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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Volume 15, Number4, Fall 2012, pp. 36-56 (Article)

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l og os 15: 4 fa ll 2012

Reinhard Htter

The Universitys Cutting EdgeSource of Its Flatness, Or:

Reclaiming the Universitys Third Dimension

The American Association of Universities (AAU), the exclusive club of the nations leading research universities, characterizes a research university in the associations White Paper thus:1

The raison dtre of the American research university is to ask questions and solve problems. Together, the nations research universities constitute an exceptional national resource, with unique capabilities:

Americas research universities are the forefront of in-novation; they perform about half of the nations basic research.

The expert knowledge that is generated in our research universities is renowned worldwide; this expertise is be-ing applied to real-world problems every day.

By combining cutting-edge research with graduate and undergraduate education, Americas research universities are also training new generations of leaders in all fields.

Let me give up front the central claim of my article2: What is increasingly missing from the late-modern research university and the kind of training it offers is what I shall call the universitys third

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dimension. For the AAU this third dimension seems to have disap-peared from the university. The first two dimensions of the late-modern research university constitute its sharpness as a problem-solving institution: to ask intricate questions and to solve complex problems. The late-modern research university accomplishes this task by way of ever more specialized research and by way of a con-comitant training of undergraduate and graduate students in the kind of expert knowledge that makes them competent problem-solvers. The universitys third dimensionconstitutive of the clas-sical universitycomprises, first, schole (in English leisure), that is, the structured practice of genuine intellectual contemplation and reflection, and, second, paideia, that is, the integral formation of the intellectual virtues in conjunction with the development of the moral virtues. A university that lacks this third dimension might well be able to develop remarkable research, but, I think, will even-tually suffer from a suffocating intellectual and spiritual flatness that in the long run will prove detrimental to the university as such. In order to make good on this claim I will proceed in three steps. In the first step, I will offer a snapshot of the late-modern research university and highlight three of its noteworthy features: first, the remarkable ambivalence in contemporary academic thought pertaining to reasons reliability and range, and, ultimately, to reasons capacity for truth; second, the late-modern universitys pervasive embrace of the means of quantification or metrics for purposes of assessment and management (into which university administration seems to have largely morphed); and third, its em-brace of the allegedly neutral framework of secular reason for its internal and external communication. These features belong essentially to what I regard as the universitys first and second dimension that together constitute the cutting edge, the utilitar-ian character of a highly complex problem-solving machine. The universitys third dimension, its depth dimension, refers to what has been at one time essential to the university qua university, that is, the pursuit of larger, comprehensive and integrating questions

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of truth and meaningquestions, I dare say, of metaphysics and morals. What is to be observed at the present moment regarding this third dimension are signs of a newly emerging disenchant-ment with secular reason as the universitys governing principle, a disenchantment discernible as it seems first and foremost among some of the postmodern avant-gardes of the late-modern research university.

In a second step, I shall consider a brief philosophical observa-tion and an equally brief theological reminder about the universitys third dimension.

In a concluding third step I will suggest that leisure and paideia are the two practices that keep the soul of the university alive and, that will assure that the university qua university will continue to matter even under the specter of a comprehensive functionalization of the late-modern universityespecially after the disenchantment of secular reason.

Like all thought, the normative perspectives that inform my cri-tique of the late-modern research university and the concomitant university education come from somewhere. The perspective that informs the normative understanding of the university pursued here has its roots in the ancient paideia that came to flourish in the remarkable and still pertinent theological and philosophical work of Thomas Aquinas. Obviously, this idea of the university does not form the matrix on which the late-modern research universities are built. However, I indeed hold as a governing principle for the subsequent reflections that a vision like the following is required as a critical normative standard in order to help us see at which point the university is in danger of becoming an equivocation (that is, a branding fraud). To quote Alasdair MacIntyre from his recent God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition: The ends of education . . . can be correctly developed only with reference to the final end of human beings and the order-ing of the curriculum has to be an ordering to that final end. We are able to understand what the university should be, only if we


