Silent Spring: An Old Purpose for the Modern University

By: Michael Kimmage

Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and serves as chair of the History Department, specializing in the history of the United States, Europe, and Russia. He is the author of several books, most recently The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy.

Universities are medieval institutions in origin, though for most modern universities the religious purpose that they once served is no longer fundamental. It may linger on in Latin or Hebrew mottos, but religious piety and theological inquiry are not at the core of what most professors and students now wish to do. Medieval elements persist in the architecture of many universities: in the “quad” that can be found at the physical center of many college campuses and in the collegiate gothic, a style that was especially popular in the United States in the 1920s, leaving its mark on Yale, Duke and many other universities. At graduation, gestures toward the medieval pre-history of the modern university proliferate, from the granting of degrees to the wearing of robes.

Whatever medieval vestiges remain, the medieval university’s notion of the good life is no longer operative. It cannot be said that that twenty-first century university is divinely inspired, that its students enter in – as students – in pursuit of revelation, of God or of the religious practices that might substantiate revelation and bring students closer to God. The medieval university’s notion of the good is profoundly foreign to modern higher education. The Enlightenment university, which persists, had as its highest ideal inquiry itself, and the post-Enlightenment university, which is still being born, often has politics as its highest ideal, whether that means social justice of one or another kind of political activism. The vita activa has gained on the vita contemplativa, or in universities the vita contemplativa must justify itself as the vehicle of the vita activa. One studies in order to act.

When considering its commitment to the good life, a life of moral and intellectual excellence, the modern university would do well to remember its medieval past. Medieval universities were monastic institutions designed and structured for prayer, and prayer, like many other forms of religious devotion, is often quiet. Typically done in silence, praying requires silence in order to be done. The university “quad” harkens back to the monastery cloister. The cloister’s open spaces and walkways left space for quiet. They kept the city at bay; they kept the market at bay; they kept the commotion of quotidian life at bay. This the modern university is still able to do. A once-sacred function – the provision of quiet, the gift of quiet – can be absorbed into the modern university. If so, it can help lead students toward the good life.

“The Quad” at the University of Washington (Wikimedia Commons)

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Universities (modern or otherwise) merge the virtues of the garden with the virtues of the library. The virtues of the garden do not demand complete silence. No garden is completely silent. People might walk through talking with one another, birds might sing in the air above and insects might add their hum to the background. Yet a garden is a place apart. It is nature organized into patterns and arranged not just for beauty but for thought. The symmetries and forms of well-tended gardens bring peace and clarity of mind. For college campuses that are at least in part bucolic and that have incorporated gardens into their lay-out, the possibility is always there: by design or by accident, a student can gain access to a garden’s quiet and a garden’s slowness, the changes that come to gardens with the movement of shadow and sun or with the passing of the seasons.

The library’s invitation to the good life is richer and deeper than the garden’s. Libraries have two areas of quiet. One is the stacks, the narrow and often musty rows of books that live in radical stillness. Simply by being there, the majesty of a library’s books is found in their aggregation: a thousand books on Shakespeare’s plays, a repository of erudition, a riot of interpretation, a record of meticulous compilation. In the stacks comes contact with the past, the generous bequest of books written so that they might not be forgotten in the future. The quiet in which these books are encountered invites reverence for the treasures stored in a university library, not a matter of worship and not a matter a prayer but a not fully secular state of affairs, either. Library books bespeak permanence and their permanence compensates for the fleeting days, weeks and semesters of students’ diminutive time as students.

The library’s other area of quiet are its reading rooms. The best of these rooms convey grandeur and height. Better than separating desks into cubicles are the long wooden tables that put silent readers in fellowship with one another. Solitude and quiet are not a rejection of others, a repudiation of the city and society out there beyond the university’s gates. Solitude and quiet are a rediscovery of one’s interiority, but if this rediscovery is achieved through reading then it achieved in a fellowship of minds, in the encounter of one mind with another, in the elevation of one mind by another. Solitude and silence can be communal. The heigh ceilings and open space of a true library reading room are metaphors – for the intellect’s capacity to take flight, for the intellect’s bigness, its will to grow and its inclination toward new heights. Noise distracts. It degrades concentration. Silence opens the mind, nourishing its ambitions.

Silence enables the good life to the extent that the good life is intellectual. At universities, the unit of this good life is the book, to which one is led by the garden path and which one finds at the library. Concordances, encyclopedias and dictionaries are hardly obstacles to the good life; they are its vehicles. Yet it is the living books of the past that bring students toward the good life, doing so through a contradictory set of methods: they unsettle, they sow doubt, they enrage, they shock, they challenge, they inspire, they illuminate, they refine and they create islands of affiliation and affection to which students can sail back for the rest of their lives, merely by opening once again the book that engendered their youthful affiliation and affection. The living books honor the English word education, which the English language borrowed from Latin. They lead out. They lead us out from ourselves, giving us selves that are new and giving us selves that are better.

Silence also enables the good life to the extent that silence pushes us toward moral contemplation. Whether in the garden or in the library or in some other spot, a university’s silence enshrines the ethical life. Conscience begins in silence; it begins after the fact, when there is time and occasion to reflect on one’s actions. Crime and transgression are heedless, and they thrive on rush and the fury of the unsilent life. Universities can push in the other direction – toward the considerateness of the ethical life. University silence aids in another version of ethical living. Ethics is innately complicated, innately hard to read. It tends toward paradox and is beautifully captured in parables rather than in codes and assertions. Ethics entails the weighing of one good against another: the need, say, to sustain economic growth against the need to preserve the environment. Students might figure out the right balance in vigorous debate. They will go further, though, if they think in silence about the ethical question that cannot be quickly or definitively resolved.

George Peabody Library, Johns Hopkins University (Wikimedia Commons)

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University administrators and funders face countless practical problems. They have buildings to keep up. They have salaries to pay. The have students to recruit, alumni to cultivate, and political constituencies to appease. Administrators have a tendency to speak in statistics. A university is thriving because it has taken in a certain amount of money, augmented its applications to a certain number and increased its physical plant by a certain amount. These are entirely reasonable criteria for the running of a university, but these are not the only criteria. They are the visible criteria and the measurable criteria. According to the flattering image, Caesar Augustus came to power in a Rome made of brick, and when he gave up his grip on power Rome was a city of marble. For boards of trustees and hiring committees, the ideal college president is a version of Caesar Augustus, a cross between an architect, a financier and an emperor, a maker of things.

Behind the visible criteria and the measurable criteria are the invisible and the unmeasurable criteria of university life and especially of the university’s purchase on the good life. One such criterion is its contribution to silence. If a university fails to introduce its students to silence, if it fails to encourage its students to love silence and to think and to learn in silence, it will have done less than it could to connect its students to the good life. It is insufficient for a university to be silent in some of buildings and spaces. It is insufficient for the founders of a university to have believed in silence. A university must care and continue to care about silence. To care about silence is to take the first step toward preserving and ennobling silence. Though this does not come naturally to modern universities, the modern university has within it a medieval DNA that can turn it from the din of professional advancement and from sheer business back toward the learned silence that for centuries has been the point of departure for the good life.