On Graduations, Universities, and What Is “Practically Useless”

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On Graduations, Universities, and What Is “Practically Useless” | Fr. James V. Schall, SJ | CWR

We need trade, technology, and engineering schools. But universities are for something beyond trade, technology, and engineering.

“I think almost all serious people understand that about 90% of what goes on in schools is ‘practically useless.’” — Neil Postman, “My Graduation Speech”

“The scanty conceptions to which we can attain of celestial things give us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all our knowledge of the world in which we live; just as a half glimpse of a person that we love is more delightful than a leisurely view of other things, whatever their number and dimensions.” — Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 644b32-45a1.

I.

The late Neil Postman (1931-2003) was a distinguished professor of communications at New York University. Over the years, like many other faculty members, he attended numerous graduations and heard varied commencement addresses—most of which, he thought, were not particularly good. He understood the reasons for this “un-outstanding-ness” of typical graduation addresses. The most a speaker could expect of an audience’s attentive listening was perhaps fifteen minutes. The graduating students were anxious to move on to what Postman called the “revelries” to follow.

Often, graduation speakers were not chosen for their ability to reason or speak, but for their accomplishments in other areas of expertise. The ceremonies were long. So Postman could sympathize with the typical graduation speaker. But in the end, he did not think that the students heard much that was important in such addresses. In fact, like E. F. Schumacher, in his A Guide for the Perplexed, he did not find much worthwhile in college in general, ten percent at best. The really important things were seldom even broached.

In this light, Postman proposed a model “graduation speech” as it should be, even if it is never actually delivered. He wanted students, in the fading moments of their academic careers, to know finally what the university was for. In this context, as in the passage that I cited in the beginning, he referred to a common opinion that about ninety percent of what went on in colleges was “practically useless.” Now, the reason why I am writing this essay is because of that phrase “practically useless.”

The phrase “practically useless” strikes an Aristotelian cord in my mind. It also goes back to Josef Pieper’s notion of “leisure.” Could Postman really have meant that the university was supposed to be “useful”? That it was to orient itself to what was primarily “practical”? Aristotle had distinguished the theoretical and the practical intellect. The theoretical intellect was ordered to know what is. The practical intellect was ordained to make or do things. The latter was ordered to the former; both had their place.

Contrary to waves of opinion emphasizing the practical, we do not enter college in principle to learn about “useful” things. If we do, we are entering something closer to a trade school, a place where knowing “how” is more important than knowing “what”. We need trade, technology, and engineering schools. But this is not what universities are for. Nor are they primarily for “research,” though knowing what the universe is constitutes a proper function of the human mind.

In fact, in the university, we should be looking for what is, in fact, “practically useless”, or perhaps, better put, what is beyond use.

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