Can a university have a soul? Can it lose it is more to the point. And can it sell it to the devil? I still remember the moment it dawned on me as a very young man that Catholic intellectuals had something in common with thinkers from the Soviet bloc: they spoke in code, for fear of being silenced.
Those of us who have worked in the humanities and who have not required an imprimatur from an official censor nor had to worry about who was sending summaries of our lectures to the authorities take this freedom for granted as informing the animating principle – the soul – of a university. And where this freedom is absent, as in certain distant institutions with which we nowadays form smiling partnerships, the distinctive life of a university is not found there and though its students may be instructed and trained, they are not educated – or not by their teachers, and not at the university.
But here at home and in a time of austerity as prospective humanities students wonder whether they can afford an education at all, they will rightly be reassured that their degree is an investment which will secure them a place in the knowledge economy. However, the noise of this reassurance may lead them to neglect in their thinking what makes an education an end in itself.
Instruction leaves a person trained and better informed – but otherwise unaltered. To stand at the threshold of an education, by contrast, is to stand poised before the possibility of an achieved formation and temper of mind, which widens perspectives and matures the power of critical judgment. It is this that we commend when we commend education for itself. To be educated is to stand in a critical and creative relationship to ideas, crucially through contact with teachers, who exemplify in their words and demeanour the life of the mind.
If a university has a soul it is to be found here, in the engagement of teachers with their students, in the critical transmission of ideas, including ideas about human nature, that their students have to struggle with and grasp, a struggle that shapes their souls. But this education is becoming more fugitive and teachers less available through a terrible absence of mind, as the ideas that inform the policy and practice of universities slowly eat into their soul.
The public rhetoric exhibits a conception of education that increasingly assimilates it to instruction. University officers are there to protect the conditions for the proper transmission of ideas, but there is more than one way in which academic freedom can be compromised by our political masters. They want to see a return for their investment and require regular audits of the product, "research".
But academic freedom is undermined when it is exposed to a demand for regular "outputs" foreign to the rhythms and natural expression of its creative life. Despite the obstacles education gets done, but many teachers are preoccupied and distant and students will wonder why they are to pay more just when it seems they are to get less.
Some universities have proclaimed that they are "investing in knowledge". It is convenient that parcels of knowledge and skill can be presented as the educational product, when student contact is quietly cut to the bone. There is nothing wrong with knowledge and skills, but the one who acquires them has still to be exposed to the far more vital processes of understanding and self-knowledge, which are expressed in the intellectual culture we must transmit to the new generation if we are not to betray them.