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Joseph Bottum at First Things has written an essay about the benefits and demise of Latin education.  The study of “dead” languages is something near and dear to my heart.  The two languages I have studied for any length of time whatsoever have been Latin and Biblical Hebrew.  Here’s Bottum’s conclusion about practical benefits of Latin:

There’s a superior command of English granted by the study of Latin, but even to make that argument is to admit that Latin requires some practical result. For that matter, there’s plenty to learn from the ancient world’s experience of politics, social life, and art, and yet, again, that’s not, in itself, a reason to demand that students study Latin. Translations will do as well, if that’s all we want, and the real argument for Latin runs deeper than mere practicality.

However, as he readily admits, practical benefits are, ultimately, beside the point when it comes to Latin.

In fact, Latin was a measure of education, not a portion that could be added or dropped. Admittedly a somewhat arbitrary measure, though it kept us tied to the continuity of Western civilization. But without some such measure, the entire idea of education becomes vulnerable to the skeptic’s relativistic question of “Who’s to say?” Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? Who’s to say what’s true or false? Who’s to say what knowledge we should share?

From the Book of Common Prayer (Canada):

Almighty God, of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding: We beseech thee with thy gracious favour to behold our universities, colleges, and schools, that knowledge may be increased among us, and all good learning flourish and abound.  Bless all who teach and all who learn; and grant that in humility of heart they may ever look unto thee, who art the fountain of all wisdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Some excellent advice from Robert Peters in Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning a Master’s or a Ph.D.:

If you decide to go to graduate school, don’t do it just because you don’t know what else to do,

A little later down the page:

Recognize that students who enter grad programs for specific career goals are more likely to graduate than those with vague plans.

And finally:

If you aren’t yet certain what career you want, grad school might give you insight, but there are certainly more cost-effective ways of figuring out your life.  You might be better off working for a conservation organization, teaching English overseas as a second language, or joining the Peace Corps until you’re sure what you want to do.

This year is John Milton’s 400th birthday, and Stanley Fish has written a post about Ninth International Milton Symposium in London, which touches on the many things to appreciate about Milton.  Here are a couple of good quotes.  First, about why Milton matters:

Rather than being employed for its own sake, the poetry is always in the service of ideas and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes – judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action, about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.

Apparently, the ghost of Shakespeare hangs over Milton studies constantly.  Another good quote, about the difference between Milton and Shakespeare, referring to the debates over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays:

Jonathan Rosen was getting at something like this when he said in a recent New Yorker piece, “No one would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work.”

Milton went blind in his mid-forties, prior to writing Paradise Lost: the magnificent epic that Milton is best known for was composed mentally and dictated to a series of secretaries, including one of his daughters and the poet Andrew Marvell, who wrote the poem “To His Coy Mistress,” a standard of English textbooks.

His blindness led him to compose one of the greatest poems in the English language, “On His Blindness,” which I memorized while I was unemployed following graduate school, wondering whether my long education would ever result in productive employment:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly.  Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

A quick explication: Milton despairs at going blind, feeling that his one “Talent” (his ability as a writer) is now wasted, and, referring to the parable of the talents, fears that Jesus will return and question him as to why he has not put his talent to work.  (The work “fondly” here means “foolishly” - Milton’s retort that he can’t work because he’s blind, in other words, is a pretty stupid thing to say to the Lord of Heaven and Earth.)  The poem turns as Milton comes to realize that God does not “need” his work or “his own gifts” (i.e. Milton’s talent was a gift from God to begin with).  Instead, what God demands is his readiness to serve.  The image changes to a royal court: thousands of courtiers speed to and fro in their service to God, but “They also serve who only stand and waite.” Milton’s readiness would soon be repaid; a few years after this poem, Milton began work on Paradise Lost.

There is a new essay called The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar that is making the rounds in higher education discussions.  I think the subtitle of the article sums up its thesis well:

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

He is writing primarily about elite universities, the same ones that ESN is trying to transform.  Deresiewicz was on the faculty at Yale for 10 years, so he has some background in this.

His argument has several points, but here’s one that stuck out at me.

An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort.  [snip]

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

I think Deresiewicz glosses over another reason why elite universities rob you of the opportunite “not to be rich”: student loans. I was accepted to Yale when I was a senior in high school, but even with financial aid, I would have need to take out something like $20,000 per year in student loans to make it work.  The University of Louisville offered me a full ride; between UofL and my master’s degree at Regent (where I also received a scholarship, and where my parents graciously paid for my thesis), I was able to complete my entire education to date with less than $10,000 total in student loans.  My senior year in high school, for some unknown reason, I was convinced that I wanted to be a high school principal (I still don’t know why), and the prospect of starting a career as a teacher with over $100,000 in student loan debt did not appeal to me.

Over at Slate.com, Meghan O’Rourke has a nice tribute to Anne of Green Gables, which has been published in a new Modern Library edition.  O’Rourke does a good job, but she starts her article playing devil’s advocate: why should Anne of Green Gables, of all things, receive this kind of treatment?