understand what the universe is. But while this thought was crucial for Aquinass conception of the university, it was remarkably unin-fluential in determining how universities in fact developed.3 De-scribing and understanding the de facto development of universities in historical, sociological, and political terms is one kind of thing. Making sense of the university qua university on intellectual terms is another thing. I am pursuing only the latter here, and the presup-position of my talk is that the ideal reflected in Aquinass thought, and echoed to some degree under considerably different conditions in John Henry Newmans 1852 Dublin lectures on The Scope and Nature of University Education, is far from obsolete. On the contrary, this ideal constitutes a corrective reminder and a salutary challenge and is as such a program, I submit, superior to the Enlightenment model of the university as a place of advanced training in useful competencies, superior as well to the Berlin-type and the Weberian versions of the late-modern research university. For all these later models share the deficiencies of modernity; that is, they regard the universitys third dimension as dispensable and, if maintained, as at best a supererogatory concession to a luxury admitted for purely sentimental reasons, namely as one expedient way to honor the uni-versitys premodern roots.

Let me expand upon what I mean by the third dimension. In 2006, as an octogenarian, the philosopher Benedict Ashley pub-lished a simply remarkable book, a model of interdisciplinary rigor and comprehensiveness, The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics. Let me use his words to amplify this idea of the universitys third, integrative dimension.

The very term uni-versity means many-looking-toward-one, and is related to the term universe, the whole of reality. Thus, the name no longer seems appropriate to such a fragmented modern institution whose unity is provided only by a financial administration and perhaps a sports team. The fragmented academy is, of course, the result of the energetic exploration of all kinds of knowledge, but how can it meet

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the fundamental yearning for wisdom on which each culture is based?4

The search for wisdom characterizes the universitys third dimension and realizes the university qua university in a strict and proper sense. Hence, the universitys third dimension functions as a critical norm that puts into stark relief strong tendenciesnot recent in origin, but recently gaining remarkable momentumto reduce the university to a polytechnicum with a largely functionalized propaedeutic liberal arts appendix, this polytechnicum being largely an accidental agglomeration of advanced research competencies gathered in one facility for the sake of extrinsic and contingent conveniences. If this trend should come to its logical term, if indeed each of these advanced research competencies could be located elsewhere, that is, be directly linked to hospitals, to biochemical and computer scientific companies or to this or that branch of the military-industrial complex, without any loss, then the university in any substantive sense would have disappeared and to still call what remains a university would be simply an equivocation, undoubtedly useful for reasons of branding and marketing, but hardly for reasons of substance.

I. A Snapshot of the Late-Modern Research University

(1) It is hard to imagine a gulf deeper than the one that currently exists between those academicians who regard reason in terms of utmost triumph and those who regard it in terms of utmost despair. Mathematically disciplined and technologically executed, human reason has transformed the globe in unprecedented ways. The aca-demic disciplines based on reasons mathematical and technologi-cal acumen hold a robust trustif not faithin reasons capacity to grasp reality and, precisely because of this grasp, successfully to conform the world to human interests and needs.

Paradoxically, we can register a simultaneous widespread sense


of despair about reasons superior status and role. Instead of sov-ereignly guiding human affairs to their clearly defined and well-considered ends, reason seems to be little more than a coping mechanism or a regulative fiction driven and directed by instincts and desires it can hardly perceive, much less rule. The academic disciplines that traditionally draw upon reasons reflexive, integra-tive, and directive capacitiesas exercised by humanity in the act of understanding and interpreting both world and selfseem to have fallen into a state of internal disarray while finding themselves exiled into what by all accounts seems to be a state of permanent marginalization within the late-modern research university. Reason triumphing in the form of instrumental rationality has produced its own demise as famously analyzed in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment.

This arguable state of affairs is obviously not just an ivory-tower phenomenon, remote from and largely irrelevant to human soci-ety at large. Rather, the simultaneous triumph of and despair about reason mirrors late-modern society as such: we encounter breath-taking developments in artificial intelligence and biotechnology to-gether with atmospheric epistemological skepticism and ontologi-cal nihilism that is as pervasive and erosive as it is elusive. Instru-mental rationality and ontological nihilism seem to be two sides of the same coin. What is eclipsed in between is the question of truth. Because reason seems to have become incapable of attaining truth, it has to assert itself instead in the gigantomaniac demonstration and celebration of its instrumental effectiveness, its will to power. The prophet of this dynamic has been a German university profes-sor of the nineteenth century, one who retired very early in his ca-reer from the university: Friedrich Nietzsche. While Nietzsche was greatly disillusioned with the nineteenth century Berlin-style uni-versity, the late-modern, secular research university with its strong pragmatic and antimetaphysical bent is more profoundly com-mitted to some Nietzschean tenets than it seems to be aware. Let me for just one example cite aphorism 480 from The Will to Power.

