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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Volume 15, Number

4, Fall 2012, pp. 36-56 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/log.2012.0034

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/log/summary/v015/15.4.hutter.html

Access provided by Aquinas College (17 Mar 2015 12:52 GMT)

Reinhard Htter

The Universitys Cutting Edge

Source of Its Flatness, Or:
Reclaiming the Universitys
Third Dimension
The American Association of Universities (AAU), the exclusive
club of the nations leading research universities, characterizes a
research university in the associations White Paper thus:1
The raison dtre of the American research university is to ask
questions and solve problems. Together, the nations research
universities constitute an exceptional national resource, with
unique capabilities:
Americas research universities are the forefront of innovation; they perform about half of the nations basic
r esearch.
The expert knowledge that is generated in our research
universities is renowned worldwide; this expertise is being applied to real-world problems every day.

By
combining cutting-edge research with graduate and

undergraduate education, Americas research universities

are also training new generations of leaders in all fields.

Let me give up front the central claim of my article2: What is

increasingly missing from the late-modern research university and
the kind of training it offers is what I shall call the universitys third
l o g o s 15: 4 fa l l 2012

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

dimension. For the AAU this third dimension seems to have disappeared from the university. The first two dimensions of the latemodern research university constitute its sharpness as a problemsolving institution: to ask intricate questions and to solve complex
problems. The late-modern research university accomplishes this
task by way of ever more specialized research and by way of a concomitant training of undergraduate and graduate students in the
kind of expert knowledge that makes them competent problemsolvers. The universitys third dimensionconstitutive of the classical universitycomprises, first, schole (in English leisure), that
is, the structured practice of genuine intellectual contemplation
and reflection, and, second, paideia, that is, the integral formation
of the intellectual virtues in conjunction with the development of
the moral virtues. A university that lacks this third dimension might
well be able to develop remarkable research, but, I think, will eventually suffer from a suffocating intellectual and spiritual flatness that
in the long run will prove detrimental to the university as such. In
order to make good on this claim I will proceed in three steps. In
the first step, I will offer a snapshot of the late-modern research
university and highlight three of its noteworthy features: first,
the remarkable ambivalence in contemporary academic thought
pertaining to reasons reliability and range, and, ultimately, to
reasons capacity for truth; second, the late-modern universitys
pervasive embrace of the means of quantification or metrics for
purposes of assessment and management (into which university
administration seems to have largely morphed); and third, its embrace of the allegedly neutral framework of secular reason for
its internal and external communication. These features belong
essentially to what I regard as the universitys first and second
dimension that together constitute the cutting edge, the utilitarian character of a highly complex problem-solving machine. The
universitys third dimension, its depth dimension, refers to what
has been at one time essential to the university qua university, that
is, the pursuit of larger, comprehensive and integrating questions

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of truth and meaningquestions, I dare say, of metaphysics and
morals. What is to be observed at the present moment regarding
this third dimension are signs of a newly emerging disenchantment with secular reason as the universitys governing principle,
a disenchantment discernible as it seems first and foremost among
some of the postmodern avant-gardes of the late-modern research
university.
In a second step, I shall consider a brief philosophical observation and an equally brief theological reminder about the universitys
third dimension.
In a concluding third step I will suggest that leisure and paideia
are the two practices that keep the soul of the university alive and,
that will assure that the university qua university will continue to
matter even under the specter of a comprehensive functionalization
of the late-modern universityespecially after the disenchantment
of secular reason.
Like all thought, the normative perspectives that inform my critique of the late-modern research university and the concomitant
university education come from somewhere. The perspective that
informs the normative understanding of the university pursued
here has its roots in the ancient paideia that came to flourish in the
remarkable and still pertinent theological and philosophical work
of Thomas Aquinas. Obviously, this idea of the university does not
form the matrix on which the late-modern research universities
are built. However, I indeed hold as a governing principle for the
subsequent reflections that a vision like the following is required as
a critical normative standard in order to help us see at which point
the university is in danger of becoming an equivocation (that is, a
branding fraud). To quote Alasdair MacIntyre from his recent God,
Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical
Tradition: The ends of education . . . can be correctly developed
only with reference to the final end of human beings and the ordering of the curriculum has to be an ordering to that final end. We
are able to understand what the university should be, only if we

