I know what you’re thinking. This post is about the recent “Varsity Blues” scandal involving wealthy parents (including at least a few Hollywood stars) bribing elite colleges and universities to admit their children.
But it’s not about that, really.
It’s not even about the broader scandal of college admissions in general (such as race-based and legacy admissions) or the scandal of easy access to federal loan money which not only has left countless students with crushing debt, but has led to steep increases in tuition (well above the cost of living) and directly abetted the vast expansion of campus building projects and high-end amenities (in order to compete with other colleges similarly flush with this same loan money). And don’t get me started on the consequent and exponential increases in staff and faculty!
The real scandal, I would submit, is how colleges and universities have all but lost their original purpose, their very reason for being.
Over the last few days, as the Varsity Blues scandal broke, I’ve heard any number of comments about the importance of attending not just elite schools but colleges and universities in general. As the argument goes, “higher education” is the pathway to a successful life.
Why? Because you need a college degree to get ahead in our competitive economy. Not only that, some jobs require specific marketable technical skills (think STEM).
And yet in all these discussions I’ve yet to hear a single statement that betrays, even remotely, what the main purpose of the university ought to be.
Education is viewed in terms of its instrumental value. Miriam-Webster defines instrumentalism as “a doctrine that ideas are instruments of action and that their usefulness determines their truth.”
Here education is merely a means to an end, something that’s value is based solely on its utility, in this case to “get ahead” or “succeed.” That’s the real scandal, if you ask me.
The original idea of the university was, in short, to order the human soul. And it accomplished this by inculcating wisdom and virtue, both moral and intellectual. As character is enhanced, the good life becomes possible, one not gauged solely by wealth or status.
The ancient Greeks argued that moral virtue grows out of habit, and intellectual virtue through systematic instruction.
Virtue was what constituted full humanity: strength, courage, capacity, worth, manliness (yes, that’s right!), and moral excellence. It signified moral goodness which included the practice of moral duties and conformity to moral law.
Plato proposed four chief virtues: justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. The apostle Paul later added the “theological” virtues: faith, hope, and charity (or love). Together these constituted for the medieval church the “Seven Virtues.”
Conversely, the “Seven Deadly Sins” were pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth.
Aristophanes and Socrates once argued about how to restore virtue within a Greek culture at serious risk of losing it. Socrates urged systematic instruction as the best method. Aristophanes argued instead that genuine virtue can only be formed as habit early in a person’s life through the agencies of family, class, and neighborhood.
Either way, both agreed that the purpose of higher education was the proper formation of moral character, and not, it must be noted, getting a good job. And an essential ingredient of the ordered soul was a clear sense of the transcendent.
This was the same approach taken in early America. Its colleges were founded by the church (as were all earlier ones in Europe) to help form souls (and citizens) conversant with high ethics, metaphysical and spiritual truths, and the long history of both.
Today this is all but gone. Higher education, with few exceptions, is dominated by “pragmatic” instrumentalism. The sense that the university is a place for furthering one’s knowledge of God and one’s fellow human beings is seen as almost quaint.
Religion, history, philosophy, art, literature, etc., as testified by the winnowing crucible of human existence through time (with its infinite trials and errors), has simply lost its allure. What we’re left with are, at best, nothing more than presumptuous (and expensive) trade schools.
The philosophy of education in this country began to change in the mid-19th century with the rise of scientific materialism, aggressive secularism, state educational institutions, and the triumph of technology.
What was old was now suspect. New utopian ideologies, distinct from custom, convention, and the long experience of the human species, took its place. Such ideas would solve all hitherto unresolved human problems.
This would be accomplished through a materialistic, this-worldly virtuosity that eschewed God and tradition, the very realities that previously had helped foster a healthy humility born of the awareness of human frailty and limitation.
Intellectualism, once considered a pretentious error by most Americans (precisely because its thought-experiments didn’t accord with human nature), would soon replace an education premised on moral virtue and the life-ordering good.
“When the intellectual feels no longer attached either to the community or the religion of his forebears,” writes Raymond Aron, “he looks to progressive ideology to fill the vacuum.”
Such are, as Russell Kirk says, “enemies of established society and of the church, opposed both to convention and the state, self-liberated from prejudice and prescription.”
As a result, “our educational apparatus has been rearing up not a class of liberally educated young people of humane outlook, but instead a series of degree-dignified elites, an alleged meritocracy of confined views and dubious intellectual and moral credentials, puffed up by that little learning…”
Which brings us back to the Varsity Blues scandal. One is left wondering if any of these misguided souls ever considered the true value of a liberal education. The question, of course, answers itself.
For the true purpose of education is to shape and mold young people into wise and moral human beings, those who have been taught to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful, those who find joy and fulfillment in education itself, and not as a means to an end, i.e. for money, power, and/or status.
From what we hear today, we might assume that the underlying, though rarely stated, purpose of life is thus to gain wealth, security, and comfort for oneself, as if life is intended to be a competitive utilitarian game, won, if necessary, by hook or by crook.
Lost in this ideological madness is the fact that we are creatures of nature and Spirit, born of God and placed on this earth to love our Creator and one another, and that the true meaning of life is found ultimately in the cultivation of the soul, a soul deep, rich, and manifestly wondrous.