College as the ‘Gateway Drug’ to Rootlessness

One of American higher education’s greatest failings, contend Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro in Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is that it inculcates in the young a corrosive “restless mobility.”

Even though about 80 percent of American college freshmen attend institutions in their home states, the messages that lead them to colleges a few hours from home, and to more-distant places, and that are reinforced there, make the campuses the first step away from responsibility to any home community, says Mr. Bilbro, an assistant professor of English at Spring Arbor University. in Michigan. “So often, college is a sort of gateway drug.”

The book examines how Mr. Berry, a poet, novelist, and agrarian environmentalist who lives on his farm in Kentucky, suggests a new vision for higher education in his fiction and nonfiction. Mr. Berry has for decades expressed skepticism of modern, technological society’s consumption-driven social instability and ecological destructiveness, and education’s general failure to temper such harms.

College lures students to a rootless cosmopolitanism that makes them thirst for maximum income at the expense of sustaining family ties and other community-building values, say Mr. Bilbro and Mr. Baker, an associate professor in his department.

It may seem ironic that they dedicate their book to the hometowns they left, “the places that taught us how to be neighbors, how to work through trouble, how to lead simple lives,” as Mr. Bilbro describes them. But he and Mr. Baker don’t claim that going home is possible for all students, any more than it has proved to be for them. Indeed, they say, they both struggled before finding in Spring Arbor, Mich., a place where they could create, with their families, a new sense of home.

Says Mr. Baker: “I went through a real crisis, trying to make sense of the town I grew up in” — Shelby, a “dying” rural Michigan village, by his estimation. He says that as a young man he wanted nothing to do with it; but reading the works of Wendell Berry led him to think about how he could ground himself in a place like it.

That made him a natural writing partner for Mr. Bilbro, a fellow Berry devotee who grew up in Seattle after spending part of his childhood in Stehekin, an idyllic mountain-lake location in Washington State. To become an academic, Mr. Bilbro had to go to a place where an exhaustive job search led him.

While Spring Arbor is a Christian institution, both authors say the values they espouse in their book are not specifically religious; rather, they are grounded in Mr. Berry’s vision of a responsible life.

Mr. Bilbro says Mr. Berry has a broad readership in part because his “overlap of moral virtue and ecological virtue” speaks to Americans whose “relationships with their places are deeply broken.”

Mr. Baker says his and Mr. Bilbro’s hope is that American higher education would stop contributing to deracination, by saying to students: “It’s OK to go home, or to put down roots somewhere, and to be committed to a place, even if it’s not the most glamorous or exciting place that you could be.”