The end of summer, and another fall convocation, as colleges and universities begin another academic year, and so do I, in my 38th year of teaching, my 33rd at Baldwin Wallace University, where I also was once a student myself, over 50 years ago. I find myself thinking about what it means to belong to an institution for that long, and about the endurance of a university over such a long period of time. Baldwin Wallace was founded in 1845: Marting Hall, which houses the English Department, was built in 1896. How many classes have been taught in its rooms since then?
And how much longer will they continue to be taught? The public seems oblivious to it, but higher education is dramatically contracting. In our area of Ohio, it is predicted that half of the small private colleges and universities will close their doors due to enrollment decline over the next 15 years. I do not think that Baldwin Wallace is likely to be one of them, but what will survive of liberal arts education, especially in the humanities, is a more serious question. Fewer and fewer students major in English, and no one knows when this dwindling will stop. There are plenty of predictions that liberal education will become vestigial, reduced to a few enrichment courses for students in business and professional programs. The humanities are always regarded as expendable in hard times, and these are hard times for what is left of a shrinking middle class.
While the past is not necessarily a predictor of the future, in this case I believe that a historical perspective provides reason for a kind of toughminded, qualified optimism. It makes one thoughtful to think of what this school of mine has already survived over the years. We have just survived our second pandemic, after all—Baldwin Wallace managed to get through the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. I cannot tell you how happy I will be to teach without masks this fall, even though I more than halfway expect to get breakthrough Covid before the semester is over. But we keep teaching, and students keep learning and growing. Northrop Frye entered the University of Toronto in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. The only way he was able to attend was by winning a typing contest and thus enrolling in a business program, switching to English and philosophy a bit later. What was it like to teach English, or to be a student, during the Depression? Then came another world war, and after World War II, there was an area on the BW campus filled with trailers and temporary housing for soldiers coming to school on the GI bill, along with their wives and children.
When I entered Baldwin Wallace as a freshman in 1969, the post-war boom that supported an expansive and idyllic period of liberal education was ending, marked at BW by the firing of tenured faculty, almost all of them in the humanities, in 1973, and a grim period in the 1980’s while I was away at graduate school, so bad that when Marting and neighboring Dietsch Hall, already decaying, were water-damaged by a defective sprinkler system in 1982, the buildings were boarded up because there was no money to renovate them, and remained ghost buildings until 1989, when Marting re-opened and I moved into my office as new faculty. On the north campus, the Philura Gould Baldwin building, once the library, was also boarded up despite its historical importance. And yet faculty kept on teaching, and students kept on studying. There have been more minor and temporary crisis periods: a week’s shutdown because of hurricane Sandy, for example. Perhaps the most serious problem that universities face, after enrollment decline, is the seriously deteriorating mental health of the students, one third of whom at any given time are partly or completely unable to function due to anxiety and depression caused by the problems of their families, financial and otherwise, which in turn reflect the breakdown of our society.
People go on because what else can they do, but there is more to it than that. The humanities are always beleaguered: that is their normal state, and the times of flourishing expansion are in fact temporary exceptions. Doing a little research for this newsletter, I discovered that there is a newsreel-style documentary about Baldwin Wallace from 1954-55 on YouTube. If you took the portrait of the school in that film at face value, you would think the college (as it was then) was no more than a playground for a privileged middle class. The election and inauguration of the Homecoming Queen was treated as if it were the central event of college life. The rest of the documentary is largely focused on athletics. But that was always the case: students and their tuition-paying parents had to be enticed by the promise of fun and social life. In one of his convocation speeches, Frye referred to English teachers as drug pushers. We have to lure students covertly, with something that is after all impractical in terms of jobs and careers. But despite its nearly complete invisibility in the documentary, the real intellectual and creative work of the school was still going on, which is why, when the BW alma mater song is played, in a convocation taking place when I was three years old, I was moved. The song is a bit corny, as such songs always are, but it represented the survival of something which, despite the compromises and less than ideal realities, is worth keeping alive.
