Here's a speech I gave to the accounting alumni at Houston Baptist University. I think the readers of this blog will appreciate these remarks:
Hello and welcome back to HBU. I am very happy to have been asked to come and speak with you this evening.
As I stand here, I can’t help but think about those surveys that tell us the number one fear of many people, even stronger than their fear of death, is public speaking. The first thing I want you to know is that public speaking is not one of my strongest fears. What is one of my great fears is that I will be forced to sit in a chair listening to someone who SHOULD have been afraid of public speaking! For that reason, I will be brief and to the point.
I think the billing for the event says that I am here to talk about bringing back the best of American higher education. As a prelude, I will tell you that I mean to talk about the importance of the liberal arts, the big ideas, and the great books. Indeed, I will talk about why those things are necessary to bringing back the best of American higher education. This is a message that I very much want to bring to seasoned professionals like yourselves.
But before I launch into that I want to announce that I come from your world. The world of the professions, by training, at least. My first graduate degree was a master’s degree in public administration. My second was in law. I worked as a corporate analyst, an internal consultant who worked to “re-engineer” the corporation, and as a lobbyist. It was not until that third graduate degree, the Ph.D. that I became a devotee of the liberal arts. But I say all this to reassure you that I am not some Ivory Tower academic so abstracted from the world I cannot remember to wear pants.
I entered college with the concern that is typical of most students and their parents. How will I make a living? Even though I was part of an honors liberal arts studies program, it was not terribly rigorous and I lacked the appreciation of the material to get much from it. Besides, our courses, like the first two years of most colleges and universities, were a grab bag of whatever the school’s faculty felt like offering to undergrads taking their general studies requirements.
The closest I came to real liberal arts training was a class in political thought. Oddly enough it was taught by a statistician for the state of Florida. We did not read primary texts. I still remember writing a paper on the theorists John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham without actually reading either man’s work. Despite that, my conclusions were very smug. After all, here I was in the late 20th century writing about men who were long since dead. Who needs to read what they wrote???
Of course, I committed the modern fallacy, which is to assume that I was smarter because I lived now rather than then. Regrettably, I had not learned from the wisdom of C.S. Lewis who wrote that clocks and calendars are odd tools for deciding who has the better of an argument. He said something else very wise, too. It is far better (and often easier) to READ Aristotle instead of reading ABOUT Aristotle. Today, I try to be a teacher who realizes both of these things. Even in the introductory course, my students read Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and others. At least they are SUPPOSED to read them!
We think that the first two years of college is a fair representation of the liberal arts. It isn’t. Students come to college and take two years of courses that often have no coherent plan behind them. This is the legacy of a decision Harvard made many decades ago. Just let students decide what to take in the first two years. The plan proved attractive to many administrators and faculty members because it is flexible and very easy to service. Robert Hutchins, former dean of the Yale Law School and then president of the University of Chicago, fought hard for a different vision of higher education. He believed that you could identify a core of the best that has been thought and said and written and that you could give students a powerful and edifying experience learning the great books and the great ideas. It was out of his vision that the famous series of volumes published for many years by the Encyclopedia Brittanica company was born. While he prevailed for a time at his own school, for the most part, this rigorous version of the liberal arts was lost to history. It was something the great universities used to do.
Today, after decades of exile, the liberal arts are coming back. Many universities, including ours, are redesigning their core curriculums around the ideal of the educated person. We are being intentional about giving students a foundation for learning and a fund of knowledge that can improve their lives, their character, their perception, and their judgment.
I wish I could say it is purely idealism that has prompted this rebirth. Sadly, I think in many cases it is happening because many college administrators can see into the future to a time when students will no longer agree to spend two years preparing to begin their major. Why get this particular training called a college degree if one could get professional training right away in accounting, law, software design, or what have you? That future is coming faster than we would like to admit.
