Jennifer Frey was recently removed from her role as the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, but she didn’t go quietly into the night. Frey penned an opinion piece for the New York Times that takes aim at her university’s administrators for squelching a program that drew 25 percent of the freshman class as well as generous support from donors. Frey and her colleagues built a great books program that was intellectually rigorous, required thousands of pages of reading, and had students defend their ideas and interpretations in small Socratic seminars. The program was shuttered when a new university administration decided the Honors College should go in a different direction. Frey concludes her piece with the following diagnosis, “The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for—and deserves.”
Frey is right that many university administrations have little reverence for the liberal arts, but the problem is bigger than a handful of administrators, it’s cultural. Many university humanities and social science departments are haunted by an ever-present hermeneutic of suspicion. The phrase, coined by Paul Ricoeur, connects writers like Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche based on their shared project of “unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness.”” This hermeneutic of suspicion pervades the teaching and writing of many professors in the humanities and social sciences.
I’ve been teaching in higher education for the last eleven years. It used to be that students’ first taste of the hermeneutic of suspicion came in their upper-division course work and, predictably, these kinds of arguments would show up in class discussions and student papers. Hermeneutic of suspicion style arguments were absent in classes where the vast majority of my students were underclassmen. This is no longer the case. The hermeneutic of suspicion has leaked into the world of social media and students are encountering it without evaluating its merits and demerits. Absent carefully constructed curriculum like Frey’s Socratic seminar, and an academic culture centered on seeking the true, the good, and the beautiful, the average student falls back on the things they see on their Tik-Tok feed. To understand why Frey’s removal and the shift in the Honors College’s focus is such an injustice, one must consider the alternative liberal arts education on offer.
Studying the liberal arts is challenging so it is unsurprising that many modern liberal arts students and teachers adopt a deficiency viewpoint, prioritizing who or what is absent in the liberal arts. Here is how it works. First, a student looks at a list of “Great Books” and notices that the vast majority are written by straight white men. “This is proof of systemic discrimination and white supremacy,” they cry; and just like that, Plato, Aquinas, and Dante are lumped together with all the other thinkers who can be called “white.” The distinctions and complexities of their thought which earlier generations struggled to grasp are categorically ignored, denied, or dismissed.
From the perspective of critical theory and its offshoots, any characteristic that an author shares with an oppressor group is proof of guilt by association. These intellectual paradigms view Plato, for example, as a white man whose philosophizing was subsidized by Athenian slave labor. They cast Dante’s Inferno as little more than the repressive teachings of the Catholic Church given life as an allegory. They contend Thomas Aquinas viewed gluttony as the least serious of the seven deadly sins because he was overweight—presumably because he was a glutton. In other words, critical theory and its offshoots begin their study of the liberal arts by looking for reasons to write off the thinkers, writers, and artists in the Western liberal arts tradition.
The issue is compounded because intellectual paradigms that draw from critical theory and postmodernism conflate absence with injustice. Thus, the metric used to evaluate past thinkers is their alignment with the ideals of modern social justice. All past thinkers are, unsurprisingly, found wanting. This severs the relationship to the past.
Moreover, if all thinkers in the past are treated as a cohort based on their immutable characteristics, why shouldn’t those in the near-past also be lumped together? It is a small step to see how this problematizes our relationships with our current elders.
Our grandparents and parents, raised in a time very different from our own, are assumed to have nothing useful to tell us about our world today. Their views on our current cultural and political situation can be dismissed out of hand with a well-timed, “okay, boomer.” This despite the fact they lived through the changes that produced our current cultural milieu. So much for dialogue.
Finding no value in the past and no value in those who will soon pass on, modern students struggle to see the value in their own peer group. They pass in and out of people’s lives like phantoms, nay, like ghosts. Such is the ubiquity of people who engage in drifting in and out of people’s lives that it has even earned its own moniker—ghosting.
Ghosting is an especially interesting behavior because it is a form of abandonment and, like other forms of abandonment, it stems from the refusal to recognize and respect the dignity of the other in the relationship. We should not be surprised that in a culture of drifting in and out of people’s lives, students lack the models and the discipline to sit and wrestle with a Plato, Aquinas, or Dante.
If a teacher engages students in the study of ancient texts, students often approach such works by ignoring the dignity of the author. As one student so poetically told me, “Plato is just another straight, dead white man.” Students read the texts, but they do not allow themselves to be read by them. Since they do not let themselves be read by them, they cannot be challenged and transformed by the texts.
Unchallenged, the culture of ghosting continues to wreak havoc on students. They report levels of loneliness, anxiety, and depression that dwarf the rates of previous age cohorts.
Since they cannot relate to their peers, they struggle also to relate to their elders. And since they struggle to relate to their elders, they find it near impossible to relate to the authors. They do not understand the lives and viewpoints of peers, elders, or authors choosing instead to explain them. One requires a posture of humility, the other a posture of superiority.
How did we get here?
We got here because reality, reason, and relationship have been under siege for the better part of the last two hundred years. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and their critical theory descendants sought to explain social life in terms of power and this approach dissolved the glue that held the three pillars of the liberal arts together. Once the relationship was severed, each pillar could be demonized and deconstructed on its own. Deconstruction begins by decentering dominant narratives. Most students and activists take this for granted, but few seem to realize peripheral ideas depend on the stability of those in the center.
Studying the liberal arts as little more than hegemonic self-justification has impoverished the lives of students and faculty alike. Understanding why this method impoverishes people’s lives requires us to reflect on relationship.
In a healthy relationship, be it romantic or platonic, both parties notice and appreciate the best qualities in the other. It’s not that they don’t recognize limitations and shortcomings, but they are not the focus of the relationship. Each person calls out the best in the other and, to the best of their ability, each seeks to assist the other in those areas where they are weakest. No relationship could endure if either or both parties were focused on pointing out what was wrong or deficient in the other.
Renowned marriage researcher and psychologist Dr. John Gottman found that for every negative interaction between spouses there needed to be ten positive interactions. Why might this be the case? Human beings, on average, fixate more on the negative than the positive. This is an evolutionary adaptation that helps us to remember dangers and keep us safe. Despite its utility, practically speaking, it can also cause people to focus on the negative parts of their relationship to the detriment of the positive.
This is precisely the temptation students are most likely to fall into when they study the liberal arts outside of a well-constructed liberal arts curriculum and academic culture.
Practically speaking, it is not what learning does for you, but what it does to you that makes the greatest difference. A well-crafted liberal arts education trains the whole person. Its structure teaches you the interdependent relationship between subjects, what each subject contributes to and confirms about the whole. Its emphasis on language and discussion, best personified by the Socratic method, reveals that persons are interdependent on each other, on their elders, and on the past. It is relationship that is the heart of the liberal arts. You cannot have one without the other and, at present, most students have neither.
John M. Kainer is Associate Professor and Department Chair of sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, and an affiliated scholar with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. His work has been featured in a variety of scholarly and popular outlets, including First Things, The American Spectator, Minding the Campus, Catholic Social Science Review, the Journal of Sociology and Christianity, and William James Studies. You can follow him on X@JohnMKainer.
Photo by Maerten de Vos – The Phoebus Foundation, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70544810