A Place for Solitude in Higher Education
The decade of the 1980s will be remembered for closely linking “civic education,” “standards” and “leadership” with the tasks of higher education. To paraphrase what Mark Twain said about Wagner’s music, these terms are not as bad as they sound. Unfortunately, they exaggerate the community at the expense of the individual, sociability at the expense of solitude.
There has been an understandable reaction to American ignorance of civic and international issues, clear language, great works and formative traditions in Western civilization, and the effect of new technologies on society. National commissions, federal and state agencies, education associations and colleges themselves have drawn connections between this ignorance and a host of problems--social and political discord, trade deficits and the loss of America’s “competitive edge,” national defense, disagreement over fundamental values, crime. Solutions to these problems, we are told, require reading certain texts, acquiring certain skills, studying a “coherent” or “core” curriculum and sharing a “common educational experience.” We want answers, not questions; cohesion, not diffusion; facts, not imagination; certitude, not doubt.
Education must have practical results, but all recent reports on education, when taken together, have unwisely diminished the value of private reflection that may have no immediate social utility. Commissions, politicians and educators rarely scrutinize this. Do our expectations of leaders deny them the privacy, independence and intellectual recreation that their followers have time to enjoy? When does citizenship become so frustrating or so burdensome that the individual must either protest or drop out of public life? What is the validity of standards that someone else tells us we should follow because they derive from the educational philosophy of Matthew Arnold, or theories of natural right, or Marxist laws of social behavior? Why are some proponents of civic virtue so uncivil? Who will judge the character of those who advocate “character education”?
The answers to these questions have to do with personal integrity, which grows within a frame of memory and experience. What we think and feel today opens windows on the past. Particular memories or episodes can trigger consciousness of the larger canvas of our lives.
In his “Memoirs,” George F. Kennan recalls having been one of the social “rejects” who did not belong to any eating club at Princeton University. “It finally dawned on me, pondering this unhappy situation, that to be fair to oneself one had to make one’s own standards, one could not just accept those of other people; there was always the possibility that those others, in the very rejection of us, had been wrong.” Kennan’s distinguished diplomatic career, and his recent criticism of American nuclear strategy, may reflect this incident and must have been influenced by his memory of it.
Norman Maclean wrote “A River Runs Through It” after retiring from the English department at the University of Chicago. He begins these autobiographical stories with this wonderful paragraph: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”
What memories and acquaintances guide us? What epiphanies mark us, no matter whether we publish the autobiographies surrounding them? By answering these questions self-consciously, each person can show that powerful autobiographical forces shape our attitudes toward education, our choice of career, our manner of working. Each has stories to tell about places, role models, moments of discovery. The stories include fragments, confusion, loneliness and pessimism just as much as they reveal our attempts to find wholes, certainty, companionship and purpose. The stories whisper encouragement and warning to us privately, and help define the personal authority behind our public actions.
Integrity relates to construction as well as to shape, to the way we form ourselves as well as the form itself. Integrity consists of knowing that who we are depends very much on where we have been, whom we wish to emulate and what we want to become. Integrity is not self-evident or guaranteed in the utilitarian preoccupation with citizenship, leadership and “outcomes” of education; anyone having political authority or controlling education funds needs to be reminded of this. When students and teachers ignore the diversity of individual experience and the distinctiveness of individual style, they impoverish education. The best citizen may sometimes be the quietest one, the best standards may come from within, the best leader may be unconscious of leading, and the best outcome of a college education may be the capacity to sit still for a while with a book, an idea or a memory.
