TROY SENIK
Staff Writer
Former president of the University of Notre Dame, the Rev. Edward Malloy, once wrote, “A college degree is not a sign that one is a finished product but an indication a person is prepared for life.” Would that such grace-filled words not so often fall upon the deaf ears of so many American colleges, many of which now seem intent upon extracting every last drop of marrow from the solemn dignity that used to serve as the earmark of higher education.
There was a time in America when the role of the college or university was a distinct one. The academy was an institution dedicated with equal fervor to the pursuits of soulcraft and education, a distinction which, while necessary for a contemporary understanding, would have been puzzlingly surgical to our forebears. That such qualifiers have to be given is a sad reflection on how completely liberal postmodernism has poisoned the well. Education has now taken its seat on a throne adjacent to politics, before which society prostrates itself in the worship of “objective” standards mercifully unburdened by moral language and thus any useful bearings.
As the classical education receded into the mists of the dawn, the 20th century found daylight breaking with a more pragmatic approach to education taking center stage. Whereas great monasteries of learning had previously dared to pursue the formation of both character and knowledge, by century’s end, the nation’s greatest names (read: the Ivy Leagues) had devolved into glorified social networks and increasingly lucrative business card appellation, while the rest of the American educational landscape had found itself foursquare in the pursuit of producing commodities rather than individuals.
The growth of such profitable entities as business schools and collegiate sports has continued to ensure that college life extends its arms to virtually every aspect of society that requires any sort of training process whatsoever, displacing the role formerly played by apprenticeships and guilds while valuing the twinned idols of raw efficiency and uniformity at the daily expense of individual development and diversity.
Nietzsche once famously criticized the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides as “bloodless,” a term that seems utterly appropriate to where we find most of contemporary higher education. One need only observe the continued degeneration of the humanities and the decay of “social studies” into “social sciences” to understand the extent to which we unjustly privilege the quantification and codification of every object that admits human understanding. That such methods do possess something of importance should not be overlooked, but the wonder of a starry night never wanted much of majesty because of a lack of the ability to precisely calculate orbits. One can only wonder if Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he decreed, “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
But, fellow Waves, I do not come to bury Caesar, so much as to praise the crevices that his ghost still inhabits. Pepperdine students are perhaps too often actuated by the rage of Facebook profiling or attempting to find adequate parking at their own private coastal fiefdom to keep adequate sight of the fact that this university, unlike so many of its contemporaries, has kept bigger goals in mind than simply moving its students names from a tuition check to a diploma in four years time.
Let that be one of this year’s reasons for Thanksgiving.
11-17-2005