An open letter to President Bruess

Dear President Bruess,

As I wrote you in a personal letter (to which you were kind enough to respond), I believe that your administration has made a grave error in eliminating an array of liberal arts programs at CSB+SJU. In an effort to bring more stakeholders into this conversation, many of whom were caught off guard by this precipitous announcement, I feel compelled to push back on some of the assertions you made in your response. In your letter you talk about focusing on “high demand programs” and the need to develop “more fluid lines of inquiry” in higher education. I’m confused when you state that the university thinks that cutting essential programs is a way to produce “more impressive higher-order outcomes.” Such programs, you suggest, are “siloed,” cut off from the concerns of our students and society, defended only by an embittered arrière-garde of academic dinosaurs who cling, white-knuckled, to their ivory towers.

No offense, President Bruess, but talk of “silos” and ivory towers are assertions that are long outmoded in serious institutions of higher education. Such ideas damage and obscure the engaged, concerned teaching of scholars who are keen to articulate the real-world implications of their research. They diminish the integral role that the humanities play in the development of higher-order analytic thinking and writing skills so imperative in a moment of increasingly dubious, never-ending flow of (mis)information. They ignore the significant advantages that the humanities create in the workplace, in lifetime earning outcomes, and in overall career and life satisfaction. The conversation has evolved, and, in the interim, we humanists have been busy building out and strengthening our shared enterprise. At my university, this hard work is paying off. For example, this year we are launching a Refugee and Migration Studies Institute that brings together experts in the humanities, the social sciences, and STEM faculty along with community organizers to understand the complex causes and human impact of the great migrations we are witnessing in our time.

In French, our program has been revitalized by our Passeport culturel initiative, where students are exposed from day one to a vibrant francophone community that exists all around us, right here in rural Missouri. So how are places like CSB+SJU going to compete with large public institutions such as the one where I work?We have vast and prohibitively expensive lab and research facilities, a generously endowed business school, a full teaching hospital, a renowned School of Journalism, a law school and even a “lazy river” in our shamelessly opluent student rec center.

Not only do we have these shiny things, but (in spite of real challenges), our humanists, with the support of our administration, are doing the hard work of building and maintaining a vibrant liberal arts community. Our smaller class size and wide variety of offerings help us to replicate (but not reproduce) the advantages of small liberal arts colleges like CSB+SJU who are busy cutting offerings in an effort to build “high demand programs” they can’t afford. Perhaps before we answer the question that asks how CSB+SJU will compete, we should ask how places like these have persisted at the center of our culture for 1500 years. Why have they endured, even when an “enrollment cliff ” meant the bubonic plague, even when “disruptive technologies” meant mustard gas, the machine gun, and a generation of young bodies strewn across the fields around Verdun? I would argue that they endure because they have proved to be the best places to rigorously examine, to tersely debate, and to persistently imagine our humanity, its sources, and its purposes.

You see, President Bruess, the truth is, big universities like mine don’t have better, brighter, or more passionate educators. We don’t have a student body that is more compelled to understand the world around us. And we surely don’t have the millennial traditions, the Hill Manuscript Library and its treasure of knowledge; we don’t have the Sag or the pottery studio at St. Ben’s where I learned focus and discipline from a stern but loving nun.

So this is my concern: gutting the humanities at CSB+SJU means that the hard work of reflecting deeply on our shared humanity, its representations, its ideas and its challenges risks become a “service” or “companion” element in support of more “in demand” pursuits like building stuff and counting things. Don’t get me wrong, such stuff and such things are awesome and essential. Indeed, when he founded his community, Benedict insisted on the radical idea that his monks should give work a place of prominence next to prayer and study. Eliminating these programs is to disregard one of the areas where CSB+SJU can compete robustly with larger, more comprehensive institutions like mine. I have been around college campuses long enough to understand that cuts like ones you have made are usually done out of desperation and should be read for exactly what they are: the academic equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass, and, as such, as a dire warning to those who care about our institution and the generational communities it creates.

Because I’m indulging in football tropes, I’ll a close by saying that no one is expecting the Johnnies to compete with the big DI teams; no Johnnie or Bennie has ever thought that beating the Tommies is any less important than beating an Alabama or a Clemson. What students want from this place is what they have always wanted and continue to need: context, empathy and understanding. These are not “lower order” operations, they are the big questions, the boldest questions we can ask about what it means to be here, right now, at this very moment.

President Bruess, I urge you to reinstate canceled programs and to engage in the real work of reimagining what the CSB+SJU community can be while respecting its traditions. This will be hard, time-consuming work where shortcuts and quick fixes won’t be enough to keep our beloved institution in business for another thousand years. With this, I call on concerned students and alumni to express their concerns by contacting President Bruess directly at bbruess@csbsju.edu.