The Idea of University: TDR Interview with Fr. George Rutler

By J. Lawrence Scholer | Monday, May 13, 2002

The Reverend George Rutler '65 currently is the pastor of the Church of Our Savior in Manhattan. Rutler is the author of fifteen books on philosophy, theology, music, history and sports. He is currently working on a book about historical coincidences. He is a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a columnist for Crisis magazine. Rutler also has a weekly television program on the Eternal Word Television Network. Rutler is also a talented artist—he has exhibited his landscape paintings and played the piano for television audiences. His musical compositions have been performed at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Rutler recently visited to give a talk on the 'Idea of a University.' The lecture is a discussion of the ideal university depicted by Cardinal John Henry Newman in a series of lectures. The Dartmouth Review had an opportunity to speak with Father Rutler before his lecture.

Father George Rutler: First of all it would be very interesting to know how many undergraduates are familiar with Newman. One thing I want to mention is the lacuna, which is a polite way of saying ignorance in undergraduates today—no fault of their own. They've just been pillaged. But why don't we know about these great minds?

The Dartmouth Review: Where should undergraduates learn about these people?

GR: To go through four years of what is supposed to be a distinguished liberal arts education and not to know what a liberal education is, what the arts are, and the great theorists of liberal thought is an indictment. Why has this been lost? Well anyway, I'm just assuming things. Maybe [students] all have fondly read Aristotle and Milton, but I doubt it.

TDR: Did you learn these things when you were at Dartmouth? And, these things are taught in Newman's ideal university.

GR: Yes. I did—I mean I began. I was kind of an autodidact. But anyway. I want to talk about the idea of university. Newman gave nine lectures in 1852 in Ireland. Of course, you could give a year long series on it. I just want to mention briefly because we only have forty-five minutes [to discuss] what his purpose was. His general purpose was his basic description of the university. And it addressed three topics. One—how his view of the university colors conversation here about Dartmouth being a college or a university. And then physically, what he thinks to be the best attribute of the university was actually the way he describes Athens. But thirdly, what should we read?

TDR: You mentioned how modern universities have strayed more and more from his ideal. How did this happen?

GR: Well, it happened right at his time. In the Victorian age, you have the development of the graduate university going on the German model which is very different from the English model. The Germans had the idea of the research university and graduate degrees. The doctorate was not an English degree; the Ph. D. is a German degree. But with progressive mood and with the secularization of society in Victorian times, they wanted to remove the university from the theological focus. All the major universities, although they were deist, were still living off the form of a quasi-monastic institution. The utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham most importantly, established the University of London as a research/technical school. And Newman was very much opposed to this. He was not opposed to graduate studies or technical education, but he was opposed to technical studies replacing liberal arts in the formation of the man.

TDR: How would that have developed the United States where many of the earlier schools were not Catholic institutions or really in a quasi-monastic form?

GR: Well, they were still living off of that model of the classical tradition of the virtues and the theological commitment to obedience to the formation of the soul as distinguishable from the material man. Look at all the mottos of the colleges. Technically, the first university [in the U.S.] was Johns Hopkins—it was the first to give doctorates.

TDR: What lead to the adoption of the doctoral study by all the other universities?

GR: Basically, I think it was the development of the physical sciences [needing] some system of accreditation. But that largely happened after the first World War. You could count on your left hand of course in the middle of the Nineteenth century the number of Ph. D.'s in the country granted each year, and I think, until about the first World War, there were only about 400 doctorates granted in the U.S. each year.

TDR: What did you study while at Dartmouth? What would you recommend to today's students?

GR: I studied history. The two most important things to study would be history and philosophy. History, of course, you have to be judicious with because it's such a hot potato because it is so easily polemicized. Ideally, philosophy would be taught but I think we have very few people competent to teach it properly so I think it would probably be self-defeating to teach it. You can't properly know philosophy without a good classical and scholastic foundation and that's usually not taught. Most philosophy courses are exercises in brain death now.

TDR: How would you suggest students deal with these problems? You know if you're going to major in history, you're going to have to face these types of problems at some point. If you're going to major in philosophy you're going to face these problems. You can only be so selective about choosing your courses.

