Displaying Value: The Case for the Liberal Arts Yet Again

Early on in his new book, “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be,” Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University quotes the economist Richard Vedder and the former university president William Brody to the effect that little has changed in higher education despite enormous changes in technology, demographics, funding models, and student habits and attitudes. Vedder notes that “with the possible exception of prostitution, teaching is the only profession that has had absolutely no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.” Brody is less wry, but the point is the same: “If you went to a [college] class circa 1900, and you went today, it would look exactly the same.”

In many of the books on higher education now flooding the market, statements like those would be preliminary either to a denial of the point (everything is not the same; here are the new things we’re doing), or to an affirmation of it followed by detailed recommendations (here’s what we should do to catch up). Delbanco, however, not only accepts the fact that little has changed in the classroom — “most of what we see in the past looks a lot like the present” — he celebrates it in the course of answering his title’s question. College, he tells us, “is a hedge against utilitarian values” that “slakes the human craving for contacts with works of art that somehow register one’s longings and yet exceed what one has been able to articulate by and for oneself.”

It is typical of Delbanco’s mode of presentation that he doesn’t hit you over the head with an argument, but leaves you to work it out: if humans do indeed crave such contact, that craving is the same in all ages, and the kind of experience that satisfies it will also be the same: “[T]he questions we face under the shadow of death are not new, and … no new technology will help us answer them.”

That includes the technology of science. Delbanco pays tribute to science’s “progressive power,” but its “principle of progress,” he says, does not “translate well” into other areas of human life: “Science tells us nothing about how to shape a life or how to face death … It not only fails to answer such questions; it cannot ask them.” Delbanco knows that some scientists have predicted that in time “neuroscience will define and ensure happiness and … biochemistry will distinguish truth from falsity among what today are mere opinions about sex and gender,” but he doubts “it will happen”; even if it does, “none of us will be around … and it’s not clear that we would want to be.”

Notice that Delbanco doesn’t say that we surely wouldn’t want to be around. “It’s not clear” strikes just the right note of questioning; the point is made, but it is not pressed. Indeed, I have somewhat misrepresented the book by collecting some of its more polemical moments. The book does have a thesis, but it is not thesis-ridden. It seeks to persuade not by driving a stake into the opponent’s position or even paying much attention to it, but by offering us examples of the experience it celebrates. Delbanco’s is not an argument for, but a display of, the value of a liberal arts education.

The display comes in two forms. First there is the felicity of the author’s prose. Mirabile dictu, there are no charts and few statistics. But there are sentences worth reading. Reminding us that “professor” means someone professing a faith, Delbanco exhorts us to keep the etymology alive: “Surely this meaning is one to which we would still wish to lay claim, since the true teacher must always be a professor in the root sense of the word — a person undaunted by the incremental fatigue of repetitive work, who remains ardent, even fanatic, in the service of his calling.”

The ardency is not only reported; it is communicated, both by his words and the words of those he marshals in a parade of inspiring, even fanatic, exemplars (this is the second form of display): Henry James, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Roth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Matthew Arnold, John Henry Newman, Walt Whitman, Jonathan Edwards, John Cotton, Seneca, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Max Weber, Henry Adams, William James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lionel Trilling, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, John Witherspoon, Groucho Marx, Philip Larkin, Homer.

These worthies do double duty: They illustrate observations Delbanco is making, and they are themselves illustrations of why books like this are written in the first place. Humanism has always been about imitation and the belief that if the song of virtue is sung well, listeners will be moved to join in. In “An Apology for Poetry” (1595), Philip Sidney asks (rhetorically), “Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?” Delbanco recalls the effect the art historian Meyer Schapiro had on students “as he spoke about Cezanne”; they would say, “Whatever he’s smoking, I’ll have some.” I recall the Renaissance scholar Jackson Cope telling me the story of how, just out of the Navy, a street kid from Chicago, he wandered into a class on iconography and emblems taught by the great Don Cameron Allen at the University of Illinois. I didn’t know what he was talking about, Cope said, but, he added, I did know that I wanted some of that.

Delbanco writes as he does — by introducing you to the voices of those who embody the values he would preserve — in the hope that his readers will want some of that and may even be moved to do something about it.