This third essay in our series on the question “What is Education?” is by Elizabeth Corey, Director of Baylor University’s Honors Program since 2015. She is also Associate Professor of Political Science and has taught courses at Baylor on political science, great texts, and in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. She is the author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics and has published numerous articles in First Things, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, and a variety of scholarly journals. She is also a well-respected teacher and has been both a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and the American Enterprise Institute’s Values and Capitalism Visiting Professor. This reflection discusses the current state of academic life in the university and the need for rhythmic deliberation, thoughtful rest, and even physical health to make the intellectual life worthwhile. When you’ve finished reading the essay, please feel free to to “like” it, comment on it, and share it with others.
On the Intellectual Life in 2022
Over the past few weeks, I have had several conversations with bright, high-achieving students at my university. These discussions have focused on a common set of problems. Two young women told me about their desires to exit the science-heavy pre-med tracks they have been on for the past few years. This is not because they are failing but precisely because they are succeeding. The soul-crushing demands and competitiveness of the program have become unsustainable. Another young man wants to approach computer science not as focused vocational training but as a liberal art. He sees coding and design as things of beauty, but he feels pressured to make all his studies “practical.” Last week, an entire seminar class confessed that they feel overwhelmed by the unending calls for achievement that come with being a college student at present. Everyone is tired, stressed, overworked, and compulsively busy. Nobody knows what to do about it. They all sense that something is not right.
I am not so different from these students. Like them, I take satisfaction in completing tasks and in the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing hard things. I count the day as successful if I have drawn lines through some or most of the tasks on my multiple to-do lists. I like my house clean and my laundry finished, deadlines met and children’s homework completed. I am the very model of the Real Simple professional woman, whose goal in life is to “balance” work and family, keep chaos at bay, and decorate my house with classic yet fashionable furniture and accessories.
I also know this is no way to live. Bacon’s famous insight, “[t]o spend too much time in studies is Sloth,” applies to many other things besides study. Sloth here is not exactly laziness; it is inattention to the things one ought to be doing at any given moment. It is a turning away from our most essential being, a refusal to discover and enact our talents in the service of God and other people. Sloth is the constant companion of all busyness. How often am I extraordinarily “productive” while putting off the single task that is actually difficult, actually meaningful? I pay bills and clean the kitchen as a way of avoiding the one endeavor that requires undivided attention and insight. In this sense I am slothful: I lack discipline and do not do what I should.
Often we keep busy because we do not know how to rest, to enjoy leisure, or to live in the present. This problem has existed for a very long time, but it is magnified in our moment. Busyness is deemed praiseworthy in itself; personal value is marked by being in demand; we do more than we should because we do not know how to say no. We then sacrifice the kinds of fulfillment that come with rest and contemplation. We do not understand or appreciate leisure in its full sense, nor have we practiced it. Like someone who signs up for a race but has never tried running, we succumb to pain and cramping within the first mile and decide that the whole enterprise is miserable and pointless. We return to the endless round of diversion that occupied us at first.
This situation is problematic for anyone, but especially for Christians, and particularly for those young Christians who find themselves at universities. Contemporary university culture—including Christian university culture—prioritizes relentless work, outstanding achievement, excellence, and high grades. The focus is on the future prospects of students—the myriad ways they will change the world, advance social justice, do “kingdom work,” make an impact, change lives, win one for humanity, reach higher, stretch further, and push boundaries. Most of this, of course, is nonsense, but apparently such public exhortations are required in our age of slogans.
This busy achievement culture fails to consider the fulfillment and happiness of individual students, and we as teachers and administrators are very much to blame. We assign inordinate amounts of work, tell them that every grade matters, hold them to standards they can never meet, and then wonder why they become anxious and depressed. The intellectual life is no longer a joy but a burden. It is a forced march through fall and spring semesters until students can breathe in the summer—though not for long, because they need to shadow a doctor or accept a Washington, D.C. internship. It is, to quote Hobbes, a “perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”
Perhaps this assessment might appear too pessimistic. “But what about excellence?” one might wonder. Surely there is joy to be found in study, and pursuing an interest to its fullest extent can yield excellence in thinking and doing. Yes—it does, and it can. But our institutions are not fostering this. Instead, everything in college is done for an extrinsic purpose, for the future, and to prepare for the next step, which by definition is never right in front of us. Rest and leisure seem like time wasted, not time well-used. There is no interval, no interim period, during which students can put their practical concerns aside to focus on learning, in leisure, with time to themselves for sustained thought.
If all of this is true, then what is to be done? I do not think the answer lies in superficial fixes like more mental health counselors or more time devoted to “self-care,” that newest obsession of the privileged classes. Both of these things are good so far as they go, but they do not get to the root of the problem, which is intellectual and moral, and lies deeper in our culture. The root of the problem that almost all of us actually value other people (and ourselves) not for their intrinsic worth but instead for what they can do, for the letters after their names, for schools attended and memberships in clubs and companies, their addresses and possessions. We turn on its head the old Latin phrase, esse quam videri (to be rather than to seem). Nobody likes to admit this, and certainly Christians should find it shameful. Still, I cannot count the number of times I have heard a Christian academic say—as if to assure someone’s existential quality—“well, you know, her PhD is from Yale,” with a knowing glance.
