In the popular imagination and in that of its students, is about progress. Technological innovation and new ideas are the coins of the realm. Students come here to meet new people and move beyond old attachments and passively accept the near-universal advice that college is a time to try new things and escape old identities. The university itself pushes growth, new initiatives, and, for better or worse, new construction. Princeton’s fundraising campaign is even called “Venture Forward” – to where isn’t entirely clear.
Traditionalism, beyond symbolic nods to mollify alumni donors, is shunned, and old ideas are discarded. As the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, “The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.”
As scholars, students challenge academic consensus. As activists, they challenge moral and political hegemonies. As people, they reexamine their inherited identities. However, none of these pursuits make sense abstracted from lasting truths and tradition.
A university exists for a reason and cannot reinvent its fundamental purpose without self-destructing. It’s based on the value to humanity of free inquiry and truth seeking. Should it care to survive, it must pass on to its students these values and the “love of unseen things that do not die,” as the poem over McCosh 50 puts it.
Furthermore, just like the arts, academic disciplines are sets of rules and fundamental schemas used to explore a topic. To make a meaningful contribution to a discipline, a student must master both the discipline as a tradition in itself and the inheritance of the discipline as employed by scholars over the decades and centuries. As T. S. Eliot beautifully put it, “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
Undergraduate students do not (or, at least, should not) study merely to delve their own inner depths and shape academic products in response. Instead, they come to universities to be challenged by the constraints of a discipline and by the questions and answers it poses. It has been said (as variously attributed to Picasso and the Dalai Lama) that one must master the rules so one can break them. Revolutionary scholarship, like revolutionary art, can be appreciated in its fullness only if one is aware of what came before.
Regarding protest, students do not choose their moral and political priors in the abstract, nor can they approach the institutions they seek to reform as revolutionaries. Ethical traditions are not something we choose as unencumbered, state-of-nature individuals based on a rational calculus. They are traditions, an inheritance our lives are shaped in accordance with before we’re even conscious of them. Abandoning one’s moral heritage without serious consideration invites chaos, a grasping for moral identity from whatever source is closest at hand. Moral traditions also keep us from pitfalls by leaving some questions settled; we need not spend our time relitigating every moral and practical issue of human existence and are instead free to focus on the future.
The importance of tradition is similarly true regarding the institutions (political, academic, cultural, etc.) that students seek to change. Their membership in these institutions necessitates obligations to them. (This is most obvious regarding a political community, where residents are bound by the laws, few of which they had even indirect representation in making.) The moral force of these obligations stems from the shaping power these institutions have on their members. A political institution, like any other, shapes the character of its citizens through the incentive structures and the formative processes it establishes. Citizens thus have a moral obligation to engage in careful reform rather than revolution. Edmund Burke wisely cautioned, “Rage and [f]renzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in an hundred years.”
Finally, students’ pursuit of identity is rudderless without tradition. As Vincent Lloyd ’03 wrote in his “Letter to a Campus Activist,” “we are formed by the ways of the world, by our years of immersion in the words, ideas, and actions of our parents, community, and society. As we struggle to discern who we are, we strike out against falsities. But our struggle is expressed in the words, ideas, and practices of the same world we despise.” If we reject our inherited identity, we are left with solely our self. We are confronted with the task of defining our self in the abstract, making our selves out of nothing, choosing attributes and values without a fundamental standard of judgment and comparison. This is a terrifying existential burden. As Lloyd argued, when we are left with simply our self, the desire for “safe spaces” to protect that self is entirely understandable. Carl Trueman wrote that psychological discomfort becomes equivalent to real violence when our expression of our inner selves is our existence. We need our traditions so we can know we are – so we can have some basis for progress, both within ourselves and in society.
So, how can we live in a place that idolizes progress without becoming unmoored? Ultimately, we must recognize that everyone is a conservative about what they care about. No one would like it if they went home for winter break and their family had decided to change all its Christmas (or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa) traditions simply because they’re arbitrary, burdensome, or without any directly obvious productive consequence. We appreciate the traditions (lowercase “t”) of our daily lives and our closest communities, whether our families or our clubs or our residential colleges, and we question change unsupported by good reasons. We value the places that matter to us and have shaped us, and we work to better them in a way that respects them as they were passed on to us. In my view, conservatism is a belief that every individual inherits and acquires values, rights, and duties from God, family, society, and the state and passes them on, and they should strive to live them out as best they can (including via reform) considering human imperfection and ignorance. It is a respect for old things not because they are old, but because they have made us.
Our families and communities value us and the duties we have to them. As much as we might wish to, we cannot escape our parents and hometowns in college – they are who we are. And we should not desire to escape them. To paraphrase R. J. Snell, “Your hometown can’t be that bad – you came from there!” We pursue our duties to our family and community through respect, service, and refusal to abandon them for the “freedom” of rootless modernity. We can respect our faith tradition by continuing to gather with members of our religious community.
We also have an obligation to Princeton as students and alumni. It is not a duty to donate or to force our offspring to apply. Instead, it’s a spirit of gratitude for and caring reform of a place that has shaped us. We must understand that just as we don’t exist for the university alone, the university doesn’t exist for us alone. For these four years, our individual tradition shares in another – one that goes back 275 years. We should be grateful.
The above is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
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