1. Professor Dallas Willard at the University of Southern California
2. Professor Robert P. George at Princeton University
3. Professor J. Budziszewski at The University of Texas at Austin
Defending the Search for Truth
As serious as the problems on the campuses may be, the collapse of traditional learning could not have happened without the complicity and silence of the individuals, agencies, and special-interest groups that surround and influence the universities. There are many willing collaborators. Administrators, faculty members, and academic institutes are abetted in their work by government bureaucrats and their agencies; by teachers unions and guilds of various sorts; by the mass media above all; and even by parents who either aren’t paying attention or don’t want to get involved in the battles raging in the schools. Without their silence and moral equivocation, the freefall of the American university could not have happened.
This is a point that emerged most clearly in my conversation with Dr. Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, and a distinguished author and lecturer in philosophy and ethics, having served as Director of the School of Philosophy at USC during the mid-1980s. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Baylor University and his doctorate in philosophy, with a minor in the history of science, at the University of Wisconsin.
His professional publications focus on logic, epistemology, and the acquisition and application of knowledge, and include his original translations of the writings of German philosopher Edmund Husserl into English. His books include an English translation of Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, and Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge, which is a study of Husserl's early philosophy. Dr. Willard also lectures and publishes on the inter-relationships between science and religion. His book Renovation of the Heart was published in 2002, and won the 2003 Book Award of Christianity Today magazine. His classic work, The Divine Conspiracy, was released in 1998 and was Christianity Today's “Book of the Year” in 1999. Other works include In Search of Guidance (1984), The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988), Hearing God (1999), and Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spriritual Knowledge (2009).
Toward the end of my research into the state of higher education today, I joined Dr. Willard and his wife, Jane, for dinner in Los Angeles. “A few weeks ago,” I said to him during our conversation, “I met with a student at Bowdoin College in Maine who told me that on the evening of the 9/11 attacks, the faculty called a forum to watch President Bush’s speech on television and then to talk about the issues it raised. What surprised him, he said, was the fact that, while the students generally agreed that it was a great patriotic speech, the faculty members were horrified by what the President had said.”
“It’s an example of what I call ‘the politics of contempt,’” said Dr. Willard. “This is now the main form of political thinking by those on the left. I have to admit that conservatives are not entirely without blame on this point, but the liberals have refined it to an art form. It’s accusation by innuendo, name-calling, and suggestion. If you look closely, you quickly discover that they don’t have any arguments, and that’s the center of the issue. What we have now on the faculties of most universities is people who are basically governed by the professional associations. Their most important contacts are not with students or even fellow faculty members, and certainly not with the administration, but with their professional associations.”
“They’ve got to be published in the right journals if they expect to get tenure and be promoted,” I said. “But does this mean that they care more about the colleagues they see maybe once or twice a year than they care about the ones they see everyday?”
“Absolutely. This is because the conditions of their success are tied to that. You see, the university no longer evaluates its faculty; it asks other people to evaluate them, and these other people are people who are considered to be the luminaries in their professions. Professionalism had not really taken hold in the American university system until the seventies. It hadn’t taken hold in the sixties, partly because the number of people involved in higher education in the forties and fifties was still so small. It wasn’t like it is now, but the GI Bill changed a lot of that. Things like avoiding the draft changed it, as well. One of the interesting things that happened in the sixties is that whole segments of the population that never would have thought about going to college before were suddenly coming in.
“When I started teaching at USC,” he added, “the annual dinner for the American Psychological Association was about 10 to 15 people. They were the ones who were active. Now it’s thousands of people, and they don’t have the dinners anymore. When you go to the APA Convention in New York or Boston, you see these massive crowds. Faithfulness to things like truth and research and students and love for teaching is nowhere to be seen: it’s all about reputation and standing and how you’re evaluated by your peers.”
The End of Teaching
I said, “It’s shocking to realize that even senior professors no longer consider teaching to be their primary objective.”
“Yes, I agree,” he said. “But it’s very interesting. The reward for faculty members who do good work is more research and less teaching. I once asked a group of senior administrators, ‘If the reward for good research is more research, then why isn’t the reward for good teaching more teaching?’ They didn’t really have an answer for that. It’s not what most professors are interested in.”
“Several of the students I’ve seen recently,” I said, “told me that part of the problem is that they rarely if ever see an actual faculty member. They see them sometimes for the first lecture, but then it’s teaching assistants and discussion-group leaders for most of the actual class sessions.”
“Yes, and they’re not the quality of TAs we used to have,” he said, “precisely because they’re not interested in the fundamental things: truth, honest research, and pouring their knowledge of the subject into their students.”
“Professors have always chosen TAs because they see something in them,” I said. “It used to be that professors would say, ‘I see something in that person that can be developed, and I want to guide them along and help them to become serious scholars.’ But that’s changed. And I suspect that many on the left are saying, ‘Aha! Here’s someone who will buy everything I say!’ So they set out to shape and mold that person into a perfect little clone.”
“Yes, and that goes to the heart of the matter,” said Dr. Willard. “No longer do you evaluate a person in terms of their arguments; rather, you evaluate their arguments in terms of their position. And if the position is wrong, if they’re not in some role that automatically confers distinction, then you don’t need to bother with them. So ad hominem attacks on people are now standard fare. They say, ‘You hold certain views, therefore you’re disqualified from serious consideration.’
“And that also means disqualifying outstanding people like Justices Scalia and Thomas, or even Chief Justice Rehnquist, because they hold generally conservative views. It’s outrageous, but that’s what’s happening.”
“Sociologically,” he said, “this goes hand-in-hand with something that started in the 1880s but didn’t really take hold until the 1940s, and that is divorcing the universities from their religious foundations. In 1848, as George Marsden reports, two-thirds of the presidents of the state colleges were clergymen. The nineteenth century still valued the importance of religious instruction, and that’s why they chose people who were religiously trained to administer public education. But things began to change about that time and the primary battles were fought around people who were willing to put their minds away to protect their denominational distinctives.
“At the center of this,” Dr. Willard said, “was what they called ‘The 39 Distinctives’ of the Anglican church, and there were some horrendous battles during those years as more and more professors began to resist loyalty oaths of one sort or another. You had to swear fealty to those 39 articles or you weren’t allowed to teach. Sometimes it was subtle and sometimes it was brutal, but it was a bad policy, and something had to happen.”.
