Countless literature professors before me have introduced their classes to Dante’s wilderness wanderings in the selva oscura, but how many of those professors, transcending allegory, have actually been lost in the woods with their students?
I have.
I teach in the High Sierra Program of Azusa Pacific University, a private Christian institution. Situated on 20 acres 12 miles from Yosemite National Park, this off-campus program integrates outdoor experience and leadership training into a humanities curriculum. In many respects, the curriculum employs a traditional “great books” approach to the liberal arts.
But it is not entirely traditional. The program functions as a kind of pedagogical laboratory—it runs experiments for the main campus’s honors college—encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty members. The natural environment fosters a communal vitality not typically associated with dusty academics. The director is certified to treat frostbite. The philosophy professor, a specialist in Aristotle’s mathematics, builds outsize treehouses and hunts game with a compound bow. We are less an ivory tower than a guerrilla camp with books.
From my forest perch, I read the articles and books published each year bemoaning the fate of the humanities and the soullessness of the elite. I sometimes feel for their authors the same sheepish pity that immune observers feel for patients dying of a contagious disease. Yet I know that my supposed immunity is really only a form of robust vaccination, for everyone professionally involved in the humanities suffers some exposure to its virulent, endemic crises.
The controversy triggered by William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, for instance, is merely the latest entry in a litany of crises dating back to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). But, almost imperceptibly, something fundamental has shifted. Whereas Arnold hoped culture would replace religion, Deresiewicz, though not religious himself, wonders if religion might rescue culture: Students are no longer “equipped to address the larger questions of meaning and purpose … that come so inevitably in young adulthood. Religious colleges, quite frankly—even obscure, regional schools that no one’s ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.”
Heard from the obscurity of my remote Christian humanities preserve, the rumor of Deresiewicz’s modest proposal sounds perplexingly anxious, raising uncanny echoes. For the condescending tone of his perspective on the role of religious colleges is not without precedent. It is only mild contempt when compared with Harry R. Lewis’s rejoinder (“The students who take your advice to attend religious colleges instead of research universities may never learn about that evolution stuff”) or Peter Conn’s contention that all religious colleges should be denied accreditation as a matter of scholarly principle.
Nevertheless, putting aside such instances of unexamined prejudice, the far more significant questions raised by Deresiewicz’s work remain: Will religious colleges play an important role in revitalizing the humanities? Is it plausible that Dante’s Inferno could be taught by religious faculty in the middle of the Sierra Nevada woods with anything approaching the effectiveness of scholars in a Harvard lecture hall?
It is more than plausible; it is true. Indeed, such a pedagogical competition would be grossly unfair to Harvard. Granted, Ivy Leaguers would wipe the floor with my students on a standardized test about Dante. But the most important learning outcomes in the humanities cannot be standardized, for the simple reason that human experience cannot be standardized. Therefore, in the ways that matter most, it would hardly be sporting to expect Harvard overachievers to comprehend the song of an old Florentine exile half as well as my tightly knit community of outcasts gathered around a mountain campfire.
Deresiewicz’s backhanded compliment to religious colleges is actually quite timid. My bolder hypothesis is that the humanities of tomorrow will flourish for undergraduates only at religious colleges. Despite good intentions, talented faculty, and enormous resources, the humanities in secular institutions will never amount to anything more than a parade of beautifully curated specimens.
The reason is neither religious nor philosophical, but straightforwardly economic: Only at religious colleges will the humanities find a broad market. It is no accident that Deresiewicz repeatedly and self-consciously collapses into a pious vocabulary that he would prefer to avoid: “Though I’m not religious, I find that only religious language has sufficient gravity to do these questions justice.”
Even at religious colleges, general education in the humanities is likely to survive only if their administrators and faculty members are willing to abandon outdated Arnoldian branding strategies and adapt to current material and technological conditions. No rational actor accrues $30,000 of debt (or more) to hear four years of lectures on the best that has been thought and said.
It is true that studying the humanities improves critical thinking. But so does studying molecular biology—and those critical-thinking skills are far more lucrative. It is also true that studying the humanities prepares students for a lifetime of intellectual pleasure. But so does a public-library card. It is probably not true that studying the humanities automatically promotes higher degrees of democratic engagement, not if esoteric, democracy-hating radicals like Plato are allowed on the syllabus.
Credit is due to Stanley Fish’s Save the World on Your Own Time for a clear-sighted recognition of what the humanities do better than anything else for nonreligious students, namely, prepare them to study more humanities.
The fact is, the liberal arts are predominantly textual, but our students inhabit a world that is increasingly verbal. Speech is natural to our species, writing merely an artificial necessity of culture, the happy invention of some clever Phoenician merchant. As a technology, writing is crude and unreliable, but it is the most efficient method of complex-thought transfer yet devised.
