August 20, 2025
To What End Do We Educate?
In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education opinion piece, “They’re Killing the Humanities on Purpose,” University of Maryland Classics Professor Eric Adler cites examples of wealthy universities shrinking their humanities departments and offerings. That the University of Tulsa fired the dean of its Honors College, my friend Jennifer Frey, despite the fact that she had led that College to quintuple its number of students by telling them they could read great books in seminars, is perplexing since the stated reason for moving the Honors College in a different direction was financial underperformance. Another example that Adler points us to is the University of Chicago’s restructuring of its humanities programs due to “historic funding pressures.” Tulsa has an endowment of $1.36 billion, and Chicago has an endowment of over $10 billion. You would think that if those institutions were really losing money from their humanities programs, they could find a way to sustain them nonetheless. But Adler suggests that this is not really about money, that there clearly is something else going on.
What is going on is a story that has become all too familiar. The Zeitgeist that has been at play in most of American higher education for more than a century has sought to dis-integrate the liberal arts university. It recognizes no unifying force either below or above the courses offered to students, no principle of organization in the service of what it means to be a well-educated human being. The liberal arts—the integrated combination of mathematics, the sciences studied for their own sake, and the humanities—are no longer acknowledged as providing the unifying force at the heart of Western Civilization. Specialization in service to utilitarian aims have replaced them. That Zeitgeist now moves with a mesmerizing and blind force all its own. Leaders at most American universities are in its service, unable or unwilling to question it.
We, unlike Tulsa and Chicago, are not a wealthy university. This is something that everyone in this room knows all too well. But if you would like a data point, consider that our endowment is a little less than 1% the size of UChicago’s. It is worth asking: is our relative poverty due precisely to our refusal to capitulate to the Zeitgeist, to surrender the freedom we enjoy in our mathematics, science, and humanities classrooms as an offering to the utilitarian Goliath. Such was the hypothesis tested by many other small and mid-sized colleges and universities that went the way of aping the research universities by gutting their core curricula to make room for overly large and specialized programs. Those are the colleges and universities closing now at rapid pace. The hypothesis has been proven false. Why go to a small faith-based liberal-arts-in-name only university when you can attend State U for less, have shinier classrooms, and enjoy the tribalism of Division I Athletics?
Truth be told, we wouldn’t go that way even if the hypothesis was proven true and eviscerating the liberal arts was the way to release the proverbial revenue streams. Our commitment to the core curriculum and the liberal arts character of our university is paramount, even when it forecloses some pathways to greater revenue. Please note, however, that I am not hereby insinuating that we should not beautify our campus, improve our classrooms, encourage comradery and a stronger ethos through our athletic programs, or experiment with new programs that fit well with what we already do. Of course we should—as we have been of late, as I expect you’ve noticed—so long as those are organic growths rooted in the essence of who we are.
We are a university that knows what we are about. Ours is a liberating education, one that really does what our mission prescribes: orienting our students to wisdom, truth, and virtue. Our liberal education is capacious. We fearlessly expose our students to the roots of the West in pagan literature and art and lead them to appreciate that the Western intellectual tradition is not a story of monolithic progress but a messy, contentious, extended argument with many competing voices. Our students find their own voices in the midst of it all, and push for new frontiers in the fields they have chosen as their major and graduate studies.
Our liberal arts education is a Catholic one. We know that however adventurous the journey of intellectual exploration might be, faith and reason ultimately harmonize in the vision we glimpse of the Divine Author of the books of both Revelation and Nature. Institutionally, we root our aim, purpose, and principles in the magisterium, which, culturally, enables us to be truly hospitable. The University of Dallas has always welcomed students from any variety of faith traditions, and our academic work has always been undertaken by a mixture of both Catholic and non-Catholic faculty members. We have always known that no UDallas student is more a UDallas student than another, and that no UDallas professor is more a UDallas professor than another. Our Mission puts these points together this way: “The University is dedicated to the recovery of the Christian intellectual tradition, and to the renewal of Catholic theology in fidelity to the Church and in constructive dialogue with the modern world. It seeks to maintain the dialogue of faith and reason in its curriculum and programs without violating the proper autonomy of each of the arts and sciences. The University is open to faculty and students of all denominations, and it supports their academic and religious freedom.”
