CV NEWS FEED // After a commencement season overshadowed by protests and debates over the war in Gaza, leading liberal arts education experts shared with CatholicVote what they believe is the true purpose of a university.
On April 17, Columbia University students set up a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” igniting a wave of similar heated protests at universities across the country in an effort to pressure their respective institutions to divest from companies connected to or supporting Israel during the humanitarian crisis among civilians in Gaza.
According to an Axios report last updated on May 10, law enforcement arrested over 2,950 people at pro-Palestine protests and encampments on at least 61 U.S. campuses since mid-April. Nearly 300 of those arrested were Columbia students.
Over 130 universities experienced encampments or “sit-ins,” the report noted, including Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and other notable Ivy League schools.
Columbia’s protests culminated in riot police storming the university’s campus to clear protestors on April 30 after student activists defied threats of expulsion and took over an entire academic building, barricading its entrance and hanging a “Free Palestine” banner from the window.
Columbia canceled its university-wide commencement ceremony a week later.
But what about the universities whose students did not participate in politically charged activism? What can be said of them?
Hillsdale College
“We haven’t seen protests at Hillsdale College because, as a liberal arts school, we have kept sight of the purpose of a college,” Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn said in a statement emailed to CatholicVote.
“A college is not a place to go and try to change the world,” Arnn added. “It’s a place to go to understand the world.”
A nonsectarian Christian institution, Hillsdale is renowned for its rigorous, traditional liberal arts curriculum.
Notably, the college emphasizes in its mission the value of individual merit over “the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity,” which “judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles.”
Responding to the dramatic and sometimes violent climax of the pro-Palestine protests seen elsewhere – particularly among Ivy Leagues – Arnn stated that he was not surprised.
“At some of these schools, the professors preach social activism, so they shouldn’t be astonished when the students go to war with each other over activist causes,” he explained:
College administrators are letting these 18- to 21-year-olds try to take over the world instead of helping them learn about it. It’s no wonder they are so quick to cancel classes—they might as well be out on the barricades.
Wyoming Catholic College
Wyoming Catholic College President Kyle Washut told CatholicVote in an email interview that there is a “fundamental” explanation for why his students have not mobilized themselves for controversial activist causes on campus.
“Many professors and consultants across America believe that the purpose of education, but especially college education, is to teach political activism,” Washut explained. “At Wyoming Catholic College, we reject that premise. We believe that an undergraduate education is for the sake of eliciting human excellences—moral, intellectual, and spiritual—in the students.”
An education, Washut insisted, should be “for its own sake.”
Washut noted that while he hopes the education his students receive motivates them to become leaders in the society they enter, “we never mistake the good of sharing this education with the idea that this education is a political activist bootcamp.”
“As a result, our students do not think their vocation as students is to engage in activism,” he observed. “Rather it is to study and focus on growth in human excellence, knowing that an investment in such study during these four years will pay incredibly rich dividends to themselves and to society afterwards.”
As pupils of “what the Catholic Church calls perennial philosophy,” Wyoming Catholic students enjoy a particular advantage as far as the framework they are given to analyze complex issues such as the Israel-Hamas war, Washut says.
Rather than teaching students to think “first and foremost as a member of a tribe or of a given ideology,” Washut explained, “we strive to help them [think] in virtue of the fundamental principles of justice.”
He continued:
This means that even though our students trend conservative, they are more likely to appreciate the nuance around the issue: both in terms of recognizing the evil of the terrorist attacks of Hamas, while also being attuned especially to the plight of the Palestinian Christians and other innocents caught in the middle of this war.
Wyoming Catholic’s Eastern Christian chapel features a shrine dedicated to Our Lady, Help of Persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, thanks to the ministry of Fr. Benedict Kiely at Nazarene.org.
Spiritual communion with Christians in the Middle East, “alongside [a] principle habit of thinking,” is the combination that Washut says has prevented students from engaging in “one-sided caricatures of political issues.”
This phenomenon, he says, is a “typical fruit of education.”
When asked whether he thinks it is “worth it” anymore to send students to prestigious universities like Columbia, Harvard, or Yale, Washut replied: “No.” At least not for undergraduate studies, he clarified, noting that undergraduate studies should be about “authentic human formation.”
Washut reflected that many students who participated in pro-Palestine activism did so in an attempt “to break out of mere classroom indoctrination and the country club experience that characterizes so much of higher education.”
