Excerpt from
"The Essential College"
by Bruce Haywood

PREFACE

In the early spring of 2004, on a visit to Lake Forest, Illinois, I drove past the campus of a private college. It was like many another I had seen over the years: a few handsome brick buildings set among towering trees, trimmed lawns, a serene oasis in a bustling world. I slowed to look at the campus, sadly and more closely than I would otherwise have done, for I had read in the Chicago Tribune just a few days before that the college would close its doors forever at the end of the academic year. Neither its founding church nor its meager endowment was able any longer to keep it alive.

Because I have spent my professional life working for and with private colleges, the death of one comes close to being like the loss of a relative, personally affecting and a reminder of the weakened conditions of others in the family. Colleges of that kind, often known only to their relatively few graduates, who yet loved their alma mater passionately and gratefully, are increasingly threatened by the ever growing system of public universities and community colleges, where tax dollars allow tuition fees at a fraction of the rate the private colleges must charge.

But no less a threat to the private college exists in the fall from favor of liberal education. Once the accepted mode of American undergraduate education, in colleges and universities alike, the study of the liberal arts can today barely hold its own in institutions where the immediately practical, pre-professional studies take pride of place. Apart from a small number of very heavily endowed colleges, virtually every liberal arts college in the country must wonder whether it can survive the next fifty years in a society which seems less and less to understand its need for the college’s work.

In the chapters which follow I shall describe the factors which have brought the liberal arts colleges to their present unhappy state, writing first, so as to put a human face on those developments, of my experience at Kenyon College, where for nearly 30 years I witnessed at first hand changes which mirror those of nearly all similar colleges in that period. My narrative will tell of my discovery, as an immigrant from England, of liberal education and that uniquely American institution, the liberal arts college.

Underlying all I write will be the question which I began to shape nearly sixty years ago, in the wreck of Hitler’s Germany: what is the relationship of education and morality? That question, central to my life, informs this book. It sets for me the poles of the amoral “pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,” the mode of the contemporary American university, and the moral purpose of liberal education as I came to know in my first years at Kenyon. I shall write of vision and leadership, as well as their absence, of the threat of financial disaster, of the struggle to maintain a traditional character in the face of radical changes and new assumptions about the purpose of higher education. Inevitably, some parts of my narrative will seem like a lament for something that has been lost, but I shall write finally of my hope that trustees, presidents and faculty members of some colleges can be convinced, while there is still time, that liberal education is so vital to the future of the Republic that they will seek to preserve in their institutions the essential college that has inspired so many generations of Americans to seek a purposeful life, rewarding to themselves and to their society.