The University and its Discontents

At one time, I understand, universities and cathedrals were once designed to be beautiful and built to engage the imagination and intellect and draw attention to things bigger than an individual, god in many cases, love in others, altruism in others, compassion, kindness, patience, logic, intellect.....

I suppose that it must be true that when universities dumped god and the virtues, and no other verb probably works as well, that universities came to be designed based on function -- get as many students through as efficiently as possible -- and not form -- beauty. Although many will not agree, beauty and the other virtues were lost in the shuffle, in the paradigm shift. When I studied art, in the university, the worst insult you could get from your instructor was that your art work was beautiful. Beautiful meant trite, unimaginative, patterned. If by mistake you did something beautiful, you were asked to take a pen or an eraser or a knife and slash lines through your "mistake." No one wanted to be compared with the more romantic painters. When I studied literature, our interpretations had to be those of the faculty or they were faulty.

However, what concerns me here is not the loss of beauty, although one might mourn its passing as one mourns the loss of one's belief in the goodness of mankind, my concern here is the limitation, the hedonism, the lack of substance of what we seem to have created. Some of my most intelligent students are the most foolish, they are those most driven to copy the ideas, voice, words, postures, dress, smell....of those they take on as role models because of their lifestyle or "intellectual" philosophy. I am bothered by the dearth of role models who are concerned for and attempt to protect those who copy them. I am not sure that those who copy sorority girls are behaving any less intelligently, as at least they are copying a model that has been successful in the endeavor of attracting an appropriate husband. I am not sure how our "intellect" model has held advantages for the students who copy that model.