What Dost Thou in This Living Tomb?

On Academia's Troubles

Recently, I've watched academic friends post recommendations. About books we can read and courses we can teach that might stem the political and social tidal wave crashing down on the world. Resistance, assemble!

I'm puzzled and exasperated by this mindset. How are very smart people still under the impression that Academia still holds this kind of cultural authority?

The economic outlook for higher ed has been troubled for some time. Add myriad political controversies and hostile social attitudes to those material challenges and, well, things look damn bleak.

Our current discourse about Higher Education leaves me troubled. Not because I know where I stand, but because I don't.

It's perhaps good that I live in the country, in something close to solitude. I don't know what to make of the world these days, and I wonder if it and its citizens are better off without my pesky doubts. Everyone seems insane, the righteous most of all, and I can't believe anyone wants to know what I think about current events.

I have long thrived in the worlds of both faith and reason, religion and academia, though I've only managed this by hunkering at the edges of both cultures.

My lifelong habit of living in margins and straddling worlds has served me mostly well; it's helped me feel connection with the variousness of life.

But now, in this moment of Choose or Die, I'm only alienated.

I can put it no better than Matthew Arnold did, writing about his visit to the archaic religious community of the Grande Chartreuse:

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride -
I come to shed them at their side."

That poem, "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse," feels wildly contemporary as I read and re-read it in our Here and Now.

I won't bore you with an extended analysis of the poem, and a quick look on Wikipedia will fill you in on its background and context. In short, the poem is a somber reflection about Arnold's dual alienation: from a space of isolated and passe religious devotion (a relic of dead tradition), AND from the modern enlightenment of scientific progress, which has pounded a final nail into the coffin of the old, enchanted world.

He visits the Carthusian monks' world seeking something meaningful and is haunted by the mocking voices of his teachers, whom he imagines asking him "What Dost Thou in This Living Tomb?" He seeks answers in a mystical, lost world even as he feels ridiculous looking there.

For the last week or so, I've been unable to stop reading this poem.

Like much of Arnold's poetry and prose, "Grande Chartreuse" tries to negotiate a tension between tradition and the new, what Arnold often refers to as "Hebraism" and "Hellenism." On one hand, there is richness and meaning in diligently following received wisdom from the past, and on the other, there is the need for society to grow and progress. Reality is struggle between these impulses.

Arnold was writing at the beginning stages of disenchantment, and the changes brought on by escalating industrialism disturbed him, even as he admires the ascending role Reason is playing in his modernizing world. This poem emerges from that tension.

Yet here we are 175 years later, and the tables have turned.

It is now the Age of Reason that teeters under its own institutional weight. If the Enlightenment hasn't failed, many of the institutions it produced are wobbly, to say the least. I must confess that, with one of my feet in the world of faith, this isn't all bad: people are at least talking about re-enchanting the world. But this is a tangent.

"Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse" retains its power perhaps because it's an image of a door that swings both ways. The anxieties about the disappearance of faith that Arnold reflects on in the poem (what he sees as the "Sea of Faith" withdrawing in "Dover Beach"), can now be applied to the increasingly tenuous future for Reason, particularly as it is represented by the modern university systems we've created and now see teetering.

(First a disclaimer; I realize that locating capital 'R' Reason in the American University system is a stroke painted by an extremely broad brush. I suppose that, like Arnold, I'm more concerned with the zeitgeist than I am with precise focus on any set of particulars. The forest over the trees, in other words).

My main point is that this poem, about one poet's attempt to find meaning in an archaic institution he may or may not actually believe in anymore, now works as a metaphor for reflecting on the relevance of our own cloistered priestly class.

Academia is in some ways the new Carthusian monastery. Like the Grande Chartreuse, it has become, if not isolated, then at least insulated from the broader society, located in its own metaphorical "forest, up the mountain-side."

Like any priestly endeavor, Academia requires disciplined exclusivity. Because we've made our work exclusive, it's become invisible, and subsequently pointless, to much of the rest of the world. To put it in Arnold's much more eloquent words:

"We are like children rear'd in shade
Beneath some old-world abbey wall,
Forgotten in a forest glade,
And secret from the eyes of all.

It's somewhat common to speak of Academia as cloistered; this is what we mean when we talk about "ivory towers," is it not?