“So was this going on in Britain and the U.S. at the same time?” I asked.
“It was a different denominational setting at Harvard and Yale than they had in Great Britain,” he said. “It was important for the universities to divorce themselves from the church, but it was not necessary for them to throw the teachings of the church away in the process. Some of the reformers wanted to find ways to maintain a theological position, but they never managed to do that, so there was a wave of defections followed by a wave of institutions arising to combat that. Some of the most aggressive ones were not founded so much as institutions of higher learning as they were institutions for people who wanted to remain Baptists or Methodists or Catholics, or whatever.”
“Sounds like they wanted to create their own alternative world,” I said..
“Yes, it was an alternative world,” he said, “but now that wave of colleges is on their way out.”
“Which is not a bad thing,” I said, “so long as they have the capacity to maintain both intellectual rigor and spiritual discipline.”
“They have to do that,” he said, “but the question is, How to do it?, and that hasn’t been solved yet in the university setting. James Davison Hunter’s book, Evangelicals in the Coming Generation, really tells that story. But if a college president who is a Christian reads that book, what’s he going to do? What’s he going to do about the situation that Hunter describes, where you have a faculty that is mostly Christian while many of the students simply don’t believe the things the school says they need to believe?”
“They don’t adhere to the school’s charter anymore?” I said.“No, they don’t,” he said. “So you have those two things sociologically: the divorce of the universities from the church and the loss of spiritual discipline, or any religious principles.”
No Place for Truth
“America’s founding documents held that religion and moral instruction were essential for the maintenance of good government,” I said, “and this, they believed, was why schools were to be established in every community — for the education and moral instruction of the children. But that idea is considered intellectual heresy these days.”
He said, “It’s also why the first spelling books and copy books, like the McGuffey’s Readers, taught children how to read and write using Scripture verses for instruction and writing practice. They would say things like, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ and students would practice their penmanship by writing that phrase over and over in the copy books.”
“Now we find ourselves in the position of having the words, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,’ carved over the gates of our great universities. At Harvard,” I said, “they’re on the walls of the Widener Library, but nobody knows where they come from.”
“Those words of Jesus,” said Dr. Willard, “tell us what the university is supposed to be about. It’s the one statement, in fact, most often carved into the walls of universities around the world. But, as you say, few make the connection to the one who spoke those words.
“Sociologically, it was the divorce of the universities from the church,” he said, “that led to the divorce of the intellectual enterprise from the church. I believe that was not necessary, but after the Civil War the country began to realize that the development of knowledge was an economic and political necessity. That’s when the German model of the research university first appeared in this country. The British model, which was designed to teach truth and train character, was put aside. So today every college wants to be a university and every university wants to be a research institution. None of them wants to be a knowledge university any longer. The idea of teaching students specific information has become a laughable proposition.”
“No one wants to train the next generation in the values of the current generation,” I said, “which means that the fundamentals of Western civilization are scorned and virtually forbidden on most campuses. I spoke to Donald Kagan at length about the controversy at Yale over the proposal from Lee and Perry Bass to expand the history curriculum. The faculty simply wouldn’t consider it, and the administration drug their heels so long the money went away. It was a total dismissal of the idea of Western civilization. The professors at Yale said, in effect, ‘How outrageous of you to ask us to put $20 million into a program that teaches the history of our culture!’”
“It didn’t make sense to them,” he said, “and that’s the tragedy. That’s because the only moral model left is the model of the ‘rebel,’ and the rebel’s job is to attack hypocrisy.”
“We tend to think so much has changed since the sixties,” I said, “but in reality not much has really changed, because the only thing the Left had to offer when they took over at Berkeley and Columbia was invective, accusations, name-calling, and anger. They had nothing to go on but untested theories and empty rhetoric, and that’s what we see from leftist faculty members in university lecture halls to this day.”
“The Marxist idea was that rhetoric is everything, and everything is political,” he said. “And, of course, people like Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty are still saying that. Rorty famously defined truth as ‘whatever your colleagues will let you get away with.’ What they will let you get away with today depends on your rhetoric, and your rhetoric depends upon being an outsider or a rebel, and having that model. In the classrooms, people can morally pontificate ad nauseum, so long as it’s against traditional values, because that means they’re a rebel, they’re authentic, and there’s even the possibility they’re persecuted for their ‘courage.’ So that’s the standard, and then you get all the sub-rhetoric that comes out of the specializations. And that means you’re really okay because someone else in your area of specialization says you’re okay.”
“If you pass muster at the APA,” I said, “then, ‘You’re okay by me!’”
“Precisely,” he said, “I think that’s the sociology on the issue of change.”
“How about students?” I said. “How have they changed since the sixties?”
“One of the wonderful things about our students,” he said, “is that they’re new, and they’re still young. But they’re tremendously gun-shy.”
“The faculty member is like a super-parent,” I said, “and if he or she doesn’t like ...”
“Oh, no!” he said abruptly. “They don’t admit that. It’s the old in loco parentis principle. The model now is to deny in loco parentis while you practice it in the classroom. One of the things you have to understand about the present situation is that professors influences students’ thinking by their body language, intonation, by the things they assign and the things they don’t assign. They negotiate a position of objective distance but with authority over the moral context of the classroom. The university may have no use for religion anymore, but it teaches a morality that’s more rigorous than any Puritanism you’ve ever seen! All you have to do is get cross-wise with it and you’ll find out suddenly that you’re a bad person!”
Losing the Logic
After a moment of reflection, I said, “I was very disturbed by my conversation with a student at UCLA who told me his professor asked for a show of hands to see which students had voted Republican in 2000. When this young man raised his hand, the professor basically called him an idiot, and said, ‘How could you be so stupid?!’ I asked the young man if he was the only person in the room who had voted Republican, and he said, ‘No! I’m sure at least half of them did, but I was the only one with the guts to raise my hand.’”
“That’s exactly what happens,” said Dr. Willard, “and that’s what I mean by their being gun-shy. If any student attempts to take a position that is not anointed by the faculty, they’re shot down immediately, and in such a way that they’re much less inclined to try it again next time. I was talking with a young woman a couple of days ago who said a professor asked if anyone in the class believed in Satan. As a Christian, she of course did, so she put her hand up, and she was the only one who did. Now, I know this person and she’s one of the brightest students at USC and the professor knew that, too. And he just about blew a fuse, and he started taking her apart bit by bit, and he wouldn’t let up. After class a large number of students came up to her and said, ‘We’re so ashamed that we didn’t stand up with you, but we knew what he was going to say and we just didn’t want to be attacked.’
“You see,” he added, “the students discover very quickly that the system isn’t fair, and I think this is where students have to start suing professors. Your young man should sue that professor for abuse.”
“I’m generally against grievance litigation,” I said, “but I think you may be right about that. If no one stands up and says, ‘You can’t do that to your students!’ then it will never stop. And what makes me angry is that the students are paying the salaries of the people who are doing that, which means they’re paying to be abused!”
“The ironic thing,” he said, “is that alumni and the public generally cannot believe that this is happening. They would never believe what’s actually being done in the classrooms at these large universities. But it’s not just that students are called idiots. It’s worse than that. Students are made to feel like idiots. Professors tell them that certain kinds of people are idiots, and if they just happen to be that kind of person, then they know where they fit in. So they learn to keep a low profile.”
“The sad thing,” I said, “is that those who are not critical thinkers are made to believe that the leftist notions being peddled by their professors are actually mainstream, so therefore if they want to fit in then they’d better believe that, too.”
“There are courses on all these campuses called ‘critical thinking,’ run by the government,” he said. “They aren’t critical thinking in any sort of logical or philosophical sense; it means criticizing all these people with whom you happen to disagree. You’re not learning to think, you’re learning ‘group-think,’ and it’s a fraud. It’s so ironic, because most of these people don’t know the first thing about critical thinking and wouldn’t recognize it if it ran over them in the middle of the street. The teaching of simple logic has disappeared.”
“A professor at another university,” I said, “told me he’d once asked the chairman of the art department why they no longer offered a basic survey in Art Appreciation. And the response, which shocked me, was ‘Who would teach it?’ More than likely it would have to be a junior professor, and he wouldn’t be qualified. Furthermore, professors today are so specialized in these tiny, esoteric subjects that they don’t have any sort of comprehensive knowledge of their own discipline. I think it would be shocking to most parents to learn that nobody on campus is qualified to teach the history of their discipline. That’s shocking!”
“Unfortunately, that’s true in every field,” Willard said. “The one thing you do not learn in your field is the history of it. And one reason is because it would be embarrassing, because regardless what your field may be, what you would inevitably find is the deeply Christian roots of that discipline.”
“Particularly the sciences,” I said.
“And also the social sciences,” he added, “which were basically founded in France by Christians — Claude Saint-Simon and others. Auguste Comte eventually took it over and made it atheistic, because he was looking for the “religion of humanity,” etc. — but no one knows this because the history of the disciplines has largely disappeared. I would have to say this is less true in philosophy than most other majors, due to the historical and empirical nature of the subject matter, but it’s still true.
“The other thing is that logic has disappeared, as well,” he said. “There are reasons for this, of course. But think about the implications of that. Once history and logic are jettisoned, what guidelines do you follow? What goes into the curriculum? Political interest groups and career advancement are practically the only guides we have left for deciding what goes into the university catalog.”
A Wake-Up Call
“If you pause to think about how the curriculum has been altered to favor certain politically correct perspectives and ideologies,” I said, “you see why this would have to happen. Logic is like a fact of nature: logic gives you rules by which you can judge the truth or falsehood of any statement. If the faculty are afraid that what they want to teach can’t pass the test of truth, then the last thing they want is students who are trained in logic and have the ability to challenge them.”
“That’s exactly right,” he said. “I’m sure there are sessions at the Modern Language Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Comparative Literature Association, or whatever it’s called, where logic is attacked as a Eurocentric male conspiracy, and people like Derrida and the deconstructionists are behind it. Logic, they say, is oppressive, and prevents them from extrapolating beyond the range of the known. You don’t want to be restrained by something like logic, for God’s sake!”
“Destroy truth and you can do whatever you like,” I said. “If God is dead, as Dostoevsky, Sartre, and others expressed it, everything is permitted. And basically that seems to be the point. If they can get rid of the natural laws, and especially the theology that restrains them, then they can do whatever they like with impunity.”
“That was extended by Nietzsche and others to truth,” Dr. Willard said, “because they came to see that it wasn’t enough just to get rid of God; they had to get rid of truth, too. And you have to think of reasoning only as rationalization. A lot of this stuff comes to a head in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche, especially in the literature department, is often regarded as ‘The’ great man on campus; I don’t think he wrote a thing that could pass as a Ph.D. dissertation in any philosophy department, but he is lionized by the academic elite.
“It’s pathetic, the kind of so-called reasoning that goes on in many departments,” he added. “It’s basically in the form of telling stories, or meta-narratives as they’re called. Nietzsche tells little stories about how the slave morality of the Jews and Jesus triumphs over the noble morality of the people — there’s not a shred of historical reality to it, but it appeals to a certain kind of audience. He tells a story he’s invented out of whole cloth and people who want to believe that Christian morality is nothing they need to deal with will accept that story, and so much of the fascination with ‘deep interpretation’ and postmodernist theorizing turns out to be story-telling.”
“What frightens me,” I said. “is not so much the story, because ultimately lies will be shown up as lies. Unless, of course, you have de-educated the receiver of those lies to the point that they can’t question what they’re told. It seems like that’s where the public schools have been complicit in this whole ordeal. It almost had to start there so it could eventually work its way up through the universities. The point was to build a cadre of ignorant people who then end up teaching illiterates who have no knowledge of the facts. I believe that’s the only way they could sell some of these ideas; and what does frighten me is that they have done this over the past thirty years, so that today, from kindergarten through graduate school, the sources of truth have been turned upside down. Entire generations of young people don’t know the essential facts of our history or culture.”
“And they think they’re educated because they’ve gone to school,” he said.
“The only thing worse,” I said, “is that a great many of them don’t even care. What troubled me most when I was teaching was not so much that students didn’t know much about the subjects they were studying but that they didn’t much care, and didn’t really want to know. We’ve always had people like that, but they never made it into the universities. Now suddenly we have students with no real interest in learning — let alone of doing responsible research of their own — ending up with teaching diplomas, masters degrees, and even Ph.D.s, who don’t have the basic educational attainment or study skills, and they end up being hired to teach our children.”
