More Bad News for Higher Education
The University of Tulsa dismantles a flourishing honors program
One of my main areas of interest in recent years has been the nature and direction of higher education. My 2018 article, “The Purpose (and Limits) of the University,” defended the university “against growing technological, ideological, and cultural pressures” and proposed “a normative framework for a university that is dialogical, democratic, and residential.” More recently, I lamented that many of the ongoing challenges in higher education “are fundamentally problems of culture, and you can’t change culture overnight.”
In these and other writings, I have worried that many colleges and universities have long lost any sense of a coherent purpose. They are instead driven by non-academic priorities like patient care, athletics, and prestige rankings.
Without purpose, it is impossible to name values—and in place of values, we get generic words like “excellence.” By way of example, a community-wide message from the then-dean of my law school in the days following the murder of George Floyd asserted that “in painful times, such as these, it becomes even more important to reaffirm our core values.” But as I later noted:
It’s not clear to me what “our core values” are. The law school’s website invites students to “Pursue Excellence,” “Inspire Global Change,” and “Work Toward a More Just Society.” But excellence in what? What kind of change? And what kind of justice?
One of the few counterexamples to the vague academic-speak permeating our institutions of higher learning has been the work of the Catholic philosopher Jennifer Frey at the University of Tulsa. As the inaugural dean of the university’s Honors College, Jen has spent the past two years building an extraordinary program that combines a rigorous humanities curriculum, relevant and reinforcing extracurricular activities, and students and faculty working together to build a common community.
Jen described her vision in a New York Times essay published yesterday:
The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum.
On a deeper level, this kind of initiative contrasts with the instrumental, credentialing-focused approach in much of higher education today. It aims instead at developing the human person. As Jen writes:
This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students.
Out of these experiences, Jen pursued a set of academic virtues integrated into and derived from a curricular, extracurricular, and residential ecosystem: patience, docility, humility, gratitude, fortitude, studiousness, civility, friendliness, and wisdom. Collectively, those virtues represented and made possible something far more tangible than “excellence.”
When Jen approached me at the start of her deanship to serve on the advisory board of the Tulsa Honors College, I gladly accepted. Over the past two years, I witnessed her build and cultivate a compelling vision. I even sent one of my kids to her summer high school honors program. I loved hearing my fifteen year-old report back about her rewarding experience with new friends and her joy reading Thomas Aquinas for the first time. Jen’s work put Tulsa high on my list of college recommendations to friends and even my own kids.
Last month, the University of Tulsa summarily removed Jen from her deanship. The recently-appointed provost informed her that the university had decided to take the Honors College “in a different direction.” Apparently, “a different direction” means something other than a wildly successful program that forms students, recruits faculty, and attracts major donors. The university contends the college will “remain the same,” but it is hard to see how that will happen without the leadership, faculty, students, and dollars that Jen has assembled.
This decision is a disaster for the University of Tulsa and a blow to higher education more broadly. It comes at a perilous time. As I recently observed, the Trump Administration’s actions toward higher education are “creating massive instability” in ways that “will weaken the nation’s well-being for years to come.” Some conservatives behind the Administration’s efforts seem more interested in destroying higher education than reforming it.
But this most recent debacle suggests that conservative ideologues are not alone in their shortsighted destruction. When the dust settles at Tulsa, it seems unlikely that they will be the ones who have engineered the ouster of a Catholic philosopher building a program committed to “studying the classic texts of the Western tradition.” And if progressive ideologues were indeed behind Jen’s removal, it will serve as yet another reminder that faculty committed to real education—not ideological posturing—are vulnerable from every side of our ongoing culture war.
It also suggests that even the most successful and student-centered programs may not survive this war. As Jen observes in her Times essay: “The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.”
In happier news, I am delighted that Jen will join me in St. Louis this fall for a small conference on “Educating for Citizenship: Universities and Democracy in a Pluralistic Society.” Our conference will include a public dialogue between David French, Roosevelt Montás, and Mary-Rose Papandera (and moderated by me) on the evening of Thursday, September 11th.
I am so sorry to hear of this. Jen is one of the good ones. And Tulsa adds to its checkered history with the liberal arts.
Sounds like a big loss for the students, present and future, of U. Tulsa. Maybe not such a loss for Dr. Frey, though. I have a little less pessimism than you, John. I expect Dr. Frey will find that the ability to build a purposeful educational program is a skill valued by many, and, though the federally-funded higher educational model may be broken (whether the ongoing assault by its patron is the cause or a symptom may be disputed), the ability to help young people learn to think is always en vogue.