The first part of Truth On Trial: Education Be Hanged (Crisis Press: Notre Dame, 1995) by Mr. Robert K. Carlson, professor at Casper College in Wyoming, describes some of the experiences of the good that children of today have missed, that a college might have to provide, and that an unusual program at Kansas once provided. The bulk of the book describes how some of the perennial hindrances to study, which anyone teaching well will encounter in the untaught, in the taught, and in oneself as well, strangled the program. As told by Mr. Carlson the story is as melodramatic as David’s Death of Socrates, which adorns the cover.
I. The Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas was instituted toward the end of the uproars (1967-71) that jolted the American Multiversities (as President Clark Kerr had so accurately, if complacently, described them) by the University of Kansas in the rational hope that it would create a community of students and teachers, a college within a State university, to be called Pearson. Its basis was to be unusual. While the three founders, John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick, were all schooled in the halcyon days preceding the uproars of the late 60s, they were critics of the academic orthodoxy of that quiet time: its emphasis on research over teaching, the dominance of graduate over undergraduate study, and above all the fragmentation of the curriculum, with the whole obscured by the divisions and hidden by the departments.
Yet the integrity that they proposed to secure community through was not the integrity of the great books, such as Bloom at Cornell, Tussman at Berkeley, Gildin at Queens, MacArthur and a band of Laval Thomists at Thomas Aquinas, and some young teachers at Dartmouth all proposed at the same time,[1] in partial imitation of St. John’s and longer ago the reforms at Columbia after World War I, the fruits of which John Senior had enjoyed especially under Mark Van Doren. To be sure, the curriculum of the Kansas Program included “great books” such as Augustine, Homer, and Plato, but they did not receive the attention encouraged by such programs. In the one sample of teaching Mr. Carlson provides, John Senior tells students that according to Plato, democracy is rule by “public opinion.” (pp. 24-32) Of the twenty-five or so things Socrates says of democracy in Book VIII of the Republic, this is not one; “public opinion” would be hard to express in Greek; moreover, all the inferior regimes in Book VIII are formed by “opinion” (doxa) not truth; all are in the Cave. Of course, any one can make a mistake. (Still, in The Death of Christian Culture, Senior writes, “As soon as Plato was taken up in St. Augustine, there was no longer any need for Plato.” [p. 167])
As a defense against such misrepresentation, the brochure for the Program averred, “The task of the teacher . . . is not to impose his will or ideas upon the student, but to see what Homer (for example) sees and to assist others in seeing the same thing.” (p. 22) Nevertheless, writing assignments were based on the lecture not the book; they were rhetorical, not inquiring. “Elaborate” on a “thesis . . . from the Republic such as: Democracy, which is government by opinion, is the last stage before anarchy” and illustrate it from other readings in the Program and “your own experience” is the one writing assignment adduced as typical by Carlson (p. 35).
How would a student, one who sees the lecturer is wrong, who also sees that what Socrates says is not necessarily what either he or Plato thinks, and who really wants to find out the truth, fare in such a program? The plight of that student will convince most good college teachers that reason, intellectual desire, and the reason in wonder were not sufficiently cultivated. Was beauty made a mask of truth, poetry an obstacle to philosophy, and the good an enemy of the great? they will ask.
However, given John Senior’s gentle character, so evident in his writings, it is unlikely that such a careful and ardent student would suffer penalty. (In one book Senior tells the story of his ardor for the monastic life reaching such a pitch that the abbot has to remind him, “You are married.” The story is revealing, but so is the fact that Senior tells it.) So, probably the scrupulous student would be treated as a worthy exception, to be encouraged in private talks with the master. John Senior may even have thought that virtue emerges best against the grain of good falsehoods. That would be, in some measure, Socratic, as we see from Socrates’ remarks on the ”Muse-ical” (but also gymnastic) education of the Guardians early in the Republic. Of course, Socrates, together with Glaukon, proceeds through dialectic and some mathematics to replace that merely Musical education with a philosophic one. And the great Christian educators, such as Thomas, Pascal, and Newman, agree; in leading to the Good, the practice of reason cannot but advance you towards Good Himself.
