May latest essay at Law and Liberty, reflecting on Josef Pieper’s book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture:
The idea of the liberal arts college has been under assault for some time now, not just from without the walls of the Academy. Liberal arts colleges made a Faustian bargain: in exchange for ever increasing tuition payments, we provide students with hypothetically valuable job training in a posh resort.
The result is that there are two forces competing for control of the colleges right now. On the one side, we have the careerism wing, which needs to offer enough practical things to convince parents to part with $70,000 a year in the hopes that the children will get employment paying multiples of that number per year. On the other side, we have the ideologues, who view students as a captive audience for all manner of indoctrination through propaganda. At most institutions, faculty who ask, “What about the liberal arts?” and mean it in Pieper’s sense of the term, survive on life support, and almost nowhere do they thrive.
The point of no return is getting closer.
Read the rest at Law and Liberty
Leave a Reply