Part 3 of 3
Christians and conservatives are campaigning to preserve the traditional liberal arts for future generations of college students while much of higher education abandons the humanities.
A growing number of initiatives include Great Books programs that require students to read primary sources in fiction and nonfiction such as Shakespeare’s plays and Plato’s dialogues. They encompass special institutes and centers that offer students havens to discuss the foundational works of Western civilization that liberals increasingly have dubbed racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ.
The goal is to “make academia medieval again,” said Rachel Fulton Brown, an outspoken conservative Catholic who teaches medieval history at the University of Chicago, where academics started the Great Books Foundation in 1947.
“Worrying about which majors students are taking will not help us,” Ms. Fulton Brown told The Washington Times. “We need to think about why we want students to learn literature, art, music, philosophy and history, which means remembering why we love these disciplines ourselves: because they celebrate beauty, goodness and truth, or should.”
In recent decades, leading universities have shunned the humanities as a relic of “dead White males,” reducing core requirements to abridged texts in anthologies with third-person critiques from contemporary political perspectives.
By contrast, primary source advocates have pushed to keep teaching the classics on their own terms and challenging students to think for themselves about them.
Great Books education revolves around seminar-style discussions about the classic texts of the Greek, Latin and European traditions that anchored nonreligious education for centuries, starting in the Middle Ages. According to the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 34 undergraduate programs — from Yale University to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland — offer “close study” of the Great Books.
Those programs assign more than 1,000 titles to students — including Aeschylus’ “The Oresteia” and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Common authors include Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, Anglican apologist C.S. Lewis and atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the Martin Center reported in November.
“There is clearly a hunger among students and their parents for a solid liberal [arts] education rooted in the serious study of the classics,” said Jeffrey Sikkenga, an Ashland University political scientist who co-directs a primary sources scholar program. He said his program has grown from fewer than 30 students to more than 140 since its establishment at the Ohio-based Christian school in 1998.
Liberal arts advocates have long argued that they produce well-rounded business executives, lawyers and doctors who understand leadership principles and have strong foundations for innovative thinking. A humanities education gives graduates the “origin story” of today’s institutions, helping them think holistically about sources of culture and society.
Studying the classics also challenges students to think critically about how their interests contribute to the world around them. Graduates of humanities programs say self-reflection makes them more valuable assets in the economy than many technology graduates who learn more specialized skill sets.
Curriculum focus
As large schools remove liberal arts core curriculum requirements for undergraduates, the number of majors in those subjects has plummeted.
SEE ALSO: Colleges close books on traditional subjects as students pursue paths to higher salaries
Studies of English and history fell by one-third and humanities enrollment dropped by 17% over the past decade, said Robert Townsend of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
The number of graduating humanities majors at the main campus of Ohio State University in Columbus plunged by 46% from 2012 to 2020, Mr. Townsend found. Over the same period, Tufts University lost nearly half of its humanities majors, Boston University lost 42%, the University of Notre Dame ended with half the number that started and the State University of New York at Albany lost almost three-quarters.
The numbers of humanities majors fell by nearly half at Vassar College and Bates College, two of the nation’s oldest liberal arts programs.
Even students who earn high school diplomas from a growing number of classical academies often snub liberal arts majors, although they speak highly of their backgrounds in the classics.
Alex Tirador graduated in 2022 from St. Jerome Institute, a classical high school that parents from St. Jerome Catholic Church in Hyattsville, Maryland, founded in 2019. He is now a freshman majoring in computer science at the University of Maryland.
“I desire a financially stable life, but also a life filled with truth and goodness,” Mr. Tirador said in an email. “Without a classical education, I would have either just money with no goal or, worse, money with a specifically unfulfilling goal.”
Many classical academies and home-schooling families organize their curricula around primary sources that traditional liberal arts colleges reprint to resist leftist educational trends.
Those resources include the 1776 Curriculum from Hillsdale College and online documents and training programs. Hillsdale is a conservative Christian school in Michigan that resists woke efforts to reframe the teaching of American history from independence to slavery and racism.
