As an art history professor at a state university attended by many first-generation students, I get the question “What can I do with a degree in art history” quite frequently from both my students and their parents. I completely understand the rationale behind the question.
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Sentimentality, according to Cambridge philosopher Michael Tanner, is a certain “disease of the feelings” that is at once aesthetic and moral. If Tanner is right about our present cultural situation, sentimentality is characteristic of advanced societies in the west, and this subjects reflective people who live within them to a peculiar kind of anxiety.
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I would like to propose two reasons that conservatives ought to take an interest in verse, one historical and the other ethical. Following them, I should like to offer as a teaching resource a guide to verisification (prosody) that the reader may find of interest as a means of understanding this seldom taught craft and that the professor of good will is welcome to use as a booklet to distribute to students.
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Do we profess a certain mode of inquiry and discovery or do we profess a certain philosophical (and maybe even theological) commitment?
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These upperclassmen have not learned to think critically or to evaluate different viewpoints and come up with their own. The entire idea that a class would ask of them to develop their own opinion on what something means is startling and uncomfortable. Best to return to the soft breast of the social sciences and be succored and soothed with definitions that can fit on flashcards.
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Our society tends to regard the university professor of liberal education as parasitic to the wealth creation of the laborer and CEO. This false view neglects the moral economy in which each of them participates, and to which each adds his own unique value.
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American education fails to understand or achieve its purpose: to educate. Primarily, universities fail because they cannot define what it means to be educated.
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A common perception in our society has it that people who create wealth directly, such as the businessman or the laborer who works with his hands, produce more wealth than a university professor, who is seen as a parasite on their efforts. The university professor, especially one who teaches humanities and social sciences and thus does not invent some machine that enhances industrial production, produces nothing of value. It’s even worse if he teaches at a public institution, because then he draws his inflated salary from the backs of those who actually work for a living. A recent encounter of mine challenges this perception in a fundamental way.
Part One of Two
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Mediocrity happens. At this very moment at an institution of higher education near you, a mildly hung-over student is finishing a mildly plagiarized paper on travel-industry marketing, for which he'll receive a B-plus. Across campus, an assistant professor is drafting a tepid scholarly article that will eventually be read by 43 people and cited by one.
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There are few professions in which one can interact in such a healthy way with young people. Though the life of a university teacher is full of work day in and day out, including weekends, I get to do what I love: converse about ideas and books!
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