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There exists neither spirit, nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of the subject and the object, but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regular-ity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience). Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power. The meaning of knowledge: here, as in the case of good and beautiful, the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropo-centric and biological sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of re-ality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of pres-ervationnot some abstract-theoretical need not to be de-ceivedstands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledgethey develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the mea-sure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service.

What would the kind of university look like in which Nietzsches understanding of the human being took hold, at least tacitly, of its self-understanding? This brings me to another segment of my snapshot.

(2) A university in which Nietzsches understanding of the human being took hold would be, to say the least, profoundly am-bivalent about itselfand remember, the best strategies to cope with ambivalence in matters of substance and teleology is quantifi-cation or metrics, instrumentalization, and management. It would also be a place in which philosophy would share an unequivocally marginal position with the other humanities, in which what once were the liberal arts would be characterized by curricular frag-mentation and even disarray, and a place in which the biotechno-


logical sciences would display an almost uncontrollableshould I say cancerous?growth. Such a universityI put the word into quotation markswould be first and foremost a highly sophisti-cated problem-solving machine at the service of those who are able and willing to pay for its services. To put it in different, more positive, that is, Benthamian terms: The late-modern research universities as they can be found across the globe are by and large institutions geared first and foremost to producing knowledge by way of highly specialized research (primarily in the natural and medical sciences), knowledge that is meant to serve interests that almost exclusively arise from the practical and technical needs and demands of the kinds of societies in which these universities are located. In a secondary way, these universities are geared to communicate this knowledge in order to produce specific compe-tencies in their graduates. The undergraduate educationmost blatantly in Europes new Bologna systemis increasingly func-tionalized toward the acquisition of marketable skills and compe-tencies. Added to these clearly defined, specialized competencies comes to stand an equally well-defined set of so-called Rahmen-kompetenzen, framework competencies. For it must be ensured that future Einsteins, Hawkings, Wittgensteins, Habermases and Auerbachs know how to lead effective small-group discussions, can organize laboratory teams, and prepare compelling Power-Point presentations.

It was none other than Newman, who in his lectures on The Scope and Nature of the Universitylectures more relevant than ever, I dare saymore than 150 years ago anticipated the specter of the late-modern research university. He discerns its seed in the scientific method of another of its founding fathersFrancis Bacon.

I cannot deny [Bacon] has abundantly achieved what he proposed. His is simply a Method whereby bodily discomforts and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed from the greatest number; and already, before it has shown any signs of exhaustion, the gifts of nature, in their most

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artificial shapes and luxurious profusion and diversity, from all quarters of the earth, are, it is undeniable, by its means brought even to our doors, and we rejoice in them.5

But in the course of 150 years since Newmans rather friendly characterization of the Baconian university, things have become considerably graver. For late modernity, that is, a thoroughly sec-ularized and increasingly fragmented modernity, has now lost its optimistic lan and instead has become tired and cynical. In the agonistic world of irresistibly corruptible, interminably quarrelling, and tirelessly consuming bodies, hence a world in which the great-est dangers are disease, litigation, and the inability to consume, the hierarchy of university sciences stands in service of the avoidance of these evils: at the top stands the medical school supported by all the auxiliary biosciences, followed by the law school and the business school supported by their respective auxiliary sciences, first and foremost computer science and mathematics, but also any useful remnants of the liberal arts. And since it has been discovered that allegedly religious practices might contribute to health and longev-ity, the gods are making a come-back, of sortsnow as an appendix to the medical school!

