The Bookshelf: Recovering the Academic Vocation

In December 2024, the academic news website Inside Higher Ed published a story titled “Has Chapel Hill’s ‘Civic Life’ School Become a Conservative Center?” The article did not restrict its gaze to the new School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina, created by the state legislature in 2023. With dark insinuation, Inside Higher Ed worried aloud about whether the Chapel Hill program was plugged into a network of like-minded academics who can be found at on-campus and campus-adjacent programs at Princeton, Duke, Harvard, the University of Virginia, Oxford, Columbia, and Berkeley, among other places, and are supported by grant-making institutions such as the Jack Miller Center and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education. (Public Discourse is published by the Witherspoon Institute, which is one of the institutions and programs mentioned in the IHE article.)

I can confirm this: there is such a network of like-minded academics at the programs mentioned in the IHE article. But what unites them is not a common devotion to political conservatism, or even a common devotion to increasing the “viewpoint diversity” on the campuses where their programs are located. What unites them, so far as I can tell—and I know some of the individuals named in the article—is a shared vision of what the university is for, and a devotion to restoring the academy’s proper sense of its own identity. As I said in my last Bookshelf column, that is the real crisis of the academy today, governed as it increasingly is by impulses variously ideological, blindly scientistic, and crassly materialistic, all of them bottomed on an underlying relativism about what human excellence is.

There is something accidental, and something not so accidental, about the fact that many of these new programs have the word “civic” in their names. The accidental reason is that the curricula these programs generally undertake involve the contributions of faculty who are historians, philosophers, political scientists, and other humanists and social scientists, but they cannot very well call their new home the Politics department or History or what have you. Those names are taken. “Civics” is not taken.

The non-accidental reason is that a common thread among such programs is a recognition of the dual function of the university: to produce liberally educated human beings and to produce prudent citizens. (There may even be, as Dominic Burbidge and James Stoner suggest, a new “emerging discipline of civics” in these schools.) Is there some tension between these functions? There can be, surely. But it is not a necessary one, and the question of the relation between these roles—human being and citizen—is one of the most critical questions of education.

In that vein, my colleagues in these new “Civics” programs, and for that matter everyone who cares about the humane education of citizens, should read Eva Brann’s 1979 book Paradoxes of Education in a Republic. Brann, who died in 2024 at age 95, taught at St. John’s College in Annapolis from 1957 to 2022, and even to those of us who never set foot there, she seemed through her many books to be the embodiment of a humane education. This book, one of her earliest, considers three “paradoxes.” First is the paradox of “utility,” in which the academy must grapple with the imperative of being useful, recognizing that citizenship, practical life, and even moneymaking generate their own legitimate demands on our attention, but must not surrender its devotion to liberal education as something “beyond utility.”

Second is the paradox of “tradition,” specifically a tradition or canon of great books that have formed our civilization. The danger is that “the ‘classics’ become, so to speak, carefully listed specimen survivals, stowed away in an ark floating upon the face of the waters where they are ‘worked on,’ rather than read, by a skeleton crew.” Or, as Brann varies the metaphor, “the academy tends to treat the tradition taxidermically.” The study of stuffed dead things is no education for human beings or citizens, for it is only in recognizing that classics in the tradition are living arguments that we can learn from them rather than about them. Ever the teacher, Brann writes: “each text is to be approached as if it might contain truth; the students are asked to ask themselves whether what they are reading is true.”

The third paradox in Brann’s treatment is that of “rationality,” which she defines as the “unreasoned use of reason.” By this she means our modern penchant for abstraction, logical dissection, the authority of “hard facts—objective, neutral knowledge, the less humane, the more respectable.” Brann relates this to the oft-praised exhortation to “think for oneself,” which can result in a “self-assertive resistance to authority” that refers all questions of value to “the supreme court of the self.” This is not the openness of intellect that education—both liberal and civic—requires.

Brann’s brief but rich book has much more wise counsel than I can summarize here. And almost her last word is this: “That educational communities should foster reverence for the Republic seems to me obvious.” But for Brann, reverence is that love that accepts the civic duty of thinking hard about what the republic needs, and what serves the highest needs of our fellow citizens. That “an education that is uncompromisingly liberal” can nonetheless serve the cause of republicanism is her firm conviction.

Eva Brann’s younger St. John’s colleague and former student Zena Hitz has become something of an evangelist for liberal education, especially since the success of her 2020 book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Drawing in part on her own experiences in the academy, including her early career disappointments and a hiatus spent in a religious order, Hitz makes the case that “learning . . . must be withdrawn from the pressure to produce economic, social, or political outcomes.” Does she then contradict Brann’s effort to reconcile liberal and civic education? I don’t think so.