The special merits of the education practiced in the Kansas program lay elsewhere. Young people ought to enjoy a thousand good books before they study a hundred great ones is the way John Senior puts it, sometimes adding “I’m a school master.” The designers of the Pearson College believed that experience of the good must come before aspiration to the great, beauty before truth. Thus their Program featured such experiences of the good as music, dance (though not strenuous athletics), observational astronomy (though not Euclid or mathematical physics), and good deportment, including neat handwriting, all experiences of order, measure, grace and beauty. Above all and with all, the Program offered poetry to the students as the store house of good things. The priority of the good before the great, meant within poetry, comedy rather than tragedy, and within comedy, especially romance, fable and pastoral. Moreover, it dictated the mode of study, one of appreciation and absorption, through communal memorization, gentle imitation, and enchanted listening, rather than strenuous endeavor, dialectical exchange, and high ardor. It was, as the professors proclaimed, for all students, not honors students only, democratic not elitist. Thus the teachers did not put seminar discussion at the heart of the program, and yet they did not really lecture; instead, they conversed in front of the students, or rather descanted in harmony: “Hey, ho, nobody’s home, yet I will be merry.”
A remedial program for the imagination, you might call it. The professors were united in thinking that students of this time are in need of experiences that they have missed, experiences of beauty, of affection, of loyalty, and of wonder. True. A lot of young people today have never tasted good bread, had a pet, grown a garden, made a good meal, or taken a long stroll with friends and thoughts (which Nietzsche says is the vita contemplativa). Growing up ought to include stories worth retelling, music you can dance gracefully to, and a comprehensive happiness in existing, sometimes sheer in its delight in the existence of this or that good thing, including yourself, sometimes diffuse, wide and wondrous, that such a whole exists at all, and withal grateful. To miss such things is to go into adulthood missing something in yourself, something more disabling than lacking a hand or a foot. And it is here that this program has most to contribute to the present college. Today it is not only that colleges do not enforce the civil laws, for example against drugs and dealers, but that they long ago gave up being responsible for half of life on campus. Fast food in the cafeteria, bad music at parties, TVs in the lounges, and students left to themselves for conversation — that is the wasteland result everywhere. But whatever does not support study at a college detracts from it. If the faculties ever rediscover the relation between imagination and morals and between the moral virtues and the intellectual, they will find in the Pearson program the means to reclaim “student life” from the unstudious.
It is remarkable to reflect that a generation ago, these professors at Kansas thought the students then, all of them, not just the spirited ones who might go for a great books challenge, were as confused, as miserable, perhaps as listless, and surely as empty as Allan Bloom would discover them to have become twenty-five years later. (Alas, it would have been interesting to hear what Bloom would have said about this program’s insight into the souls of students, as well as its remedy. But Bloom, he is dead. So we must shog.)
The chapters in which the experience of the Program is described will I think appeal to many students and to those concerned for their good; many adults may feel they missed something precious in their youth. How might someone institute such a thing again? One senses that there was an intellectual design, intellectual principles, and intellectual reflections behind it all. It is very unfortunate that the chapter in which this is asserted is too skimpy to provide more than a sketch. Perhaps one of the former students quoted in the final chapter, which contains the best writing in the book, will provide such an understanding. Or perhaps John Senior himself.
II. The success of the Program seems to have been considerable, whether measured in the rapid expansion Mr. Carlson reports, or by the testimonials of a few of its alumni twenty-five years later, which Mr. Carlson solicited, edited, excerpted, and included in his Epilogue.
However, Mr. Carlson is more interested in the failure of the program than its success. According to him, it was the success of the program that destroyed it. He tells us there were three causes and two attacks. The first cause was simple envy. Although some faculty outside the Program appreciated the good it did students, who turned up in their classes later, more eager for study and the cause of the same in others, still there were more faculty who resented its success, either personally, as rivals, or in the name of their department.
Envy, says Tocqueville, is the secret emotion of democracies. And also of faculties. Yet envy alone would not, I think, have done serious damage without the second cause. After all, envy is mum; he who declares it, admits something shameful about himself, which is why the envious do not say “I am envious.” Instead they look for a mask to speak through. Nor can one exclude fear as a cause, for had the Program been allowed to grow at its initial rate, it would by now have taught every one in Kansas.
According to Mr. Carlson, the second cause of the destruction of the Program was truth. The integrity of the Program was based on the conviction that truth exists, that it is steady, that the human mind can know it, and that what it knows illuminates life and may guide it. “We know too much to be skeptics” they thought. Whether they also knew “we know too little to be dogmatists,” Carlson does not say. Naturally, they were opposed by others.
A great many current academics hold that there is no truth, that the search for it is vain, and that the belief in it encourages cruelty. A generation ago many academics believed some of this, but less passionately, with more exceptions, and sometimes with more pity than anger for others, but they believed it and began to criticize the Program when it succeeded. Very soon this conviction in some, and in others the suspicion that students were not seeking the truth but having it imposed on them, cut off the hands of the Program, by forbidding it to send invitations to prospective freshmen.