It is in light of these recent developments that the warning of Pope Benedict XVIhimself a long-time university professor and profoundly committed to this unique institution of higher learn-inghas an especially salient and sobering ring. The following is part of a speech that the Pope had prepared in January of 2008 for the Roman university La Sapienza (once the Popes own university in Rome, now a secular Roman university), a speech that, however, never was delivered because in the last moment the university ad-ministration withdrew the invitation. Here is the pertinent passage, however:

The danger for the western worldto speak only of thisis that today, precisely because of the greatness of his knowl-edge and power, man will fail to face up to the question of the


truth. This would mean at the same time that reason would ultimately bow to the pressure of interests and the attrac-tion of utility, constrained to recognize this as the ultimate criterion. To put it from the point of view of the structure of the university: there is a danger that philosophy, no longer considering itself capable of its true task, will degenerate into positivism; and that theology, with its message addressed to reason, will be limited to the private sphere of a more or less numerous group. Yet if reason, out of concern for its alleged purity, becomes deaf to the great message that comes to it from Christian faith and wisdom, then it withers like a tree whose roots can no longer reach the waters that give it life. It loses the courage for truth and thus becomes not greater but smaller.6

What the Pope indicts here is the unexamined negative framework of a secular reason, uncritically reductive and in the end unscientific because unhistorical and antihermeneutical, as the everyday default working paradigm for the self-understanding of the university qua university. It is interestingto say the leastthat the Popes con-cern is echoed in unexpected and surprising ways among those of the postmodern avant-garde who have come to realize that secular reason is a figment unable to account for itself let alone the com-prehensive nature of the university as universitas.

Now to the final segment of my snapshot of the late-modern research university.

(3) Stanley Fish, once upon a time chair of the English depart-ment at Duke and now a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University in Miami, recently introduced and dis-cussed a noteworthy book by University of San Diego Warren Dis-tinguished Professor of Law Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Reason. Stanley Fish and Steven Smith attempt to break open from the inside what Charles Taylor once aptly called the citadel of modern secular reason. In his book Smith argues that there are no secular reasons . . . of the kind that could justify a decision to take

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one course of action rather than another. Consider Fishs apt sum-mary of Smiths argument.

Secular reason cant do its own self-assigned jobof describ-ing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projectswithout importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain. While secular dis-course, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experi-ments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to.7

Now, in a certain way, this is not surprising under the conditions of the modern dismissal of ontological and moral teleology. This pro-found incapability is in fact just what we should expect from secu-lar reason and a university committed to it. But there is a deeper and more unsettling problemthe self-deception of secular reason about its own sleight of hand. Consider again Fish on Smiths book:

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How does it manage? By smuggling, Smith answers. The secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anywaybut only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to. The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include notions about a pur-posive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian final causes or a providential design, all banished from secular


discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a directionto even get startedwe have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversationsto introduce them incog-nito under some sort of secular disguise.8 Fishs analysis of Smiths argument rings true. For every university reflects unavoidably to at least some degree the culture it arises from and operates in. The late-modern research university has to a large degree embraced the assumptions of secular reason and is committed to serving an alleg-edly shared, non-partisan discourse of public reason,with its many unquestionable and indeed staggering accomplishments. This, how-ever, is an illusion and for that a disastrous one. For inside the self-imposed limitations of secular reason the university qua university becomes unintelligible to itself. All it can be for secular reason is a convenient agglomeration of facilities and competencies proxi-mate to each other, branded and marketed under one single name, but each receiving its justification in light of distinct and largely incommensurable needs from vastly varied segments of advanced, diversified, and technologically driven society. Secular reason has intentionally cut itself off from the intellectual and moral sources that would allow it to acknowledge and advance the overarching te-leology that gives intrinsic value to the university as such: the mind being ordered to truth and the corresponding search for truth and the ordering of these truthswhich is the task of wisdom.

In the same speech for Romes La Sapienza University, Benedict pointed to the self-deception of secular reason. If our culture seeks only to build itself on the basis of the circle of its own argumenta-tion, on what convinces it at the time, and ifanxious to preserve its secularismit detaches itself from its life-giving roots, then it will not become more reasonable or purer, but will fall apart and disintegrate.9 Like late-modern society, the late-modern research university lives from intellectual and moral sources it cannot ac-count for, let alone produce. The universitys third dimension,

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however, seems to depend precisely on such intellectual and moral sources.

