Kevin J. Daley of the Federalist has written a new column which explores the current sorry state of the liberal arts.

How Liberal Education Became Illiberal

We must summon a miraculous indulgence of grace to greet with patience and good faith campus radicals across the country whose demands and quest for continued media spotlight were inspired by Yale University, Dartmouth, and the University of Missouri. The vignettes widely circulated (and they are merely vignettes) are reason for despair. Students blast dissenters with a deluge of illiberalism and vulgarity, like a rhetorical Jackson Pollock. Comparisons to Robespierre are not totally inapt.

As Ross Douthat observes, these fits of radicalism, beginning in the 1960s and continuing apace to the present dramas, are in fact attempts to erect a new moral scaffolding, to restore the higher purpose higher education has lost in recent decades. The drama of the moment may reflect an unyielding reverence for identity thought (and not a little egoism), but it is primarily the effect of the decline of the liberal arts.

The Liberal Arts Don’t Mean Anything Any More

Properly understood, liberal arts are a temple-arena for pursuing the permanent questions that elevate moral life—truth, beauty, justice—in light of reason. This quest for the sublime animates and edifies the soul. Speaking always with a Greek twang, the late professor Allan Bloom once characterized the liberal arts as “the experience of greatness.”

Today, students lack an experience of the sublime because the university has lost the ability to sublimate. Left directionless but zealous for direction, students are prone to intellectual licentiousness, susceptible to the passing vulgarities of mass movements. Thus, the disposition of the campus radicalism currently en vogue is the result of an ongoing iconoclasm, an erosion of aspirations and ideas that have defined education since Martianus Capella compiled “Marriage of Mercury and Philology.”