However, according to Mr. Carlson, it was a third cause and second attack that killed what had only been crippled. The Program seems to have persuaded many students to appreciate the good, but also to have converted some to Christ as well. What is the aim of a college? Newman says the aim of a university is truth, not salvation. Like Thomas and like Pascal, he was confident that the search for the one could not but advance the student toward the other. In the final chapter of his Death of Christian Culture (1978), John Senior says a state university needs to have a monastic college in it.
Be that as it may, according to Carlson, many students discovered a God already present in their childhood and family worship. However, some proceeded from the faith of their fathers to Christianity, or some from the Christianity of their parents to Roman Catholicism (and some even to a monastery in France). That Mr. Carlson never says how many converted to Catholicism, although it would be a testimony to the instrumentality of Senior in the hands of Grace, is a measure of how short he comes of measuring by the truth. The common estimate is 250 or so. Of course, that number would raise questions. Could that be accidental? Was the cause a deliberate plan? Or an undeliberate one? Free speech followed by free choice?
Judging from the testimony of their student, Mr. Carlson, these teachers respected that free will of the students. While they all sang the same song, they sang it sweetly, gently, softly as the Afton flows. The student who did not care to join the chorus was probably free to join another or not sing at all. Moreover, it is incontrovertible that students who stayed with the Program would end up with more courses outside it than in it. At Kansas then, as everywhere today, the benefits of “pluralism” were inescapable.
Nevertheless, according to Mr. Carlson, the lions came for the teachers, and in the stands, their fellow academics smiled, or clapped, or looked away. The “lions” were a small group of parents, some Protestant, a few Jewish, who were upset by their children putting other gods before the family’s. That is not surprising. It is very painful to see your own child embrace something contrary to what you have taught him, something you deem precious, and that you have offered him as a gift. (Knowing that, Thomas Aquinas himself teaches that if a Jewish child falls into your care, you are to raise him a Jew.) Still, what is surprising is that the parents did not, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, recognize that free will exists. They blamed the teachers. But, from a distance, it seems. Instead of approaching the teachers, these parents approached the Administrators, the same ones who had cut off the hands of the Program reaching out to freshmen, and raising the cry of separation of church and state, they put public pressure upon the University to cut off the Program’s legs and neck as well. In defense of the teachers, the doctrine of academic freedom — that no one shall interfere with a duly chosen teacher doing his duty: to teach the truth as he sees it — was raised. That this Academic bulwark did not halt, but only slowed, the destruction of the Program says something about the weakness of the University or the weakness of the bulwark.
Of course, beneficiaries of the Program will feel satisfaction at having this story out, and those in academe who have been treated similarly will feel a vicarious satisfaction. For the reflective among them there will be some questions.
Could the Program have prevailed? It began with full administration support, received an NEH grant, was taught by three full professors honored for their teaching, waxed steadily in enrollment, and after examination, was praised. Did the turnabout come without warning? Should alliances with other faculty have been built earlier, in the knowledge that initial support always depends on ignorance as much as understanding? How much did the view that things as a whole are declining, that our times are the Darkest Age, sap the faith and cloud the sagacity of the founders? Were prudences omitted or imprudences committed? Granted that the third time a student asks you “What do you really think?” you should probably answer, still, need Mr. Quinn have led students, on a spring term in Ireland, all the way to the door of a monastery in France? Later, shouldn’t the teachers have sought out the grieving parents in person, and even the aggrieved ones, too? And, later still, shouldn’t the founders have gone to court to defend their program? Readers will naturally ask such questions, which Carlson does not raise, and may well find these good teachers wanting in prudence, without, however, altering their judgment of their superiority to the detractors.
However, that comparative judgment would be surer if Mr. Carlson had given those detractors a chance to make their case. While Carlson has clearly been in continuous contact with Senior and Quinn since his student days and has access to their files, he seems never to have felt obliged to interview the detractors afresh. Who knows, the practice of impartiality might have discovered some big changes of heart. Not even fellow students were allowed their criticisms of the Program. Mr. Carlson’s penultimate chapter is managed opinion, and in the final chapter no letter with the slightest criticism was permitted. Despite the author’s indicating what he wanted, there were criticisms, especially that the teachers’ view that all modernity is bad left them disconsolate entering the world after college. Our century is certainly a bad, brutal one, but against its darkness a remarkable number of knights have stood out: Churchill, Schweitzer, Lawrence, DeGaulle, Weizmann, Weil, Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, Guardini, and John Paul II. They saw how bad things were but did not dishearten others or themselves by railing. The times will always be out of joint. Every thing these knights have done says, “Be not afraid.”
