Will this be on the exam? How will I use this in real life? Why am I even here?
These are the perennial questions of the college student, especially those sitting in the pesky core curriculum classes like Christian Heritage or U.S. Constitution, two required courses in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Dr. Jennifer Frey, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa, addressed these exact questions when she delivered the annual Drumwright Family Lecture on Wednesday Nov 11, aptly titled: “Why Are We Here? A Liberal Arts Education and the Pursuit of Wisdom.”
Frey began with the assertion that we are at college, first and foremost, to pursue wisdom. To buttress her bold claim, she juxtaposed two competing visions of the university: Max Weber’s research ideal and John Henry Newman’s liberal arts college.
Beginning with Weber, the twentieth century German sociologist, Frey connected his idea of the “knowledge worker” to the mission of the modern university: “Weber gave an account of scholarship as mere expertise, undertaken with no ultimate horizon of meaning, purpose, or goal.” For Weber, the work of scholarship is specialization in a narrow and exclusive mode, the foundation for the knowledge-production ethos of research institutions. Today, similar views are held by prominent thinkers like Stanley Fish, who argues that the professor’s role is merely to impart the technical skills of an intellectual trade.
This is precisely why questions of meaning and value in the modern university go entirely unasked. Higher education becomes a soulless machine. For an alternative to this clinal approach to education, Frey directed our attention to US history.
Frey explained that higher education in the United States began with small, liberal arts colleges run by clergy and grounded in classical curriculum. (Harvard was one such institution.) The university was not a factory churning out the product of “knowledge-workers,” but a garden for the nurturing of good human beings and citizens: “The moral formation of these pupils was paramount to the entire enterprise.”
This all changed when the model of the German research university hopped the Atlantic: “The telos of the university was transformed, it was now to create new knowledge, rather than to pass on received wisdom or the cultivation of personal morals.”
The renowned theologian and Catholic Saint John Henry Newman shared the educational principles underlying America’s first colleges, Frey argued. “Newman is most concerned that the university be a place for the whole of liberal knowledge to be presented and handed on. This knowledge must form a whole or be comprehended as a unity.”
Truth is not simply grasping the facts, but understanding those facts as part of a universal, comprehensive system—a sharp contrast to Weber’s silos of specialization. “All the partners within this ideal university should understand themselves as making a necessary but radically incomplete contribution to the whole of knowledge.”
This “whole of knowledge,” according to Newman and Frey, may also be defined as wisdom: “Newman’s ideal knower is not an expert or a technocrat, but someone who possesses an intellectual virtue of wisdom in his mode of study.” Pursuit of wisdom is a good in itself because it aligns with our nature as beings possessing an intellect. Thus, Frey insisted, “as we acquire this habit of mind in our university study, we are advancing in our own flourishing or perfection as a human person.”
“Newman’s ideal knower is not an expert or a technocrat, but someone who possesses an intellectual virtue of wisdom in his mode of study.”
Jennifer Frey
In Newman’s model, university education is training for a life, not just a job. But today, many would like to reduce it to just that. Frey concluded with a call to upraise and support this vision of liberal education, a difficult task that she herself faced as the founder and leader of a Great Books Honors College.
In a guest essay for The New York Times, Frey revealed how her position as inaugural dean at the University of Tulsa’s Honors College was abolished by the administration—not because of decline in student interest or lack of funding for its Great Books enterprise, but because of administrative disfavor.
In an interview with The Standard, Frey criticized the University of Tulsa administration. “It’s clear that [liberal learning] is not valued; I would like them to just admit it—the people making decisions about how to allocate resources.” For Frey, hostile administrators pose the present threat to liberal education. These administrators are withholding the formative education that students need in an age of doomscrolling, A.I., and a “loneliness epidemic.”
Baylor’s current strategic plan, Baylor In Deeds, brings Baylor one step closer to becoming one of the outcome-oriented academies that Frey critiques. In prioritizing research initiatives, is our beloved Baptist R-1 university susceptible to losing its liberal arts origins? Will Baylor’s story be the same as Tulsa’s?
In the past, Baylor has claimed to occupy both realms, insisting that the tension between Weber and Newman is not as rigid as it seems. While emphasizing impactful research, Baylor has nonetheless retained its focus on personal formation through the core virtues in the College of Arts & Sciences, and various Honors College programs that engage the Great Texts of the past under the motto “love truth, kindle faith, and cultivate virtue.”
As soon as the university forgets her past and purpose, then our research will be just as directionless as our lives.
If virtue remains at the core of Baylor’s mission, then students, faculty, and administrators will be able to answer the question “why are we here?” But as soon as the university forgets her past and purpose, then our research will be just as directionless as our lives.
This loss will not be abstract. It will be felt by the student entering a required core class already convinced it is useless and leaving with no reason to think otherwise. For her, the question “Why am I even here?” is no longer ironic or rhetorical. It is the most serious question a university can either help her face, or quietly teach her to ignore.