Marymount University announced the axing of English and Theology majors last year. The move was notable because it showed that University administration’s ability to talk out one side of its mouth about how “the coursework — particularly in the humanities — is central to our mission and identity as a Catholic university,” all while attacking that same coursework, mission, and identity. What sits more poorly with me is the destruction of theology at a Catholic institution of higher education. A university is, at its very core, an institution claiming a special relationship with truth. Whether it spreads, teaches, discovers, or otherwise verbs truth, the centrality of the relationship is shown by America’s oldest university’s motto- Veritas. A Catholic university necessarily claims that truth can be found in theology. Therefore, for a Catholic university to decenter theology is for it to decenter the relationship with truth. It either ceases to be a university or it ceases to be Catholic.
I do not run the Opinion Section as a democracy. I do not ask my writers to contort themselves into representing sides of a debate with which they do not identify, and I do not seek to adjust the section so as to be representative of our readership. Thus, it would be hypocritical for me to expect a national magazine to represent America.
While maintaining my principles, that The Atlantic is justified in publishing opinions in whatever proportions they see fit, I feel compelled to note that their recent Trump coverage is rather unrepresentative of America.
Recently, the magazine “of no party or clique” published a collection of essays on the prompt “If Trump Wins.” The project is magnificent in scope and scale, including writers whom I, every day, seek to emulate in my own work. It is the tour de force of a giant in American letters. And, every single one of the twenty-four essays predicts dire consequences if Trump wins.
I must repeat myself. The Atlantic can publish whatever it wants, by whoever it chooses. Furthermore, had the magazine condescended to ask my contribution to the project, I would not have represented the views of the tens of millions of Trump supporters. They must look elsewhere for their champion. All I am saying is that the reader of The Atlantic might be better informed and more meaningfully entertained than the average Truth Mobile user, but they will be no less ensconced in an ideological bubble.
Can students discriminate? Talk to a humanities professor and, sooner rather than later, you will hear some version of the refrain, “I can no longer assign that text because students won’t read it.” The modern student’s inability to handle what I’m going to call ‘difficult’ texts is sometimes ascribed to shortened attention spans (Tik Tok), nonacademic concerns (the stress of Covid, climate change, etc.), or a lack of connection to the author (too white, too dead, etc.). I would like to add my own hypothesis to this list.
It goes as follows: the modern student resists reading difficult texts because they were not taught to discriminate, and since they lack the discriminatory ability to separate good from bad, great and worthy from despicable and unworthy, and venerable from outdated, the modern student will, when confronted with a difficult text, be unable to determine whether that text is worth the effort of understanding, and, should they choose not to expend that effort, will label the text hard, boring, irrelevant, or some other derogation, dispiriting the professor who assigned the text in the first place.
Why, though, would the modern student be unable to discriminate when their predecessors could? Since our strawman humanities professor assigned the text successfully in the past, we must assume that something has changed with the students. This leads to my second hypothesis: pedagogical changes in the K-12 system have highlighted the social virtues of texts at the expense of their intrinsic value, and since students were never taught to identify the intrinsic value of texts, they can no longer do so; they cannot discriminate between texts. Instead of seeing how a work influenced later ideas, was written beautifully or speaks to some universal truth of human nature, the modern student was taught to identify how the text relates to the supposedly immutable mores of today. Does the text, through the subject or author, contribute to the representation of the unrepresented? Does the text advance the position of the oppressed? Does the text speak to a societal condition? Does it present a remedy to that condition?
All of these questions can be asked without asking if the text was good. Thus, when the modern student, in a liberal arts environment, is asked to read a text ‘merely’ because it is good, they are unable to rely on their own taste to see if their effort is warranted. Instead, they run the text through the framework provided by their K-12 education.
Let us use Blake’s Milton as an example. Here we have a straight, dead, white Englishman writing about another straight, dead, white Englishman. No representation of the unrepresented here. Milton also does not address the oppressed, except to the extent that all mankind is oppressed by the supposed twins, demonic and Athenian. As for societal conditions, you will need a better student than me to articulate that.
Having exhausted their education, the modern student will find Milton without value. It is not because the modern student is lazy or stupid that they make such a judgment, but because they have done what they were trained to do. Then, they will tell their professor, in their limited vocabulary, that they found Blake “hard and boring and irrelevant.” The professor, mindful of feedback, will strike the text from their syllabus.