The humanities are a modern form of the quest to preserve a light in a dark time, and, as I said, it is almost always a dark time, although some times are darker than others. In European culture, the definitive form of this myth was the Arthurian legend. I hear tell there are people who loathe anything Arthurian because the legend has been taken over by white supremacists. I know nothing of this ideological kidnapping, but insofar as it has occurred, it has been perpetrated by people with no sense of irony. I assume white supremacists identify as Anglo-Saxon. But the historical Arthur was, um, a Celt trying to repel the Anglo-Saxon invasion that occurred after the Romans withdrew. “Britain” actually referred to the Celtic culture that the Anglo-Saxons overran. In the long run, Arthur’s attempt at resistance failed, and thereafter the first ideological kidnapping of the Arthurian legend was by the Tudor dynasty in Shakespeare’s time, who claimed descent from Arthur’s line on the spurious basis of a Welsh branch of the family. So there is precedent for the attempt to make over the Arthurian myth into propaganda for a British empire. But ideological takeovers often generate a resistance taking the form of a counter-version of a myth, and in this case the story arose that Arthur was sleeping underground but would awake and return as a revolutionary figure. Frye speculates that if the revolutionary Milton had written his epic on Arthur instead of on Adam and Eve, as he contemplated doing when he was young, it would not have been imperialist propaganda but the story of a mysterious recreative power that awakens after a long sleep underground—a myth of the imagination itself.
At any rate, the ideal of Camelot and the Round Table is not necessarily imperialist, let alone white supremacist: as always, myths are what we make of them and, in a phrase by which Milton sums up the entire theme of Paradise Lost and indeed everything he ever wrote, “reason is but choosing.” The true myth of Arthur is of someone who tried to create a new, ideal society to replace the declined-and-fallen Roman Empire of the 5th century. The ideal is still alive in one of the greatest comic strips of all time, the historically-researched Prince Valiant, created in 1937 by Canadian-born Hal Foster and thriving to this day thanks to the creative team of Mark Schulz and Thomas Yeates. There was, however, an actual historical figure who genuinely strove to lift his society to a higher level, the appropriately named Alfred the Great. Where the historical Arthur failed to stop the Anglo-Saxon invasion, Alfred in fact did stop the Viking invasions. Unable to repel the Vikings entirely, he nonetheless achieved a peace treaty by which Vikings and Anglo-Saxons lived peaceably on either side of a north-south boundary. But that is only half of Alfred’s achievement: the other half is educational. He preserved the English language by making it the language of schooling, and he promoted learning in every way he could, including translating documents himself. Once again, we see the ideal of preserving and promoting education in the midst of social darkness.
What is “the college experience,” as the recruiting rhetoric calls it? It has two aspects, practical and liberal, the latter meaning good for its own sake, beyond utilitarian concerns. In turn, practical education has two aspects, career preparation and socialization. These are exactly the characteristics held against it by hard leftists, who regard higher education as merely an assembly line for the mass production of human component parts for the late-capitalist machine. Or that was the rhetoric of a previous era: these days the accusation would probably be that higher education is the means by which white privilege rationalizes and reproduces itself. There is some truth to all of this, up to a point, that point being where conservatives complain of the exact opposite: higher education teaches critical thinking about things that should be beyond criticism, like, well, capitalism, sexism and homophobia, and systemic racism. It teaches revisionist rather than ideologically glorified history. Does college education try to produce social adjustment, or does it try to make students question their society? The answer is that it tries to do both at once, which is why the system so often seems self-defeating and at odds with itself. At the risk of being accused of betraying my progressive credentials, I would say that that is what it should be doing, trying to strike an impossible yet necessary balance, trying to give students tools to cope with the demands of their society and at the same time preserve a detachment from it that enables them to criticize it and retain a degree of individuality and autonomy. Ideologues tend to be purists, and will tell you this is “mystification,” that you cannot serve God and Mammon, but either-or thinking is as reductionist here as it is everywhere else.
