Dissolution

Could colleges and universities eventually be reduced to ruins?

Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, there was one common understanding, in the United States at least: a college education is a good thing. Returning soldiers took advantage of the original GI Bill, and their children took advantage of what was, for a time, a very affordable college education (at least at public colleges and universities). One result was the greatest economic boom in the nation’s history, but another was its most educated public. It would be hard for anyone back in the 1980's, (to pick a decade) to imagine a time when college attendance wasn’t a reachable ideal and an unquestioned good for anyone who could manage it.

Today, college education is questioned on every front; tuition has risen dramatically, and pundits — who take for granted that the best way to measure the value of something is in the increased earning power it confers — declare that a useful trade-school education would be a much better deal. We’re told that we have to let go of the idea that college is for everyone, as pressure mounts on public institutions (public in name only, as decades of cuts by state legislatures have meant that most state colleges and universities receive less than 1/3 of their funding from the state). Even those who talk up the importance of college are insisting on “accountability,” which means endless rounds of assessments and measurements of “outcomes” even the supposedly liberal President Obama, and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, wax ecstatic talking up their plans for cradle-to-grave tracking of the correlatrion between education and earnings.

But in the midst of this neo-utilitarian fervor, something has been forgotten. As Mark Thomason wrote in a comment on a recent New York Times editorial,

I send my kids to college as a growth experience. It changes them, in good ways. I hope they do well financially, but I am not sending them to a trade school, I’m sending them to complete their education and complete growing up. It did me a lot of good, and it is doing them a lot of good.

The only difficulty is that this good — which I agree is the most important aspect of a college education — is very diffult to quantify. It doesn’t necessarily lead to higher earnings; those who are inspired by their college experience to undertake creative careers in the arts, or work for a better society, often find they’re earning a great deal less. But their personal satisfaction, and benefits to the world of their labors, though not necessarily tangible or measurable, are certainly vital.

All this puts me in mind of a much earlier moment when a large number of institutions whose work was universally understood as contributing to the greater good came under government pressure to prove that worth. Secured for centuries in beautiful gothic buildings, supplied with dormitories for their residents, dining halls for their meals, and chapels for their worship, the inhabitants of these institutions little dreamt that, in a few short years, their buildings would be reduced to roofless rubble — and by their own king. Thomas Cromwell (yes, that one — whose villainy is deliciously revisited in Hilary Mantel’s recent novels) sent out “visitors” to investigate the practices at these places, and the reports that came back were damning: the people there were not following their own rules, they were living lives of suspicious comfort, and worse yet — by providing spiritual services to their neighbors, they were perpetuating false superstitions and scurrilous beliefs.

The king, Henry VIII, used these reports as the justification for what would, earlier in his own reign, have been an unthinkable act. He, with the collusion of Parliament and a few strokes of a pen, dissolved all the monsateries of England, seized their buildings and properties, and sent troops to round up the valuables. The golden altar furniture and books were added to the King’s own collections, while the buildings and land were given to his political allies as their personal estates. The monks and nuns were supposed to receive pensions, but there seems no record of many, perhaps any, actually collecting them. What the King’s men left behind, local villagers pillaged, finding new uses for door-hinges and window glass. The lead that had protected the roofs was removed and hauled away (it being a valuable metal at the time), and before long, the unprotected beams and boards rotted and collapsed.

To add to the irony, some of the funds raised by some these closures were used to fund colleges and endowments, including what later became Christ Church at Oxford.

I know it sounds crazy — how could such a thing happen today? But I think it’s a cautionary tale, especially for a population which seems unable to resist the siren-song of mere utilitarian value.