The quality of Anglo-American university education is eroding, and the Government of Ontario this past week confirmed its rapidly decaying state. With its rapidly ageing motto, ‘open for business,’ finally maturing, the Minister of Colleges and Universities announced that a long negotiation with Ontarian public universities resulted in a new five-year plan. Ontarian universities will now receive government funds based on their graduates’ employment success.
Lest the non-Ontarian reader’s eyes glaze over, this trend is growing across Canada, in the United States, and in the United Kingdom. It strikes at the soul of a university and the souls of university students now adrift without a unified worldview with which to navigate.
I could not be more afraid because I feel the passion for university education that once animated my studies now dwindling in an era where governments require quantifiable performance. My most memorable vote as a university senator works to this point. It occurred after an in-camera session where the Senate debated the University’s adoption of a strategic mandate agreement. These agreements are contracts between the university and the Ontario provincial government that set strategic priorities and performance indicators for each university in exchange for government funds. The University of Ottawa Senate accepted its strategic mandate agreement with a single abstention from my dweeby undergraduate self. No one voted against.
My abstention was at the time the subject of good-natured levity, but I think that it expressed the palpable apprehension that filled the room. Most members were career academics. The university was a home for their passions. I knew from some that they were uneasy with the idea of tying financial support to the university’s strategic decisions. A lay academic could describe this reticence as an alpha personality, one that brooks little to no intervention in scholarly work.
I think, however, that the old description of a university education in William Blackstone’s work still applies. Scholars (students and professors alike) collectively work ad studentum et orandum: for study and prayer. Prayer is so little-noticed in the multiversity, but it speaks to the passion for knowledge that might be awakened in every student’s soul. That passion is the education because students learn to weave narratives and pull them apart. No human discipline can survive without this critical skill, yet governments now insist on hard skills that lead to immediate employability.
Prayer connotes an openness toward realms of knowledge that are structured in expanding concentric circles. A medieval studies professor that I knew described movement toward this knowledge as a dangerous mysticism. John Henry Newman and others of the Oxford Movement tried to evoke this view by projecting the Christian God as the center of a virtuous and effective humanist education. We have now moved beyond this (and other) exceptional worldview(s). The university can only house multiple faiths if it publishes its own creed. Professors may have to temporarily abandon the certainty of scholarly production to speculate on the nature of their creed with a view to publishing a collegial expression of beliefs about education.
A university’s Book of Common Prayer rejuvenates each university far better than any strategic mandate. Strategy performs a university’s social role, but performance makes no substantive contribution to a student’s life, or to their university education. Prayer is instead a genuine vulnerability between professor and student, and between university and pupils. Nor does hyper-specialization: prayer evokes purpose in which each professor might find a calling. Callings, however, demand profession, and true profession requires meditation. Hence the need for collegium in that older sense of the word. Departments, faculties, and universities are nothing more than their academic officers. They impose collective rights and obligations, the most important of which is sustaining that common prayer—whatever the college decides that may be.
My alma mater, the University of Ottawa, was once an example of this point. Its Catholic and particularly Oblate identity informed its mission from 1848 through to the 1950s. Economic circumstance eventually removed the religious order in a two-pronged attack. The Government of Ontario systematically withheld funds and the rapidly growing professoriate did not hold a religious view of the University. The Oblates petered out and with them went a century of charism that had informed the University’s teaching.
The University of Ottawa is but one case: many other universities attest to religious foundation and subsequent secularization. We now conceive of the university as pillars of rational thought and democratic debate, and they are to a certain degree. Academics, however, now face the twin pressures of securing government funds and pleasing a restive, entitled student population. Universities and their scholars must perform.
History tells us that university education which moves beyond performance in some common spiritual purpose faces censure regardless of teaching. The brunt of Ontario’s universities have, for example, religious histories, and the need for government funds forced religious groups to cede charters to preserve their educational missions. The University of Ottawa is an example of a holdout. When its religious owners finally sold the university, they faced serious government opposition to a fair valuation of the University’s assets. The Oblates sold their university for $4 million less than their initial valuation. (That’s $32.5 million in today’s currency.)
A modern Canadian example of censure is Trinity Western University, an evangelical undergraduate university in Langley, British Columbia. This university was censured by law societies because it refused to acknowledge LGBTQ rights because its governors viewed these rights as contrary to the University’s religious creed.
Hence my desire to move away from established, religious worldviews as spiritual glue for universities’ missions. We nevertheless need a narrative that can be more evocative of universities’ ancient purpose to teach ad studentum et orandum because current concerns about accountability don’t suffuse teaching with purpose.
Transmitting knowledge is defeated by bare focus on learning outcomes. The prayers that are now more essential than ever must aim to recreate a collegium working in modern values.
Working to that end is a fraught enterprise, and one made difficult by modern universities’ size. A firm grasp of the history of higher education might help shape efforts in this regard. Knowledge, however, of that history also suggests that, at the last, the modern university might occupy untenable ground as fountains of knowledge. If professors cannot define their enterprise beyond strategic goals foisted upon them by government, their ultimate recourse may lie in smaller eleemosynary corporations, where shared values can suffuse teaching.
The converse view—and I make this observation as a young man who might one day have to send a child to higher education—is that universities without a spiritual purpose might not carry the weight and prestige that somehow still defines their enterprise. Higher learning that cannot teach a narrative and the tools with which to pull narratives apart doesn’t merit the title, nor can its sponsors purport to assemble all of the knowledge that exists without a golden thread that strings it all together. I’d rather just homeschool my lads and lasses.
On a related note, you might enjoy this film:
Don your futurist caps and peer into a political reality in which technology accelerates the speed at which society changes; what role is left for conservatives? The political, deliberative realm that we sometimes trust to chart our societies’ course either fades as deliberative government becomes too lugubrious for rapid development, or the speed of deliberative government accelerates to a point where they might cease to exist. In either case, legislative thinking disappears, but these are the worst cases. A much more likely case is that deliberation continues unabated while power shifts from government to private corporate nodes.
Those who dominate current conservative discourse, a brand of neo-liberal, are largely adrift in any of these tech-fueled futures, and they represent the wider problems that assail government. The lack of adequate technological adaptation and regulation in public services is a symptom of governments’ slow movement. Conservatives who seek to preserve social norms even as society moves beyond them similarly fail to adapt and regulate, but this time because the message that they send is a moral or economic injunction.
‘Thou shalt not’, however, does not inspire, nor does it accomplish a worldly conservative agenda. That phrase writ large fixes on social preservation. Such an emotional response, engendered by clinging to past behaviour, has no place in a digital society where everything is liable to be impermanent unless consciously continued.
Bottom line: a longer view of conservative thought (theory) that unites ideas of conservation and pragmatic government is needed for a century that will experience dramatic technological change at breakneck speeds.
Conservation
At present, the increasing polarization of American and Western politics more generally grounds itself in facts: issues of the moment are assigned left-wing and right-wing descriptors ad hoc. Words like ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, and ‘socialist’ are bandied about with regard to individual issues, and these descriptors stick based on patterns of behaviour. There is an inductive simplicity to this approach: Democrats are ‘liberal’ because they advocate solutions to issues that are generally more progressive; Republicans are ‘conservative’ because they believe in small government, so oppose democratic attempts to further regulate business, &c… Canadian politics, to take a second north-American example, has some similar divisions as social conservatism takes root in our Conservative Party.
Inductive reasoning, as I have elsewhere been at pains to illustrate, is faulty reasoning because it generalizes from particular cases that we might never see again. This reasoning has caused many to err in their appreciation for historical patterns and ways of living. These realities, though immensely valuable (again, I’ve touched on this elsewhere), are anachronisms from which we select concepts that ought to endure. This process is truly conservative because it implies curation.
Curation within the conservative tradition is magnificently expressed in Edmund Burke’s prose, prose which is sometimes associated with conservative movements. Burke frames a conservative intellectual stance as maintenance of continuity in social organization. His explanation of complex political systems relies on absolute self-interest that, in Lockean fashion, balanced competing self-interest: politicians and lawyers form their Plans upon what seems most eligible to their Imaginations, for the ordering of Mankind. I discover the Mistakes in those Plans, from the real known Consequences which have resulted from them. They have inlisted Reason to fight against itself, and employ its whole Force to prove that it is an insufficient Guide to them in the Conduct of their Lives. (A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756)
Emotion and reason, concepts that Burke plays on throughout his long rhetorical career, are juxtaposed in political systems. Emotion causes adherence to fantastic notions (perhaps those of bygone times); reason—Burke labels it as natural reason—is the tonic that can correct too much emotion. Reason can also, however, be used to create erroneous assumptions, ones that induce a bias. These inductive fantasies will successfully play to emotion, yet they provide little satisfaction for much of society because they do not serve the working population’s interest.
Induction aside, Burke acknowledges that tough love prevails: all organized societies are tyrannous because the will of others is imposed on individuals. There is violence in every society. Burke justifies the order because it is pragmatic. Some order is required to govern, even if the order is inevitably violent.
Burke’s later works explain the departure from or alteration of social order as a cultural phenomenon. In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Burke expresses the conservator’s fundamental truth: ‘Every age has its own manners and its politicks dependent upon them’ (1770). Understanding an idea’s context allows the able conservator to translate the idea into contemporary practice.
That practise receives extended treatment in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. This work against the French Revolutionary government encapsulates Burke’s late thinking on government: ‘to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind’ (1790). The quality of this mind proceeds from deductive reasoning. The form of government, once created, is sustained by pragmatic application of the principles of the form of government. The combining mind exerts itself with a view to the continuity of government, and the deep reflection required for this task is the curatorial instinct of a true conservative.
In brief, then, curation proceeds from a top-down logic that will control cases. The conservative in this view does not defend issues, but principles that have been selected to sustain government as a part of culture. The principles so selected inform the synonym of government and culture.
Preservation
Preservation—what I believe is the dominant misapprehension in conservative circles—fulfills Burke’s biting criticism of politicians in A Vindication of Natural Society. The tendency to hold something unchanged runs toward an ideal, a perfect image whose perfection is anachronistic. The image occupies the imaginer’s context without accounting for any historical concerns, so it is inherently flawed. Preservation fixes things out of context. Pure nostalgia animates this kind of view, but, without some mediating (and, ideally, dispassionate) intelligence, the emotion carries politicians and governed alike into stagnation.
Conservatives for a digital age
Conservatives will, on the above theory, flourish when they do the intellectual work of identifying the machinery of government and understanding whatever they wish to conserve as an artefact.
The faster pace of a digital world can and will admire these artefacts when they are contextualized because context shows social utility. That work of contextualization embraces a pragmatic view of politics and government, a view where propositions must be justified with reference to the machinery of government, history, and prospective value. This is a patient exercise, but one that can be achieved in a digital age if conservatives can build solid bases.
The populism that appears to overtake conservative movements reacts against a reasoned approach to government, thus defeating attempts at solid bases. Burke and many eighteenth-century politicos attribute populism to the breakdown of hierarchical authority. They are, in their way, correct. Technology’s decentralizing effect on governance structures, in terms of speed and distribution of power, presents fresh challenges that centralized political systems rarely face. Discovering fresh hierarchies, ones palatable to the governed, is an important challenge for conservatives and progressives alike. The conservative movement can’t hope to address these concerns without first having understood that conservation is not preservation.