Christianity and the Crisis of the Universities - Jessica Hooten Wilson

i'm so grateful that i get to be here today i was telling jared i'm i'm just so thankful for everything that word on fire is doing and i'm amazed that this many people are coming together to find ways to spread the gospel to share the good that we've received and not just hold it to ourselves like bishop baron said last night but to find ways to increase the true good and beautiful things in the world and as jared just mentioned my heart is for education a quick a quick background on me and then um i'd like to open in prayer if that's okay borrowing a prayer from the tradition but my heart is in education i was an undergrad at pepperdine university and i was trying to find where god was calling me to and i knew i wanted to share ideas i knew i wanted to change people's hearts and i didn't know what that looked like and i tried paramount studios for a little while i thought i was gonna write movies and then i went to dc and i worked in public policy and i found that in both of those places yes gospel work was being done but everything was changing all the time whether i was in hollywood it's just you had to keep up with the latest thing and with dc you have to keep up with the latest thing that and i got in trouble for wearing too much color i'm not joking they told me i needed to wear more black and white and brown and less color and that just doesn't work for me when i came into the academy it was the permanent things and i thought oh this satisfies my thirst in a way because the more you dig and the more that you learn there's just more there and i didn't have to be up on the current headlines i didn't have to be constantly changing with the news i could dig into aristotle and augustine and dante and they were dead so they stayed the same and i loved that stability for me and so the education is really where i've been for a long time i always open with a prayer and i always close with a poem when i talk and the closing of the poem my great teacher dana joya has mentored me for a long time and he always have a poem always share beauty and so i do that and i open with prayer because i realize that his strength comes through my weakness and so this prayer howard thurman who was a mentor to martin luther king jr and the prayer repeats over and over again our little lives are big problems these we place upon your altar so i'm going to say that line at the beginning and then if you can when i say we rejoice this day to say if you can then repeat that with me our little lives our big problems these we place upon your altar our little lives our big problems these we place upon your altar the quietness in your temple of silence again and again rebuffs us for some there is no discipline to hold them steady in the waiting and the minds reject the noiseless invasion of your spirit for some there is no will to offer what is central in the thoughts the confusion is so manifest there is no starting place to take hold for some the evils of the world tear down all concentrations and scatter the focus of the highest resolves we do not know how to do what we know to do we do not know how to be who we are called to be our little lives are big problems these we place upon your altar pour out upon us whatever our spirits need of shock of life of release that we might fight strength for these days courage and hope for tomorrow in confidence we rest in your sustaining grace which makes possible triumph and defeat gain and loss and love and hate we rejoice this day to say our little lives our big problems these we place upon your altar i'm so grateful too that sister josephine started with educating the whole person and we were able to talk about what education should look like they gave me a topic the crisis in the universities it's rather a dire story if i'm the one who has to talk about the crisis if we think about the word is a metaphor that implies sickness so the patient is in critical condition what then is the cure and if you notice the title of the talk is christianity and the crisis of universities so are we saying that christianity is the cure yes thank you i'm done but it's true men have forgotten god that's why all this happened alexander solzhenitsyn said that in 1983 men have forgotten god that's why all this has happened what is education if christ is not wisdom as sister josephine said what is education if we're not training people and forming them towards the love of that wisdom that is christ what does education then become it is rather a dire story i i'm gonna start with the negative but i want to as sister josephine said move us towards hope i want us to see this as a road as a path there is a way forward we have to remember that no matter how dark things seem when rome was falling to barbarians augustine wrote city of god no matter how dark things seem christians are the remnant that keep going so what is the problem in education i'm going to quote from the president of wesleyan university michael roth he was in a dialogue with my friend jen frey and they were dialoguing about whether or not college is worthwhile and these are his words and i'm not taking these as authoritative it's um lord help us this is a president of a wesleyan university a college education should not require religious devotion he says it does not aim only for a life of study the purpose of college is to develop practices of learning that we can share and thereby modify or amplify contributing helping us to contribute to our society and reshape ourselves students should learn how to share what they've gotten better at with others developing the skills to show others that the work one finds rewarding has value for them did you hear all of that you know as bishop baron said last night that ego drama language his assumptions are we are each autonomous units and education is for our consumption and whatever we want to get out of it so that it is useful for whatever we want to do with it education then becomes just another retail chain in our moves towards self-satisfaction and this assumption unfortunately is not only pervasive at