The full text of Prof Simon Haines’s talk to the Centre on 20 September 2019
Ramsay, the universities, and Western civilisation
Roughly speaking, here is what the Ramsay Centre has been offering universities: they put on a course in the arts or humanities faculty called “Western Civilisation”, though in fact it’s better described as a “great texts” course, similar to the often life-transforming courses offered in a variety of models for a hundred years or so at a number of top-flight American universities and liberal arts colleges. And in return we offer significant funding over eight years, possibly extendable, to hire academic staff to teach the courses, but also to slot into existing departments of classics, philosophy and so on and contribute there like anyone else. Vital new hires into struggling Arts faculties– and the universities run the hiring process. And then every year we offer up to 30 generous 5-year undergraduate scholarships, to be taught in small classes of 8-12 students, rather on the Princeton model. Also selected by the universities. And just as the staff can teach elsewhere, so the students can take other courses in parallel to this one—they could do a second major in anything they liked, indigenous studies, Asian studies: or indeed a combined degree such as Arts/Law.
As we have heard so many times over the last two years, how could anyone refuse? How could well-established academics deny these rare career opportunities to earlier career staff; or this wonderful degree and generous funding to so many students? What could be so offensive in a course offered for 100 years or more in some of the greatest universities and colleges on earth, most of them decidedly left-of-centre institutions, producing students of all political complexions: or none at all? What’s the problem with studying art and architecture from Praxiteles and Phidias to Le Corbusier and Zaha Hadid; or dramatists from Sophocles to Murray-Smith; or philosophers from Socrates to Simone Weil; or feminists from Wollstonecraft to Greer—at the discretion of the university to choose the list? And there’s room for cross-civilisation comparisons too: a look at the Koran alongside books of the Old Testament, or the Analects of Confucius alongside the Ethics of Aristotle. A course in which, I might add, and this has been attested to by thousands of students, there is no trace of a suggestion that that the civilisation which produced these texts is any “better” than all the others. Indeed its opinion of itself has often been pretty low. You have only to think about individuals as unlike each other as Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates of Athens, not to say a cast of thousands including for example Aristophanes, Juvenal, Rousseau or Solzhenitsyn, to realise that these so-called “great books” are great precisely because they were so very critical of their own cultures, which together make up that amorphous thing called a civilisation. This conversation is at times something close to a history of criticism of the West by the West, not a chorus of triumphalist self-promoters.
And indeed the response to all this from senior university managements and many academics has been positive. But at the same time there’s often a very different kind of reaction, especially from some of the more vocal, activist, and “progressive” academic staff and students in the Arts Faculties. To them, we are triumphalist, racist, supremacist, reactionary, imperialist, fascist, Zionist, masculinist, neo-Nazi: and so on and on. Now of course it’s extremely important to bear in mind that “a” university nowadays is often a huge complex aggregation of fiefdoms. Most of the lawyers, the commerce and business people, the scientists, the engineers, the architects, the musicians, and even many in Arts, to say nothing of the large class of administrators often as big as all the rest put together, probably wonder what all the fuss is about. But academics have their research and teaching to do, and the last thing they need is to get drawn into a nasty political fight with a minority of noisy outraged colleagues. And PR departments, university lawyers and media advisers are generally risk averse.
So what’s this really all about? Where exactly is this hostility coming from and why is it sometimes so extreme? There are some obvious answers; we aren’t that naïve. We have some notable right-of-centre individuals on our Board: although we also have some notable left-of-centre ones (a fact often conveniently overlooked), as well as non-aligned educators and business people. And yes, of course academics are perfectly right to be suspicious of ideologically or commercially motivated outside funding (and it does happen, even more so in non-Arts areas). And this is the largest gift to the Humanities in our history: surely it must come with strings? But then—surely it doesn’t take much intelligence to understand what I was saying earlier about the non-political nature of our proposed courses?
We also fully recognise that we are implicitly criticising some teaching programs. Very far from all teachers or all courses, obviously. But our proposal is for a small class scholarship program in a context where most classes are very large—which raises accusations of privilege or elitism. Still: there’s nothing to stop non-scholars enrolling, within the limits of class sizes (many other courses are capped). Nor to stop the universities growing the courses themselves if they turn out to be popular. These courses work well for mass undergraduate populations at Chicago or Columbia. We are just showing the way to what might be possible. And there’s also the point that all scholarships are by definition exclusive of those who apply for but don’t get them.
