Revival: Knowledge without wisdom

It's time we once again started hearing the word wisdom on campus. (Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture. Original version.)

Woody Allen once confessed that he was expelled from New York University for cheating on his metaphysics examination; he was caught peeking into the soul of the boy sitting next to him. This couldn’t happen today because universities don’t teach metaphysics. As for souls, universities sold theirs a long time ago.

Instead of the meaning of existence, today’s universities focus on the vocational skills students need for their first job out of university, the courses that make money. Subjects concerned with the ancient search for wisdom—philosophy, classics, literature—are slowly fading away. We must face the sad fact: wisdom has developed an image problem.

As far as young people are concerned, wisdom is the province of ghost whisperers; extraterrestrials like Mr. Spock, the Vulcan on Star Trek and wizened kung-fu sages (“The body is the arrow, the spirit is the bow, Grasshopper”). Wise people are not only seen as old, alien and weird but also bookish, risk-averse and unemotional. No wonder their pearls of wisdom are routinely ignored by the impetuous young.

Youth thirsts for new experiences; it’s in their nature to take chances and to follow their hearts. Wisdom just gets in the way. “Fools rush in, where wise men never go”, goes the old song. “But wise men never fall in love, so how are they to know?”

You might think that universities would hold a different view; after all, they’re in the wisdom business. Well, you might think this, but you would be wrong. Every type of knowledge—massage therapy, herbal medicine, even circus performing is represented on one or another campus, but the word “wisdom” is rarely mentioned.

It wasn’t always like this. Wisdom was once central to education, and its importance persisted right down to the 20^th century. But wisdom is no longer on the curriculum. Today’s universities are concerned with preparing students for a career. Wisdom has been replaced with job skills.

There is nothing wrong with vocational training; a fulfilling career is an important part of a good life. Much of my academic work over the years has been devoted to career preparation. I was once a Dean of Medicine, and there are few more vocational courses than medicine. Our students were all bright, but they were narrowly focused on their career goals. They resented any time spent on subjects that weren’t directly related to diagnosing or treating patients.

It’s easy to see why. Studying philosophy does not make it any easier to remove a gall bladder; reading Galen sheds little light on how to recognise pneumonia. As far as our students were concerned, time spent on any subject not related to a doctor’s daily work was time wasted.

It’s easy to empathise with them; medical education is long, arduous and expensive. Why add to its length and cost with apparently irrelevant subjects? If doctors want to study history, literature and philosophy, they can take them up when they retire and have time for such frivolity.

This makes some sense, from the students’ vantage point, but it demeans our purpose as universities. Yes, we must prepare graduates for what they will do in life, but we also have a duty to help them to at least think about what kind of people they want to be. Indeed, these two educational goals—doing and being—are actually inextricable. Let me tell you why.

No one would try to argue that a deep knowledge of philosophy makes surgeons better skilled. But it might deepen their empathy and improve their understanding of what constitutes a high-quality life. This would not help them learn how to remove a prostate, but it could help them to decide whether it should be removed in the first place.

Such wisdom is essential for a doctor’s work. Without it, how does a doctor tell a mother-to-be that her baby will have Down’s syndrome? How does a doctor explain the mother’s options to her in a humane way? This takes more than just knowledge of genetics. It also requires an understanding of suffering, of disappointment and maternal love.

How does a doctor tell a daughter that her mother’s life support needs to be withdrawn? It takes more than just knowledge of physiology. It also requires an understanding of loss. How does an emergency room doctor avoid despair when faced with a baby battered nearly to death by its own father? Such horror requires a faith in humanity that cannot be learned in the anatomy lab.

It’s not just doctors who could benefit from a broader education. Everyone can.

Studying drama would not help financiers devise the complicated financial schemes that periodically plunge the economy into financial crises. But if they were familiar with Goethe’s Faust, they might think twice about the consequences of their actions.

Being able to quote poetry will not help politicians get elected (certainly not in Australia). But what if they had the opportunity to read Shelley’s Ozymandias? Perhaps it would make them more humble and thoughtful about their accomplishments?

As I say this, I’m looking around the audience, and I can see the raised eyebrows of my academic colleagues. A generation of graduates familiar with the great works of history, philosophy and literature is a wonderful vision. But they doubt that reading Goethe and Shelley, not to mention Shakespeare, guarantees wisdom.

They are correct. Reading, by itself, won’t make anyone wise. Experience is also required. As Odysseus learns on his journey back to Ithaca, some important lessons can only be learned the hard way—through bitter experience.

Nothing has changed. Youth start with sex, drugs and rock and roll, and with experience, they eventually come to appreciate the Delphic prescription “nothing to excess”. Tragic exceptions only serve to prove the rule.

There is a problem, however. Experience alone cannot guarantee wisdom any more than reading books can. The lessons of life are only available to those who are ready to learn them. If wisdom is the goal, then students must “walk 10,000 miles, read 10,000 books”, said the 17^th-century Chinese philosopher Gu Yanwu. In other words, becoming wise requires more than a set of adventures but a cultured mind that is open, ready and able to absorb the lessons that experience teaches.

Pasteur famously said that “Chance favours the prepared mind”, and our job as university academics is to take his words seriously. To prepare students to learn from experience, we need to go beyond vocational training.

Life, death, tragedy, love, beauty, courage, loyalty—all of these are omitted from our modern vocational curricula, and yet, when it comes time to sum up our lives, they are the only things that ever really matter.

On Ash Wednesday, the priest admonishes the faithful to “remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” A salutary reminder of what we all have waiting for us. In the meantime, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, we spend our years trying to find some meaning in our lives.

It is easy to fall into the pit of nihilism, to consider life “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. But before we let our students reach Macbeth’s conclusion, we should at least try to provide them with the intellectual foundation they need to make such a judgment.

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.

This speech, in other forms and versions, appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement (London), the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and this substack. This is the original speech delivered at Macquarie University.