Latent Functions of University
One of my professors, George Feaver, once made a florid speech ranting about the bureaucratic impetus to tie education to jobs and treat University like a technical school. (He was against such a thing. He was a gadfly, our George.) He thought that an arts education was valuable in and of itself. He thought that University should be about training the mind to think, and training your self to be, in the world, both graciously and gratingly.
George was both of these qualities. He made me cry in my drinks (at 11 am; that’s how hard some mornings with him were) at the Student Union Pub after a tongue-lashing in class. He made me seek out support in more like-minded professors who had climbed up the ivory tower before me and so would know how to handle dinosaurs like him. He made me laugh in my kitchen at an unruly house party he most definitely should not have attended if he cared about his career.
And he made me a fine thinker, a better writer and a better scholar.
Because I didn’t dare show up all feminist and postmodern in his class unless prepared. So I was prepared: I could argue about his beloved Aristotle and hold my ground, because I knew the text – and the critiques – inside and out, backwards and forwards. I memorized some of the more offensive paragraphs and could cite them, verbatim, to him in the midst of an argument (and there were lots). I overwrote my essays to push him over his mark ceiling. (He loved the A minus. I suspect it physically pained him to offer an unqualified A.)
He was in love with the Socratic method. He worked the Socratic method. He was a gadfly, our George. Grating, stinging, agile, impossible to swat away.
(Another of my professors, Ken Carty, characterized George perfectly when he noted that George had a “well developed capacity for apology – he really was quite good at it, no doubt in part because he had considerable practice.”
That line was part of George’s eulogy. Feaver would have loved it.)
And Feaver’s commitment to the gadfly Socratic method was why he raged against the transformation of Academia into purposive, technical training. He wanted us to study political science because we loved it. Because it made us better. Because then we’d understand – and respect – the grand traditions that had shaped our world, our thinking, us.
But our gadfly had other theories, too. University might be a grand and weighty undertaking, but it was socially practical too. (But not in a train-you-for-occupation way. Heavens, no!)
Because university:
- functions as a marriage market
- forces you to learn how to drink, and manage alcohol
He once said that the biggest lessons you learn in four years away from home are how to manage your social life and drink responsibly. And you only learn that after you surrender to Dionysus and Bacchus, for a while.
Yep.
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Cleavage, by Kelly Diels. What is this blog all about, anyways?
On Flaws, Insecurities, Vulnerability and Why Perfection is the Enemy