And a third obvious point. The hostility is to some extent part of a reiteration of the so-called “culture wars”. You can read recent books by Frank Furedi, Jonathan Haidt and others, social psychologists, anthropologists, alarmed academics from across the political spectrum, many of them on the left, as most academics in the humanities are, charting the evolution of the civil rights and protest movements of the sixties and seventies into the stifling and alarming identitarianism of the last five to ten years, both on and off campus. We are feeling the backlash from that long-running, still-evolving, “protest” phenomenon.
But I want to take a different tack, on a much longer time scale, looking at some deeper tendencies in Western thought about the nature of knowledge itself, but also at the institution of the university itself and the role it has played in this thinking process. So let’s go briefly back to the beginning, about 2500 years back.
The Greeks recognised three kinds of knowledge: two of them “practical”, one “pure”. All three of them are in contrast to mere opinion or belief. Pure or higher knowledge, and I’m going to call it truth-knowledge, was known as episteme. The first kind of practical knowledge, skill or training or instruction or applied knowledge, was known to them as techne. And then the second type of practical knowledge, let’s call it good judgement, inward knowledge of the human, of the virtues and vices, of the values world: knowledge of how to live, how to grasp the moral contours of an issue or a behaviour: this was called phronesis, or later in Latin, prudentia (prudence is a miserable inadequate translation). Practical wisdom is the usual translation for phronesis, though I’m inclined to just call it wisdom, wisdom-knowledge as opposed to truth-knowledge or skill-knowledge. (I’m staying away from the confusing term sophia, usually but misleadingly translated as “wisdom”, as it is much closer in meaning to episteme in the sense of the perfection of theoretical knowledge, and indeed, on occasion, to techne in the sense of the perfection of a skill, than it ever is to phronesis.) Interestingly unlike techne and episteme this third Greek term for knowledge hasn’t entered our language, so I hope you will excuse me if I use phronetic from time to time.
Now the crucial point I want to make is that ever since Socrates, the master thinker of the West, this phronesis has tended to play second fiddle to its purer relative, episteme. No doubt all humanities academics and scientists too would endorse that subordinating of skill to truth, techne to episteme: but in the intellectual tradition of the West truth has also often trumped wisdom.
This happens quite often in Plato, perhaps most obviously in the dialogue called Protagoras. You will recall that Socrates is always the hero of Plato’s dialogues, demolishing his opponents by argument, especially by clear definitions of the concepts at stake, justice, courage, and so on. In this particular dialogue, though, he almost meets his match in a Sophist, a professional teacher specialising in literary criticism, whose job it is to teach his students how to be outstanding or virtuous in ethics and politics by showing them examples of such outstanding-ness in the passional lives displayed in drama and poetry. Since to show us what virtue is, is essentially Socrates’ own vocation, he’s a bit taken aback; but in the end he is able to show that the way to be virtuous is to understand what it is in the sense of the meaning of theconcept. To have a virtue we must define its meaning properly: not watch it being embodied in some fictitious character as described at second hand by a mere sophist (this association is another problem with the word sophia). Truth is a matter of concepts, not lives; of intellect, not passion. Of logic, not rhetoric. Again in the Phaedrus, Socrates sets out to show that love itself, that archetypal subject matter of poetry, is thought about better by philosophers, along the above lines, than it is by poets.
I wouldn’t presume to trespass into territory so much more familiar to those here than it is to me: but I would venture the suggestion that you can see in Mark’s telling the story of Jesus in his Gospel, and Paul’s telling the story of his faith in the Epistles, some faint traces of that same conflict between an epistemic and a phronetic model of knowledge.
So with that little summary out of the way, let’s jump forward 1500 years or so, to 1088. That’s the date of the foundation of the University of Bologna, with Paris and Oxford both following around 75 years later. Bologna was created to offer mainly professional degrees in law and medicine; it was funded privately by the wealthy families of the students. The other two offered mainly theology and philosophy for future teachers, scholars and clerics, and were funded by the crown and the state in Oxford or by church tithes in Paris (much the same thing from the taxpayer’s point of view). So right from the beginning of the university there is that same contrast between professional training or applied knowledge, pursued for the sake of a career, and the pure or “higher” knowledge of the theologian or philosopher, pursued for its own sake. And also, by the way, another, ancillary contrast between privately and publicly funded education, wealthy private schools producing lawyers and doctors, and inadequately funded humanities institutions full of badly dressed philosophers nobly pursuing knowledge on a shoestring.
But all universities from then on, whether private schools for the professions, or public ones for theologians and philosophers, put their students through the same two- to three-year foundation course or first degree, called a Master of Arts. The twin bases of this degree were the trivium, the study of language; and the quadrivium, the study of number. The ‘trivial’ subjects were called that because they were the foundational ‘three ways’ considered to lie at the heart of all study. The three ways of language were grammar, rhetoric and logic. Logic is, in short, the truth of language, thought about and in concepts: its logos, its episteme. Grammar is its skills or instrumental aspect, the structure of language, its techne. Rhetoric, the study of great examples of wisdom from the past, occupies roughly speaking, the space of phronesis. This is the territory of our old friend Protagoras. The first of the three ways is so to speak the purest one; the second is the most useful for everyday language users; the third offers life models. All three were ideally meant to be in harmony: the primary colours of all thought in language. In fact the third one enjoyed about three centuries, the 12th to 14th, of great prestige: that is, during the medieval and early Renaissance periods. But its ascendancy faded as the high Renaissance arrived and evolved into the Enlightenment. On the one hand the new empirical science of Copernicus, Galileo and Bacon, and on the other the mathematical and logical systems of Descartes and Leibniz: both science and logic were developed for the most part outside the universities, and assumed between them the mantle of truth, of episteme. The medieval curriculum persisted well into the nineteenth century in many places. But these modern notions of what counted as truth did eventually confirm as well as transform the way the institutions came to regard empirical and mathematical science (and we all still tend so to regard it) as the pinnacle and paradigm of knowledge. The phronesis element of rhetoric, study of wise texts of the past, lost much of its prestige.
And now I’m making another big jump forward in time, to the nineteenth century. The modern university arrived in Germany in the early 1800s. It was to a remarkable extent the work of one man, the linguist and philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the equally brilliant naturalist Friedrich. It happened partly as an outgrowth of the scientific Enlightenment but also partly in the anti-Enlightenment shadow of the Romantic philosopher-critics Johan Georg Hamann and Johann Herder. The key insight enlisted by Humboldt was that just as every culture and individual is distinct (this was the Romantic principle known as the principle of Bildung), so is every discipline of thought. The university’s job is to explore and document that near infinite set of differences in a scientific, methodical spirit (that’s the Enlightenment bit). What in German are called the Geisteswissenchaften, the knowledges of mind and spirit, the concerns of Wilhelm the humanities scholar, were seen as the complement to the Naturwissenschaften, the knowledges of physical nature, the concerns of his botanizing, naturalist brother Friedrich. Mind and spirit are to be studied like a science, a set of facts to be researched and investigated by a serious professional researcher, in an epistemic institution built on and devoted to a taxonomy of all knowledge. Research is rechercher, the thorough investigation or closer looking into of empirical discovery, resulting in the finding of new things. Whereas scholarship, from scholia and schole, originally meant leisure, then discussion. This was the preserve of the old-fashioned scholar, later perhaps the comfortable dilettante: not the dedicated modern professional.
