It is the beginning of my son’s last semester of high school, and we are on the road. We are often on the road these days, visiting universities, participating in scholarship competitions, touring campuses. My wife is a schoolteacher and can’t take the days off work, so it is just us two. Mostly it is me behind the wheel. He prefers I drive when we’re together, even in his own car. It’s early evening, just before golden hour, and we have followed the GPS to the backest of back roads, rolling over steep, sloping hills, woods giving way suddenly to open meadows. We are hurrying to make the gala dinner opening tomorrow’s scholarship competition. I am accelerating irresponsibly over the crests of the hills, and he is into it, thrilling at my shedding of fatherly restraint, which encourages me in my recklessness. It can be difficult to get a rise out of teenage boys. I take what I can get. 

I’ve come to enjoy these college visits, even if they occur more and more frequently and eat up more and more of my days. This is a hectic stage of life. Usually either he is busy or I am. Quality father-son time can be hard to come by. But on these trips we get hours side by side in the car, a sort of forced intimacy. After an hour or two of eating junk food and listening to pop music, we start yakking in earnest—about school and girls and the future and God. The longer we’re on the road, the more topics are fair game. 

He is a smart but unambitious student, not gunning for a top-tier school. No Division I’s, no Ivy Leagues, nothing in a big city or more than a day’s drive from home, he has told me. All the schools we’re visiting are small, in small towns, and more or less near where we live. Today we are heading to a scholarship competition at my alma mater, coming directly from another one at his other top school. A lot is on the line this weekend. I know which of these two favourites of his I want him to go to, but I hold off on any heavy-handed advice. I want this to be his decision. Besides, it might just come down to money. 

My son is, like me, a word guy. He loves to read and write, and he plans to major in English. One might say the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, but these things are never inevitable, and I am glad for him to choose it. Many parents would discourage their children from pursuing such an impractical degree program. I have no such qualms. I have spent much of my adulthood pursuing the intellectual life, trying to resist the pull of mere usefulness and instead to cultivate an appreciation of beauty and leisure. I have been lucky enough, in this most utilitarian of ages, to make an honest living engaged in such pursuits, and I have sought to instill in my children a similar relish for the inefficiencies of the good, the slow, and the simple. That is to say, I have sought for them, both at home and at school, an education in the liberal arts. 

The liberal arts tradition is a formal apprenticeship to reflection on the things that make for the full formation and flourishing of the human. As such it is deliberately unattached from making and doing. Those engaged in the liberal arts are “liberated” from the necessity of utility and so are free to reflect on fundamental human questions: Who am I? What is God? What is a human? What is the world? What is goodness? What is truth? Contemplation of these questions and others like them is both the means and the end of liberal education, the soul’s ever-deepening participation in beauty. The initiation of young people into this tradition used to be known simply as education, but as it has slowly been supplanted by other ends, liberal education must now be qualified as classical education. Access to the best of this tradition is ensured by exposure to what we call the great books. 

My kids all attend a classical school, where the liberal arts are valued, taught, and learned—and, when necessary, retrieved. It’s a good school, an excellent one even, but it is not perfect. Students grouse about having to read “boring, old books” and are prone to ask what they will “do” with whatever it is they are learning; teachers, rather than questioning the premise of the question, are prone to answer them on their terms. At a soccer game I overheard a father prominent at the school say that his recently graduated son was unhappy with his business major and wanted to change to English. “I told him he could double-major in business and English,” he said. “Or at least major in English education.” He chuckled. “I mean, you’ve got to do something useful, right?” 

O tempora! O mores! Even here, in the inner sanctum of liberal learning, the totalizing force of utility seeks to encompass all things in its gaping maw. We love art and music programs for children; we are all for Homer and Virgil and Dante and maybe even a little Plato and Aristotle for our high-schoolers; but when real-life decisions are on the line, it’s all about results. This father’s unguarded comment betrays just how far the common, everyday conception of the university has slouched—from the humanistic to the utilitarian. 

When I attended university back in the tony days of the late nineties, the liberal arts still managed to coexist, at least uneasily, with the practical orientation that now dominates the landscape of higher education. My small Christian university offered a generous sprinkling of subjects across what were basically even then career-prep degree programs. We talked about such “gen ed” courses mostly in the register of how best to get them out of the way so we could focus on what we were actually at university to study. It never really occurred to us that a liberal arts education—especially a Christian one—was supposed to represent a unified body of knowledge around which the whole person was shaped (though I do remember hearing a great deal about “the integration of faith and learning”). Still there was a semblance of a wider integrative formation. While I gritted my teeth through statistics and wellness and biology and was eager to be done with them, each of those classes provided me with some fundamental concepts I carry with me to this day, and they have certainly improved “my stock of metaphors,” as Coleridge said in explanation to a friend who asked the poet why he attended chemistry lectures at Oxford. 

