I’m back from viewing some liberal arts colleges with my college-bound son, and appropriately, I’ve learned some things. For instance, buildings designed according to an acronym called LEED are all the rage in academia. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and it is a Green building rating system that the all the college kids giving the tours think is pretty cool and cutting edge. If you design your structure with enough Green points — water conservation, energy efficiency, “indoor environmental quality,” etc. — then it can be building registered as one of these and you earn extra brownie points for being an evolved organization concerned for the planet.
Some buildings only rate the Certified standing, but others can reach Silver, Gold, or Platinum status. There are cute water runoff systems for roofs, for example, that feed into underground irrigation for those velvet lawns that, however pretty, would otherwise evoke a lot of guilt over water consumption. Different things are also done with glass walls and windows, including coming up with ways of treating it to discourage birds from hurling themselves into it.
So Green living is a passionate but seemingly not very controversial issue on college campuses. It’s a safe topic. It’s an acknowledged Good.
And as we know, diversity is another unarguable good. Every college stressed its love of diversity, desire for more diversity, and efforts to attain such diversity — whether cultural, geographical, racial, sexual, etc. There wasn’t, however, much mention of political or religious diversity — actually, there was almost no mention of religion at all, even as a campus activity.
None of this is all that surprising. Colleges — especially the small liberal arts kind — have been tending the grounds of liberal public opinion for many decades. Besides, once you get past the institutional spokespeople, a little more “diversity” of opinion is likely to pop up in the student population.
Still, it is striking what academia now chooses to label as Truth. Barring a small minority of colleges consciously bucking the trend, institutions of higher learning nowadays see their mission as teaching facts, methods, processes, ways of uncovering and analyzing information, ways of forming and testing scientific hypotheses, ways of approaching texts, documents, artifacts, etc. But they’ve definitively pulled back from pronouncing themselves to be in the business of passing on truth or imparting wisdom. Philosophy is taught as either history (how did Plato, Socrates, etc. tackle the big questions?) or as linguistic acrobatics performed in a mental blind alley. Theology doesn’t exist outside of denominational colleges, and most of those don’t hold it up as a light to illumine every other subject.
That brings us back to diversity, because without a secure sense that truth exists and is at least partly knowable, nothing holds the individual subject matters together. “Things fall apart/ The center does not hold.” Students majoring in different subjects have little in common academically. But that’s okay. In addition to the standard conversational topics of love, gossip, sports, news, weather, music, movies, and clothes, today’s students can share a common moral and intellectual commitment to the truths of LEED and the value of diversity.
Human beings have not completely evolved out of the habit of asking ultimate questions. They still think sometimes of the big ones — what’s life all about? What happens when it’s over? How do I lead a good life? Is there a God and what can I know about him? They still talk about good and evil. (Though the whole moral absolute thing is much scarier and more foreign to a generation that grew up hearing that each of us decides on his own personal truth. And Muslim terrorists haven’t helped matters by giving religious certitude a bad name.) Rational beings with immortal souls have such questions built-in.
The difference today is that students often flounder through those profound conversations without the necessary logical and philosophical tools and historical grounding needed to get somewhere. They’re not even sure there’s a somewhere to get to. Institutions of higher learning believe they teach their students how to think, but mostly they are devising ingenious mind games to help pass the time pleasantly on the journey through life. Meanwhile, some of their students would like to know where we are going.
Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.
