“It profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he should lose his soul…but for Wales?” (A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt)
Founded in 1636 for the purpose of raising up young men for ministry in the Congregational Church, a tradition long since abandoned as hopelessly retrograde, Harvard University yet remains the oldest institution of higher learning in this country. It could well be the most expensive, too, current tuition being around a hundred thousand or so per year. That includes both room and board, by the way, plus the usual obscene amounts for personal and travel expenses required by privileged members of the Ivy League.
The good news, of course, is that if your parents make less than the sticker price, you get to go free, although that rather begs the question as to why anyone would want to go there in the first place. Leaving aside the obvious cachet of the place, which helps pad the resume, what exactly is the advantage of a Harvard education? Will it tell you anything you don’t already know? More to the point, will it teach you things you very much need to know? Like truth, for example?
“All human beings desire to know,” Aristotle tells us, who surely had more degrees than even Harvard gives out—and knowing the truth belongs at the very top of his list. The same goes for Augustine. “I have met many who wanted to deceive me,” he writes, “but none who wanted to be deceived.” So, if you imagine four years at a university as a journey of discovery, then truth ought to be what you find at journey’s end. Not deception.
Why, in the circumstance, would any self-respecting parent pony up all that money in order for his or her child to end up in a ditch when the journey is done? The road, in other words, is not better than the Inn, despite what romantic poets may say. In fact, there’s no advantage to even being on the road unless there is some prospect of an Inn at the end of it.
Meanwhile, sly old Harvard won’t tell anyone about the Inn, only that the road in search of imaginary ones is somehow worth the trip, even if it goes on and on forever. Worse than an asymptotic curve whose baseline is never reached, Harvard won’t even acknowledge the existence of a baseline. However painful the prospect of a search that turns up empty, Harvard will do nothing to assuage the human hunger to find that truth, buoyed by the hope that, in the end, it will not prove empty.
“The ‘Veritas’ in Harvard’s shield was originally intended to invoke the absolutes of divine revelation, the unassailable verities of Puritan religion,” announced freshly installed Drew Gilpin Faust at the start of her 2007 to 2018 run as Harvard’s first female president.
We understand it quite differently now. Truth is an aspiration, not a possession [emphasis added]…We must commit ourselves to the uncomfortable position of doubt, to the humility of always believing there is more to know, more to teach, more to understand.
Imagine telling an audience of young people, surrounded by wise and august professors, eager to begin their studies amid the hallowed halls of Old Mother Harvard, that it’s all a washout in the end? That the only truth is that there is no truth? And that it will not be easy, as she went on to remind everyone, “to convince a nation or a world to respect, much less support, institutions committed to challenging society’s fundamental assumptions”? Indeed, to challenge root and branch such assumptions is precisely what institutions like Harvard are for.
Given the implicit nihilism of such a pronouncement, what could possibly possess anyone to talk like that? Least of all the chief academic officer of an institution the very seal of which proclaims Veritas as its defining principle? For nearly four centuries, it has thus been inscribed. In fact, until the late 19th century, when methodic doubt began its long march through the institution, two additional terms adorned that seal: namely, Christo et Ecclesiae, as in Truth for Christ and the Church.
Harvard has clearly come a long way, which should leave us in no doubt as to the essential pointlessness of the place. “If that’s what your education is about,” commented George Weigel in conversation with a very different university president, namely, J.J. Sanford of the University of Dallas, “then eventually what you get are undereducated, overprivileged ‘snowflakes,’ camping out in Harvard Yard espousing nonsense.” And no ordinary, garden variety nonsense, either; but rather, the most toxic of all, which we have not heard since Hitler and Goebbels last spoke to us back in the 1940s on the subject of a “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.”
If university presidents no longer feel obliged to oversee the transmission of the moral and intellectual patrimony acquired over the centuries by learned and pious teachers and scholars, if they cannot even bring themselves to condemn anti-Semitism, then it’s time they got out of the business of education altogether. “Hypotheses may fascinate,” writes John Paul II in Fides et Ratio, his signature encyclical of 1994,
but they do not satisfy. Whether we know it or not, there comes for everyone the moment when personal existence must be anchored to a truth recognized as final, a truth which confers a certitude no longer open to doubt.
There may be countless difficulties thrown up along the way to complicate that search, but not even a thousand of them, as Cardinal Newman once famously said, constitute a single doubt. If educators no longer believe in truth, so enamored have they become thanks to the seductive power of doubt—or if they think that the search for it only makes sense if, in fact, it does not exist, that we can never really know anything, much less love what we know—then they need to quit the profession. Do the honorable thing and get out. Go learn some practical skill, like plumbing or hotel management, and leave the education of the young to those not yet unwilling to learn from the wisdom of their ancestors. Who, because they stand on the shoulders of giants, are thus able to see both far and wide, secure in the possession of the truth which sets us all free.
There are no comments yet.