Liberal education is in a state of perpetual crisis. Over the past two years, the University of Tulsa’s Honors Director, Jennifer Frey, built a program where students read “thousands of pages of difficult material every semester” and participated in “small, Socratic seminars” marked by vigorous and civil debates about ideas. But in a recent New York Times editorial, Frey recounts how the newly installed provost decided that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” To save money, distinctive programs were cut, staff eliminated, and a new mandate―increased class sizes―was issued. However, this shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise. Before Frey’s arrival, Jacob Howland described how the new university’s board of trustees were business people first, educators second. The lesson learnt here is that who is in charge is as important as who is in the classroom.

Before I discuss university governance and the possibility of reviving liberal education, it would be helpful first to survey the landscape of American higher education. Besides its number (nearly 4,000 universities and colleges) and diversity (private, public, regional, etc.), what makes the American system of higher education unique is the different purposes and values that its array of institutions offers. Some are comprehensive; others are narrow; some are religious; others are civic-minded. This assortment of university missions―and not just generous federal funding―made American higher education “the envy of the world.” What created that envy was a diverse educational marketplace able to cater to the various needs of a continental nation.

What is troubling is the trend that this diversity in university missions is being homogenized into a singular purpose: pre-professional training. The latest manifestation is the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and pre-professional studies (e.g., business, nursing). At the same time, humanities majors have declined by almost a third between 2012 and 2022, with no bottom in sight. Social science majors also have dropped. How did we get here? What are the consequences? And what are the possible remedies?

Authority, Data, and Equality

The factors often cited for the rise of pre-professional training in American higher education are the declines in government funding and high-school student demographics, the increased costs of college tuition and student debt, and the politicization of the humanities and social sciences. Fewer resources and greater costs have led both universities and students to seek a more career-aligned education at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. But there are three additional factors that have played a role that are often neglected. They are authority, data, and equality.

The first is authority: who has the power to recognize the legitimacy of an institution of higher education? To answer this, we must look briefly at the history of accreditation. Starting in the late nineteenth century, accreditation was established to ensure the academic quality of colleges and ease student transfer between schools. Over time, specialized accreditation bodies (e.g., law, medicine) and regional organizations (e.g., the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities) emerged and conferred the authority to recognize legitimate colleges and universities.

It wasn’t until 1952 that the federal government became involved with accreditation with the passage of the G.I. Bill for Korean War veterans. The bill was limited to students enrolled at accredited institutions and designated a peer review process as the basis for evaluating institutional quality. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the non-governmental Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) were authorized to recognize reputable accrediting bodies. That is, neither the federal government nor CHEA accredits individual institutions, but published a list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies. Without the imprimatur of that list, federal student loans were not eligible to colleges and universities. While there are some exceptions, American universities and colleges need access to those student loans in order to stay financially afloat.

This traditional division of supervising higher education―the federal government monitors issues of financial support and access, accreditors examine educational quality, and states focus on consumer protection―was changed in the 1960s and 1970s with the federal and state governments relinquishing their responsibilities to accreditors. With access and consumer protection incorporated into their mission, accreditation bodies now monitor schools so that all students and groups have equal access to education and that universities demonstrate students are learning (assessment).

These two responsibilities are amenable to metrics of quantification. For example, access is determined by such metrics as how many students receive financial support, graduate, and become employed afterwards. Assessment likewise has been transformed from qualitative peer reviews and self-studies to numerical data that correlates with student learning objectives. Universities are accountable to these metrics, with poorer outcomes interpreted as a sign of failure rather than a baseline from which the institution should improve.

Accreditors, therefore, not only have appropriated more power but have channeled that power into the currency of quantifiable data. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with relying upon data to make evaluations about academic quality. However, the data accumulated for these evaluations are divorced from educational achievement, e.g., looking at post-graduate salaries rather than foreign language passage rates. Academic quality, consequently, is defined by these metrics and misses not only educational learning but also evaluations of students’ character and the interiority of their lives. Such currency flattens educational distinctions, nuances, and idiosyncrasies, the hallmarks not only of the humanities and social sciences but more broadly of liberal education. By contrast, STEM and pre-professional studies align well with quantifiable metrics because of the nature of how they structure and disseminate knowledge.

