Some of you know Susan Wise Bauer as a gifted narrative historian and one of the leaders of the classical homeschool movement. I don’t know many homeschoolers who have not read her book The Well Trained-Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home.
When I first started blogging fifteen years or so ago, I would regularly read her blog chronicling her writing on the family farm outside of Williamsburg, Virginia. I regularly revisit her 2008 book The Art of Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America. It is more relevant than ever.
I knew that Bauer had a Ph.D in American Studies from The College of William and Mary, but until a few of her recent social media posts I had no idea that she attended Liberty University.
In response to our post on Liberty University’s recent $16 million fine for failing to keep its students safe, Bauer wrote on her Facebook page:
I wish I found this surprising.
When I was an undergraduate, one of the philosophy professors was actively abusing one of my friends. (Not me. Really my friend.) No one listened to us or took our concerns seriously. Eventually, so much evidence piled up that he was (so far as I can remember or tell) “allowed to resign,” and continued on working in evangelical circles for decades.
I can’t regret attending, because my (horrible) five semesters there became part of who I am, and I’m comfortable with who I am. But I regret, every week, that I’m in a position to have my name associated with this institution.
She followed this up with a tweet:
A follower on the Other Site asked me why I described my 5 semesters at Liberty as “horrible,” so I’ll just add this here.
Even though this was a “university,” the scorn for intellectual inquiry was evident in almost every class; questioning and real uncertainty was disdained, and academic expertise was treated with scorn. The social environment was strictly controlled with hundreds of small, ridiculous rules (like skirt length and, for women, not wearing pants before 5 PM), which didn’t in any way keep students from the bigger “transgressions” in the Liberty Way. We went to “church” 11 times a week (Sundays, chapel, hall meetings) which gave us very little time to actually think about God. The outside regulations on us (curfews and requirements) were jail-like. I had some good and genuine professors, and from them I learned. I tried to transfer out in my sophomore year and found that no other school would accept my Liberty credits, so instead I went back, took 22-24 credits per semester, and graduated summa cum laude (that should let you know how poor the academic standards were). Then I went to grad school at 19. Graduate school was my real bachelor’s degree. My parents were both the first in their families to graduate from high school, and neither of them knew anything about how to evaluate colleges. At the time, Liberty seemed to them (and to me, when I went to college at 16) to be a good choice. Liberty was a necessary but painful stop on my way into actual higher education.