Some famous books have been written about what are called rites of initiation in many societies, marking the passage from childhood to adulthood. College education is the chief rite of initiation in our society, at least from the lower middle class upward. As the term indicates, the four years of undergraduate education do initiate: they induct students into society, and are to that extent mildly conformist. Believe me, they used to be a lot more conformist: schools changed dramatically in about a decade, from the mid-60’s through the mid-70’s. When I was a freshman in 1969, compulsory chapel had already been abolished. However, there was curfew for women, but not for men, and, needless to say, no co-ed dorms. Fraternity and sorority life dominated campus life. Greek life helped the loneliness and anxiety of the transition from living at home, but, like the military (and ROTC was also a big thing on many campuses, though not on ours), it continued the peer-group pressure of high school with its demand to fit in or be cast out into the darkness and the gnashing of teeth (more likely the darkness and smoking of grass in the hippie dorms). That is what fraternity and sorority initiations, with their hazing, are all about. You must humiliate yourself a little, lose a little of your individuality and self-respect, in order to fit in. Nowadays there are alternative sororities that focus on academic achievement, but Greek life, at least back then, was hive life.
And hazing rituals were not confined to the campus Greeks. In 1969, freshmen were supposed to wear little beanies, at least during opening week. If an upperclassman came up to you and said, “Dink, frosh,” you were supposed to remove your beanie and, I believe, genuflect and repeat some mildly stupid saying. My best friend Dennis and I were perfectly willing to be expelled from school rather than wear a beanie, much less “dink.” Given what I was at that age, I would probably have replied “Dink you, asshole” and got the crap beat out of me, but luckily I was not called upon to preserve my brittle post-adolescent dignity. As absurd as it all sounds, it reflected the society outside the academic walls. This was an era in which, to work at IBM, you had to wear a standardized suit and join in the singing of the company song. Most of this conformism is of course long gone. The one place where peer-group mentality still thrives is the football team. For some of the players, including those who never actually get to play, belonging to the team is their one reason for being in school, and they seem to have very little interest in any other aspect of life. I do not say this to put them down, not for one minute. But I do find it sad that they feel their options are so limited.
However, there are still initiation rituals today. The conformist pressures now come from the career-preparation rather than the social-life aspect of academic life. The new hazing is padding your resumé. You must join campus organizations, do as many internships as possible, volunteer in the community, volunteer for social work over “alternative spring break,” study abroad. Where once academic work had to struggle for priority against the centrifugal pull of campus social life, now it has to struggle against the centrifugal pull of career-building outside activities, which is the harder struggle since the activities are all good in themselves. But a good deal of the involvement is driven by fear of not looking competitive in a ruthless job market. This tendency was just beginning when I was an undergraduate: I remember my parents and the guidance counselor begging me to get involved in something, anything, in high school or no college would look at me. But it is far worse now. It has bred a type of student who is addicted to involvement, driven by a kind of relentlessly positive extraverted energy. Our Provost had to put a cap on the number of majors and minors students were allowed, because we had students doing two majors and three minors, and unable to graduate on time. These students might as well be the “sleepless” in Nancy Kress’s science fiction classic “Beggars in Spain,” mentioned in a previous newsletter, except that they are more impressive. They too never sleep, but without the aid of some kind of special science fictional operation. And for the same reason: Kress’s “sleepless” are driven by achievement. Every so often I advocate a more introverted lifestyle that puts reading books, thinking about them, talking about them, and then writing about them at the center of the educational process. People are astonished: it is as if I were advocating a return to writing with quill pens. There is certainly much of both academic and personal value in all the activities. But they take up all the students’ time, and, more seriously, draw students away from the calm, intensely inward focus necessary for true liberal studies. However good extracurricular activities are in themselves, there is also a frenetic, panic-driven quality to student life that the students themselves are not conscious of, and perhaps do not want to be conscious of. It makes for a strange assortment of students in any given class: on the one hand compulsive overachievers; on the other, students too paralyzed by anxiety and depression to come to class or turn in work.
