Suspending Time

Universities suspend time. They take time’s many distensions and upheavals, its unending movement and infinite cycles of life and death, and freeze things. If only for a moment. But in this moment, the world, including time, opens up. The university lives in this opening. The university is for this moment between moments. It makes its life there.

Suspending time is why universities look like they do, sometimes as artifacts of bygone eras and sometimes as emblems of imagined futures. Listen in on a university, attend any of its scripted scenes of instruction and what you won’t hear – among the most interesting things you will hear – is how things are. Universities instead traffic in how things were and how things might be. How things are is the commotion you encounter on the way to university and long after leaving, the pedestrian of the everyday, which has its importance all right, but that importance belongs to another place – call this other place the world.

Universities are what you get when you suspend time, hold the world at bay, and having suspended time, get to peer into the soul of the universe. The cellular biologist at her microscope obsessed with mitosis, the classicist considering the locution of a lost language, the comparativist thinking how things might go if this culture and that culture found common ground. These are not feats of phronesis, the practical wisdom necessary for navigating the everyday. This is the stuff of pure contemplation, as if staring down God on a computer screen, of imagining the nous in the annals of history. We sometimes call this “basic research,” but already we’ve ruined the moment by putting this timelessness within the clutches of the transactional.

Photograph by Corey / Adobe Stock.

The hardest thing to teach students is to cherish the time out of time they have in their four years of undergraduate education. These years are a luxury afforded by a society that bequeaths to its youth a denouement of life. Society knows all that came before and all that will come after, and it bestows on this talented class time away from time. If only we could have these students check their concerns at the door, that they would not bring along concerns about the future, demands from the past, the dreaded burden of the j-o-b. Once society, through them or against them, instrumentalizes university as for something, it is no longer for them, but only for society, some vulgarized version of them. I celebrate for the student who answers the question “What are you going to do with your major?” with an innocent “I don’t know.” I mourn for the student who answers with some intensive degree program that maps out every waking hour of their day – it is not just that these students will be professionalized by some university certification process; it is more that they are already professionals, and we teachers will have very little to do with them besides getting in their way.

The irony, of course, with the university’s suspension of time is that it is the most timeful thing a society does, giving a moment to its youth to drill down on time, to live into it. The rest of a society’s time is spoken for, and so hardly makes time for time, seeking above all else to rid time permanently of its distensions and upheavals, to make the denouement of university unnecessary. Perhaps as part of its remaining humanity, society grants the gift of university while knowing full well the time of the university remains the last vestige of our selves.