The medieval and early Renaissance view, recognisably Protagorean, phronetic, wisdom-oriented, had been that the lineaments of human nature were eternal and unchanging and could be taught by reference to great and equally unchanging classical texts. This view was now replaced by a dynamic Romantic perspective, from which every culture, every individual, seems unique, protean, and can only be understood by mastering an infinite corpus of fact. Each researcher or scientist can only add his or her little stone to the ten thousand topless towers of scholarship and research. There’s not much room in this model for teaching character, virtue or wisdom as something transmissible across generations: except I suppose the great value or vocation of research itself, the human life given to serious truth-knowledge, as Socrates gave his (see for all this the excellent book by Anthony Kronman, The End of Education). And this is what on the modern German model the student must be prepared for. Humboldt’s key essay on education makes it clear that primary school is where we learn to learn; it “makes the teacher possible”, he says. Then secondary school is where teaching and learning happen and in the process the “teacher renders himself dispensable”. At university the teacher has disappeared; he has become a researcher, showing his students by example how to be researchers themselves. And broadly speaking, this is where we still are. “Research”, episteme, is now overwhelmingly prestigious, vital to rankings and status: teaching is mere instruction, mere techne, although of course it makes the institution a lot of money, especially in overseas student fees. Fourth year honours classes are increasingly regarded as MAs now, research training programs. As for wisdom: well, what’s that? Not something you learn at university, anyway.
In America the German model gradually took over during the course of the nineteenth century, displacing the Oxbridge-medieval model that had been in place since the foundations of Harvard and the other older colleges at the end of the seventeenth. What emerged was a hybrid. The old medieval model survived, though increasingly watered down and generalist, as it still does to some almost unrecognisable extent, in the so-called “liberal arts” foundation years. Meanwhile the research-intensive German model took over at graduate school.
But in early nineteenth-century America there was a new factor. Huge levels of immigration at the end of the century left educators feeling the need to provide common understandings to people from hugely diverse backgrounds. So at Columbia, Chicago, St John’s and other places there was a kind of Gothic revival, if I can use such a phrase (I’m thinking of Matthew Arnold speaking of Oxford “whispering from her towers the last enchantment of the middle ages”). I mean a revitalisation of the classical-medieval-Protagorean model, but with a new insight of its own: and this is something of the greatest importance to us at Ramsay. This insight is that truly great texts are not static monuments. The poet W. B. Yeats uses the phrase “monuments of unageing intellect” to refer to the great vestiges of past achievement in Byzantium. But the emphasis should be on “unageing” not “monuments”. Great works of philosophy, art, literature, music, are themselves dynamic interactive inter-temporal generators of endlessly renewable intellectual energy, the signs and powerplants of a civilisation constantly and critically exploring and reinventing itself across the ages. This is classicaldynamism, not Romantic. Paradoxically, the university teacher’s main job in this model is to get out of the way, to lose his or her personality in the contemplation of or close careful attention to those texts, to enable the students to see those ancient thinkers as their contemporaries, to become part of a perpetual conversation, if not an eternal one. And that revived Protagorean or wisdom model, invented or revived or modified by the likes of Stringfellow Barr, Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins and Scott Buchanan, is still working very well, to judge by what we have seen at and discussed with St John’s College in Annapolis, Columbia University and other similar places.
Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Scottish university had consistently been more reformist, or should I say more Reformed: their ancient universities, St Andrews and Glasgow, were modelled on Paris and Bologna; but the Reformation had already seen a revitalised curriculum the equal of any in Europe. This was further transformed by the Scottish Enlightenment of Hume, Hutcheson, Smith and Blair. By the mid-nineteenth century the leading Scottish universities were urban, non-residential and with a strong scientific and secular disposition, with a four-year honours degree in a range of modern disciplines. The training they offered was principally professional and scientific: that is, in the terms I have been using, technical and epistemic. And this was in essence what we inherited in Australia, starting with William Charles Wentworth’s Sydney in 1850; although there was also strong influence from the comparable early nineteenth century Utilitarian foundation of University College London, where the embalmed corpse of Jeremy Bentham can still be viewed on site in a glass case.
Ours, then, is a London-Scottish model, liberal, secular, merit based not class based, metropolitan, utilitarian, comprehensive in its discipline range, non-residential for the most part, and publicly funded, owned and governed. And because much the same professional or technical instruction was needed in each of our widely scattered urban universities, they became nearly carbon copies of each other (see Glyn Davis’s Idea of an Australian University for a good short account). This techno-epistemic model persisted for about 100 years; and then after the second world war the German-American research model arrived (the foundation of the ANU in 1947 was a turning point) and was grafted on to it, particularly onto the epistemic function, where of course it now sits at the top of the heap.
