The Right Questions

“The academy is in crisis,” quips one recent article from The Public Discourse. Some might read such news with a bit of a yawn. This is a tale that’s been told and retold in any number of iterations, after all: recent years have seen university “budget crises, enrollment crises, employment crises, adjunct-reliance crises, preferential-admission crises, tuition-inflation crises, doctorate-overproduction crises, research-integrity crises, grade-inflation crises, student-radicalism crises, academic-freedom crises: you name them, they appear with numbing regularity, sometimes several at once.”

But “the real” crisis of the academy, our author asserts, “is an identity crisis.” This is bigger news, certainly, but news some still may have been tracking for some time. Those who cherish the place of the liberal arts or humanities traditions, for instance, have been watching with dismay for a good while now at those programs’ slow demise, as vibrant institutional havens of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” have become training grounds for professional life or settings for certain kinds of ideological indoctrination.

But even among these who celebrate and campaign for the humanities, there seems to be perplexity about why they should: subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) debate about what such programs really are and do, and why they matter, brims under the surface of even a shared dismay when they’re lost. And of course, some of these patrons have obviously perilous reasons for their humanities advocacy: there are those, for example, who defend philosophy, history, and literature departments because of their usefulness for advancing an agenda rooted in various kinds of critical theory, an agenda centered on redistributing power to those who have had less of it historically. But there are other varied and many-sided ways people tend to defend these programs that are not perilous, necessarily, and yet risk not getting to the heart of things: we say such programs cultivate critical thinking, for instance, preserve a cultural space for beauty, form well-rounded citizens, even maintain a sense of our common history and culture.

Those are noble ends, but the stakes are higher. The university’s identity crisis is intimately tied to a more far-reaching identity crisis, as our author suggests. We’re in need of “some coherent idea of what a human being is,” he notes, “and what the excellence of such a being consists of.” And the truth is that a human being is, simply and yet profoundly, a creature who was made to know, to see true realities and be conformed to them in a way that is the consummation of our minds and hearts. That wisdom is our excellence, a road to our perfection, a high and lofty end upon which the fulfillment of our lives depends.

“The modern academy … is in a state of incomprehension about the questions themselves,” the author notes. The questions universities are meant to answer have less to do with changing or preserving the world than with discovering it. We are meant to become who we fully are, and that doesn’t happen by becoming instruments for the aggrandizing of power, or by (simply) becoming masters of cultural traditions and aesthetic experiences. It happens by persevering in the right questions. And the right questions happen to be those philosophers and poets have been positing for long centuries, which gives us good cause to keep listening and wondering with them: who am I, where am I going, how do I get there, and who’s bringing me?

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