In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Liberal Arts
  • Sam Pickering (bio)
The Liberal Arts at Sewanee: A History of Teaching and Learning at the University of the South by W. Brown Patterson (University of the South, 2009. x + 206 pages. Illustrated. $18 pb)

The Liberal Arts at Sewanee is a model of what a college history should be—beautifully written, rationally celebratory, and so brightly thoughtful that reading becomes rumination, almost every paragraph providing mullable provender. "In a sense," Brown Patterson writes at the beginning of his study, "the curriculum is an expression of what the college or university is—and what it seeks to become." In contradistinction to Patterson's statement, corporate universities differ greatly from Sewanee. The corporate university is often hydralike, with but one of its heads devoted to curriculum and undergraduate teaching. Among other powerful sectors stamping their trademarks upon the university is the entertainment sector (which includes athletics), the marketing and publicity sector, and the government and industrial sector—this last often buttressed by the term research, a word before which faculties genuflect, not always out of intellectual commitment but because grants help pay the bills.

As the curriculum of such schools less often sets out to shape knowledgeable broad-minded people, the counseling or advising sector has grown—the growth positive, reflecting the lingering notion that education should improve lives. Lastly the administrative sector has swelled, in great part because universities now flourish amid, not apart from, the grit of industrial living. Indeed many administrators are migrants skipping from one educational factory to another. Even worse, instead of using their positions to comment on society, indeed on life itself, university ceos speak so that their talk will not be remembered, relying on buzzwords and clichés that have no sting—formulaic words such as diversity, interdisciplinary, and [End Page xlii] committed to excellence that will not stir corporate or political hives into stinging criticism.

Sewanee is different—a school that should treasure its difference for the sake of its students and faculty, these last forming the essential college, people who spend decades at the school shaping curriculum and place, unlike students who, no matter how sentimental they wax as alumni, are sojourners. In describing Sewanee, Patterson cites John Henry Newman's famous statement that a university is "an alma mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill." To a real extent that remark fits Sewanee.

During my years as a student there John B. Ransom boosted me enthusiastically, and Professor William Cocke and his wife, Loulie, once invited me to lunch at their house, a kindness that has stuck in my memory despite the waning years. Still I also remember the embarrassment I experienced two weeks before my graduation when I told Francis E. Carter, a dear friend who was the headmaster of Montgomery Bell Academy, my secondary school, that I had not met the vice-chancellor. Mr. Carter had come to Sewanee at the vice-chancellor's invitation to discuss the admission of students from mba. I was head of student government, and my never having met the vice-chancellor so startled Mr. Carter that he pulled me along to the meeting and introduced me to him. "You should shake Sam's hand before he graduates. He is one of your best students and head of the student body," Mr. Carter said, his voice rasping with irritation.

Patterson succeeds wonderfully in placing Sewanee in the context of higher education in America over the past one hundred and fifty years. He also locates it in the South and notes that it is the only school in the nation owned by the Episcopal Church. In clear detail he describes the school's founding, noting that the founding bishops believed that for religion to "occupy the largest field of usefulness" it "must be supported as well as invigorated by an adequate amount of intellectual culture." Bishop Otey declared that, from George Washington onward, "intelligence and virtue among the people, are the chief supports of our civil institutions." He said that education, in Patterson's words, "must seek to develop human beings who would use knowledge wisely, humanely, reverently, and for the benefit of...

pdf

Share