So here’s* my contribution to a symposium on “originalism” as the mode of interpreting the Constitution that facilitates the maximization of the libertarian value of “negative liberty.” Everyone else in the symposium operates on a higher pay grade than I do when it comes to really knowing all about the controversies in the field of [...]
Authentically Catholic liberal-arts colleges and universities accept the harmony of faith and reason. The overall intellectual bent of Catholic schools should thus be, at least to some extent, and hopefully to much extent, Thomistic; and the teaching of Thomism and the philosophia perennis with regard to the philosophy of nature and science is, as opposed [...]
Congratulations to graduates in the Class of 2015. Graduating high-school students often ask me how college will differ from high school. And what I say usually seems to come as a surprise: In college, you should start thinking much more seriously about happiness. “What does college have to do with happiness?” you may be thinking. [...]
In this stubborn old college and at this pleasant old town of Hillsdale, the young ladies and gentlemen, who are being graduated today, have enjoyed four years of sanctuary from the hurly-burly of our era; four years of immunity from the violence and fraud of an age that some call “the post-Christian era.” That four [...]
By an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to the new members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the Program that governs St. John’s College—and not only to tell you but [...]
Alan Jacobs patiently explains why even the most scrupulous of scholars can’t understand the first thing about Flannery O’Connor’s stories without at least a good deal of biblical literacy.* Well, a real poet or a person with genuine artistic and psychological sensitivity can understand something about her writing without the Bible. John Huston’s film version [...]
So there was a decent article in the WSJ calling upon conservatives to stop trashing the liberal arts. The argument: Conservatives respect the wisdom of our Founders, and Jefferson and the others really thought that liberal education as bookish civic education, at least, was indispensable for self-governing citizens. We need to be educated to be [...]
After more than a decade of “No Child Left Behind”* (NCLB)—the 2001 Act of Congress that was supposed “to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice”—it has clearly failed. Congress is busily engaged in efforts to reform** the bill, whose reauthorization remains doubtful. In his recent article for Newsweek.com, Paul Thomas writes about [...]
College costs are out of control! Middle-class students will be financially ruined by going to college! Only the wealthy can afford a good liberal education! The hype about college costs has generated many myths about higher education, and has driven them deeply into the collective consciousness—where they are wreaking havoc with parents and students trying [...]
What Villanova should be famous for is its well-funded and brilliantly staffed ”great books” gen-ed alternative program and a real surge in “great books” humanities majors. The program really does has a Christian/Augustinian focus without in any way neglecting either classical or modern authors. Now, according to Tocqueville, the point of higher education today is [...]
“If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, [...]
You asked me to speak about “Intellect and Intuition,” an enormous topic and yet an intimate one—enormous because the title encompasses the two most distinctively human activities, and intimate because I have, after all, no way to come to terms with it but to look into myself. But it is a congenial inquiry you’ve chosen [...]
So I’ve written an article* for Yuval’s National Affairs that’s all about sustaining truly higher education in America through deploying libertarian means to achieve non-libertarian ends. There’s a sense in which all libertarians are for that, of course. In a free country, the money we make through being productive is for satisfying our (subjective) personal [...]
Today, the same day on which you cease to be transient members of the College, is the day on which you join us as its permanent members. Our polity provides for it to be so, and our common studies confirm the communion. Therefore I would like to speak to you today as members-at-large of the [...]