It is a pity that soon after the final attack John Senior suffered first one and then another heart attack. Had that not happened, perhaps he might have, together with his confreres, Quinn and Nelick, and some of their older students, started a college or school independent of the State of Kansas. As it is, the gratitude of the students, reaching into their mature lives, so evident and eloquent in the book’s Epilogue, remains. When you teach, you are dealing with the soul. That lasts.
III. The Kansas program was poetic not philosophic. In poetry it favored not epic or tragedy, but comedy and pastoral, and it favored pastoral strongly, especially withdrawal to the country life, be it the sweet, melodious family life, boisterous bachelors trekking in the mountains, or quiet, chanting, monastic labor and prayer. Mr. Carlson’s account of that program’s demise is, however, a melodrama. His title, his cover, and his account evoke shades of Socrates and Christ. But in truth, no one when he was put on trial was ever Truth, but Christ. And Socrates, who says in the Republic that he has only a glimpse of the Good, was, when he drank the hemlock, an image of Truth.
If Mr. Carlson’s book were made into a movie, it would star Gary Cooper, James Cagney, and Ernest Borgnine as three teachers who stood for the good in a small place in the West. For villains to hidd it could have the likes of Karenin, Shylock, and Gradgrind. Of course, as in “High Noon” there would be the town folk unwilling to back the three good teachers dead at the end. So, unlike the best Westerns, this movie would not end happily. Yet there would be at least one boy, played by a young Robert Duvall, and later lots of boys and girls idolizing the dead heroes. One wonders if that is entirely good. Is it a sign of good teaching, if your students think of themselves as your disciples, more than as students of what you think higher than yourself, and if they add “-ite” to your name to identify themselves? A hard question. Surely, every great teacher must be forgiven for his students. And by the teacher himself.
What is enduringly important about John Senior and his fellow teachers, Quinn and Nelick, is the good they shared with their students. Very often in Cervantes’ Don Quixote the Knight of Doleful Countenance fails. Again and again he does so, and, nonetheless, something precious perdures. It is the good shining through him. And so it does in these three quixotic knights. That good is best stored up in John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture (Arlington House, 1978), even more in his The Restoration of Christian Culture (Ignatius, 1983),[2] for comfort, for instruction, and for reformation, and it is stored up in whatever account of the place of school and college studies in that restoration John Senior might sometime choose to favor us with.
Dr. Michael Platt
San Jacinto Day 1996
College of St. Thomas More
Ft. Worth, Texas
And in this book and even more in Senior’s Restoration of Christian Culture, the means of restoring some of the good that was once the prelude to undergraduate college education is stored up as well, for delight, for instruction, and for reformation.
How much is a teacher responsible for what his students think? As a teacher one likes to think one deserves some credit and some gratitude for the good things but also not be responsible for the bad. In any case, a good teacher wants the good to be freely chosen and independently cultivated. Otherwise, it would only be opinion, however right, only obedience, however acquiescent, or only idolatry, however reliable. Likewise, no good student loves his teacher more than truth, and no good teacher wants his student to. Given the superiority of such a man as Thomas, Thomists are inevitable, but that does not mean Thomas purposed them or would be deeply pleased with someone who said of himself “I’m a Thomist.” Not that he would prefer a neo-Thomist.
How much is a teacher responsible for who his students choose to become and thus with what they do? If some “Seniorites” are regularly observed by their friends lauding the monastic life, taking annual all-male trips to the mountains, or to Las Vegas, and treating each other to feasts from which their wives are excluded (or banished to the basement), does that mean their teacher is responsible? And if others echo Senior’s criticism of current academe, but don’t start a program like his or help others who might, does that mean Senior is responsible for their inactivity?
Unnoted is the thriving plagiarism off campus. When Boston University happened to obtain the lists of students who had paid for “research” papers and offered it to her sister institutions none were interested. Some colleges just encourage “peer writing” anyway. No American college now dares to guarantee that its graduates can write a decent report, or letter, something that used to be achieved before admission to college, and was in the nineteenth century often achieved by those without a high school education, as we see from
Campuses have become places of shrill cries, chronic hatreds, and little conversation.
“It is not surprising that those parents were upset. It is very painful to see your child embrace something contrary to what you have taught him, which you have offered him as a gift,” Michael Platt has observed and added, “What is surprising is that the parents did not, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, recognize that free will exists.”
I turn now to some lesser defects in the book.
