The launch of the University of Austin, Texas (UATX) last week has reignited the simmering conflict over what the left and the right think has gone wrong with American liberal arts education. The left has “deconstructed” (and, in some cases, dismissed) traditional liberal arts as irretrievably biased against nonwhites, women, and sexual and gender minorities. For the right, such education is often seen as irrelevant to earning a living and, at worst, an adversary of traditional American values because of the deconstruction I just mentioned.

What the left and the right share in
common is a skepticism of the liberal arts grounded in a highly instrumental
understanding of the purpose of education. Study is not for its own sake, but for
other goals like social reform or employment. This is a profound and often
unacknowledged shift with ramifications for institutions of higher education,
for students, and for American society.

It was the perceived need to
reinvigorate traditional liberal arts that led to the foundation of UATX. A
significant part of the criticism leveled at this project emanates from the
academic left, which both questions the need for such an institution while also
calling into doubt the motives, integrity, and judgment of the founders. This
is a very unfortunate new front in the nation’s ongoing culture war, and it
represents an effort to extinguish an interesting new model before it has a
chance to take shape. 

To help provide some context to the UATX story, we have developed a transcript of a conversation I had with the new president of the university, Pano Kanelos, who prior to joining UATX, led St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. St. John’s provides a “great books” education centered on the classic works of Western Civilization, and, not surprisingly, this kind of schooling is a key element in the kind of education UATX plans to offer. Our conversation explores why such education is necessary to human flourishing and how it is, against expectation, also surprisingly good career preparation.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full transcript is available here.

Orrell:
Let’s start with you talking about your own life, the influences that brought
you to where you are today, what kind of conclusions you’ve reached about what
actually creates human happiness.

Kanelos: I am one of the least likely
people to have ended up to be a college president. I wasn’t even really
supposed to go to college at all. My family are Greek immigrants. I grew up in
the back of a Greek diner. Neither of my parents were educated, and nobody in
my family had ever been to college at all. I was the oldest in our immediate
family, none of my cousins or anybody. So there weren’t really, kind of,
evident pathways for me, other than my fears for going off to college. But I
somehow stumbled my way into college.

I went to a Jesuit high school in
Phoenix, Arizona. It was a place where everybody was oriented towards college.
And I would say one of the things that really propelled me forward: I had a
couple fantastic English teachers. I really developed a love for literature, a kind
of insatiable appetite for wanting to read more books.

I’ll just share an anecdote to show
you how naive I was.

I went to Northwestern University in
Chicago. My very first week of being there, I was sitting in my dorm room with
my new roommate and we were just chatting. He came from a family that was
pretty privileged, and I was a bit intimidated by him. He looked at me and he
said, “Pano, so what are you going to major in?” I had no idea what he was
talking about. I didn’t know what a major was. I thought you went to college
like you went to high school.

This of course was before you could
look things up on Google so I started asking people as quietly as possible, “So
what are you majoring in?” It dawned on me that, oh, you pick something like a
specialty and then you make your way forward. I was an English major, creative
writing is part of that, which is fantastic. I did Teach for America
immediately after college and taught in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the
very bottom of Texas towards the point on the border, in a very interesting
community there.

And then I went into a graduate
program at Boston University called the University Professors Program, which is
kind of interdisciplinary and in line with somebody like me, who really was
just using graduate school as a platform to read even more books. And they had
this wonderful collection of really amazing, towering figures, which I only
came to appreciate in retrospect. People in the program, faculty included, Elie
Wiesel, Derek Walcott, and two people who became very important in my life, the
poet Geoffrey Hill and the philosopher Roger Scruton.

From there, I did a postdoc at
Stanford, and then onto teaching gigs at the University of San Diego, Loyola in
Chicago. Moved on to be the dean of the Honors College, the Great Books Honors
College at Valparaiso University called Christ College, wonderful program,
great place. And then from there, St. John’s made the totally irrational
decision to hire me as president four years ago, and I’ve been here in
Annapolis since.

