Newman Redux

In a response to an article by Roger Scruton, in which he employs Newman as a lens for examining the contemporary university, The Little Professor (Dr. Miriam Burstein) reminds her readers of how complicated the reception of Newman's ideas may be:

http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2010/09/the-ideal-of-a-university.html

Indeed, we can peg Newman as both a conservative and a radical. A lot of inside baseball? Perhaps. At the same time, Newman's problematical legacy provides much to consider for those who care about Lutheran higher education. In what ways is it beneficial for our institutions to embrace this paradox? How might we both conserve the past, challenge the present, and change the future? To what extent does an educational institution committed to confessional Lutheranism provide the perfect foundation from which to negotiate between these two extremes?

Happy New Year!

Over the semester break, I have tried to catch up on some reading, and I came across an open letter that Gregory Petsko posted as a response to the cuts that SUNY Albany is making to its foreign language and classics programs:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/22/petsko

Now, I don't agree with every point Dr. Petsko makes. For example, I don't think a student has to come into contact with a Russian department to appreciate Dostoyevsky or that meeting a set of distribution requirements automatically gives students a rich liberal education. At the same time, anyone who has hung around the colleges affiliated with the old synodical conference knows that this is just not how people on those campuses talk to each other. But, I quibble. If you can move past those issues, I think it's important to note a couple of Dr. Petsko's points:

(1) I love his emphasis on the concept of universitas. The university is a place where the humanities contribute to the education of the "whole" person.
(2) I appreciate his articulating the serendipity of the educational process. The person who has been educated in a more "whole" or complete manner is well-prepared to meet the changes and chances that life brings. The best laid plans, etc.

The older I get, the more I think these are important issues to push when students walk through the office or classroom door.

A Monitory Lesson

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes up the curious case of the now-defunct Founders College, what happens when what you have is a great idea and what you don't have is all your ducks in a row. Read more by clicking here. 

Why Not Accept the Status Quo? An Open Letter to Ray, a Skeptical Lutheran Reader

Ray, a reader of RenMus, has left some provocative comments on the last post, “Well, Of Course.” The present post attempts to address them, and, as you can see, I’ve organized these thoughts around answering the question, “Why not accept the status quo in contemporary confessional Lutheran higher education and, by implication, work with and within it?”

Coat of Arms, Wittenberg

The answer to this question is, in some sense, the entirety of this blog. But let me try to condense things as much as possible. First, the status quo in confessional Lutheran higher education hardly resembles anything distinctly or even noticeably Lutheran. I don’t think there’s any big secret here. In the vast majority of its programming, what the average synodical conference college does differently from, say, Cardinal Stritch (just to take an example with which Ray will be familiar) is so minuscule that students, especially those in satellite campus and evening programs, have to make an effort to discover any unique residuum of Lutheranism. This, by the way, puts the lie to the notion that opening the doors of Lutheran institutions to all comers is really “missional.” This is a pious self-blandishment and -deception at so many levels. First, it’s an extremely expensive way for the church to fulfill the Great Commission. Second, because the residuum of Lutheranism is so scant, it’s frequently the case that most non-Lutherans can enter and exit a great many Lutheran colleges without so much as a brush with the bracing claims of Scriptural, Lutheran theology. Third, as it’s sold it’s a terrible bait-and-switch scheme, even though the “switch” never really occurs (see “Second,...” just above). One might add that while the church certainly is and must be engaged in works of love toward the world (charitable and human-care undertakings), it is not clear to me that higher education, especially with a steep price-tag attached to it, is such an offering. The church’s charity is charity (“Come, buy without money!”), not “charity” on the back of student debt.

That’s the Lutheran theology element of the critique. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there are not Lutheran theologians at the Lutheran colleges. I’m not saying that those theologians do not teach Lutheran theology. But that also does not mean that I am saying that all of the Lutherans are really Lutherans, either, nor that all the faculty are actually Lutherans, much less ones who can give what could be identified as a reasonably articulate account of Lutheranism. But therein lies the problem.

