The True Purpose of a University

"What the university of today tends to forget is that man has other hungers which the lower animals do not possess and that, if he is not taught how to satisfy those hungers too, he remains individually distrait, socially dangerous, and disruptive, no matter how well he has learned to sate and does sate his lesser appetites. The true business of a university is to see to it that men and women learn to give primary consideration to how to feed the extra-animal hungers. These human hungers are three: the hunger for meaning, the hunger for love, the hunger for creative craftsmanship. By feeding these hungers—or trying his best to do so—man can arrive at life of a sort that makes sense in spite of the frustration which ends every human career, in spite of death which comes surely, swiftly.”—Bernard Iddings Bell, Crisis in Education (1949), 154-155.

Why Attend College?

Despite a lip service to the importance of creative thinking and moral discrimination and to the necessity of a critical estimate of current patterns of behavior, those who direct the universities care for none of these things. Their chief aim is to turn out graduates who can fit comfortably, if possible eruditely, into the current pattern of living, ask no basic questions, experience no heartbreak—machine tenders, thing makers, thing users. Otherwise a university might become a breeding place of rebels, a sender forth of graduates who, unadjusted and unadjustable, would try to turn the world upside down. How tragic if young men and women should be compelled to make a choice between honor and comfort! How much easier, how much more kind, how much wiser for everybody if the universities stick to their undeniably successful knitting.—Bernard Iddings Bell, Crisis in Education, 158.

Tyranny of the Herd

by Paul Beston

Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life
by Bernard Iddings Bell.
Fourth Edition, Intercollegiate Studies Institute 2001 [1952], 136 pages, $20.

Americans watching the political upheavals in Egypt and elsewhere feel a variety of emotions, ranging from excitement about potential reform to fear of political regression. Both instincts revolve around the image of crowds in the streets—their promise and their peril. While we might take a justifiably cautious attitude toward crowds elsewhere, few of us tend to think of ourselves as members of a crowd. After all, America is the land of the individual.

Nearly sixty years ago, a learned Episcopalian priest witheringly disputed that notion. In a concise book of just four chapters, he argued that American life had become stiflingly conformist, where the dictates of the crowd guided most people’s choices. Further, wrote Bernard Iddings Bell, the “chief threat to America comes from within America.” It came, he wrote

from our prevailing self-admiration, from indisposition to listen to adverse criticism of our way of life, disinclination to see ourselves as we are, an unwillingness to confess our sins which has come dangerously near to being an inability to see that there are serious faults to admit and remedy. Most Americans regard an insistence on national self-criticism as traitorous or near it.

Today’s readers are more likely to associate such language with liberal thinkers, but Bell was an important if little-remembered figure of the old traditionalist Right. In his 1952 book, Crowd Culture, he offered an unsparing view of America’s “self-applauding jamboree,” which he saw as bound up with its democratic ethos and a decline of standards. Central to his criticism was the American elevation of the Common Man, whom Bell viewed in undeniably elitist terms—“for the most part ill-informed about how and for what man must live if he would be happy.” Bell believed that America’s obsession with egalitarianism had impoverished education, the arts, politics, and religion. He did not write against the Common Man’s advancement, but against a society that seemed interested in advancing only on narrowly economic, materialist grounds.

Quote of the Day: Bernard Iddings Bell

While wealth accumulates in the United States, man seems to decay. In our private lives a pervading relativism, in absence of conviction about what is the good life, a willingness to seek the easy way rather than the way of integrity, blunts the prodding of conscience, takes the zest out of living, creates a general boredom. We are not a happy people, our alleged gaiety is not spontaneous. Our boredom results not only in a reluctant morality but in shockingly bad manners. We become increasingly truculent. Our way of life, while opulent and brash and superficially friendly, is less and less conducive to peace of mind and security of soul. (Crowd Culture)