John Agresto, professor and former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, has penned a passionate defense of the liberal arts for the Wall Street Journal. His captivating narrative, commencing from his working class background as the son of a Brooklyn dock worker, certainly makes the case for the critical need to retain the liberal arts to save the minds and souls of college students.
Yet, like so many before him crusading for the liberal arts, he does not state specifically what needs to be done. He does make a passing reference to professors who ruin higher education by demanding students view the world through a the prism of race, class, and gender in the liberal arts. And he does fire one salvo against the current status quo — stating that university “should liberate minds, not capture them.”
Agresto must know he is advocating a lost cause. There will be no return to traditional curriculum as long as “tenured radicals” are in charge. Professors are not interested in the emancipation of their own higher education handiwork in infecting the liberal arts with identity politics.
Agresto does recommend modifying the smorgasbord of random class offerings. Yet he misses the critical point. Course selection vetting is indeed needed, but classes must be offered in chronological order — from foundational courses to specialized ones, from basic to complex. And even if higher education returned to two years of required liberal arts courses for entering students, neither Agresto nor any of his confreres (his term) have called for the extermination of the multicultural, politically correct virus embedded in the teaching of history, English, literature, philosophy, anthropology, political science, art history, and the arts.
Consequently, the milquetoast efforts to justify and defend the liberal arts are not enough to force real change to alter the curriculum or the mind-sets of modern professors.
So thanks but no thanks to Agresto for falsely giving hope to a lost cause. He should have called for an inscription on college entrances, paraphrased from Dante’s Divine Comedy: Abandon All Hope of a Quality Education All Who Enter Here. It may be the only authentic liberal arts quote the student body ever sees.