In this important and provocative new book, a respected college president looks at the crisis in American higher education, and if this sentence doesn’t make you want to stop reading right now then there’s something wrong with you. But wait. Josiah Bunting III is not an ordinary college president, just as the college he leads, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, is not an ordinary college. Bunting is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, a successful novelist (The Lionheads, his remarkable novel about the war, is still in print twenty-six years after publication), a trained classical pianist, a specialist in modern European history, and a prose stylist whose robust sentences and paragraphs bear comparison (I’m not kidding) to Macaulay’s. He’s also a Rhodes scholar, but nobody’s perfect.
Given his background and range of interests, it’s not surprising that Bunting, of all academics, might have something worthwhile to say about the “crisis in American higher education,” which, as a pet subject for publishers, seems rivaled only by diets, mutual funds, and mountain climbing. But Bunting’s book, An Education for Our Time, stands out from the other edu-crisis books. For one thing, it is less a critique than a fantasy of what education can be — less a diagnosis than a cure. For another thing, it isn’t a thundering manifesto but an epistolary novel — a series of fictional letters from a dying billionaire to the executor of his estate.
As his cancer advances, the billionaire, a microchip magnate named John Adams, lays out careful and detailed plans for a new college, to be built from scratch with his money, on a vast tract of land in the foothills of Montana. This is another way in which An Education for Our Time differs from most books on today’s colleges and universities: It is remarkably precise, with instructions on how to construct dormitories and commissaries, how to recruit students and faculty, how to design a curriculum, how to assemble a workable college administration, and, pre-eminently, how to mold the character of young people. This last how-to overrides all the others. The formation of character was, after all, the traditional purpose of liberal-arts schools, and in some places it is still declared to be so. But Adams really means it.
“We will aim to educate young persons,” writes Adams,
to be virtuous and disinterested citizens and leaders; patriots who more than self their country love; citizens who when they are not virtuous in their lives and works will know they are not and will labor always to sustain their determination to be virtuous, self-mastering, drawn to the accumulation of a moderate sufficient property only, and educated liberally but avid in their commitment always to remain liberally self-educating.
Adams turns out to be as high-minded, humorless, and far-seeing as the founding father for whom he was named — and as admirable, too, in the same starchy manner. We learn along the way that he was wounded on Iwo Jima and later served (with understandable disenchantment) as a systems analyst in Robert McNamara’s Vietnam-era Defense Department. His idea of higher education is rigorous and austere and, as he knows, not for everyone.
He proposes that students not only receive a classical education, with a heavy emphasis on history and the biographies of great men, but also learn to handle tools, to cook and use firearms and write musical notation. Memorization being an essential element in mental discipline, students will be required to learn by heart at least two thousand lines of great writing every year; his recommendations range from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and Lee’s Farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia to poems by Rudyard Kipling and Howard Moss. Of their five-year program, students will be required to spend one year in the military and another devoted to some menial task of public service — as hospital orderlies, for example, or tutors in the inner city. Not for everyone, as I say.
But then Adams’s premise is quite different from the watery, come-one, come-all mandate that has shaped colleges and universities for better and worse since the GI Bill was enacted in 1944. Adams’s school is a school for the training of elites, properly understood: “The elite that our College must exemplify, and champion, is an eliteness of opportunity honestly earned and exploited, and of service to the Republic.”
He is enough of a democrat to know that the raw recruits for such an education will be found among all races and classes and among both of the top two genders, and he is eloquent on the near-worthlessness of SAT scores, high-school grades, class ranks, and “life-experience essays” that flood college admissions offices every spring. “What we are looking for,” he writes, “is a compound of practical intelligence, mother wit, determination, courage, certain early signs of selflessness, and a demonstrated willingness to go against the grain of expectation.” This isn’t the sort of thing you find on the SAT.
How then are we to find these people, the country’s disinterested citizens of the future, and what and how are they to learn? The answers to these and related questions could fill a book, and now they have, for the first time in a long while. It is odd that such fundamentals are so seldom raised in the screeds that critics, most of them conservative, routinely aim at higher education.
Adams is clearly Bunting’s mouthpiece, and the answers he comes up with are, to speak mildly, open to dispute. But together they make An Education for Our Time (this time I really mean it) an important and provocative contribution to our discussions of what an education should be, and, what amounts to the same thing, of the kind of character we want our sons and daughters to have.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
