The Blackboard

Preserving moral authority in schools would truly be something to cheer about.

The frictionless existence we were promised, one that freed us from slavish obedience to place and tradition and family bonds, turns out to be one in which we amorphously float about in a gelid atmosphere longing for the halcyon days of family farms and quaint communities.

The aim is to get young people, of all backgrounds and races, on their feet with as little fuss and expense as we can, regardless of whether their families can afford the usurious colleges, and by doing so, to empower families that are richer in brains and in common moral virtues than in money or power.

Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under...

The imagined student’s intentions are honorable: to promote racial justice. But when the conversation begins, she has already set herself against the teacher and the course. The task of the teacher is to encourage her pursuit of justice while showing that the Great Books are not enemies, but allies. If this can be done, the student and teacher may even realize the same about each other.

As we approach the new academic year, we, like Sisyphus, are condemned to roll the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down. However, this does not have to be a meaningless task – we can escape the absurdity of our condition. We give ourselves meaning by following either the dogmatist, the activist, or the healer.

Montás deserves great credit for illuminating the perverse priorities of American higher education throughout Rescuing Socrates. It must be admitted, however, that the book suffers from occasional missteps. A fuller engagement with the history of the liberal arts than Montás musters would have enriched the book.

The best educators (and the best educational institutions) will neither embrace nor eschew the electronic technologies that commercial forces wish to prevail in higher education; rather they will assess each one, in light of both its assets and its liabilities, employing those that are superior to other tools, while not employing those that are not.

The intrusion of AI-generated content into the university sphere is a strange kind of judgement, even an old-style apocalypse, whose real gift is neither its productive power nor the opportunity it provides to declare one’s Luddite bona fides. ChatGPT is, both more simply and more profoundly, a revelation.

The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students, they may even say I’m boring.