Reading Booman today, I came to the realization that a normal lifespan is long enough for a person to lose everything. The world changes in such a way and at such a pace that one is bound to witness the disappearance of whatever makes living in this world interesting and rewarding.
So, I learned here that one of our large public universities SUNY-Albany has decided to scrap Classics, French, Russian, and Theater. Universities everywhere are in financial distress. They are dumping unneeded ballast so they can stay afloat. That unneeded ballast, though, happens to be the university’s soul.
I attended college in the seventies, and then dropped out, and finally dropped back in and got my degree two years ago. So my perspective covers some ground. And I found that both times I was in college, the most exciting courses were in the Classics Department. I don’t think that this is a coincidence. The people who devote their lives to that type of scholarship acquire a mindset that is critical, incisive, insightful, and playful all at once. There was nothing in my college experience to match the intellectual excitement of being led through a text by Plato or Euripides in the original. And I was not a Classics major.
Of course, it all makes perfect sense. Students need to get job skills, and don’t have time for much else. The universities don’t want to spend limited resources on departments that nobody majors in. So they disappear. I expect the next to go will be the libraries. Very expensive, and why keep them up? Students do their research on the internet these days. And what percentage of the volumes in the libraries’ holdings are even taking off the shelves in a given year? I’d guess less than 1%.
But universities can not exist — they make no sense — if they see their purpose as providing pre-professional training. You don’t need the expense of dormitories and gyms to provide professional training. You don’t need to have leaders in the field explaining basic concepts to 18-year-olds. You don’t need a classroom for what can be provided just as well and much more cheaply on line. By jettisoning precisely the services that only a university can provide, the university is abetting its own demise.
I’ve probably spent too much of my life learning languages so that I could read books that I thought were too important to me to read in translation — Plato, the Bible, Proust. I don’t think students are wrong for wanting some payoff for the amount of money they have to spend for their education. But I feel that the world is becoming narrower, and I feel sorry for the students who won’t experience the useless yet wonderful pleasures that lie in the texts they will not be given the opportunity to read.
Who could disagee with you? My only reservation is that readers of Plato or Proust never amount to much in leadership roles in the country. Politics is below the level of the English majors who eventually become literati, and like to quote Freud rather than get involved in resolutions to real life problems. They like to sport liberaries in their own homes, where they can display their knowledge to neighbors, but getting into politics and social change is just below them.
I always wondered why I had to take two years of French (or any other language) in order to get a BA degree, and then realized that it was a matter of employing people. Now I can’t even read French, and of course, I could never speak it. What was the point?
People who need to be guaranteed 3 credits in order to take a course in philosophy most likely didn’t give a damned about Plato or Proust to begin with, over the requirement. The issue here is that if you need a material reward before you read Plato or Proust you probably don’t care about what they had to say to begin with.
A few things to respond to
Consider first that what you say is true, but it is even worse than that.
Context: Archaeologists routinely discover sites that show a history something like this: When the civilization in question first appears, artifacts are crude but innovative, and improve rapidly as skill is acquired. Whatever the engine of the civilization is, its success results in rapid development and improvement in all sorts of areas. Gradually, though, the civilization hits its peak and innovation slows while improvement stops. Then decay sets in as the engine of the civilization falters–artifacts become shoddy as obvious corners are cut, and skills decline as they are apparently no longer valued or affordable. Finally, the civilization fails, and the site is burned.
The decline in education you describe is real. What used to be the soul of our civilization also used to be affordable and well worth affording; now it is thought to be too expensive and unnecessary anyway. But the most obvious signs of decline are in everyday artifacts: Goods are no longer designed to function well and to last, but are redesigned to fall apart in what is called planned obsolescence. Then the planned lifetime of the artifact is further shortened.
Computer technology provides no exception to this: The rapid growth of new techniques is hyper-rapid, so that obsolescence is pretty much guaranteed and the artifacts are junk, for they need not last anyway. (Even the software is junk, not worth fully debugging.) The external costs of disposing of all this junk becomes part of our predicament as we press environmental limits.
There is a reason this all is happening, and happening now. Industrial civilization depends on ever-increasing resources, and ever-increasing energy. Both are running out.
Wood was the original fuel source, and just as that was running out (in Europe) ways were found to utilize coal, which turned out to be cheap and plentiful. Before coal ran out, petroleum was found to be even more useful and cheaper still. But now, as production of oil peaks (peak production of light, sweet crude occurred in 2005) oil becomes more scarce and more expensive to produce, undercutting the ability of industrial civilization to maintain itself. No cheap, plentiful replacement for oil has been found, and time has run out. Decline has entered the beginning of its visible phase, as civic life becomes thoroughly corrupt (it is no longer worth maintaining) and everyday life for most people becomes obviously harder and more austere.
This is called collapse.
The important thing for you to realize is that the things that you value will never again be supported by public institutions or large-scale organizations. As collapse unfolds and conditions deteriorate further all such corporate bodies will become obsessed with maintaining their position and survival, even as they inevitably erode away.
If you indeed value the classics that were created before (and before the fall of) the Roman empire, and the literature created before the first great setbacks of the twentieth century, you must choose yourself to try to save them. Of course, you should look for other people who feel the same way, but there won’t be many of them, and they like you, will find it difficult to do much. By working together you might be more effective, but in any case it is up to you to decide what is worth saving, and to find ways to do it.
You raise a lot of good points.
The internet has made it easy to find like minded people and build community of a sort. But the immediacy of reading a text with other students engaged with the same text and a scholar who has devoted his or her life to the study of such works is something that the university is uniquely designed to provide. I doubt that any real substitute can be found.
As someone who attended college as a nontraditional (i.e., old) student, I wondered why colleges didn’t do more to expand their base beyond the 18-26 year olds that constitute the huge majority of their students. There are retired people with lots of time and (depending on the person) resources to spend on education. You would think that among them there are some who regret having spent their college years focused on their professional goals, and would welcome the opportunity to spend some of their later years learning the things they missed out on. I think that if the university had some creativity and a commitment to its core values, it could attract these people (and their tuition money) and not have to close down whole departments.
True. That is over. Except for what people such as yourself create, and that will be more or less outside any institutional setting.
All I know is even back when I was in college (decades ago) the shift had already started for colleges to abandon their goals and follow the money. It is now far to late for any institution to do what you suggest–nor would they want to: Too much corruption has set in.
Time has run out, and you must move outside of any regular institution. The internet may help you find people, but that is a short-term solution , and you must be ready to move off the internet when access fails–as it will within a few years.