APU Blogs

To Prospective Students and Their Parents:

I’ve been seeing quite a few of you around campus the last couple of days because of Senior Preview Weekend.  I’m glad you are here and checking us out. 

It did take me a bit longer to get through the lunch line today than it does on most Fridays because a lot of you got to Heritage before I did.  At the same time, I was in front of many of you, and I was the reason you had to wait a bit longer for your lunch, so I guess it all evens out.

You are all faced with a big decision about college, and you have a lot of factors to take into consideration.  I thought this might be a good time to throw in another factor that you may not have put into the mix.  Maybe it complicates your choice; perhaps it simplifies a few things.  In any case, it seems like an important element that is often overlooked.

Walker Percy sets all this up well with a probing question he asks at the beginning of his book Lost in the Cosmos.  “How is it possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California—or the Cosmos?”

By the standards often used today, the education of the person described in the paragraph above (should it surprise us that he was a Californian) was a rousing success.  He had attained the type of knowledge that allowed him to pull off a stunning technological feat.  But somewhere in that process, a person died.  This scientist became nothing more than a hollowed-out human at a computer with no sense of any greater goal in life than to get a chunk of metal to the outer reaches of our planetary system.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not bashing scientific discovery or any other amazing accomplishment of the intellect, regardless of the field.  Intellectual accomplishment is something I’m all for, and is a big part of what my job is about.  The question is, however, why, as a society, we know more and more about the universe we inhabit but know less and less about how to live well (not to mention that we know less and less about the God who created the universe we know more and more about).

Behind this problem, in my humble opinion, is that universities in general have decided that their task is to educate people for a particular role in life.  In the case of the rocket-scientist, our higher education system did a great job in giving him tools for that role.  Apparently, however, it did not do much to help him become a better person, because most universities don’t see this as their job.

I could say a lot more about this, but I’m already getting preachy.  So let me put it like this.  When parents see their students off to start college, you don’t send up fifth-grade teachers, psychologists, and marketing managers.  You send us humans who are economic, physical, psychological, intellectual, social, spiritual, made-in-God’s-image beings.  If, after four (or five or six) years of college education, all you get back is a proficient but one-dimensional fifth-grade teacher, psychologist, or marketing manager, that education has come at far too great a cost.  If they are not better human beings when they come out, something has gone wrong.

Most educators today think that is it outlandish for a university to claim that its job is not simply to prepare students for a role in life (a very worthy but incomplete goal), but also to make people better people.  After all, they say, who are we to decide what a “better person” is, and even if we think we know, that’s not our job.  Yet there are some good universities, and I work at one of them, that are willing to go out on the limb and say that our task in this world is not just to graduate brilliant strategists or brains with legs.  Our job is to educate whole, multi-dimensional people.

What’s at stake?  Martin Luther King, Jr., once said that we live in a world filled with guided missiles under the control of unguided human beings.  The next rocket designed by the scientist Walker Percy describes may have a nuclear warhead on it.  My son’s fifth-grade teacher next year may see him as a number rather than a full-orbed, divinely-loved person because that teacher herself has little concept of what it means to be human.  Your aunt’s psychologist may have lost touch with the spiritual dimension of life and be totally unable to fathom that this dimension may play a part in the healing process.  Marketing managers, who know with great accuracy what you will pay for a product but nothing about what things are really worth, will bombard you with ads.

Just one more thing to think about, but it does seem worth the time to consider.