It is a distinctive characteristic of our culture that it is defined by a pedigree of books, a continuous lineage that runs parallel to, and that has shaped, the history of our institutions and our social practices. In being offered a selection of great literary and philosophic books, narratives of history, and works of art, music, and drama, students are being invited to encounter the human condition in all its superlative virtue and all its depraved evil. The purpose of these adventures is to invite students to acquire the discipline of intelligence, to pursue intimations of wholeness, to cultivate a discerning appreciation of meaning, to fine-tune their moral vision, and to learn how to respond to the contingencies of their existence with courage and hope. These encounters may be random andfortuitous. A genuine education is, in part, uncharted and unpredictable.
Conversations are the second vital component of the scholarly culture.
No greater exactness can be expected when speaking of apprenticeship to the scholarly culture. There is knowledge, there are facts, there are data, but these are only approximations to answers. The answer to any question, as Northrop Frye once said, is just a way of formulating the next question, whether in the humanities or the sciences. The origins of the university and later accretions to it have decisively defined the human needs to which the university caters. The scholarly culture is a collective memory of the many historical experiments in channelling and maturing human longing.