The summer after I graduated I was, perhaps predictably, having trouble leveraging my lately obtained bachelor of arts degree in English studies toward gainful employment. In an odd coincidence, our university president heard of my plight and summoned me to his office. I was ecstatic. This was a man with connections. If anybody could get me a job, he could. When I sat down with him, he was casual and approachable, draping his knee over the arm of his wingback chair like a teenager. He asked me about my experience at the school, my major, my long-term plans. When we finally got around to the subject of my immediate employment, he told me, “You know, studies show that it takes graduates of liberal arts schools longer on average to find jobs than those at state schools, but when they do find them, they make more money and have more job satisfaction.” 

He smiled. 

I smiled. 

“Do you know of any jobs around here?” 

“Oh, well, I’ll ask my secretary if there are any openings in our office,” he said, and he stood up and opened the door. 

I left deflated. A lousy pep talk citing a few higher-ed statistics? That’s all I get from the most powerful man on campus? I went out to face the world again. Wiser. 

Leaving aside for the moment that he was right—it did take me longer, and it was worth the wait (though I do not make more money than most)—do college presidents still make arguments like this one? Focus on the important things, get a well-rounded education that forms you into a smarter, better person, and you might have a tougher go of it but you’ll be better off in the long run? I doubt it. It would certainly be too much to ask of the father at the soccer game. There’s too much room for failure. Margins are too tight. Competition is too stiff. Some schools I’ve visited with my son literally guarantee that students will have a job upon graduation. 

I am not an expert in higher education, and by temperament I am a purist and an idealist. I recognize that no school can exist outside the complex institutional trends and market forces of twenty-first-century higher education, and I have no wish to face the difficult choices that inevitably fall to those who steward such institutions. But something else is going on too, less about mission drift, economics, or resources and more about unspoken disagreements over what education is and is for—differences, increasingly, between those who run universities and those who teach at them. 

We are told that students don’t read and therefore don’t want to study the liberal arts and the humanities, and that the departments housing them are left under-subscribed and financially strained. Both claims are only partly true. Students indeed do not want to read, but that is why we bother to educate them. And they are, generally speaking, not signing up for liberal arts majors, but that is often because anxious parents, intent on financial stability, and universities, eager to promise it, collude to steer them elsewhere. This is a structural feature of higher education, not a bug, one that was established in the nineteenth century, as Eric Adler explains in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The humanistic disciplines . . . wither,” he says, not because students are uninterested but because they exist “in a system deliberately created to marginalize them.” A liberal arts program does not need to be unpopular for it to be gutted, as Jennifer Frey found at the University of Tulsa. Booming student enrollment and generous funding were not enough to prevent administrators from deliberately reshaping the honours college she had built into a model more compliant with the technocratic ends of the polytechnic utiliversity, in Reinhard Hütter’s depressingly apt phrase. 

While my alma mater still offers a core curriculum of interdisciplinary coursework required for all students, I have watched over the years as resources have been steadily directed away from the humanities and toward departments that can offer more tangible results. A friend of mine, on the theology faculty for a number of years, was once told by an exasperated administrator, “We’re just not a liberal arts school anymore.” When he quit they did not fill his position. 

Not all university administrators are malevolent overlords. But it appears that if a school does not make the liberal arts part of its core identity, those disciplines will shrivel up and become desiccated shells of their former selves. As Adler says, this is “a crisis of will, not capacity.” 

At my alma mater, the gala dinner finished, my son attends a “student activity time” while we parents attend an intimate and informal Q&A with the school’s president. This president is well liked, is often visible on campus, and frequently invites students into his home. At the Q&A he is clearly in his element. In charge on the stage, a pleasing blend of ham and gravitas, he fields questions about dorms, the cafeteria, chapel, and, occasionally, academics. 

This president was hired the year after I graduated. He came with impeccable academic credentials for a Christian liberal arts university, but I have heard that it was his ability to effectively fundraise that was crucial in securing him the position. Indeed, under his leadership the university has prospered, undertaking many building projects while maintaining its Bible Belt–infused evangelical Protestant identity. 

He tells us about the school’s new “esports arena”—that is, an auditorium dedicated to the playing and watching of competitive video games. “Now this is something we boomers don’t really get,” he says. “I studied English literature! I don’t know anything about this stuff!” He throws up his hands in mock exasperation. “But the kids, they love it. This is a competitive sports program. They play other schools. Games like Rocket League and League of Legends. Again, I don’t understand it! But it’s very popular. There are even scholarships available.” People nod their heads slowly. I have heard this bit before, at my twenty-year reunion, in these exact words, with the same self-deprecating, aw-shucks, kids-these-days, what-can-you-do, bright-eyed fatalism. I have not responded to a fundraising call from the school since. 

