By: David Ortiz
This semester marks a step in a different direction for the academics of Belmont Abbey College – a step that many today would view as backwards, into the dust of the ancient past that we, enlightened souls that we are, long ago shook from our shoes. The Abbey, as the college is often referred to, is a four-year private institution that identifies as Catholic, and is affiliated with the Order of St. Benedict. The campus is locate fifteen miles from uptown Charlotte, and features all the normalities of small colleges that one would expect. Life here continues as it did at the college’s founding in 1876, except for one small, slight change that is in essence no change at all. The administration of the college recently updated the core curriculum offered by the college – a curriculum that all students are required to pass in order to graduate. The fall 2011 semester marked the grand unveiling of this new curriculum. The interesting thing about this new core, however, is not its novelty; but, rather, its utter lack of novelty. The philosophy that drove the changes was not one of revisionist progressivism. Instead, the orchestrators of these changes saw works that have remembered for millennia to be of far greater intellectual value than what is hot off the publishing presses. Not to say, of course, that what is new cannot be good, or what is old is by virtue of age wise, but instead that the latter has been proven by combat, so to speak, while the former has not yet endured the test of time. But what, actually, are these changes? To start with, freshmen are now required to take such courses as the “First-Year Symposium,” that seek to introduce students in a seminar environment to the methods of inquiry that have been used for millennia. Thus, students are in their very first semester incorporated and welcomed in the academic community of the college, all the while studying classic texts. Other courses, spread out over four years, cover such diverse areas as scripture and theology (reflecting the Catholic tradition of the college), the U.S. Constitution, sciences, mathematics, and literary classics of the Western tradition, as well as the Western civilization surveys evicted from college campuses across the nation during the 1960s.
The “Rhetoric I and II” sequence forms another crucial part of the changes, and is composed of a series of courses focusing upon ancient models of the art of rhetoric; his same course of study in its day produced such lights as Cicero and Augustine, among others. Students at Belmont Abbey are exposed to the thought of many of the traditionally most valued thinkers, poets, and politicians who have ever lived. These students are not only given the option to pursue such studies, indeed, they are required; but the requirement is such that it may only benefit those who undertake its rigors. The value inherent in reading and absorbing Cicero himself, rather than reading about Cicero in some history lecture course, is immediately apparent to all but those most drastically cut off from the intellectual legacy to which the West has given rise. The question, then, for us must be thefollowing: why does our own university that first and foremost holds itself as a place of education, ignore this fundamental source of education? As only a cursory glance at the general education requirements at UNC will reveal, our university places little stock in the intellectual tradition of the West. The general education requirements of our university are intended to enable one to “make connections;” to connect knowledge “in ways that cross traditional boundaries and spatial boundaries.” For the most part, these are all laudable goals, unless by crossing traditional boundaries one means rehashing multiculturalism for the millionth time, but how does our university actually seek to fulfill the goals it has set? Two courses spent on “English rhetoric and composition.” Three courses (until level three) spent on learning a foreign language. One course learning mathematics. One lifetime fitness course. Two courses in the sciences and three in the social sciences, including history. How many allotted to the humanities? Three. Once these have all been fulfilled, students are required to satisfy eight “connections” requirements, many of which can be fulfilled through higher level courses within a given major, or most courses available.
The subtext to these requirements are the literally hundreds – if not thousands – of options a student can use to satisfy them; from the “place of Asian Americans in Southern literature” to “Popular culture and American History” and beyond (and I haven’t even delved into the women studies department), one can find almost any subject offered here at Carolina. While some may applaud this vast cosmopolitan marketplace of topics, the consequent situation is undeniable. Students can fulfill general education requirements by taking classes on virtually any topic one can think of – meaning, students can fulfill the literary arts requirement by reading Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc; or, if so inclined, students can fulfill the very same requirement by reading about the heritage of Asian Americans in Southern literature (not to disparage Asian Americans). The university, from an administrative point of view, simply does not bother itself much over how the requirements are satisfied; only that they are. The point, however, is not that these things are of themselves wrong or useless; learning about Asian Americans in the South has its own intrinsic value, as does discussing the relationship between popular culture and American history. The point is that, by constructing a set of educational requirements so vague as to allow, for all intensive purposes, inexhaustible possibilities for meeting them, the university has reclude any possibility of actual education for a vast majority of students. It is not here the time nor the place – nor am I the person – to discourse upon the solution to the silent crisis facing this university, and indeed, facing the Western world in general, but I will say the following.
The only real start to addressing the problem can be a return to studying those works which place us firmly as the heirs to the intellectual tradition of the West. This legacy of thought, of construction and criticism, is thousands of years old; within it empires, religions, and entire cultures have risen and fallen, ebbed and raged, waxed and waned. If we are to claim to be men and women of America, of the West, we must truly be so. It is imperative for us to know how Homer, Vergil, and Dante understood themselves and their world – for only then can we hope to understand ourselves and our world today. On the part of the administration of Belmont Abbey College, the decision to turn the clock back, so to speak, as part of that solution may puzzle some. In the increasingly technocratic world of today, in which education is synonymous with employment and all not deemed practical is deemed cute, this decision to return to the foundations of the Western world may seem archaic and “conservative” – as if politics determined the Western canon. After all, the link between that snazzy and lucrative job as a hedge fund manager on Wall Street and reading the works of Homer is not so clear. Yet, that line of thought misses the point entirely. In reading Homer, we find something much more than shallow economic gain. What would be the value in attempting to understand man, and the place of man in the universe he encounters, and the legions of questions springing from those, if we only did so for our own material reward? If our sole motivation in attempting to become wise, in attempting to learn from those who were wise in their own lives, is the Ferrari in the garage, how, I ask, could we even hope to understand at all? The study of the Western intellectual tradition is such, that if its temples are approached only with sacrilegious gain in mind, the sibyls themselves will bar the gates.
Perhaps these sentiments are idealistic. Perhaps they ignore the practical realities of the world of today that changes so rapidly. Yet, is it wrong to be an idealist, and is it wrong to desire more from one’s studies than the Porsche and the vacation house in the Cayman Islands? I, for one, desire to learn what it means to be human, to breathe, to feel, to think, to act in accordance with reality; and the answer to my question is not found in equations and molecular models, but in poetry and literature; in the human voice. For what I desire toknow and understand above all else is not how or what; I wish to understand the why.
Chesterton once defined education as the “soul of a society as it passes from one generation to the next.” Is the soul of our society merely technological advancement and new ideas of harnessing new cash-cows? We need doctors, inventors, and bankers to be sure. Indeed, these pursuits are of course themselves good, but let them also have heard the voices of Shakespeare and Dante. Let them at least have glimpsed the person, the why, of humanity.
