So I’ve been thinking about some way of getting you to know me better when it comes to what’s really going on and what needs to be done in higher education. We need to protect educational diversity against standardization, homogenization, quantification, techno-vocationalism, mechanization, left-libertarianism, relativism, scientism, and “diversity” as a corporate/bureaucratic project to stifle genuine moral and intellectual diversity. A lot of my views are summed up in a softly polemical way in this speech I recently gave at Berry College. It appeared in the April issue of Vital Speeches of the Day, but there turns out to be no reliable way to link it for nonsubscribers.

SCHOLARSHIPS AND THE BERRY COLLEGE BUBBLES

I’m going to talk to you about scholarships and the Berry bubbles.

Over the last year or two, I’ve become fascinated with all those expert critics of American higher education. They say that our colleges are caught in two bubbles.

The first bubble is a lot like the housing bubble that burst back in 2008. The cost of higher education is rising much more quickly than the rate of inflation, is facilitated by easy-credit government subsidized loans, and is used to support an increasingly shoddy product.

The second bubble is like the place where the bubble boy on that famous Seinfeld episode found himself stuck. The artificial environment of the residential college does nothing to prepare students to survive and flourish in the 21st-century global competitive marketplace. It does the opposite, in fact. College classes have become too easy; professors and students do nothing but self-indulgently shoot the bull and give each other good evaluations for no good reason. Colleges look more and more like resorts, dorms like luxury hotels, cafeterias like gourmet restaurants, and gyms like top-of-the-line health clubs. Student-affairs staffs function like concierges saving students from boredom and low self-esteem. Meanwhile, everyone looks the other way when student life increasingly makes what’s displayed in the movie Animal House look tame.

When I read these criticisms, put forward by those who say we have to “disrupt” higher education with efficiency and productivity in mind, I get really angry. It’s not that they’re completely untrue, but they’re so obviously big-time exaggerations. And I can see that the point of the exaggeration is to undermine the greatness and especially the diversity of real higher education in America.

Those exaggerations are not really true at all of Berry College – even though our new dorms and the Cage Center are really spectacular.

All the experts, first off, exaggerate the extent to which the cost of college is going up. I recently read an interview with the President of Harvard. She said, well, our sticker price may be higher than ever, but what we really charge students after financial aid kicks in has gone down.

So what keeps the college cost bubble from bursting or even expanding: scholarships! Some of the experts say that scholarships are ways colleges have of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. But that’s not true: Scholarships come from the voluntary generosity of the rich. And scholarships aren’t even based on the principle of Karl Marx — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Scholarships are given for both need and merit, and none of the scholarships given tonight are merit-free. Giving on the basis of both need and accomplishment is, in fact, justice.

Consider, for a moment, the case of the recipient of the scholarship named after me. Stephanie Tomys is a woman of means by no means. She’s pretty much gotten all As both in high school and in college. Berry has given her lots of scholarship assistance, but we haven’t exactly comped her education. So she knocked herself out getting four other scholarships from her local community, and she’s maxed out every semester in hours worked in our work program.

Not only that: She came to Berry with 30 hours of credit from AP tests so that she could graduate in three years. It, of course, should make us all sad that she wants to leave us so soon. But Stephanie isn’t about wasting money, either her money or Berry’s scholarship money, your money.

To move on to bubble no. 2. Has Stephanie spent her time at Berry self-indulgently luxuriating in the artificial environment of college life? Well, she has majored in political science – focusing on political philosophy and international relations — and minored in English. She’s following the classical model of American education for leadership: An undergraduate, bookish liberal-arts curriculum followed by a technical or professional graduate degree. Stephanie’s goal all along at Berry has been law school, because she wants to be of service to those especially in need of the help of the law.

The route Stephanie has followed is the same as that of President Barack Obama, who we know takes pride in what he learned in both political philosophy and literature at Occidental and Columbia. For those who aren’t big fans of our president, let me add that’s it the nearly same route followed by Mitt Romney with his lit major. Mitt, I will grant, was a very ineffective candidate, but I hear he’s done pretty well as a business leader.

Now there are two ways to escape the bubble that is your particular time and place. The first is through study of and travel to different places in the world, as Stephanie has done through her study of international relations, her stellar participation in our model UN program, and studying abroad. The other way is through reading the best books written in other times and places about perennial themes that transcend the limits of time and place. That too Stephanie has done; she’s great at reading great books, partly because we’ve given her so much practice. Lately, for my class, she’s read Nietzsche and really saw what was good and evil in his attempt to get beyond good and evil. Stephanie has spent lots of quality time in her imagination and mind outside our American, middle-class techno-bubble. Sh knows the world is a lot more than a marketplace.

But Stephanie hasn’t only studied at Berry! She has been involved in all sorts of practical ways in running the college. She’s doing high-level work right now for our legal counsel, she’s organized all kinds of important events for the president’s office, and for me she’s run whole conferences and edited whole books. She’s picked up all kinds of real skills that complemented her classwork. She didn’t get college credit for them for displaying them, because the work and the service were real.

So I’ve sometimes worried that Stephanie hasn’t been having enough fun at Berry. I don’t think she’s been to even one toga party. When I brought that up to her as an “issue,” she looked at me like I’m crazy. She’s had plenty of fun at Berry.

These days every talk needs to have a takeaway. Here’s mine: Higher education is about learning to have the right kind of fun. Aristotle says that you’re not really virtuous unless you enjoy being virtuous. That means, in part, taking proper pride, as we say at Berry, in worthwhile work well done and ministering unto others. But there’s more to it than that. A free man or woman knows that work is for leisure, and that leisure is, in the broadest sense, for study, for learning that improves your soul. A truly free person, Socrates says, even knows that philosophy is the most erotic human activity. (Well, even I don’t quite buy that . . .)

Stephanie, of course, won’t mainly live a life of leisure after Berry. She’s taking what’s become the risky professional path of law school. For one thing, she might end up having to be a lawyer. For another, the market for lawyers isn’t so good right now. But once again, Stephanie is minimizing personal risk by saving money: She’s been offered scholarships to the University of Georgia and Emory Law Schools. She’s also minimized personal risk, of course, by preparing as well she possibly could have for the demands of legal reading, writing, and thinking.

One more thing: It’s a big mistake for us at Berry to take much credit for how well students like Stephanie have turned out. The constant pleasure I’ve enjoyed from teaching at Berry is getting to hang out with young men and women who’ve been so well raised. Sometimes I think we’ve accomplished a lot if we don’t manage to mess them up. So let me close by thanking Stephanie’s mom and all the other responsible and loving parents here tonight.