A UD Education: The Road Goes Ever On

Ten days ago I sent the letter below to the University News at Dallas. I haven't seen it published yet; maybe they had a stack of better stuff coming in. In any event, I thought I'd share my sentiments here.


In May I will again visit the University of Dallas campus to attend graduation. It has been 11 years since that spring morning when I received my Bachelor of Arts degree, concluding an idyllic season of my life. With the passage of time the memories have lost some of their sharpness, and yet the insights, the vision, the thirst for recovering the great ideas of our civilization remain with me, making themselves apparent nearly every day. Far from fading into the darkness, my UD education continues to grow.

This may seem obvious to those currently steeped in the world of ideas that is the UD campus. It is far less obvious when you consider my present circumstances. Since graduating I have moved more times than I care to count, completed two additional degrees, married, settled into a career, started a family, published a book, and purchased a house. Much of my time is spent washing dishes, changing diapers, folding laundry, or drawing pink puppy dogs for the umpteenth time. But somehow, my UD education, time and again, worms its way back into my life.

One day last year my eye fell upon a copy of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua­ on the shelf. (My wife had purchased it for a graduate class that never actually used it.) Although I wrote a paper on Newman for one of Dr. Norris's classes, I was too intimidated by Newman to actually read more than a couple pages. More than a decade later, I righted that shortcoming, and Newman did not disappoint: with every page his erudition and firmness of purpose show through, bathed in the light of eloquence, honesty, and joy.

Earlier this year a coworker mentioned that she was taking a class on the history of political thought and was writing on Aristotle's critiques of Plato. Excited conversation followed and the next day two large volumes came with me to the office, so I could read the Republic and Politics literally side by side. Just the other day a fellow dad mentioned Jean Leclercq's understanding of Benedictine education; that evening I pulled down my collection of essays in honor of the late Fr. Louis J. Lekai, O. Cist. and turned to Leclercq's contribution to that volume.

But these examples may be misleading: they suggest that a UD education is something contained in books and resting on a shelf, to be brought down as a curiosity. It is far more than this. To paraphrase Dr. Frank's introduction to my Phil & Eth class, a UD education is a sense of wonder, a quieting of the mind to focus on the things that matter most, and a relentless determination to seek the Truth, heedless of the cost.

Learning that I have a PhD, people often ask where I received it. Though I valued my doctoral studies, and am happy to share about them, I try to gently turn the conversation from that final degree to my UD education, the foundation that supports all my subsequent work. Whatever I have accomplished as a researcher, analyst, and writer comes from the skills I learned at UD. But even more important, UD nurtured within me the habits and virtues needed to be a citizen, a friend, a father, a husband, and a disciple. These are the things that matter most.

One cannot repay the kind of debt I owe to this school, just as one can never repay parents for their love. But I write to thank the amazing faculty, who taught me, and my fellow students, with whom I lived, studied, worked, and prayed, for four fantastic years. You are some of the most incredible people I have yet met. May God, who has so richly blessed us, continue to pour out his grace on this school and keep its spirit ever strong!

Against the Great Books?

The Great Books are not the solution to the problems of higher education in this country. In fact, the Great Books are enemies of wisdom.

How could a proud graduate of the University of Dallas like myself say such a thing? Such a statement practically amounts to blasphemy!

But, before you dismiss me as some crazy liberal, let me point out that I am not the one who made those statements. They were made by Patrick Deneen and Fritz Wilhelmsen--hardly crazy liberals. If anything, they are usually described as crazy conservatives. And indeed, both men make their critique of Great Books programs from a conservative perspective. Last week Deneen wrote an article "Why the Great Books Aren't the Answer" which has sparked some lively discussion on a couple Internet forums. Deneen's concerns, though, are not entirely original; they were voiced years ago by one of UD's very own, the late Fritz Wilhelmsen, in his essay "The Great Books: Enemies of Wisdom."

There is a lot to think about in Deneen's and Wilhelmsen's articles, but I would like to focus on one interesting issue they both raise, and one which is, I believe, at the heart of their critique of Great Books programs: the role of tradition in a proper education.