“You are trying to engage in reality,” Washut said, addressing student activists: “You are protesting because you know deep down that there is something inauthentic about your institution of higher education […] By all means, keep this zeal for justice!”
Washut further encouraged students to nurture the desire to embody the ideals they study, but to keep in mind that they are “vulnerable to manipulation” by their institutions. Rather than exhibiting this zeal through violent campus protests, Washut advised students to “come and study what justice is,” and to become immersed in reality rather than ideology.
“Flee the schools that have let you down; pursue real formation,” he continued: “And rightly order the passionate yearning for truth and justice that is being twisted in the service of others’ agendas.”
American universities have revealed themselves to be more concerned with the nurturing of their “absurdly large endowments” than with the formation of their undergraduates, Washut argued.
“Over a hundred years ago, Americans felt that their institutions of higher education were failing them, and they pooled resources to found a new wave of institutions,” he concluded. “Now is the time to do that again.”
CLT Founder Jeremy Wayne Tate
Classical Learning Test (CLT) Founder Jeremy Wayne Tate frequently hails the fruits of classical education, the beauty of traditional European architecture, and the cursive handwriting of famous past authors who contributed to the Western canon such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, and Miguel de Cervantes.
On the day Columbia University announced the cancellation of its commencement ceremony, Tate wrote on X (formerly Twitter):
Headlines: Columbia University cancels main graduation ceremony after weeks of pro-Palestinian protests.
Translation: Administrators at Columbia University finally admit that America hating students are now in complete control.
— Jeremy Wayne Tate (@JeremyTate41) May 6, 2024Headlines: Columbia University cancels main graduation ceremony after weeks of pro-Palestinian protests.
Translation: Administrators at Columbia University finally admit that America hating students are now in complete control.
What happened at Columbia, Tate told CatholicVote in a phone interview, is without excuse.
“There should not be instances in which it’s okay for kids to take hammers to university windows and to use violence and intimidation,” he said. “We need to have clear limits, and we need actual adults to enforce policies when they are broken.”
Columbia’s move to cancel its commencement ceremony “clearly sends a signal to these kinds of agitators that what they’re doing is working,” Tate said, adding that since the university “bowed to the mob,” it can expect similar antics from its students in the future.
When asked what he believes is behind the rise in violence and division over activist causes on university campuses, Tate said two main issues are at play.
On the one hand, modern universities have failed to preserve and pass down Western intellectual tradition, he said. On the other hand, Generation Z students, who are the first to grow up with the iPhone, have been inundated with the ills of social media.
“Gen Z is inherently very paranoid, and very anxious,” he pointed out, asserting that the time Gen Z students have spent as children and teenagers on smartphones, interacting with each other on social media, has resulted in a loss of ability to engage with people who have opposing views.
However, there are universities in the U.S. whose students are able to successfully carry out these kinds of conversations respectfully while remaining secure in their viewpoints, Tate observed.
He cited St. John’s College as an example. The highly regarded Great Books college has no majors, he notes, and the curriculum constitutes a deep dive into the Western intellectual tradition.
“They’ve got lefties, they’ve got conservatives, they’ve got Jews, atheists, Catholics, and Muslims—they’ve got everybody,” he noted. “And they’re learning to speak well, and to listen well; and to consider the open exchange of ideas that the anxious generation has never been exposed to.”
It used to be, Tate remarked, that the “fundamental purpose of university” was to preserve and pass down truth from generation to generation. Instead, universities have begun “selling credentialism.”
The solution to counteract this “breakdown” of the American education system, Tate says, is for the Church to reclaim its former prominence in the intellectual sphere.
“For 1500 years, Christians, the Catholic Church were the intellectual authority of the world—we created the universities, and we created the schools,” he noted.
Ultimately, “there’s no center to hold” the modern situation regarding academia, he said.
“I think that we should be completely unsurprised that we are seeing this kind of collapse,” Tate said, adding: “And I think it’s a time where Christians can hopefully reestablish themselves.”
Until then, Tate said that when evaluating potential hires for his own company, “I’ll take a Benedictine graduate any day of the week, over a Brown, Harvard or Yale Graduate.”
Benedictine College
For his part, Dr. Edward Mulholland, Sheridan Chair of Classics at Benedictine College, responded to a request for comment on the recent rise of political activism in modern universities, quipping:
The type of protest that uses force and refuses discussion or reasoned debate is exactly what universities were founded to replace. There is nothing more antithetical to the true spirit of a university.