The excerpt is bad enough in itself; the fact that it is the only or most detailed example of teaching in the book damages the book, and yet this damage is made potentially even worse by your reversion to the old title, Truth on Trial. Very few readers do not know the words of the oath, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” that every witness must swear to or affirm. Your title authorizes all readers to hold you to that standard. And yet, if you include this lecture excerpt, you will be showing your beloved teachers as indifferent to the truth, indifferent to the merely literal truth of Plato’s text, let alone the deep truth. (The melodramatic cover from of Socrates dying can only increase the contrast between its implicit claim “these guys were treated as Socrates was” and the evidence that they didn’t attend to what Socrates says on an important matter or encourage the students to.)
(Your rechosen title will also, by the way, arm your critics to ask whether you have told the whole truth elsewhere; has Carlson showed us all the letters? has he represented the parents objections fully? and why does he not tell us how many conversions there were? they will be provoked to ask, and armed unto sharpness by the knife you provide: “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”)
Of course, as I’ve said to you, there are good moments in the excerpt, best of all Dennis’ dream of his back yard invaded by alligators, toads and snakes of modernity and innocent him, the man of the house who has not taken the garbage out for weeks, telling his wife he will get to it soon.
Surely you can find some better except, that has the flavor of the three present, but without this grave error, which the more the reader thinks about it the more he will question whether the Program belonged in a college.
That is what I urge you, find a better excerpt. It is more than a month since I brought this matter to your attention. There are perhaps a number of reasons you have turned away from it. It will require you to find another excerpt free of this grave and violating error, but that it more important than your rush to publication. Reflect this: you will not honor the teachers you feel such sincere and reasonable gratitude to by giving as the only verbatim representation of their teaching (and their only written assignment, too, I believe) an example that contradicts their own stated principle, that does not cultivate reason, stir aspiration, or accord with simple truth. As to your rush, the competent Fingerhut has put you way out ahead of the schedule that you were satisfied with when McInerny offered it (start by June).
And for myself, I have a question? How far did the Latin go? Did many, or few or any students go so far as to read a great Latin author? Vergil? Augustine? And how about Greek. Not only Plato but Plutarch and the New Testament were in the curriculum, yes? Did any student ever take up Greek?
July 95: The program emphasized comedy and pastoral, not epic, history, or tragedy, but this book belongs to none of these noble genres. It is a melodrama. The title, the front, the managed survey of opinion, the absense of criticism in the results reported, the absense of facts (how many conversions), the absense of any self-criticism (also we would like to know whether these fellows ever considered fighting, going on to the AAUP, to court, to the public.. Really interesting questions are not asked; they weren’t on the author’s mind and because they weren’t the evidence that might have been pertinent to them is not present.
Every teacher should be forgiven for his students, especially those who idolize him.
fr. footnote 16 in YGWest
As the typical class Carlson describes shows, Senior really meant imagination before reason, lectures rather than discussions, and good books before great books, for when a great book was read, the lecturer’s account was to be accepted rather than the author’s sought. The purely ‘musical education’ in the Kansas program, the Platonic Socrates of the early books of the Republic would find lacking in gymnastique, and thus not fit to serve the city; nor would he think it sufficient for the man; no mathematics, no dialectic. The dialogue with Glaucon and the others doesn’t stop with the likely stories of the Muses and the soul doesn’t either.
Nor do the examples of Thomas, Pascal, and Newman suggest that a Christian need fear students exercising their reason. Indeed they regard it as the duty of a Christian teacher to lead others up the path from the good to the great, from opinion however true to knowledge, and then from nature to grace. When Newman said the purpose of a university is truth, not salvation, he was confident the one could not but help you to the other.
on raising a Jew as a Jew Quod. Ques. vol 2 (series) Qu. 4 Art 2
Su. Th 2.2. Qu 10 Art 12 Tertia Qu 68 Art 10
[1] See Allan Bloom’s essay on liberal education in Liberal Education (Rand McNally); Joseph Tussman’s Experiment at Berkeley (Oxford U. P. 1969) first reported to the faculty in 1966, and Charles Sykes‘s The Hollow Men, pp. 190-91. For more on the Liberal Arts program rejected at Dartmouth, see the Dartmouth Review, Vol 10 (Issue 15) 14 Feb. 1990, pp. 7-9. The program was instituted at Queens College, with an NEH grant, by Prof. Hilail Gildin, and continues to this day.
[2] It is also stored up in The Death of Christian Culture (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1978); in the essays in The Integration of Knowledge (Lawrence, Kansas: Integrated Humanities Program, 1979); in the many sets of tapes, on manners, on schooling, on literature, of Senior and Quinn descanting anew, available from Emrich Enterprises, P. O. Box 2613, Casper, Wyoming 82602: tele 800-800-2613. Some of his poems are collected as Pale Horse, Easy Rider (Lawrence: Shakespearean Rag, 1992).
Friends Of The Republic 