This support of the datafication of the university is, in turn, a manifestation of the American value of democratic equality. Data, as the numerical assignment and valuing of reality, has the illusion of being objective and transparent. It is therefore a valuable commodity by which accreditors, administrators, teachers, and students evaluate themselves. Those experiences, activities, and moments not amenable to the pre-set standardized categories of evaluations are ignored.

The power of data resides in its apparent objectivity, an attractiveness that is especially appealing in democratic societies where, according to Tocqueville, individuals believe that everyone has an equal right to understand reality for him- or herself. In democratic societies, everyone relies upon his or her own judgment to make decisions and reduces everything to its practical or utilitarian value: to “accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as lesson to be used in doing otherwise and doing better.” But because everyone is equal, no one is certain that his or her judgment is better than anyone else’s, ultimately yielding a consensus dominated by easily quantified data.

Data, consequently, is the crystallization of democratic judgment because nobody can challenge it: it is objective, transparent, and universally accessible. When universities apply data appropriately―such as student retention and graduation―schools can learn where they fall short and remedy it. The problem today is that universities only use data to measure against standards that seem objective, like post-graduate salaries. This, in turn, replaces the diverse and competitive market of American higher educational missions with the monopoly of pre-professional training. The values of instrumentalism, exchange, and productivity crowd out values like ethical reasoning, citizenship, and friendship.

Beyond the Mandarin Class

Given this landscape of American higher education, those who seek leadership roles must follow this path of numerical counting―a path antithetical to liberal education. Values like wonder, discovery, and purpose are resistant to meaningful quantification. The result is an administrative class and leadership that think, speak, and decide on data alone.

When higher education is publicly discussed, it is often characterized in terms of ideological, cultural, and curriculum battles between left and right. What is missing in this conversation is the need to address how administrators and board members understand higher education and how it is manifested in the missions of their schools. The concerns of finances, as expressed in data, are critical for the health of the university, but even more so is the question of values and purpose. The datafication of the university can’t answer these questions. Only humans can.

The first step that schools can take to promote a diverse and competitive market of higher education is to provide instruction to board members about the history of education and the institution that they are leading. One of the oddities of American higher education is that board members often lack an understanding of the history and purpose of education, even that of the institution they lead. As a result, these members approach the university from their own perspectives, which are usually from a business mindset since many are asked to serve in part because of their financial contributions and their professional networks. To introduce these members to the history and purpose of education would expose them to a different set of values that can’t be captured by data.

The second step is for faculty to reassert their roles as administrators. While there are circumstances when it makes sense to bring in an administrative leader from outside the institution, it is frequently better for the university that faculty be promoted as administrators within―and then only for a limited period before they rotate back into faculty. One of the results of this faculty responsibility is that university culture benefits in terms of institutional memory and a sense of continuity and community. Administrators have a stake in the long-term health of their institution and are perceived by faculty as part of the university rather than apart from it. Again, another oddity of American higher education is that more than 80 percent of college presidents are external hires compared to 30 percent of CEOs of major corporations. The consequence is that a president upsets the university applecart in pursuit of new metrics of success, only to depart soon after for the next gig, leaving faculty and staff resigned to the next experiment of another incoming leader.

The third step is for the school as a whole to determine its mission: what are its values and educational purpose? This is not just faculty and administrators but includes students, staff, alumni, and other stakeholders. Then the school must ask itself how they―from board member to president to student to staff―hold themselves accountable and evaluate success? For now, quantifiable metrics will be required, especially for accreditation reports, but these are not the only ways to determine accountability and success. For instance, qualitative methods exist to evaluate leadership accountability and student success. And even more meaningful are the relationships that are sustained between alumni and the university, faculty and students, staff and administrators. While these relationships cannot be measured, they can be articulated and provide purpose for people and the institution they serve.

The fourth step would be to provide alternative methodologies for how accreditation bodies and governments evaluate schools. As stated previously, there is a value in data to evaluate universities, but it should be one among many tools. Higher education leadership and public pressure can nudge governments and accreditation bodies to be more open to non-numerical assessment. But more importantly, scholars and educators need to devise different methodologies and practices to evaluate academic quality and standards for their institutions. These could include entrance and exit examinations, qualitative assessment, and student portfolios.

The fifth and final step is to articulate and demonstrate the value of the type of education one’s institution offers. This particularly applies to those colleges whose mission is liberal education. Instead of recycling museum-piece arguments from the past, board members, administrative leaders, and faculty need to explain why liberal education is relevant, important, and lasting. They must find ways to blend the old and the new―the perennial principles of liberal education with the current circumstances of today―to promote liberal education’s promise that in studying it one becomes authentically human.

The challenges that American higher educational institutions confront are myriad, from a loss of public trust to government funding cuts to declining student enrollment. But what is neglected in this conversation is the loss of mission diversity―of values and purposes―that traditionally has characterized the marketplace of American higher education. It is this diversity that has served this vast continental country well.

The repurposing of the University of Tulsa’s Honor Program is representative of a troubling homogenization trend in American universities. Liberal education colleges and programs are its most recent casualties, but if this trend continues unabated, the variety in American higher education will disappear. To prevent this from transpiring, American higher education leaders need to think and rethink their institutions’ values and purpose and discover new ways to make the old seemingly new.

Anthony Kronman is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, and his latest book, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age, offers a fresh conservative theory. The argument starts from his conviction that the Enlightenment’s ideals of equality, toleration, and scientific rationality define “the civilization we call home.” He believes there is “wide and stable agreement” about the worth of these liberal principles, so our political problem is that of the classical humanist: how best to cultivate the soul morally and aesthetically.

True Conservatism insightfully poses a double challenge. On the one hand, it forces conservatives to lay their cards on the table. Is their anti-modernism really a dissent from the high ideals of the Enlightenment? For instance, post-liberal conservatism argues that liberalism incubates massive and recalcitrant inequalities between city and countryside, white- and blue-collar workers, and the oligarchs of the contemporary means of communication and users. The core complaint is a shortfall in equality, confirming Kronman’s observation that “we are all progressives by default.” If conservatism is to resonate, it must make an honest peace with modernity. 

On the other hand, Kronman challenges progressives. Are we wise to junk a tradition that taught the West how learning and beauty train the proud to gloriously manage their passions? Are we edified by immodestly mocking an inheritance that has made us more cultured? If conservatism must reconcile with modernity, progressivism must embrace the humanist’s cultivation of excellence and piety. 

Kronman superbly frames politics between Enlightenment rule of law and the humanist’s refined liberty. He is a syncretic thinker—which I admire—but has he done enough to show how Enlightenment rationalism sits comfortably with humanism?

False Conservatisms 

Descartes kicked off modernity with the epistemological problem of whether we ever know the world around us, and Kronman holds fast to verifiable knowledge: “the truth is preeminently what science declares it to be.” Much of Kronman’s conservatism stems from his love of the Great Books, but nowhere does he dwell on the varieties of evidence and proof that humanism employs. The humanist’s broad theory of truth haunts Kronman’s treatment of allegiance, specifically his struggle to find a stable place for love within his reason-based political order. 

Kronman argues that the progressive’s skepticism towards love of family, nation, and God mutilates the spirit. Historically, conservative allegiance follows the ordo amoris. A recent controversy in American politics, the order of charity depicts love expanding from self to family, then community and country, and finally cresting in love of God. Metaphysically, these ordered loves cascade from the font of God’s love. Kronman’s anxiety over the voluntarism in Christianity’s cosmology of love makes Kronman privilege the God of the arch rationalist, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a deity that does not love. Kronman’s appeasement of scientific progressivism triggers a theoretical incongruity that ill suits humanist elegance. The incongruity is that Spinoza’s God does not ground the ordo amoris. We love and sacrifice; God does not. 

