About this time of year, lots of thoughtful people take time to reflect on the generally grim situation of higher education in America. I thought I might join in the conversation. There is always a mix of good news and bad news about higher Ed. It’s the latter that often seems to dominate our thoughts—and of course we are justified in our concern.

David Whalen, associate professor of English and associate provost at Hillsdale College penned a column in a June 2005 issue of the American Spectator, entitled “Go Forth and Forget This School.” In it, he offered an imaginary commencement address as “a dream, an antidote, a provocation” to imaginary graduates, and to the academy at large. His candor—echoing our deepest frustrations with the worst in American higher Ed—was priceless. Wrote Whalen:

You have rightly been taught the horrors of the Holocaust and the betrayals and bigotry witnessed in the West. But at the same time, you have heard curiously little about the Soviet Ukraine of the 1930s, or the number of those slain throughout the 20th century in Communist regimes…Your education has likely trained you in the evils of imperialism, colonialism or globalization. But has it said much about he aggressive imposition of progressive secular ideologies, including population control, upon the undeveloped world? Or the parallel imposition of secularism upon developing countries with strong religious cultures?... In blithe contradiction to a number of anti-western notions, it is often assured that man’s history is a steady ascent out of error and into the light. We once thought spirits inhabited rocks and trees, we then came to think they inhabited the heavens, and soon we will have banished them from existence altogether. Secularism is as inevitable as gravity. All this you have learned. Rather, you have seen it taught. Many of you, I am sure, smelling a rat and its nest of error have learned at least one lesson: play along, get the grade, but don’t take anything seriously. The great danger in all these absurdities is not that you will be persuaded of much… [but rather] that your experience has rendered you a cynic. But even that can be fixed. It may have to wait, though, until you reach middle age and rediscover the drama of truth and beauty.

The drama of truth and beauty—indeed! On the good news side, I have learned of one man who is using his office adeptly to do precisely that, to bring truth and beauty, not only back into higher Ed., but back into the mainstream of culture at large. I’m talking about Mr. Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. I saw a column by George Weigel last month in which he sung Gioia’s praises:

Under Gioia's leadership, NEA created the "Shakespeare in American Communities" program, which has brought 22 of the Bard's plays to more than a half-million Americans in over 2,000 performances -- and not in major cities, but to small towns, rural areas and military bases. It's been the largest Shakespeare tour in American history, involving seven professional theater companies, and it's touched down in all 50 states… "The Big Read" is even more ambitious. This Gioia initiative aims at nothing less that restoring reading –and reading serious fiction at that –to the center of our national cultural life. More than one hundred communities are participating in "The Big Read" this year, reading American classics ranging from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to Willa Cather's My Antonia to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In partnership with corporations and private foundations, participants use well-prepared study materials to get inside an author's head, and are given the opportunity to attend lectures and seminars that help restore the idea of reading great literature as an adventure as well as a pleasure.

Gioia was also highlighted recently in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (August 8, “Not by Geeks Alone”) by Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch. Raising a red flag to the dangers of educational over-emphasis on “STEM” subjects (science, technology, engineering and math), the authors rightly warn that:

As with all education reforms, the STEM-winders mean well. They reason that India and China will eat America’s lunch unless we boost our young people’s prowess in the STEM fields. But these enthusiasts don’t understand that what makes Americans competitive on a shrinking, globalizing planet isn’t out-gunning Asian technical skills. Rather, it’s our people’s creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition and problem-solving prowess.

Their proposed answer? More liberal arts:

The liberal arts make us “competitive” in the ways that matter most. They make us wise, thoughtful, and appropriately humble. They help our human potential to bloom. And they are the foundation for a democratic civic polity, where each of us bears equal rights and responsibilities.

These convictions were cogently echoed in a subsequent Wall Street Journal op-ed (Sept. 5, “Our Compassless Colleges”) by Peter Berkowitz, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and professor at the George Mason School of Law. The “general distribution requirements” of most colleges, Berkowits affirms “add up to little more than an attractively packaged evasion of the university’s responsibility to provide a coherent core for undergraduate education.” Putting his money where his mouth is, Berkowitz then goes on to propose his own formidable liberal arts core curriculum. Such a core, affirms Berkowitz, would afford students “a common intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and politics responsibly, enhances their understanding of whatever specialization they choose, and enriches their appreciation of the multiple dimensions of the delightful and dangerous world in which we live.”

Well, at least we would tend to hope so.

I was intrigued by what I was reading, so I thought I would ask my friend Jeff Nelson for his input. Jeff has thought a lot about higher Ed and the place of the liberal arts within a college education. Jeff was for many years a senior vice president at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and publisher of ISI books. Currently, Jeff is president of Thomas More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire. These were some of his reflections:

The liberal arts are needed now more than ever. The Church's approach to education over the centuries, as embodied in the Trivium and Quadrivium, emphasized the formation of the whole person and the acquisition of competencies that will serve the individual in their profession, their family, their community, and—by extension—serve society and the common good.

Jeff reflected—and I heartily agree—that in our contemporary setting, an “integrated culture” in which individuals grasp and understand themselves within a meaningful whole is essentially non-extent. Jeff sees the solution in a return to a strong liberal arts core curriculum for undergraduates that would equip them with: 1) communication, persuasion, writing, and oral skills 2) a philosophical habit of mind enabling them to reflect critically “on the tsunami of information that will hit them every day”; 3) the ability to work imaginatively within groups to develop and advance projects and dialectically engage currents within their corporate, religious, and professional lives; 4) an understanding and appreciation for cultural complexities throughout the world and, over time, “the skills to see beyond the intractability of historic cultures to the common human ground that is the basis for all of them”; 5) anunderstandingof the fundamental questions that drive the liberal arts, summed up in the humanistic What is Man?

“Liberal arts education was developed to form leaders,” says Jeff. “Thomas More is a great patron in this regard: a great scholar, a great man of affairs, a great man of the Church, a greateducator, a great humorist, a great family man. The Liberal Arts still form men and women for all seasons. We must commit ourselves to renewing them for our children, our children's children, and the future of our culture/civilization. The Liberal Arts are ever ancient and ever new. The global age before us will be led by those formed in this way, not by the fragmented half-men of the contemporary college.”

Well, said, Jeff. Amen to every syllable!

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