It has been a difficult decade for American higher education. 

From the COVID pandemic to funding cuts, from admissions scandals and upheaval in athletics to anxiety about AI, the American college campus hasn’t seemed so fraught with crisis and controversy since the student uprising of the 1960s. 

Now more than ever the public is questioning the value of a college education. Rightfully, people want to know that they will earn a return on a substantial financial investment that results in more than crushing debt. This is a crisis that goes far beyond past arguments about co-ed dorms, student free speech, evaluations of teaching and grade inflation. In this current argument about value, people want visible results. If they don’t get them, they’re going to leave. Enrollments at four-year colleges are down across the country, especially at smaller private institutions, and more students are being drawn to the affordability and practicality of trade schools and pre-professional programs. 

I’ve been in academia for 35 years, and I’ve heard just about every buzz word and catch phrase that herald the advent of a new academic year, but I’ve never heard with such earnest pleading the insistence upon “career-readiness” as I have this fall semester. 

Whenever I’m worried about the state of human affairs in society, I do what any English professor does: I hide in my room for a bit and read, seeking answers in the literary truths I’ve professed for all my life. Lately, as I often do, I’ve been reading Chaucer. 

Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” is a profoundly Catholic work even as it serves as a primer for life. It has two primary themes. One, people are defined not by what they do, but by who they are. And secondly, we should live wholeheartedly in the physical world while always remaining spiritually detached from it. 

I’ve written about “The Canterbury Tales” before in this space, once in a column from March 23, 2018, and again in a column on Sept. 21, 2020. Both essays are available at The Georgia Bulletin website, but I’ll give a brief sketch of the work here as well. 

Chaucer was a clerk in the English Court during the time of the French occupation and a time of great change in the English language. Chaucer’s decision to write “The Canterbury Tales” in vernacular English rather than French did much for the preservation of his native tongue. The Tales were composed near the end of the 14th century, probably between 1387-1400, but their appeal is timeless. 

The fundamental lessons 

The structure of The Canterbury Tales is simple, and entirely medieval in its organization and larger purpose. Twenty-nine pilgrims, in addition to Chaucer himself and the host Harry Bailey, have gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to embark on a spiritual pilgrimage to the shrine of the martyred St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. To pass the time, each pilgrim proposes to tell four stories—two on the way, and two on the return—that would have resulted in the composition of nearly 120 tales. The final work as we have it today contains only 24 tales, in addition to the brilliant General Prologue, but the sheer range of literary genres and characters that the tales contain represents one of the greatest achievements in English literature. 

The Library of Congress is home to this detail of the mural by Ezra Winter illustrating the characters in “The Canterbury Tales” by Chaucer. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

It may be overly idealistic, but I like to imagine that the college experience should be exactly like The Canterbury Tales. Consider first the pilgrims. They represent all the primary classes of medieval English life—the Church and its clergy and religious, the Crown and its chivalric code of manners, the growing merchant class, the trade guilds, representatives of the University and the medical and legal professions and the working class. Together, they constitute a cross section of the entire public, and the fact they have gathered in the pursuit of a common goal represents a realistic, insightful and comical portrait of the necessity for human community and communion. 

Consider also the pilgrims’ purpose. They are on a pilgrimage, a quest to find spiritual solace and meaning. Yet as sincere and reverent as they may be, few of them collapse into false piety. Instead, “The Canterbury Tales” is a celebration of human life; though the tales clearly reveal humanity’s faults and foibles, they also reveal the depth and potential all people possess. 

It’s not a stretch at all to imagine the 29 pilgrims, along with Chaucer and the Host, as being like a college classroom. In such a classroom, as in the tales, there are some fundamental lessons that should be learned. 

The first is that the experience should be a joy. The Oxford Student is described by Chaucer in the General Prologue as a model of eager charity: “Gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” The Canterbury Tales are full of laughter. Some of the comedy is bawdy, as in “The Miller’s Tale.”  Some is wise, like “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Some is also pragmatic and cautionary, as in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” when we are admonished “May God greet with mischief the man who babbles when to hold his tongue were needful.” Almost every tale imparts a lesson, yet almost every tale also inspires laughter, reflection and contemplation. 

I still believe that college should be a life-changing transformative experience, not just a hapless trudge to earn a credential to get a job. College doesn’t so much teach us how to do something; it shows us why what we do matters. 

In the great Catholic intellectual, aesthetic and philosophical tradition all our creativity and all our inquiries point to a sense of vocation, and the Catholic understanding of vocation is very different than in the secular world. 

A vocation is not just a “job,” nor is it the elevated term “career.” A vocation implies a purposeful pursuit, like a pilgrimage, of work that unties body, mind, and spirit in service to the common good. An occupation is not necessarily a vocation, but it can be if it is viewed with imagination and a sense of spiritual purpose. 

Implicit within the idea that a college student should arrive at such an understanding is the crucial role of the teacher, whether a full professor or an adjunct instructor. Like Chaucer and the Host, and indeed like the tellers of the tales, the teacher has an obligation to engage, motivate and even learn from the listeners, or students. The First-Year Experience movement that swept campuses in the 1990s implored professors not to be “sages on stages,” but rather “guides at students’ sides.” It may sound sappy, but the slogan contains truth: students may respect knowledge, but they respond to passion. More than anyone else on campus, the faculty member in the classroom is the one who has the most influence regarding a student’s success. 

 The meaning of the experience 

“We had the experience,” T.S. Eliot writes in The Four Quartets, “but missed the meaning.”  Whether you are a college student yourself, or you know someone who is, I hope that in your college experience you have the time to think and discern not just a possible career, but also a more defined set of values and ideals. I hope you come to love learning for the sake of learning. I hope that even as you prepare for a successful future, you don’t lose sight of the priceless value of your education, for it is one of the only things that no one can take from you.  

The journey that the Canterbury pilgrims take doesn’t turn out like they expected, but then what in life ever does? Yet the pilgrimage changes them.  

Chaucer’s own journey came to an end in 1400, on Oct. 25 if one adheres to tradition, and he left “The Canterbury Tales” unfinished at his death. Likely aware that the work would be his last, Chaucer wrote a retraction to be placed at the end. Much of the retraction is like a deathbed confession, a contrite and perhaps overwrought apology for his life and art. It begins, “Here the maker of the book takes his leave: Now I pray to them all that listen to this little treatise or read it, that if there be anything in it that pleases them, that thereof they thank our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom proceeds all wit and all goodness. And if there be anything that displeases them, I pray them also that they blame it on the fault of my lack of skill.” 

Read one way, the retraction is like a goodbye; read another, it’s like the start of yet another journey. It’s much like college. You end with a beginning, a commencement.