Scholarship’s Uncertain Sound

For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? (1 Cor. 14:8)

The scholar in battle dress always looks faintly ludicrous. No zeal to serve can mask a bicep-less arm. In an aggressively muscular world, scholars are always overmatched—as long as they contend with the world on its own terms. Until scholars realize that their function is to set the terms, define the opposition, and, hardest of all, inspire their cohorts, they are engaged in a losing cause and deserve to lose. No one should really be surprised, therefore, when Humpty Dumpty’s fall proves disastrous. After all, here is just one more impractical egghead relying too heavily on mundane horses and men.

Scholars are no less involved than others in today’s competitive struggle; they do not ignore the battle or retreat from combat. They misread their distinctive function and contribution, however, if they conceive of their place in usual terms, if they are content to follow, to conform, to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand encounter. Such leveling dissipates scholars’ strength. In practice, scholars often fall into the ambiguity of being something less than a dynamic leader and something more than an uncritical follower. They are too tentative to lead and too intelligent to follow. Perhaps scholars’ difficulty here arises from their concept of leadership. In our time, scholars have been too willing to accept leadership ideals proposed by followers. Perhaps we have made a fetish out of democratic procedure. Perhaps we have stultified creative and effective leadership by encouraging the masses to seek directors and governors who reflect the masses. Until scholars exploit their difference rather than hiding it, and until we common people concede that unique contribution, the scholarly call to battle against ignorance, prejudice, and all the hosts of darkness will continue to be uncertain and ineffective.

This general problem of the scholar in society is a microcosm of the student in school. The transmutation of student to scholar—a bit of alchemy rare on any college campus—never quite takes place until students bring themselves into significant adjustment with faculty, administration, their colleagues, and themselves. Consider, for example, why the ordinary student’s relationship with faculty and administration is vague and awkward. The student tends to convert university personnel into symbols: the teacher becomes a grade, the administration a big stick. At the risk of sounding defensive, I believe that most teachers sincerely regret this problem and are anxious to achieve at least an intellectual rapport with those whom they instruct. But teachers’ authority works against them. Since they can command, their invitation is suspect. Yet even when a student initiates a meeting with an instructor or administrator, real communication rarely takes place. For every one student who comes to such an interview to learn, a hundred come to explain. Too many young people today believe the defensive assertions of those who must justify student apathy. Too often, students have heard that they are not responsible causes but unfortunate results. They believe this assertion—and sit down in it. After all, a “result” has no future, only a past. Society is to blame, or the atomic age, or broken homes, poor teachers, comic books ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

In a rather moving poem, John Holmes tells of his boyhood experience with a deaf New England shipbuilder who provided him with some of the profoundest “talk” he ever heard—without speaking a word. Watching the old craftsman’s skilled hands, young Holmes suddenly realized that no matter how we build our ship, it has to float: we cannot “explain to the ocean.”¹ How many students visit me to explain to the ocean! Their work will be late; they have not been feeling well lately; or, in a reflection of our mind-obsessed times, they have “always” had a psychological block against spelling or grammar. The ultimate—or perhaps the nadir—of all such “explanations” I have heard occurred when a student, a mite plaintively, excused his absence from my class by telling me he needed to have his teeth fixed, and my class was the only “free period” he had!

How significantly different is the attitude of the student-scholar. The student-scholar recognizes administration not as discipline but as direction, teachers not as opponents but as components in a dynamic learning process. The student-turned-scholar expects, nay insists, on being inspired by instructors—and is not often disappointed. In other words, the material, the teacher, and the student are ready. Consequently, a fusion occurs, not the amalgamation we often rather unctuously call education.

In a true learning experience, teachers are not outside or above or detached; they form an integral part of the reaction and are, therefore, never quite the same afterward. How easily students can settle for something less than scholarship on their own part and in so doing prevent teachers from providing more than mechanical direction. Students must not leave instructors adrift in a lotus land of indifference. Without the stimulus of students’ scholarly absorption, teachers can shrink into mere catalysts—that is, people necessary for the reaction but unwilling to get their own chemicals dirty. When we are students, therefore, we must not let teachers come away from an encounter with our minds unscathed. We may be surprised to find how much steel abides in most teachers’ minds, but we will never know unless our own minds are file-hard!

Of course, we must avoid giving our instructors merely grudging attention, for in so doing we turn them into police officers. Similarly, we must avoid fawning upon them, for in so doing we tend to corrupt them. But even the least of us can never completely escape the gnawing realization that dull students are invariably taught by dull teachers, and scholars are taught by scholars.