We ought to know better, and in fact we have significant Christian intellectual resources for knowing better. In his short works, “Learning in Wartime,” and “On Living in an Atomic Age,” C.S. Lewis reminds us that we need not feel guilty about pursuing an intellectual vocation, even in the midst of a crisis, which turns out to be the permanent predicament of human life. The world may be busy and anxious all around us, but we need not always be busy and anxious ourselves. Likewise, A.G. Sertillanges’ famous book, The Intellectual Life, is a manual for ordering our lives to find time for study. And almost everything written by Josef Pieper, especially Leisure the Basis of Culture, reminds readers of what leisure really is and why it matters in a life well lived. All these authors recognize the difficulty of escaping our busy world, but they are not at all confused about the value of doing so.
The members of my seminar class who admitted their exhaustion were doing so in direct response to Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life. They said they felt “convicted” by his critique of their passionate and distracted lives: their pride, their laziness, their inability to sit quietly alone in a room. They agreed that meaningful intellectual work requires escape from the “wretched preoccupation with self” and the “passion, vanity, ambition” and “vain desire to please” that motivate so many of us.
Yet passions are only one of the obstacles that must be overcome in pursuit of an intellectual life. Just as important is to “slacken the tempo of [one’s] life,” to graciously decline invitations, to take on only obligations that are really meaningful and suited to our gifts. “Society life is fatal to study,” Sertillanges writes. We must also engage in reading, watching and listening with intentionality and discernment. Sertillanges even takes physical health into account: we must sleep, eat and exercise if we wish to fulfill our intellectual potential. In general, we must simplify our lives as much as possible. Even the things “one cannot get rid of outwardly, one can always remove from one’s soul.”
All this preliminary work is crucial for university students because it prepares them to approach their studies in a different spirit. It is crucial for their teachers too, if we want to escape the treadmill existence of learning only for the sake of the constantly receding future. At those rare times when we have left the treadmill behind, how wonderful it is to read and think, to consider the connections between things, the ways diverse authors see aspects of life in related ways, and to see our own lives through different lenses. In doing this, we are opening ourselves toward discovery not just of external happenings but of ourselves.
As Montaigne observes, one of the greatest things in the world “is to know how to belong to ourselves.” This is is the most valuable result of intellectual inquiry. One learns, as Sertillanges puts it, “the discipline you are capable of, the sacrifice you can make . . . the public you can serve. Take the measure of all these things with humility and confidence,” and then, “throw yourself with your whole heart into your task.” This most important inquiry requires quiet, leisure, insight, sensibility developed over time—not hurried, frenetic work aimed at extrinsic ends.
How might we convey this “countercultural” understanding of college life to a world that does not value it? The only way, I think, is to present it to students in the words of its greatest expositors and to show that it is a coherent way of living. As I have said, Christians—and particularly those in study centers and in Christian colleges and universities—have excellent resources for this. We must recognize that it will initially seem strange: intellectual inquiry not for a grade? Reading when we might otherwise be engaged in social service or moneymaking? Conversation without an extrinsic purpose? Yes, to all those things! And let us also recognize our insistent focus on the future, which is a waste of the life we have been given so generously by a God who takes us just as we are, right now.
Superb, as usual with Professor Corey. As a college professor and father of three adult children -- one still in college -- I have thought about this cluster of questions a great deal in recent years. One thing I get stuck on -- hinted at by Emily Wenneborg's comments -- is data suggesting that college students spend significantly less time studying than they did in past generations. Here is a comparison between 1961 and 2003: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/61383/why-has-the-time-spent-studying-declined-so-sharply-in-the-united-states-over-th. I doubt that the trend has been reversed in the two decades since 2003. Professor Corey isn't suggesting that we cut back on the reading or problem sets we assign; her point is broader. I'd suggest that a healthy countercultural change would actually include more study and less of the other things -- particularly on-line social activity -- that consume students' time.
An excellent essay, and very consistent with the emerging vision of Pascal Study Center (the Christian study center I lead at the University of Illinois). I’m reminded (Montaigne quote notwithstanding) of Alan Noble’s recent book You Are Not Your Own, and of course of Pascal himself. I especially appreciate the idea that rest is a muscle we must (paradoxically!) learn to exercise.
I do wonder about the claim that college teachers assign too much work. We’ve seen plenty of historical syllabi that suggest otherwise. I suspect it is rather that students come to university with so many other things going on in their lives. The college years are no longer a closely guarded oasis from other cares (and insofar as this corresponds with the expansion of access to college beyond the leisure class, it is a good thing). So the work assigned is “too much” relative to the new realities of students’ lives, not in an absolute sense.
Of course it is also possible, and I have seen it happen, that instructors shift from assigning a few, high value assignments to many smaller and less impactful assignments. While this creates more (busy)work for students and can quickly overwhelm any time for reflection, it also is (seems?) easier to grade. So the shift to quickly completed and quickly graded assignments may be a response to teachers’ own feelings of overwork.