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

understand what the universe is. But while this thought was crucial
for Aquinass conception of the university, it was remarkably uninfluential in determining how universities in fact developed.3 Describing and understanding the de facto development of universities
in historical, sociological, and political terms is one kind of thing.
Making sense of the university qua university on intellectual terms
is another thing. I am pursuing only the latter here, and the presupposition of my talk is that the ideal reflected in Aquinass thought,
and echoed to some degree under considerably different conditions
in John Henry Newmans 1852 Dublin lectures on The Scope and
Nature of University Education, is far from obsolete. On the contrary,
this ideal constitutes a corrective reminder and a salutary challenge
and is as such a program, I submit, superior to the Enlightenment
model of the university as a place of advanced training in useful
competencies, superior as well to the Berlin-type and the Weberian
versions of the late-modern research university. For all these later
models share the deficiencies of modernity; that is, they regard the
universitys third dimension as dispensable and, if maintained, as at
best a supererogatory concession to a luxury admitted for purely
sentimental reasons, namely as one expedient way to honor the universitys premodern roots.
Let me expand upon what I mean by the third dimension. In
2006, as an octogenarian, the philosopher Benedict Ashley published a simply remarkable book, a model of interdisciplinary rigor
and comprehensiveness, The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary
and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics. Let me use his words to
amplify this idea of the universitys third, integrative dimension.
The very term uni-versity means many-looking-towardone, and is related to the term universe, the whole of
reality. Thus, the name no longer seems appropriate to such a
fragmented modern institution whose unity is provided only
by a financial administration and perhaps a sports team. The
fragmented academy is, of course, the result of the energetic
exploration of all kinds of knowledge, but how can it meet

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the fundamental yearning for wisdom on which each culture
is based?4

The search for wisdom characterizes the universitys third

dimension and realizes the university qua university in a strict and
proper sense. Hence, the universitys third dimension functions as
a critical norm that puts into stark relief strong tendenciesnot
recent in origin, but recently gaining remarkable momentumto
reduce the university to a polytechnicum with a largely functionalized
propaedeutic liberal arts appendix, this polytechnicum being largely
an accidental agglomeration of advanced research competencies
gathered in one facility for the sake of extrinsic and contingent
conveniences. If this trend should come to its logical term, if indeed
each of these advanced research competencies could be located
elsewhere, that is, be directly linked to hospitals, to biochemical
and computer scientific companies or to this or that branch of the
military-industrial complex, without any loss, then the university in
any substantive sense would have disappeared and to still call what
remains a university would be simply an equivocation, undoubtedly
useful for reasons of branding and marketing, but hardly for reasons
of substance.

I. A Snapshot of the Late-Modern Research University

(1) It is hard to imagine a gulf deeper than the one that currently
exists between those academicians who regard reason in terms of
utmost triumph and those who regard it in terms of utmost despair.
Mathematically disciplined and technologically executed, human
reason has transformed the globe in unprecedented ways. The academic disciplines based on reasons mathematical and technological acumen hold a robust trustif not faithin reasons capacity
to grasp reality and, precisely because of this grasp, successfully to
conform the world to human interests and needs.
Paradoxically, we can register a simultaneous widespread sense

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

of despair about reasons superior status and role. Instead of sovereignly guiding human affairs to their clearly defined and wellconsidered ends, reason seems to be little more than a coping
mechanism or a regulative fiction driven and directed by instincts
and desires it can hardly perceive, much less rule. The academic
disciplines that traditionally draw upon reasons reflexive, integrative, and directive capacitiesas exercised by humanity in the act
of understanding and interpreting both world and selfseem to
have fallen into a state of internal disarray while finding themselves
exiled into what by all accounts seems to be a state of permanent
marginalization within the late-modern research university. Reason
triumphing in the form of instrumental rationality has produced its
own demise as famously analyzed in Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment.
This arguable state of affairs is obviously not just an ivory-tower
phenomenon, remote from and largely irrelevant to human society at large. Rather, the simultaneous triumph of and despair about
reason mirrors late-modern society as such: we encounter breathtaking developments in artificial intelligence and biotechnology together with atmospheric epistemological skepticism and ontological nihilism that is as pervasive and erosive as it is elusive. Instrumental rationality and ontological nihilism seem to be two sides of
the same coin. What is eclipsed in between is the question of truth.
Because reason seems to have become incapable of attaining truth,
it has to assert itself instead in the gigantomaniac demonstration
and celebration of its instrumental effectiveness, its will to power.
The prophet of this dynamic has been a German university professor of the nineteenth century, one who retired very early in his career from the university: Friedrich Nietzsche. While Nietzsche was
greatly disillusioned with the nineteenth century Berlin-style university, the late-modern, secular research university with its strong
pragmatic and antimetaphysical bent is more profoundly committed to some Nietzschean tenets than it seems to be aware. Let
me for just one example cite aphorism 480 from The Will to Power.

