'Even Erudition is Possible Outside Academe'

A reader tells me he earned his B.A. in English several years ago and now he works for a non-profit that pushes “arts education,” whatever that might be. I don’t take him for an idealist. He’s bright, personable, an ambitious reader and bored. Our culture doesn’t know what to do with such people. He contemplates a return to the university to earn an advanced degree, and he asked for my thoughts.

 

Last week I received an email from Elizabeth Conquest, widow of the historian and poet Robert Conquest (1917-2015), author of several indispensable books including The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968). In 2020, Liddie edited her husband’s Collected Poems (Waywiser Press). Now she’s working on Yours to Hand: The Letters of Robert Conquest and hopes to have it published next year. Hearing from her moved me to read his poems again and one of Conquest’s later volumes, Reflections on a Ravaged Century  (W.W. Norton, 2000). In Chapter XII, titled “‘The Answer Is Education,’’ his thoughts on a university education are more acute than mine:

 

“[P]eople can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all—as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon . . . the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells it) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds—except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.”