One of the accomplishments of Arnold's poem is that it paints a vivid picture of the ramifications of living in a cloister. One is the willing surrender of popular relevance.

If the work we do is so important and vital, how is it that our academic institutions have so utterly failed to retain their importance to so much of the public? How has it possibly come to pass that so many people think the world would be better without our institutions?

I won't win many friends or influence many people when I suggest that it can't all be the result of "fake news" and "misinformation."

Like monks, we've built institutions that purport to serve humankind, but have evolved over time to become inward-focused. Professional incentives have submarined the altruistic mission, in other words. And professionalism is the stone from which our cloisters are built. Chasing the prestige of the sciences, even the humanities have insisted that our work be seen as serious, even at the cost of it appearing joyless.

Picture Arnold's Carthusian monks:

"Each takes, and then his visage wan
Is buried in his cowl once more.
The cells! - the suffering Son of Man
Upon the wall - the knee-worn floor -
And where they sleep, that wooden bed,
Which shall their coffin be, when dead!"

I want to humbly suggest that there are cultural consequences for generations of wan visages. There are good reasons the general public often perceives liberal academics as humorless scolds, and our often smug social media presences have not helped matters. One would think English professors would be more aware of the rhetorical consequences of moral finger-wagging at the deplorables, for instance.

Then there is the problem of having to answer the question, "what does all this have to do with me and my life?" As a teacher, I understand the frustration of this question. I teach literature courses to students who are mainly preparing for careers in medical professions, so it's a question I face every day. And yes, in an ideal world, I should not have to answer it. But we live in the real world so I have to. By and large, my classes go well, and I think this is because I spend a significant amount of effort addressing this question, whether it is asked or just implied. In fact, I simply assume my students are demanding this of me, whether they ask or not.

Arnold's observation about the Carthusian library should similarly give us pause as we think about the relevance of the knowledge we curate:

"The library, where tract and tome
Not to feed priestly pride are there,
To hymn the conquering march of Rome,
Nor yet to amuse, as ours are!
They paint of souls the inner strife,
Their drops of blood, their death in life."

What is the vision of life we offer the world? Is it just credentialing and jargon, our hymn to the conquering march of Professionalism? The grim seriousness of our profession might very well have value for the people of the world (certainly it does), but the curriculum won't speak on its own behalf for its relevance. That is a part of our work that we neglect when we over-emphasize gatekeeping for the professional world of the meritocracy.

I wrote at the beginning of this essay about my own cloistered, rural personal life, and I've tried to draw on my isolation for perspective here.

What I've written is metaphorical and unscientifically comparative; "this is like that," in other words. Not very academic of me. But as a citizen of the margins, this is how my mind comprehends the world.

With one foot in one world (that of Belief) and one in another (Academia), I cannot help but see how one culture sometimes resembles the other. "Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse" is a treasure for me then, as its picture of a ruined institution of past serves as conceptual model to understand a contemporary ruination-in-progress.

But I also feel the same tension Arnold felt when writing his poem.

He felt the Grande Chartreuse was anachronistic and purposeless in his modern world, yet he was still drawn to it as a fount of weary wisdom. There was something in the futility of the Carthusian devotion that inspired him. This is how I feel about our crumbling Academia. I too come to shed tears at her side, even as she is the object of derision from a world for which she no longer has any use.

From my vantage point inside the Titanic, I'm awestruck at how some of us are still polishing the silver. There is something beautiful and sad about the decay of, and continued devotion in, this institution, just as there was about the Grande Chartreuse.

And there's reason for hope. After all, the Grande Chartreuse still exists, as do monasteries all over the world. None of them hold the unifying cultural position they once did, but nevertheless they persist, doing God's work as best they know how. This is, I think, the best we in academia can hope for: to be a cloistered remnant, a resource for a future world to draw on. Learn from our achievements and our mis-steps.

But, like Arnold's Carthusians, todays academy simply wants to cover its ears and be left alone, and one can imagine this stanza in an opening statement before a congressional hearing someday soon:

"'Fenced early in this cloistral round
Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,
How should we grow in other ground?
How can we flower in foreign air?
-- Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease;
And leave our desert to its peace!"

But it should be clear by now that the world will not leave our academic desert to its peace. The bugles are sounding, and this time they sound for us.