The final step in the process that has given us our modern universities was taken with the Dawkins reforms of the 1980s. The effect of these was that an already uniform system essentially collapsed into a single giant monoversity with nearly 40 campuses. In 1995 an OECD analyst commented in amazement on their “uniformity of mission…all wanted to enter the research arena…all the avowed emphasis on teaching and diversity disappeared”. We witnessed massively expanding student numbers, costs and class sizes. In 1970 only 5-7% of 20-year-olds attended university: the figure is now 40-50% and rising, out of a much larger population. With them came an increasingly casualised teaching underclass; plummeting staff-student ratios; rapidly growing bureaucracies on the managerial-feudalist model analysed by Max Weber and bemoaned by Thorstein Veblen decades ago; and an increasingly corporate and commercial ethos in which those overseas students have recently become indispensable customers.
The political philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote over 50 years ago that “a university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research, when its teaching has become mere instruction”. There has been in this country, perhaps more than elsewhere in the Anglosphere (and therefore anywhere else, since the Anglosphere is further down this track than universities in Europe or elsewhere), a perverse interaction, intended by no-one, between the homogenisation, the massification, the commercialisation, and the research-and-rankings obsession. This has all contributed enormously to the age-old tendency for the epistemic and the technical functions, truth and training, research and professional instruction, almost entirely to crowd out that part of a university education that had most to do with life-meaning, with character formation, or with wisdom. Those other functions are of course utterly essential in themselves, no doubt about that: but the balance has gone. Note that this happens not just systemically but at the level of the individual teacher and class: in how the delivery of knowledge happens, and its disposition is formed. That goes to the teaching function; but teaching itself has become disvalued at the systemic level in the modern Australian university.
So I think an important part of what we have run into is that our project at Ramsay is to introduce an American-based wisdom teaching model, itself developed relatively recently in reaction to a new research paradigm, but with its deepest roots in the medieval university, into an Anglo-Scottish techno-epistemic degree structure, with its own strong new allegiances to the research paradigm. The resistance in these terms isn’t surprising. University academics (and I include myself) are in general conservative (small ‘c’): by no means as innovative or radical as we often give ourselves credit for. By and large we don’t like having either our institutional environments or our world views questioned any more than anyone else does—indeed often much less so, since typically we have spent a working lifetime living in one and justifying the other. Indeed collectively justifying our views to each other, in those surroundings, is our life—much more deeply so than having our views questioned, which is supposed to be the function of university research. It’s also, nowadays, how we get research grants or positive readers’ reports: which is also what the administrative class needs from us so that it too can protect its funding, status and existence. This new academic career pattern absolutely requires that teaching become a second-order activity.
Now this all gives us some good clues, I think, to the near-hysteria Ramsay has sometimes encountered. It’s partly a defensive reaction from huge bureaucratic institutions. It’s partly a defensive fear in Arts faculties, disguised as the somewhat complacent assertion that “we already do all this”: the fear that a more interesting neighbouring gallery of material might steal students away from the increasingly threadbare tapestries of colonialism, empire, gender and race. It’s partly, as I said at the start, naked political partisanship, morphing into hostility to a perceived “elitist” small class model: seen in this mindset as an exclusive private stream within the public university—as if those stylish Bologna students were giving themselves airs in the threadbare quadrangles of Oxford.
But there are some deeper significances emerging from this story. One has to do with a fundamental misconception (or so I perceive it—others will say the misconception is mine): a misconception about what knowledge and education are, at least in the humanities (of course like a good post-German scholar I wouldn’t presume to speak for other disciplines). The misconception is that an uneducated reader can’t actually know a primary text at all. Education consists of telling the reader things about the text. Researchers of course already know these things from their research. In a way this is a distorted version of von Humboldt’s ideal. Their job is essentially to tell the studentabout their research, not disinterestedly to read with the student the primary material on which the research is ultimately founded and to which it is addressed. The discipline involved is not constituted in the careful reading of a complex text: that is to say, it isn’t a discipline derived from the text itself. Instead, it is constituted in the application to the text itself of a corpus of key concepts derived from elsewhere, that is, from the teacher’s own research. (An important exception would be where the text in question is a recent theoretical one: that can be carefully studied. Theory has the prestige of episteme here.) So any attempt to offer unmediated primary texts from the past, in all their richness and dynamism, to be patiently attended to by teachers and students together— this not only downgrades the value of the teacher’s own work, indeed his or her whole life as dedicated to research; it also questions the value, indeed the very validity, of that conception of research itself. The primary text has actually become a positive threat; it’s almost as if the student can’t be allowed to find something in it that the researcher hasn’t seen or can’t endorse. And of course the students receive those complex meta-messages loud and clear. Not so much the doctrines of the research itself, although they receive those too (see below)—but the suspicion of the text as something that’s trying, perhaps unconsciously, to hide something, something that needs exposing by research. And then here comes our Centre offering not just an implied criticism of this research-teaching model, but small primary-text-based classes where it’s much harder for the model to work. A recipe for hostility.
