Loss of Logic

Reason itself has disappeared to the point that, in education generally today, I don't know of a single reputable college that requires a course in logic as a part of its degree program."

-- Dallas Willard

Steve Zelnick argues in an article entitled ""Critical Thinking" Minus Criticism and Thought", that what is often called "critical thinking" is usually nothing more than politically correct indoctrination.

At San Elijo College, we intend that each student take a full course in Logic, starting with Aristotle's "Organon."

We believe that if our students can master Aristotelian logic from the original sources, then they should be able to think critically about most everything else.

Inaugural Donor Symposium: A Success!

Thank you to all who made our Inaugural Donor Symposium a sucess!

We had over 100 people in attendance and have raised over $20,000 for the college so far!

Our next steps are:

1) To apply for approval to operate as a degree granting institution from the State of California. This will be pending the re-establishment of the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (see http://www.bppve.ca.gov/) for details. We hope that the California Legislature and Governor can come to a quick resolution for this regulatory agency.

2) Begin marketing plans and implementing student recruitment, once our approval to operate is granted.

3) Continue our fundraising efforts with the goal of $250,000-$500,000 start up campaign.

Feel free to drop us an e-mail if you have any questions about our progress.

administration@sanelijocollege.org

Inaugural Donor Symposium

Our Inaugural Donor Symposium Dinner is scheduled for Saturday, November 15th, 6pm at the Hilton Garden Inn, Carlsbad with best selling author Dinesh D'Souza and John Mark Reynolds, Ph.D.

For additional information or to RSVP for the dinner, please e-mail: administration@sanelijocollege.org.

Matthew Arnold on Culture

"The whole scope of the essay[Culture and Anarchy] is to recommend culture as the great helpout of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our totalperfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically."

At San Elijo College it is our aim to get at "the best which has been thought and said in the world." We understand our college to be part of the transmission of the best in western culture. We agree that studying great works allows us to turn a "stream of fresh and free thought" upon what western culture has become. We do this with the intention to live out what is good, true and beautiful.

The Tower of Liberal Learning

We were impressed today with a quotation from a lecture given by John Senior entitled, "The Several Storied Tower." It is a short reflection on how the classical liberal arts build on one another, from grammar to theology.

We were particularly struck by this quotation:

"That is the difference between a technical school and a university—the university rises to the universal; it integrates the horizontal in the vertical; it is a place where "young men see visions and old men dream dreams." And if your education has not been much like that, that is because no institution ever lives up to its purpose—but at least some of us have tried."

We at San Elijo College are trying.

Tradition, tradition! Tradition! --- Tuition, tuition! Tuition!

We at San Elijo College intend our college to be tuition free. We would like to have this done by the time we begin offering classes in the fall of 2010.

There are four reasons for this.

First, we want to free the College from the commoditization of education. If education is something valuable for its own sake, then it is not the kind of thing that can be bought and sold, let alone publicly traded. Students who are treated as customers soon begin to treat success in their education as both a positive right and something deserved because they have paid their tuition. A tuition based education becomes something like what happens at a drive through hamburger stand: one orders (declares one's major) at the menu stand, pays (tuition) for their food at the first window, and picks up their burger (diploma) at the second window. Somewhere between the first and second window education occurs, but is something the student knows not what.

Second, tuition driven institutions are driven to get more bodies in the door to pay for the mostly bureaucratic functions of the institution. Thus, as a college grows it needs more money for growth, and ends up sacrificing student quality and instructional quality, usually in terms of large class sizes. A college that depends on tuition for its survival is a college that will often sacrifice its core principles in order to keep its doors open. This is especially applicable to the stability of faculty appointments and to the long term relationships between faculty and the college. At San Elijo College, we intend each faculty position to be fully endowed such that each faculty member's salary will be fully funded regardless of whether enrollment dips in any given year.

Third, federal and state governments now contribute a great deal to the possibility of higher education for many students across the country. Federally subsidized student loans make possible funds that enable students to pay for the increasingly exorbitant costs of tuition at private universities and colleges. Federal and state funding bring with it restrictions or attached strings on which a truly free, independent and liberal institution should not depend. This is especially true for a college which has specific religious and philosophical commitments which may run counter to the whims of ever changing government and bureaucratic administrations and regulations.

