In mid-October 1956 I became a visitor to the Middle Ages: I matriculated at Oxford. Robed in gown and white tie (mysteriously called “sub-fusc”), I stood with other freshmen before the celebrated classicist Sir Maurice Bowra, who intoned ritual sentences of Anglo-Latin (no broad “A”s) and we responded.
Some days before my ceremonial appearance before Sir Maurice, I had another introduction to Oxford civility. I had seated myself on my first morning in the dining hall, under the floor-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, the college’s titular patron. I asked for water. “But sir,” protested a white-jacketed scout (servant), “you cawnt wash in here.” Had I stumbled into the role of a transatlantic visigoth? No. There was a twinkle in his eye, as he deliberately misunderstood southern-American words. Soon a glass of water appeared, ceremoniously borne high on a silver salver. This amenity continued throughout my tenure. A decade later, with no further study and 10 years of “good behavior,” I gained an M.A. hood that made me a voting member of the university and a flimsy certificate authorizing me to profess an astonishing range of subjects for which my qualifications were distinctly limited. Even divinity!
I begin with these antique civilities because mid-1950s Oxford, while it suffered the lingering deprivations of wartime austerity, compensated with ceremonies lovingly retained from medieval times, assuredly pre-Columbian. Teaching was individual and tutorial. My essays would be heard as I sat, stuffed with instant learning, before an erudite gentleman who, for the fun of it, accepted me as an intellectual peer. After two years (for the holder of an American degree) and 10 relentless hours of written examinations all at once, one gained an honors B.A., the prime English degree. The DPhil—cousin of the American Ph.D.—was then deemed a Teutonic affectation.
Is it any wonder, given my antique academic prejudices, that I approach James Axtell’s book with a jaundiced eye? The author, a professor emeritus at William & Mary, seems to know all there is to know about American higher education—at least in its statistical and quantifiable aspects. (Somehow he missed the real allusion in Hamlet: “to the manner [not manor] born.”) His book begins with a lengthy exposition of Western learning in 12th-century Paris and Oxford. This Cook’s Tour of early universities occupies almost a third of Wisdom’s Workshop, although it leads—by way of an excursion into the German influence that took some 9,000 young Americans to German universities in its transitional 19th century—to the modern “multiversity,” as Clark Kerr of Berkeley notably called it 40 years ago. Today, we have what Axtell calls, without embarrassment, a “knowledge industry” that is, allegedly, the envy of the wide world. The quantitative term is significant. But his title is a bit misleading. Wisdom tends to be individual and subjective, and is only rarely the “product” of multiversities.
Though he leads the cheering, Axtell is duly severe about some distractions from the academic “enterprise” (another term suggestive of commodification): corruption by big-time commercialized sports. One of his examples, with which this reviewer happens to be well acquainted, suggests the limited relevance of his scores of footnotes. A Midwestern college functionary has blogged in the Chronicle of Higher Education that my alma mater (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) should be de-credentialed for its social promotion of semiliterate football and basketball players. Without extenuating the offense, I must note that Axtell and the cited blogger ignore the context: The disgraceful bogus courses flowed from typical academic sentimentality—an “African Studies” program that fulfills high-minded ideas of racial improvement, the sole source of the phony (classless and examless) courses. Which tends to explain why the NCAA has been slow to pinpoint and punish the offense.
This reservation noted, no one seeking a newsy update of American higher education can ignore this book. The title, attributed to a 13th-century pope, begs an embarrassing question, however: “Wisdom” is subjective and individual, and often incommunicable; and Axtell’s title wistfully echoes the long-lost world of classical learning—the era of the trivium and quadrivium. The middle name of American higher education today isn’t wisdom but money: the pursuit of alumni, foundation, and federal “research” dollars. The cup-rattling and hat-passing are as beneficial, but as perilous, to academic integrity as the “bear hug” of Oxford and Cambridge by Henry VIII in Tudor times. Federal funding is the heroin of super-academe.
Axtell does not neglect these questionable trends—indeed, he seems at times to celebrate them and his book deals more with the husks of higher education than the kernels. Most of us, even those experienced in the world of universities, can know only a few institutions intimately enough to evaluate the level of learning they offer: a question of cultures. Ultimately, the test of universities and colleges is how well they furnish the brains and sensibilities of those they teach. Undergraduate instruction in traditional arts and sciences, once the mainstay, lately seems of marginal relevance in a survey of this sort. And it hardly helps that the commodification of learning is ratified by public officials—even President Obama (Columbia, Harvard)—who associate college degrees with levels of income. No wonder that many notable undergraduate teaching institutions are treated cursorily or ignored.
The prime symptom of distortion is Axtell’s term “research universities.” The adjective is ultimately as hard to quantify as “wisdom.” Aside from medicine and technology, whose byproducts aren’t invariably of high social value, genuine discoveries are rare. (Axtell reminds us slyly that Harvard, in the Second World War, was the birthplace of napalm.) In the humanities, meanwhile, originality worthy of the puffy adjective is even rarer. The field of history may be an exception, since it isn’t “new knowledge” but old knowledge, reviewed and reprocessed, that is usually notable; but in any case, few “research” breakthroughs match such distinguished examples as Milman Parry’s discoveries regarding the structure and origin of Homeric poetry or Michael Ventris’s decipherment of the archaic Greek of Linear B. And both “researchers” were, in fact, independent amateurs!
In sum, Wisdom’s Workshop is readable and worthy, especially for those denied my own exceptional good luck to have studied before the onset of commodification and inflation. But a cautionary sprinkle of salt is to be recommended for Axtell’s celebratory diet, since not all of wisdom’s workshops are wise.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. is the author, most recently, of Vacancy: A Judicial Misadventure.
