My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

It’s not clear, from Googling around, who originated this line, but I thought I’d use it to begin a kind of Part Two of my post the other day about the nature of a serious university education.

UD can’t listen to the Overture without thinking of a 1960 tv ad for Lark cigarettes. Have a Lark have a Lark have a Lark Lark Lark…

*****************************

In an opinion piece titled “The Slow Death of the Intellect,” Jonathan Jansen, a South African professor, laments the absence of an intellectual culture at his country’s universities. He describes such a culture as featuring

critical activities (film, drama, seminars, special lectures, open debates, musical performance, architectural display, critical dialogues, scholarly book launches, thoughtful protests — more about this later — and speakers) that together act to encourage, excite and evoke thoughtful discussion and deliberation.

An intellectual culture in this sense is a felt experience, not localised events in isolated parts of that campus. It is not busyness but quality activities that breed curiosity, creativity and dissent.

“Felt experience” is I think the most important part of this — all of the critical activities share a certain characteristic seriousness and energy; they act together, as Jansen says, to provoke people’s curiosity about the world, to draw them into disciplined thought and discussion, and thus to create an environment of collective reflection.

You could think of it by invoking a couple of other statements about intellectuality, the first from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

And the second from Jacob Bronowski:

To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

Making them live; taking pleasure in them; this is the felt experience Jansen’s getting at: A real university campus feels different from any other place because everywhere there’s a seductive, perceptible, pensive buzz. All around you, people are being changed by new thought, led forth, as the word educate has it, from wherever they were before they entered university culture.

Jensen notes the irony that apartheid, and the galvanizing, widely shared moral debate it generated, turns out in an odd sense to have been good for universities. Now, “with the anti-apartheid motif gone, there is no longer a higher appeal to organise, mobilise and cement intellectual cultures on campuses anywhere.” In its place, “creeping managerialism [has] turned the scholarship of teaching and inquiry into a parade of ‘measurable units’ used by university bureaucracies to satisfy the constant demands for numerical accountability.” Bad presidents, “ignorant of the purposes of the university and the threats to it,” have also done their bit.

Jansen goes on to propose reasonable and unsurprising changes — a new, rigorous liberal arts curriculum; a critical mass, on each campus, of intellectually serious professors who would organize seminars and invite speakers and do other things to energize moribund schools… But he knows the task is daunting, that “building cultures is not the same thing as changing a curriculum or erecting a new lecture hall.”

Indeed, “intellectual culture” will always be a rather inchoate idea; but we know of its intense attractiveness to people: Students at Harvard and Princeton routinely complain of its lack on their campuses, and they’re at two of the best universities in the world.

Clearly we’ve all got in mind here some sort of ideal, an entire way of life, a deep and rich existence, in which our minds and bodies and hearts and souls are constantly and delightedly roused by the pleasure of transformative thought.

UD thinks the heart of this ideal involves our conviction that when we’re thinking most excitedly and authentically, we’re actually feeling what it feels like to be free.

Come again?

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

John Adams seems to point here to the connection between the intensest moments of free inquiry in our lives (these moments take place for most of us during college) and the felt experience of personal and political freedom itself. At the heart of intellectual culture is the radically free exercise of the human mind. It is hard to think of a more seductive prospect.