On Professor John Senior, founder of the Integrated Humanities Program
The modern university has undergone major changes within the last fifty years. The extent of these changes was well documented by Dr. Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987). In this bestseller, Bloom laid out the extent to which the university had undergone a radical upheaval where most students became skeptical of objective truth. He sought to show in his book how the humanities programs were rapidly deteriorating into relativism and nihilism. Bloom’s pessimism and fear over the state of the university are almost justifiable had it not been for a professor named John Senior.
John Senior was born in 1923 and showed academic promise at an early age. He attended Columbia University and wrote his dissertation under the esteemed Mark van Doren. Upon graduation, he started to teach at several colleges, with Cornell being the most well-known of his appointments. Although Senior was academically gifted, he would likely be entirely unknown today if it were not for the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) and his writings.
In 1970, Senior moved to the University of Kansas, where he and two other professors started the Integrated Humanities Program. The mission of the program was pretty simple, as Robert Carlson wrote in a Crisis Magazine article in 1995:
[IHP’s] contention was that an integrated approach to humanistic studies through the teaching of great literature, in which students who sought truthful answers to the perennial questions of human existence would not only make education more meaningful, but would also address the disintegration of our culture and the university itself.
Fifteen years before Bloom would write his seminal work, Senior was working to show students that objective truth existed and mattered. IHP was one of the first universities to host what would later be categorized as a “great books program.” The program, however, was structured very differently than the modern Great Book programs. For one, note-taking in class was discouraged. This idea might sound foreign to those who took meticulous notes while in college, but Senior and his colleagues noted that college students were not fully formed when they entered college. They found that wonder needed to be reawakened in students and that wonder could not be created on notebook paper:
Wonder is thus not only the beginning but also the sustaining principle of the best education, because when we wonder, our attention is awakened to the world. This is the first step on the way to truth.
The motto of the IHP supported this goal, Nascantur in admiratione, which translates to “Let them be born in wonder.” An extended quotation from the original pamphlet that promoted the program is illustrative of the problem with then-current education and how wonder can correct that error:
These Latin words on the [college] emblem [Nascantur in Admiratione] mean, “Let them be born in wonder.” To be a student is to be alive to intelligence, and the beginning of such a life is wonder. In our own day wonder has been so cheapened by sensationalism and so crippled by skepticism that the college freshman, instead of being as one newly awakened to the excitement of learning, is often, rather as one who has never been born. To such a young person learning is so much drudgery and routine, alien to his real interests, remote from reality itself. To revive wonder may be said to summarize the aims of the Pearson Program. Hence it should be regarded as an elementary or elemental course, where one discovers the love of wisdom; a course for beginners, who look upon the primary things of the world, as it were, for the first time.
Books and literature were Senior’s way of reaching the students. Professor Dennis Quinn wrote years after IHP was forcibly shut down that the books they read in class spanned history; “We wanted to teach the Great Books, the classics, from the Greeks up through the Romans and through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the modern times,” he said.
In addition to no note-taking, IHP also ensured that students were well formed. Ballroom dances were a requirement, much to the chagrin of this author. Students also had to memorize ten great poems each semester and were required to take a calligraphy class.
The initial student enrollment started out slow, with only twenty students joining the IHP in 1970. That number then jumped to 140 in 1971 and then 186 in 1972. Bishop Paul Coakley, a former student of IHP, attests to the success of the program on the minds of the students; “Our professors taught as if they believed there was a truth and that that truth was knowable.”
Senior and the other two professors were Catholic, but because the IHP was part of the University of Kansas and received money from the Federal Government, no religion was explicitly taught. Despite this, it is estimated that over two hundred students converted or reverted to Catholicism within the nine years the institute was open. The program’s success, however, also led to its subsequent censure and eventual demise.
As one can imagine, the thoroughly secular departments at the University were not pleased to hear that students were using their open minds to close down on the solid truth that IHP offered. By the late 1970s, parents, faculty, and outsiders started lodging complaints to the campus administration. The ACLU also got involved. The University of Kansas launched an investigation to see if religion was being taught to the students. They could find no evidence that students were being exposed to religion in class. The official report stated that:
In the face of charges of religious indoctrination and proselytizing, the Committee has found no evidence that the professors of the program have engaged in such activities in the classroom.
The campus was foiled in its attempt to close down the IHP. The secular administration was not able to abolish the program outright but it did put the program under a new department which then took the steps to eliminate the program, which was finally achieved in 1979.
Up until this point, John Senior worked diligently to fight against modern academic trends that he saw were intellectually and spiritually wounding students. Though the IHP was coming to a close in the late 1970s, Senior was not ready to give up the fight.
In 1978, Senior published his book The Death of Christian Culture. Senior outlines what is wrong with the world in this short but meaningful book. By the time of the book’s publication, Senior had almost a decade of experience from the IHP program and was thus ready to help his audience understand the world’s cultural decline. This book, though published forty-five years ago, is especially pertinent for today’s discussion on culture.