True Conservatism opens: “The rich and enlightened societies of the modern West are the most prosperous, tolerant and democratic the world has ever known … a sober observer may be forgiven for thinking that ours is the most brilliant civilization that has ever existed—because it is.” An echo of the famous End of History thesis by Francis Fukuyama is clearly heard, and Kronman believes the achievement of the Enlightenment emboldens progressives to further enshrine liberal ideals in our institutions and mores. After all, liberal nations have been, he believes, “the leading edge of a global revolution,” one that has defeated “the great reactionary movements.” 

Churlishly discounting this great achievement, “the conservative cause has lost its way,” concludes Kronman. His resources are the Great Books, and so recent conservative theorists are not highlighted—there is no mention of Roger Scruton or Patrick Deneen, and Alasdair MacIntyre only gets brief mention in a footnote. Enough is said, however, to help us place Kronman’s theory amongst contemporary options. 

Libertarians, he argues, exaggerate equality since they validate any consumer choice, even if it offends “beauty and truth.” Neutral about value preferences, libertarianism undermines “the Ciceronian ideal of connoisseurship,” where the arts and sciences build character. Amongst other false conservatisms presented, Scruton likely qualifies as a Humean. In David Hume’s political thought, custom orients us politically. With its emphasis on history, Kronman concludes that Hume’s politics is an irrationalism, of a piece with his skepticism towards science as hard truth.

In Kronman’s telling, even an Aristotelian-Thomist like MacIntyre is ultimately wedded to Christian voluntarism, obedient to mysteries that cannot be rationally explained. Deneen’s post-liberal political theology similarly falls foul of the same irrationalism. 

Delusional Progressivism

Contemporary conservatism fails because it either undermines human grandeur or is irrational. Progressivism also has deep problems, however. Riding the coattails of scientific progress, progressivism is a “destructive illusion,” victim to arrogant self-sufficiency. Our “ruling prejudices” maintain that God is merely a private belief, nation an accidental attachment, and forebearers worthy only of criticism, not care. This lack of humility is not a recipe for ennoblement. Historically, Western achievement has built on the legacy of classical humanism.

Bedeviling our age is “the demotion of excellence,” the product of “a spirit of plebiscitarian rule.” Contrasting with our egalitarian self-congratulation, “judgements of rank are pervasive in classical literature and philosophy.” Kronman credits Augustine with moderating “Cicero’s aristocratic hauteur,” but after egalitarian exaggeration, Christian beneficence itself needs tempering by the cut and thrust of Attic competition. 

Christianity softened ancient aggression by proposing that all humans are created in the image of God, an image of love between persons. Since Christian conservatism is unworkable, a better foundation for equality is needed. The imago dei is, Kronman cleverly proposes, merely “an interpretative gloss on a more primitive duty,” one better captured by Heidegger’s idea of the clearing. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) excavated the early Greek astonishment at the sheer fact of human intellect. Of a piece with his rationalism, Kronman believes that intellection provides better protection of human worth than the capacity of persons for love: moral consideration is owed to “all who share the experience of standing out from the world in the ecstatic awareness of time that is the root of every human endeavor.” Appreciating that persons are “companions of the clearing” secures equality, thinks Kronman, and in addition, empowers liberty to act again on the humanist’s appreciation that “excellence is sovereign among values.” 

Tying dignity to intellectualism comes with a cost, however, and undermines Kronman’s account of friendship. 

To the equality, toleration, and scientific rationality that define us, Kronman should have added commerce. Our civilization is the product of an Industrial Enlightenment, and I wish Kronman had spent time on Adam Smith, specifically his portrait of a true friend. The amiable man, says Smith, is someone of “the most exquisite sensibility” who through sympathetic restraint aligns his sentiments with those around him: “When we bring home to ourselves the situation of his companions, we enter into their gratitude, and feel what consolation they must derive from the tender sympathy of so affectionate a friend.” 

