Liberal Education and the City as Subject
Scott F. Crider
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω
Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned.
Homer, Odyssey, 1.3 (Murray trans.)
In the Rome Program, we spend a great deal of time and energy explaining to ourselves
and students why Rome matters, why the semester spent studying in the city of Rome
somehow fulfills UD’s distinct form of liberal education. My own favorite answer is
that it does so because it is where the classical and Christian worlds meet and mingle.
That may be why the city of Rome matters.
But why does the city of Rome matter? That is, why is it important educationally for students to encounter not only the events, texts, equations, hypotheses and artifacts of the Western traditions (note the plural), but also one of their greatest cities? Why must students — Fromers, Spromers or Sumromers — learn a city to be liberally educated? Yes, Nomers are missing something educationally, which is why we try so hard to get everyone to Rome. What are those who do not study here missing exactly?
One answer students often give — that seeing where the curriculum came to life makes it more real — is good, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. Thoreau’s Walden was an extremely important and real book in my education when I was in my early 20s, but I visited Walden Pond as site only recently. I was disoriented, then reoriented by Thoreau’s great book before I ever walked around the pond where he wrote it.
As I like to tell students, we should define what we will discuss. What is a city?
A city is an artistic form of material intelligence for individual and social flourishing,
one which evolves over historical time and in which people actually live. The UD Bulletin
has it that the purpose of UD’s liberal education is the pursuit of wisdom, which
is truth and virtue — knowledge of what is and action in accord with what is — and
its three fundamental subjects are the natural, the human and the divine. What is
the truth of a city, what virtues does it encourage, and what wisdom would be missing
without it in the education of our students? What, exactly, makes the Rome semester
educationally important to our students? One answer is that the semester makes each
a city-dweller, offering an occasion to pursue the wisdom of the city, to participate
in that artistic form of material intelligence as a lived experience of flourishing.
The students certainly read about Rome and its history; they see its art; they may very well calculate its times and distances. Even so, there is simply nothing like being in a city whose legibility is involved in its inhabitability, where all of the obviously curricular subjects and arts are in situ, and those situations necessarily involve the students. A city includes its inhabitants, and our students do not simply study a city; they are in it and, in a small way, constitute it at a particular moment in its history. Students are too modest to put it this way, but they are in a reciprocal if unequal relation of influence.
Students visit many other cities, too, of course, and they live out in the Italian countryside in the Castelli Romani, in Marino to be exact, not Rome. Even so, they go into the city all the time — on sponsored trips, with friends, by themselves — to learn about Rome by being in it, to travel inside the city’s form of intelligence. It is not that their classes are not experiences — different subjects providing different experiences of the natural, the human and the divine. It is that the exploration of a city is a distinct, total and vibrant experience — mental and physical, individual and social, psychic and historical — which is no safe space for reflection, but a risky one of odyssey. Odysseus returned home, but the cities he visited were altered by his visits, and he too by them.
As a result of the student-to-city, city-to-student reciprocity, you can take the
students out of Rome, but you cannot take Rome out of the students. They take the
city with them when they return because they supplemented the city, and their leaving
is its small loss. This helps explain the great, beautiful sadness of Rome, the trace
of presences of all those who have helped make it. Students hope to return to Rome
to find, in its density of persons, the city it was when they were young and the world
saturated with significance. They can only rediscover themselves here because they
left a trace within the city they inhabited, studied, lived. Although this is true
in some fashion for the curriculum as a whole, what is distinct about the city is
its material intelligence, its ensouled body. If the metaphor holds, then UD students
will have had the distinct experience of friendship with a city. The Rome semester
is an experience of an embodied soul within an embodied soul in which the souls achieve
a momentary but significant union. To become like-minded with a city is to be transfigured
into a more capacious self. One’s soul expands until one contains, as Walt Whitman
would have it, multitudes. One contracts again, of course, but one carries the stretch
marks on one’s soul — and they are precious.