secular institutions but it runs across christian schools as well who begin to play this game about what education is i would say the real crisis of the universities is that they are having an identity crisis like so much of the world they don't know who they are or what they're for they have no idea i want to propose that education and i'm going to use this definition several times education is an apprenticeship to a tradition towards a contemplative life education is an apprenticeship to a tradition towards a contemplative life the story that we have in education right now in universities is a false one what we have is a secular narrative here's one example this new book that i just it's a fantastic book it's worth wrestling with it was written by chad wellman and paul ryder is called the permanent crisis the humanities in a disenchanted age but their narrative begins with the founding of secular universities in germany in the 19th century at that point in time in the universities they were trying to create this holistic humanities curriculum without being founded upon a belief in jesus christ how do you have a holistic vision of education or even know what humanities are without the human one as your foundation and your end and they discovered that they were actually very confused about how to go about this curriculum so in germany they started treating the humanities instead just like its own specialization i'm sure many of you have been in classes where the humanities seemed so pointless right you had to read an anthology of things that were just excerpts of material then you have to take a quiz on it there's like multiple choice and it seemed completely disconnected from who you are and what matters and that was the problem is this narrative is really short-sighted and how it was looking at what education is what if we told a different story about education what if instead of talking about specialization and utility of the humanities what if we looked back much farther into our history i would say even farther than american universities right we do have these narratives of 1636 harvard is founded to be a church in the wilderness we've come a long way from that but originally there was some foundation in american schools they were going to create like protestant gentlemen right who could go out and be civil servants in the world let's go back even further let's go back to the middle ages maybe let's even go back to the ancients sister josephine was quoting plato the purpose of education is to teach someone how to love what is beautiful this tradition is this then inherited and baptized by the monasteries who are starting the monastic schools who are copying these manuscripts why are they doing that because they loved what is beautiful they weren't reading ovid because he was moralistically good they loved what is beautiful and they felt like that was necessary to pass down and there are practices in the medieval the monastic culture that i think can be a great model for what education should be and could be in the world instead of having this vision in which you go to college to be trained towards just a job what if you were being formed and again drawing from sister josephine she laid such a great foundation you're being formed in your loves in community and you're seeing yourselves as part of a larger story than just yourself what if you were thinking about studying under these great teachers these relationships you were going to have these fellow wayfarers you were wanting to learn from in the monastic tradition that is what what education looks like hugh of st victor who's often called a master teacher he starts his um diascalicon which is on reading on on the art of reading and he begins with of all things to be thought the first is wisdom and then he defines wisdom as christ and he's teaching people that of all things they seek the first has to be christ it has to be the foundation and it has to be the end of their education journey what would it look like to go back to that i think it would take a massive paradigm shift and i'm not sure that i have like a practical solution for exactly what that looks like but i do know that the problem with the whey academy currently is we have to do something because we cannot continue to treat students like autonomous units we cannot continue to let them be malformed by the system they're in we cannot continue to have young people receiving so many lies from their culture that they don't know their place and they don't have hope and they have no relationships and they're being entirely misformed i want to talk about a resource mont in instead i want to change our vocabulary of education imagine what you currently hear about education what and what it looks like i'm going to give you a list of words that probably sound very familiar to you because i think one of the first things that we would need to change is to change our vocabulary of education on the one hand we hear words like success would where does that fit in the kingdom i'm sorry i get i get distracted by that uh i'm gonna just list out the words and not annotate every single one of them ah success right customer i am going to annotate every single one of them i'm sorry i'm not joking when i say customer is used in professional development for academics i have sat through professional development seminars led by customer service representatives who handed us packets about how to be better customer service agents i'm a professor i want to love my students and you're trying to teach me how to serve a customer that's so short-sighted and of course because i can't keep my mouth shut i even raised my hand during that session it was like i'm sorry they are not customers they are students and this person said oh just cross out customer right student whatever makes you feel comfortable so success customers values not virtues like sister josephine was saying not virtues not the highest human powers right of excellence but just values you can evaluate whatever is valuable to you at any given moment and sometimes truth is valuable to you and sometimes it's not so we have