So my essay asking whether colleges should get out of the housing business was somewhat controversial. I didn’t answer the question definitively or for all institutions of higher education. But, in the spirit of “critical thinking,” I thought I’d raise one tough question that arises in the all the controversy over the Rolling Stone article about the gang rape at the University of Virginia frat house, an alleged gruesome incident that turns out to have been imagined to fit into a common politically correct narrative about “the culture of rape” on our residential campuses.

The question remains, after all, about whether life on campus makes students better or safer than if they lived on their own as genuinely autonomous adults. One criticism of campus life, after all, is that it’s deformed by the extreme consumer sensitivity that animates colleges competing for the increasingly scarce resource of the student willing to pay the often bloated price of the private (or any) residential college. A related criticism is that the effectual truth of treating dorm students like autonomous, freely consenting adults is that they are granted all kinds of privileges without the corresponding responsibilities that they would have in the real world. Another related criticism is that colleges are too focused on non-academic amenities at the expense of sustaining the high academic standards and somewhat common curriculum that could, with friendships rooted in the goods tht those pursuing a higher education should share in common, to some extent displace the loneliness and cluelessness of an excessive focus on personal autonomy.

Somebody sent me an article with the upbeat title “Why Small, Residential, Student-Centered Colleges Will Prevail.” It’s by Scott Miller, president of Bethany College (West Virginia). He’s no ordinary president, but a quite influential consultant. Not only that, he edits Presidential Perspectives, which features essays on higher-education leadership written by college presidents for college presidents. If you go to that essay series, you can confirm for yourself my view that Dr. Miller is not alone in his perception of what can save the small college.

The first thing you notice is his account of how the Christmas season brings his particular small-college campus community together. Dr. Miller reports that we “light our tree as a symbolic, interfaith illumination of hope and knowledge against the darkness.” I have no objection to that, but I will note that the community doesn’t rest on a shared religious faith in the personal meaning of Christmas.

On education, Dr. Miller claims that there have been two waves of reform initiated — demanded — by students. The first, from the Sixties, was all about “injecting social awareness and educational relevance into the campuses.” It’s about civic activism, justice ,or, as some say, political correctness.

The second came from the student demand that their education become relevant in the sense of being keyed to “personal technology.” Educators, the president explains, had no choice but to accept this demand too.

All in all, what students have demanded, allegedly, is educational reform in the service of activism and technology. And he creates the impression that that’s not only where reform has occurred but that those innovations have displaced whatever it was higher education was about before the Sixties.

These two particular moments in higher-education reform have been displaced by a broader awareness of administrators that higher education has become “a consumer option.” So the institution’s mission becomes more about what students desire than what they need. And Dr. Miller seems, at first, to be critical of this therapeutic approach, admitting that one feature of it is the “recreation arms race” that turns the campus into a theme park. Still, he admits that Bethany has “invested millions in facility upgrades…that we all knew would appeal to the facility-focused student consumer.” There’s no choice for college presidents but to be “beholden to student inclinations.” And he tellingly never gets around to saying confidently or even straight out that we, at Bethany, give students what they need as, say, “evolving citizens” instead of what they think they want as clueless teenagers.

The danger for the residential college, of course, is that students’ “ever-increasing need for convenience” will mean that they will be displaced by “branch locations,” online degrees, “for-profit” programs, and so forth. The consumer might well conclude that the distinctive aspects of residential education aren’t worth the big bucks or huge investment in time that they cost.

In Dr. Miller’s own experience, however, the preference for the small liberal-arts college remains strong. Why? Well, there are the “student creature comforts.” But there’s also the immediate access “to their fellow creatures — devoted faculty and staff.” These service creatures are completely devoted to fostering the success of particular students in their pursuit of “meaningful careers” and “engaged citizenship.” It’s the job of faculty and staff to “speak up for students where it counts,” to be agents facilitating their entry into “global competition.” This kind of devoted facilitating is yet another amenity for which students are paying handsomely, a privilege that doesn’t seem to generate a corresponding responsibility.

So, at the end of the day, what the residential college offers is better customer service. There’s nothing said about the distinctive content of the education that Bethany or other such schools offer, beyond the student’s acquisition of “a complex mix of special skills to compete and a broad perspective to flourish.” There’s nothing about liberal education, shared and cherished academic experiences, deploying the residential model to offer students leisurely experiences of books, art, music, and so forth that they couldn’t get on the activist and entrepreneurial streets of our middle-class democracy. There’s even nothing about character-forming student community or the “tough love” that produces demanding standards and sparing praise from formidably distant (yet still caring, in the right way) faculty. There’s nothing, as some would criticize, about forming the souls of students around some vision of the good life, about learning who you are and what you’re supposed to do.

In my view, there is something to what Dr. Miller says, just not as much as he thinks. After all, there are surely advantages to attending an institution that is all about me and my educational needs. The faculty aren’t specialists lost in the research and allowed to be dreamily disengaged from student life. The college doesn’t claim to be on the cutting edge of the advance of human knowledge, and that’s appropriate, because no undergraduate should think of himself or herself as anywhere near ready to get anywhere near that edge, except perhaps in some fairly trivial pursuit.

Still, if education is really reduced to relevance generated by student demand — to justice and technology — then I can’t see why all this personal service is really worth the money.

There are two kinds of residential colleges that, I believe, have real futures. The first is those whose “brand” signifies of a high level of intelligence and accomplishment in all those admitted. Harvard, whatever goes on there educationally, undeniably provides almost all its graduates access to a career path that leads to a high level of success. That is true although Harvard may not be so student-centered, and, as Steven Pinker humorously remarked, its faculty are hired as highly competent specialists in their fields who are pretty clueless when it comes to cultivating the souls of their students.

The other residential colleges with undeniable futures are those with “niche” missions centered around some understanding of what higher education is as more than justice and technology. The common conceit of democracy is that undeniable progress in justice and technology signifies progress in all areas of human virtue and self-understanding. The truth is that such progress in the direction of personal liberation has undeniable relational costs. We’re getting worse and worse, after all, in living well in the truth about who we are as beings born to know, love, and die. And our access to genuinely countercultural narratives — such as those found in poetry, philosophy, and theology — that might give us a kind of selective nostalgia for what we were deprived of in our busy world full of the diversions of outraged activism and personal technology displayed on screens is atrophying.

There is a market, if a limited one, for the genuinely countercultural college. That is, a college that hasn’t caved in the most important respects to the spirit of the Sixties and the alleged imperatives of technology. And, if you think about it, there’s something fishy in Dr. Miller’s claim that these two sources of allegedly indispensable disruptive innovation even came from students. It seems to me that they came from educational experts and that serious students, even or especially today, long for much more.

Maybe the center of a residential college should be understood as friendship, the kind of friendship that emerges through the joy of shared discovery in the lab or through “Socratic conversation” about a tough book. But there appears not to be enough there there at Bethany to speak of the goods to which the students should have been led to devote themselves in common. There’s an undeniable conflict between the higher forms of friendship and an overemphasis on personal autonomy, and surely almost all the charges and countercharges about rampant sexual assault, infantilizing and intrusive political correctness, and all that stem from the absence of trust that forms a genuine community, a place in which the various privileges all come with corresponding demanding responsibilities.