This field is a university because we said so

Engraving of Harvard College by Paul Revere, 1767 (Wikipedia)

It’s easy to poke fun at Harvard. When I was at UT Austin we used to call it “the UT of the North”. Not, you understand, from any sense of insecurity. But however that may be, I want to tip my mortarboard today to its first graduating class… on September 23, 1642. That was fast.

Well, in some ways not. Harvard was actually founded in 1636 so the six-year BA is evidently not entirely a 20th-century slacker invention. But what was fast, bold and inspiring was that the first major wave of settlers only arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, Puritans fleeing Charles I’s dissolution of Parliament and effort to impose Laud’s Liturgy on the church.

Six years later they started a university that not only still stands, it towers. Everybody has heard of Haaaavaaaad and not just in the United States.

Now I said it was bold. And I mean partly because when the “Great and General Court,” the precursor to the Massachusetts legislature, voted the thing into existence in 1636 it didn’t have any students. Or professors. Or buildings. Though in 1638 it did acquire the first known printing press in North America. But it was bold in a much deeper and arguably equally reckless sense.

The Great and General Court had no formal authority to establish a university. In Britain you needed permission from on high. But the settlers figured that as Englishmen they were free and would do as they liked.

I have a lot of problems with Puritans including their feeling that freedom to do as you liked included freedom of communities to meddle in the affairs of individuals. (The “visible saints” of early New England are still highly visible in the mavens of PC today.) But I do like their devotion to individual initiative and the right of citizens to manage their own affairs.

I even like their devotion to education. Even if I still laugh at the joke about the Texas freshman at Harvard going up to a senior reading Nietzche under a tree and saying “’Scuze me, where’s the library at?” only to be favoured with a withering glare and a haughty, “My dear fellow, this is Haaavaaad, and at Haaavaaad we do not end sentences with prepositions.”

“Oh. Thanks. Where’s the library at, you jerk?”

It happened todayJohn Robson
Saving classical Greece

My latest from the Rebel: The Battle of Salamis on September 22, 480 BC, saved classical Greece before it even got started, before Aristotle, Socrates or Sophocles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qqB_c1jUgk

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Rebel audio, September 22"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/September/160922Rebel.mp3[/podcast]

History, PodcastJohn Robson
Xerxes takes a soaking

Today we do another battle. But not just any battle, or one with a funny name. One with absolutely profound consequences for our way of life. Salamis, on September 22, 480. No Salamis, no classical Greece, one might say. And no classical Greece means no open society today.

It’s amazing how much of what we regard as the beginnings of our secular heritage, from the philosophy of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle to the drama of Sophocles and Aeschylus to the architecture of the Parthenon took place in this very brief period between, say, the overthrow of Hippias in Athens in 510 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323.

Now you may be objecting here that I just threw a lot of marble at you. And it’s true. But here’s the thing. It may be all Greek to us today. But it was all once a staple of education in Western society, not just in school but at home, in conversation, even in church.

Where did it all go? How did we lose interest in our heritage if not by losing interest in its results, becoming so focused on our failings that we lost sight of the fact that the great defect of the West is not living up to its ideals whereas the great defect of so many other societies is the ideals themselves.

Certainly that is true of the Persian Empire that, under the god-emperor Xerxes, sought to conquer the free city states of Greece early in the 5th century BC and very nearly succeeded. In Persia there were no rights for the common person, nor indeed for the rich, whose property was as liable to be seized on an imperial whim or their head cut off as the humblest peasant. There was no dignity for the individual, no spirit of inquiry, no toleration of dissent, let alone admiration for it. And there were, not coincidentally, no citizen-soldiers.

In Greece there were. And it is they who rallied, after a long string of ominous defeats against a numerically far superior foe and after the annihilation of the Spartan rearguard at Thermopylae and of the main Greek armies at Artemisium and the conquest of much of Greece, they nevertheless rallied to Themistocles’ call to confront the mighty Persian fleet.

What’s more, as free people, they bickered and squabbled and argued their way, right up the battle, to a strategy that actually turned the Persians’ superior numbers against them in the narrow straits of Salamis and decisively crushed Xerxes’ navy. (For more on this, as so often, see Victor Davis Hanson’s inspiring Carnage and Culture.)

The mighty Xerxes went home, leaving his general Mardonius to crush these annoying turbulent insolent commoners. Instead the next year at Plataea his army was badly beaten, as was his fleet at Mycale. The Persians left and never again attacked the Greek mainland.

It is a date we should celebrate if we love the right to question authority. It’s not some new radical thing. It’s embedded in our heritage right at the base of those Doric columns. And paradoxically we should today question the radical skeptics who are the new voice of orthodoxy. Because the point of questioning isn’t to undermine everything. It’s to separate truth from error. And sometimes the truth is that tradition had it right.

Chant from on high: “Question authority!” Twerp in crowd: “Why?” Because the messy, rowdy, dynamic Western heritage of individualism is as much worth defending today as it was at Salamis.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - September 22, 2016

“And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? or do we imagine we no longer need its assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs in the Affairs of Men. And if a Sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without his Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid?” Benjamin Franklin, “Motion for Prayers in the Constitutional Convention” June 28, 1787, in The Patriot Post “Founders’ Quote Daily” April 27, 2007

Famous quotesJohn Robson