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The current university system caters to Americans’ consumerist, selfish motives: universities promise to deliver lucrative employment and “upward mobility,” and for these sought-after commodities they demand ever-higher tuition. As Wendell Berry has been arguing for decades, however, an education founded upon such a reductive economic exchange causes real damage to our land and our communities. In opposition to the deracinated educational culture, Berry’s fiction, essays, and poetry provide a vision for an education in the virtues of place. His understanding of place includes not only a geographic dimension but also the dimensions of hierarchy, community, and tradition. This book explores how a university might educate students to be properly placed in all these dimensions. Part 1, “Rooting Universities,” explores how imagination, language, and work help to locate us responsibly in our places. Part 2, “Cultivating Virtues of Place,” considers how universities might foster four virtues—memory, gratitude, fidelity, and love—that are particularly relevant to orienting ourselves within these four dimensions of place. University communities guided by Berry’s vision might produce graduates who can begin the work of healing their places, graduates who have been educated for “responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity.”

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The kind of language Andy learns from his Port William community stands in contrast to the irresponsible language often spoken in the academy. Such language fails to be responsible to its objects because it either focuses primarily on the speaker’s internal feelings or thoughts or takes on a falsely objective tone and focuses only on the object itself. Thus it fails to relate inner and outer, speaker and object, in a way that enables them to respond to each other. By making this accountability more difficult, the language typically spoken in universities corrodes community rather than contributing to healthy, affectionate places. A responsible language that encourages individuals to have healthy relationships with their places can be maintained only by a love for particular places and objects, a love that motivates speakers to use careful, accurate language. Universities often fail to teach such language, allowing different disciplines to hide in their own jargon rather than fostering a common, community-wide language that encourages individuals to be more broadly accountable. Recovering the trivium and learning from literature may cultivate a more accountable language.