“We had one guy a few years back who couldn’t read and he received his bachelor’s degree,” Dr. Willard said. “He even started teaching. He had never been in a course where he had to read; all he had to do was listen and take multiple-choice exams, and fill in the blanks. He was smart enough to find ways to do that. He eventually wrote a book about his experience and how he pulled it off. He said he found ways to get other people to do things for him that he couldn’t do. And he learned how to listen.
“When I saw that,” he added, “it made me think of the famous experiments with ‘Hans the Intelligent Horse,’ who was supposed to be able to count. They would say, ‘How many apples are on the table?’ and Hans would paw the dirt three times, and it was astonishing, but they discovered that when Hans couldn’t see his trainer, he couldn’t count. He was getting his clues from the trainer’s body language, and I suspect a lot of that goes on at the highest levels, reading body language. Students are expert at it. When they come into the classroom, they watch for clues to find out what sort of person this teacher is going to be, whether he’s smart or mean or a push-over or whatever, and they’re looking for clues on how they can get the grades they want with the least amount of effort.”
“It makes you wonder if they want an education or just a diploma,” I said.
Dr. Willard smiled and said, “I often ask my students when I take up their tests, ‘Did you believe what you wrote?’ They always laugh because they know you don’t have to believe it: you just have to know the answers. So they have developed a form of life that totally insulates them from this system that they’re stuck in.”
“In a column earlier this year,” I said, “George Will offered the sad truism that the main preoccupations of university administrators today are parking for faculty, football for alumni, and sex for students. That’s outrageous but, sadly, I suspect it’s probably true.”
“It’s an exaggeration, of course, but like most humor it contains a grain of truth,” he said.“In a couple of my interviews with students,” I said, “I heard of parents who grew up in the sixties and they were really upset when their kids became conservatives. They said, ‘College is for experimentation, for sex and parties, and trying stuff you’ve never done before!’ The freefall of morality is of no concern to them, even though it can have devastating consequences, both physically and emotionally. But kids in that situation are getting it from both sides; not only are they getting it from the faculty who are pushing them to try it all, but parents are pushing them as well. My long-term hope is that I can wake up some of these people to what they’re doing to their children.”
The Failure of Atheism
“Obviously, a lot of parents don’t have any idea what’s really happening on campus,” he said. “But now that you’ve been all around the country doing these interviews, do you get the feeling that the academy is in denial about what’s happening?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “Arnold Beichman at the Hoover Institution suggested I read the new book by Haynes and Klehr called In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage, so I’ve been taking it with me to read on the plane. Essentially it says that professional historians in this country have defended the whole sordid history of socialism and communism, and they’re in denial about the tragic consequences of that belief system throughout its entire history. Because they refuse to admit the dark secrets of the death camps, of mind-control, and the other horrors of socialist indoctrination, the Left in this country has been pushing socialism down our throats so successfully that it’s now the dominant view — not just in the history departments but in the university as a whole. Liberals on the campuses refuse to see that the values of Western capitalist societies are just the opposite of that. Wherever you look, you find that benevolent free-market economies have lifted people out of darkness and put them in charge of their own lives. But the academy refuses to see any of that. Instead, they just look the other way, and continue defending the evils of Marxism and socialism.”
“I believe there’s an element of truth to that,” Dr. Willard responded, “but I think you need to be sure and do justice to the good will of many of these people. I think where many of the books on the problems with the modern university go wrong is that they come across as attacking the intentions of these people. What one has to do, I believe, is to recognize that there’s a problem; an ego investment often leads people to falsify facts in order to make things come out at the right place. It’s the same way with the media, when you look at the liberal bias of the media. For the most part, they’re very liberal, but frankly, they’re also uncomprehending of what people are talking about when they accuse them of liberal bias. They don’t intend to be biased, so they protest their innocence. But if you don’t want to be biased, you have to take an active stand against it. I wish I could teach logic more often, but when I do teach it, I tell the students that being logical is a moral commitment. You have to take this as something you do to be a good person, and if you don’t do that, you’ll be overrun.”
“That’s another reason why logic is foundational to any course of study,” I said.
“Another thing is that a lot of people within the professoriate don’t really understand the positions that are dominating the academy,” he said. “That’s less true in the sciences, but it’s overwhelmingly true in the humanities. They’re dominated by glittering personalities and phraseology and they go to professional meetings and warm themselves in that glow for a while, but they don’t understand the issues or the arguments. There are exceptions, of course, but if you take the ordinary person on a faculty in a good university and ask them to explain a position that is behind some popular position, they will generally not be able to do it.”
“Especially in political science,” I said. “If you look back into the history of the profession, you eventually come to people like John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and the ideologues on the faculty can’t deal with that because they’ve long since turned all that stuff into invective. They have a certain number of catch phrases to say about Locke or Mill or Hume or Tocqueville, but their knowledge level is not much deeper than that.”
“To make a serious debate,” he said, “they would need to spend a year studying Locke, but they haven’t done that. They get their Ph.D.s now by learning to play ping-pong in the academic journals. You can earn a Ph.D. if you start doing something that might function in that field, but you don’t have to know the history of your subject.”
“That sort of mentality has happened to a lot of intellectual endeavors,” I said, “not just political science, but the humanities, history, and much more.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Too often these days research just means coming up with weird stuff.”
“So someone like Peter Singer gets a richly endowed chair at Princeton for coming up with the idea that mothers can murder their babies up to the age of three,” I said.
“That’s exactly right,” he said. “The underlying premise of the modern academic enterprise is that something has been found out. Someone somewhere has found out that there is no God, that the Bible is a made up bunch of fiction, that no one really knows anything about truth, and this just infects the whole system. It turns the intellectual world into a rumor mill and the center of that is the university, which is now the dominant authority in our culture.”
“And if it’s not checked somehow,” I said, “it can destroy the entire culture.”
“It will do it,” he said, “if nothing else, just by negligence of teaching what is fundamental for human life.”
“So was Nietzsche right?” I asked. “Has the university succeeded in killing God?”
“Yes, Nietzsche was right,” he said. “He was right in saying that this world cannot remain the same if you accept the idea that God is dead. There isn’t a single field of knowledge, including divinity — or “religious studies” as it’s sometimes called — where belief in the reality of God is a part of the essential knowledge. No one proved that, of course; it was decided through a process. It was not true, but there is this idea that someone somewhere found out that all that Christian stuff was wrong. So now the university has become a rumor mill.
