"April is the cruellest month", said T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922). In that poem he depicted, says Karen Armstrong in A Short History of Myth (2005) the spiritual disintegration of Western culture. This month income tax returns compound the misery. It is small comfort that, at last look, one gets a federal tax exemption of 16% on the first $200 donated to a registered charity and 20% on contributions above that amount.

In April university students face imminent of year-end exams. Ontario should allow at least 20% tax relief for donations to their tuition and living expenses. Their student debt mounts steadily while they spend time working in bars and coffee shops when they could be studying. It is estimated that 70% of the new jobs created in the next ten years will require expensive post-secondary education.

Meanwhile, appeal letters come like April showers. Many are from universities and colleges with which I have had a long association. One is signed by the respected film producer, Norman Jewison (Vic 4T9), chairman of the U of T Annual Fund. It is addressed to all graduates and emphasises that institution's AIDS research and its work on global warming. Does that indicate that the priority of tertiary education in this province lies in the area of natural science? If so, the university itself is a sign of the disintegration of Western culture. Boards of Education, which do not always include people closest to students or best acquainted with the process of education look to what the universities think is important. Is Mr Jewison's letter a warning signal in that regard?

The appeal may have been written for him by someone who wears natural science blinkers or by someone beyond academe who never heard of 'trivium' or 'quadrivium' and could not define 'the humanities'. Nor would he/she likely appreciate the following exchange between a construction boss and an arts student looking for summer work. "University student, eh? You probably don't know a joist from a girder", said the man. "I certainly do", was the reply. Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust. The boy got a job at Chapters.

Mention of the wider concerns of the university is not made in the letter. Philosophy, theology, law, mathematics, music, the visual or performing arts, the social sciences and other things that are neither located in a laboratory nor studied under a microscope are ignored. With respect, such a restricted view of the university's vocation to preserve and transmit culture should raise concern.

The human person needs years of parental nurturing and instruction by a variety of teachers before it is able to face the world. Teachers, like parents, do need adequate incomes. A 'world class university' needs money because it must compete for the services of the best. But its diversity should be celebrated. Higher education does not exist simply to produce natural scientists, M.B.A.s or specialists in phys. ed. or nutrition.

How about education for citizenship, for a fuller life and a broader view of the world? Those students who will teach English and history to youngsters now in elementary and secondary schools are as important to society, if not necessarily to all individuals, as are those in chemistry and biology. And so with those in political science, economics, architecture and rhetoric, all of whom will be makers of the future as surely as are engineers and physicians. Appeals for all charities should make clear their aims and budget details. Those for the University (capitalised as being one of the pillars of civilisation) should emphasise the range of cultural and practical concerns that is included under the category 'higher education'.

Mr Jewison, a resident of Caledon Township and the holder of several degrees, earned and honorary, is aware of all of the above. The concern here is whether the framers of appeals from the University of Toronto, which have to compete with the dozens of other annual 'begs' that are received by its 'grads' realise the narrow parameters they draw when they appeal only for the natural sciences. The word 'science' means 'knowledge'. There are many other things that an educated person should know. They extend far beyond what can be placed in a petri dish or be preserved in formaldehyde.

No one denies the advances in human welfare that are made in the 'science' faculties of a university but the modern campus is a cluster of schools between which there is little intellectual dialogue and, too often, little understanding. It should not be anarchipelago of self-absorbed isolates. John Donne to the contrary, too many intellectuals are islands. For all its accomplishments, the university fails society if it becomes a condominium of researchers who live in a multiversity or pluriversity rather than a university.

Last year the U of T Press published Ivory Tower Blues: a University System in Crisis. Authors James Côté and Anton Allahar said that few students experience the university as they should. And not everyone leaving high school should go on to a university. We are in dire need of a variety of skilled trades personnel, of qualified sales people and technical support staffers. In any case, inflated high school marks, poor study habits and lack of academic curiosity are disqualifications for success in a university. Côté and Allahar say that higher education has become big business, its purpose, other than self-perpetuation, much misunderstood by parents, faculty members and students.

In the 1987 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago Prof. Wayne C. Booth reported having asked selected colleagues, "Could you, given a week's notice, read an article in a given field and then enter into a dialogue with the author at a level of understanding that he/she would take to be roughly comparable to his/her own?". Most respondents confessed that they inhabited tiny cognitive islands.

Ivory Tower Blues opens with a chapter called "Troubles in Paradise". One prescription for that malaise might be careful reading of John Henry Newman's On the Scope and Nature of University Education, A.N. Whitehead's The Aims of Education, John U. Nef's The Universities Look for Unity and Jarolslav Pelikan's The Idea of the University: a Re-examination.