Category: Education

Screwtape Proposes a Hellish Education

  

I’ve been scouring C. S. Lewis’s essays for pertinent comments for the Academic Roundtable in which I will be participating at the upcoming summer Lewis Foundation conference. This is work? Not really. More like fun. In the process of my scouring, I reread his “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” a followup to the fabulously successful book, The Screwtape Letters, that put Lewis on the literary map for Americans. As a lifelong educator, just now completing my 27th year of teaching at… Read more »

Lewis: On Bandwagons & Integrity

  

In Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis takes aim at people who jump on bandwagons for their own personal benefit. In a chapter he titled “Connivance,” he writes of those in ancient Judea “who fleeced their fellow-countrymen to get money for the occupying power in return for a fat percentage” of the take. He was, frankly, astounded by the attitude he witnessed in one young man who had studied at Oxford. The man had been an avowed socialist during… Read more »

Chambers: Higher Education & Despair

  

What led Whittaker Chambers to become a communist? His university education was one source, not because it taught him communism per se, but because it offered nothing to believe in. Faced with a choice between nihilism and communism, he chose the latter. Here’s an excerpt from my new book that I hope you will find enlightening with respect to the decline of higher education. Chambers chose to attend Columbia University, close enough to home that he could save money by… Read more »

Campus Insane Asylums

  

On the higher education front, welcome back to the 1960s. Well, sort of. Yes, the latest round of protests from people with great experience in the world (aged 18-22) isn’t quite what it once was. Not that I cared for the 1960s protests, you understand. I was in college at the time myself. But this new protest movement from those who think they know everything is even more self-centered than the previous one. It’s all aided and abetted by those… Read more »

A Toxic Campus Environment

  

This new outbreak of campus unrest is more than slightly reminiscent of the turbulent period between 1964-1973, which coincided with the Vietnam War. Along with the war protests, however, we also experienced a major shift in culture. Traditional morality based on Christian faith was largely jettisoned on campuses, and in the intervening years, hostility to Biblical faith and morality has only increased. While the ostensible rationale for the current unrest is racial, what we are seeing is a bandwagon effect… Read more »

What People Don’t Know

  

Teaching about Andrew Jackson and his faith in the common people the other day, I noted another of my Snyderian truisms: “Public opinion polls are not the fount of all wisdom.” I mentioned to my class that it really would be nice if voters had some concept of how our government was set up in the Constitution and what limitations there are on the federal government’s authority before allowing them to vote. Of course, it would be rather unwieldy to… Read more »

In Support of Christian Higher Ed

  

I remember my one experience teaching at a public university, which will go unnamed. I was an adjunct there for at least three semesters and thoroughly enjoyed the classes I taught. Student evaluations at the end of each semester were high, and it was my first taste of college-level teaching, prior to getting my first full-time position. I recall fondly one student who walked out to the car with me after the last class session one time, telling me that… Read more »