“There’s a fascinating book,” he continued, “by A. N. Wilson called God’s Funeral which shows you all the absurd arguments that convinced people that God was irrelevant. On the other side is a book by Owen Flanagan called The Problem of the Soul, which is merely the most recent stroke in the battle. Basically it’s an attempt to establish decency on the basis of pure secularism, and the problem is what to do once the notion of the soul is gone. But the idea is pervasive that someone found out that all our ideas about God and the Bible are wrong. No one did, but it was decided so that the university could get on with its research without having to worry about God. Once that was decided, then the university — and the popular media who live a symbiotic life with the university — can function as a rumor mill to spread this new secular gospel.”
“I cut my teeth as a young reader,” I said, “on the great Russian novels, like Fathers and Sons by Turgenev and of course Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which the pre-Marxist brew of the late 1800s was already visible — you could see that a revolution was coming. The Bazarovs and Raskolnikovs of the world, who were a foreshadowing of Lenin and Engels and so many others, were all beating their chests saying, ‘I’m a free man! I can do whatever I wish!’ But you know, at the end of all those novels the rebels were always proved wrong. And they always had terrible lives and horrible deaths.”
“The reason,” said Dr. Willard, “is because all of those novels had a moral vision of human goodness, and they recognized when it was betrayed. Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others like that, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in our own time, understood that if you betray that basic moral reality then you’ll have hell to pay. Even if they didn’t see it work out in their own society, they knew it to be true, and that’s why those novels have such a ring of truth to them today, and why our students need to be reading them over and over again.”
“Then, and I suspect even now,” I said, “those who say ‘There is no God!’ really believe that there probably is a God. It’s undeniable that there’s something going on in our midst that’s bigger than we are.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Atheism is highly over-rated!”
Robert P. George is the Cyrus McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He teaches constitutional law, philosophy of law, and political philosophy, and is a specialist in family policy and well known advocate for life issues.
A member of the President's Council on Bioethics, he has also served as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He was Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law; Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality; and The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis.
Professor George earned his bachelor's degrees from Swarthmore College, a law degree from Harvard, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University. He has received many honors and awards during his career, including a 2005 Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, and the Stanley Kelley, Jr. Teaching Award from Princeton's Department of Politics. He holds honorary doctorates of law, ethics, letters, science, and humane letters, and was selected as the John Dewey Lecturer in Philosophy of Law at Harvard in 2007.
As founder and director of the James Madison Program he has reached out to scores of bright young people who are able to challenge the PC doctrines of the Left; and as a man of robust Catholic faith, a father, and a frequent guest on Capitol Hill, he is having an influence on ethics and helping his students come to terms with some of the most complex ethical issues of our time.
A Contest Worth Pursuing
When I asked Dr. George for his thoughts on what’s happening on campus, he said, “The situation is mixed. There are certainly some good people who have emerged as professors at various institutions in recent years, scholars who are dedicated to the pursuit of truth. They’re distributed across many fields, from the natural sciences to English literature and the humanities. Yet, we still see people who are being excluded from key faculty positions because their views don’t conform to the campus orthodoxy, particularly if they subscribe to traditional Judeo-Christian ethics. The screen that excludes such people is imperfect, however, and some of us have broken through.”
“The bias against conservatives is so strong,” I said, “do those who get in have to dissemble in their résumés in order to be considered for faculty positions?”
“I can’t speak for everyone,” he said, “but it’s not what happened in my case. My approach was not to hide my convictions but to express them very clearly and to put them in the form of a challenge to the people on the other side. I was fortunate enough that when it came to passing on my case, both hiring me and reviewing me for tenure, there were enough good old-fashioned liberals on the panel that I was able to get through.”
“We used to call them ‘honest liberals’.”
“Exactly. And I think that in many cases the strategy of candor that I adopted really is the best strategy. To hide your beliefs doesn’t work because you’ll eventually be smoked out, and then you’re going to look like your were dissembling, as you put it. My own judgment was that it would be much better to just be honest.”“In all fairness,” I said, “I suspect it’s a different story for those who may not have your distinguished credentials, and who are applying for teaching positions at mid-level colleges and universities. I’d be surprised if many of those who didn’t earn top honors at Oxford and Harvard, as you’ve done, would be treated quite so fairly.”
“Well, I’m not suggesting that every case will be just like my own. It’s certainly true that there are too many people on the moral and cultural left in the academy who are prepared to act on prejudice against us. Given that, it’s really important for conservative and Christian scholars to go beyond the standards required for appointment to most academic positions. Your record has to be better. You have to remove any possible excuses that could be used as a cover for prejudice against you. So, yes, it was to my advantage that the credentials I was able to present were those that are esteemed in the academic world. I held degrees from the right sorts of institutions, earned the right sorts of honors and recognition.”
I said, “In one of the letters Stephen Balch sent out from the National Association of Scholars last year, he said it looked like that, among a faculty of 800 or so at Princeton, you were about the only tenured conservative on the faculty. Was that the case then, and is it true now?”
“There’s a small number of conservative members on the faculty,” he said. “When he was here, John DiIulio was certainly an outspoken conservative. When he went to Penn, that left me as about the only outspoken conservative at Princeton. But there’s a number of quiet conservatives.”
“On the other side,” I said, “you have outspoken liberals like Peter Singer, Paul Krugman, and Cornell West, who do their best to enflame the Left. But one of the issues that concerns me is the curriculum. Back in the sixties and seventies when I was in university, we assumed the core curriculum would always remain the same. But that’s no longer the case. And most of the elite universities have very few required courses. Is the degeneration of the catalog still ongoing, and is it a major problem?”“Given the governing ideology of many who are in control of departments and program in universities at the moment, you probably wouldn’t want to go in the direction of required courses, because the courses that would be required would be courses designed to erode people’s appreciation of the Western tradition. So I suspect it’s often a good thing that we don’t have required courses. But, still, it’s a shame that people are able to graduate from elite colleges and universities, never having taken an American history course, and never having studied Shakespeare.
“These are the great treasures of our civilization,” he added, “intellectual treasures that should be understood as the patrimony of all of us. Students should be exposed to them. It should be part of their standard education. Not only do many universities not require them, but in many cases students aren’t even encouraged to take them. And in some cases they’re not effectively available. To be effectively available, they have to be offered regularly, and in a format that is attractive to the students. But in too many cases that’s not done.”