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There exists neither spirit, nor reason, nor thinking, nor
consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions
that are of no use. There is no question of the subject and the
object, but of a particular species of animal that can prosper
only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience).
Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that
it increases with every increase of power. The meaning of
knowledge: here, as in the case of good and beautiful,
the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. In order for a particular species
to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant
for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservationnot some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceivedstands as the motive behind the development of the
organs of knowledgethey develop in such a way that their
observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the
measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species
grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master
of it, in order to press it into service.

What would the kind of university look like in which Nietzsches

understanding of the human being took hold, at least tacitly, of
its self-understanding? This brings me to another segment of my
s napshot.
(2) A university in which Nietzsches understanding of the
human being took hold would be, to say the least, profoundly ambivalent about itselfand remember, the best strategies to cope
with ambivalence in matters of substance and teleology is quantification or metrics, instrumentalization, and management. It would
also be a place in which philosophy would share an unequivocally
marginal position with the other humanities, in which what once
were the liberal arts would be characterized by curricular fragmentation and even disarray, and a place in which the biotechno-

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

logical s ciences would display an almost uncontrollableshould I
say cancerous?growth. Such a universityI put the word into
quotation markswould be first and foremost a highly sophisticated problem-solving machine at the service of those who are
able and willing to pay for its services. To put it in different, more
positive, that is, Benthamian terms: The late-modern research
universities as they can be found across the globe are by and large
institutions geared first and foremost to producing knowledge by
way of highly specialized research (primarily in the natural and
medical sciences), knowledge that is meant to serve interests that
almost exclusively arise from the practical and technical needs
and demands of the kinds of societies in which these universities
are located. In a secondary way, these universities are geared to
communicate this knowledge in order to produce specific competencies in their graduates. The undergraduate educationmost
blatantly in Europes new Bologna systemis increasingly functionalized toward the acquisition of marketable skills and competencies. Added to these clearly defined, specialized competencies
comes to stand an equally well-defined set of so-called Rahmenkompetenzen, framework competencies. For it must be ensured
that future Einsteins, Hawkings, Wittgensteins, Habermases and
Auerbachs know how to lead effective small-group discussions,
can organize laboratory teams, and prepare compelling PowerPoint presentations.
It was none other than Newman, who in his lectures on The Scope
and Nature of the Universitylectures more relevant than ever, I dare
saymore than 150 years ago anticipated the specter of the latemodern research university. He discerns its seed in the scientific
method of another of its founding fathersFrancis Bacon.
I cannot deny [Bacon] has abundantly achieved what he
proposed. His is simply a Method whereby bodily discomforts
and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed
from the greatest number; and already, before it has shown
any signs of exhaustion, the gifts of nature, in their most

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artificial shapes and luxurious profusion and diversity, from
all quarters of the earth, are, it is undeniable, by its means
brought even to our doors, and we rejoice in them.5

But in the course of 150 years since Newmans rather friendly

characterization of the Baconian university, things have become
considerably graver. For late modernity, that is, a thoroughly secularized and increasingly fragmented modernity, has now lost its
optimistic lan and instead has become tired and cynical. In the
agonistic world of irresistibly corruptible, interminably quarrelling,
and tirelessly consuming bodies, hence a world in which the greatest dangers are disease, litigation, and the inability to consume, the
hierarchy of university sciences stands in service of the avoidance of
these evils: at the top stands the medical school supported by all the
auxiliary biosciences, followed by the law school and the business
school supported by their respective auxiliary sciences, first and
foremost computer science and mathematics, but also any useful
remnants of the liberal arts. And since it has been discovered that
allegedly religious practices might contribute to health and longevity, the gods are making a come-back, of sortsnow as an appendix
to the medical school!
It is in light of these recent developments that the warning of
Pope Benedict XVIhimself a long-time university professor and
profoundly committed to this unique institution of higher learninghas an especially salient and sobering ring. The following is
part of a speech that the Pope had prepared in January of 2008 for
the Roman university La Sapienza (once the Popes own university
in Rome, now a secular Roman university), a speech that, however,
never was delivered because in the last moment the university administration withdrew the invitation. Here is the pertinent passage,
however:
The danger for the western worldto speak only of thisis
that today, precisely because of the greatness of his knowledge and power, man will fail to face up to the question of the

