The Higher Learning

When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life.  I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself. ... The longing for I knew not what suddenly found a response in the world outside.

The transformative experience Allan Bloom that describes in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) is one that, according to Rick Perlstein, is no longer possible for today's wide-eyed freshmen.  (To begin with, they are no longer wide-eyed:  thanks to the usual technological suspects, they've already had all the transformative experiences previous generations could only access in the rarefied environs of the university.)  Interestingly, Bloom's reminiscence suggests that Damascus Moments were not the birthright of all hitherto existing undergraduates; rather, it was a privilege linked to a particular place and time:  

In high school I had seen many of the older boys and girls go off to the state university to become doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, the whole variety of professions respectable in the little world in which I lived.  The university was part of growing up, but it was not looked forward to as a transforming experience--nor was it so in fact. ... But a great university presented another kind of atmosphere...

Perhaps this atmosphere was only ever really available at Chicago and at a few other like places.  But if that's so, then Perlstein's pronouncement is even more dire, since his sweeping conclusions are drawn entirely from conversations with contemporary undergrads at ... Chicago.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to be skeptical of Perlstein's claims.  It can't be denied, of course, that there is a general movement among both students and administrators to view university training in more corporatized, instrumental terms.  But that is all the more unfortunate, given that Damascus Moments that are still to be had in a good university.  To say that transformation is no longer possible because kids can now discover free jazz or indie films on their own overestimates the amount of transformation to be had autodidactically; in principle, there was all kinds of information available to the novice even before the advent of the Web.  The point of a university even then was to acquire the interpretive and critical apparata that permit a higher assimilation of such information.