The Blackboard

The censorship of slavery no longer dictates Huck’s morality. Unlike Tom, Huck has begun to question his society’s standards, to weigh and consider what is just and right, and I hope that by reading this story, my students may follow him in this difficult endeavor.

When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they are pursuing, in college and in life.

In an age of knee-jerk innovation, the warnings articulated by Emerson and Dewey are more needed than ever. They advocated for applied knowledge, but they also insisted such technology must serve human ends.

Colin Phelps is not the first to discover a graced thing in college: it’s the unchosen self-knowledge that is most liberating.

The Cult of Smart is deeply entrenched in most modern systems of public education around the world, and the increasingly clear reality of cognitive and genetic differences between different human beings poses a sharp challenge to liberals whose membership in the Cult makes them want to deny this reality entirely.

We all want students to think critically and to reflect on what they have encountered in the course of their education. In order to do that, however, they must have something to reflect upon.

The liberal arts aren’t for some utilitarian purpose; they’re to free young people to love rightly.

The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me.

Students may return to universities that post a philosophy statement but have no philosophy department. Yet as we look at our country, divided over history and by economics, home to scientific innovation and scientific ignorance, education is both more needed and more endangered than ever.

As President John Thrasher alienates Florida State University from segments of the broader Tallahassee, Florida community, a lesson from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is worth considering.