Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 9

THE CRISIS IN THE MODERN UNIVERSITY

For those who see poetry as a unifying and
integrative cultural force that can and should
transcend social and political divisions, it is
indeed deeply ironic that Pushkin-writing
in tsarist Russia with very few universities-
could count on railway workers knowing his
poems, while poets in a democratic America
with hundreds of universities can now count
on only a few other university-affiliated poets
knowing their work.6
Because American poets now typically
have no readers except those academic conscripts enrolled in their own campus-based
writing programs, Gioia acknowledges that
poetry in modern America is increasingly the
possession of a distinctive "subculture" that
must depend heavily on a "complex network
of public subvention, funded by federal, state,
and local agencies" to maintain its insular,
artificial, and campus-centered existence.
"The more [poetry readings] I attend," Gioia
frankly remarks, "the more I begin to feel
like I'm living on an asteroid."7 It is hardly
surprising, then, that informed observers, in
fact, now openly speak of poetry as "dying,
dead, or in decay."8

T

he fracturing of today's university and
its loss of cultural and pedagogical
health would hardly have surprised Newman. After all, he recognized more than 150
years ago that the increasing secularization
of the university could only lead to intellectual confusion. Theology, he argued, and
theology alone could give the university an
integrative and unifying center. "How," he
asked, "can we investigate any part of any
order of knowledge, and stop short of that
which enters into every order? All true principles run over with it, all phenomena converge to it; it is truly the first and the last."
For Newman the conclusion was inescapable:
"University education without theology is
simply unphilosophical." For an institution

even to call itself a university without making provision for the study of theology could
only be "an intellectual absurdity."9
That absurdity is all too palpable at a time
when American universities-including
a number initially founded to educate
clergymen-have become so hostile to religion that historian George Marsden sees in
them "the virtual establishment of nonbelief,
or the near exclusion of religious perspectives
from dominant academic life."10 Endorsing Marsden's perspective, Louisiana State
political scientist James R. Stoner Jr. has
decried a "secularization of the university"
so complete that "on campus, or at least on
the faculty, the theological voice is absent or
barely audible."11 It is to a large extent this
university-based secularism that historian
James Turner has in view when he assesses
the emergence of unbelief in late-nineteenthcentury America and its growth in the twentieth century. This unbelief, Turner argues,
has "dis-integrated" our national culture by
denying religious belief its traditional function as a "unifying and defining element of
that culture."12
Yet, even as secularizing professors drive
traditional religion and theology from
campus, a goodly number of them are
converting the university into a sanctuary
for a surrogate faith, a faith of ideological
politics. What is happening on the university campus is clarified in perceptive remarks
by critic J. Hillis Miller: "When God is
annihilated, at the same time man annihilates himself and annihilates also the world
around him. He annihilates them in the
sense of hollowing them of any substantial
presence." "The disappearance of God" from
modern thought, Miller explains, translates
into the disappearance of an "extrahuman
foundation for man, nature, or society." This
radical shift in the perceived foundation
of meaning-a shift that Miller discerns
9
Modern Age - Summer 2014

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