Ray wonders whether eschewing such professional-preparation courses as pharmacy or exercise science or what have you is a wise move on the part of those who advance a Wittenberg higher education. In other words, the question is “Why can’t RenMus and the professional and pre-professional courses of study just get along, i.e., exist side-by-side, in the same institution?” Answer: Because they can’t. Please note, that’s the “can’t” of impossibility, not the “can’t” of “uneasy, but liveable relationship.” There are many reasons for this. First, students are important to other students’ education. In fact, some educators identify “peer-group” as the single most important factor in a student’s college-years intellectual development. The peer group in a “multi-versity” is so broad and uneven that it has a corrosive effect on the entire student body. If one’s experience in higher education has been with high-quality liberal arts colleges, this factor will hardly have been apparent. However, it is a reality. A conversation can be only as good as its weakest link. If higher education is something like a sustained conversation between students and students and students and faculty, etc., the impact of the recalcitrant is utterly destructive. It would be like going to a Star Trek convention only to find that more than 50% of the people there wanted to talk about Desperate Housewives.

Second, when an institution of higher education, especially a Lutheran one, develops programming that is not characteristically Lutheran, that is, that lacks an account for why Lutheranism needs that program, the motive is always the profit motive (despite our pious self-blandishments; see above). This motive opens the floodgate to an Iliad of evils, not least of which is prizing and prioritizing the new programming over the “old standard.” Not only is it the case that the concerns of the Evangelical Lutheran Church are represented in an attenuated way or not at all in major curricular decisions (such as core requirements), but now the entire curriculum is shifted to meet the needs of what I like to call “grabby” professional and pre-professional programs. The argument might go something like this: “A legitimate business major doesn’t have room for a heavy distributive core. Now, since everyone at institution X earns the B.A., the B.A. requirements across the institution need to be curtailed to accommodate the professional programming.” Again, the church’s interest is derailed. Not only that, but as mentioned above, this places serious students of, say, theology or history or chemistry in a class with students who regard all of those courses as hoops to jump through (Desperate Housewives fans in a conversation with Trekkies about Star Trek). Again, the impact is corrosive on the student body. One might argue, even, that theology fares even worse in this scenario than the students (and therefore the students with it): as Robert Benne has well pointed out, the marginalization of theology on campuses has the effect of reducing it to what he calls a pietism, wherein religious feelings are expressed in the vaguest of terms (“God is great, God is good.”) and not brought into real converse with the intelllectual project or academic disciplines of the institution [see the post Worth Reading]. Thus to put a RenMus program in an existing institution is something like throwing the lambs to the wolves; there’s that bit about pearls, too.

Third, a Lutheran skeptic might wonder why a RenMus higher education could not or would not benefit, financially, from being attached to an institution with income-generating (?) programs [on this see Steve Gehrke’s monitory words in several comments on earlier posts]. In other words, why not use, say, a pharmacy program to underwrite a Wittenberg humanistic education? First, see the arguments above. Second, if generating income to support core programming is the goal, I can think of many ways to make money more effectively than by skimming the slim margin off tuition payments for a professional program that, in any case, provides a distraction from the institution’s purpose.

There are more universal concerns here, too, and unfortunately this post has grown way too long. But let me add a couple of points. First, the professional programming mentioned above is animated by an entirely different value system from that that underlies Wittenberg higher education. In Wittenberg higher education, that is, the higher education that the Evangelical Lutheran Church has at its heart, the goal is theologically learned and conversant laity and clergy. The education itself, while ordered to the goods of the church, state, and individual, takes what looks to us today like an indirect route to those goods: it mines the past for the present and the future. Carl Springer in his recent talk at CTSFW [click here, and then click on Listen/View Conferences and Events; then click on Lutheranism and the Classics; then click on Wise, Steadfast, and Magnanimous] points out that Lutherans, by habit and even by confession, “back” into their future. The future is unknown, except for the eschatological horizon when Jesus will return. The past is known. And we approach the present and future on the basis of what is known, using (again, a quaint notion) the best that has been thought and written in the past. In other words, the notion of utility that partially animates Wittenberg education should not be confused with utilitariansim, which is what animates professional programming. Second, it is always the case that the proliferation of programming takes the eye off the ball. Efforts at an administrative, curricular, financial, admissions, development, and PR level that can and should be aimed at advancing and fostering an ongoing encounter with Lutheran theology, developing awareness of the Wittenberg reformational approach to the life of the mind, foregrounding the Christian life of vocation (not vocationalism) become so scattered that what is said about the important core purpose of the institution becomes something like background noise—perhaps at most a kind of mood lighting or light God-“musack.”