Fourth, a classical liberal arts education in the great books tradition at San Elijo College should be open to the poor who merit admission to the College. This applies most to the best and brightest students who come from limited financial means. It provides a way for them to attain the best that can be offered educationally without having to send their parents or themselves tens of thousands of dollars into debt.

San Elijo College will thus seek a full endowment for each faculty position from private benefactors who believe in the mission and purpose of the institution. This will be an easy task to accomplish. Our culture is one of the wealthiest in human history. It is also one in the throes of great educational crises. There are many in our culture who have the means and the desire to participate in this renaissance of our national intellectual life, and through San Elijo College now have the opportunity.

Does this mean that the college will not cost the student anything? No. We recognize that one’s investment in one’s education, both in terms of time and money, breed a commitment to it on the part of a student. While tuition might be free, each student at the college will be responsible for providing their own support to cover room, board, and all other expenses. The College is planning to work with local businesses to provide a work/study program to offset these costs as well.

A liberal arts education sets the soul free. Doing so should not bring with it financial enslavement upon graduation. A tuition free college with fully endowed faculty positions will provide a truly liberating education.

Languages: Classical and American

San Elijo College is a classical liberal arts college in the great books tradition. As such we study the ideas that come to us from the past which make our own free American constitutional republic possible.

These ideas are transmitted to us through language.

Because we believe in the objectivity of knowledge, (i.e. that we can know what is good, true and beautiful), we believe that language does not stand as a blur between us and the ideas that we come to know through reading great works of literature, listening to music or seeing great works of art.

San Elijo College will emphasize three languages.

First and foremost all students will master the English language. English is the language of the United States of America. It is the "mother tongue." It gave birth to the ideas in the English political tradition which in turn nurtured the concepts of the founding documents of our American national experience, without which San Elijo College would not be possible. This is especially so for the primary document of our nation's founding: the Declaration of Independence. In the Declaration we have a language (English) and ideas, especially the ideas of self evident truths (part of the objectivity of knowledge). The ideas and the language go together. Our students master both.

In addition, we will focus on the classical language of Latin.

We will focus on Latin for two reasons: 1) many of the ideas of antiquity come to us through the Latin language, both ideas transmitted through ancient Rome and through the Medieval Church, 2) Latin has influenced the English and Spanish languages in many ways. Latin will be the classical language of the college.

We will also focus on the modern language of Spanish.

We will focus on Spanish for three reasons. First, Spanish was the first European language of San Diego. Spanish links our college to its European Spanish roots. Thus, it deserves special place in our curriculum as contributing to the European cultural and intellectual traditions developed in this corner of the United States. Second, Spanish is the main second language of California, a major international language spoken on three continents, and our students will benefit in practical ways from knowing it.

Language and ideas go together in important way. At San Elijo College, we will master the good, true and beautiful in each.

To Major or Not to Major?

We at San Elijo College have been deeply influenced by Newman's Idea of a University which lays out an integrated general education program coupled with specific areas of emphasis or majors.

We are convinced that higher education should be classically oriented with a focus on the great works of the western tradition. We also recognize that the specific disciplines within the academy bring an important strength to undergraduate study.

At San Elijo College, we intend to have a single degree program in Liberal Arts with a unified curriculum, while allowing for the specific strengths of our faculties' expertise to compliment the unity of our degree program.

Can we call this a "major" in Liberal Arts? Maybe. However, we intend to offer more than a mere major. We offer the art of being free for well being and well doing.

Kansas University Integrated Humanities Program

Sometimes there are bright lights which blaze for a season and then fade, fulfilling their task in their demise. One such bright light was the Kansas University's Pearson Integrated Humanities Program. One of the things which struck us in the description of this program was the way in which students "did" poetry: "groups of students met to memorize poetry, truly by memory, since no text was used, but conducted by another student who had himself the poems of the program in his memory." This reminds us of the end of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where people become their own books. We think SEC should try this with poetry for faculty and students.