But now there is one more step. Rather than talking about the great texts of Western civilisation, let’s widen our scope to Western civilisation itself as a text, a huge tapestry. Suppose your research, the work you have given your life to and all your identity, has been utterly absorbed with the discovery and exposure of some subset of the cruel or inhumane or repressive aspects of human behaviour, and specifically of our civilisation. Of course it should go without saying that almost by definition every civilisation is implicated in cruelty and repression and exclusion, as well as innovation and creativity and inclusiveness: although almost none has been as self-critical of its own faults as ours has. But suppose that your life and research are so dedicated to a conception of unmasking evil that “Western civilisation”, to you, simply means, for example, Hitler not Goethe; genocidal imperialism not democracy; racism not multiculturalism; the burning of the Summer Palace not the building of the Winter Palace; slavery not abolition; misogyny not amour courtois; crusades not cathedrals; narcissistic consumerism not rational choice; capitalist greed not free markets; repressive tolerance not freedom of opinion; environmental destruction not green activism; vested interests not inclusiveness: and so ad infinitum.
Now what’s happened here is that both the German and the medieval insights have been warped into something quite new. The research ideal, the space of truth, has mutated into something more like activism: for how can anyone, faced with these appalling evil things, not want to do something about them, both outside and inside the classroom? This is turn perverts the teaching function. The vacated space of wisdom, of what you might call “invaluation”, has now been filled by what Oakeshott politely calls a “serviceable moral and intellectual outfit”. As the old cowboy ballad says, I see by your outfit that you are progressive. An off-the-shelf, ready-made set of views and opinions, of what the Greeks called doxa, mere belief, replaces real wisdom, and is purveyed to students as a kind of patina or gloss covering all the material they encounter. Both kinds of knowledge, pure and practical, episteme and phronesis, have disappeared, to be replaced by non-knowledge. You might say, well at least techne remains. Well, yes, and in the professional faculties that is certainly true. But otherwise, if sufficiently dressed up in the correct moral outfit, the place of instruction becomes an instrument of social change, or “social justice”.
The Chicago educator Edward Shils wrote about this as long ago as 1993: “some university teachers nowadays think that … they have a unique opportunity as well as a moral obligation to further the cause … . An aggressive and intimidating body of antinomian academic opinion [on such matters as] the equality of genders, the equality of races and cultures—these are the only real values.” [“Do we still Need Academic Freedom?”, The American Scholar, LXII, Spring 1993, 187-209.]
That was 25 years ago, but the underlying impulses are still just as intimidating. The arena of research has become for many academics one of political and social reform; that is the underlying emotional driver of the research agenda. And it is only human that the more passionate you are about your research/reformist agenda, the harder it is not to shout about it in the public forum: hard, even, appalling as it may seem, not to shout down others who have different views, which to you seem to lend support to the evil you are giving your life to combatting.
Wisdom has always tended to be overshadowed by truth on the one hand and training on the other; and now, in those areas of the old humanities faculties where it used once to be an equal partner with its two companions, it has become all mixed up with dogma, with doctrine. And if you march into the heart of this dogma, where research and instruction are converted into activism, march into it offering an opportunity for unmediated contact with the great primary texts of a hated (and self-hating) civilisation, then you will be strongly opposed, at least by those who see their vocations in that way. But for the sake of that very civilisation, it’s important that they not succeed.