To some, this canonical promotion of a writer who would probably now be classified as a Y.A. (young adult) author might seem preposterous. To certain left-leaning cultural theorists who won’t embrace a heroine with a less-than-revolutionary CV—Anne, once the Island’s best young scholar, chooses to become a devoted wife and mother of six—the Modern Library’s decision may appear to be a reactionary cave-in to nostalgic sentimentality.

Compare this to Deresiewicz’s point about elite education: using a bright mind, or an elite education, to become something as pedestrian as a mother is, well, “wasteful,” when you could be doing the “real work” of becoming rich or “successful.”  There’s nothing wrong with being a banker, hedge fund manager, or what have you, but let’s be very careful here.  The Victorians elevated motherhood to an idol; we have lowered to a calling of last resort.  I had a feminist professor in college who liked to read aloud articles that described how much a mother would be paid if all of her jobs were added up (e.g. chaffeur, personal shopper, maid, etc.).  I think she thought she was being flattering to mothers by noting their worth.  And she was, but she was also buying into our society’s preoccupation with salary as a measure of importance.

Two years ago, InterVarsity and five other evangelical student ministries were disaffiliated at Georgetown University.  It was a surprising move, which made the news among both Christian and secular publications. Had things gone in a different direction, the relationships between InterVarsity, Georgetown, and the students on campus could have been severely damaged. 

But, praise God, the result was that new relationships were formed and old relationships were reconciled, and InterVarsity at Georgetown was able to regain official affiliation.  Ironically, the daughter of Alec Hill, InterVarsity’s president, was a student at Georgetown during this entire ordeal.  Now, Alec has written up this thoughts about what happened, and where InterVarsity stands after a long process.

Two Year Turnaround by Alec Hill

One of my favorite blogs, GetReligion.org, posted about a very strange story from ABC News , headlined “Religion is a Product of Evolution, Software Suggests.”  James Dow, an anthropologist at Oakland University, claims to have written a software program that explains how religion evolved.  But, as always, the devil is in the details - or, more accurately, the devil is in the presuppositions.  Here’s how ABC News described the set-up of Dow’s software:

To simplify matters, Dow picked a defining trait of religion: the desire to proclaim religious information to others, such as a belief in the afterlife. He assumed that this trait was genetic.

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn’t spread unreal information.

The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people  those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, “believers in the unreal” went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

“Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them,” Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

 As one of the commenters on the GetReligion post noted, it’s interesting the subtle jump that Dow makes from “unverifiable” to “unreal” information.  Note, too, his clear distinction between “believers” and “non-believers,” when the reality of personal belief is a bit cloudier.  Further, when you consider the communications of actual religious teachers, such as Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Francis of Assissi, Martin Luther King Jr., etc., and not hypothetical prehistoric figures like Dow does, it becomes clear that they are not merely “communicating the unreal.”

It’s an interesting experiment, but methinks that Dow could benefit from some philosophy to clarify his terms and examine his presuppositions a bit more closely.  At least he’s upfront about what he is assuming.

Here’s the link to Dow’s actual published study, Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?, published in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 11, no. 2 2. 

One of the books on my shelf to read is How the University Works: Higher Education at the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet, a professor of English at Santa Clara who blogs at howtheuniversityworks.com and the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog. I’m looking forward to reading the book, which examines systemic problems in higher education.  Here’s a brief blurb from the back:

Burdened by debt, millions of undergraduates work multiple part-time jobs - but quit before they earn a degree.  Meanwhile college presidents, basketball coaches, and corporate interests rake in millions, even at schools where fewer than half of students earn a degree in six years. Read the rest of this entry »

Sphere: Related Content

Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Research Institute and one of our featured speakers at Following Christ 2008, announced yesterday that he is resigning in order to “explore writing projects and other professional opportunities.” Here is the official news release. 

Dr. Collins has been one of America’s premier scientists, and he is also a Christian.  His book, The Language of God, is subtitled “A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”  He’s also an incredible speaker, who is very comfortable discussing both his professional work and his personal testimony. 

Back in February, Dr. Collins spoke at Stanford University at an event co-sponsored by the InterVarsity chapter there; you can download audio or video from his talk.  It’s well worth it.  In addition to presenting a clear case for Christianity, his personal testimony is inspiring - from hardcore atheist to devoted Christian, all while being confronted daily with the realities of suffering and death as a practicing physician. Like so many other thoughtful Christians, Collins credits C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as one of the key influences in his journey toward God. 

I will be very interested to see what he does next.  May God bless him in his endeavors. 

In my work with the Emerging Scholars Network and Faculty Ministry, we call Christian students and faculty to be “redemptive influences within higher education.”  People often ask me what that means, and it’s tempting to paint a picture of thousands of C.S. Lewises, spiritual giants at every college in the country.  First of all, that would be unrealistic - someone like C.S. Lewis comes along once in a century.  But more importantly, it would give a distorted image of what a faithful follower of Christ in the academy looks like.  C.S. Lewis is famous because of his many acclaimed books, now being made into blockbuster movies, and his justified fame as both an apologist and scholar. However, as Lewis himself pointed out in The Great Divorce, greatness in heaven is very different than greatness in the world.  Worldly success, such as that enjoyed by Lewis, is not a guaranteed result of faithfulness to Christ.  The very opposite may be the case. Read the rest of this entry »