The university is cutting liberal arts and programs. The administration describes it as a “reimagining” of the liberal arts. History is taking one of the hardest hits. Here is Katherine Kealey at Iowa State Daily: Departments were divided up based...
liberal arts
Grove City College update
We originally covered this story here. Colleen Flaherty gets us up to speed at Inside Higher Education. Grove City College’s Board of Trustees recently said that it had formed a committee to investigate allegations of “mission drift” on campus and...
What is going on at Grove City College?
Is Grove City College, a conservative Christian liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania, promoting critical race theory? I have no idea. The phrase “critical race theory” has become such a bogeyman in evangelical and conservative circles that it is impossible...
Will Christian colleges and universities survive?
There is A LOT to consider in Catholic moral philosopher Charles Camosy‘s recent piece at America. Here is a section that got my attention: As institutions’ connections to Christianity become frayed, other ideologies have gained ground. Too often, Christian values...
Do we need a new university?
I first met Peter Kanelos (albeit very briefly) when he served as Dean of Christ College at Valparaiso University. In 2017, Kanelos left Valpo to become president of St. John’s College, a Great Books college in Annapolis, Maryland. Earlier this...
Roosevelt Montas’s “heartfelt defense of the Eurocentricity of a Great Books curriculum”
Historian Steve Mintz‘s recent column at Inside Higher Ed reviews Roosevelt Montas‘s forthcoming book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Here is a taste: For far too long, he...
“Anti-critical race theory laws are un-American”
A diverse group of writers–Kmele Foster (libertarian), David French (conservative evangelical), Jason Stanley (Yale philosopher and scholar of propaganda), and Thomas Chatterton Williams (liberal) have weighed-in at The New York Times. We, the authors of this essay, have wide ideological...
Do Marxists, critical race theorists, and Tucker Carlson have anything in common?
Anne Applebaum is going to catch hell for this column, but she is right. The subtitle of her Atlantic piece reads: “Marxist literary scholars and popularizers of critical race theory have one thing in common with certain GOP commentators: a...
“They’re 18 years old…and already they’ve decided to devote the rest of their lives to accountancy”
Yesterday I taught Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in my Created and Called for Community class. This text speaks volumes about the value of a liberal arts education. Today college and universities sell programs. When my daughters visited college campuses...
“Cultural humility” vs “liberal humility” in the classroom
Baylor University political scientist Elizabeth Corey explains the difference between these two views of education in an excellent piece at National Affairs. I definitely find myself in the “liberal humility” camp (or at least I aspire to such an approach),...
A conservative makes a case for liberal arts education
Liberal education is education for liberty, or freedom. As a result, one might think that Ursinus College political scientist Jonathan Marks’s book Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education would not be necessary. Conservatives, with their commitment to...
“The Ethic of Being”
Note: This piece is a slightly revised version of a post I wrote on February 20, 2020. –JF This week in Created and Called for Community at Messiah University we are exploring the Judeo-Christian creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2. On Tuesday we read...
Mintz: “It’s time to be blunt: postgraduation success requires a demanding liberal arts curriculum”
Read to the end of this post to learn about supplementary patrons-only content. I am teaching Created and Called for Community again this semester. This is a course required by all Messiah University first-year students in their second semester. Our...
Mapping Catholic land; fighting climate change
Molly Burhans, a liberal arts graduate of Canisius College, a Catholic college in Buffalo, is leading a major project to help the Catholic Church map its vast landholdings in order to help it fight climate change. David Owen of The...