Also, John Senior, one of the founders of the program has provided us with a call to clarity in our moral commitments as a college from his book The Restoration of Christian Culture.

Van Doren on Eductional Vision

Mark Van Doren once wrote:

"The courage in the educator that makes him labor at the outline of his task will push him on, virtue being with him, to take the risk of action; he will not only see an outline, he will form his institution in harmony with the vision. This may involve mistakes, but he would rather make mistakes than linger in confusion . . . When educators do not labor at the outline, others who are their subordinates, whether students or teachers will. The one intolerable thing in education is the absence of intellectual design . . . Education with an intellectual design is liberal education" (Liberal Education, pp. 10-11) by Mark Van Doren 1959, Boston: Beacon Press.


We at SEC desire to have this virtue of courage giving an outline of our college in its early stages. We intend to flesh out what it means to be a college committed to the objectivity of knowledge, believing that we can really know what is good, true and beautiful, and that this knowledge is part and parcel of the Christian tradition as a knowledge tradition contributing to what we value and cherish in what is good in the West.

Higher Ed and Hard Work

We at San Elijo College are looking for market driven solutions to the high cost of higher education. One of the ways in which this seems to have been successful is through a robust work/study program. There are a couple of schools in the country with this model:

• Berea College
• College of the Ozarks
• Deep Springs College

At SEC, however, we are not primarily focused on a specific region or constituency as is Berea, nor do we have the sizeable endowment which allows College of the Ozarks to pay their students directly, and while there are dairy cows, horses and chickens in Harmony Grove and Elfin Forest, just down the road, San Elijo Hills is not a working cattle ranch like Deep Springs.

Ideally, we want to fully endow each faculty position and have the college essentially tuition free. However, we recognize, from our own experience in college, that practical work experience is invaluable. While we admire the cloistered life of many colleges, we also recognize, as did Plato the value of "trudging down" to rule in the world. We believe that partnering with local business to employ SEC students will allow each student to have high ideals and an ethic that comes from hard work.

A friend of the College introduced us to the Cristo Rey model for work/study which allows students to pay for a great deal of their tuition through an innovative job-sharing and employee leasing program. We think that this might be a feasible program for the college to offset tuition or living expenses.

Thomas Sowell on Measuring Outputs

Thomas Sowell has an interesting article on measuring ouputs of student achievement in order to "rank" colleges instead of "prestige" based on inputs.

He writes, "The CCAP [Center for College Affordability and Productivity] study uses several measures of educational output, including the proportion of a college’s graduates who win awards like the Rhodes Scholarships or who end up listed in Who’s Who in America, as well as the ratings that students give the professors who teach them. Professor Vedder admits that these are “imperfect” measures of a college’s educational output, but at least they are measures of output instead of input."

Sowell goes on to add that an addition "output" might include the number of students who go on for Ph.D.s

One worry about both the USNWR and CCAP's approach is an empiricist leaning toward numerical and measurable quantification rather than in the role that universities play in shaping the soul's of their students.

Would it be possible to rank schools on the quality of the souls of the faculty, trustees and alumni? One output that is measurable would be something like, how many alumni give their lives for what they believe to be good, true and beautiful?

Plato's Republic and Types of Colleges

In Plato's Republic Book 8 and following, Plato describes the five types of cities and souls:

The Aristocracy: the rule of goodness
The Timocracy: the rule of honor
The Oligarchy: the rule of wealth
The Democracy: the rule of the masses
The Tyrrany: the rule of the tyrant

We think that American Universities and Colleges can fit into these type as well.

The Aristocratic university is literally one that is ruled by Goodness itself, as Plato puts it, when we see the Good, it "is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed."

We at San Elijo College believe that our students can see the Good! And that seeing the Good enables true success in every endeavor in life, private and public. Our graduates can even put that on their resumes! e.g. Skills: Able to see the Good and act rationally.

Are there any Aristocratic universities left? We believe that there are a few, and San Elijo College stands with them on this.

