Revival: knowledge without wisdom

Fortunately, it turns out that students want us to do this. The Vice-President of an American university asked his students: "Why have you come to university?" The students said, "I want a good job" or "I need a degree to get a promotion at work". Not surprising. Just what he expected.

But when he framed the question in a larger context: "What kind of life do you want to be leading five or ten years from now?" the answers were different. Students talked about purpose, meaning, identity, integrity and relationships.

There is a hunger for the kind of insight and wisdom that a narrow skills education cannot satisfy. I once published an article in a magazine saying that there ought to be a list of great literary works with which every student should be familiar. This sparked a lively debate in the magazine and on the Internet. Most writers agreed that there should be such a list, but, as you can imagine, not everyone agreed about what should be on it. The important point is that people really cared. They felt strongly that books have the power to convey wisdom. And so do I.

Whatever profession students choose to pursue, they will benefit not only as professionals but also as human beings from being exposed to the greatest works of fiction, history, biography, philosophy and science. It is from these sources that they will learn about love and loss, about memory and desire, about loyalty and duty, about our world and our universe and about what it means to be a human being.

In Choruses from The Rock, T.S. Eliot asks these questions: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Good questions. I recently read two books that tried to answer them. The books were The Lost Soul of Higher Education by Ellen Schrecker and Harry R. Lewis's Excellence Without a Soul.

I was struck by the word soul in both titles. In my decades as an academic, I don't think I have ever heard any of my colleagues use the word "soul", at least not in connection with the university. Yet soul is exactly the right word.

Our universities have made a Faustian bargain. Like the scholar in Goethe's famous play, we have traded our souls, and this transaction did not turn out to be a win-win proposition. We have replaced wisdom with skills while pretending that nothing has changed. We are like priests who have lost their faith but still have to conduct mass every day.

Of course, universities are right to be concerned with preparing students for work. As I have said, a fulfilling career is part of a good life. But work is about more than money. To paraphrase John Ruskin, the highest reward for work is not what graduates get for it but what they become by it.

Mahatma Gandhi warned us to be on guard against science without humanity; politics without principle; knowledge without character; wealth without work; commerce without morality; pleasure without conscience; and worship without sacrifice.

He may not have realised it, but he was making the case for including wisdom in higher education. It's time our universities heeded his advice. It's time we once again started hearing the word "wisdom" on campus.