John William Corrington delivered “The Academic Revolution,” which is part memoir, as a lecture at Centenary College in 1969. In this talk, Corrington seeks to develop what he calls his “ontologies,” which he adopted in part while he was a student at Centenary.

Corrington suggests here that our lives are short and meaningless without an ontology and that our purposive acts ought to be guided by essential patterns of history.

Corrington’s conservatism and his belief in canonical greatness are apparent in his recommendation to “enter that vast communion of past, present, and future, of living, dead, and yet to be born that was recognized by the early church and called the communion of saints.” One’s sense of place and continuity, Corrington submits, is requisite to the production of great works of art.

Corrington suggests that academic revolution is paradoxically tied to tradition in that the new necessarily springs from the old. Corrington claims that the current academic revolution is rooted in the rejection of authority and the repudiation of materialism. He is concerned with the transitional ethic of the 1960s and the concomitant widespread questioning of the legitimacy of authority and institutions. He refers to this questioning as the New Politics.

Corrington praises the academic revolution and encourages universities to serve as a matrix for that revolution. He believes that universities study the old disciplines to reveal new ways of forming constructive communities. Championing the drift of the university toward more student-centered objectives, toward more bottom-up rather than top-down power structures on campus, Corrington embraces and celebrates the reforming spirit of his students. He believes this spirit is in fact conservative in that custom and tradition and the complex, organic nature of social development teach that reform is necessary to ensure future growth.

Corrington suggests that colleges and other institutions, to remain faithful to the past, must reform themselves; to be faithful to the past, in other words, colleges and other such institutions must rework and re-energize the past for present purposes.

“The Academic Revolution” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below: