The Wabash Commentary

When something is faulty, there are two ways to go about it: either you fix the faults, or you toss it out the window and start all over. And what if that something is a soul, and you are God? Same thing:  You give a means of absolution, or you flood the earth. That whole messy system of redemption and absolution, the two stone tablets, the priest caste, the body and blood – or enough torrential rain to turn bodies into sponges and dilute blood until it loses the redness of its life.

And what if that something is a tradition? What if, say, it is the tradition of aristocracy, and you are France? You might work from the inside, repairing the excesses of extravagance bit by bit as a sculptor chisels away the excess stone to reveal the good lurking within – chink by chink, raising the hammer again and again, sweating. But you didn’t. You beheaded the King, and erected the guillotine. Vive la Révolution! So goes the anthem of destruction, of a reduction of traditions to rubble, and of the wide-eyed giddiness that looks with the glee of a madman on all the possibilities present in an establishment that lies dead in broken stones.

All those possibilities – a world reduced to ruins. The slow route traded for the express route, deliberation traded for action, and action now. Ancestors disgraced, the dead degraded, traditions shattered – but a new world, a brand new world, open to the whims of those left standing.

The times are threatening. C&T, the bastion of the liberal arts at Wabash and a tradition in some shape at the College for over sixty years, lies neck exposed. By the time this goes to print, it may be already headless. A questionable move by certain faculty to hasten the final vote may have worked, and we may now be in a time of questioning what we as an institution really believe in. Say your prayers if so. The sexiness of a new world is tempting, tempting to all the little odd ideas faculty have about what students simply must learn to be educated men. Must we learn that masculinity isn’t about standing up for what you think is right, but rather an open-mindedness that sees all things as right in their own special ways? Must we learn that racism is bad, sexism worse, and misanthropy the worst of all? Must we learn to feel privileged to the point of feeling guilty that we’re at college while others are starving? Must we learn that others are starving because instead of helping, we’re reading? Must we learn that what our fathers read was wrong because based in a WASP worldview? Such pithy goals for an all-college course are not just straw men:  They could very likely be at the center of whatever is to stand upon the ruins of C&T. And if so, we will have failed ourselves. We will have mistaken the point of liberal education to be a certain moral orthodoxy instead of a certain mad revelry in the grand mystery of unanswerable questions, of the questions that motivate mankind. We will have failed ourselves, and we will have failed those who went before us.  We will have preferred destruction to correction, and we will have to face the consequences.

Maybe, though, the vote has not happened. Maybe it’s to come. If so, the opening lines of this article will come into play:  Do we want to destroy, or do we want to correct? Fix the fault, or toss the tool? Redeem or flood?

C&T is not perfect – but it is not so imperfect as to require its removal before its faults might be corrected. It is not essentially flawed; indeed, its heart is still in the right place. The course, as it is, is interested in talking about big ideas, in posing unanswerable questions, in trying to keep you up at night, thinking about things with which humans have wrestled since the first time they anticipated their death before it happened, since the first time an individual conscience conflicted with the public law, since man became dumbfounded. Not the answer, but the question; not knowing, but knowing you know nothing; not the lesson, but the unease felt when the premises on which the lesson rests are suddenly and shockingly toppled. This is the life of C&T, no matter how frequently or infrequently it is realized. Its goal is good; its essence is good. And why reduce something not fatally flawed, something with life still in it, to rubble? Because that new world is so sexy. A new world, a brand new world. The possibilities! It is the lusty desire to play God that is so tempting – so tempting, and so, so dangerous.

Rather than destroy, let us correct. The module system too often misleads faculty into thinking they need to know something about a culture so that they can teach some little cultural something to the students. It tricks faculty into thinking they need to give answers, when all they need to do is ask questions. And this is not necessarily the fault of the module; it could very well be the weakness of professors. It is easier to teach something, to give answers, to profess – it is much harder to be a student among students, to ask questions to which you do not know the answer. Anyone can ask questions to which they know the answer, but not everyone can think of a question without an answer. This takes work, but not expertise – time spent thinking seriously about a book, but not excessive detail of the culture in which the book was written. In short, it takes curiosity, “the first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind,” according to the ever eloquent Edmund Burke. It is deeply lamentable that in becoming an expert in their field, some faculty lose their curiosity for other subjects; that from their loss of curiosity, they lose the desire to teach C&T; that from their loss of desire, they move to cut it to one semester; that from this threat, they lose the respect of their students.

The students – me, you, us. We’ve been told our voice counts. We have, indeed, been entertained by researchers employed by the College to find out what we think. And we’ve told them what we think: that C&T is “indispensable,” “synonymous with liberal arts education,” and “the quintessential vehicle for delivering the arts.” We have, in short, ruled in favor of tradition. We recognize that C&T has its faults, but those faults are worth fixing, because C&T is worth keeping. And we have been met with polite indifference. Cody Stipes, President of the Student Body, appealed to the Academic Policy Committee (APC) multiple times and in no uncertain language on behalf of the student body’s united demand to keep C&T at two semesters, not to mention as part of Wabash’s curriculum. Did they listen? Only so much as to say, “Oh”, or “O.K.”, or nod their head at the appropriate time. We have then a division between the people who teach, and the people who learn. Those who teach refuse to teach what those who learn demand to learn – what those who learn pay to learn, as it is. What is this but an oppression comparable to that of women in the 19th century or blacks in the 20th? People want to learn and are denied access. Plain and simple. It would of course be one thing if the student body demanded they be taught the best way to find a hooker in Paris, or the principles of homemade explosives – but we are not. We demand to be taught big ideas, and we demand the classroom opportunity to discuss them. We see this as being of utmost importance, and so necessitating at least a year of our time, insofar as it falls under C&T. We’re willing to give a year; we want to learn. The faculty are not willing to give a year; they don’t want to teach. It is one of the oldest exercises of injustice, to deny education to a demographic. We are now that demographic – the curious, liberally minded students of Wabash College.

So what? So, if the vote has not yet happened, let us protest the removal of C&T from the curriculum of our College. In the mid-90s, students stood wall-to-wall in the Chapel, resolute in their united determination to keep Wabash an all-male college. They shaped the history of Wabash in a way that is now open for us to take – in a way that is necessary for us to take, if we wish to keep Wabash alive in the liberal arts tradition. The liberal arts at Wabash are not in the distribution requirements; every university has distribution requirements. They are not explicitly in Freshman Tutorials, which could ostensibly focus on one subject, and one alone. But they are at the very core of C&T:  They are C&T. If it goes – what are we?