He is little known today, but among the greatest of literary talents produced by the 20th century, Professor E. Merrill Root was a colossus. He was widely read and widely published, his brilliant and often beautiful essays appearing in such publications as Human Events, National Review, Freeman, New York Times, Literary Digest, New York Herald Tribune, and American Opinion. More importantly, he was the ideal of the liberally educated man, knowledgeable and conversant in literature, philosophy, religion, and science, but dedicated to only one thing, the eternal truths that he saw, already in the 1950s and 1960s, slipping from the mind of man. To recover those truths, and to remind his readers of their importance, was Professor Root's singular passion, a passion that long remained a theme that informed all of his written work. Like many of the great conservative scholars of his day, Professor Root recognized the central importance of education in either forming man's attachment to eternal truths, or in leading him astray into a forest of trivialities. As a result, he dedicated much of his work to uncovering the increasing problems that then were afflicting the nation's education system and published two best-selling books on the subject: Collectivism on the Campus and Brainwashing in the High Schools. In 1964 he returned to the subject of education in an essay for American Opinion magazine in which he described the purpose to be filled by the hypothetical "Great College." The unique and sole purpose of such an institution, he wrote, "is to preserve the heritage of man. The great college, amid the shifting winds of the world, must save and serve the light that shines unshaken across every wind. It must save and serve quality, value, and meaning." In short, Professor Root concluded, any college that wishes to be great, will strive to preserve mankind's attachment to and understanding of, the great eternal truths. Now, for the first time made available from the archives, American Opinion Foundation is pleased to present Professor Root's essay, "The Idea of the Great College."

The Idea of the Great College
Professor E. Merrill Root

In Alice in Wonderland Tweedledum said, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." These classic words perfectly describe college education in America today — "but as it isn't, it ain't."*

I do not intend here to state negatively what is wrong with colleges today. A great deal of what is wrong is due to their almost universal conformity to collectivism, their almost universal dogmatic rigidity known as "Liberalism". I have already discussed this in Collectivism on the Campus, but such things are a sly weasel that today I do not intend to hunt. For the time being, let such things rest — not in peace, but in the coma which is their natural status quo.

I am concerned today not with the status quo of orthodox conformist "Liberalism" in our colleges, but with the potentia qua, or power from which true education flows. What is the great college that, beyond the years, may be a sun whose light shines unshaken across all the winds of the world? What is the great college — not of the past, the present, or the future, but (in its own intrinsic destiny) of the Eternal Now? That college exists, even in the winter of our present dismay, as the blossom and fruit exist in the roots of the February tree; or as the statue exists, always potential, in the formless marble. But we can entice it out of the winter earth, or we can free it of the encumbering marble, only by the sun of a philosophy or the chisel of a criticism.

The weakness that most subverts the American mind today is the fact that most Americans today do not have a philosophy — or rather that they do not have a metaphysical philosophy. They do not have a philosophy of first and last things, of transcendentalism, of Eternity. Their pseudo-philosophies are various pure or mongrel forms of pragmatism, instrumentalism, relativism; but to seek physics and the relative without metaphysics and the absolute is to steer across perilous seas without a chart or compass æ or a single star to steer by. Is it any wonder, then, that our colleges are nondescript, helter-skelter — or, as Dr. Hutchins calls them, "insupportable": not the Happy Isles of the sun, but the reef of Norman's Woe where the long retreating roar of the ebbing tides is dismal, and only "Liberal ideas" are washed to and fro, not like seeds that grow but like barren pebbles that scrape?

Let us first review the false philosophies — the mis-philosophies — that have caused our shipwreck on that reef, and see why they led us there. And then let us seek and see the genuine philosophy that may direct us, across perilous seas, to the Happy Isles of the sun where the great college at last may be.