Deneen identifies two potential effects that Great Books programs will have on most students. On the one hand, making students read a "potpourri of conflicting views"--from the ancient Greeks through the 20th century--can easily lead a student to adopt relativism or to despair of ever finding the truth once he realizes that all the great thinkers he has read disagreed radically with one another. On the other hand, many students enter college with a progressive theory of history in their mind: all of history has reached its culmination in the present, therefore the present is the best. Instead of relativism, these students will simply be confirmed in progressivist dogma. But more worrisome than either relativism or progressivism by itself is the possibility that students will combine these twin dangers of relativism to form a single monster: the dogmatic relativist. The dogmatic relativist will believe that history, and therefore truth, has culminated in relativism.

To fend off these dangers, universities, in Deneen's view, need to give students a framework within which to read the Great Books, and not simply approach them with neutrality. Ultimately, Deneen (a professor at Georgetown) believes it is necessary to teach "in the light of the standards that the Catholic tradition would provide."

Wilhelmsen in his article focuses less on the conflicting content of the Great Books and more on the inadequacy of the Great Books in fostering in students the virtues necessary for the philosophical life. For Wilhelmsen, following Aristotle, philosophy is a way of knowing; it is not found in books, but rather in the philosopher's virtues, the habits of the mind, "through which things are understood in their causal structures." Philosophy, though, also requires that a master educate a beginner in these virtues. This approach to philosophy--which Wilhelmsen describes as it used to be practiced in Catholic universities in America--is at once both traditional and personal. Each student (and teacher) submits to the tradition, but is also able, thanks to his own virtues, to contribute to that tradition. Wilhelmsen at one point even uses the word "apprentice" to describe a student's relationship to his teacher. A philosophy department at a university, then, should in this respect quite literally resemble a craft guild.

For Wilhelmsen, one of the chief follies of the typical Great Books program, besides only teaching students what others said rather than to philosophize themselves, is to teach certain texts with no regard for the historical context in which they were written. Students are expected to cope with the most varied authors "without having the faintest hint of the kind of world within which these men lived and thought." In other words, the typical Great Books program utterly neglects the importance of tradition.

Deneen's and Wilhelmsen's critiques of Great Books programs, though they emphasize different aspects of education, both rest on the assumption that a student cannot learn the truth unless he is embedded within a craft and a tradition.

This insight that has been developed by Alisdair MacIntyre in the area of virtue ethics, especially in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (in particular, chapter III: “Too Many Thomisms?”) According to MacIntyre, tradition embodies the claim that “reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.” This claim would sound preposterous to most people today, especially in a discussion of higher education, since most people conceive of higher education as “free enquiry." MacIntyre, however, defends the rationality of tradition by pointing to two things an apprentice in any craft has to learn:

[First,] the apprentice has to learn, at first from his or her teachers and then in his or her continuing self-education, how to identify mistakes made by him or herself in applying the acknowledged standards, the standards recognized to be the best available so far in the history of that particular craft…[Second,] the apprentice has to learn to distinguish between the kind of excellence which both others and he or she can expect of him or herself here and now and that ultimate excellence which furnishes both apprentices and mastercraftsmen with their telos.

But, how does an individual’s membership in a craft connect with a larger historical tradition? “The standards of achievement within any craft are justified historically. They have emerged from the criticism of their predecessors and they are justified because and insofar as they have remedied the defects and transcended the limitations of those predecessors as guides to excellent achievement within that particular craft.”

To conclude before I quote the entirety of Three Rival Versions, I would like not to provide a complete justification of tradition--that would require me to write books I am not capable of writing--but simply to draw out three implications which Deneen, Wilhelmsen, and MacIntyre's position has for higher education, particularly Catholic higher education.

First, we must take the historical aspect of learning within a tradition much more seriously than we do now. Many of the problematic aspects of a Great Books program arise from false philosophies of history--especially, as Deneen notes, relativism and progressivism. The solution is a proper understanding of education as initiation into a craft, into a tradition. And a tradition's standards, as MacIntyre reminds us, are justified historically.

