If our university were to be personified, what would be its mental state? I contend that our university would suffer from perpetual anxiety—just as many of its students do.
While addressing the freshman class during orientation, the provost commonly flatters students with praise and statistics indicating that they are better than any class that has come before. We are invited to infer that we are among the freest and most enlightened folks in our society because we got into Notre Dame, one of the great research universities in the world. But these soaring words do not make us vain, or satisfied, or even serene. Instead, we constantly worry about what else we have to do to achieve the next step—even when we are not sure where that next step is going to take us. We have become accustomed to jumping through hoops for the simple reason that doing so has favorable consequences.
The reality is that there is no end of hoops to jump through, and that we will continue in our state of perpetual anxiety unless we pause to consider and comprehend what we are seeking.
A large number of students are studying not what they love but what they feel will provide security and a well-paying job after graduation. Or students have received the message from their parents that they must study something “practical”. (Some students appear to fit this description but truly are studying what they love or are choosing a more “practical” path with the intention of also pursuing what truly interests them, only in an informal fashion.) How do we respond to the pressures inherent in jumping through the next hoop? We either work harder or seek temporary relief. One motto often used to describe the mentality of the student body at Notre Dame is “Work hard, play hard.” Yet we are serious and almost sad even in our play in that much of the time our pursuit of pleasure consists of mindless revelry the purpose of which is to allow us to forget our anxiety, to distract us, if only for one weekend.
Yes, one should prudently chart one’s path through college, appreciating the costs involved in higher education. Yet what tends to result from these pressures is an attitude that treats the pursuit of knowledge and truth as merely instrumental to getting good grades, which are instrumental to graduating with some distinction, which leads to the well-paid job, and then the wherewithal to purchase the stuff I want.
This view of work and education fosters a culture of careerism that pervades the community and influences students before they ever set foot on campus.
This sort of anxiety is not limited to students at Notre Dame. And I do not mean here to talk about students elsewhere. Rather, the university’s leadership is anxious, covetous. Their disquiet can be sensed in the frequent comparisons of our school with our so-called peer institutions made by university administrators. This competition leads to a propensity for frequent change and new development, which sometimes sacrifices meaningful tradition along the way. Academic excellence is a standard to which we must always aspire, but only as understood within the framework of the university’s institutional vocation. Rather than comparing our school to the Ivies, we should focus first on understanding our own distinct apostolate and mission as a Catholic university.
To take but one example: Notre Dame is a campus perpetually becoming. It is always under construction. I was born and raised under the shadow of the Dome. I have witnessed first-hand the transformation and expansion of the campus. Of course, some measure of development is necessary to maintain the university’s standard of excellent education and academic performance. However, the central motive behind some of the university’s recent construction projects has been not necessity but anxiety coupled with a thirst for prestige. The Campus Crossroads Project is the latest example of an invasive and unnecessary development introduced through a desire to “measure up to” and exceed our rivals.
A common theme appears in the responses of both students and the university to this perpetual anxiety that the most astute observer of the American temperament—Tocqueville—observed so many years ago:
“In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures.
“It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.”
We respond to this “vague dread” by doing something, by performing more work, or else (in the case of students) by seeking distraction with play that does not refresh. But perhaps this activist motion is the wrong response to our anxiety. Perhaps what is needed is a recovery of leisure.
What has leisure to do with the workings of a modern university and the affairs of its students? As Josef Pieper writes in his seminal essay Leisure the Basis of Culture, “ … leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English ‘school’. The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means ‘leisure’.” A university is a place where we should be at leisure.
Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world, and it allows us to ponder the great questions of life—questions that must be addressed before our work can have any meaning. Leisure is concerned with the contemplative life whereas work is concerned with the active life; central to contemplation is our ability to receive, and central to action is our ability to give. Only through leisure can we properly orient our work, because only by learning to receive can we learn how to give. This is the foundation of vocational discernment: receptivity to a will extrinsic to our own but fidelity to and execution of which nevertheless constitutes our fulfillment.
We risk losing our ability to receive, our ability to accept what is given to us. We risk growing accustomed to operating on the principle that if we work hard enough and want something bad enough, we will eventually earn it. For us, everything is earned. This attitude feeds our overvaluation of work as a response to a felt anxiety. We live to work. Too often, we measure ourselves as more or less “successful” based on how much we are able to produce and consume. Could we not instead work in order that we might live—well and now?
As Pieper urged, leisure is not merely rest and relaxation for the sake of being able to return to our work refreshed and able to function smoothly; it is to ensure that we remain fully human in our work. We must devote ourselves to our careers and to ordering our society and economy, but these are merely elements in human life and not the totality of it. What is truly central to human life and flourishing is the enterprise of knowing what is and what is good. Leisure allows us to seek this knowledge and realize the basic human goods or values that fulfill us. Students at a university ought to embrace this pursuit, not set it aside as too bothersome to interrupt their constant endeavoring for achievement.
In his introduction to Leisure the Basis of Culture James V. Schall, SJ, writes, “Before we can pretend to do anything about the present, we must know what we are, what the world is, and yes, what God is. Construction of a civilization that knows little or nothing of these deeper realities can only make things worse.” A university’s construction of itself, and a student’s shaping of his life, must be undertaken with a sound understanding of what is and what is good.
Every member of this university community could better understand what a Catholic university is and what its role in the world ought to be. And we should all try to acquire this understanding, lest the perpetual motion around us come to no lasting, true good. If we undertake projects in response to our perpetual anxiety without giving due consideration to how these projects harmonize with what we are, how can they not serve to make things worse? Students at Notre Dame need to escape the wilderness of “total work” and seek leisure in order to receive the reality of things. “We stand in a gift relation to what is not ourselves,” Schall writes; leisure can help us to grasp that “we did not cause ourselves to be and that we cannot but be amazed and grateful that what we are actually exists in our own persons and in the companions we find in this mortal life, itself destined not just to itself but to eternal life.”
What good might a recovery of leisure do? It just might help us—both as students and as a university—recognize that not everything we have is earned.
Contact Tim Bradley at tbradle5@nd.edu.
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