Higher education

Hear excerpts from interviews with Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura. (28 minutes)

Stanley Hauerwas on the necessity of a theological foundation within higher education

Voracious omnitasking, argues English professor Mark Edmundson, makes the lives of his students both highly promising and radically vulnerable to living lives that leave no room for reflection and self-knowledge.

Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”

Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality

Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university

Mark Noll on why Christian intellectual vitality requires a vision for the universality of Christian truth

Bishop Robert Barron explores the misanthropic and inherently unstable anthropology at the heart of the modern university and offers an alternative for human flourishing. (46 minutes)

FROM VOL. 25 George Marsden explores the culture of suspicion in academia toward Christian scholarship and argues for its inclusion as intellectually viable and coherent with regard to reality. (11 minutes)

Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy

In this essay, Reinhard Hütter examines in depth John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University and argues that its insights and prescriptions are urgently relevant to the current status of higher education. (87 minutes)

Edward T. Oakes, S.J. explains why John Henry Newman’s eloquent defense of the nature of university education, The Idea of a University, continues to inspire, challenge, and even frustrate its sympathizers. (24 minutes)

In addressing the state of liberal arts education in the U.S., Gilbert Meilaender raises some core questions and makes some surprising proposals. (28 minutes)

FROM VOL. 10 George Marsden explains how and why American universities became places where religious concerns are excluded. (10 minutes)

FROM VOL. 94 Tim Clydesdale discusses the experience of freshmen year at college, suggesting that by that time students have been effectively inoculated against a love of knowledge. (21 minutes)

FROM VOL. 140 Drawing from Wendell Berry’s works, Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro discuss a vision of higher education that respects a multidimensional notion of place. (23 minutes)

FROM VOL. 38 Alvin Kernan explains sweeping changes in American university education since the 19th century. (11 minutes)

FROM VOL. 142 Perry L. Glanzer and Nathan F. Alleman discuss the fragmentation of modern higher education and why we need theology to unify universities. 26 minutes)

Providence College is a Catholic, Dominican, liberal arts institution of higher education and a community committed to academic excellence in pursuit of the truth, growth in virtue, and service of God and neighbor.

FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)