The second type of school is a Timocratic one. This school values honor. Honor is a real value, but it is not the sole value, and as Lewis puts it in the Abolition of Man, when you isolate one value from all the others within the natural law, you can swell it to madness in its isolation. Publications, research grants, presentations at academic conferences, tenure, great football or basketball teams, fancy buildings, a good reputation, high rankings in US News and World report; all of these things are honorable. But the cannot be the sole values for a college. Without objectivity of value, these things are hollow.

The third type of college is a Oligarchic one. This school values money. It encourages its students, as Plato puts it to make "reason and spirit sit down on the ground obediently on either side of their sovereign, and [teaches] them to know their place, he compels the one to think only of how lesser sums may be turned into larger ones, and will not allow the other to worship and admire anything but riches and rich men, or to be ambitious of anything so much as the acquisition of wealth and the means of acquiring it." These colleges emphasize only the acquisition of wealth and focus their energies solely on their student's ability to do so.

The fourth type of college is the Democratic one. This school values, well everything equally. Relativists U! Plato says, "if anyone says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honor some, and chastise and master the others -- whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another ... life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom." This is reflected in the curricular irrationality of the majority of American universities and in most dormitories on a typical weekend. Colleges have always been places for the young to be young, but only the recent moral relativism in higher education allows for the approbation of all conduct and thought as equally praiseworthy.

The final type of college is the Tyrannical one. The Tyranny is of course, for Plato with respect to the city the rule of one from the masses at the expense of all others, e.g. Kim Jung Il. We are not sure if there are any tyrannical colleges today; individual departments at schools, maybe, but we have not slid this far down in higher ed today. We seem to have mostly oligarchic and democratic schools today. Plato, however, seems to think that the slide from democracy to tyranny is an easy, wide and natural downhill road.

San Elijo College seeks to stem this drift by focusing the minds of our faculty and students on the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

Thought on Larry Arnn's Article

Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, in his Imprimis article (November, 2006) recommends two soloutions to the current problems entrenched in higher education today:

To repair all this and place the education system on a better footing,
there are two things that need doing, neither of them proposed so far during
this reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The first is that we should
return control of college to private people to the utmost extent possible. The
federal government should do what Reagan suggested: go back to the things it has
the constitutional power to do ...

Or even go one better: Let taxpayers keep
their money, if they are prepared to spend it for something so vital to the
public interest as education.

The second thing is to recover the tradition
of liberal and civic education that has helped to keep us free by teaching us
the purpose of our freedom. To do this, we will have to be willing to take
positions on subjects that are “controversial.” We will have to organize our
colleges to study the great documents of the American past and those upon which
that past was built. This will involve us—gasp—in the study of the Western
canon. This is not merely a good thing; it is “urgent.”

We at SEC agree with Arnn about these two things. We agree that private colleges should take no federal or state aid at all. We fear for like minded private colleges, especially those with religious, especially Christian commitments. Private religious colleges which are on the government dole, and which are tuition driven will likely, maybe even in the next presidential administration, be faced with a dilemma: compromise their missions or lose federal aid.

San Elijo College hopes to avoid this dilemma from the beginning by commiting to avoid entanglement with government bureaucratic encroachment on academic liberty.

We at SEC also agree with Arnn that the way to have a great college, which preserves the best of Western culture and the American experience the west has produced is to master the history, languages, science, philosophy, and religion which produced it. We hope too that this study will allow us to effectively critique problems within the western tradition, while maintaining a clear objectivity to knowledge. This is what CS Lewis calls "alteration from within" the tradition.
In the Abolition of Man ch. 2, Lewis writes "Those who understand the spirit of[natural law, the western tradition] and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands. Only they can know what those directions are. The outsider knows nothing about the matter. His attempts at alteration, as we have seen, contradict themselves."

People who've taught us: Victor Davis Hanson

We all have teachers.

The founders of SEC have had several currently living teachers who have inspired us in many ways.

One of our teachers is Victor Davis Hanson.

His commencement address from St. John's College in 2002 was particularly inspiring as we researched the academic and curricular foundations of the College.

San Elijo College inspires to be, as Hanson states, "Like Euripides, you are hunters of beauty, which Socrates reminds us is really the The Good and The True—what the Greeks call aletheia “that which cannot be forgotten.”

