COLLEGE AVENUE: Liberal Education?
Lawler, Peter Augustine
COLLEGE AVENUE PETER AUGUSTINE Liberal Education? It Can Happen Here SOMETIMES YOUR VIEW OF A PROBLEM is clearer when you stand in an unusual place. My perspective...
...The second obstacle to authentic intellectual lib 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 PETER A U G U S T I N E L A W L E R erty in America is the state or public bureaucracies...
...My perspective on the American academy comes from a small, sort of Christian but definitely not denominational college in the South that has lots of Evangelical students, and a pretty typical, mostly liberal, and fairly secular faculty...
...Our administrators live in fear that a culture war will break out here and they will be casualties...
...But in America today, the strong institutional presence of a religious mission also tends to drag professors into angry, interminable disputes concerning what opinions are genuinely orthodox and into the "us versus them" way of thinking which besets genuine believers living in a pluralistic or basically anti-religious society...
...our public institutions...
...Or you might seek out a small private college in the South that's Christian enough to resist fashionable secularism but secular enough to resist much of the animosity of our national cultural war...
...The hands refers to the college's work program, which offers every student on campus a job regardless of income: most of our students take advantage of that opportunity...
...Then, the college makes an unpromising situation worse by its indifference to sexual promiscuity and the development of character...
...At our more prestigious colleges, students often arrive on campus already jaded by a mixture of pseudo-sophisticated moral skepticism, narcissistic self-obsession, and relentless careerism...
...Because I'm neither Evangelical nor liberal myself, you probably think I'm going to whine about my marginalization and oppression...
...There's nothing getting in the way of reading the Great Books with the goal of really learning how we should live...
...but to their credit, the students also have the habit of not surrendering their beliefs in the light of their professors' allegedly superior wisdom...
...All I can claim is that it's possible to be a conservative professor at Berry, and it's possible for a student to get a genuinely liberal education here...
...was an evangelizing but not Evangelical Christian who gave the college an elegant, if corny, threefold purpose...
...The first (and most ambiguous) obstacle is the doctrine or mission of a sponsoring religious denomination...
...They often choose this particular college because it still has a work program, an active and diverse religious life, single-sex dorms, and visitation hours, and doesn't have fraternities or big-time sports...
...THE DOGMAS OF OUR BERRY STUDENTS, of course, are often simple-minded and badly defended...
...We are devoted to the education of the head, the heart, and the hands...
...Despite the occasional skirmish, that has never yet happened at Berry College...
...I'm doubtful that I would or even should be able to seem to surrender Christian apologetics for that long at an orthodox Catholic or Evangelical college...
...Through a lucky combination of circumstances, Berry is blessed by genuine moral, religious, and intellectual diversity in both its campus and classroom life, and very few of our colleges and universities share this advantage...
...Evangelical students-at least the very smart ones-turn out to be extremely open minded and full of the longing that fuels liberal learning...
...To a remarkable degree, our students, whether strong believers or not, understand that their futures are shaped not primarily by their careers or individual self-fulfillment but by family, church, charitable service to others, and country...
...COLLEGE A V E N U E PETER A U G U S T I N E L A W L E R Liberal Education...
...Our public colleges and universities are full of political correctness that discourages moral and political controversy-and genuine inquiry into the possibility that anyview about virtue, or religion, or anything else really important might actually be true...
...The founder, Martha Berry, was an evangelizing but not Evangelical Christian who gave the college an elegant, if corny, threefold purpose...
...The heart refers to the college's encouragement of all kinds of religious activity-mostly but by no means exclusively Protestant and Evangelicalunder the guidance of a basically nondenominational chaplain...
...Berry's faith-based students understand that they have no right to have their professors conform to their beliefs...
...In seeking to educate your children in a nation dominated by an educational establishment quite hostile to liberal learning, you might choose a countercultural college with a sound mission that corresponds with your political opinions or religious faith...
...Today, a single course in religion or philosophy is required, and among the religion alternatives is the standard, touristy, faith-traditiona-week World Religions course...
...Too much of education turns into apologetics...
...But such a discussion would actually be tougher at most of The founder, Martha Berry...
...Students, professors, and administrators all come to agree that all real education (as distinct from politically correct indoctrination) is merely technical or at least merely materialistic, because it's impossible to talk meaningfully about that illusion that used to be called the human soul...
...Even in the college's early days, the only required religious component of the curriculum was a single course on the Bible...
...They can bring their religious convictions freely into the classroom, where they can expect them to be shared by some and attacked by others...
...The absence of both the state and the denomination at Berry means that students and faculty can speak on both sides without intimidation...
...LTHOUGH IT WAS NOT PARTICULARLY her intention, the will of Martha Berry saves our professors rom three main obstacles to liberal education today...
...The pressure is on to reduce education to "correct" and sometimes insultingly obvious, and otherwise insultingly obnoxious, views about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation-combined with an easygoing yet dogmatic moral relativism about everything else...
...My defense of the virtues of my college doesn't mean I'm lobbying to have Berry put in the various conservative college guides...
...And the head refers to the academic program, which is not understood to have a religious purpose...
...If the college aims to achieve any goal of imparting or defending "Christian values," it is clearly not in the classroom...
...It's true that at a strongly mission-driven Catholic or Evangelical college it would be difficult to have an open-minded discussion on whether Roe v. Wade was rightly decided or on the threat or promise of same-sex marriage...
...And our faculty, if sometimes suspicious of me and of many of our students, is remarkably free from factional strife and ideological animosity...
...the dogma shaping discussion would just be different, and dumber...
...Souls full of longing cry out for education, but souls that are flat or believe they are flat are often just too wounded to be able to appreciate liberal learning...
...he exposes the superficial mendacity of thinking that "Christian values" can be maintained without Christian faith...
...I would go further and say that partly through luck and partly through the wisdom of the founder, our college is a unique bastion of intellectual freedom in America...
...But that would hardly be noble, or even particularly true...
...If your kids are smart and well raised, all they might need or want is a college that has nothing against higher education.''* Peter Augustine Lawler isDanaProfessorofGovernment at Berry College in Georgia and the author of numerous books, including Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls (ISI Books, 2002...
...The religious atmosphere of the college on the whole invigorates their spirit of resistance, but not too much...
...Yet it's much easier to get religious students to think and read and become a bit ironic about themselves than to get fashionably skeptical elite students to take them selves, the real world, and God with the serious ness they deserve...
...But at Berry, many of our students come to college with very insistent and personally demanding faithbased and soul-based opinions...
...But the truth is that Nietzsche offers less comfort to our liberal atheists than to our Christian believers...
...They also need to learn how to read, and how to like reading hard books: "Evangelical book" is far too close to an oxymoron...
...The third and most discouraging obstacle to liberal education today is the outlook students bring with them to college...
...For me, there is no denying that only with a religious purpose can education claim to address the longings and limitations of a whole human being...
...They do need to come to college to think things through, become morally and religiously challenged and invigorated, and in some intellectual ways just loosen up...
...April 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47...
...It Can Happen Here OMETIMES YOUR VIEW OF A PROBLEM is clearer when you stand in an unusual place...
...My way of teaching of Machiavelli or Nietzsche is to do my best to defend every level of their thoughtincluding the atheistic parts-for the duration...
Vol. 38 • April 2005 • No. 3
