Four Seasons of the University

Peter Schuurman

“The contemporary university is hollow at its core.  Not only does it lack a spiritual center, but it is also without any real alternative.”

So says George Marsden in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997).  While that may aptly describe the core of the public university today, I believe four grand stories (which are also seasons in history) currently vie to occupy it.  Jumping off from Marsden, the four seasons I’ve distinguished are:  Christian establishment, established non-belief, default commercialism, and dialogic pluralism.

I. Christian Establishment

It is no secret that all universities that were started over a century ago or more were motivated by deep Christian conviction.  Most, in fact, began as seminaries for clergy training, and had clergymen as their first presidents.  Chapels were mandatory, sometimes even twice a day.  The mottos on these universities’ crests reveal a deep purpose, set in the context of transcendence:

            “In Christ all things hold together,” from Colossians, McMaster U.
            “Teach me wisdom, discipline, and knowledge,” from the Psalms, U of Windsor.
            “Wisdom and knowledge shall the stability of thy times” (Isaiah 33:6) Queens U.
            “Under God’s power she flourishes,” Princeton U.
            “Truth for Christ and for the church” Harvard U.

These were the days of the Christian establishment.  But the monopoly could not hold.  If these were truly to be the nation’s public universities, they needed to change as the nation did.  Canada became increasingly diverse, and a secular spirit was on the rise.  Consensus was to be determined by what is “rational”.  Rational consensus determined who can speak, and rational consensus is the goal of all speaking.

II. Established Non-Belief

Harvey Cox bestseller Secular City captured this spirit in 1965 which declared on its opening page: “the rise of urban civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are the two main hallmarks of our era…” (p. 1).  Even the Beatles sang:  “Imagine there’s no heaven, its easy if you try…”  Schools for medicine, law, and liberal arts soon eclipsed the original theological schools.  Chapels disappeared, and the clergyman professor faded into the background.  The notion of human progress through science replaced the former trust in Providence.  Governments took ownership of educational institutions.

The mottos of the universities that were founded in this era reveal the replacement of theological themes with secular humanist themes.  The horizon of expectation lowered as York University’s crest says rather mundanely,  “The Way Must be Tried,” Simon Fraser University’s says, “We are ready” and Brock University chose “Surgite!”-- the last words of the dying General Brock at Queenston Heights in the battle of 1812.

This was the 60’s--a season of established non-belief.  If it was hard to be anything but a Christian in the first era of the university, the tables completely turned in this second season.  Marsden explains how the dominant academic culture of today has become “defined in a way that [faith-related] viewpoints, including their counterparts in other Christian or religious heritages, have been largely excluded.” (7)  Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, and a dogmatic scientism become gatekeepers to the academic table.

III.  Default Commercialism
           
Marsden’s book was written in 1994.  I believe we are beginning to see another season now, a season that is much less homogeneous, with an amnesia for the university’s classical and Christian origins.  Secular reason has been debunked by postmodern thinkers, as they say it only hides Western white male perspective, power and privilege.  There are only a multiplicity of individual perspectives, each relative to one’s ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and generation.  What is left to pursue and share and hold the university together, except a power play of perspectives?

You might just call this “disestablishment of everything” season, but that gives a false impression.  There are no cultural vacuums, there is never neutral ground.  From what I can see, we live in a season of what you might call default commercialism.  Recent books like The Corporate Campus, University, Inc., Universities in the Marketplace, and Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education all basically say the same thing:  commercial interests are the highest value on campus today.  “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities,” prophesies Jane Jacob in last book Dark Age Ahead (2004).  The campus has become subservient to the market.

Again, I turn to the mottos, or in this case, slogans intended to market the university’s product.  Brock University’s recent slogan was “Your Career Begins Here.”  Windsor’s slogan:  “The Degree that Works.”  Queens: “Knowledge is Power.”  University of Western Ontario even had a small promotion event entitled: “Major in Yourself.”  The trend is the same:  universities are selling themselves to the student consumer as a degree granter that is the ticket to privilege, a secure career.  Its not just that God, truth and service have disappeared from the aims of university, but so have the humanistic slogans of the sixties.  All they can promise now is a place in the market.  And the names of corporations on the campus buildings make it clear.  The soul of the university is for sale.

IV.  Dialogic Pluralism

We have shifted from church to government to market-run higher education.  In some ways, all three of these previous “seasons” still exist and play off each other, although the influence of the church has been almost completely wiped off the campus map.

Is there an alternative?  A small, Protestant theological tradition may offer a way forward that promises hegemony to none of the three above.  The “Reformed” tradition – tracing themselves through Holland to John Calvin’s Geneva--has been called “the Protestant Jesuits” because of their dedication to education.  They have spoke for over a hundred years already of a “principled pluralism” that can respect and facilitate a diversity of voices on the campus.

More recently, this pluralism has been referred to by philosopher Nicolas Wolterstorff as a critical dialogic pluralism.  This concept recovers the ideals of truth and spirituality, but invites everyone to the academic table, whether First Nations alternative health specialist, secular feminist philosopher, or market-driven economist.  It is understood that everyone comes to their research and teaching with a perspective or worldview.  We bring all of who we are to university, and we need to promise to engage and challenge each other in making a just and peaceful society.  Otherwise other interests will rule the day.
           
Harvey Cox changed his mind about secularization.  Apparently its hard to imagine there’s no heaven. In his later book Fire from Heaven (Da Capo, 1995) he declares that “today, it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction… the predictions themselves had been wrong… a religious renaissance of sorts is under way all over the globe.”  Markets and governments need to give space to faith-based perspectives, for they cannot be shut out.

A critical dialogic pluralism is the only way forward.  As Wolterstorff explains:

Instead of assuming one can, and insisting that one should, strip off all one’s particularities of perspective and engage in academic learning as a generic human being, moving from rational consensus in basis to rational consensus in results, I propose that we acknowledge that we have no option but to enter as who we are, human beings with shared faculties but ineradicably particularist perspectives.  We enter as feminists, as Christians, as Jews, as African-Americans, as gays, as agnostics, as atheists, or whatever.  And we then engage each other as much as possible with the goal of arriving at consensus on the truth of the matter under consideration, recognizing, what is in any case obvious, that whereas sometimes we succeed in achieving consensus, often we fail. (Anastasis, Winter, 2003).

The secular hegemony of the present will not hold.  The Muslims pressure administrations for prayer space, the Jewish students request kosher food in the dorms, and global politics force religion back into the curriculum.  The inconvenient truth is that our planet is dying, and markets must be directed and limited by larger concerns than self-interest and competition.  The invisible hand has left dirty finger prints all over the globe, and it needs a head and heart to make it work for the flourishing of all.  That is what public education must be about:  nurturing people for global citizenship.

New mottos for our universities are wanting.  Not just mottos, of course, but a new vision for what public education can be in these postmodern, post-Christian times.  We desperately need a vision for education in our country that speaks to a wider horizon of meaning than consumption and markets.  The wisdom of our great religious traditions, alongside other rigorous, academic perspectives, will bring the full richness of our cultural mix to the table of teaching and learning.