COVID-19 has been apocalyptic for higher education, and indeed for our nation as a whole; it has intensified pressures already threatening liberal arts education. Our conversations aim to enable colleges and universities across the country to learn from one another in addressing today's challenges and opportunities, and they will encourage these institutions to draw on the rich heritage of the liberal arts tradition, while acknowledging its historical limitations, in shaping their responses. Our goal is to think and talk in public about the enduring value of the liberal arts for the particular concerns and challenges of our time.
Good discussion but in my opinion not coming up with a convincing concept to “fix the permanent crisis” - at least not for the American context. It sounds like we should get better at the arguments we have delivered again and again over the years. Make better arguments for goals of humanities as character building and being humanitarian does not convince students who do not want to go to college for character building or being humanitarian. The existence of pseudo-humanitarians is lamentable, but we won’t change this by just telling people they have their goals for education wrong and we know better. Side note: the comparison between universities with many majors and a restaurant with a large menu seems not useful: one chef cannot be expert for everything, but different majors in universities are not taught by the same people. There is more than one chef.
I'm not an academic, I'm a retired Pharmacist. I came upon Dr. Hooten Wilson via Bishp Barron via my conversion to Catholicism. I came to Catholicism, partly through Russell Moore, a Southern Baptist, who introduced me to Walker Percy. I'm so glad I found Dr. Hooten Wilson. I've read Giving the Devil His Due, and am nearly finished with "Reading Walker Percy's Novels. " Thank you Dr Hooten Wilson for enriching my mind and my new found Catholicism.
There are guys who haven't spent so much as one day in college who know everything about the Civil War. If someone wants to become a lawyer then the liberal arts are what you should major in as an undergraduate. Political science and history are the two most popular undergraduate majors for future lawyers; and philosophy may be the ideal undergraduate degree for an aspiring lawyer as philosophy trains you to argue persuasively.
“It’s not an explicit bait-and-switch…” Right. It’s far worse than that. It’s a subtle bait-and-switch, boiling the young frogs slowly rather than all at once. The JWHC is not about being “radically Christian.” I would know. I underwent their classes for two years. As much as David and Lanta deny it, the JWHC’s telos is to promote Leftist cultism under the guise of pseudo-Christian language. I have a recording of David claiming that gender isn’t determined by chromosomes. That is inherently an anti-Christian notion that flies in the face of historic Christian orthodoxy. Classical Christian education is a wonderful, eye-opening thing, when done rightly. When done wrongly, it’s neither truly classical nor truly Christian; rather, it becomes a postmodern utensil for dissecting the minds of conservative students and implanting an alternative set of pro-immigration, subjectivist, anti-nationalist, globalist, pro-transgenderist, pro-sodomite, anti-Western, and ultimately anti-Christian ideas.
"A developed capacity for the un-useful." That was just one of the phrases from your conversation that I'll be pondering for a long time. Thank you so much Andy and Jessica for this conversation. I am deeply thankful for the formation I received at my Christian liberal arts college (Whitworth), and I'm praying for you who are working in this field day in and day out.
If "supremacy" is to be taken seriously as a negative characteristic and utilized as a pejorative, then any form of "supremacy" (better-than-thou narratives) should be called into question if they can be objectively scrutinized as intended to diminish others, correct?
wealth accumulation is elitist, as well as criminal. Liberal arts is a path to intellectual freedom, which allows the individual to liberate himself from the oppression of authority, and plot for it's overthrow. workers of the world UNITE
