Emailbag:

I had to shake my head at the juxtaposition of the Occidental story and the one about declining enrollments at St. John’s. As a St. John’s alumnus (although not a graduate ) I can attest to the value of *that* brand of liberal education. In fact, I can’t help but wonder how Obama might have turned out if he’d spent his undergratuate years wrestling with Plato and Aristotle, reading original sources instead of textbooks and learning to defend his position in discussions with other students who might disagree with him in twice-weekly seminars – instead of being spoon-fed predigested Marxism and the rest of the lefty agenda. (“Das Kapital” is still on the St. John’s reading list, if I’m not mistaken, but so is “The Wealth of Nations”, so students got to argue about the theories actually propounded by Marx and Smith and make up their own minds instead of being told that Marx was right and Smith evil. ;-))
By its very nature St. John’s can’t help but be something of a conservative institution, because it insists on the value of studying the works of “dead white males.” And while I suspect that most of its faculty is conventionally liberal, it has a curious effect on students. I know a lot of people who entered as typical lefties as freshmen, but who were wracked with doubt as sophomores and often conservatives by junior year. (In the case of the Annapolis campus, the proximity to the Naval Academy helped in this regard. I enrolled at St. John’s in the mid-70s and my political views had been shaped by the anti-war movement. I had never bought into the “drug-addled baby-killer zombie” stereotype of individual service members, but I still had a strong prejudice against the military as an institution. Meeting midshipman and even more hanging out in bars where marines and junior naval officers frequented pretty much cured me of that.)
The whole argument over the “value” of a liberal arts education is a red-herring, anyway. Most people who go into the professions are going to do graduate work in any event, whether to secure an MBA, a JD or some other MS or MA degree. And the people who hire those folks don’t care a fig what they studied as undergraduates. Those who do hire college grads, unless they are in technical fields, simply want to see a BA/BS. They know they’re going to have to teach *their* business to anyone they hire. Why hire a business major who was taught models that your company doesn’t use, and thus has to unlearn, when you can hire an English major who you can shape as you like and who, presumably, will be able to understand written instructions and write a clear memo. (Two things that may well exceed the abilities of that business major. )