“Seminar in the Future of the Liberal Arts”

EMERSON DID NOT live to address the full effects of the modern university established by the end of Charles Eliot's tenure as president of Harvard in 1909. But as I have argued throughout this study, significant elements of Emerson's idea of liberal education resonate, beyond his death in 1882 and into the twentieth century, in the minds and words of some of his most studious readers. Emerson did not know firsthand the “Ph.D. Octopus” that William James would confront in the first decade of the twentieth-century university. However, Emerson's undisciplinable method of thinking provides James, as we saw in chapter 1, with a way of conceiving philosophy pragmatically and pedagogically, in part as a counter to the scientific conceptions of both philosophy and educational psychology emerging in James's midst.

As I demonstrate in chapter 2, Emerson's rhetoric of mind carries into the 1870s and the beginnings of university specialization a counterbalancing response of the kind that Wendell Berry would embrace a century later as an unfashionable art of the commonplace. Both place great value on the life of the mind in the community. To complicate matters further, Harvard's President Eliot used this rhetorical Emerson to transform the college into a university that, ironically, by the time Eliot celebrates Emerson's prophetic teachings in 1903, would have been less likely to hire him as a professor. The rhetorical lessons that Whitman learned from Emerson—where culture takes shape as an agonistic, gymnastic struggle to read into the books of the past for the purposes of an unwritten future—also applies to these other readers, and to Whitman himself. As I argue in chapter 3, Whitman's cultivation of rhetorical poetics in his work of the late 1860s and early 1870s, Democratic Vistas most notably, can be read in relation to the emergence of university reform and to Whitman's own interests in the cultural office of oratory.