Why Build a New College, Pt. 4

Not Just Another Liberal Arts College

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to higher education over the past few decades, then the news that there are plans for a new liberal arts college being founded in southern California might be met with suspicion.

Haven’t we learned that the liberal arts are irrelevant and detached from reality?

It is by answering "yes" that the vision for Hildegard College began to take shape.

The mainstream liberal arts have certainly stretched their case at being relevant. Spend a few minutes looking at the courses offered in Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Gender Studies departments. Or, worse, browse the titles of recent dissertations by humanities PhDs at major research universities.

Years ago, I visited one of the nation’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges. I was having lunch with some students in a second-story cafeteria, when a startling vision caught my attention outside the window: a handful of students, completely naked, faces painted with bright colors, perched in a tree. My twenty-year-old host answered, Oh, That’s a ‘naked tree.’ Our student body is famously creative. The following year these same undergraduates performed a series of sit-ins at the college’s Great Texts humanities core program, protesting it as colonialist, racist, and sexist.  

Liberal arts colleges have earned their reputation for being a waste of time and money. We should be wary of any field of knowledge that is so preoccupied with defending its existence.

Professional academia is a game. Those who play it well (myself included, at one point) appeal not to the public or to the goods of learning for society. Instead, they appeal to the need for the mainstream liberal arts to justify their inclusion in undergraduate programs that receive federal and state funding and through which professors can attain unassailable tenure.

How did the liberal arts devolve into this sorry state? Volumes upon volumes have been written on the subject.

For one, the liberal arts cannot thrive when they aren’t oriented toward the good and the true. No matter how many times we reinvent the liberal arts through critical theory and pseudo-science, the liberal arts will only have meaning when the freedom they offer (what is "liberating" about them) is a freedom for some higher good. It’s tragically ironic that the current postmodern intellectual trends that reduce truth to power dynamics are the very trends that denature the liberal arts and cut them off at the legs.

A second reason for the decline of the traditional liberal arts is that they’ve become professionalized. Now, this cause can be easily misunderstood. We tend to think of the Humanities when we think of the liberal arts, although the liberal arts historically included the natural sciences and mathematics as well. And these humanities fields—History, Literature, Philosophy, etc.—are taught as professional disciplines.

If you become an English Major, for example, your advisor will tell you that you’ll learn to think critically, write cogently, and analyze culture well. But really, you’ll spend your time building skills that you need to be an English professor. Likewise with History and Philosophy. A Philosophy major spends most of their time memorizing the various intellectual puzzles that a professional philosopher needs in order to be proficient.

Only a small fraction of humanities majors will have careers as humanities professors. So where’s the accountability? What are the outcomes?

When we started dreaming about the future undergraduate program at Hildegard College, we considered this question. What should a liberal arts education prepare someone to do? There’s no need to reinvent the answer. Historically, learning logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, and the other liberal arts created well-ordered people who were capable of leading others in times of change.

We use the term "entrepreneur" to describe this kind of person. An entrepreneur differs from someone trained in business management in that the entrepreneur sees the whole picture. They’re able to lead organizations and build new ones if necessary because they understand the order that unites economics, human behavior, communication, and strategy.

The difference between an entrepreneur and someone with a "business" education is that the entrepreneur comprehends the problem. Aristotle drew a distinction between mere knowledge and understanding. Knowledge requires the ability to recognize a thing for what it is. But comprehension, or understanding, requires knowing the causes of a thing. Why does it exist? Where did it come from? What is it made of? What is it for?

To be certain, our vision of the liberal arts looks nothing like the pet-projects and trendiness that plagues mainstream liberal arts programs. Our Fellows read the greatest works of philosophy, literature, mathematics, music, economics, the sciences, theology, and politics for the sake not only of recognizing their ideas and becoming hyper-literate but in order to truly understand the world.

So why are we building a new liberal arts college? Not because people need to read more philosophy (though, of course, they do) but because our society needs young people who are capable of seeing the whole picture. We need people who are not slaves to social media but who are free to act on their own convictions.

2023 has begun. It is our inaugural year as an organization. In the Fall, we will welcome our first class of Hildegard Fellows to campus.

These are young people who are not only willing but excited to be part of something new. And they want to join other like-minded, ambitious Christian young people in seeking the truth through the great tradition and learning to change the world through entrepreneurship.