Penultimately, given the reality on the street, even approaching an institution that presently exists in order to create something like a Wittenberg curriculum would require showing up money in hand. In other words, it is not the case that present institutions will simply divert funds from what they are already doing to develop a Wittenberg curriculum. Since that’s the case—that is, since it requires starting from scratch anyway—it’s best to keep it at a safe remove from what history has shown to be the inexorable progresss of a typical confessional Lutheran institution of higher education.

Will this mean teaching a handful of students in a trailer park in Northern Wisconsin? No, it must not; for it all to work properly, architecture, location, curriculum, faculty, governance, financing, admissions requirements, student body, etc., must all work together, that is, be expressive of the same animating idea or ideal. As I’ve tried to show above, just one element being out of whack can and most frequently does have a long-term and irreversible deleterious impact.

Finally, I express my thanks to Ray for putting his finger on and pressing the issue. Much of what has been said here has been alluded to or touched upon lightly in other posts; the fruit of Ray’s prompting, “Why Not Accept the Status Quo?” attempts to draw a line from RenMus’ critique of contemporary confessional Lutheran higher education to the envisioning of a better way. 

Well, Of Course

It is time to get rid of the humanities as unproductive, useless money drains. Gradgrind has been making the case for years. The numbers! The facts! And now we have this from the maven of humanism, Stanley Fish, in an Opinionator column of his in the New York Times several weeks ago [click here for the article]: “I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum—that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said—but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.”

Thomas Gradgrind

Well, there you have it. Milan Kundera has one of his characters, Paul, say that Europeans will never be able to fight another war because they don’t believe in anything anymore. That is, the French can’t and won’t fight for the French way of life because they don’t believe in it (at least against other nations; I’m not saying anything about torching their neighbors’ businesses and bashing the windshields out of tante Yvette’s car, an altogether understandable way to preserve one’s way of life). Nor can perhaps the most-listened-to (or heard) of the humanists in the U.S. today make a case for the humanities that is anything else than a French temper-tantrum at his friends losing their jobs.

But let me put it to you: why would you do anything else—if you didn’t believe in it?

This is what has been slowly choking the life out of the humanities. Once the Gradgrind argument became vogue—that is, once we bought the idea that facts, numbers, etc., should determine the good of the humanities—it was only a matter of time.

Ironically, the humanities have in some sense been a millennia-long protest against a view of the world that is “just the facts, ma’am.” Their very existence, their very own articulation of their raison d’être, is that they give access to some other non-quantifiable, qualitative dimension of human life: that of the soul, that mysterious thing we all know we have but whose existence we cannot prove by empirical measure.

Humanism, in fact, and Wittenberg humanism in particular, prizes this unproven thing, this thing whose existence has no demonstrable measure, as the center of human life, as the definitional element of humans. Luther defines the human being by his aristotelian potential in his Disputatio de homine: hominem posse justificari—man has the ability to be justified. Here he lays a theological finger on the distinctive element of human beings as overagainst all other creatures. Humans have the ability either (failingly) to justify their own existence before God, or to receive from God the justification for their existence. All other things have their account. It is humans alone who seek—and either make up or blessedly receive—an account. In other words, it is humans alone who are possessed of a soul, a soul caught in immeasurable existential Anfechtung or temptatio. And that’s why we need the humanities—to help us live in this strange place, between God and the animals, between good and evil, between infinite beauty and unspeakable horror amidst the truths and deceptions, the scant justices and barbarous injustices involved in human life.

That’s what we think. But if that account makes no sense to you, at least the humanities keep a few of Stanley Fish’s friends employed. 