this culture of education which is about success and customers and values retention right recruitment i've had a university president ask me what i loved about education i said i love forming friendships with my students and guiding them towards wisdom and he said i can't recruit for that i can't recruit for that i need something i can recruit with can you say something on a video that helps me recruit them i don't work for walt disney that's not that's not actually what i was made to do so we have this false vocabulary and it infiltrates everything i actually founded a classical school i'm having that moment where i know sister josephine was saying she was wishing it wasn't recorded because i'm going to tell a little bit on my parents i love founding a classical school i was talking about this with someone last night i think that when i die i think this will be the best thing i ever did with my life because it is the most thankless sacrificial job but i think that the school will still be here years after i'm gone and no one will remember me but the school people will still be loving the lord lord willing through that school and through that education but i founded a school and all the parents that are sending their kids there they want a christian education but they really want to make sure their kid still gets into college that's that's the end goal because my kid needs to go to college and my kid then needs a job and my kid needs to make money and that's the goal and i just want to throw a fit that is such a weak goal college is four years of your life i want to make sure that they're 60 and that they can say they love jesus that is a much bigger goal i want your kid to be able to die well i want your kid to be able to love his or her neighbor more than his or herself that's my goal yes they're probably going to get into college because the great tradition the way it forms you to think and to love and to know and to be is undeniable yes i'm going to teach your kid how to think and so he or she will surpass the automatons out of the other forms of education i promise but stop being so short-sighted with what you think education is we have to think longer we have to think about who they're going to be and not just what they're going to be able to do your kids are not just to-do lists right they don't we don't want to just check boxes and we don't want to teach them just to check boxes so on on the one hand there's that way of thinking about education try try this vocabulary for education and this vocabulary is very unpopular charity an education it's about charity piety i i have to mention this i don't know if you saw jd vance uh this last week called professors the enemy it's the most impious thing i've ever seen you have someone who grew up in appalachia who was formed by public universities who got the privilege of going to yale law school who is now getting to stand on the stage because of all the men and women who taught him sorry as a professor it's very hurtful to me that i would give so much to my students and if they turned around and then called me the enemy in public we need to teach piety magnaminity we need to care about souls and not just selfs in our classrooms and it's going to form a completely different kind of education i give talks regularly about to teachers mostly i teach a lot of teachers and i talk about what are you what do you imagine you're doing in the classroom do you imagine that a socrates says there's a feast of discourse and you're inviting students to the table and you know that they're bringing something to the table just like you're offering something at the table do you imagine a garden in which the lord is is growing them before you what do you imagine and i would say that the highest thing you can imagine when it comes to your classroom is to cultivate saints in that space what does it look like to cultivate saints how can education towards cultivating saints what would that look like well one of the things that it needs to do is teach us vision sister josephine said kingdom vision one of the writers i love eugene peterson he translated the bible into the message and there's all sorts of people have problems with his translation but what i love about it was the vitality he showed that the word of god is alive and that it can be translated it's always been translated pentecost is this this great show of the spirit that the spirit is a translator and he talks about in matthew when he's trying to explain to his disciples the parable of the seeds that they fall on different types of soil and he says i'm trying to give you god-blessed eyes eyes that see and god blessed ears ears that hear to move towards this idea of contemplation to cultivate saints that can see and can and hear and not be deaf and not be blind to the world around them that's a different process of education if you're educating towards vision this is dante's journey right moving through purgatory and great gaining sight and gaining vision so that his eyes are more fully opened and so at the end of the the mount purgatory not even into the paradise yet where he gets to move towards sanctification but even just the journey at mount purgatory virgil says lord of yourself i crown and miter you his vision has freed him from the enslavements to the world way of seeing things from the enslavement to the world's vocabulary and moved him to a kingdom vision a way of seeing the world differently i want to talk about a cue a couple of the features that i think this education has differently and this is again very much drawing from from monasteries so i began with that definition of education as education as an apprenticeship to the tradition towards the contemplative life and i do want to unpack contemplative more but what does it mean to be an apprenticeship so one of the things that it means is that you have a relationship with your student that you would found your education on that relationship meaning i know my students and that cannot happen in a room this big if this was my classroom regularly it's difficult for me to apprentice in this setting so that's one of the things