Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 7

ESSAY

BALK ANIZED BUREAUCR ACY
OR UTOPIAN SANCTUARY?
THE CRISIS IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY
Bryce J. Christensen

"W

hat an empire is in political
history," declared John Henry
Cardinal Newman, "such is a university in
the sphere of philosophy and science. . . . It
maps out the territory of the intellect, and
sees that the boundaries of each province
are religiously respected. . . . It acts as umpire
between truth and truth, and, taking
into account the nature and importance
of each, assigns to all their due order and
precedence."1 A rare and far-seeing wisdom
inheres in these words, written in 1854 while
Newman was serving as rector of the Catholic University at Dublin. It is, tragically, a
wisdom largely ignored rather than honored
in most twenty-first-century American institutions of higher learning, institutions that
are fast forfeiting any claim to the lofty title
of university.
On campus after campus, professors and
administrators act not as umpires between
truth and truth but rather as gladiators in

often-bitter fights over resources and policy,
fights in which truth counts for far less than
sheer bureaucratic power. At many schools
these fights have grown particularly heated
as traditional academic disciplines-lacking
all sense of order and precedence-have
fissioned and mutated into new specialties
and subspecialties, each with its own academic agenda, none with a unifying vision
grounded in philosophical universals. Women's studies, ethnic studies, business ethics,
sports management, leisure studies . . . the list
of accredited disciplines just keeps growing
while the shared philosophical understandings uniting the academic congeries of the
modern polyversity dwindle.
The beginning of the cultural and intellectual fracturing of the modern university was
evident to physicist-novelist C. P. Snow when
he lamented in his famous "Two Cultures"
lecture of 1959 that the literary humanist
and the technical scientist inhabited cultural

Bryce J. Christensen is associate professor of English at Southern Utah University and author of the novel
Winning and of "The Portals of Sheol" and Other Poems.
7



Modern Age - Summer 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2014

Contents
Modern Age - Summer 2014 - Cover1
Modern Age - Summer 2014 - Cover2
Modern Age - Summer 2014 - Contents
Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 2
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