It is not just that our hospitality is compatible with the University of Dallas’s commitment to Catholicism, it is rather a core feature of it. It should be a core feature for any Catholic university that takes seriously the apostolic constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae, a document in which St. John Paul II describes non-Catholics as essential contributors to the mission of the Catholic university. Anchored by the ultimate harmonization of faith and reason and refined by deep study and our common commitment to wisdom, the University of Dallas’s Catholicism is a confident one. We are not nervous about the university’s ultimate commitments. Whereas anxious Catholicism circles the wagons, confident Catholicism is both capacious and hospitable. Our educational approach has from our founding been capacious, and our culture one of hospitality. Let’s make sure we keep it that way. We keep it that way when we stay committed to the university’s telos, captured so well in our mission, and when we put our energies into the work proper to us as academics committed to excellence in teaching and research.
A veritable treasure trove of reminders of why we do what we do at the University of Dallas was bequeathed to me this July, during which time I taught Philosophy of the Human Person for the summer Rome program. Though covering the whole course in just one month is a little more compressed than typical, our excellent undergraduate summer director, Dr. Andrew Moran, found a way to make it work. In addition to teaching the course, I was able to travel with our students on site visits, and even tried my hand at a few of the site lectures in Greece and Rome. A few takeaways are relevant.
Before I share them, I want to make absolutely clear what a privilege it was to do this. There are not very many slots for Rome teaching. Occasionally, a faculty member will get really creative and find some ways to get to Rome outside of Core course teaching, such as Dr. William Cody’s Tor Vergata program through which a number of our science majors worked in Italian laboratories. But, those creative experiments have been few and far between. And, it really is a shame that so many of our faculty do not get the chance to experience what for so many of our students is a formative part of their education. A few of you in this room have shared promising ideas with me about how to open features of the Rome program to the whole of our faculty. I cannot say yet whether those ideas are actionable, but I will be determining that in earnest. In any event, my main point here is that it is not lost on me what a privilege it was to spend a month teaching a core course, and teaching in Rome no less.
What were my reasons for spending what would have been family vacation time this way? One is that I spend a great deal of time with prospective students, their parents, alumni, and donors generating excitement about the Rome program. I’ll be able to do that more effectively now that I have a better idea of just what it is I am describing. Another is that the faculty and staff on our other campus are just as much "ours" as those in Irving. It meant a lot to them, especially our Italian staff members, to be able to see so much of me. A third is that Rebecca and I are naturally sensitive to the fact that our children now see relatively little of their father, the president. It meant the world to our youngest four who accompanied us on this trip to be around their father on a daily basis, even if I was often busy. Finally, I decided to teach a course in Rome this July because, well, it sounded pretty awesome. And, it was.
I am especially grateful to Provost Vorwerk who held the helm in Irving in my stead and kept our ship moving along smoothly while I spent a month seven time zones away.
Here are a few of my Rome lessons:
1. There is a great difference between being a sight-seer and being a cultural pilgrim. Our students learn to be true cultural pilgrims. We prepare them well for what they will experience in Rome, Greece, Orvieto, Florence, Venice, and elsewhere. They are well-informed walking into various sites, and then made even more attentive to the meanings of what they experience through the masterful site lectures that our excellent faculty provide.
2. What our students learn as cultural pilgrims is not a mere collection of important facts about what they experience on their visits. We provide them with the narrative structure by means of which Western Civilization and the Catholic tradition are living and real. They grasp the "big story" through this program, and see themselves in it. This came home to me especially on the Greece trip, which took place between Summer I and Summer II, and so included Drs. Hanssen and Alexander. It was from Dr. Hanssen that I have lifted the phrase “cultural pilgrim,” and her site lectures in many respects provided the narrative structure into which the other faculty members, myself included, fit ours.
