The Blackboard

Students may return to universities that post a philosophy statement but have no philosophy department. Yet as we look at our country, divided over history and by economics, home to scientific innovation and scientific ignorance, education is both more needed and more endangered than ever.

As President John Thrasher alienates Florida State University from segments of the broader Tallahassee, Florida community, a lesson from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is worth considering.

Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under...

The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students, they may even say I’m boring.

In my elder, more invulnerable years, when the Untied States had finally established a formal E. Unibus Pluram, I was appointed by lot to assume the position of SAT (Self-Actualizing Therapist[1]) at Saint Thinkery University for Unlimited Personalized Execution.

While the futurists and transhumanists and purveyors of educational technologies would have us voluntarily cut off our arms so we can enjoy their fancy new prostheses, our priority should be to avoid dismembering ourselves.

Perhaps we ought to hope that things won’t quite go back to what’s normal: rootless young folk siphoned away by elite universities and groomed to lead the managerial bureaucracies and mass popular culture that dominate our national life. The students who remain in their hometowns have the potential to restore declining local institutions and community associations.

As difficult as some content is to teach, we have a responsibility to educate our students about the past, good and bad. A curriculum which leaves out the bad would gaslight our students.

If we have all the knowledge in the world but have not love, the apostle Paul says, then we’re as annoying as a banging cymbal. It’s no wonder students wouldn’t want to listen to us.

Berry moves the conversation from common nouns to proper ones and implicates us all in something deeply practical and doable, yet inexplicably difficult: to love our neighbor, the person right next to us, and the land beneath our very feet.