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Every Catholic and Jesuit university – must reject hollow curriculum
Source: Word on Fire
PART ONE: THE CRISIS AT FORDHAM
A Renaissance humanist once wrote that a citizen must not mourn the decline of one’s own city. All cities decline. If there is anything to mourn, it is that it is one’s unhappy fate to be born when one’s city is in decline.
This counsel seems apt for the intellectual situation at Fordham University these days. Fordham is at a crossroads, a true crisis; it is on the verge of deciding that a core curriculum, rooted in centuries of tradition and custom, time-tested across generations of alumni, is about to be cast aside for something that is truly the triumph of a counterfeit freedom and a narrow technological view of education.
Fordham University has been debating the revision of its core curriculum for nearly three years now. Last academic year, a proposal drafted by a small committee of faculty was rejected by one of the crucial college councils (made up of department chairs and associate chairs) necessary for its approval before it proceeded to a vote of the whole faculty of arts and sciences. This year, a new proposal was drawn up in the fall and is now before the whole faculty of arts and sciences for its approval.
The proposed curriculum is made up of nine “inquiry” requirements, plus a smattering of other distribution requirements. None of the inquiry courses that will satisfy these requirements will belong to a specific academic department. Instead, an interdisciplinary committee will choose what specific courses meet these inquiry requirements.
The proposed core is, in fact, not really a core at all. For these inquiry requirements are really distribution requirements loosely stitched together across different fields of “inquiry,” under the control of no specific departments. A close examination reveals that there is not a single specific course required of all students. Students are not required to take any common course in philosophy, history, literature, or government of any civilization, let alone of Western civilization. No common courses; no common authors; no common texts. Students and faculty will share no common intellectual experience, let alone a single author or text. Students will also not be required to take a foreign language—none at all. So much for globalism. Nor will students be required to take any art history or music course. It’s not even clear if they will be required to take a course in the natural sciences. Philosophy and theology will be cut from two courses to one. This set of “gen ed” requirements, unworthy of a liberal arts college, will not yield any community at all among its students and faculty. It plays into the worst tendencies of the modern university to disintegrate into total plurality and isolation.
PART TWO: THE LOSS OF ETHICAL FOUNDATION
This lack of commonality and grounding will arguably take its heaviest toll when it comes to ethics. Taking general education requirements in “justice” (merely one of multiple options for seminars) without a prior systematic and deep foundation of reflection on the question of “what is the good?” and on the normative ethical theories that follow from this reflection will contribute to the incoherent discussions of ethics that transpire in the public square today. To debate justice, one must first know what the good is. Students will be using terms without really knowing what they mean, a malady that Alasdair MacIntyre famously diagnosed a generation ago. It will be like people using terms such as “neutrino” or “atomic weight” without ever having taken basic science courses, or like students doing algebra without ever having taken arithmetic. There is an order to learning in the sciences and mathematics. So too there is an order to learning ethics. The new proposal cuts out the basic ethics course and thus will send students to debate “justice” with little idea of what the term may mean or of the sophisticated and complex millennia-long debates that have transpired over this very topic.
Furthermore, in the name of freedom for students, the proposed smorgasbord of courses will in fact imprison them in the ignorance of their own culture and civilization, not knowing who they are, where they came from, to what civilization they belong, or of what stories they are a part. Such general education requirements, masquerading as a core curriculum, will produce “hollow men.” Hollow for many reasons—hollow for not knowing where or when they are but hollow also because they will never have engaged in the first task of education: “to know thyself,” to explore the inward caverns that are the human mind and heart.
PART THREE: SOCRATES AND THE SAPIENTIAL MISSION
Socrates found such hollow citizens when he wandered the marketplace of Athens 2,400 years ago. He realized that his fellow citizens were experts in all sorts of technai—technical skills—but they had no idea what it was to be human or what it meant to be rational, what it meant to be free. They had no idea of what justice or courage or any virtue was.
Recognizing his own ignorance, Socrates went on a mission to question his fellow citizens so that they would at least take up the task of pursuing a wisdom greater than their mere technical skills, even greater than what the sophists of his day taught was the highest techne: eloquence in oratory. For the sophists, the purpose of education was success, defined as winning—especially power and money. “Truth” is what wins. Socrates saved ancient Greek education from the technocrats and sophists of his day. Socrates died a martyr in defense of the search for a wisdom that transforms human life and leads it to flourishing and happiness.
This Socratic mission ultimately transformed the whole of classical education in antiquity, and this legacy perdured through the Middle Ages. It became part of Jesuit schools from the very beginning. When St. Ignatius of Loyola approved the first school of the Society in the 1540s at Messina in Italy, his assistant and rector of the first college, Jerome Nadal, set down a course of studies that inscribed the humanities and philosophy at their very core. This core was to serve as the draft for the official and more famous Ratio Studiorum of 1599. It is this Ratio that shaped the whole history of Jesuit education for the next 450 years. It was truly a core and became one of the two or three most influential plans of study in history. It presumes that students need some order to their studies; they need commonality to bring students from many backgrounds and ethnicities together; they need desperately to drink from the well of the liberal arts—literature, math, music, poetry, science, and theater—to be deeply human and deeply free in their decisions as individuals and as citizens. Above all, education ought to be sapiential, not merely technocratic or sophistical. That is to say, education ought to be ordered to seek wisdom about the human and highest things. Jesuit education has, from the beginning, been grounded in a humanism that seeks the glory of God, hidden in the starry skies above and in the human heart within.