3. The Due Santi campus provides a model for the way in which all aspects of the university can be integrated. We lived in relatively tight quarters in the dormitory, ate together, traveled together, exercised in common spaces, and worshiped together in the small chapel. This could go really badly if we did not have excellent people in key roles. Fortunately, we do, and our students, faculty, and staff learn to navigate the complexities of common life in ways that will pay dividends throughout their lives.
4. Our students work really hard. The Rome program is not, as is so often the case with other study-abroad programs, academic-lite. Fr. Stephen Gregg, OCist, who taught the literature course in the July semester, and I gave our students the full doses of regular course work. Put the regular travel and tight quarters on top of that, and I would guess that students during the Rome semester end up putting in more work than in a typical semester. It has been great to see our students rising to the challenge while still managing to have a blast.
5. July was a great reminder to me of how hard our faculty work! I was kept more than a little busy with class preparations, teaching, and grading.
6. July was also a great reminder that Italy can be just as hot as Texas, and that it would sure be great if we could find a donor willing to foot the bill for an air-conditioning system.
7. Concurrent with our undergraduate program, we had 35 adult students taking three different courses on campus in our Classical Education summer program this July. Director of that summer program, Professor Stefan Novinski, and the other faculty, Dr. Katie Davis and Dr. Erik Ellis, did a fantastic job with these graduate students. Most of them are high school teachers having their first in-person experience with the university (the Classical Education program is online). Speaking to these students as they were preparing to return, it was evident how blown away they were by this life-changing experience and already trying to figure out how to return next year to take the next course in the sequence. They have now returned to their schools full of additional reasons why their best students need to go to the University of Dallas.
Finally, I was struck again and again by the superabundance of it all. Why, for instance, are there so many extraordinarily beautiful churches in which every square inch has been decorated and built to last for millennia? Why are there so many different courses in a proper Italian meal? And, why are we sending hundreds of students across an ocean to take classes they could take just as well in Irving? It’s all so, well . . . inefficient. Judged by the standards of commodified and utilitarian higher education, none of what we do with the Rome program makes sense. Neither does the university’s investment in a Rome campus at all. But, for that matter, neither does what we do in our Core curriculum, or in our senior projects, or in our small class sizes. Why insist on two foreign languages for our PhD programs? Why insist on Gupta core courses in our business programs? None of it makes sense if we lose sight of our raison d’etre as the Catholic liberal arts university seeking to orient our students to wisdom, truth, and virtue. So, let’s not lose sight of that.
Make no mistake, we are out of step with this age’s educational Zeitgeist. We put that point this way in our Mission: “Whether professional or liberal, the University is convinced of the priority of the ethical over the technical, of the primacy of persons over things, of the superiority of the spirit over matter.” The Zeitgeist discourages us from lingering over and making beautiful and lasting things, things that are unnecessary and superfluous. A University of Dallas education, on the other hand, encourages the soul to make genuine friends with that which is good, true, and beautiful. The Zeitgeist tells us we must think for ourselves and so must rip ourselves free from faith. A University of Dallas education, on the other hand, insists that we can only really be free to think independently by rooting ourselves in faith. The Zeitgeist disparages the Western intellectual tradition for stifling innovation. A University of Dallas education, on the other hand, embodies the conviction that creativity must first be honed through imitation and practice, for it is those trained practices that enable countless projects of remarkable and genuine innovation to be produced by our students and graduates.
We are standing athwart the spirt of this age because we are endeavoring to stand with all those noble souls who saw that human beings are made for so much more than technological sophistication in the service of a comfortable and hassle-free life. We know, deeply, that we are made for so much more. To put a fine point on that “so much more,” I would like to remind you that the Fathers of the Church did not hesitate to describe our destiny as divinization. I won’t hesitate to do so either.
Sincerely,
Jonathan J. Sanford, Ph.D.
President
Professor of Philosophy