We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed….

[T]he objects of culture are not analyzable…. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not “discourse about,” nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship.

Culture in whatever form — art, thought, history, religion — is for meditation and conversation. Both are necessary sequels to the experience…. As for true meditation, it excludes nothing; its virtue is to comprehend — in both senses: to understand and to take in the fullest view. Both are actions of the mind-and-heart, and therefore charged with the strongest feelings. Indeed, both interior monologue and spoken dialogue aim at discerning which feelings and what degree to each belong to an idea or image. That is how culture reshapes the personality; it develops the self by offering the vicarious experience of art and thought; it puts experience in order.

— Jacques Barzun, “The Culture We Deserve”