The
question that I want to pose to you is, what have you learned? You talked
earlier in this conversation about you discovered the importance of the life of
the mind. What’s the life of the mind, and then why is it important?

Life of the mind is a life that takes very
seriously the self-reflection that others have engaged in, usually through text
and works of art. Human beings are separate from the rest of creation, the rest
of the material universe, in a sense that we can come to know ourselves, but
not entirely.

So a life of the mind is not just a
game. It’s about asking the fundamental human questions and orienting ourselves
around our search for those answers. I think anybody who is thoughtful and
attentive to the world, and attentive to their own place in the world, and who
reads, and who looks around them with curiosity in the world, I think all of
that is life of the mind.

How
does knowing yourself lead to a happy life, as some of the people at St. John’s
might think of happiness?

When I think of happiness, I think of
Aristotle, who defines happiness essentially as fulfilling one’s purpose. So
we’re all imbued with a sort of potential. As we strive to reach that potential
we reach a state of happiness. It’s not a euphoric state. It’s a state of, I
think, feeling fulfilled. I think this does circle around to the life of the
mind. Human beings are creatures of language. Language allows us to perceive
the world in very, very complex, nuanced, and sophisticated ways.

And so as our perception of the world
is amplified, enhanced as we learn more about ourselves and the world around
us, I think we feel like we’re doing what human beings have been engineered,
designed — I don’t know what the right word is — to do. And I think it is very,
very gratifying.

I
want you to talk to us about St. John’s College, give us its origin story and
what it’s designed to do. How does it go about achieving its purpose?

So St. John’s actually has, I think,
two origin stories. There’s two St. John’s. There’s the one that spans most of
the history of the college, and then one that started more recently. The college
was originally founded in 1696, so it’s the third oldest college in the country
after Harvard and William and Mary. And it was founded as a conventional,
colonial liberal arts institution, first called the King William School. But as
you might imagine, towards the end of the 18th century, naming things after
British monarchs was less popular than it had originally been so the name was
changed to St. John’s. And so for most of the college’s history it’s been one
among many of the, sort of, archetypal, East Coast, traditional liberal arts
institutions.

But in the early 20th century, the
college took a turn. In 1937, the college had been on financial rocks at many
points throughout its history. Most colleges can say that. And there was sort
of an existential crisis in the 1930s between the wars. The originators of the
new program of instruction were two fellows named Scott Buchanan and
Stringfellow Barr. They decided that it would be revolutionary to move from
what had been a relatively conventional program of study that you would find in
almost any college to a program that exclusively focused on about 200 of the
Great Books of the Western tradition, studied by all the students collectively
in the same order over a period of four years.

And so at that time the new program
began, and it was mapped out as a study from the ancient world to the modern
world, integrated program of literature, philosophy, math, science, music,
languages, and very ambitious. At that time there was a general movement
towards Great Books that was meant to democratize elite education. The idea was
that the authors that had formed the canon of the Western tradition should not
be the exclusive province of families who could send off young sons to elite
prep schools, but that they should be the inheritance of everybody.

So what if we created this curriculum
and made it available to everybody? And for 80-ish years we have been
conducting what we call the “new program.” It’s stayed roughly the same. Every
student comes in; there are no majors. Everybody follows the same course of
study. The books — there is some change over time of the books. Some books make
their way onto the program; some are taken off. But it’s, I would say, glacial
in terms of change.

All the students share the same
material, same discussions, same sequence of study. What’s even more
extraordinary about it is that our faculty come to us with PhDs from all
different backgrounds, but they all have to teach all the texts in the program
over the course of their career. So they, over the course of their teaching
career, exemplify the comprehensive approach to the program that we want our
students to undertake. It’s really unlike anything you’d find anywhere else.

What’s
the product, do you think, the student product for getting people graduating
from St. John’s? Since they’re not being equipped for a technical field,
they’re not being equipped as experts in history, or philosophy, or some
subject matter?