We have so far been speaking only of the conservative side of undergraduate education, the side that initiates students into their society through career preparation and socialization. Good things in themselves, and necessary, even if you are an English major. We are not just giving a sales job when we tell English majors that their facility with language and critical thinking will be an advantage to them in the job market, at least in the long run. But that is not the meaning of liberal education, the kind of education that liberates us from practical goals and “success.” A long time ago, liberal knowledge, knowledge that was good in itself rather than for any practical reason, was a social marker: a liberal education was the sign that one was a “gentleman” and therefore liberated from the vulgar need to work at a job. But that definition is not only long out of date but represents another ideological kidnapping. Liberal education has always been more than just a kind of social polish for the privileged.
Rites of initiation in traditional, non-modernized societies do induct young people into their adult social roles, and often involve a degree of hazing, especially for males, sometimes so severe that it is basically a form of torture. The reason for such ordeals is, again, the same as in the military, the need to break down a previous identity and replace it with a new one that identifies itself with the group and its wider concerns rather than with the self-centered desires of childhood. To that extent, rites of initiation are conservative and collective. But a society that only breeds drones, collectivized identities capable only of hivethink, will not survive. That is why the collectivizing movements that are sweeping the world right now in a kind of psychological pandemic, are ultimately doomed, even if they triumph in the short run. Putin, the right-wing parties of Europe, and our very own homegrown fascists are regressive: they represent a desperate attempt to stop a social evolutionary process towards a new type of society, and their obstructionism cannot succeed indefinitely in an age of science and mass communications. The present success of China may suggest otherwise, but I suspect that is a temporary illusion. I know that Orwell says otherwise in 1984, but I think his vision was incomplete: what it leaves out is that a house built on nihilism cannot stand, at least not forever. And, mind you, the oligarchies that now rule Europe and the United States cannot keep up their present denialism either. The world is careening towards massive change, and one thing that is driving that change is education. Voters in the United States already line up according to the kind of education they have had—or not had. Those with four-year college degrees tend to vote liberal or progressive; those with community college associates degrees or no degrees at all tend to vote conservative. The present political crisis is a conflict of visions of reality, and education is perhaps the most central factor in that conflict. Blake spoke of the apocalypse—a word meaning “revelation”—as “the day of intellectual battle.” It has come.
Traditional societies used to be characterized as “primitive,” which meant almost entirely collective and non-individualized, only a step up from the “herd instinct” of the animal kingdom. It is now recognized that that is a racist and colonialist lie. Traditional societies were no doubt as heterogeneous as modernized ones are, and no doubt some of them did their best to remain in a collectivized, herd-animal state by repressing all aspects of individualism. But I think that rites of initiation in the healthier traditional societies included or encouraged a tendency that was the opposite of conservative and collectivizing, a tendency akin to what we call liberal education in a modernized society.
To grow up, you have to become an individual, and to do that you have to leave the safe confines of the collective order. You have to travel beyond the boundary into the unknown. You may of course refuse, saying, “That is the hero’s quest you are talking about, and I am not a hero.” But the call is there, and not just to an elite. Many are called, and few are chosen because you do the choosing or refusing yourself. In some societies, this may entail a physical quest into actual wilderness, and that is still an option for some people, like my friend Terry Martin, who has hiked across much of Europe and the United States, taking photos of landscape and natural life along the way. If you know Terry, you know that this is a quest and not a hobby. Behind such journeys lies the tradition of the “vision quest,” to use a name for it out of Native American studies, although it is not limited to that tradition.