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

truth. This would mean at the same time that reason would
ultimately bow to the pressure of interests and the attraction of utility, constrained to recognize this as the ultimate
criterion. To put it from the point of view of the structure
of the university: there is a danger that philosophy, no longer
considering itself capable of its true task, will degenerate into
positivism; and that theology, with its message addressed to
reason, will be limited to the private sphere of a more or less
numerous group. Yet if reason, out of concern for its alleged
purity, becomes deaf to the great message that comes to it
from Christian faith and wisdom, then it withers like a tree
whose roots can no longer reach the waters that give it life.
It loses the courage for truth and thus becomes not greater
but smaller.6

What the Pope indicts here is the unexamined negative framework

of a secular reason, uncritically reductive and in the end unscientific
because unhistorical and antihermeneutical, as the everyday default
working paradigm for the self-understanding of the university qua
university. It is interestingto say the leastthat the Popes concern is echoed in unexpected and surprising ways among those of
the postmodern avant-garde who have come to realize that secular
reason is a figment unable to account for itself let alone the comprehensive nature of the university as universitas.
Now to the final segment of my snapshot of the late-modern
research university.
(3) Stanley Fish, once upon a time chair of the English department at Duke and now a professor of humanities and law at Florida
International University in Miami, recently introduced and discussed a noteworthy book by University of San Diego Warren Distinguished Professor of Law Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of
Secular Reason. Stanley Fish and Steven Smith attempt to break open
from the inside what Charles Taylor once aptly called the citadel of
modern secular reason. In his book Smith argues that there are no
secular reasons . . . of the kind that could justify a decision to take

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one course of action rather than another. Consider Fishs apt summary of Smiths argument.
Secular reason cant do its own self-assigned jobof describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our
projectswithout importing, but not acknowledging, the
very perspectives it pushes away in disdain. While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that
can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can
count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do
with it. No matter how much information you pile up and
how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform,
you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when
you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson
or imperative it points to.7

Now, in a certain way, this is not surprising under the conditions of

the modern dismissal of ontological and moral teleology. This profound incapability is in fact just what we should expect from secular reason and a university committed to it. But there is a deeper
and more unsettling problemthe self-deception of secular reason
about its own sleight of hand. Consider again Fish on Smiths book:
Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse
of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and
defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How does it
manage? By smuggling, Smith answers. The secular vocabulary
within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient
to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments.
We manage to debate normative matters anywaybut only by
smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that
cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to. The notions we
must smuggle in, according to Smith, include notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian
final causes or a providential design, all banished from secular

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather
than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational
calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have
a directionto even get startedwe have little choice except to
smuggle [them] into the conversationsto introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.8 Fishs analysis of Smiths
argument rings true. For every university reflects unavoidably to
at least some degree the culture it arises from and operates in. The
late-modern research university has to a large degree embraced the
assumptions of secular reason and is committed to serving an allegedly shared, non-partisan discourse of public reason,with its many
unquestionable and indeed staggering accomplishments. This, however, is an illusion and for that a disastrous one. For inside the selfimposed limitations of secular reason the university qua university
becomes unintelligible to itself. All it can be for secular reason is
a convenient agglomeration of facilities and competencies proximate to each other, branded and marketed under one single name,
but each receiving its justification in light of distinct and largely
incommensurable needs from vastly varied segments of advanced,
diversified, and technologically driven society. Secular reason has
intentionally cut itself off from the intellectual and moral sources
that would allow it to acknowledge and advance the overarching teleology that gives intrinsic value to the university as such: the mind
being ordered to truth and the corresponding search for truth and
the ordering of these truthswhich is the task of wisdom.
In the same speech for Romes La Sapienza University, Benedict
pointed to the self-deception of secular reason. If our culture seeks
only to build itself on the basis of the circle of its own argumentation, on what convinces it at the time, and ifanxious to preserve
its secularismit detaches itself from its life-giving roots, then it
will not become more reasonable or purer, but will fall apart and
disintegrate.9 Like late-modern society, the late-modern research
university lives from intellectual and moral sources it cannot account for, let alone produce. The universitys third dimension,

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however, seems to depend precisely on such intellectual and moral
sources.

