John Senior and the Restoration of Realism
by francis bethel, o.s.b.
thomas more, 452 pages, $34.99

H

igher education has survived the end of the American century, if just barely. American colleges and universities are like a naval mothball fleet that’s still afloat but not seaworthy. Some schools are headed for deep maintenance; others will become scrap metals for the building of newfangled institutions. Only the indestructibly rich schools can sail for blue waters, and even they might not have a better clue where they are headed, except slightly up or down in the national rankings. The tableau of higher education must prove especially troubling to the forty-four million Americans holding student loan debts that are amortized unto perpetuity.

Suspicion that higher education has lost its purpose is long-standing—and it always turns out to be more justified than not. The anxiety was there at the beginning of the twentieth century. Provisioned with monies from the Gilded Age, the model of a German research university began to flourish on American soil. Opening their portals to middle-class students and soon after to the precocious children of immigrants, research universities sent forth their graduates to teach the gospel of specialized knowledge. In short time, however, it became evident that specialization beginning at freshman year was an inadequate way to form undergraduates. A century ago, Columbia University began a core curriculum for undergrads in response to the broad moral, social, and political debates that broke out with the First World War. Two decades later, during the Depression and the Second World War, the University of Chicago installed its common core curriculum, which, like that of its Columbia parent, was designed to expose undergraduates to big questions. Respected humanistic scholars—Karl Jaspers, Mark Van Doren, Jacques Maritain, Christopher Dawson, Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Dorothy Sayers—insisted that democracy, if not Western civilization, depended on recovering the old arts or “ways” of learning, the so-called liberal arts.

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