This article was originally published for the Classical Ed Review on September 9, 2025.
If you've been following the plight of the humanities in American higher education, then surely you’ve read about the recent dustup at the University of Tulsa with keen interest. Philosopher Jennifer Frey lost her position as the inaugural Dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, and she’s been all over the internet lately, telling us about an unpleasant truth: the top administrators at her institution are not committed to liberal education. In fact, the circumstances of her removal suggest that they’re no more than ersatz corporate executives who wouldn’t know “the idea of a university” if Newman himself descended from the heavens just to chuck it at their foreheads. And this is not unusual. Nor should it be surprising. We have known about this kind of university pseudo-leadership for decades and at many institutions.
But unlike so many top administrators in higher education lately, my university’s President didn’t spend his Summer scheming to choke out the humanities. What was he doing instead? He was teaching the humanities.
That’s right. Dr. Jonathan Sanford, President of the University of Dallas, taught a course on the Philosophy of the Human Person to undergraduate students on our Rome campus this Summer. In that course, he engaged students in the same kind of Socratic questioning and deep engagement with classic texts that characterize our Core Curriculum. He and his students pondered such questions as “What does it mean to be human?” and “What is the soul?” and “What is the relationship between the soul and nature?” Their guides for the exploration of these questions were some of the greatest minds who ever lived: Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine.
This kind of academic leadership is, unfortunately, rather rare in higher education. But at the University of Dallas, it’s not unusual.
Now before I say anything more, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I’m not some blue-eyed idealist who doesn’t perceive the very real challenges in my own house. My university has significant money problems. Nobody’s had a raise in years. There’s what we euphemistically call “deferred maintenance” throughout our campus. We’re now up against a multi-billion dollar international gambling syndicate trying to open a monstrous casino in our backyard. And, like everyone, we are staring down the demographic cliff that threatens all enrollment-based institutions like ours, where 90% of our annual revenue comes from tuition and only 10% from endowment draws, rather than the other way around.
But you know what? Our President and Provost both teach in the philosophy department; our associate Provost teaches theology; our Deans teach literature and political philosophy. That counts for something. It means that our top administrators understand who we are and from within. It means that they are committed to liberal education and to our purpose as a Catholic university. It means that our university leadership can stand and deliver a liberal education because they are liberally educated themselves. It means that they believe in the importance of the curriculum enough to actually teach it. The fact that the President and key university leaders continue to teach also suggests that our Board of Trustees supports this same mission. We may not have silver and gold at our fair institution, but such as we have, we give abundantly. As it turns out, that’s a pearl of great price.
Institutions without this kind of leadership, as Eric Adler recently laments, too often fall prey to the tyranny of university politburos. After conducting sham hand-wringings over the esotericisms of their financial projections, they may intone their deep concern about “historic funding pressure” as though it were proactive fiscal responsibility. But Adler, clearing his throat politely, suggests that the Emperor, ahem, has no clothes. After all, institutions with endowments in the b-b-b-billions really have no urgent need to decimate liberal arts and humanities programs like Frey’s or the University of Chicago’s, now do they? After all, humanities programs generally cost less to operate than their far more expensive counterparts in the natural and social sciences. Yet the cutbacks are still happening.
No, the ruthless slashing of liberal education isn’t really motivated by budgetary constraints. As Adler clearly sees, it’s rooted in the radical educational “reform” movements that jettisoned core curricula in the humanities and theology, replacing it with a narrow focus on research in the natural and social sciences under the guise of an elective system. This ideology is baked into the very structure of American research universities. With few notable exceptions, we no longer have small classical colleges influenced by a humanistic spirit and devoted to ancient Greek and Roman literature, much less theology. Instead, we have modern research universities.
Modern scientific research is worthwhile, and universities rightly pursue a deeper understanding of the physical universe through innovative experimentation. Donald Cowan, who was my university’s President from 1962 to 1977, was a brilliant physics professor in his own right. He was also an exceptionally visionary leader who understood the importance of a core curriculum in the humanities for all. As he put it, “The curriculum is the center of the solution; it must be the same for all students, but designed for the best – not in its complexity but in its imaginative scope and profundity.” His vision set the tone for academic leadership at our institution, one that still resonates today with our current President and the academic leaders he has assembled.
It’s easy for university administrators to pay lip-service to liberal education–and probably just as easy for them to cry crocodile tears over its deconstruction. What’s hard–and what ultimately bears fruit–is teaching.
Would that we had more philosopher-Presidents who taught.