II. What Is the Universitys Third Dimension About?

The third dimension is the unifying dimension that offers an inte-grative and ordered view of the first two dimensions and hence en-ables coherence, order and evaluationand pedagogically paideia. It is the dimension of meta-science, of a unifying and integrating inquiry that transcends each particular science and the acquiring of specific competencies. It is an inquiry that attends to the whole, to the order and coherence of all sciences, to their governing prin-ciples and hence to the university as a self-conscious and coher-ent search for truth and wisdom, forming an ellipsis around two foci: the universe and the human being. The third dimension, the depth-dimension, offers internal coherence to a university educa-tion and realizes the university in a strong and proper sense. What-ever makes a university still a somewhat, even marginally, coherent reality is parasitical on this third, depth dimension. Inasmuch as the late-modern research university embraces secular reason as its dominant mode of self-understanding and of mediation, it closes itself off from this third dimension and restricts itself to the two-dimensional plane of the production of knowledge. I would like to highlight two features of this third dimension by way of a philo-sophical observation and a theological reminder.

a philosophical observation

First the philosophical observation that brings me again to Fishs interpretation of Smiths The Disenchantment of Secular Reason.

Smith does not claim to be saying something wholly new. He cites David Humes declaration that by itself reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question, and Alas-dair MacIntyres description in After Virtue of modern secular


discourse as consisting of the now incoherent fragments of a kind of reasoning that made sense on older metaphysical as-sumptions. And he might have added Augustines observation in De Trinitate that the entailments of reason cannot unfold in the absence of a substantive proposition they did not and could not generate.10

In this pregnant passage, as well as elsewhere in his essay, Fish seems to suggest the return of metaphysics by way of the resurgence of two ultimately irrepressible realities: teleology and the transcen-dence of human reason. What is he gesturing toward? Instead of entering a protracted discussion of these deep matters, let me take a shortcut by offering two citations as placeholders. First, MacIntyre says in God, Philosophy, Universities that the ends of education . . . can be correctly developed only with reference to the final end of hu-man beings and the ordering of the curriculum has to be an order-ing to that final end. We are able to understand what the university should be, only if we understand what the universe is.11 In short, if the university is to be coherently a university in the full sense of the term, it needs to embark upon inquiries that depend upon principles that secular reason can neither produce nor account for.

What is even more important to realize is that, arguably, the full recovery of a meta-scientific inquiry is correlated to an equally full recovery of genuine academic freedom. In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the German philosopher Josef Pieper reminds us of this all-important correlation.

Strictly speaking, a claim for academic freedom can only ex-ist when the academic itself is realized in a philosophical way. And this is historically the reason: academic freedom has been lost, exactly to the extent that the philosophic character of academic study has been lost, or, to put it another way, to the extent that the totalitarian demands of the working world have conquered the realm of the university. Here is where the metaphysical roots of the problem lie: the politicization

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is only a symptom and consequence. And indeed, it must be admitted here that this is nothing other than the fruit . . . of philosophy itself, of modern philosophy!12

Instead of modern philosophy, Pieper could as well have said secu-lar reason. His point is that true academic freedom is a freedom that is realized fully in the universitys third dimension, a dimen-sion that is accessible from each university discipline. Differently put, the integrating and ordering function of the third dimension is not extrinsically imposed upon the various academic disciplines but arises from what Pieper calls the philosophical character of academic study per se by way of which each discipline transcends itself in the very pursuit of its distinct subject matter.

the theological reminder

Now from the philosophical observation to the theological re-minder. The theological reminder is simply this: the universitys third dimension flourishes to the fullest if enlightened from above. As long as God is the end of the pursuit of wisdom and theology, natural and revealed, is the capstone of the university disciplines, then the third dimension will never collapse, and the university will remain universitas in the full sense of the term. It was this theo-logical reminder that has kept premodern Christian universities aware of the fact that the primordial human estrangement from God is a fundamental estrangement that left a wound in the hu-man being, a wound that affected the will most strongly of all hu-man faculties. In light of the knowledge that the third dimension yields, Newman in his typically succinct way formulates a serious reservation that indicates the limitations of even the best kind of university education one can hope for, the best kind yielded by a university whose third dimension is in full bloom, so to speak. I cite again from his 1852 Dublin lectures, The Scope and Nature of University Education.


Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, how-ever profound, gives no command over the passions, no in-fluential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. . . . Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man. . . . Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.13

On one level, the most fundamental one from a theological point of view, Newman is right: liberal education is meant not for the culti-vation of saints, but for the cultivation of the intellect; the univer-sity is meant for the excellence that characterizes the intellect, and not for the excellence that characterizes the saint. The gentleman Newman invokes should, I think, be understood as an intellectually well formed and socially competent person. But here I think New-man is granting a point tacitly that at other instances in his work he was willing to support explicitly: that paideia, the formation of character, is integral to a university education. For, arguably, the formation of intellectual virtues occurs best in conjunction with the formation of character; differently put: a deficient or absent charac-ter formation complicates and even obstructs the proper formation of the intellectual virtues.

Because the virtues of the mindthe development of which is integral to the universitys third dimensioncannot be divorced from the formation of character, that is, the formation in the moral virtues, we can now specify more clearly the twofold way in which the university matters, especially after the disenchantment of secu-lar reason. This brings me to the final part of my article.

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III. What It Means to Reclaim the Universitys Third Dimension: Leisure, Paideia, and Genuine Academic Freedom

I do not indulge in the illusion that one can save the university in one sabbatical, let alone in the course of a single article. But one can begin to think in different ways about different things and ask different questions. The university is a privileged place, a precious institution, and it is a great honor to teach in this institution: it is an institution that matters greatly, but cut off from its own intellectual and historical roots, from normative philosophical and theological traditions, it has largely forgotten why it actually matters. It matters because of the truth and because the human being is made for the truth. That is the surpassing dignity of the human being in which the dignity of the university participates. To ask secular reasons dismis-sive question, What is truth? is to lose the dignity of the human being as well as the dignity of the university.

What would it mean to recover this dignity in full? As I men-tioned in my introduction, two practices are essential for its full de-velopment and flourishing: leisure or schol and paideia. The practice of leisure has as its intrinsic end the integration of the sciences, the contemplation of the whole, in short, the search for wisdom. The practice of leisure is the only practice that allows for something like the self-reflexivity of the university as university. (The integration thus brought is, however, radically different from the kind of in-terdisciplinarity that is meant to produce just another kind of data, another kind of useful knowledge to be applied here or there).

Second, the practice of paideia aims at an integral human forma-tion of character, the formation of the intellectual virtues in con-junction with a development of the moral virtues. There is no paid-eia without leisure, and true leisure flourishes in paideia.

Let me turn to paideia first and begin with an unlikely voice of concern. In his 2004 novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe offers a trenchant expos of contemporary American university life that only seems to confirm Newmans position about contending against


the passion and the pride of man. While describing the drug-abuse, alcoholism, and sexual promiscuity that characterizes late-modern secular American college and university life, Wolfe clearly also seems to expect more from colleges and universities than simply to mimic the cultural and moral destitution of the wider society. In a con-versation with an interviewer, Wolfe said that he deplored the fact that with a few exceptions, universities have totally abandoned the idea of strengthening character.14 Are Wolfes expectations of the late-modern university hopelessly naive, outmoded, and ultimately utopian or might they reflect some understanding of the connection between character formation and the pursuit of wisdom?

It is noteworthy and should give those who care about these mat-ters pause that on this very point the Thomist students of Aristotle and the Augustinian students of Plato are in full agreement, and that, therefore, Benedict shares Tom Wolfes expectations of charac-ter formation to be an integral component of a university education that deserves that name. On September 27, 2009, in his address to representatives of the members of the academic community of the ancient Charles University in Prague, Benedict states: From the time of Plato, education has been not merely the accumulation of knowledge or skills, but paideia, human formation in the treasures of an intellectual tradition directed to a virtuous life. . . . The idea of an integrated education, based on the unity of knowledge grounded in truth, must be regained.15How such paideia is exactly to be un-derstood needs further development. What seems obvious is that in order to engage in the pursuit of the unity of knowledgewis-domone must be formed in those intellectual virtues requisite for such a pursuit to be successful. Less obvious is the correlation between the formation of the intellectual virtues and the formation of the moral virtues. In Aquinass doctrine of the cardinal virtues, prudence holds a principal position, for it is the one intellectual virtue that cannot be without moral virtue.16 Hence, like Newman, Aquinas can also account for the brilliant scoundrel. For prudence does not belong to those intellectual virtues that perfect the specu-

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lative intellect for the consideration of truth. But, unlike Newman, classical paideia and also Thomas expect from a university education more than the perfection of the strictly intellectual virtues; for the end of a proper liberal arts education is the pursuit of wisdom. And the pursuit of wisdom entails not only the refinement of habits of thought but also of habits of action; for both pertain to the end of the human being. It is for this reason that paideia is integral to the pursuit of wisdom. And since prudence is the intellectual virtue that perfects reason pertaining to things to be done,17 the practice of paideia entails first and foremost the formation of prudence.