The political problem of law and liberty requires the balance of sense and sensibility. Alert to the debt all owe to family, country, and the divine, conservatism reasonably adds humility to liberal self-assertion. This necessary supplement regards sentiment, not axioms. Humanist modesty is less about judgement and more about trust, less about propositions and more about gratitude. Hence, Aristotle’s wide definition of reasonableness in Poetics: “Under reasoning fall those effects which must be produced by language; these include proof and refutation, the production of emotions (e.g. pity, fear, anger, etc.), and also establishing importance and unimportance.”

Consistent with his rationalism, Kronman employs a cognitive account of friendship. His model is biography. “Who are we, really? We wonder but never know. Only our successors are in a position to say.” A biographer, Kronman argues, makes a person better known—but not necessarily better loved. Family members and ancestors, says Kronman, “deserve the honest afterlife that only their successors can give them.” The same turn to honest appraisal of friends figures in Kronman’s patriotism. 

“A life without patriotism is as incomplete in human terms as a life without friends and for the same reason.” All have need of roots, he believes, and the peculiarities of geography and history are inescapable. “The goal of American life is to make it possible for each of us to be proud of our accidental inheritance.” Lest he go back into Hume, however, Kronman emphasizes judgment: even more than a friend under a searching biographical lens, country is “more properly subject to moral review.” Once under judgment, loyalty “to the good in an inheritance” can be calibrated. We are far from Smith’s idea of amiable friendship. Rather, a rational probing of allegiance is the first emphasis, not gratitude for, and taking consolation in, familial and national inheritance.

Reason and Roses

The progressive’s marginalization of the divine is a losing wicket, says Kronman, for “every religion is a response to the universal human longing for a connection to eternity.” However, progressives are right to be suspicious of Christianity. If Spinoza is the hero of the argument, Augustine is its villain. To be modern, conservatism must separate itself from the irrationalism of Augustine’s voluntaristic cosmology of love. About good political order, Kronman says, “the post-Augustinian answer is, only an order that has been freely willed by the individual or community whose order it is.” This voluntaristic construction was unknown to the ancients, and only with Spinoza is a complete rationalism reintroduced into the West. 

Spinoza offers, Kronman relates, “a God that is nothing but explanation and necessity, from whose nature the orthodox Christian attributes of freedom and will have been completely expunged” (emphasis original). Equating God with an eternal cosmos, Spinoza rejected the idea of creation ex nihilo. He did so because orthodox Christianity must finally fold into the act of an “unfathomable will.” To the mystery of uncaused action, Spinoza opposed “implacable logic,” and only the latter is compatible with scientific positivism, believes Kronman. 

Kronman’s presentation of Spinoza makes explicit the tension that dogs his effort to reconcile scientism and humanism. Quoting Spinoza, Kronman relays that God is “a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essence.” There is thus an “infinite gap”—and not an analogy—between God and humans. By contrast, the long humanist tradition—ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern—relies on congruity (convenientia) for the link between God, cosmos, and persons. In humanism, congruity connotes a comely and harmonious connection rather than strict implication. 

Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric gives an example of congruity. He argues that in addition to science there are proofs of character that persuade: “Proofs from character are produced, whenever speech is given in such a way as to render the speaker worthy of credence—we more readily and sooner believe reasonable men on all matters in general and absolutely where precision is impossible and two views can be maintained.” In appealing to the person of Jesus, Christian humanism dwells on a person’s character to convey the difficult truth that friendship involves sacrifice (John 21:15-25). The life of Jesus is a reasonable proof that love and sacrifice are the height of humility and grandeur. 

An example of an incongruity is Spinoza’s God of necessity and implacability, which is not an example of divine friendship and sacrifice in sympathy with our friendship and sacrifice. Dante’s rose explains. True Conservatism closes by reflecting on Spinoza’s signet ring engraved with a rose along with the Latin Caute, meaning caution. The lesson of the ring, proposes Kronman, is the conservative truth that wariness must attend endeavor. In contrast, the humanist Dante depicts cosmic order as a comely rose. In the rose, the world of spirits coheres with humans, the petals and the Trinity, the ovary (Paradiso XXXI). In a congruous conservative humanism, Dante has the angels flitting around like bees “inflowering” the people with the divine sacrificial love of which human dignity is worthy.