is it really constrains the idea that you're going to take as many numbers as you can right you're going to have the the biggest number of incoming freshmen that you can if a master apprentice model is going to work you have to have a relationship the second part of the relationship needs to be a willingness towards friendship too many professors do not think of their students as their friends and what i mean by that is not something silly or superficial so i want to clarify c.s lewis talks about friendship that two people are standing next to each other looking at the same thing that you're loving something let's imagine you're loving a beautiful painting and you look over and someone else is loving it like you are wordsworth says um what we have loved others will love and we will show them how so to have friendship with your students is maybe you're looking at the same painting and you've got to lead them towards loving that painting together it does not mean that i invite my students to come into class and tell me about their boyfriend troubles i have had i have had that instruction as well from professional development i had someone come to professional development and say you need to go to class early maybe 10 minutes early and instead of rereading dante for the 12th time go to class early and ask them about their lives again the short-sightedness of that first of all if they are talking to me about their boyfriend their professor that that relationship's probably not gonna work i i'm not the one you should be going to about your boyfriend troubles right you first of all should be going to that person and second you hopefully you have somebody else in your life for that kind of conversation to happen i should be the last resort kind of like a bartender in a movie right it's the very last person you go to to explain your troubles instead what if i read dante for the 12th or 13th time before class and then i come in and because i just practiced loving it i am so excited about loving it and sharing it with them and we have been a friendship not formed on small talk not formed about the things that are in their lives that are temporary but forming a friendship based on permanent things that last and matter and transform them that kind of friendship is deep and rich and real it's not superficial if we're going to have an education that looks a lot like the community that sister josephine was talking about we need teachers and students to engage in those kinds of friendships that should be the start of the learning process is that kind of friendship second apprenticeship i said in the tradition i'm also very frustrated with the ways that curriculum are done more and more and this is going to be rather unpopular on two different fronts but especially within the last few years we have this divide about curriculum and i'm specifically talking about the humanities because on one side you have the great books being treated like it's just a package to be handed on to the next group and most of it has to do with being just white male western writers packaged up for you and dropped now these are the great writers that were uplifted by their time and place and i don't want to lose any of them but if a tradition is going to be alive then we also need to consider all the voices of the past that are still the best that has been thought and said but that come from persons of color and from eastern writers c.s lewis quoted the tao why aren't we reading laosu then why aren't we drawing from that the way lewis did one of our great teachers from women teresa of avila sarwana inez de la cruz perpetua's testimony the tradition is alive and it's only alive because people are reading it and engaging it and learning from it they're sitting underneath it and being read by it that's what the tradition should be not something packaged that we debate about and we drop the product in people's laps but something that we really are wrestling with the way jacob wrestled with the angel and it's gonna hurt us and bless us it's gonna scandalize us and make us uncomfortable and that's how we learn but it also is going to be a blessing so if i could change education i would move it first towards an apprenticeship real relationships real people the personalism that the catholic church shows us in the tradition which is a living thing trederae to be handed on it's a living thing and finally towards the contemplative life so let me unpack that last one what then does it look like to have the contemplative life well i again i loved getting to hear sister josephine today because i feel like she laid this amazing foundation for what education should be and she talked about starting in prayer so throughout the tradition we have this idea that you read the scriptures lectio you meditate on them then you pray them and that moves you towards contemplation and the tradition especially in the monastic culture they saw this as a ladder that you go up and down again like jacob's vision of the angels ascending and descending and so you're always reading the word and praying the word and then seeing god and then coming back down to read again and this this continual movement in life and we want our students to be doing that with us to be reading these things and meditating on them memorizing them knowing them in their hearts because that's what expands their vision if we contain students by only their own limited autonomous vision of the world so what president roth was saying that he wants them that whatever they want out of education that they can get better at that and see the world that they the way they see it they're never going to have this contemplative vision of the world their visions are not going to be expanded instead we have to draw them in to various perspectives and increase the way that they see things so that they may know them better there's a beautiful moment in um narnia chronicles i love lewis and tolkien and in the narnia chronicles when the world is created you may remember this from the magician's nephew and the magician's nephew the world is created by this beautiful song and the stars seem to