“Students coming in from the typical high school,” I said, “aren’t inclined to do that. Too often the whole Western history thing has been expunged from the curriculum, even in lower school. So they don’t know what they’re missing.” “Yes, and now we’re into a second generation,” he said, “because the erosion that began with the collapse of academic standards and core curricula in the 1960s means that students coming to college today are kids whose parents don’t know what they’re missing either. Not only are there students who don’t know what’s missing, there are often not parents in the background telling them what they’re missing or encouraging them to rectify the situation. So unless the situation is turned around, it’s just going to get worse and worse, because it won’t be too long until there will be a third generation that doesn’t know what they’re missing, and there won’t even be grandparents who know.”
Signs of Hope
“I think the thing that most surprised me about 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq,” I said, “was that so many Americans turned out to be patriotic and care about their country. They reacted like people who believe in Western values. I thought all that had disappeared.”
“It’s interesting,” he said, “at Princeton, and I’m told this is true at other places as well, but at Princeton a large percentage of the students support the war. Very few faculty, as you would expect. But the difference between student and faculty opinion with respect to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 is absolutely remarkable.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said, “and I think you’re right. I’ve seen much the same thing on other campuses. But, I must say, I got a surprising comment from a young man at Harvard who said, ‘So what’s the big deal about liberal faculty? Everybody knows the faculty is liberal, and if we don’t happen to hold those values we just don’t bring it up.’”
Dr. George said, “No, that’s unfortunate. That’s mistaken. It’s a bad way to look at it, because it’s not just that students are being force-fed liberal dogma, it’s that they don’t have an appreciation for the alternative. I mean, what student today can give you the reasons for the traditional understanding of marriage? What student today can explain why fidelity, exclusivity, and monogamy are intrinsic to the idea of marriage. They may reject some crazy professor’s advocacy of bestiality or group sex, or something of that sort, but what they aren’t being given is an alternative understanding. “They can reject it,” he continued, “but they still don’t know the other options. Take abortion, for example. You may have a student who rejects Peter Singer’s views about infanticide, that the mother has the right to kill her child up to some point well after birth, but the student really doesn’t know why he rejects it. It’s just an emotional thing, or perhaps a matter of uncritical religious faith. But is anyone communicating to him the basic facts of human embryogenesis and intrauterine development and discussing their relevance to a determination of the moral status of the child in the womb? It really doesn’t matter what the faculty member’s personal opinion is; if he’s honest he should be prepared to equip students with an understanding of why some well informed people hold a pro-life view.”
“Which makes last year’s Zogby poll of college seniors all the more shocking,” I said. “The survey showed that 75 percent of college seniors believe there’s no objective standard of right and wrong. Only 25 percent said they believe there are absolute standards of right and wrong, which is especially scary when you realize that this 75 percent are going to become the leaders of the next generation.”
“I heard something astonishing the other day,” he said. “I don’t recall the source, but I was told that even among Bible-believing evangelical Christians the position that there is an objective moral truth is a minority position.”
“I think that was the Barna survey,” I said, “and, yes, I believe it’s true. They say one thing on Sunday and for the rest of the week they hold a diametrically opposite view.”
“If Harvard seniors don’t believe in objective truth,” he said, “that’s bad and worrying. But if evangelical Christians don’t believe in objective truth, as Robert Bork would say, we’re doomed.”
For several minutes we talked about grade inflation, student evaluations, and the dumbing down of the curriculum, and Dr. George assured me that his classes were heavily subscribed, even though they’re known to be very demanding and with no grade inflation. “I would think that the brighter, more disciplined students would gravitate toward courses that demand a little more of them,” I said, “and where they feel there’s some integrity.”“I think that’s right,” he said. “If you do get a reputation for teaching harder courses, there tends to be some self-selection among the students. Students who aren’t serious just don’t sign up for the course. And the courses that get a reputation for being easy — the so called ‘gut courses’ — students who aren’t serious flock to them. With that in mind, even with the reputation of my courses and with the self-selection that’s going on, I get a lot of very good students but I still get a broad range of grades.”
“Are there any signs that students are beginning to see through the hegemony of the Left and are looking for other answers,” I asked. “And particularly, is there any indication that they’re willing to stand up for their beliefs despite the risks they have to take to do it?”
“Absolutely,” he said, “and I’m sure it’s true at most of the major schools you’ve talked about. It’s always a substantial minority of conservative students, many of them Christians or observant Jews, and increasingly from Asian families. It’s a minority, but it’s substantial and within that minority you have the more activist ones as well as those who aren’t activist but nevertheless don’t go along with the established orthodoxy.”
“It’s been surprising to see how many of the conservative students around the country are involved with the student newspapers,” I said. “Is that a trend?”
“I’ve noticed that, too,” he said. “Our main student newspaper actually editorialized against the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy. The university signed on to a brief supporting the university’s position, but the newspaper rejected that. There’s a problem, though, at the graduate level. This is very important because graduate students are the future professors, and I don’t find the representation of conservatives among graduate students that you find among undergraduates.”
“Graduate study involves mentoring relationships,” I said, “and a professor who has a particular bias may look for students who mirror back to him what he wants to see. So as long as liberal professors are in the majority, they’re often going to pick students who fit in with the orthodoxy.”“I’m afraid that’s right,” he said. “And that means that the hegemony of the Left is being institutionalized. But my fear is that the left-wing dominance we have now is being replicated in the next generation of graduate students.”
Targeted Giving
“All of this raises the question I’ve been pursing throughout my research,” I said. “Is there any sign we can break that dominance?”
“Money can help,” said Dr. George. “This is an area where people can make a difference by marshaling financial resources. People who have wealth and care about the future of the academy, and want to do something about it, really can do something by contributing to programs that encourage and support graduate students and faculty. Organizations like the Earhart Foundation have identified and sponsored for many years outstanding graduate students who don’t subscribe to the liberal orthodoxy, and they help fund their study.”
“So that’s something positive that people can do,” I said. “Charitable giving for most of us, or actually funding grants of that type for those who have deeper pockets.”
