The Vanity of a University Education

"I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’ And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.

For in much wisdom is much vexation,and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow." (Eccl 1:16-18)

Why, then, do we university professors, students, staff, and administration often fail in this Christian pedagogical project? We should begin by recognizing this implication of Scripture: The university is full of lies.

But, then, so is every aspect of human life. This ubiquity and immersion of evil is the meaning of total depravity: not that human beings are incapable of good, even great good, but that every aspect of our good is subject to corruption and that our “good” is inevitably mixed in its motives and ends. The language and lessons of paradox are profitably invoked before our attempts at the true understanding, the righteous act, and the sublime beauty. Sometimes the honorable and the dishonorable are impossible in practice to tease apart, as are the wise and foolish, the noble and ignoble, the selfless and selfish, and the attractive and repulsive. There is no perfect Christian education. Every university begun by people of faith is subject to the same forces of sin that infect everyday life. Thus, we must be willing to face the truth about our best efforts even in the name of Christ. All our efforts contain a measure of vanity. We should not be shocked to discover this worm at the heart of our pedagogical projects. Instead, such knowledge should force us back on God’s grace and mercy.

I would contend that Ecclesiastes is a good “prelude” to the Christian college or university and is especially instructive to honors students who strive, even expect, to thrive in the collegiate academic environment. It offers an astringent lesson on the failure of temporary happiness. The author of Ecclesiastes (hereafter Qohelet, meaning “teacher,” “preacher” or “gatherer”) invokes vanity (hesed) not just as an observation about life, but also as a judgment on its qualities. Hesed for Qohelet is the finding of evil in what we count as important and in what we suffer. The inevitable nature of death (Eccl 12:1-8) haunts our mirrors of self-delusion, and the limits of human memory haunt the shelf life of our scholarly reputations and our past students’ recall of our curriculum (Eccl 12:11-12; 8:13-18). The ephemeral nature of what we seek to attain and to retain is often invoked in satires on education such as Erasmus’ Praise of Folly or John Trumbull’s The Progress of Dullness, to name only two of multiple examples, but admittedly it is not a subject we are prone to return to. Critical realism suggests that we should.

Qohelet’s dissatisfaction with his various explorations of happiness is a sharp challenge to the promises by which universities sell themselves. He recounts the inevitable disappointment with pleasure, consumption, great works, ownership, power over others, possessions—monetary, aesthetic, territorial, sexual, even pleasure in work and in fame (Eccl 2). This is in part why the tradition of American education distorts the self as a basis and end for learning--because education is held out as the key to the promised good life, one built on all the above. Offering ourselves as a necessary step to career success may have a measure of truth to it, but we commit ourselves to an economy other than Jesus’ when we also tacitly suggest that this is the center of human meaning and purpose. "Since it is hard to market subversion, that creates a certain cognitive dissonance for colleges that retain the liberal arts ideal as more than a shibboleth," so says Merold Westphal. But at the same time, this negative potential is also true of a promotion of liberal arts as in itself being fulfilling.

Without the context and telos of the Christian eschaton, the liberal arts as career pursuits are also false gods subject to disappointment and human pretension. Qohelet treats work in a complex way—it is a burden and a labor, as full of conflict, danger, and the perversion of power, yet it is also a gift from God. This can be said of careers in academics and in politics, in business, in the human services sector, and so on. Work inevitably contains suffering, and that personal “happiness” is not itself a guarantee of anything, especially the condition of true blessedness which carries with it the deep joy of true happiness. Ordinary happiness is right and good, but it should not become a god, an attempt to escape the conditions of our existence as God’s creatures (Eccl 8:16-17; 9:7-12). The Christian university should offer a more full-bodied portrait of human existence and vocational fulfillment, including its sinfulness.

By themselves, career success and the liberal arts are both subject to the corruption of instrumentalism. Qohelet here, too, is instructive. We are all subject to nature’s limitations, to the seeming caprice of the world (Fortuna), to death. The university can overcome none of these, and we fool ourselves if we claim to be able. Ecclesiastes is a lesson that evil is not a question of systemic mismanagement or of an environmentally defective upbringing. Better organization and better education do not of themselves eradicate evil. To speak of the foolishness of the university may seem counter-intuitive to us, but we must recognize that its educational pretensions are finally empty. The disappointment surrounding portions of the postmodern multiversity is similar to the sage’s dark wisdom. Only when we come to understand deeply the failure of the university may we pursue a Christian education that seeks to align itself with God’s wise order for creation and the human person.

The misuse of academic power calls for Christian hospitality, as the economics of education must be chastened by Christian concern. As Jacques Ellul points out, “Our pursuit of money is infinite;” we can never have enough. Economic unrest is devouring in its service to the god Mammon. It is lost before death’s nullification: “The evil lies in the fact that money makes everything possible, yet it is nothing." In similar fashion, liberal arts, which in theory are for “nothing” but themselves, really become instruments of human pretension, a belief in career success, over-therorization as a tool for locating and creating illusions of order. “The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings. . . Of anything beyond these, my child, beware. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl 12:11-12).

Qohelet’s wisdom, we should not forget, is not at the center of the canonical truths, but functions (as does all the wisdom tradition) as an expression of creational and covenantal purpose. To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 1:7). “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments” (Eccl 12:13).