Literacy is a potent but perverse state of affairs. Should our technology ever advance far enough to enable our species to revert to images and sounds, without loss of data-transfer efficiency, we will surely do so.
It is early in the game to prognosticate with confidence, but it certainly appears that such advances—film and photography, social networking, exponentially accelerating data storage and computational power, discoveries in neuroscience—are already making the humanities obsolete. One can hope that the digital humanities will furnish a lifeboat, but it will fit a much smaller crew.
Suppose, however, that there existed a large group of middle-class and upper-middle-class prospective customers in the educational marketplace who shared an intense prior commitment, consciously or not, to the obsolete textual worldview. That group of customers already believes, before ever setting foot in a classroom, that a ragamuffin set of ancient texts, a collection of dissonant poetic voices in unfamiliar languages, holds the key to human meaning.
Suppose further that those customers come to learn how much humanistic study will improve their facility with ancient texts. Envision consumers for whom hermeneutical skill and ancient wisdom, rather than technical expertise, constitute the nonnegotiables of a college education. Imagine a “people of the book” in the era of the book’s demise. Such is the condition of observant Muslims, Jews, and Christians in developed countries today.
My analysis may appear crass and cynical, but it is nothing of the kind. As a Christian intellectual, I believe that the humanities training I give my students is worth $30,000 of debt—as long as my students also hail from (and are hailed by) a religious tradition of some kind. For Christian students, such debt is merely a temporal down payment on an eternal project of soul-craft.
Occasionally I teach atheists, and I work just as hard for them, even though I know they are wasting their time and money. It’s not that atheists won’t gain things of value from humanistic study; of course they will. They just won’t have much use for those valuable lessons, because humanistic study does not automatically foster moral virtue when it is pursued for intellectual freedom alone. Christian students, by contrast, need something from the humanities that only the humanities can provide: rigorous, literary, textual sophistication.
Obviously, to function in the existing parameters of 21st-century capitalism, all students will continue to need training in fundamental rhetoric. But only religious students really need literary “close reading.” Their atheist counterparts will get along just fine with Twitter.
When my mostly Protestant students read Dante (or Darwin) in the woods, they are not primarily “appreciating a classic,” “learning to respect otherness,” “gaining a marketable skill,” “cultivating the life of the mind,” or living out some bizarre Thoreauvian fantasy.
Any of those things may happen by accident, but their measurable learning outcomes are explicitly religious: (1) I expect them to master basic skills of literary interpretation and rhetorical organization as a prerequisite for biblical and ecumenical dialectics; (2) I expect them to clarify and refine their own theological perspectives by practicing textual confrontation with the past—a practice significant only in communities that affirm that identity emanates from the past.
Those two learning outcomes represent competencies that students cannot develop anywhere else, for their churches stopped teaching them long ago. And they certainly won’t develop this particular set of skills in the Ivy League, notwithstanding the wealth of intellectual stimulation offered there. In simple terms, general education in the humanities offers Christian customers a product valuable enough to justify a large expense. For secular students, by contrast, the humanities no longer pay off.
Americans once maintained an uneasy truce with history. Even self-reliant Emerson recommended “the mind of the Past” as a spur to originality. His quaint Romanticism, though, is fading faster than a Snapchat photo. Whatever ceremonial reverence the past may now receive, its material relevance to secular life is declining. This is not the end of history, but rather the end of historicity, a shift heralded by Darwin’s vision of deep time. Evolutionary history matters far more to secular Americans than American history. And only the latter belongs to the humanities.
Today nonreligious Americans are likely to join Richard Dawkins in lauding the late paleontologist G.G. Simpson, who asserted that “all attempts to answer that question [of human meaning] before 1859 are worthless and … we will be better off if we ignore them completely.”
Religious customers of education, by contrast, are incapable of reviling the past when they are reminded that their salvation resides in it.
The decisive evidence supporting my argument is the shrinking number of nonreligious, high-achieving students enrolling in the humanities. Even elite institutions seem unable to offer compelling reasons why they should. If only they would advertise properly, religious colleges and universities could dominate the humanities market.
During the past two years, I have frequently accompanied my students on five-day backpacking treks in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. We hike together, pray together, debate together. Sometimes at elevations of more than 9,000 feet. Sometimes in snow. Because every student is required to lead the group at least once during this experience, we always get lost. And because I have been lost with them, they follow me down some crooked paths, too, no matter how my imitation of Virgil falters or my faith in Commedia wanes.
Only those who walk such religious paths can reasonably justify the major investment of time and money that a rigorous general education requires. Facing extinction elsewhere, the humanities will always have a chance to evolve in Christian colleges.
Assuming, of course, that we keep our accreditation.
