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.