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “Given all the factors that deter students from going to graduate school these days, what we need most is support. We need incentives for conservative students to go to graduate school, and we need support for them while they’re here. Fellowships that provide the financial incentive to take on the challenge of doing a Ph.D., which under the best of circumstances is a strain, takes many years, and is very difficult. But also the prestige of a fellowship of that type means a lot.
“If a student is able to go to the admissions office and say, ‘I’ve got a fully funded scholarship that will pay for four years toward a Ph.D. at Yale,’” he said, “that sometimes helps with the admissions process. Then, when a student knows the resources are there to support him through four or five years of graduate school, he doesn’t have to play the game of conforming in order to get the support necessary to have his fellowship renewed each year. So here’s a place where something very concrete can be done by people who aren’t in the academy but who understand the importance of trying to reverse the trends and reform the academic institutions.”
“It’s a great idea, and it’s the positive side of a two-sided coin,” I said. “The other side is, of course, foundations and other organizations that support the universities — and, in particular, alumni — withholding their support so long as the policies that are critical of traditional culture remain in place. Does that have any impact?”
“Yes, it does,” he said, “although the positive and negative need to be put together. Certainly people should be careful in their giving to universities to ensure that their resources aren’t being used for purposes that violate their consciences.” I said, “That’s why my friend who worked in the White House decided to say to his alma mater: “My gifts to this school are based on policy. So when your policies change, I’ll give again.”
“He’s done half the job,” Dr. George said, “but the positive and negative need to be combined. You certainly shouldn’t give money that can be misused, and withholding gifts may help, but so many other people are going to give, no matter what, that the university just absorbs the loss. So here’s what you can do. Universities have a hard time turning down money — they will, of course, as Yale famously rejected $20 million from the Bass family — but that’s an exception. So what you should do is target your gift. You say, ‘I would like to make a significant capital gift to support a particular faculty member whose work I admire.’ You give on the condition that the money goes to support that professor’s research, graduate students, or institute and programs..
“The James Madison Program at Princeton, which I founded in 2000, has benefited from that sort of giving,” he said. “Some people — including Steve Forbes who had stopped giving money to Princeton because of Peter Singer’s appointment — now are giving money but are targeting their money for the exclusive use of our program. It’s the difference between cursing the darkness and lighting a candle. Not giving money is cursing the darkness. By itself, it’s not going to change anything. Lighting a candle changes things.” [1]
“That’s marvelous,” I said. “What a great suggestion. I’ve said there are two basic problems: one is the group I call collaborators, and the other is the complacency of the Right. How many parents are there who don’t really care what their children learn at Harvard or Princeton so long as they come home with that sheepskin that means they’re going to have a secure future. ‘They may come home as little leftist zombies,’ they say, ‘but so what? At least they can earn big bucks in Manhattan.’”
“It happens,” he said, “but it’s a real failure of faith and trust. God put your children in your care as a kind of trust. Your task is to keep them true to him, not to make sure they’re wealthy or that they can achieve success as the world sees it. Wealth and success are great when they’re the result of true learning and good character; that’s icing on the cake. But the cake is maintenance of good character and good faith.”
“You know,” I said, “I think everyone finally realizes what a change it’s been since the sixties when the counter-culture was the Left. Today those who think the way you just described are the radicals: we’re the counter-culture!”“There’s something else worth mentioning here,” he said. “People need to think of themselves not as alumni of Stanford or Columbia or Chicago anymore, but as alumni of the American university system. And they need to target their giving. They need to say, ‘I’m willing to give my money wherever academic reform is taking place.’ If it’s not taking place at your own home institution, then look for another institution where they’re doing things right.”
J. Budziszewski is Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Budziszewski (pronounced Bood-ja-shev-ski) is an ethical and political philosopher. He is also a nationally-known authority on the tradition of natural law. Much of his work focuses on the repression of moral knowledge — on what goes wrong when we try to convince ourselves that we don't know the difference between "right and wrong." Another of his interests is the intersection of philosophy and theology. Recent scholarly works include Evangelicals in the Public Square (2006), What We Can't Not Know: A Guide (2003), The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man (1999), and his newest, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (ISI Books, 2009).
During my research for Freefall of the American University, I spent several months traveling to elite universities coast to coast — from historic Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, to Stanford and U.C. Berkeley on the opposite side of the country. Along the way I met with and interviewed more than two dozen faculty, students, and alumni, and spoke off-the-record with a dozen more. By any measure, what these men and women had to say was eye-opening.
As I approached the end of my research, I arranged to spend an hour with Dr. J. Budziszewski, a well known professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas. He earned his BA degree at the University of South Florida, an MA at The University of Florida, and his Ph.D. in Political Science at Yale University. In addition to his academic publications and conference papers, his influential books and articles on law, conscience, and the search for moral order are often cited and highly regarded in the academic world. Notable among these are Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (1997) and The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man (1999).
Works such as What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide (2003), How to Stay Christian in College (2004), and Ask Me Anything (Volumes 1 and 2), deal with some of the logical fallacies of postmodernism and popular culture, helping students and their parents deal with the questions that inevitably arise in any learning situation. How to Stay Christian has sold in outrageous numbers. It’s easy to read, and helps Christian kids heading for college defend what they believe to be true and an environment that is often hostile to faith.
Over the years, some of the critics of higher education have said that faculty tenure is the real problem, and doing away with this guarantee would help weed out the worst and force those with a tendency to use the classroom as a soapbox to change their evil ways. But Dr. Budziszewski strongly disagrees, and said that ending tenure may only put the best at the mercy of the worst who are already entrenched. In the long run, he told me, issues such as tenure, curriculum, and the racial or sexual environment on campus are secondary issues. Of course it’s important to deal with weakness and abuse in these areas, but genuine reform calls for a bigger strategy.
“There are three ways that you might imagine the reform of the university system taking place,” he told me, “and I think they deserve greater attention. The first is a complete revolution of the intellectual culture. Revolutions like that certainly can occur, but they take centuries and can’t be master-planned, so it’s not the most practical approach!”
“That idea came up in a previous conversation,” I said, “and we decided it was like moving a mountain.”
“Yes, but not just moving a mountain; it’s a mountain too big for us to see. We can’t begin to anticipate the results that our efforts might have two centuries down the line. Consider the passing of the medieval university. It’s not as though nobody was trying to change it, but the changes that actually took place during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Reformation weren’t the ones they were planning. So I don’t think any of us can manage a revolution from the top down.
