As I mentioned a week or so back, I’m giving a talk to all the faculty and academic leaders at a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in the midwest next week. I’ve included the opening refections below, with a link to the full text on Google Docs. I’d love to get your feedback (as comments here, as comments on the Doc, or in person when you see me next). I’m grateful for the opportunity to help this SLAC envision its future, and would love to capitalize on the hivemind assembled here to take advantage of it!
The faculty parking lot at the University of Notre Dame is in the shadow of our enormous stadium. On Saturdays, it’s actually where hundreds of thousands of people set up their tailgates, and sometimes, on Monday mornings after a game, you can find a half-drunk can of Coors, or even an entire hotdog in the lot that the groundskeepers (who are otherwise fastidious and massively efficient) have missed. When I walk in from my car, nowadays in the dark, the stadium looms over me like Mount Doom in Mordor, and then I enter a building that’s attached to it -- our student center -- to get out of the rain or the chill for a few minutes on my way to my office.
When I exit on the other side of the student center slash stadium, the first thing I see is an art museum. There are a handful of rare and valuable paintings in there, and -- for the last six months -- there’s been a large poster advertising a special exhibit on the history of Catholic folk art in Africa. If it’s raining, I duck into the art museum building, walk through the College of Arts and Letters -- to which it is attached -- and exit right in front of our library, which bears the 10-story tall “Word of Life Mural” on its face. You probably know this mural -- which is made of granite and other heavy rocks -- by its popular name: Touchdown Jesus. Once again, we can’t escape the shadow of football at Notre Dame.
My morning walk from the parking lot is often a time of reflection and contemplation. At least, it is when I’m not glued to my phone answering emails and putting out minor administrative or pedagogical fires. And when I reflect, I sometimes use the architecture of the campus as an opportunity to contemplate why any of us are at Notre Dame in the first place; why my students come here; what attracted my colleagues to sunny South Bend (for those unfamiliar with the concept of a “permacloud,” that’s obviously a joke); what the administrators are doing in the Main Building that’s topped with a seventeen-foot statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary gilded in literal gold; why parents bring their children to visit; and why this place has become a pilgrimage site for alums eager to share the university with their closest friends and families.
Here are the fruits of that reflective exercise.
The university is, first and foremost, a place of liberal education. This is what we advertise to our students in the glossy brochures we send them during their junior year. We promise not just training, but transformation; not just knowledge, but understanding; we promise them -- and their parents, communities, and society at large -- that we will facilitate their growth into free, independent, open-minded persons.
The university is also a training camp. Sometimes literally, in the pre-dawn dark you can often hear the bark of ROTC officers and the crunch of leaves beneath the boots of the cadets who are following them on the unraked quad. When I leave campus in the evening, stadium lights shine on the main field and practice fields across campus, where student-athletes are finishing their days in sweaty, exhausting exercises. In classrooms and seminars across the university, students train in pre-professional programs, disciplinary studies, and a whole host of academic pursuits. While none of these activities constitutes the primary purpose of the university, they are both intrinsically good and essential to its ability to flourish, both socially and financially.
Finally, the university is a place of work. Notre Dame employs more than three thousand residents of St. Joseph County, more than any other single employer therein. The university provides these people -- faculty, staff, and administrators -- with the setting against which their professional lives play out. It is where research breakthroughs happen, prestigious awards are won, wages to put food on the table are earned, and meaningful projects are undertaken.
These three functions are not incompatible. Indeed, I take them to be deeply interdependent. (I often remind my colleagues that -- the way things stand -- there’d be no sabbaticals without football, our classes would be larger without research money, and character formation is not something that can take place in the absence of a thriving intellectual community.) But I think the biggest danger for Notre Dame, and for every liberal arts institution in this moment, is to let these functions get out of alignment, that is: to forget that our mission is to serve our students and to provide them with a transformative, holistic liberal education. In the past three weeks, I’ve been to Harvard, BC, Providence College, Princeton, and St. John’s College. And on each of these campuses, I observed and investigated the state of liberal education. I spoke with students, faculty, administrators, and staff. And I’m here to report that this danger -- and, by contrast, the opportunity for institutions who take up the challenge -- is existential.
So here’s my thesis: the future of liberal arts education depends on finding ways to integrate the study of professional skills with their academic studies, and especially the humanities. There are many ways to make this case. I could talk about AI and the future of humanistic work (an area I’m writing on right now). Or I could talk about the state of polarization and the need for virtuous citizens (a talk I’ll be giving in the spring). But, today, I want to focus squarely on something that we can all agree, beyond the shadow of a doubt, matters: the perspective -- hopes, fears, and expectations -- of the students we serve…
Read the rest of my draft (and comment, if you’d like) here.
-pb
Thanks for putting this out on Fb. Let me give everything another read and I'll say more. Meanwhile, keep up the good work.
A couple phraseology comments. "We already see Silicon Valley frothing at the mouth as they envision hundreds of thousands of users looking for personal transformation outside the walls of academia." "Frothing at the mouth" usually means enraged to the point of hysteria. "Licking their chops" might be a better phrase to apply to their dog and wolf like appetites. Then bottom of page five: "abstract." Your use of the term is quite correct, I just personally cringe every time I hear or read it. It is just used too much. I think plain old "general" is a better term here. Beyond the nit-picky, what you are doing sounds very exciting and it should be done, well, generally; at every university and college. I love your God and Good Life course. I wish there had been such a course where I went to college. There the intro to philosophy course was essentially the history of how science and empiricism emerged from the superstition and falsehood of the dark ages. I'm glad you are getting support for your project at Notre Dame and elsewhere. You might look into The Great Issues course taught at Dartmouth the fifties. It was required of all seniors and I never met a graduate from those years who did not love the course. Many went so far as to say it was the only course of which they had any significant memory thirty years on. The faculty killed the course because teaching a general knowledge course - that word again - was not helping them get tenure. But I think faculty are in a different place now. The existential threat is obvious. Best wishes!