“The function of the college is not to rouse young people to revolt against the nature of things, but rather to acquaint them with the wisdom of our ancestors.”
-Russell Kirk
These words, prophetically written a half century ago, are representative of the efforts of Russell Kirk to define the true purpose of a liberal education and to recall American colleges back to their worthy mission. The journal you now read was born in the same spirit, taking its inspiration and direction from Kirk’s column of the same name. In the five hundred columns he wrote under the title “From the Academy,” appearing in National Review from 1955-1980, Kirk exposed the ideological trends that are the ancestors of today’s four pillars of political correctness on U.S. campuses—“Inclusivity,” “Identity,” “Privilege,” and “Inequality”—the aim of which is to urge students to effect revolutionary social change. By contrast, Kirk taught that, “if you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.”
Through his columns, Kirk contrasted these ideological approaches to education with an articulate defense of the traditional purpose of a liberal education as the formation of both a mind and a soul: “Liberal education works for order in the soul and order in the republic.” Furthermore:
The primary purpose of a liberal education, then, is the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination for the person’s own sake … rather than to serve the state. […] Formal schooling actually commenced as an endeavor to acquaint the rising generation with religious knowledge: with awareness of the transcendent and with moral truths. Its purpose was not to indoctrinate a young person in civics, but rather to teach what it is to be a true human being, living within a moral order. […] Yet a system of liberal education has a social purpose, or at least a social result, as well. It helps to provide a society with a body of people who become leaders in many walks of life.”
Kirk drew upon the wisdom of the ages and several particular luminaries in the formation of his own ideas regarding higher education, among them John Henry Newman. In The Idea of a University, Newman provided a vision for higher education that began something of a revival of the liberal arts in the United States, particularly at a humane scale in smaller liberal-arts colleges. Newman’s influence continues to spread today through the Newman Centers on college campuses, which now number over two thousand across the country.
This, among many other still-pressing issues, is one reason why this new journal was created, to take up the task of educational reform where Kirk left off.
Kirk also introduced his national audience to the ideas of writers such as Irving Babbitt, who, in his book Literature and the American College, tells us that the end of education is ethical, and that that end is to be achieved through an intellectual process. Babbitt, in turn, echoes Plato, who taught that the ends of education are wisdom and virtue.
The thinker perhaps most associated with Russell Kirk is Edmund Burke, whose writings gave us the phrases “the Moral Imagination” and “the Eternal Contract,” both of which Kirk expounded upon over the course of his career and particularly applied to the study of history and literature. Burke claims that there is an eternal contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to come. This concept reminds us of the perennial need to protect our young from agents of corruption, in whatever form they may take on college campuses, be it ideological or otherwise.
Even as early as the 1950s, Kirk was addressing disturbing trends in academia that we find all too familiar today. In his book Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning (1967), which outlines the history of colleges and universities in the United States since 1953, Kirk creates two categories of erroneous thought that lead to a loss of true education:
Fallacy I is the notion that the principal function of college and university—if not the only really justifiable function—is to promote utilitarian efficiency. The institutions of higher learning, according to this doctrine are to be so many intellectual factories, delivering to society tolerably-trained young persons who will help to turn the great wheel of circulation, producing goods and services. […]
Fallacy II is the notion that everybody, or practically everybody, ought to attend college … [and] that all his countrymen will be redeemed soon, through formal schooling, without the operation of thought.
The ills of higher education in the U.S. identified by Kirk were “purposelessness,” “intellectual disorder,” “gigantism in scale,” and “the enfeeblement of primary and secondary schooling.” Today’s ills have expanded to include grade inflation, historical and cultural illiteracy, hyper-specialization, and career specialization replacing a traditional liberal education, as well as a general relativism and skepticism in the wider culture due to a materialist worldview.
Kirk’s prescription to redirect this divergence from the path of true education was to reorient education toward the development of the individual through humane learning, and to reduce colleges to a humane scale. In “Conserving the American College” (“From the Academy,” Dec. 14, 1957), Kirk provides those interested in “the restoration of learning” with fourteen “general rules by which the prudent college might be guided in its work of conservative reform and self-preservation.” These begin with the reaffirmation “that the end of a liberal education is an ethical consciousness, through which the student is brought to an apprehension of the enduring truths which govern our being, the principles of self-control, and the dignity of man.”
Elsewhere, Kirk writes that, ideally, colleges should be small and located outside the bubble of the metropolis, because, as he explained, “politically, a country in which power is concentrated in a few cities tends to become more subject to ideology and demagoguery, with fewer centers of resistance and balance against the slogans of the hour.”
Above all, students must be given humane learning—the opportunity to study real history and its lessons, to develop an appreciation for the permanent things, and to cultivate the moral imagination through the humanities.
Through “From the Academy” and his other writings on education, Russell Kirk not only diagnosed the ills of academia that undermine our nation still today but also gave us reasons to return to the perennial remedies—to the wisdom of our ancestors, to a recognition that, for “the unalterable in human existence, humane letters are a great guide.” This, among many other still-pressing issues, is one reason why this new journal was created, to take up the task of educational reform where Kirk left off.
Annette Kirk, widow of Russell Kirk, is president emerita of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. Andrea Kirk Assaf, fourth daughter of Russell and Annette Kirk, is a compiler, writer, guide, and professor of the art and architecture of Rome.