The president goes on to talk about what programs are new or might be available in the near future: cybersecurity, criminal justice, aviation—even, lord help us, artificial intelligence. The nursing program, introduced in 2014, quickly became one of the most popular majors on campus. STEM majors have grown steadily, along with “pre-professional” majors like business and psychology. What strikes me about the introduction and growth of these programs is not that they are unnecessary whereas liberal arts programs are necessary, but that the common theme to most everything the president has brought up is that there is a demand and the school is eager and ready to meet it—a startlingly vacant philosophy of education. There is undoubtedly more to the school’s approach, but whatever it is, it is not important enough to emphasize at an event like this. I am amazed to find almost nothing said that would approximate the liberal arts—nothing about education for the whole person or the formation of the soul, nothing, even, about well-rounded individuals. Rather, the whole thing is almost unembarrassedly presented as vocational training wrapped up in the soft pillow of “the college experience.” 

As if to draw all this together in a nice thematic bow, the president transitions to his excitement about the long-needed renovation of the library, currently under way. Animatedly, he tells us that the main floor of the library will no longer have any books. “Kids read all their stuff online now,” he explains with a wave of the hand. “We don’t need as many books. So we’re devoting that space to a student resource centre and a coffee shop.” Smash-cut to me shaking and slowly turning red, sweating profusely, a cartoon blood-pressure dial above my head spinning in circles. 

The truth is, none of this is surprising. I have consciously steered my son away from my alma mater for precisely these reasons. He has said he would prefer a school more rigorously trained on the liberal arts, and I would prefer it for him. But driving into town one evening a few years ago to visit some friends who live here, I told him in a fit of nostalgia that maybe he ought to consider it, at least as a backup. “It’s a good place. You could have a good experience here.” So now here we are. 

Even now, though, as I sit in the back of the auditorium superciliously rolling my eyes, I do not deny that he would love it here, or even that he would get a good education. The school has never been an ivory tower of reposeful learning, and I do not mean to fault it for what it never aspired to be. There has always been an admirable, non-snooty sense of revivalism and practicality at the school, one that did and maybe still does provide an education that has an integrating force on the human person. What worries me is not the school’s humble origins but its slow remaking in the model of the larger technocratic, fragmented polytechnic utiliversity that now dominates across the nation’s state schools and research universities. I would be tempted to think that for a university to survive in today’s “market” such a transformation is inevitable, had my journey through the steep, sloping hills not begun at a different school situated on the bluffs of a river almost three hundred miles north of here. 

I will call them University South and University North. On the surface the two schools are similar: roughly the same size, religiously oriented, private, residential, (at one time) centred on the liberal arts. The two presidents were hired around the same time, and both have guided the schools, with much success, through a tumultuous period in higher education. But while the president of University South took the reins of a relatively healthy institution, the president of University North inherited a school already failing at the polytechnic utiliversity model. It was known as a party school, and despite its being Catholic, most students were not religious. By all accounts the school didn’t know what it was. I heard rumours that it almost closed. All that changed under the new president. During his tenure—during, it is worth reiterating, a time of massive, rapid change in higher education, one in which the conventional wisdom has been that the liberal arts are moribund and schools must double-down on STEM and professional programs or die—the school has reasserted its Catholic identity, fostered a wholesome sense of community and campus culture, and rejuvenated its liberal arts program. Enrollment has increased, and the school’s profile has risen. It’s one of the few schools within driving distance of where I live that has a Christian great books program, which has made it appealing to our family. We are not Catholics, but I am an ecumenically minded guy and am not threatened by prayers to Mary, of which there are many at the school. 

The president himself gave us parents the campus tour while our kids wrote essays and participated in interviews for the scholarship competition. Both presidents share a similar demeanor, common, I think, to college presidents—that mix of down-to-earth approachability, comfort in front of crowds, reassuringness, and optimism. The buildings were pretty much what you would expect at a small liberal arts college, some old and dishevelled and beloved, some new and shiny. The real excitement, though, lay in the school’s new library, a Georgian building with classical proportions and a brick façade. “We know kids don’t read as many books these days,” the president conceded. “They use electronic resources, and we facilitate those on the school’s web platform. But we also believe the library is the symbolic centre of any college campus, and so we’re building a big beautiful library and we’re going to fill it with books.” 

What do I say here that is not overwritten? It feels too symbolically perfect, a crystallization of two worldviews. One weekend, two campuses. Two libraries. Two completely different understandings of what they are for. 

This is, to me, the fault line of higher education today. Not every student at University North is a great-books nerd, to be clear. Most students major in professional degrees. Campus sports are a big deal. It’s a very normal-looking school. But the student body radiated the idea that they were all there for the same reason, and that their education was drawing them together, not pushing each of them toward their own siloed fields of study. Educationally the two schools are on different continental plates. Both their models have proved successful, but they are successful on different terms. 

