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The End of Higher Education

Over the summer I took my oldest son on his first set of college visits.  All of my emotions about sending him off to school were mixed with the analytical interests of an educator.  I want to see him end up at a school that is able to nurture his gifts, skills, and interests and to help him direct those toward some set of goods. So I was asking questions like, what do these schools offer? what sets them apart? what is their mission? what kind of student do they hope to produce? and, of course, can we afford this?

The_Tower,_University_of_Texas_at_Austin_(ca_1980) (1)
The Tower, University of Texas at Austin (ca 1980) Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0

My own personal questions parallel in many ways a larger national conversation about higher education.  The question of access has, thankfully, come front and center with President Obama’s push for public funding of at least a portion of a community college education.  And while access may be the most important public policy issue, I am interested in pressing the question a bit further to ask, “access to what?”  What is it that we are offering in higher education and what value does this have for students and for the public good?
Commentators and educators have been debating the heart of higher education since the early days of this country (Franklin and Jefferson had decidedly different ideas as Michael Roth points out in Beyond the University), but recent years have brought an onslaught of debate.  Each of the various ways of shaping an answer to “access to what?” seem to coalesce around a dichotomy: is higher education meant to prepare workers for the economy or is it meant to form minds for personal flourishing and democratic responsibility?  Whether the contrast is drawn between “the market model vs. the socratic model” or “utility vs. utopia” or “human capital vs. habits of learning” the underlying question is the same.  While one view has the advantage of sounding more noble, the other certainly appears more practical.
Into this conversation, seminaries might inject a new question and a new option. When Jesus exhorts us to “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness” and then promises that all the other things needed “will be given to you as well” (Matt 6:33), he asks us to attend first to ends: what is the goal which we will pursue above all else?  This question of ends has largely dropped out of the debate on higher education, because lacking shared agreement on good ends we default to means.
Could we reignite a conversation about ends, not just in seminaries, where there can be some presumed agreement, but in higher education as a whole?  The question is really whether or not we are preparing students to think about the purposes to which they will direct all of their learning and formation (whether technical job skills, intellectual habits, or character traits).  Will they know not just how to do a job or how to participate in democracy but how to order human life toward God’s reign, or to use Wendell Berry’s term (which is probably more amenable to the modern university) how to participate in the “great economy” of human and non-human flourishing?
We may turn out students with remarkable technical skills, but if we have not helped them think about whether to use those skills to hack computers or to cure disease then we have failed them.
How would you name the ends to which you put your efforts?  Have you become intentional about those ends?  What helped you learn to ask those questions?  How might the church contribute to a conversation aiming to reconnect means and ends?
 
Scott-Bader-SayeScott Bader-Saye (@ScottBaderSaye) serves as academic dean and holds the Helen and Everett H. Jones Chair in Christian Ethics and Moral Theology at Seminary of the Southwest. He joined the faculty in 2009 after teaching for twelve years at the University of Scranton, a Jesuit university in Scranton, PA. His academic interests include political theology, sexual ethics, ecology/economy, and Jewish/Christian/Muslim dialogue.

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