From the Academy

Liberality or Slush?

At a Middle western college, recently, when it was proposed to undertake some study of conservative principles, certain young lions of Liberalism raised their sweet voices in anguish. A liberal-arts college, they cried, is a place to inculcate Liberalism; conservative ideas ought to be anathema in the academy. This philological confusion is itself a symptom of the decay of our higher learning. To the scholar who best expressed the idea of liberal education, Cardinal Newman, “Liberalism,” in all its usages, was repellent. It was not the arid political ideology called Liberalism which Newman espoused, but instead something worlds away: the examined life; the form of education fit for free men, the leaders of their society. From the time of its first employment, the phrase “liberal arts” has meant those disciplines which make a man master of himself and a participant in that great intellectual and spiritual continuity which we call Tradition.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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Liberality or Slush?

At a Middle western college, recently, when it was proposed to undertake some study of conservative principles, certain young lions of Liberalism raised their sweet voices in anguish. A liberal-arts college, they cried, is a place to inculcate Liberalism; conservative ideas ought to be anathema in the academy. This philological confusion is itself a symptom of the decay of our higher learning. To the scholar who best expressed the idea of liberal education, Cardinal Newman, “Liberalism,” in all its usages, was repellent. It was not the arid political ideology called Liberalism which Newman espoused, but instead something worlds away: the examined life; the form of education fit for free men, the leaders of their society. From the time of its first employment, the phrase “liberal arts” has meant those disciplines which make a man master of himself and a participant in that great intellectual and spiritual continuity which we call Tradition.