The need for deconstruction

In the two years that I have been attending Brown, one aspect of the school’s environment has been particularly annoying, and even infuriating at times. And while I am tempted to write that the statist impulses and cries of many fellow students are the cause of this deep-felt annoyance, such is actually not the case. Rather, the perpetual construction, as well as the infernal noise which inevitably accompanies it, has drawn my fiercest ire – and I would venture that I am not alone in having these sentiments.

Barely a day passes when the men with orange vests do not descend on our campus, replete with drills, cranes, and a bobby or two. While some may claim that the capital improvement implemented (wrought?) during this construction only benefits the student body, I would say that this is not a profit-making business with the sole, or even primary, intent of attracting customers. Despite the administration’s shameless pandering and advertising to prospective students, I still hold fast to the idea that this is a liberal arts university, charged with the responsibility of encouraging reflection, scholarship, and community. We are not a commercial enterprise; we are not a research university; we are not a tabula rasa to be radically changed or rebuilt at the fancy of a few.

Brown, as I am sure that most students are aware, was founded in 1764 (as the College of Rhode Island) as a liberal arts university with a Baptist affiliation. The Protestant Christian roots of this University, then, are clear and undeniable – although the rabid amount of construction presently taking place on our campus would seem to suggest that it was founded as a school with the sole objective of churning out as many degree-holders as possible.

Our charter claims that the University would focus on pursuing an education policy whereby students are inculcated “in the liberal Arts and Sciences” – but the logical inference from the administration’s actions is that our University instead intends merely to attract attention, expand its tentacles throughout the city, alienate its own history and founding purpose, and foster an environment in which studious reflection and cultivation of gentlemanly manners are virtually impossible. The manifest consequence of the insufferable amount of construction is that a community has been destroyed – the unassuming has been relegated to the sidelines, while the egotistical has not only been given full rein, but also encouraged quite vigorously.

I fully understand why Brown may want to increase its prestige in the academic world, but the somber truth is that the University no longer seems to value what made it so laudable in the first place. An American outgrowth of the long English tradition which gave special emphasis to, and placed sincere value on, liberal arts institutions, Brown was meant to be a reflective, temperate, disciplined academic setting, so that tranquility and serenity would facilitate, nay actively promote, several years of ascetic, scholarly devotion. That the current administration, and its predecessors since the 1960s, has disregarded this key purpose, in favor of artificial improvements that greatly hinder proper devotion, is not only rueful, but decidedly shameful.

Perhaps I will be told that I am vainly clamoring for a return to the values of a bygone era, which will never return. Perhaps I will be told that money and status trump virtue and manners, in this modern age of ours. Such responses would be quite regrettable, even condemnatory, as they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of why education is to be valued and pursued.

Despite the pretensions of materialistic modernists, education is not solely a means to an end, whether that end be a greater social status, an ability to command a higher income in life, or a time for “experimentation.” Indeed, I would claim that the degradation of modern institutions of higher learning can be traced precisely to the prevalence on college campuses of students who possess a life philosophy that values educations as means for those ends.

Education, much as the institutions which facilitate it, is an intrinsic good, which allows man to fulfill a part of his nature that would go unsated without it. Education refines men, for it humbles even the most arrogant, as they are confronted with the sobering fact that the living are merely one generation, the inheritors to thousands of years of human history which have come before. How dare we overvalue our own importance!

Sadly, the contemptible arrogance of the modern man is not palpable only in the actions of our University’s administrators. My own parochial high school – ironically, given a religious institution’s typical deference to accumulated wisdom via tradition – has fallen victim to this wholly modern tendency to alter, if not radically change, our inherited culture and values. Upset by this fact, last year I wrote the following words in a letter to the President of the school:

I am worried by the possibility that the school has evolved into a business that sates competing interests, rather than the den of discovery, learning, and refinement that any true educational institution should be.

And though I would love to be able to claim that, for once, I can concretely prove that it is indeed the Protestant who has more respect for actual tradition than the Roman Catholic, that claim would be fruitless. For, though I do regard Protestantism as the true keeper of Christ’s Church, the hope here would be that the Protestant and Roman Catholic would be able to unite behind a desire to maintain respect for tradition (after which we would debate over what that tradition actually is), when an atheistical, progressive view of history seeks to destroy such respect, root-and-branch.

Alas, even the self-identifying conservatives cannot recognize what is taking place in the modern world. Many of them even fail to understand that everything we cherish, everything which has been handed down to us, everything that gives meaning to the institutional structure of our Anglo-American world, is under attack.

But maybe, just maybe, my fellow students will acknowledge that something is irrevocably lost when material improvement and pursuit of glory are valued over spiritual enlightenment and cultural refinement. Maybe they will join me in rejecting constant construction on this campus, such that our highest academic ideals will not go unfulfilled. Maybe they will join me in being truly liberal.