appear from the song and the cabbie driver says like lord i would have been a better man if i'd known there were sights like this and as readers we realize there were always sites like that as hopkins would say these things were all here and but the beholder wanting we need to teach students that we are meant to be the beholders of these beautiful things to behold to contemplate to live lives that are attentive to what's worth beholding it requires a certain amount of humility requires leisure it requires these these gifts of charity that something is worth beholding outside of yourself and it's a completely different view of education than the one we currently have in the universities i told you i was going to close with a poem and then what i'm hoping for is maybe five to ten minutes of questions if we have them um but in this poem what you get to hear is this vision of education and that's not what the poet intended and i don't care it's called reading and it's dedicated for jorge luis borges and you get to hear what the poet has received from borges what the poet acknowledges has happened to him by the experience of a certain kind of education that has opened up his eyes to the world and that that the opening of his eyes did not happen by himself but it happened with a guide and that it happened through the tradition and now he can see reading i stand before the books as i might stand beneath the night sky they're in stacks and stacks of self-contained infinities demanding exploration i have neither maps nor ladders to pursue these stars these books that burn within themselves that's when he comes and shows me where to start a blind librarian with a lantern in his hand it's my hand he knows the books for me he knows exactly where they are where he points i at last know where to look the deep night sky he navigates by heart and as he shows them to me one by one i find those stars opening into suns this is a vision that could have come straight from c.s lewis who writes in reading great literature i become a thousand men and yet remain myself like the night sky in the greek poem i see with myriad eyes yet it is still i who sees here as in worship in love in moral action and in knowing i transcend myself and am never more myself than when i do i would suggest that one of the greatest anecdotes to our current culture's identity crisis is to return to this story where the lord tells you exactly who you are and what you were made for and that you are not alone and that you are within a much bigger more fantastical picture of the world than the one you see when you're only seeing by your own eyes in this poem there are maps and ladders and guides to the stars and we are pilgrims as sister josephine said we are wayfarers and i think we're also students we're students who want someone to take our hand we want virgil and we want beatrice and that same longing i think is also a call to us to answer to be that for the next generation thank you if there are any questions we have about five minutes and i would love to answer a couple um the teacher nature and me is just i'd rather engage in a dialogue than just stand up here by myself so i'd love a couple questions yes ma'am are there any colleges or universities that are actually offering what i'm recommending well i think that jared set this up really well because sister josephine went to university of dallas and i teach at the university of dallas so university of dallas is one of those schools that is still embodying the tradition in so much of what they do and so i applaud them for that i'm very grateful to get to work there and to represent them university of dallas is definitely one of those i think the other is that you have to think more in terms of the professors than the university as a whole so for example i went to baylor university and i had a few great professors that helped me navigate my way through what they were offering i think the same thing can be said by a lot of schools so we need to not treat the universities monolithically so you have to go to the schools and talk to the people who will be teaching your children so instead of seeing at large you know what are the amenities they offer what are all the stats they're going to give you what are all the majors and one of the signs of a really unhealthy university is a lot of majors i'm just telling you that it's a great criteria to think through the fewer majors means that they are really rooted in something solid because they're not scatterbrained and trying to be all things to all people so some of the strongest programs are going to have few majors so go and talk to the faculty what do you love about teaching what do you hope your students learn and become and the more that you have those conversations then you can say okay i want you to teach my kid and i want you to help them who should they take who should they not take and i need a route through this school so i don't think we should be considering any more just the universities at large like these entities these nameless faceless entities but we really need to have conversations with the people who are doing the educating yes so um i'm a mother of children that have already graduated from college and one point just struck a little thing about the long and talkative professors when i went to the orientation thing with my daughter at san diego state it was more or less like you don't need to say anything it's not you know it's like they made you feel like you know you're the hovering mother or something you know so just that point you need to speak up and then the second is so what is the advice if you have the young adults who have now graduated from college they've been you know inundated with crazy things right and they're finding themselves with you know a college degree that you thought they were going to be able to go out and have this career and then they find out okay that's not really what it is so they're kind of lost now so what is their advice absolutely so the question was about advice especially to those who have graduated and also whether or not as parents how involved you should be in the