True Learning Starts With Real Mentorship

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | December 21, 2020 | Shannon Watkins

[karpov]

There’s a chasm between the purpose of a liberal arts education and how many colleges and universities actually operate. Throughout academia, excessive value is placed on efficiency, research publications, and prestige—things that are, at best, ancillary to a liberal education’s central purpose of growing in wisdom and pursuing truth.

Consequently, instead of focusing on nurturing students’ intellectual and moral development, much of the modern academy functions as a business that sells a product (credentials) to consumers (students), with professors dedicating most of their time to pursuing their own narrow research interests.

Many professors are content with this arrangement. And why wouldn’t they be?

Higher education’s current structure doesn’t incentivize professors to be excellent and attentive teachers. Instead, academics’ job stability and professional prestige is much more dependent on producing a steady output of “original” research than on mentoring students—no matter how obscure or arcane their subject of inquiry might be.

Some professors, however, prefer academic settings that prioritize teaching over research. One such professor is Zena Hitz, a classical philosopher at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. She is the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, which came out in May 2020.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

St. John's College is one of the few colleges left which celebrate what is derisively referred to by the Left as Dead White Men—totally politically incorrect and thriving.