GR: I think there's a parallel to that in the church and seminaries. You have a younger generation of seminarians who join the seminaries for different reasons. They tend to be more traditional, conservative, and they face faculties that are largely deconstuctionists. And because they have that primary commitment and focus, they must be judicious in knowing what to say and what not to say, but also knowing where there are reliable sources. Now that's what Newman touches on. The essence of liberal education is teaching how to think more than what to think. It's much easier now than, I think, in the past times because you have much more access—everything from the library to computers and all that. You have the whole world as university. The thing is you have all this information out there but you have to know how to find it. And it's the same thing in university studies.

TDR: Some students they may come here and not be familiar with various schools of thought. And they'll get a professor who indoctrinates them, and students accept just that. They'll be told something and they'll believe it because that's the only thing they've ever been exposed to.

GR: One has to read constantly. And preferably with few exceptions I would read very little after the Sixteenth century. You have to get your basics, right? You can't eat your dessert before you have the meat.

TDR: So who would you start with?

GR: Well, first of all, you have to use languages. You're reading the Reader's Digest version if you're reading translation. It's impractical if you're going to be able to read the entire books in the original language. But a child should have a foundation in the classical languages. It teaches you how to observe different ways of thinking. The sentence structures are different. What does that mean about how people view things? So that helps break down cultural provincialism. You're opened to a whole different world there. I have to laugh at a lot of politically correct people who talk about third world and anti-imperialism, and they are the most culturally imperialistic of all in that sense. They don't speak anything except English, and they speak that very badly.

TDR: Classics, though, is not immune to things like deconstructionism. Those things are popular and stylish now.

GR: But that can be shot out of the water by anybody who has had the rudiments. I think in a way it's very healthy because these absurdities expose the fallacy of the little contempt for the authentic text. There's nothing wrong with reading it. You have to know something in order to criticize it. But it's very difficult if you have information without sources. One of the great gifts of the classics is the introduction in our culture to the life of the virtues, the classical concept of the virtuous man. Alone in our civilization, we intuited to some degree the whole concept of prudence, discernment, equanimity, phronasis? This was the favorite word of Newman. Phronasis—wisdom in the sense of discernment is more than one is absorbed, the discriminating faculty of the mind. And classical formation countered the indifferentist's subjective approach to the truth. This is something that Newman was battling in his own day in which he talks about the spirit of liberalism. And there are two kinds of liberalism. He talks about liberal education, but there's another kind of liberalism. And when he's made a Cardinal he says as an old man he spent his entire life fighting the spirit of liberalism in religion which is indifferentism with subjectivism. And, of course, he saw it coming, and we inherited it—denial basically of the objective truth. The classical mind contradicts that, even the atomists when they talk about self-appropriation truth. They have a skill of recognizing truth as something beyond themselves. And we've lost that. It's hard to believe, but we've lost it. [Newman] believed that the university should be a place for the free exchange of ideas. Today, it is very hard to have scholarly debate. If you're a subjectivist, all debate is unholy now; it's not ad rem.

TDR: What are some of the key classical works to read?

GR: As much Herodotus as possible. The Metaphysics. Aristotle. Everything else is commentary, I think. Historical narratives. Caesar. The Ciceronic Letters. But the Platonic dialogue is the forerunner of what Newman is dealing with when he's trying to define modern university. He stood in awe of the peripatetics. See, you have to remember that Newman was part of the reform movement in his early years himself in Oxford. In his early days when he was a student, the place was falling apart not unlike schools today. The revival of the tutorials sort of becomes rudimentary. And that helps what we were talking about before—guide the students into right thought. Go to lectures, but to tutor them, and advise them as to what to read, whose lectures to hear. Now again it's a matter of the right tutor. But Newman says in the conjugal sense that you cannot really teach. The one we call the teacher exposes the students to facts, directs them. I think he would say that that is one of the damages done by the technical university—there is very little formation in the minds, the communication of information, the little training in how to think. And there is very little freedom on the part of the student to analyze and discern and to choose.

TDR: Did you learn how to think when you were at Dartmouth?

GR: I was very na've. I played ball and was involved in all things. But I think I learned more outside the classroom. I learned more from the personalities of the professors—very important as a role model in the formation of character. And I think we could use a little emphasis on that in the courses so that we could focus on character. One reason undergraduates are so fascinated with characters, eccentrics, you know, is because they are fascinated with personalities.

The Idea of University: TDR Interview with Fr. George Rutler

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