Driving home from my alma mater on a long, straight highway cutting across open grassland, my son and I reflect on our weekend at the two schools. I am once again restraining myself from imposing my views and am instead attempting to coax his own thoughts out of him, though I have spoken my mind frequently enough that he, I am sure, has no questions about where I stand on things and could easily tell me what I want to hear. And even though he is now eighteen and legally an adult in the eyes of the state, the line between what he wants and what he knows I want is still a little blurry. He is an oldest child in the classic mold: earnest, duty-bound, eager to please and do the right thing. Often in our conversations when I ask him for his opinion, I can read the struggle written on his face: How do I say what I want and still please my father? Discussions about his future, as a result, can feel a bit like divining an answer from a Ouija board, hard to know what is the product of an independent mind and what is the product of my own subconscious attempts to guide the direction of the answer. 

University South, he tells me, feels familiar, easy, homey even. We have visited campus often over the years. His mother and I are prone to waxing sentimental during these visits, pointing out where we first met or where we had our first kiss or where one of us hit our head on a doorjamb at a full run and had to get stitches (it was not her). He knows the place and the type of people there and feels like he could have a good experience. University North, on the other hand, while less familiar, has a unity of vision and an intellectual energy that is palpable among students and faculty alike, one that coheres with his classical education. It is, he acknowledges, a tough decision. But all things considered, if it does not come down to money, University North seems to have a bit of an edge. 

It does not come down to money. The financial aid package at each school is essentially the same. So it is decided. University North is the better choice. No problem. Everything is fine. 

As the weeks go by I sense in my own heart that everything is not fine. I am beginning to wonder whether I have been guiding the planchette more than I am willing to admit to myself, unconsciously laying my hands on my son’s destiny. Then one evening he comes into the living room, where I am reading a book. He has not spoken of college for a couple weeks. His face is pale, and he is pressing the tips of his fingers to the tips of his thumbs and lightly bouncing each set of clustered fingertips into each other, a nervous little gesture he has made since he was preschool age. “Daddy” (yes, he still calls me this), “I think I want to go to [University South].” 

I can see he is feeling fragile; this is a delicate situation. I must buy time. I strike a thoughtful expression, one that I want to be sure doesn’t convey disappointment but also doesn’t over-correct and look idiotically happy. At the same time I have to reckon with what I really think, and respond honestly but compassionately. 

I raised my son with a certain view of education in mind, one that involves knowledge, yes; but more importantly I have wanted him to learn love and wisdom, how to think and know and judge rightly, how to exercise virtue. And here he is, maybe for the first time in his life—definitely his first time as an adult—bringing to bear all his knowledge and his wisdom and his loves on a major life decision, and he’s courageous enough to tell me, even when he knows it’s not what I want to hear. What could I do but honour it? 

I decide—and this is hard to say to him, way harder than I think it will be—that what I really want is for him to tell me the truth. I want him to choose what he thinks is best for his life, not what I think is best for his life. I ask him why he wants to go to University South. I can guess with confidence what he will answer, but I want him to say it to me and I think he needs to say it. He tells me that while University North would be a better fit academically, he just feels more comfortable with the idea of attending University South. It’s a more natural fit. He’ll know more people there, for one thing; friends from his school and church have already chosen it. For another, while the Catholics at University North were friendly and unthreatening, he is understandably weighed down at the thought of explaining to every new acquaintance that he is not Catholic, what he is instead, and why. 

These are, I believe, legitimate reasons, but there’s something deeper going on, something he cannot quite articulate. It is this: My son doesn’t care about trends in higher education; he doesn’t think about university administrators or institutional models or the marginalization of the humanities. He just wants to go to college and make new friends and learn interesting things and see a slightly different part of the world and figure out who he is. While he is making a very grown-up decision, he is in significant ways not yet an adult, nor should he be. This decision is part of what will make him one. And so I must concede, as every father eventually must, that my son is not me. He will have his own ideas, his own hang-ups, enthusiasms, and ambivalences, and certainly his own battles to fight. 

I tell him I am glad he told me and was honest with me, and we will get going on the paperwork. 

Later that evening, I am still in the living room, and he is walking from his bedroom to the kitchen. I stop him and ask, “Was that hard for you to do? To tell me that?” 

He laughs a little. “Yeah.” 

“Were you afraid I would be disappointed?” 

His expression becomes more serious at this question, but then he looks relieved, and he answers forthrightly this time. “Yes.” 

Now it is time for me to be honest. “Well, I think if I were making the decision, I would choose [University North]. But I think the important thing is for you to do what you want and what you think is right for you. I’d rather have you do that than go along with what you think I want.” 

His whole countenance lightens, and he smiles. He goes on with his evening, I go on with mine, each of us in our own separate directions.