The way it goes :: essays research papers

In 1940, George Santayana looked back on his forty years in America, and remarked morbidly: "If I had been free to choose, I should not have lived there, or been educated there, or taught philosophy there or anywhere else."1 He had come to Harvard in 1882 when it was in the middle of its most dynamic transformation; he succeeded both academically and socially as an undergraduate, and, in the company of William James and Josiah Royce, he became one of the most prominent and well-recognized participants in perhaps the greatest department of philosophy that ever existed. Yet Santayana found something horribly wrong with the changing University. He worried that the mass movement towards practicality and specialization, which he equated with President Charles William Eliot's attempts to make Harvard a nationally-recognized institution, was draining the university of the aestheticism and humanism that had made higher education worth pursuing. He saw in Harvard's atmosphere of excessive materialism and utilitarianism an ailment of American society as a whole, an ugly new trend that had separated the national "will" from imagination, and rendered the intellect irrelevant. Unlike most other critics of the new university, the academic and cultural environment was so intolerable to Santayana that he decided to escape it altogether. He left for Europe in 1912, and although he would continue to write about America until his death in 1952, not once did he return. Academia is still not at rest. The public's widespread admiration for higher education once prevalent in the postwar era has begun to reverse itself, and between harsh budget cuts on the one hand and Alan Bloom's vicious denunciation of the university on the other, the future of higher learning in America may look as bleak to the prospective graduate student as it ever has in recent history. Crisis, however, is nothing new to the American university, and Bloom is not the first to warn of the "collapse of the entire American educational structure,"2 which, at last observation, was still standing. The very revolution in education that gave the university its modern, recognizable form found itself confronting similar forecasts of gloom and doom at the turn of the century. Along with the adoption of the free elective system and specialization of knowledge that came to be the staples of higher learning there emerged a small but vocal force determined to curtail the excesses of utilitarianism and abstract research. Known as the "advocates of liberal culture," these men reacted to an institution they believed had lost its sense of purpose, and their opposition, like today's, was testament to the growing and deeply felt fragmentation of the university. The way it goes :: essays research papers In 1940, George Santayana looked back on his forty years in America, and remarked morbidly: "If I had been free to choose, I should not have lived there, or been educated there, or taught philosophy there or anywhere else."1 He had come to Harvard in 1882 when it was in the middle of its most dynamic transformation; he succeeded both academically and socially as an undergraduate, and, in the company of William James and Josiah Royce, he became one of the most prominent and well-recognized participants in perhaps the greatest department of philosophy that ever existed. Yet Santayana found something horribly wrong with the changing University. He worried that the mass movement towards practicality and specialization, which he equated with President Charles William Eliot's attempts to make Harvard a nationally-recognized institution, was draining the university of the aestheticism and humanism that had made higher education worth pursuing. He saw in Harvard's atmosphere of excessive materialism and utilitarianism an ailment of American society as a whole, an ugly new trend that had separated the national "will" from imagination, and rendered the intellect irrelevant. Unlike most other critics of the new university, the academic and cultural environment was so intolerable to Santayana that he decided to escape it altogether. He left for Europe in 1912, and although he would continue to write about America until his death in 1952, not once did he return. Academia is still not at rest. The public's widespread admiration for higher education once prevalent in the postwar era has begun to reverse itself, and between harsh budget cuts on the one hand and Alan Bloom's vicious denunciation of the university on the other, the future of higher learning in America may look as bleak to the prospective graduate student as it ever has in recent history. Crisis, however, is nothing new to the American university, and Bloom is not the first to warn of the "collapse of the entire American educational structure,"2 which, at last observation, was still standing. The very revolution in education that gave the university its modern, recognizable form found itself confronting similar forecasts of gloom and doom at the turn of the century. Along with the adoption of the free elective system and specialization of knowledge that came to be the staples of higher learning there emerged a small but vocal force determined to curtail the excesses of utilitarianism and abstract research. Known as the "advocates of liberal culture," these men reacted to an institution they believed had lost its sense of purpose, and their opposition, like today's, was testament to the growing and deeply felt fragmentation of the university.