smaller and smaller subspecialties, and scholars worked away in their specialties trying to advance the frontiers of knowledge.
A lot was discovered by this method, especially in the sciences, but, as Kronman argues, this emphasis on specialization “draws our attention away from the whole of our lives and requires that we focus on some small aspect of them instead.” The idea that one could survey the main forms of living, or ask big, vague questions like “What makes life worth living?” began to seem not only unrealistic but irresponsible and pernicious. “For it made the question of the meaning of life appear unprofessional—a question that no responsible teacher of the humanities could henceforth take seriously,” Kronman writes. The research ideal offers little way for the university to engage the student as a whole person, an entity that has longings and a hunger for meaning. It subtly says, Ignore the soul behind the curtain.
It’s not that moral education was actively expelled from the universities, but the whole enterprise just became awkward, and people more or less let it drop. Moral development is tremendously important, everybody acknowledged, but it’s something you sort of do on your own. Steven Pinker of Harvard summarized the research ethos of the modern university: “I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it.”
Students are taught to engage in critical thinking, to doubt, distance, and take things apart, but they are given almost no instruction on how to attach to things, how to admire, to swear loyalty to, to copy and serve. The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.
Fortunately, I went to one of those institutions that has one foot inside the research ideal and one foot still stubbornly planted in the humanistic ideal, the University of Chicago. When I attended, the study of the Great Books occupied at least the first two years of study, and often beyond. Our professors didn’t just teach the books, they proselytized them. Some of the old German refugees from World War II were still around then, and they held the belief, with a religious fervor, that the magic keys to the kingdom were in these books. The mysteries of life and how to live well were there for the seizing for those who read well and thought deeply.
When I was a student, a legendary professor named Karl Weintraub was teaching Western Civilization. He epitomized the commitment and zeal that many put into the teaching of these books. Years later, when he was nearing death, he wrote to my classmate Carol Quillen about the difficulties of teaching Western Civ: “Sometimes when I have spent an hour or more, pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and exhausted. I think it works on the student, but I do not really know.”
It is a tragedy of teaching that sometimes the professors pour more into the class than the students are able at their ages to receive. And in that way good teaching is like planting. Those teachers like Weintraub were inserting seeds that would burst in us years or decades later when the realities of adult life called them forth. I don’t know about you, but I felt more formed by my college education twenty-five years out than I did on the day I graduated.
There is an old saying that if you catch on fire with enthusiasm people will come for miles to watch you burn. Part of my education was just watching my professors burn. The essayist Joseph Epstein, who went to Chicago a quarter century before me, remembers the same tone of extensive erudition: “From the deep abyss of my late-adolescent ignorance,” Epstein remembers, “I never for a moment thought I could hope to emulate such men and women. I nevertheless somehow sensed that there was something immensely impressive about them. I mostly remember getting caught up in an immense admiration for these professors and these authors.” As the philosopher Eva Brann put it, there is a feeling of delightful humility in knowing that you are lesser, but are bound by love to something greater, that you recognize superiority and are inspired by it.