II. What Is the Universitys Third Dimension About?

The third dimension is the unifying dimension that offers an integrative and ordered view of the first two dimensions and hence enables coherence, order and evaluationand pedagogically paideia.
It is the dimension of meta-science, of a unifying and integrating
inquiry that transcends each particular science and the acquiring
of specific competencies. It is an inquiry that attends to the whole,
to the order and coherence of all sciences, to their governing principles and hence to the university as a self-conscious and coherent search for truth and wisdom, forming an ellipsis around two
foci: the universe and the human being. The third dimension, the
depth-dimension, offers internal coherence to a university education and realizes the university in a strong and proper sense. Whatever makes a university still a somewhat, even marginally, coherent
reality is parasitical on this third, depth dimension. Inasmuch as the
late-modern research university embraces secular reason as its
dominant mode of self-understanding and of mediation, it closes
itself off from this third dimension and restricts itself to the twodimensional plane of the production of knowledge. I would like to
highlight two features of this third dimension by way of a philosophical observation and a theological reminder.
a philosophical observation
First the philosophical observation that brings me again to Fishs
interpretation of Smiths The Disenchantment of Secular Reason.
Smith does not claim to be saying something wholly new.
He cites David Humes declaration that by itself reason is
incompetent to answer any fundamental question, and Alasdair MacIntyres description in After Virtue of modern secular

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

discourse as consisting of the now incoherent fragments of a
kind of reasoning that made sense on older metaphysical assumptions. And he might have added Augustines observation
in De Trinitate that the entailments of reason cannot unfold
in the absence of a substantive proposition they did not and
could not generate.10

In this pregnant passage, as well as elsewhere in his essay, Fish seems

to suggest the return of metaphysics by way of the resurgence of
two ultimately irrepressible realities: teleology and the transcendence of human reason. What is he gesturing toward? Instead of
entering a protracted discussion of these deep matters, let me take a
shortcut by offering two citations as placeholders. First, MacIntyre
says in God, Philosophy, Universities that the ends of education . . . can
be correctly developed only with reference to the final end of human beings and the ordering of the curriculum has to be an ordering to that final end. We are able to understand what the university
should be, only if we understand what the universe is.11 In short,
if the university is to be coherently a university in the full sense
of the term, it needs to embark upon inquiries that depend upon
principles that secular reason can neither produce nor account for.
What is even more important to realize is that, arguably, the
full recovery of a meta-scientific inquiry is correlated to an equally
full recovery of genuine academic freedom. In Leisure: The Basis of
Culture, the German philosopher Josef Pieper reminds us of this allimportant correlation.
Strictly speaking, a claim for academic freedom can only exist when the academic itself is realized in a philosophical
way. And this is historically the reason: academic freedom has
been lost, exactly to the extent that the philosophic character
of academic study has been lost, or, to put it another way, to
the extent that the totalitarian demands of the working world
have conquered the realm of the university. Here is where
the metaphysical roots of the problem lie: the politicization

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is only a symptom and consequence. And indeed, it must be
admitted here that this is nothing other than the fruit . . . of
philosophy itself, of modern philosophy!12

Instead of modern philosophy, Pieper could as well have said secular reason. His point is that true academic freedom is a freedom
that is realized fully in the universitys third dimension, a dimension that is accessible from each university discipline. Differently
put, the integrating and ordering function of the third dimension
is not extrinsically imposed upon the various academic disciplines
but arises from what Pieper calls the philosophical character of
academic study per se by way of which each discipline transcends
itself in the very pursuit of its distinct subject matter.
the theological reminder
Now from the philosophical observation to the theological reminder. The theological reminder is simply this: the universitys
third dimension flourishes to the fullest if enlightened from above.
As long as God is the end of the pursuit of wisdom and theology,
natural and revealed, is the capstone of the university disciplines,
then the third dimension will never collapse, and the university
will remain universitas in the full sense of the term. It was this theological reminder that has kept premodern Christian universities
aware of the fact that the primordial human estrangement from
God is a fundamental estrangement that left a wound in the human being, a wound that affected the will most strongly of all human faculties. In light of the knowledge that the third dimension
yields, Newman in his typically succinct way formulates a serious
reservation that indicates the limitations of even the best kind of
university education one can hope for, the best kind yielded by a
university whose third dimension is in full bloom, so to speak. I
cite again from his 1852 Dublin lectures, The Scope and Nature of
University Education.

