Afterword

There aren’t many English Departments in which two-fifths of the professors study Wendell Berry. So when Jeff took a job as an Americanist at Spring Arbor University and joined Jack, a medievalist by training, we immediately began to talk about collaborating on a project. Our many long, wide-ranging conversations culminated in this book....

Standing by Our Words

The kind of language Andy learns from his Port William community stands in contrast to the irresponsible language often spoken in the academy. Such language fails to be responsible to its objects because it either focuses primarily on the speaker’s internal feelings or thoughts or takes on a falsely objective tone and focuses only on the object itself. Thus it fails to relate inner and outer, speaker and object, in a way that enables them to respond to each other. By making this accountability more difficult, the language typically spoken in universities corrodes community rather than contributing to healthy, affectionate places. A responsible language that encourages individuals to have healthy relationships with their places can be maintained only by a love for particular places and objects, a love that motivates speakers to use careful, accurate language. Universities often fail to teach such language, allowing different disciplines to hide in their own jargon rather than fostering a common, community-wide language that encourages individuals to be more broadly accountable. Recovering the trivium and learning from literature may cultivate a more accountable language.

Geography

Burley Coulter is a wayward individual who, because he responded to the needs of his community, can say at the end of his life that he has been faithful. Perhaps universities, by seeking to meet the needs of their places, can produce students who will settle down after they graduate and work to serve the places where they find themselves. For educational institutions to be faithful members of their places, faculty members and students need to identify and resist the powerful forces that foster the abstract, displaced knowledge favored by cosmopolitans. Berry proposes local or parochial knowledge as a counterweight to the commodifiable, centralized knowledge valued in contemporary universities. Training students to faithfully attend to the needs of their local places does not mean that they should become insular and ignore knowledge and ideas from other places. Rather, faithful care of local places depends on maintaining a robust conversation between parochial communities and the cosmopolitan knowledge favored by universities. Students can study abroad with an eye toward bringing what they learn home, teachers can incorporate local knowledge into their curricula, and university administrators can place a priority on charging lower tuition.

Hierarchy

As a youth, Andy’s inconsiderate curiosity can’t be bothered to contemplate the consequences of his investigations. To remedy such recklessness, Berry argues that we should pursue knowledge within limits and apply it within healthy forms. Academics who are enculturated in a publish-or-perish environment, however, tend to form similarly driven, ambitious students who aspire to be global leaders heroically solving big problems. Yet universities should also honor humble vocations that help steward the health of local places. Such stewardship can be an act of gratitude for the good gift of life. This grateful stewardship runs counter to the denial of limits embedded in much of our contemporary culture, which believes in scientific progress and unending technological improvement. The arrogance and ingratitude that cause these various denials of limits are exacerbated by the specialized, fragmented organization of knowledge in higher education. Such isolation allows academics to be unmindful of and ungrateful for their places, the sources of their life and health. Members of universities can foster proper gratitude and an acceptance of our limited, embedded place in creation by observing the Sabbath, acknowledging our ignorance, and maintaining a local, contextual scope in learning.

Introduction to Part 2

In the first half of this book we laid out a three-part approach to educating students for homecoming: share stories of habitation and dwelling to form healthy imaginations; study the trivium and read literature for what it can teach us about speaking a common, responsible language; and do work that enacts our love so that university members participate in local, healing economies. For imagination, language, and work to flourish in students’ lives, though, students also need to practice virtues or habits that form them for “responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity.”...

Introduction

An education for health begins by forming the imaginations and affections of students so that rather than desiring upward mobility, they can imagine healthy, placed lives. The introduction starts with a reading of Hannah Coulter, whose title character describes her fear that she has failed to tell the right stories to her children, thus inadvertently contributing to their desire for upward mobility at the cost of healthy communities. Because our affections have such far-reaching influence—shaping the questions we ask and the ways we arrange knowledge—Berry focuses on the conflicting internal desires termed “boomer” and “sticker” and how we should work to rightly order these desires. The contrast between boomers and stickers—the different desires they have, the different stories they tell, the different questions they ask, the different economies they participate in, and the contrasting models of the university they propose—elucidates the contrast between the educational system we have now and an education for health: the boomer wants to isolate knowledge from its origins in order to maximize its utility and profitability, whereas the sticker values a medieval, rooted kind of learning whose branches connect as much as possible. Thus, the way we organize and order knowledge stems from the kinds of questions we ask, which in turn arise from the orientation of our desires.

Imagining the Tree of Wisdom

Berry’s novella Remembering powerfully depicts the importance of the imagination in healing the dismemberment and displacement caused by our contemporary mode of life and education, so this chapter opens with a reading of Andy Catlett’s journey to reimagine the health and beauty of his home, thus regaining his desire to return. An education that hopes to encourage students to serve the health of their communities must offer particular, complex images of health that they can desire and work toward. Most universities today are unable to clearly articulate what end they serve, so they lapse into merely providing students with career training. While this is an important part of a university’s task, it fails to provide students with any vision of a healthy place. We propose an education rooted in and united by place. Such an education would combat the motivations to obtain money and power that have led to the current fragmentation of academic disciplines. Thus, we follow Berry’s suggestion that universities adopt the medieval image of knowledge as a rooted tree.

Conclusion

Our aim in this book is quite humble. The hope Berry offers for universities is not a grand new program or some big solution: we’re not calling for a fund-raising campaign to establish Wendell Berry University. Rather, Berry’s vision offers us a small, humble, practice-able hope. Higher education is under immense economic and cultural pressure to prepare graduates for upward and lateral mobility, regardless of the costs to our ecosystem, communities, and souls. But change can take place if we tell students different stories—stories about rooted, contented lives; about the grateful, loving pursuit of wisdom; about people who sacrificed their private ambitions to serve the health of their local places. Such stories cultivate the virtues needed to shape the knowledge students currently learn in universities. Graduates who practice the virtues of memory, gratitude, fidelity, and love will be prepared to inhabit the membership of their places. An agrarian hope for higher education, then, begins with the simple act of telling better stories, stories that might lead to renewed imaginations, a more responsible language, and faithful work that serves the health of our communities.

Community

Berry’s diagnosis of the fragmentation that characterizes most educational institutions is particularly nuanced in Jayber Crow. This novel also develops an alternative mode of communal catechesis, one that provides an education in and for love. After describing Jayber Crow’s indictment of formal education and the “way of love” Berry offers in its place, this chapter articulates two contrasting modes of intellectual appetite—the curious and the studious. Whereas the curious desire knowledge in order to gain power for themselves, the studious desire knowledge for the sake of the subject. One of the characteristics of a studious person, then, is an ability to make connections and foster complex health—habits that modern universities are particularly bad at fostering. This chapter concludes by considering two practices that might foster this loving orientation toward others: asking connective questions and developing focused attention.

Tradition

In “Pray without Ceasing,” Andy discovers that his own ignorance of his community’s history didn’t prevent that history from forming and shaping his life. Similarly, students ought to learn from their cultural past in order to understand more deeply how that past shapes them; understanding history is a precondition for working toward its healing. As students develop the habit of memory, they can participate in a rich, ongoing conversation that equips them to attend and tend to their places. This participation is particularly important in an educational environment where technologies that access information are valued. Such technologies can be useful, but when they become normative, we outsource knowledge to “the cloud” rather than internalizing knowledge and forming it, through memory, into wisdom. Faculty and students can develop simple practices that cultivate the habit of memory: memorizing poems, studying etymologies, remembering their places, and learning the human history of their disciplines. Furthermore, despite the contrived nature of university communities, they can foster institutional memory as a way of teaching students the importance of participating in communities that pass down local knowledge to succeeding generations.