Technology without wisdom is killing us. Socrates and his intellectual progeny across the generations understood this; we need a wisdom that surpasses mere technical skill. In the age of nuclear weapons, which can wipe out the human race, and in the age of artificial intelligence, which can replace the human, it is precisely a sapiential education that is needed more than ever. Far from being an antique, it could hardly be timelier or more relevant or more timely. It seeks a wisdom ever ancient, ever new.
PART FOUR: COMMENTARY – THE CRISIS OF THE HOLLOW UNIVERSITY
Introduction: A Crisis of Identity
The debate at Fordham University is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a broader crisis in Catholic and Jesuit higher education. The proposed curriculum—with no common courses, no common texts, no common authors, and no shared intellectual experience—represents a fundamental departure from the tradition that gave birth to the university itself.
The author’s diagnosis is sharp: this curriculum will produce “hollow men.” Students will graduate with technical skills but without wisdom. They will be able to debate “justice” without knowing what the good is. They will be able to use ethical terms without understanding the millennia-long conversation that has shaped those terms.
The Socratic Mission
Socrates was not a sophist. He did not teach for money or for power. He taught for truth. He wandered the marketplace asking questions, not to win arguments, but to expose ignorance and to invite his fellow citizens into the pursuit of wisdom.
The sophists taught that education was about success—winning, power, money. Socrates taught that education was about virtue, about the good life, about the flourishing of the human soul. He died for this conviction.
Catholic and Jesuit universities were founded on the Socratic mission. They were not meant to be trade schools or vocational training centers. They were meant to be communities of learning, ordered toward wisdom, grounded in the liberal arts, and animated by the desire for God.
The Ratio Studiorum
The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599 was one of the most influential educational plans in history. It was built on the conviction that students need order, commonality, and a shared intellectual inheritance. It required the study of humanities, philosophy, theology, and the classics. It was not a smorgasbord of electives; it was a core.
The proposed curriculum at Fordham is the antithesis of the Ratio Studiorum. It is a surrender to the fragmentation of the modern university, where students piece together a degree from disconnected courses, never sharing a common intellectual experience with their peers.
Technology Without Wisdom
The author’s warning is urgent: “Technology without wisdom is killing us.” In an age of nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, we need more than technical skills. We need wisdom about what it means to be human, what it means to be free, what it means to be good.
The liberal arts are not a luxury; they are a necessity. Literature, philosophy, history, theology, art, music – these are not decorative additions to a technical education. They are the very things that make us human. They are the well from which we drink to understand ourselves, our world, and our God.
The Call to Resistance
The article is a call to resistance. The faculty at Fordham – and at every Catholic and Jesuit university – must reject this hollow curriculum. They must defend the core. They must insist that students share a common intellectual inheritance. They must refuse to produce hollow men.
The stakes could not be higher. The future of Catholic higher education – and perhaps the future of the Church’s witness in the world – depends on the answer to the question: will we educate for wisdom or for technique? Will we form souls or train workers?
DECLARATIONS BASED ON THE ARTICLE
I DECLARE that education must be ordered to wisdom, not merely to technical skill!
I DECLARE that the liberal arts are essential to forming fully human persons!
I DECLARE that students need a common core of knowledge to be citizens of a shared civilization!
I DECLARE that ethics without a foundation in the good is incoherent!
I DECLARE that I will resist the fragmentation of the university into isolated specialties!
I DECLARE that I will defend the Ratio Studiorum and the tradition of Jesuit education!
I DECLARE that technology without wisdom is dangerous; we need both!
I DECLARE that I will seek the wisdom that transforms human life and leads to flourishing!
I DECLARE that I will not be a hollow man; I will know myself, my civilization, and my God!
I DECLARE that the Socratic mission – the pursuit of truth – is the heart of authentic education!
PRAYER FOR CATHOLIC EDUCATION
Father, You are the source of all truth and wisdom. You have called the Church to be a witness to Your truth in every age, including in the halls of learning.
We pray for Catholic and Jesuit universities. Give them the courage to resist the trends of the age that would reduce education to technical training. Give them the wisdom to preserve the core, the liberal arts, and the pursuit of wisdom.
We pray for faculty and administrators. Give them clarity of vision and strength of purpose. Let them not be swayed by fashion or fear, but rooted in the tradition that has formed saints and scholars for centuries.
We pray for students. Let them hunger for wisdom, not just for credentials. Let them seek the good, the true, and the beautiful. Let them know themselves, their civilization, and their God.
We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
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