An exhortation to the administration

To the editor,

Last week, on Friday, Feb. 24, President Bruess announced that major changes, of which we are all aware and I feel no need to repeat, were to take place in the university curriculum and that the Common Boards of Trustees had approved these changes. All of this, ultimately, was in the name of “getting jobs” for students. I think that I speak for a significant portion of the university community when I say that, while certainly a good thing, the attainment of a career is not the primary purpose of a liberal arts education. The aim of an education is to liberate; its means is the personal revolution and its end is a young person oriented toward the universal.

First, the word education has its roots in the Latin words “educare” and “educere,” which mean “to train” and “to lead out,” respectively. I believe we all understand and agree with the training aspect—an education ought to prepare a student to undertake a certain path or trajectory of life. The second, however, is perhaps less understood—what is meant by the notion of leading out? The philosopher in me is compelled to note that the “manifesto” of liberal arts education is, basically, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We understand ourselves to be participating in a process of illumination—leading students from “darkness” into “light,” by which we mean from falsity to truth, absurdity to meaningfulness, bias to authenticity and so on and so forth. This movement, this leading out, is what is meant by liberation. For, the “liberal” in liberal arts means nothing other than “setting free.”

Second, the means by which this liberation is attained is personal revolution—yet another Latin root, from “revolvere,” meaning “to turn over.” This turning over is in the sense that one turns over soil, so as to stir up and revitalize the dirt. Thus, in the student, in the one being trained, being led out, this turning over is a radical shift in the way they see and approach the world. This revolution is not passive, however, and not something that merely happens to the student. Rather, it is active and personal, taking place at the behest of and through the energies of the student who seeks out greater and greater illumination, so to speak, as they ascend from the false images of the cave to the clarity of sunlight.

Third, the end of this liberative process of personal revolution is the emergence of a universally-oriented young person. It is a deep-seated feature of our institutional heritage to be ordered toward the universal, as the word Catholic, coming from the Greek “katholikos” (a language students are now precluded from learning), pertains to universality—the broad expanse of the cosmos, including within it things studied both by physicists and philosophers. The student is gradually illumined and liberated in a process of personal revolution for the sake of being turned toward the full breadth and depth of what the world has in it to discover.

Ultimately, this liberation is not merely freedom from the darkness of the cave but freedom for the light of the world. Our aim, simply put, is to aid students in the process of deciding who they are going to be and what they are going to do with their lives. Failing to do so is failing to adhere to our mission identity. As an addendum, something else that our institution, as rooted in faith, ought enable students to do is to discern the movement of the spirit—to attend to what God is inviting us to do. Now, by no means can I claim to know perfectly the will of God, but I do seriously doubt that, at this present moment, we are being called to curtail the possibilities available to a whole generation of young people.