Why Build a New College, Pt. 1

Who’s Making the Decisions?

Here’s a seldom-spoken-of insight into the academic profession at a big university: being a professor is lonely. I don’t mean emotionally as much as professionally lonely, though the two sometimes coincide.

Most universities are so big and dispersed into independent siloes, called majors, that a typical professor of History, Chemistry, or Economics will almost never have any reason to interact with faculty in other disciplines.

Why is this a problem? Professors are experts in their own areas, right? So why should an English professor care about what a Public Policy professor is teaching?

Here’s the litmus test. Ask a professor at a typical university, What will a student learn at your school? At best, they’ll be confused by the question. It depends on what they major in, what General Education options they choose, what professors they take, what their classmates are like.

So who determines such pivotal structures as what classes a student needs to take, how the degree progresses, and how subjects interact with one another?  

The answer: some unholy combination of VPs of Marketing, Accreditation, and Student Retention (increasingly, retention, since so many students these days are left disappointed with what they find). Yes, faculty have some input in their individual siloes, but it should be no surprise to us that university graduates are suffering professionally, in their families, and in their faith when the coming-of-age education we give them lacks a positive vision and design.

If you’re unhappy with the cost, secularity, and ineffectiveness of higher education today, then you’re probably already aware of the factors contributing to this problem.

Universities are top-heavy with bureaucracy. They’re overly dependent on federal student loans. They have abandoned the liberal arts as a foundation for learning.

These are all part of the problem, but at its root lies the gaping absence of a singular vision. The reason why great colleges of old like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge became what they are today is that at one time in history they were ordered toward a singular end. Whether you’re studying law, medicine, or languages, for centuries university students approached every field of learning as a manifestation of divine order and every science as a technique for furthering the good.

The fact that sounds grandiose shows how far our universities have fallen.

So why do we endeavor to build a new college?

We envisioned a college where the following question could be answered clearly and with conviction.

What will a young person learn?

At Hildegard, our Fellows learn what virtue is by discussing Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, and Kant.

They learn what nature is by reading Nicomachus, Archimedes, Galileo, Leibniz, and Newton.

They study human desire and behavior by reading Tacitus, Montaigne, Adam Smith, Mill, and Marx.

They learn what justice is by reading Plato, Leviticus, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Thomas Aquinas, and Luther.

And they study the soul in the Gospel of John, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, and Shakespeare.

The reason we can say emphatically what Hildegard Fellows will learn is that they take the same classes. Our faculty don’t teach in segregated departments but teach across disciplines, encouraging our Fellows to be courageous in the questions they ask, and challenging them to find order where the world only sees confusion.

For the sake of our young people, we need to change how higher learning is done, how it’s built, what it costs, and how it's taught. This begins by putting first things first. Hildegard College exists to form young people for lives of faith, virtue, and extraordinary work. We’re experiencing tremendous response from our community, and now I ask you to help us build.