Paideia entails also the formation of other virtues such as truth-fulness, studiousness, persistence, humility, collegialityordered and structured by temperance, that is, self-restraint, as well as by courage and justice. But what correlates paideia to the other central practice, leisure, is indeed prudence. Here we have the virtue that integrates both core practices of the universitys third dimension into the concrete life of each studentand for that matter, of each professor, too.

Which brings us finally to the practice of leisure or scholethe practice of a non-productive productivity. Differently put, the pro-ductivity in which leisure reaches its termcontemplationre-mains essentially intrinsic to the practice of leisure. It cannot be functionalized for some extrinsic purpose. As such, leisure is the soul, the life principle of the university. Where schole is gone, pai-deia will not occur. Where the practice of leisure is gone, and with it contemplation, meta-scientific inquiry is also lacking. In God, Phi-losophy, Universities, MacIntyre puts the matter most succinctly. To whom . . . in such a university falls the task of integrating the vari-ous disciplines, of considering the bearing of each on the others, and of asking how each contributes to the overall understanding of the nature and order of things? The answer is No one, but even this answer is misleading. For there is no sense in the contempo-rary American university that there is such a task, that something that matters is being left undone. And so the very notion of the


nature and order of things, of a single universe, different aspects of which are objects of enquiry for the various disciplines, but in such a way that each aspect needs to be related to every other, this notion no longer informs the enterprise of the contemporary American university. It has become an irrelevant concept.18 Is the practice of leisure and its intrinsic end, contemplation, a waste of time? It is exactly that. As Pieper has forcefully reminded us, leisure is the basis of culture. Without leisure, without that waste of time that escapes metric functionalization and managerial manipulation, in short, without the excess that contemplation always is, the universi-ty and the research it undertakes and the education it offers will be nothing but two-dimensional, that is, as flat as the blade of a circular saw, providing many cutting edges but no depth, or as ineffective as the razor scraping character from the rock. What gives a university and a university education depth and its unique dignity is what is in excess of usefulness (what the ancients would call servility). The artes liberales carry their end in themselves. And as such they always indicate the nature of genuine academic freedom. It is the practice of leisure, however, that enables regular academic freedom to be realized as a freedom for excellence, which is nothing but a freedom for contemplation. I would hope that some of the Catholic colleges and universities in America at least will not only be found among those institutions of higher learning that defend the univer-sitys third dimension but be first and foremost among those eager to return to this third dimension its original dignity and splendor.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered on April 4, 2011, at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. I am grateful to Don Briel, director of the Catholic studies program, for the invitation, and to him and the colleagues from the Catholic studies program and the department of theology for their splendid hospitality and numerous engaging conversations.

2. American Association of Universities, White Paper, http://www.aau.edu /research/article.aspx?id=4670.

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3. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philo-sophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 95.

4. Benedict Ashley, The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduc-tion to Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 20.

5. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse V, 8, http://www .newmanreader.org.

6. Benedict XVI, Lecture by the Holy Father Benedict XVI at the University of Rome La Sapienza, http://www.vatican.va.

7. Stanley Fish, Are There Any Secular Reasons? http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes .com/2010/02/22/are-there-secular-reasons/?/.

8. Ibid. 9. Benedict XVI, La Sapienza, http://www.vatican.va. 10. Fish, Secular Reasons? 11. MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 95. 12. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 75. 13. Newman, Idea, Discourse V, 9. 14. Tom Wolfe, quoted in Mary Ann Glendon, Off at College, First Things 150 (Febru-

ary 2005), 41. 15. Benedict XVI, Meeting with Members of the Academic Community, Address of the

Holy Father, Vladislav Hall in the Prague Castle, September 27, 2009. 16. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 58, a. 5. 17. ST I, q. 57, a. 5. 18. MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 16.

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