College Epistemology

*yes, that is William Rice, founder of Rice University. Also the name of my grandfather and younger brother...


College is an interesting thing. Some of us find ourselves at the dawn of our academic pursuits, while others, like myself, are nearing that moment when the sun, after slowly bleeding into the horizon, sofltly slips away. The light shines on many things during its parabolic journey, but I wonder sometimes what exactly is revealed. Post-modernism, what with its challenges to absolute truth and the notion of progress has, among other things, cast long unflinching shadows.

Things weren't always this way. The Aristotelian ideal of the educated person endured many centuries as a fundamental basis of knowledge for those pursuing a liberal education. Liberal because it aimed to free the individual from the confines of ignorance, which hopefully would ensure greater happiness. The student, under the Aristotelian method, would learn seven arts or skills, which were the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).

But the structure of today's colleges is radically different. An aberration from the original Greek pursuits of knowledge is abundantly evident. Why the change? What was the catalyst for this (de)evolution of intellectual pursuits? Charles Van Doren proposes a possible answer:

The failure of the Renaissance to produce successful "Renaissance men" did not go unnoticed. If such men as Leonardo, Pico, Bacon, and many others could not succeed in their presumed dream of knowing all there was to know about everything, then lesser men should not presume to try. The alternative became self-evident: achieve expertise in one field while others attained expertise in theirs.

The convenient device for accomplishing the change consisted of a divided and subdivided university, with separate departments, like armed feudalities, facing one another across a gulf of mutual ignorance... The "uni" in university became meaningless as the institution, possessing more and more power as government funds were pumped into it for research, turned into a loose confederation of disconnected mini-states, instead of an organization devoted to the joint search for knowledge and truth.

Until World War II, undergraduate colleges, at least, hewed to the liberal ideal, without always doing so enthusiastically. After the war, the liberal curriculum was discarded almost everywhere, and the departmental organization of the educational establishment was installed at all levels below the university, even in many elementary schools.

The progression of epistemology in the university setting is fascinating. If the greatest minds of the Renaissance conceded in their limits of knowledge and post World War II intellectuals restructured knowledge to limit its scope, where does that leave us? And to think, they weren't plagued by the crumbling effects of post-modernism and its full frontal assault on absolute truth or morality.

Admittedly, this is all a bit disheartening. But Socrates knew the scope of our minds, the finiteness of an individuals knowledge when he set forth philosophies most famous dictum, "The only thing one can know is that they know nothing." But the astute wisdom of Socrates leaves one dissatisfied.

My father once told me that the point of college is to learn to think for yourself. The numbers, theories, dates are virtually certain to dissolve in the cognitive caldron otherwise known as our minds, but our approach to rational and critical thought, is hopefully what will emerge. And that, undeniably, will be personal progress.