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not
conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and
justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education
makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.
. . . Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel
with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and
delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason
to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of
man. . . . Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the
cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing
more or less than intellectual excellence.13

On one level, the most fundamental one from a theological point of

view, Newman is right: liberal education is meant not for the cultivation of saints, but for the cultivation of the intellect; the university is meant for the excellence that characterizes the intellect, and
not for the excellence that characterizes the saint. The gentleman
Newman invokes should, I think, be understood as an intellectually
well formed and socially competent person. But here I think Newman is granting a point tacitly that at other instances in his work
he was willing to support explicitly: that paideia, the formation of
character, is integral to a university education. For, arguably, the
formation of intellectual virtues occurs best in conjunction with the
formation of character; differently put: a deficient or absent character formation complicates and even obstructs the proper formation
of the intellectual virtues.
Because the virtues of the mindthe development of which is
integral to the universitys third dimensioncannot be divorced
from the formation of character, that is, the formation in the moral
virtues, we can now specify more clearly the twofold way in which
the university matters, especially after the disenchantment of secular reason. This brings me to the final part of my article.

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III. What It Means to Reclaim the Universitys Third Dimension:

Leisure, Paideia, and Genuine Academic Freedom
I do not indulge in the illusion that one can save the university in
one sabbatical, let alone in the course of a single article. But one
can begin to think in different ways about different things and ask
different questions. The university is a privileged place, a precious
institution, and it is a great honor to teach in this institution: it is an
institution that matters greatly, but cut off from its own intellectual
and historical roots, from normative philosophical and theological
traditions, it has largely forgotten why it actually matters. It matters
because of the truth and because the human being is made for the
truth.That is the surpassing dignity of the human being in which the
dignity of the university participates. To ask secular reasons dismissive question, What is truth? is to lose the dignity of the human
being as well as the dignity of the university.
What would it mean to recover this dignity in full? As I mentioned in my introduction, two practices are essential for its full development and flourishing: leisure or schol and paideia. The practice
of leisure has as its intrinsic end the integration of the sciences, the
contemplation of the whole, in short, the search for wisdom. The
practice of leisure is the only practice that allows for something like
the self-reflexivity of the university as university. (The integration
thus brought is, however, radically different from the kind of interdisciplinarity that is meant to produce just another kind of data,
another kind of useful knowledge to be applied here or there).
Second, the practice of paideia aims at an integral human formation of character, the formation of the intellectual virtues in conjunction with a development of the moral virtues. There is no paideia without leisure, and true leisure flourishes in paideia.
Let me turn to paideia first and begin with an unlikely voice of
concern. In his 2004 novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe offers
a trenchant expos of contemporary American university life that
only seems to confirm Newmans position about contending against

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

the passion and the pride of man.While describing the drug-abuse,
alcoholism, and sexual promiscuity that characterizes late-modern
secular American college and university life,Wolfe clearly also seems
to expect more from colleges and universities than simply to mimic
the cultural and moral destitution of the wider society. In a conversation with an interviewer, Wolfe said that he deplored the fact
that with a few exceptions, universities have totally abandoned the
idea of strengthening character.14 Are Wolfes expectations of the
late-modern university hopelessly naive, outmoded, and ultimately
utopian or might they reflect some understanding of the connection
between character formation and the pursuit of w
isdom?
It is noteworthy and should give those who care about these matters pause that on this very point the Thomist students of Aristotle
and the Augustinian students of Plato are in full agreement, and
that, therefore, Benedict shares Tom Wolfes expectations of character formation to be an integral component of a university education
that deserves that name. On September 27, 2009, in his address to
representatives of the members of the academic community of the
ancient Charles University in Prague, Benedict states: From the
time of Plato, education has been not merely the accumulation of
knowledge or skills, but paideia, human formation in the treasures
of an intellectual tradition directed to a virtuous life. . . .The idea of
an integrated education, based on the unity of knowledge grounded
in truth, must be regained.15How such paideia is exactly to be understood needs further development. What seems obvious is that
in order to engage in the pursuit of the unity of knowledgewisdomone must be formed in those intellectual virtues requisite
for such a pursuit to be successful. Less obvious is the correlation
between the formation of the intellectual virtues and the formation
of the moral virtues. In Aquinass doctrine of the cardinal virtues,
prudence holds a principal position, for it is the one intellectual
virtue that cannot be without moral virtue.16 Hence, like Newman,
Aquinas can also account for the brilliant scoundrel. For prudence
does not belong to those intellectual virtues that perfect the specu-