At Ashland University, Mr. Sikkenga runs the Ashbrook Center, an independent program that supplies core humanities documents to K-12 schools and trains teachers in their use.
As of September, he said, 10 states had enacted laws requiring primary sources such as the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s speeches to be used in history classes to reduce political bias in teaching about hot-button issues such as race. An increased number of teachers have been contacting the center.
“Despite the move away from liberal arts at many universities, they are still alive and thriving in particular colleges and university centers across the country,” Mr. Sikkenga said in an email. “In fact, enrollment in some traditional liberal arts colleges, especially at religiously affiliated ones, is growing much faster than enrollment at other universities.”
The trend has spread to public schools. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, appointed six conservative trustees this year to reshape New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school founded in Sarasota in 1960, as a “classical college.”
The move strengthens the college’s founding commitment to the liberal arts, as seen in the ongoing requirement of a senior capstone project, according to a statement that the New College of Florida’s office of communications and marketing emailed to The Times.
“These traditions are important to higher education and will continue to be a focus,” interim President Richard Corcoran said in the statement.
‘Freedom studies’
The push goes beyond politics. Free market advocates say a classical education also makes good financial sense, giving graduates the free-thinking creativity they need to transform and not just participate in the economy.
At all-male Wabash College in Indiana, a $10.6 million gift from 1962 alumnus Richard J. Stephenson established the Stephenson Institute for Classical Liberalism two years ago.
The private school received a $20.8 million grant from the Lilly Endowment in 2000 to establish the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts to demonstrate the relevance of liberal arts in higher education.
The financial value of the liberal arts comes from the role that “freedom studies” plays in helping students reflect philosophically on the value of individual liberty, said Daniel J. D’Amico, a libertarian economist who serves as the Stephenson Institute’s founding director. He assigns his students readings from free market political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville.
“In this vein, the liberal arts aim to provide intellectual nourishment for the free citizen and the free society,” Mr. D’Amico said. “Students not only develop the skills and familiarity to digest the deep questions of meaning and purpose about themselves as individuals and a free society, but they also gain experience and exposure to real research methods and policy analysis that translate into job skills across a variety of careers in business, public policy, philanthropy and entrepreneurship.”
He said free market principles help “the liberal arts to react to the changing market conditions of higher education because they situate abstract discussions of moral political philosophy atop a strong foundation of theoretically rigorous and data-informed social science.”
North of the Wabash campus, Purdue University has launched the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program to reincorporate the humanities at a state school known primarily for graduating engineers. Purdue President Mitch Daniels, a former Republican governor of Indiana and pharmaceuticals executive at Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly, has championed the program.
More than half of Purdue undergraduates major in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, known as STEM. David A. Reingold, dean of the liberal arts, said Cornerstone is “perhaps the largest Great Books program in America” and will instruct 3,800 incoming freshmen in introductory written and oral communications in the fall.
“Purdue’s commitment to and investment in the liberal arts is robust,” Mr. Reingold said in an email. “We recognize that education across the social sciences and humanities is an integral component of a comprehensive 21st-century education.”
The value of “knowledge for its own sake,” as ancient Greeks understood a classical education, lies in having surgeons who know ethics, defense attorneys who have mastered public speaking and politicians well-versed in history and political science.
A liberal arts education not only nourishes the soul but also develops the habits of thinking deeply, writing coherently, speaking clearly, listening carefully and making sound judgments — qualities valued by employers, advocates say.
Yet college humanities programs have been struggling for years to attract students, with COVID-19 shutdowns exacerbating higher education’s problems. Colleges and universities nationwide are now slashing their humanities programs, and some liberal arts schools are shutting down entirely.
This three-part series examines the role that the push for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education has played in the decline in interest in the humanities; the growing challenges that liberal arts programs face, including sky-high tuition and dropping enrollment; and the effort by conservatives and Christians to save traditional humanities education.
• Part 1: Colleges’ focus on STEM is killing liberal arts programs
• Part 2: Liberal arts programs face mounting challenges
• Part 3: Conservatives, Christians work to preserve traditional liberal arts
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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