“The second approach,” he added, “might be called the seat-at-the-table method. In some ways the contemporary university resembles the Hindu social system in India, where the castes aren’t just social strata but compartmentalized, coexisting subcultures. There are a lot of different subcultures in the university, too. Some people say the postmodernist movement contributes to a kind of compartmentalization because it doesn’t believe in any sort of grand meta-narrative — or a ‘big story’ that’s true for everyone. What it does claims is that all the different subcultures have a seat at the table, and they all co-exist. The problem is that the seat comes with a high price. You have to accept the rules of the table: you have to sit in your assigned seat, and it’s difficult not to compromise your principles. Basically it’s called being captured by the institution.
“There’s an admission price to sit at the table,” I said.
“That’s right. But if you can avoid being captured by the institution — and that’s a big if — then the seat-at-the-table strategy can work. At some universities, traditionally-minded scholars are trying to establish alternative degree programs — something like small liberal-arts colleges within the structure of the university. At others they’re making places where visiting scholars can work without ideological pressure.
Ideas That Work
“The success of Robert George’s Madison Program at Princeton, for example, suggests that it may be easier to do that than most people think. By their nature, universities will try to capture those programs — that’s just the way they are — but they don’t necessarily oppose them, because the programs give them something to show their donors. When someone from the outside says, ‘What are you radicals doing down there?’ they can simply say, ‘Let me show you this new institute or degree program,” and they’ve got cover.
“Now there’s something they’ll understand!” I said.
“Yes, and I think that approach is a good one if you go about it realistically,” he said. “But my guess is, that sort of initiative can only remain independent for about one generation. Then it will be captured by the university, absorbed into the system, and you have to find another initiative.
“But there’s a third approach,” he said, “and this is to foster alternative institutions not within the universities but alongside them. You have to keep your eyes open, because you don’t know what alternatives might be possible. Nobody anticipated that monasteries would save Western learning, for example. And, for that matter, nobody anticipated universities. At one time higher education didn’t happen in universities. They were a historical surprise, based on an ideal of universally integrated knowledge, where all the parts were connected.
“That’s why they’re called UNI–Versities. Some people say we don’t really have uni-versities anymore, we have multi-versities which reflects the view that knowledge is disconnected, that it doesn’t always hang together, and that it’s all a matter of perspective. But people are trying all sorts of new alternatives to the multi-versities, and I suspect we need to keep an open mind.”
I said, “Would you include things like ‘distance learning’ and the ‘electronic universities’ on the Internet in that category?”
Not really. I’m not encouraged by distance learning. I’ve had some experience with it and I’m afraid it’s just going to be another way to pull in educational consumers — a way to make money. You can provide certain kinds of purely technical education that way, but you can’t provoke searching reflection of ideas. It’s not a solution, but a symptom of the problem.”
Relational Learning
“A better example of what I mean by alternative institutions,” he said, “might be the Christian studies centers that are being established alongside many campuses — or something else along that line. This is a burgeoning movement, and the centers operate on a different sort of educational ideal. They have a different view of knowledge, how it works, and what it means to cultivate it. They aren’t at war with the universities, but their perspective is all their own, and it contributes to a helpful intellectual tension, and a new kind of discussion.”
“My own experience with these organizations,” I said, “is that there’s a lot of genuine enthusiasm about ideas among the students who get involved. In fact, it’s a striking contrast to the kind of apathy I often see in the typical lecture hall.”
“I agree,” he said, “and I think that’s another reason why this sort of thing is going to grow. Who would have anticipated that Christian Studies Centers would be popping up all over the place? And then we have to wonder, what other sorts of institutions are going to develop? We don’t know, but we have to be ready, and wherever we see something that seems to be promising we ought to work with it and explore the possibilities. Who knows? Perhaps 150 fifty years from now we may see a whole new system of higher education! We can’t engineer such a thing — I criticized that approach earlier — but if something good starts to happen we should just get out of the way!”
“That is long-range planning!” I said with a laugh. “But one of the things I’ve observed on virtually every campus I’ve visited the past year is just how prone students are to self-segregate into communities of one kind or another. The trend toward ‘theme programmed’ dorms is a version of that which is not very helpful, because it’s often done with the express purpose of creating barriers between groups, to foment bitterness and disharmony instead of what the Left euphemistically refers to as ‘unity’ and ‘tolerance.’ Dividing up by race, gender, or class is, to my mind, a bad idea. But the idea of establishing relational communities within the university based on a common commitment to a philosophy, a set of principles, or perhaps certain professional disciplines sounds like a good one.”
“If it were done in the spirit of ‘My truth as contrasted with your truth,’ it would be as bad as theme dorms,” he said. “But if it’s done in the spirit of the search for universal truth, it could make all the difference. Bear in mind that I’m using these institutes merely as examples. There may be many other possibilities on the horizon that we don’t yet see. Think of institutions that aren’t the university, but live in the same world as the university. They have an influence on education, they have intellectual transactions with their people, but their aims are different — and more sane, perhaps. Theme dorms and things like that, I’m afraid, weaken the search for universal knowledge because people aren’t interacting with one another.”
“Instead of ending racism,” I said, “they actually breed it.”
“Yes, racially themed dorms are an especially virulent idea,” he said, “but on the other hand, suppose that you had an alternative degree program that’s really a classical education. You really want those students to interact with each other intellectually, outside the classroom, and to encourage them without requiring them to live in a common dorm.”
“To get them reading great books together and debating ideas.”
“Exactly,” he said, “and trusting the ordinary dynamics of young adult intellectual energy to keep it all going. Now there’s something worth thinking about.”
“That’s an exciting concept. The closest thing I’ve seen to it would be the Directed Studies program at Yale where students are encouraged to study together and spend free time together reading and arguing about great books and all the ideas they’re dealing with in this fairly intense program of study.”
“At the same time,” he said, “I think it’s very important for young people who are looking ahead, preparing to go away to college, to think not just about which courses they’ll take, but what sort of influences they want to be exposed to. That means looking for mentors. The university isn’t going to provide appropriate influences for them, but there’s really no substitute for the teacher-student relationship.
“So this is something to keep in mind. As students begin to find their way around the university, discovering what their interests may be. They need to be looking for professors who may be suitable mentors. Not just people who can write letters of recommendation when they graduate,” he said, “but people to whom they can entrust a part of their intellectual formation.”
