first to pool all their capital with friends and, faring forward to the end, buy the farmhouse? Who will surrender professional approbation and accept precarity for the sake of meeting in a damp town cottage to teach the alleged lunatic fringe of 22-year-olds why modern European history begins with Gustav Vasa, or how to decline urbs? Academics are not natural pioneers; yet we are reminded of the Puritan founders of Harvard, or the band of worthies who allied with Newman to found the National University. We recall the dedicates of Citeaux, dedicated to a different kind of study. We bring to mind the Maharajah of Darbhanga, or Yang founding the Guozijian. Many academics are in the position of Robert of Molesme or Bruno of Cologne – children of the gentry with no great settlement, entered into a vocation. Yet what did Robert and Bruno accomplish?
Let the money follow; courage must come first. More courage is needed here than to build the Home or the Shadow Society, or even the Schoolroom – because the personal benefits are marginal in the short term. But where the Schoolroom provides the haft of the spear, the University provides the tip – and without that, we cannot strike. Courage and sacrifice now will provide leaders in the coming decades, and sound institutions for our great-grandchildren. Let the building begin.
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