In our second area of adjustment—that involving our would-be scholar’s relationships with colleagues—our problems are not so specific, but they are more pervasive. Let my begin by suggesting a paradox. Scholarship should always connote leadership, but leadership can exist without scholarship. To extend the scriptural analogy of the “uncertain sound,” scholarship can sound a bugle note—but the call to charge is not the charge itself. Charges are led by people. Such people may be imbued by the intellectual and emotional wholeness of scholarship. If so, they can inspire their followers, lift their followers above themselves. If not, however, then leadership only reflects the superficial unity of the mass mind, never rising above that source.

My emphasis on inspiration as a significant part of scholarship is deliberate. If I overstress it today, I do so in the hope of balancing the weight currently given to scholarship’s informational and research aspects. We have tended to lose the scholar in the technician during recent times—or perhaps during recent wars. Such a loss may be inevitable during periods of national emergency, but a constant state of emergency is a contradiction in terms. If “emergency” becomes the norm, we must recognize that we have shifted the meaning of this term; it has lost some of its absolute authority. Our “emergency” focus on technology, therefore, should now undergo reexamination, lest we become victims of a vast cultural synecdoche—substituting the part for the whole. Some people have argued that, war to the side, the competitive drive of our economic and political system requires increasing technological specialization. Quite possibly. My argument today, however, is not with technology or the technician but with those who would substitute the technician for the scholar. Emerson’s hundred-year-old definition of the American scholar—“man thinking”—has not been superseded. Emphasis here is not upon the thinker, the chemist, or the poet, but on the complete person in the laboratory, the whole soul writing poetry. The real danger facing both the sciences and humanities is that we shall turn into idiots—idiots in the original meaning of the term, which suggests a deliberately narrow point of view. The technician, the expert, and the specialist may be necessary, but they are something less than our scholar.

The scholar must bring the whole human being into action; humanity is their province. They may need to start humbly. Neighborly kindness and sympathy prefigure communication between nations. Apparent perversity may cloak insecurity, and what seems to be willful ignorance may be only an arrow in the heart. The scholar adds empathy to research. If scholars truly hope to inform—or reform—they must first inspire. A warning here, however. Titillation is not inspiration. Dilettantism can become a counterfeit for the breadth that scholarship demands. People never seriously question Pope’s insistence that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but how much more dangerous are bits of knowledge and posturing attitudes mistaken in the aggregate for scholarship? Sadly, Goldsmith’s picture of the schoolmaster in “The Deserted Village” remains the scholarly ideal of too many people:

The village all declared how much he knew;
Twas certain he could write and cipher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And even, the story ran, that he could gauge:
In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill,
For even though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew.

University, college, school—all these terms have roots suggesting community, inter-relationship, interdependence. The only gauge for scholarship’s wholeness is another scholar.

Aspiring scholars may take direction from those who supervise them and know inspiration in their relations with others, but scholars’ basic motivation is not inspiration—“breathing in” from outside. Scholarship is never simply given; it develops. The subtlest temptation of scholarship is to see oneself in another’s image. Derivative scholars, scholar-disciples, are arrogating a title they do not quite deserve. We cannot feel Jeremiah’s burning within the bone vicariously, but true scholars are just a bit uneasy in the role of prophet too. They remain too conscious of their insights’ own relativity to pontificate. Furthermore, Plato not withstanding, few scholars care to see themselves as gadflies whose sting deflates pretense and hypocrisy. Close analysis may be destructive, but it need not be mean or sadistic. A slight odor of ego attends those who cannot resist pricking the illusions of their fellows. How easy, in this state, to confuse carping with criticism. The real danger is not that the gadfly may become too critical; rather, the gadfly may become unable to discriminate at all. Jonah provides the archetype of this pseudo-scholar: he fervently preached condemnation but could not imagine bandaging the wound. I find something subhuman about Jonah, plated stubbornly under his withered gourd, bitterly unhappy with God and man, himself most completely lost in illusion. Jonah’s role as critic is only the means to an end. Since that role is all he has, however, he adopts it as an end in itself. What an instructive contrast between the repentant, rebuilding Nineveh and Jonah, the perspiring gadfly!

If would-be scholars remain true to the wholeness within themselves, their appeal is clear and unmistakable. We want to follow him, to serve with him. We want to stretch, to fit our ideal selves in the certain, demanding, impelling call of scholarship. Here we find the abundant life Christ promised. In the concluding, resolving lines of “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot describes how the truly religious person makes a dynamic adjustment to society. Eliot’s lines illuminate the fulfillment of scholarship just as significantly. The end of all our striving is a “condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”