And one of the things I always say is,
there’s no such thing as a liberal art. There are only liberal arts. So to be
educated in liberal arts means you have to be educated comprehensively across
disciplines.

In studying mathematics, in studying
music, studying ancient languages, modern languages, you come to understand the
world and the human condition through a kind of prism, through different
lenses, different angles, all aiming at the same thing, which is
self-understanding, but coming at it from different angles. And what you find
is those things start to cross over and converge. I’ll give an example.

We study biology in the natural
sciences extensively. The very first thing we have our students do when they
begin their study of the natural world of biology is we don’t open a textbook.
There’s no, sort of, quiz about anatomy or anything like that. We send them
outside. It happens to be a time of year where the wonderful magnolia trees we
have on campus are in blossom. And we have them each sit apart from each other
with a sketchbook and draw a magnolia, focus on the plant, on the living
organism. And they have to do it for, like, an hour.

And what they learn is, through
intensive observation of a natural organism, they start to ask questions. Why
is it shaped this way? What about its coloration? What about the different
textures on its surface? What about the magnolia’s position relative to the
rest of the natural world around it? And a whole series of questions arises
from that. So they return to the classroom and they start sharing the questions
that they have, and start thinking about those questions.

What they’re essentially doing is
going back to what natural philosopher has always done: observe, ask questions,
and then try to figure the answers. So we don’t begin with the answers, right,
which we get in a textbook. We begin with the process of questioning and then
the process of trying to teach oneself how to answer the question. That’s what
you get from a St. John’s education: intense habits that ask fundamental
questions about the world and then the ability to find a way to answer those
questions, to use one’s own native resources, one’s own intellect, to answer
questions and solve problems.

I can’t imagine that there’s any
employer out there in the world that doesn’t want a person who has been trained
to identify problems and use their own resources to solve those problems, all
right? I actually think when you study things within the disciplines it can be
debilitating over time. I always say that a liberal arts education is not about
the transfer of information but about transformation. And so what we’re doing
at St. John’s is we’re transforming young people into seekers of knowledge with
the capacity to find the thing they’re looking for.

Is
that something St. John’s teaches people to do? Or does it draw people who are
already predisposed to that kind of learning and that kind of an approach to
life?

I think it’s a both/and. Students understand
that they are embarking upon an education that’s unconventional and that is
book-centered. So we tend to draw students who have a natural inclination to
seek out books. Now in terms of stepping back, pausing, and thinking about
questions, those are habits that we purposefully form here.

Customarily our classes begin with an
opening question. So the students will do the reading, prepare for class, come
in, and it’s usually the tutor but sometimes a student who’s tasked with an
opening question. They’ll just pose a question that comes out of the reading.
Sometimes it’s a simple question, sometimes it’s complex, sometimes it’s
nuanced. But it could be something like we just finished reading the middle
section of Machiavelli’s Prince.
Machiavelli suggests that the ends justify the means. Is he right?

There are sometimes these prolonged
silences. And you’re right, under any other circumstances you would think the
students were unprepared. But what they’re doing is processing. One of the
greatest sins at St. John’s is to speak in a less than thoughtful way, to just
speak to be heard. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to formulate a
response, and most of them are not eager to be the first one to speak. Because
what they really want to do is hear what other people have to say. They want to
listen and then respond to that.

We
have such a performative educational culture of people needing to be right and
to gain the affirmation of the authority figure in a classroom. And at St.
John’s, I think you’re pushing against a deeply entrenched culture. How long
does it take students to get into a rhythm?

By sophomore year it’s almost like
you’re at a different institution. Freshman year, they tend to be eager and they
tend to bring with them the habits that they’ve acquired elsewhere, the ones
you described. It takes, kind of, going back to knowing ourselves. To be able
to be quiet takes a degree of self-confidence, right? I mean, why do we speak
out and try to receive the approval of our authority figures? It’s because we
need assurance that we’re okay, that we’re not dumb, that we’re smart.

