Hope or Despair?

"An unspoilt youth . . . with his mind just waking up and his feelings all fresh and open to the good," Essayist G. Lowes Dickinson once wrote, "is the most beautiful thing this world produces."

What happens to the unspoilt youth when he gets to college has moved Sir Walter Moberly, ex-professor of philosophy at Birmingham University and one of Britain's top educators, to write a book called The Crisis in the University. Britons have decided that it is one of the most thoughtful, responsible critiques of the British university since John Henry Newman's Idea of a University. By last week Sir Walter's blast had whirled the learned dust along academic corridors in England and made eddies in the intellectual weeklies.

The universities, Sir Walter charges, are trying to renounce their responsibility for the education of youth. Philosopher C.E.M. Joad, discussing The Crisis in the New Statesman and Nation, satirizes the university attitude: "You want an atom bomb? Right! We will make it for you. But we really can't concern ourselves with the use to which you propose to put it . . . You want a cathedral? Right! The architectural department will tell you how to build it. But whether you should worship in it or keep pigs in it is a question which falls outside our province."

Such academic lackeydom, says Sir Walter, has reduced the universities to imposing islands of bewilderment in a sea of confusion. A leading symptom of bewilderment: at least three educational traditions are battling for the soul of the modern university, the classical-Christian, the liberal-humanistic, and the technological-democratic.

The Looters. Which of the three traditions should be chosen? Though Sir Walter's heart leans towards the first, his mind rejects all three. Instead, he says, a new sort of Christianization process is needed if universities are to correct the world's confusion rather than merely reflect it.

Other critics of Britain's universities disagree. Editor Michael Oakeshott, in the Cambridge Journal, argues that no new tradition is needed, that the most a university has to give is "the gift of an interval ... a break in the tyrannical course of irreparable events . . ."

The real crisis, Oakeshott holds, is somewhat different. "In the past, a rising class was aware of something valuable enjoyed by others which it wished to share; but this is not so today. The leaders of the rising class are consumed with a contempt for everything which does not spring from their own desires, they are convinced in advance that they have nothing to learn and everything to teach, and consequently their aim is loot--to appropriate to themselves the organization, the shell of the institution, and convert it to their own purposes. The problem of the universities today is how to avoid destruction at the hands of men who have no use for their characteristic virtues, men who are convinced only that 'knowledge is power.' '

Philosopher Joad especially deplores the technological-democratic tendency in education, which "seeks to enable a man to acquire a living rather than to acquire a life worth living." He advises "a return to . . . classical-humanism ... I would suggest that every student, whatever other subject he may be studying, should take . . . a compulsory course in the history and problems of philosophy, supplemented by the history of scientific ideas . . ."

The Round Men. "Such a course . . . would give the power of concentrated thought. This has a special relevance at the present time, when an increasing number . . . are subjected to conditions which render the practice of concentrated thought impossible . . . Secondly, it would have the effect, historically claimed for it, of turning out 'round men' ... It would so polish and refine their minds that they could 'get up' any subject of which they might subsequently stand in need, while the possession of a perspective and a sense of relative values would fit them for high administrative posts . . .

"Finally," Joad concludes, "such a course has been known to give men a serenity of outlook. It may not in our present age be the best dividend-payer from the purely utilitarian standpoint, but this at least may be said of it, that it sometimes enables men to despise the wealth that it prevents them from acquiring."

When the critics had all put up their pens, some thought Sir Walter still held the intellectual field. He had carefully rejected all the pat answers, just as carefully decided that only the Christian world-outlook is universal enough for a university. Yet such Christianity must look more eagerly toward the future's addition of ideas and events than toward the past's tradition of them. Sir Walter's hope for the universities is that Christian teachers and students, seeking "new symbols" for old values, may "play the role of a 'creative minority,' from which the whole community may gradually take colour."

To many, such hope seemed perilously near to despair, but it was hope enough for Sir Walter. Last week, while still heading the government's University Grants Committee, he was busy preparing for his new job as first principal of St. Catherine's, a new college "based on the Christian faith and philosophy of life." Sir Walter's hope was considerably fortified by the faith of others, notably of King George VI, who gave furniture from Windsor Castle for St. Catherine's, and last week offered its principal the use of Windsor's Henry III Tower for his new lodgings.

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