Second, if we want to restore this understanding of education as initiation into a craft, we cannot make students fumble in the dark reading all the Great Books yet expect them somehow to figure out how to philosophize on their own. And realistically, we cannot expect students to find their own way into the tradition in the four short years of their undergraduate education. College is, in many cases, already a late stage to enter into a tradition. This means we have a lot of work to do in restoring the educational craft, not only at the university level, but also in high schools, and even in elementary schools.

Third, if any healthy tradition necessarily excludes fundamental dissent in order to teach students to philosophize, we have to radically rethink our notion of academic freedom. More specifically, we have to rethink the relationship of education and religion. Academic freedom today is often portrayed as the freedom to ignore or even disparage religion. But academic freedom is not the freedom to mock what is holy, or even to read the Great Books; academic freedom--as Wilhelmsen explains--is really the freedom of a craftsman working in a tradition.


Note: For further comments on Deneen's article, see Front Porch Republic and First Things.

The Irrelevance of Political Science

In a piece he wrote back in April, FT columnist Gideon Rachman wrote that "it is no longer fashionable to pick political scientists for the top positions making US foreign policy." The reason why is clear enough: "I looked at something called the Journal of Conflict Resolution and found articles about real-world political problems which seemed just to be a mass of quadratic equations. It is hard to believe that anybody actually trying to resolve a conflict would find this kind of stuff useful, or relevant." Joe Nye and Stephen Walt, both of whom teach at Harvard, have made similar observations.

As a result of the growing irrelevance of political science, it has become fashionable to recruit talent from Washington's think-tanks, institutions which are much more policy-oriented than the American academy. But this, Rachman points out, has in turn created another problem: "The transition must be extraordinary for these former analysts and scribblers. Many of them have never managed anything more than a research assistant. And suddenly, they are placed in the White House or the Pentagon and given real-world responsibilities and real soldiers to play with. It’s all a long way from the seminar room."

Not to toot my own horn too much, but a little school in the Federal City seeks to address some of these issues. The Institute of World Politics - from which I hold an MA - was founded in 1990 by a former member of the National Security Council Staff who noticed the very same problem Rachman points out: in spite of studying and teaching at the finest schools in the national security field, John Lenczowski discovered that these institutions had not prepared him for the actual work of national security. So he founded his own school, dedicated to the apprehension of intellectual tools which have a practical value for foreign policy practitioners. For faculty he has recruited a variety of men and women who are not only published scholars in their respective fields, but have also served in foreign policy and can bring real-life experience to bear on their teaching. Finally, recognizing that international affairs is not an amoral business, IWP insists that its students study the ideals and values of the American Founding and the Western moral tradition.

IWP has not yet achieved a perfect synthesis of study and practice, ideal and realpolitik. But it is definitely doing some interesting work and making a serious effort to train a rising generation of foreign policy practitioners in, well, the practice of foreign policy.


This post first appeared on Statecraft & Security on 16 May 2009.

Higher Education: Practice for the Welfare State?

Eric Gibson, who has recently been visiting colleges with his high school son, recently wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal titled "Pleading Poverty: Colleges Want Parents to Foot the Bill for Their Largess". He writes:

I've been wide-eyed on some of my visits, struck by the extent to which being a student today resembles living at Versailles, where Louis XIV's every whim was so thoroughly accommodated that there was even a Superintendent of the King's Furniture. One college tour guide proudly informed us that upon arrival every freshman is issued a brand-new laptop. Even if the students already have one? Why, yes, the guide replied....

Until I started these tours, I used to assume that college kids tilted left politically because they were young and impressionable. Maybe, but it's also because they get introduced to the welfare state at a tender age and become addicted. The government (college) offers cradle-to-grave (matriculation-to-graduation) care and feeding, levying higher taxes (tuition) on the populace (parents) whenever the spirit moves them -- which is every year. Not even the actual government is that brazen.