Thoughts on Higher Education, Christian and Otherwise

I’ve posted a reflection on the future of higher education, with a particular emphasis on the Christian universities, over at the Touchstone Magazine Mere Comments blog. Catch it here.

Here’s a clip:

The economic downturn has had a substantial impact on colleges and universities.

The first shoe dropped when endowments everywhere took big hits from a rapidly falling market. When endowments go underwater, they produce no income and generally can’t be touched.

The other shoe will drop when we see how private colleges and universities do in terms of their student numbers for the fall. My casual conversations with peers indicates that the private schools are running behind in terms of student deposits. The buyers are not feeling flush.

The public universities, on the other hand, have their own problems. The ones that have endowments are down. They also rely on tax subsidies in a time when tax revenues are diminished. The trend of the last several years has been for states to offer less and less financial support. In-state tuition has risen substantially. Where they do not suffer is in terms of student numbers. They will be overwhelmed by bargain seekers in tough economic times. The question is whether they will have state funds to backfill the subsidized education they offer and how many they can admit. As it stands now, their facilities are often severely strained, teaching assistants do an awful lot of the instruction, and there are a large number of cattle call style courses.

Why Study the Liberal Arts?

My university is in the middle of talking about a reform of the core curriculum.  When the school was founded, it began with a knock-out liberal arts core that could not have helped but shaped students in a significant way.  Over time, like so many other schools we moved to a cafeteria-style core that mainly serves the majors.

People in the professional schools often seem to hold the view that a liberal arts education is unnecessary.  An accountant, they might suggest, is a better accountant the more credit hours he has in his discipline.  If that comes at the cost of serious liberal arts courses, then the loss is an acceptable one.

I once wholeheartedly agreed with that type of thinking.  I thought the liberal arts were useless.  However, I slowly became aware of the lacunae in my own learning.  Attempting to make up for what I hadn’t learned earlier, I began to study the liberal arts on my own and then at the Ph.D. level.  I became a convert.  To me, to know something about history, literature, political theory, art, and other matters is to know something about being human.  It is to escape the consumeristic spirit of the age and to gain access to wisdom and beauty.  My life has been far richer since I learned to appreciate the things I once believed to be useless hobby-horses.

Will the liberal arts transform a scoundrel into a saint?  Will they turn a professional into a super-professional?  No to both questions.  But the study of the liberal arts through careful reading, consideration, writing, and speaking can turn a philistine with the attention span of a gnat into a more thoughtful and perceptive individual who knows what kinds of things happened in the world before he was born.  I suspect that’s enough difference to prove telling.