But others of us, and in this group I include many HBU professors, our president Dr. Sloan, and our provost Dr. Bonicelli, believe in our souls that genuine, carefully thought out liberal arts education of the kind once offered by the vast majority of American universities is GOOD for students. We don’t just want to find a way to legitimize tuition costs. We want to participate in the formation of the person. In other words, we say, I have found something very special, something precious, come and see. Let me tell you about it!
For this proposition, I have the support of America’s founding generation. They understood that a person is more than simply a unit of economic value. A person is more than their job. A person has been created by God for more than commercial activity. Because people are more, because they are special in some way, they are entitled to rights and freedoms. But the problem from time immemorial was how people could be free while still maintaining the benefits of law and order. The American founders were perceptive. Freedom by itself is no great thing. Freedom is like a knife. It can be used for good, like the scalpel, or for ill like the switchblade. But freedom with virtue, that is something special. A free people must be a virtuous people. This realization is part of why our founding fathers were not secularists. They believed in a working relationship between virtue, freedom, and religion.
We study the liberal arts because they are about exactly this type of question. If we study the great books, the great ideas, then we have understanding when we talk about things like liberty, equality, freedom, responsibility, and accountability. Without understanding, we simply walk around like dolls with strings in our side that we pull out and say, “Freedom is good. Equality is good. Responsibility is good.” Fine, we can say it. But do we know what we are talking about? Or are we like the bubble-headed denizens of Huxley’s Brave New World or like Orwell’s Proles who give all their energy to devising lucky systems for winning the lottery when they live under brutal oppression? Do we understand these things well enough to merit the awesome responsibility of being free citizens in a democratic republic?
The title of this presentation is Bringing Back the Best of American Higher Education. Like so many things that are American, I think the best of higher education is a hybrid. The ideal training for a young person living in a free society, I believe, consists of a strong foundation in the liberal arts and professional training. The student learns how to think, how to value the important things in life, and what it means to be free. And the student also learns how to do something good and productive professionally. Accounting is a brilliant example. How great is it to train an accountant who loves the truth, understands the rights and freedoms so hard won by those who went before us, and is a darn good accountant? I want to hire that accountant!!!
The reason I made this my topic tonight is to pay homage to the founders of this university, who envisioned exactly such an ideal for their school and hopefully to pique your interest in what I’m talking about. I’ll never forget a comment I once read by an HBU trustee offered over half a century ago. He said it is one thing to learn how to build an atomic bomb, but our university will make sure students have learned how to think about whether and when such a bomb might ever be used. That one statement makes the case very clearly. We must have technical knowledge and we must understand our values.
I agree with the Yale Law professor Anthony Kronman who once said, “The meaning of life is a subject that can be studied in school.” At the right school it can. I pray we strive to be that kind of institution. I hope you will want this kind of education for your children. I know I am planning to seek it out for my young ones. I will leave you with the words of Sir Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest leader England ever had, and a great master of both statecraft and soulcraft. These words are part of our official vision for the university which can be found on our website:
The first duty of a university is to teach Wisdom, not a trade; Character, not technicalities. We must learn to support ourselves, but we must also learn how to live.
Sir Winston Churchill[i]
Thank you for listening to me this evening. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to address you. And thanks to Shari Westcott for inviting me.
"I think the readers of this blog will appreciate these remarks:"
I certainly do. Well said, Hunter!
Posted by: Truth Unites... and Divides | July 24, 2009 at 05:47 PM
Many universities teach neither Wisdom nor a trade. Students graduate fit to be only a member of Congress.
Posted by: Benighted Savage | July 27, 2009 at 04:52 AM
I wish I thought this address would do some good for the student who just dropped my literature class because he plans to transfer to a school that won't require these pointless liberal arts courses but will allow him to go directly to his major, do not pass "Go," do not collect wisdom. He didn't learn any of Mr. Baker's points when assigned to read Cardinal Newman's "The Idea of a University," either--assuming he did actually read it--so all I can say is, "Farewell."
Posted by: Maeve | July 29, 2009 at 12:48 PM