Willard Lecture on Moral Knowledge and the University

Willard has an excellent talk on the nature of moral knowledge in the university. It's well stated, although a bit grainy in the audio. The lecture can be found here as part of the Veritas forum: “The university no longer offers a body of moral truth, the closest you get to it is freshman orientation."

San Elijo College believes that there is a body of moral knowledge found in both natural law, as defended in C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man" and by the majority of the great writers of the West. In addition, the College believes that the Christian tradition, as stated in the Nicene Creed, is a knowledge tradition, and in that knowledge tradition, there is a clear body of moral knowledge that regulates human life.

Dallas Willard's Papers on Higher Education

Those of us founding SEC have been deeply influenced by Dallas Willard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California (www.dwillard.org)

This entry will highight a few quotations from Dallas' papers on higher education and then show how SEC will fulfill those ideas.

Willard has a nice paper on Jaques Maritain's views of higher ed: "How Reason Can Survive The Modern University: The Moral Foundations Of Rationality."

Willard states: "The life of reason is not generally speaking, self-sustaining. The values inherent in it are not by themselves enough to secure its institution and perpetuation. This brings out the pointlessness of teaching logic as part of a liberal education without illuminating and emphasizing our duty to be logical. Only a strong moral commitment to being a reasonable person can effectively produce routine conformity, or will to conform, to truth and logic in action and assertion. We see such commitment in outstanding examples such as Socrates, Jesus and Spinoza, and certainly Maritain."

We at San Elijo College agree. We intend our college to have a strong communal commitment to the life of reason and the life of a just soul.


Here is another quotation by Willard from his paper, "The University's Responsibility for Moral Guidance"

"We cannot simply return to the Christian past of the universities; the honest, critical inquiry which the university at its best has always aspired to must prevail. The university must forsake its reactionary position against the worldview from which it arose and devote its attention to an open and free-minded scrutiny of the claims of Jesus Christ, placing them alongside the alternatives that now try to tell us who we are and what we ought to be."

San Elijo College begins with the Christian past and strives for the ideals Willard discusses.

Here's another quotation from and interview of Dallas Willard entitled: "Happy Graduation from Amoral University."

tts: Has the university abandoned "capital T truth"?

DW: Yes! The university has explicitly abandoned the project of the search for Truth--despite remnants that suggest the contrary such as Harvard's seal that sports the Latin word for truth ("Veritas"). In fact in an address to entering freshman at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer made it clear what were and what were not the goals of the educational institution. The goals were: to encourage critical thinking, to broaden intellectual horizons, and to encourage self-awareness. The NON-AIMS were equally explicit: "Not only is there a powerful imperative at Chicago to stay away from teaching the truth, but the university also makes very little effort to provide you with moral guidance. Indeed it is a remarkably amoral institution" (149, Mearsheimer).

tts: Does this sentiment permeate secular universities in general?

DW: Yes!

SEC is founded on the objectivity of knowledge and truth. It is our core philosophical commitment.

Alan Kors' Article on Higher Education

Alan Kors has very telling article on the state of higher education today. We believe that San Elijo College will as Kors states be a "model of higher education that offer[s] a prestigious degree, high admissions standards, a superb and rigorous education, a faculty that was truly and usefully intellectually pluralistic, and a climate of individual rights and responsibilities (joined with rights of voluntary association)."

We also believe with Kors that such a model will as he puts it "sweep the field."

Welcome

Welcome to the blog for San Elijo College: www.sanelijocollege.org

We will be posting thoughts and reflections on the college, on higher education, great books, classics, philosophy and other related topics. Mostly, the point of this blog is to keep college supporters updated on our progress.

San Elijo College is in its embryonic stage. During a recent lunch with a supporter of the college, We were reminded of this truth. Alan said something that really stuck in our head. He said, "Your website says things like the college "will be" a great books college, or the college "will be" a classically oriented college .... but the college already is a great books college and it already is a classically oriented college." He reminded us that San Elijo College although in its embryonic stage is just what a college looks like at its beginning. We are already a college, at its earliest stages of development.