question process as students or finding out schools i think you have to be very involved on the front end your students are going to be independent learners so if you can also you know teach them those kind of moves to to figure out how they're going to navigate that when so much of the time they won't be with you because they're going to be adults and that that is the time for them to to do that but teaching them to ask the right questions and to look for the right people so i've had a lot of students my best students have been the ones who have come up to me before even class started and said like i want to learn from you who are you kind of thing but also what happens when they graduate so one of the problems with training towards a career or a job is again that short-sightedness did you know that like the average person changes careers not just jobs careers two or three times in their life like careers and so if you're only going to college and training for one specific career or job you're going to find yourself floundering when you move around from job to job and you're going to be relearning on the ground instead more and more people need to be trained in the things that will not fail you it will not fail you to study history it just will not fail you your ability to be able to read your ability to critically think your ability to engage your ability to see longevity to see past the small and see the big all of these things happen in the humanities i don't want to go through and just quantify all the goods of them i don't want to make the humanities useful i'm just saying that you can play that game if you had to play that game overall there's so many things you can't even quantify for the goods of those kind of studies and this is for maths and sciences as well i've mentioned before that maths and sciences are becoming so applicable but we're still using them and i don't know that we just need to use them i think we need to think through how they teach us how to see as well maths and sciences can do so much for how you see training you to find the patterns training you to know the numerical language of god in the world so there's just a lot of benefit to the liberal arts as a whole for training your student and moving your student forward in life so that they can be ready for any job they can hit the ground running with any career and be trained in that specific career when they get there because of the way that they've been formed as a person which is important yes education and i would tell you that government government okay government government has got their fingers on everything and it's largely agnostic and accreditation uh is a critical issue as well since most of the money flows from student through student loan programming how would you deal with that part absolutely so i'm glad you got to hear the question so i won't repeat it so right now there's new colleges being formed and they're not going to be accredited the only ways that they're going to be able to keep doing what they're doing is if people are not going to be concerned with the accreditation and one of the reasons that you don't have to be concerned with their accreditation is because they're only about 4 000 a year you don't need the accreditation you don't need the money so for example hildegard college in la is opening next year based on hildegard the polymath their goal is to create christian polymaths it's going to look different it's not going to have amenities it's not going to have residential life it's not going to have a high-powered gym or a huge football team but you're going to have a relationship with your faculty they're going to know you they're going to train you inform you it's a if you want that kind of learning those colleges are coming up this ain't constantine college in houston k through 16. so you are there learning with all different age groups and so you have faculty talk about the humility of the faculty no pretension no prestige no floating on errors that are all of the world instead sometimes i'm teaching eighth graders and any of you i've taught eighth graders have you taught eighth graders that's humbling you're teaching eighth graders and then sometimes you're teaching plato to 22 year olds and that's your life as a professor there imagine what that does for the students to see that lifelong learning really is a journey it's a whole process that began early and is going to continue until you die right and so there's a lot of these different schools that are doing this unfortunately any schools that are bowing too much to accreditation and to government funding are very problematic because they are losing their identity they are losing who they are i especially for education departments because i love the education reform department for example at the university of arkansas the short story is that somebody wanted to found a catholic education department and university of arkansas said no and so they went to the head of university of arkansas i was like i want to found a different education department i'll give you 20 million dollars and now there's an education reform department and an education department we need to be willing to step outside of government controls especially when the government is going astray we don't need to take their money if they're trying to do something with education that is not education and i'm saying this from somebody who's been willing to i've had to resign from jobs just not knowing what was going to happen next because i am not a survivalist because i don't belong to that kingdom i belong to a different kingdom which may mean i have to lose a paycheck i've had to eat lasagna with craft cheese on it it was awful you know and sometimes you have to be willing to do that and i i would want more and more people to be courageous enough to say i am not going to do false education to keep my job i'm not going to do false education to recruit the largest number of students so thank you [Applause] you

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Length: 45min 50sec (2750 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2022