World-Class Liberal Arts for Lutherans

The point RenMus has been attempting to make—with some success, we hope!—is that a new way in Lutheran higher education can and must be found. Worn out are those attempts to turn essentially parochial institutions into the multi-use, “everything-to-everyone,” institutions we see today. In fact, the success rate for Lutheran colleges that have become everything to everyone if only they might win a few for their coffers is dismally low. The Church’s interest in higher education really cannot be anything other than “a theologically conversant and literate laity and clergy.” All other “objectives” of higher education can be met by large state universities. So let’s leave those objectives to them and attend to our own interests.

Liz Reisberg makes a similar point in today’s Inside Higher Ed in an article titled, “If not a world class research university, then perhaps world class liberal arts?” The piece hinges on two arguments. First, world-class research university is coterminous with big bucks; liberal arts education is relatively much less costly. Second, given the tortuous route of a typcial worker’s “career” these days, liberal arts education is poised today as at no other time to be useful.

Mutatis mutandis, the same arguments Reisberg makes can be directly applied to Lutheran higher education. Chasing the latest professional program is always going to be much more costly than sticking with a solid liberal arts curriculum—and the payoff disappointing to the effort given. And since Lutheran higher education educates for one’s vocation, Lutheranly understood, and not one’s “vocation,” understood as “career,” it uses the human arts (artes humaniores) to that end on the premise that one learns to be a human better by reading Thucydides than by learning the precepts of marketing.

While the first point is one going to the proper management of limited resources, the latter is really a theological, not a merely aesthetic, issue. The Wittenberg Reformers were convinced that the higher education entailment of the Lutheran Reformation was a radical approach to the Western intellectual tradition through the sources themselves. To be sure, other approaches to higher education were wildly popular at their time; Melanchthon could complain with the best of us that students eschewed the liberal arts and chose instead what was “universally more saleable.” But for the Wittenberg Reformers, higher education was a matter of best preparing students to live under God’s call in a world and under orders created by God for men and their benefit. It was not, finally, business prowess or bureaucratic advancement that made for a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way; rather, a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way was one with a deeply cognizant sense of being located in a specific time and place, gifted with a certain wisdom handed down from antiquity and with an eschatological horizon that meant that this world was not all there was. That was the end to which the Wittenberg Reformers put the artes humaniores.

And that’s the end to which their modern heirs should continue to educate. Indeed, Thucydides is still the father of political philosophy, and the eschatological horizon hasn’t changed a bit. It’s only that we heirs of Wittenberg seem to have lost our way between our past and our future. But by approaching things like Wittenbergers, that is, by understanding what we ought to do now based upon where we have come from, based upon what we already know, we can find our way again. 

Lutheranism & Classics a Huge Success

The dust has finally settled, and I can offer a report on Lutheranism & the Classics. Attendance at the conference numbered over 150, and the response by those in attendance has been overwhelmingly positive. The conference drew together Lutherans and non-Lutherans alike (I ate breakfast one morning with a public school teacher from Colorado, a Methodist, who thought the conference sounded interesting and so decided to come!), clergy and non-clergy, and academics and non-academics. Speakers forcefully and persuasively made the case, both directly and indirectly, that the languages (classical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) and the arts in which they find their home are the highest and most natural decoration of the Church and that the Church of the Augsburg Confession without them is like a stripped-out, whitewashed shell: a church building in Geneva, say, compared to the Stadtkirche Wittenberg. 

That's all fine and good, and you probably wouldn't have expected anything else to transpire. But those in attendance, both by their numbers and by their appreciative reception of the orations at the conference, confirmed that Lutherans want to be Lutherans. They want their children to be educated as Lutherans, they want Lutheran preachers in their Lutheran pulpits, Lutheran teachers in their Lutheran schools, and they want it authentically--not in an attenuated form. 

Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, which hosted the conference, has also generously published sound recordings of the plenary talks by Jon Bruss, Dale Meyer, Carl Springer, John Nordling, and Avery Springer and Jim Lowe. You can find these on the CTSFW Media page. Once you've navigated there, click on "Listen/View Conferences and Events," then hit "Lutheranism & the Classics 2010," which will bring up the five plenary talks. 

Papers from the sectional sessions will, along with the plenary papers, be available in a Logia 2012 special issue. I'm sure Logia would be delighted to have new subscribers in anticipation of that issue! 

To all who attended, to all who helped out, to all who spoke, many thanks.