“Education’s End”
In recent days, the folks at Mirror of Justice, America magazine, the Commonweal blog, etc., have been talking about ye olde topic, “the identity of Catholic universities”. Of course, it’s not just those of us who are into the “Catholic university thing” who are hang-wringing about the state of our project; lovers of the university-enterprise generally are uneasy. See, for example, the new book by my law-school teacher and former dean, Anthony Kronman: Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.
In the Yale alumni magazine, there’s a short essay adapted from the book, called “Against political correctness: a liberal’s cri de coeur.” (Kronman, it should be emphasized, writes and worries as a liberal and a “secular humanist.”). Kronman writes:
[W]hen a presumptive commitment to the values of political liberalism begins to constrain the exploration of the personal question of life’s meaning — when the expectation that everyone shares these values comes to place implicit limits on the alternatives that may be considered and how seriously they are to be taken — the enterprise itself loses much of its power and poignancy for the students involved and their teachers lose their authority to lead it. . . .
Today’s idea of diversity is so limited that one might with justification call it a sham diversity, whose real goal is the promotion of a moral and spiritual uniformity instead. It has no room for the soldier who values honor above equality, the poet who believes that beauty is more important than justice, or the thinker who regards with disinterest or contempt the concerns of political life. . . .
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Amen and Amen and Amen.
Very true.
Another engine of sham diversity is status-seeking – using others as a pawn in the great game of moral preening for your peers.
Not sure I buy the concept of “sham diversity.” But I do appreciate the need to return to a better sense of Catholic identity at our universities. Another book which critiques the assumptions of higher ed in a liberal society, but which likely comes to different, more radical, conclusions based solidly in Christian discipleship is Conflicting Allegiances: The Church-Based University in a Liberal Democratic Society, co-edited by Michael Budde and John Wright.
In the same vein as the vision of this book, my thoughts on the teaching of capitalism at Catholic universities is here:
http://www.catholicanarchy.org/essays/The_Capitalism_Dialogues.pdf
It sounds like a book in the vein of “Closing of the American Mind” where some of the trends described in Bloom’s book are coming to fruition in the end of the liberal society – truly, we live in a post-liberal age.