The Raised Hand, which historian Daniel Hummel edits, “is a project of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and serves its mission to catalyze and empower thoughtful Christian presence and practice at colleges and universities around the world, in service of the common good.” Every year, TRH publishes a series of monthly essays on a particular question. This year’s question is: “What does every university and college student need to learn?” (And Dan Williams kicked off this year’s series)
Current author Julie Durbin wrote the November installment, which ran right before Thanksgiving last week, so we are bringing it to your attention now. A taste from her response, which is very much worth reading in full:
What students need to learn is more than just information—a what. What they need, what we all need, is a how and with whom—a way of pilgrimage in the world.
Any college or university, regardless of its posture toward religion, is working to prepare students for life. Our actual lives—in college and beyond—are lives of motion. As German philosopher Josef Pieper put it, we are in status viatoris, on our way toward fulfillment or annihilation. Our students are struggling to survive their own persistent anxieties, their fractured families and communities, and the crumbling remains of civil society. In the classroom, they increasingly exhibit cognitive and emotional paralysis. But perhaps there is a way out. As John Andrew Bryant writes in A Quiet Mind to Suffer With, “The most important thing in the Wilderness is not to feel better or worse, but to know someone and be headed somewhere.” …
We’re inviting students on “an ever-deepening quest.” We use the language of adventure, asking students to see the stories they are in, the roles they are called to play, and the weight of their choices. Something real is at stake here, even in the classroom. Like Frodo, who said, “I will take the ring, though I do not know the way,” we may find that our journey demands the courage to take paths through the dark unknown.
The way goes through the valley of the shadow. “You want to convince your students that they are going to die,” one professor said during a planning meeting over twenty years ago. These days we find students require less convincing. Death meets them everywhere, but preparing to face death is another matter. Though we would prefer to be distracted or made to feel better, what we need is a way through the valley.
You can read the full essay here.
This essay prompts several thoughts:
1. “Death” figures rather prominently (11 uses). Some version of “die” another 7. Other terms that share the mood if not the precise subject matter–“despair,” “disappointment,” “cultural self-deception”–are scattered across the piece. The author’s experience of a life in higher education gets eloquent summary here: “We are in the practice of making meaning daily, semester after semester, wearied by our need for it, but not wearying of the repetition because it is a liturgy for life in the midst of death.” I wonder if the general appraoch to life as represented by this essay might not as much reflect the experiences of the typical middle-aged, mid-career, western academic–parents, friends and colleagues submitting to mortality; the peculiar yet familiar range of references (O’Connor, Tolkein, Dostoyevsky); the creeping sense of a looming personal-professional reckoning, perhaps precipitating a crisis–as it does Chiristian higher education as a whole? Is this actually what we expect from even a thoughtful 20 year-old? (Do people still watch “Harold and Maude”?) Moreover, there may be a disciplinary angle here, too: it’s very much what one expects to hear from the English department, less so from biology, or even history.
2. I realize students have different needs, oreientations, experiences. My mother died over Christmas vacation one year; my father my second semester of grad school. In hindsight, I’m not sure I would have benefited from my course of studies becoming a death-haunted search for meaning. As a double-major in the humanities, my readings often shone light in some way on experience, but the curriculum’s focus was elsewhere: figuring out if Leibniz made any sense, eg, or whether Robert E. Lee’s generalship was over-rated. It was good to have things to work on that didn’t treat me like a miniature Sartre locked in a mausoleum.
3. Again, in hindsight, I’m glad I went to a large, anonymous, public university in a busy and porous urban setting. My education was just that, rather transactional, in fact: I paid them money, they told me what the Crusades were about, or what the 14th amendment says, or walked me through Hemingway. I paid them to assess my mastery of these things, they delivered a diploma. I was a satisfied customer. As for my inner life, there were numerous resources available to nurture it.
4. As I think of my colleagues where I taught, there aren’t many I’d want to submit to as the engineer of my soul. There aren’t many I’d even want to have to listen to very often as they expounded their visions of what a well-engineered human soul would be. I appreciate their help explaining statistics and spike proteins, however.
5. I wonder sometimes if academics don’t need to reflect on what, precisely, their proper lanes are, and on the virtues of staying in them?