Alex McHugh, at Phi Beta Cons, has written an appreciative and only a bit critical account of my “Truly Higher Education” in National Affairs.

I agree that technology will have a lot to do with the future of higher education. But: There’s a big cost to be paid if the screen displaces the personal instructor across the board. And there’s little to no reason for technology to intrude much into the classroom in much of the humanities. I used to use more technology than I do now.

For now, I tell students that there are three centers of beauty in the classroom: me, each of you, and the great or at least good (as in the case of a Supreme Court opinion) we are studying. And it’s a mistake to think that personal instruction (the actual instructor, the person who wrote the relevant text, and the personal dialogue that is or should be the class as a whole) can be replaced by a machine — or even a machine supplemented by life coaches (as Tyler Cowen recommends and as many schools are now implementing). Or even the most riveting of MOOCs.

For classes in philosophy, history, and literature, there’s actually less reason than ever for students to deploy their laptops, tablets, and such during class. The latest studies show, alas, that students learn more when they take notes by hand. It’s more creative and less boring. It might be better still if (as the most conscientious Berry students do) a student types up the notes later alone in his or her own room. That turns out to be a way of imaginatively reliving the glory or the tedium that was the class.

The rage we should have should be directed against “the disaggregation of instruction,” a kind of intricate division of labor (between intelligent designers and a scripted proletariat) that replaces the whole person who should be responsible for and “deliver” each particular course. I admit we already see that disaggregation at our large universities when the professor functions as the lecturer/entertainer, and the grading and most “customer relations” are turned over to his or her assistants. To the extent possible, that needs to stop.

So I certainly agree with Alex when he writes that “the real risk is in allowing a cadre of future leaders to develop high-level technical skills with no moral or philosophical basis for what to do with them.” That “basis,” it turns out, requires the development of a large and complex active vocabulary capable of grasping the reality of moral and philosophical distinctions and of being ironically contemptuous of the empty abstractness of various attempts to “redescribe” our personal world in the language of mechanical operations and contentless freedom. One such anti-biologial and anti-relational mode of description is the transhumanist utopianism of our friends in Silicon Valley.

It turns out that the “how” of technology in our time is surprisingly easy (except at the highest levels). Subordinating that “how” to the “why” of properly human purpose is getting tougher than ever. So it would certainly be better if every professor of philosophy and theology showed students that what he or she does is tougher than, say, experimental physics or engineering. Done properly, it really is.

So I’m probably more aggressive than Alex in resisting the description of the goals of higher education in terms of content-free competencies such as critical thinking and effective communication. If it weren’t critical, after all, it wouldn’t be thinking. And if it weren’t effective, it wouldn’t be communication–unless you reduce effective communication to manipulation in some Machiavellian sense.

Still, I appreciate the way in which Alex appreciates that my limited goal is to preserve true intellectual and moral diversity in higher education. Today (April 30), what seems most imperiled is the freedom of our religious colleges and universities to teach according to their distinctive understandings of their moral and philosophical missions.