Where
do they wind up after they leave St. John’s?

A significant number of them do end up
doing graduate studies. They’re not all going to become PhDs in philosophy.
Many of them are going into the sciences. A significant number are going into
tech. A significant number are going into medicine, some into business. They go
in every direction.

A lot of our students go into education
in one form or another, not surprisingly. But then we have these, sort of,
clusters of students in very unexpected places. The most famous winemaker in
Napa Valley is a graduate of St. John’s College. People joke out there that the
two most important schools for winemakers are UC Davis and St. John’s College,
and I don’t think they’re wrong.

There aren’t too many significant
patterns, I would say. What most of them are looking for is careers where
learning can continue to happen. I would say that’s a trend that I see.

I
want to ask you about the pushback that we’ve seen against college
bachelor-level study and education over the last couple years. “We don’t need
more philosophers. We need plumbers; we need electricians; we need welders; we
need people who work with robots in factories to build things.” How do you
react when you hear that and you’re leading a college where you’re doing the
opposite?

I think there’s two things that prompt
the questioning of the value of the four-year college degree. The first is, if
you treat higher education simply as something instrumental, it makes a heck of
a lot of sense to try and find an end around a four-year education. It’s
expensive. It’s time consuming.

The other is a fault of the system
itself, of higher education. Four-year degrees have essentially come to be what
I call 120 credit delivery systems. The whole point is you’re, kind of, racking
up this abstract thing called college credit that’s attached to an assortment
of classes that mostly don’t add up together to anything in particular. At
least half of the credits most students take are general electives that are
disconnected from one another, general education requirements, one-off classes.
Things are done buffet-style. And even within majors, sometimes the pathways
aren’t very clear.

The disconnectedness of higher
education, the fact that it’s not holistic in its approach, where there’s a sequence
of coursework that is adding up to something greater than the sum of its parts —
I think that’s very frustrating to a lot of students. I think a lot of students
feel like they’re spinning their wheels taking classes that are just checking
boxes.

I would say that I think four-year
education should be questioned. I don’t really understand why college is four
years, to be honest with you. It’s a convention. Think of it this way, we look
at graduate programs that are perfectly comfortable with graduate programs
having different lengths. You do three years for a law degree but eight years
for a medical specialty. One year or two years for an MBA. The length of those
programs is dictated by the course of study and what it is that one needs to
encounter. Why is every bachelor’s degree essentially the same shape and size?
I don’t know.

Do
you think there isn’t an answer to that question? How did it evolve into a four-year
program?

I think it is a convention here
roughly mirroring the four-year convention of the high school years.

We have this elastic sense of college. You show up. You hang out. You explore. You figure out what a major means, and then you hone in on what you’re going to do. It’s very expensive to do that. It’s very expensive. If we were to shorten our bachelor degrees by a single year, so if we made three years the standard, we would lower the cost of higher education by at least 50 percent? Twenty-five percent of that would just simply be the cost of that fourth year, tuition and otherwise, and then the opportunity cost in there of not being employed that year would be added back into the cost of education.

We would solve the financial crisis of
higher education in one fell swoop if we could convince our accreditors, the
whole system to certify three-year college degrees, unless they’re justified. I
mean, there are programs, for example, engineering, or maybe nursing, where
four years is really critical. I think four years at St. John’s is critical. We
use every second of that time very purposefully. But I think it’s something to
take seriously.

You’ve
been at St. John’s for four years and you’ve done some really remarkable things.
But you’re moving on. I’d like to know where you’re going and what you’re
doing. What are you trying to create?

I’ve been asked to found a new university, and that will be near Austin, Texas. And the reason for this institution is to solve some of the problems we’ve been talking about, the questions of the right scope of higher education, how one combines all the benefits of a liberal arts education towards professional life in the modern world. And also to try and move us back towards a center in higher education where we recommit to principles of freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience and model those critical freedoms as best as we can.

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