In solitude, outside the social order, there is a possibility of what might be called a liminal experience. On the borderline, the distinction between real and unreal, possible and impossible, breaks down, and strange experiences may occur. A long time ago, Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (1908) claimed that the origin of religion was in a liminal experience of some numinous power that he called “the holy,” but which had nothing to do with the Sunday-school pious meaning of that term. The holy is a manifestation of awe, mystery, power, and frequently of terror, as something breaks through our ordinary categories of experience and reveals at least an aspect of itself. Sometimes it takes the form of what historian of religion Mircea Eliade called a “hierophany,” a revelation of the sacred, by charging some object of the ordinary world with energy so that it becomes a symbol—a sacred tree, a sacred stone, and so on. Sometimes the manifestation goes farther and communicates: Moses not only saw a burning bush, but the bush spoke to him. That is the experience of the Biblical prophets: the prophetic books of the Old Testament are compilations of oracles spoken by God to the prophet. But it is misleading to identify liminal experiences too exclusively with religion. They are what Abraham Maslow referred to as peak experiences, and his surveys indicated that many people had them, but did not necessarily identify them as religious. Moreover, some few people choose to live entire lives in the strange, uncanny area of the borderline, outside of respectability. A dark and unforgettable book about a few such people is Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
The vision quest, which some people now call the wilderness quest to avoid the danger of appropriation, takes place not only in the wilderness, outside of cell phone range, but in extremity, in conjunction with fasting and other physical hardship. It is a quest for wisdom: what is sought is advice from a spiritual animal who becomes a guardian. I am suggesting that there is an armchair version of this quest, and that it lies at the heart of true liberal education. That is why I stressed the necessary introversion and inward focus necessary for such an experience. We know from his own account that Northrop Frye had several peak experiences that he described as suddenly a vast number of things making sense. He was anything but some New Age flaky mystical type, but he repeatedly insisted that the thousands of pages of his work, published and unpublished, emerged from epiphanies that took altogether less than an hour. I have my own version of this, which I have spoken of repeatedly. It was based on sitting by myself in the dorm at the age of 19 and trying to read a book, Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, and being overwhelmed by a feeling that, if a vast number of things that I sensed suddenly as connected didn’t make sense now, I would keep studying until they did. I am still studying. That is liberal education.
That is what needs to survive, and which I have faith will survive because it is impossible to kill, although it may be driven underground or to the margins. It may or may not survive in the form of, for example, a college English major. I hope it will, however, because the traditional set-up is ideal for liberal studies. There needs to be introverted, solitary time reading and thinking, then a communal conversation in the classroom so that students come to understand both viewpoints outside of their own and the social context of all knowledge, then a return to solitude to arrive and one’s own wisdom by writing a paper. And it should be the student’s own wisdom, not the repetition of the wisdom of critical books or the professor. My absolute final word on paper writing is, “Make it your own.”
Whatever the future of undergraduate liberal education, and whatever one thinks of that mercurial Trickster called the Internet, I would add that since that 1954-55 documentary, there have been some wonderful innovations that may work towards the effort to keep a light lit in a dark time, especially by preserving past records. I was delighted to find that the BW historian has digitalized precious archives: all the BW student newspapers and yearbooks are now preserved online and searchable from my desk. We should not underestimate how good a thing this is. And, beyond traditional undergraduate education, there are new resources for making liberal education possible, such as, um, newsletters and podcasts. The enthusiasm the public has showed about these forms seems to me a hopeful sign about our society. On the front lawn of Marting Hall is a historical marker explaining that the area is a site of the Lyceum movement of the 19th century, an attempt to encourage public enthusiasm for intellect and culture outside of the academic system, mostly through public lectures to a general public. Emerson took part in the movement. We have NPR and, despite their problems, TED talks. The Cleveland Public Library, one of the finest library systems of the United States, constantly features lectures by important writers. All of these forms of liberal education go back to the quest of reading.
In an essay called “What Is a Healing Dream?” Marc Ian Barasch recounts an anecdote from Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, who had a dream of a burning spirit man:
Then the spirit man took Johnson by the hand and flew him to a great nebula coruscating like a diamond at the center of the universe. Standing on the very threshold of divine majesty, before vast, dazzling whorls of light eternal, Johnson tugged at the man’s sleeve and asked impatiently, “This is fine, but what is it good for?” | “The spirit man looked at me,” wrote Johnson, “in disgust: ‘It isn’t good for anything’.” (254)
I intend to teach this essay in my Honors composition course in the fall. I hope the students will understand that it is a parable of liberal education.
Reference
Barasch, Marc Ian, “What Is a Healing Dream?” in Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, 8th edition, 2012.
We should all be concerned about the future of higher education in the old sense of education in the liberal arts and sciences instead of vocational training, which most state legislatures understand post-secondary education to mean. I have heard from Ohioans that the state constitution stipulates that there be a college within some distance of every inhabitant. -- I think it was fifty miles. That's quit a commitment to citizens and their tax dollars.