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lative intellect for the consideration of truth. But, unlike Newman,
classical paideia and also Thomas expect from a university education
more than the perfection of the strictly intellectual virtues; for the
end of a proper liberal arts education is the pursuit of wisdom. And
the pursuit of wisdom entails not only the refinement of habits of
thought but also of habits of action; for both pertain to the end of
the human being. It is for this reason that paideia is integral to the
pursuit of wisdom. And since prudence is the intellectual virtue
that perfects reason pertaining to things to be done,17 the practice
of paideia entails first and foremost the formation of prudence.
Paideia entails also the formation of other virtues such as truthfulness, studiousness, persistence, humility, collegialityordered
and structured by temperance, that is, self-restraint, as well as by
courage and justice. But what correlates paideia to the other central
practice, leisure, is indeed prudence. Here we have the virtue that
integrates both core practices of the universitys third dimension
into the concrete life of each studentand for that matter, of each
professor, too.
Which brings us finally to the practice of leisure or scholethe
practice of a non-productive productivity. Differently put, the productivity in which leisure reaches its termcontemplationremains essentially intrinsic to the practice of leisure. It cannot be
functionalized for some extrinsic purpose. As such, leisure is the
soul, the life principle of the university. Where schole is gone, paideia will not occur. Where the practice of leisure is gone, and with
it contemplation, meta-scientific inquiry is also lacking. In God, Philosophy, Universities, MacIntyre puts the matter most succinctly. To
whom . . . in such a university falls the task of integrating the various disciplines, of considering the bearing of each on the others,
and of asking how each contributes to the overall understanding
of the nature and order of things? The answer is No one, but even
this answer is misleading. For there is no sense in the contemporary American university that there is such a task, that something
that matters is being left undone. And so the very notion of the

reclaiming the universitys third dimension

nature and order of things, of a single universe, different aspects of
which are objects of enquiry for the various disciplines, but in such
a way that each aspect needs to be related to every other, this notion
no longer informs the enterprise of the contemporary American
university. It has become an irrelevant concept.18 Is the practice of
leisure and its intrinsic end, contemplation, a waste of time? It is
exactly that. As Pieper has forcefully reminded us, leisure is the
basis of culture. Without leisure, without that waste of time that
escapes metric functionalization and managerial manipulation, in
short, without the excess that contemplation always is, the university and the research it undertakes and the education it offers will be
nothing but two-dimensional, that is, as flat as the blade of a circular
saw, providing many cutting edges but no depth, or as ineffective as
the razor scraping character from the rock. What gives a university
and a university education depth and its unique dignity is what is
in excess of usefulness (what the ancients would call servility).
The artes liberales carry their end in themselves. And as such they
always indicate the nature of genuine academic freedom. It is the
practice of leisure, however, that enables regular academic freedom
to be realized as a freedom for excellence, which is nothing but a
freedom for contemplation. I would hope that some of the Catholic
colleges and universities in America at least will not only be found
among those institutions of higher learning that defend the universitys third dimension but be first and foremost among those eager
to return to this third dimension its original dignity and splendor.

Notes
1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered on April 4, 2011, at the University
of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. I am grateful to Don Briel, director of the
Catholic studies program, for the invitation, and to him and the colleagues from
the Catholic studies program and the department of theology for their splendid
hospitality and numerous engaging conversations.
2. American Association of Universities, White Paper, http://www.aau.edu
/research/article.aspx?id=4670.

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3. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 95.
4. Benedict Ashley, The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 20.
5. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse V, 8, http://www
.newmanreader.org.
6. Benedict XVI, Lecture by the Holy Father Benedict XVI at the University of Rome
La Sapienza, http://www.vatican.va.
7. Stanley Fish, Are There Any Secular Reasons? http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes
.com/2010/02/22/are-there-secular-reasons/?/.
8. Ibid.
9. Benedict XVI, La Sapienza, http://www.vatican.va.
10. Fish, Secular Reasons?
11. MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 95.
12. Josef Pieper, Leisure:The Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 75.
13. Newman, Idea, Discourse V, 9.
14. Tom Wolfe, quoted in Mary Ann Glendon, Off at College, First Things 150 (February 2005), 41.
15. Benedict XVI, Meeting with Members of the Academic Community, Address of the
Holy Father, Vladislav Hall in the Prague Castle, September 27, 2009.
16. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 58, a. 5.
17. ST I, q. 57, a. 5.
18. MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 16.