Critical Mass

By Evan Sparks

Look at a typical modern university (let’s call it “Big Time University, Inc.”). BTU may be a registered non-profit organization, but it has the spirit of a big corporation, focused on profitability, metrics, efficiency. It’s not as though the education BTU provides for its clients is bad; in fact, it’s quite good – but it’s not what it ought to be. And this has everything to do with the corporate mentality of the leadership. The business of America may be business, as Calvin Coolidge once posited, but the business of a university is something else entirely.

The mission of a university is education: for wisdom and virtue. This has historically been accomplished through the teaching of the liberal arts and sciences. Although they may not lead directly to a job, they will enable the educated man or woman to think for himself, to participate in the eternal dialogues of ages past and future, and to sound out the questions of wisdom and virtue that make a liberally educated man capable of succeeding anywhere. As Oxford polymath Dorothy Sayers wrote, “ For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

Wisdom and virtue: what antiquarian notions, here at Big Time University, Inc.! Both concepts presuppose some kind of moral content, something dividing wisdom from knowledge and virtue from ethics. Businesses like BTU are not in business to make moral judgments, no thank you: go to church or synagogue if that’s what you seek. BTU is a university for the mind, not the soul. The mind may take shape here, but the soul is left fluttering in the wind. Perhaps a thoughtful professor, a campus organization, or a group of friends will handle this aspect of our education (as has happened for thousands of our graduates), but Big Time University, Inc. is not in business for the soul.

Furthermore, it’s not really possible to measure wisdom and virtue in any meaningful way; they are not quantitative values. For years Big Time, Inc. has sought validation of its success in metrics: ranked n^th, according to U.S. News and World Report; 78 national fellowship winners in the last ten years; $100 million, the largest gift in BTU history; X, Y, and Z. And what is the value of such numerical figures? Former VMI Superintendent Josiah Bunting III writes, “The utility of such practices is zero. No, worse than zero. Everything that we should value and exalt in the way we educate our young people is ignored utterly; or if not ignored, forgotten or unknown. What kind of men and women teach the students? What do they teach them? For what have such numbers, such rankings, to do with what the undergraduates will become when they are forty or sixty?” Big Time University does not contribute to the formation of character, and in this it resembles a business more than a university.

The nagging question, at last, is this: could it be different? Could we have a school concerned with shaping character as well as informing the intellect? Can Big Time become a real university again, a place where wisdom and virtue are inculcated in its students and where the pursuit of ever-higher profit margins is replaced by the pursuit of ever-greater honor? To teach virtue is not to indoctrinate, as David Hicks ably states in Norms and Nobility; the process of shaping character is borne out in dialectic and dialogue, as iron sharpens iron. Knowledge becomes the servant of wisdom and ethics the fruit of virtue.

A university may pursue this worthy goal, but a business cannot. Big Time University, Inc. will never provide the full measure of education until it stops counting the “costs of doing business.”