Senior begins his book by defining what he means by culture and civilization. A Christian culture, Senior says, is pretty simple; “Christian culture is the cultivation of saints.” Culture, then, is conducive to religion. A key way to transmit culture is through education. When education focuses solely on job prospects, then discipline and human formation decline:
The long tradition of Western civilization says that education is the acquisition of not only skill but a discipline, which in turn means not the exercise of the heart, soul, strength, and mind in the service of our appetites, but the subjugation of our appetites to the rule of the intelligence.
Today’s Western society could certainly use a strong dose of Western civilization given the height of decadence. Society is not governed by letting intelligence rule, said Senior, but rather letting sensationalism rule. Sensationalism, in this context, is not on par with drama or creating a spectacle, but that people only engage with the world superficially. The goal is not deep fulfillment but rather satisfying the senses with cheap tricks that leave one thirsting for more.
The main problem with being a purely sensational person is that one has the intellectual and spiritual capacity of a potato chip bag – 20% substance and 80% air. He who aligns himself with the purely physical “allies himself with the current and the novel, and therefore always the strange. He has the rage for the latest thing because it would be death not to be new – the latest news, scientific invention, experimental novel, critical theory, fashion. To be is to be avant garde”
The world is filled with people who cannot not be invested in the latest inventions. The desire for the new, said Senior, derives from a revulsion of normal life; “The exotic is the abnormal because the desire for the new derives from the hatred of the norm.” Senior inadvertently recalls a similar statement from Chesterton, who said, “The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing, an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place to be compared to Timbuctoo.” The world traveler is often a person who only lives by their senses. Exotic places soon become mundane, and then it is time to pack up and find new experiences that reignite the senses.
Senses themselves are not evil, but divorcing the sense from reality, said Senior, is the danger: “For us, therefore, sensation is not divorced from reality that causes it, but rather, quite the contrary, it is wedded to it by a marriage made in heaven.”
Sensationalism is only one of several diseases that plague and corrupt society. Each chapter of Senior’s book drives home the claim that Christian culture is not only in decline but is dying. Hope remains, however.
Drawing on his decade of teaching in the IHP, Senior said that one of the ways to begin reviving culture is to bring back a classical education. The key is to read good books well. At this point, the reader might groan, asking “Haven’t we heard enough about classical and Great Books education already?” It is important to remember when Senior was writing this book. By 1978, attempts at starting a Great Books program were not succeeding. Senior said at the end of the book that “[t]he ‘Great Books’ movement of the last generation has not failed as much as fizzled…like good champagne in plastic bottles, they went flat.” Programs like IHP were few and far between.
Nevertheless, Senior saw books as the key to mending the gap between religion and education which had widened since the 19th century. Books, he said, are not history lessons; “In poetry, as in meditation, the past was seen as present because its meaning was present. The past event is materially long since gone, but if it is anything, it is spiritually present right now.” Literature classes often use a dissecting approach to great books. The story told by the author and his beliefs are not so important as finding minute details about economics, psychology, or politics. Save the social sciences for classes that deal with social science, and let the great books speak for themselves.
Senior is not so naïve to believe that if several colleges instituted something similar to the IHP then culture would recover. The cultural world was already deeply troubled in 1978 and Senior knew that children needed to start learning young:
[T]he seeds are good but the cultural soil has been depleted; the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas thrive only in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes and adventure: the thousand books of Grimm, Anderson, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest.
It is a cliché to believe that the modern world is worse off today than it has ever been before. The fact remains, however, that Western culture as defined by Senior has not improved since 1978. The case can be made that society has only become more decadent in the last forty years. The need for adults and children to read good books is a necessity. The only way to instill a love of books in others is to love books yourself; “The first quiet but definite step in the genuine reformation of education is that parents and teachers should read. Beginning with themselves, wherever they are and in whatever stage in their own depletion – they must read.”
Though great books are great for a reason, Senior cautions readers against using reading lists that have the top one hundred – or whatever the number – greatest books and trying to read them all. It does not take a hundred great books to change you – just one. Senior relates a story about his graduate days under Mark Van Doren:
I vividly remember standing before a fine teacher at college who had done a lot to promote the hundred great books and saying to him, ‘But I just can’t read all those books!’ In the middle of the Critique of Pure Reason I had despaired. ‘Of course you can’t,’ Mark Van Doren said. ‘Nobody can read a hundred great books; but here is one – read that.’ He took a volume from his desk haphazardly and handed it to me – it happened to be a collection of Plato’s Dialogues that helped change my life.
John Senior remains relatively unknown today except in a few circles, but his ideas are crucial in understanding why culture is declining and how to revive and recover the West’s heritage. He does not see tradition and heritage as something dusty and old but something that grounds the intellect, nourishes the mind, and brings a person closer to Truth. The purpose of having an open mind, as Chesterton said, is like having an open mouth. The purpose is to shut it down on something solid.
Stop reading empty things and stop sedating yourself with vapid technology. Take Senior’s advice: find a great book, read the book, repeat – either with the same book or a new one. The alternative, said Senior, is the death of culture.
This piece was originally published in Cogitare’s Spring 2022 Print Edition.