In arguing that intellectual life “is an essential good for human beings,” Hitz does not deny that it is “one good among others.” She warns us against “the corruption of learning by politics and political goals,” and insists that “intellectual life properly understood cultivates a space of retreat within a human being.” Yet she concludes: “The social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human, in shaping our aspirations and our hopes for ourselves.” What she insists on, however, is the “splendid uselessness” of intellectual life, without which “it will never bear its practical fruit.” Brann might chime in that here again is one of her paradoxes—that liberal education’s civic utility is found only by not devoting our learning to searching for it.

I think Christopher Dawson, the English historian who finished his career as the first occupant of a chair in Catholic studies at Harvard, would agree—albeit with qualifications. His 1961 book The Crisis of Western Education begins by looking backward, to the history of education in the Latin West, where a classical Greco-Roman “civic education through the liberal arts” continued to exist alongside “a specifically Christian learning which was biblical and theological.” And the medieval founding of universities—in Bologna, Paris, Oxford—fostered a Christian culture that transcended feudal and national boundaries, and could readily accommodate political changes. Even the Reformation’s political impact was mitigated by the continuity of “humanist education,” in Dawson’s view. “Thus under the influence of humanism, Catholic and Protestant Europe shared a common type of culture.”

But politics has taken its toll over time. As Dawson carries his history forward, into the age of nation-states and the Enlightenment, he celebrates the “two outstanding exceptions” of England and the United States from the general trend of education’s passing entirely from the control of the church to the control of the state. But in America, where public education has been captured by a dogmatic view of the “separation of church and state,” the results are dismal. In a striking passage far truer today than when he wrote it, Dawson remarks:

And thus we get a situation in which the Catholics who both practise and understand their religion are the minority of a minority, and the majority of the population are neither fully Christian nor consciously atheist, but non-practising Catholics, half-Christians and well-meaning people who are devoid of any positive religious knowledge at all.

So, he argues, “the time has come to consider the possibility of introducing the study of Christian culture as an objective historical reality into the curriculum of university studies.” This is not special pleading for a kind of catechesis in every classroom. Dawson is right to say that “anyone who wishes to understand our own culture as it exists today cannot dispense with the study of Christian culture, whether he is a Christian or not.” It may be still “more necessary for the secularist,” who will not acquire it outside of school. In short, education in Christian culture is an essential element of liberal education; its civic effect is incidental and not Dawson’s focus.

I recently thought of Dawson’s observation about the academic neglect of Christian culture as I dug into Peter Brown’s memoir, Journeys of the Mind (reviewed at PD by Peter Meilaender). Brown, the biographer of St. Augustine, historian of late antiquity and early Christianity, and professor emeritus at Princeton, describes the Oxford to which he arrived in the early 1950s as a university that chiefly concerned itself with educating the next generation of the British elite in the civil service and the professions. Hence there was a “fatal drift” in the undergraduate teaching of history “toward the lowest common denominator of political and institutional history . . . at the expense of the wider field of the history of religion and ideas and the history of the world beyond Europe.” That Brown was able to become what he did was owing to the considerable freedom Oxford gave him to specialize outside the “set subjects.”

One could acquire a fine education in the historiography of late Rome and the origins of Christian culture by turning to the many books Brown discusses. He has a prodigious memory for people, places, experiences, and above all the books that he encountered in his life. And as Meilaender’s review noted, he displays a zeal for learning that has led him constantly to revise his views when new discoveries or better arguments come along.

Perhaps, indeed, it is in the odd genre of academic memoir that we can find models for the recovery of the academic vocation, for it may do us more good to be shown a life of the mind than to read arguments about liberal education. In addition to Brown’s memoir, I would recommend those of (coincidentally) two other Princeton men, the English professor and former dean Alvin Kernan (In Plato’s Cave, 1999) and the scholar of French literature Victor Brombert (The Pensive Citadel, 2023). Each man served in the American armed forces in the crucible of World War II—Kernan in the navy and Brombert in the army. Each devoted himself afterward to literary study, convinced (in Kernan’s words) that “the real power of great literature” is “its ability to portray feelingly and convincingly critical human concerns in terms that do not scant its full human reality and its desperate importance to our lives.” And each set his face against what Brombert called the “invasion of ‘theory’ and critical methodologies” that threaten the humanities with an “arsenal of rhetorical devices, technical words, and pretentious circumlocutions.”

Anyone who can write without irony of “the joy of literary studies,” as Brombert did, has not lost sight of what liberal education can be. (And Brombert was 100 years old when he published those words; he died in 2024 at the age of 101.) If the academy can produce teachers able to communicate to students the perfectly useless joy of learning, then it may continue to make its most valuable contribution to our civic life.

Image by Anton Ivanov Photo and licensed via Adobe Stock.