Ben Sasse

The right answer should be yes, both.

We should be preparing the mind and the character for all of the various vocations and callings in life, and also to be prepared for the first job, but also for the third job in an industry that doesn't even exist yet and won't for 15 or 20 years.

And so we need a lot more rigor, we need a lot more both and.

So many universities have had liberal arts colleges captured by ideological activists that really only want to speak to eight or 10 or 17 other ideological activists that liberal arts colleges, and I say this as a historian, I say this as somebody who loves the liberal arts, have so obviously abdicated any responsibility for preparing a next generation.

that we're now five consecutive decades into higher ed in America, having students choose by major, voting with their feet to move from liberal arts majors to more STEM majors.

Five consecutive decades, students migrating from liberal arts towards STEM disciplines.

But the liberal arts, instead of then saying, well, let's use the core curriculum as a way to prepare people for the rest of life, not just the jobs that they may have, that may be in engineering or health professions or whatever, getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.

And their power, the power of those faculties, are increasingly just to compel students to take their classes through the core curriculum.

But the classes aren't very good.

They aren't very big.

They aren't very rigorous, but they aren't big in terms of grand questions.

They're not trying to help people fall in love with the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The answer is not to hate on the liberal arts.

The answer is to recover the liberal arts.

Burn it all down.

One of the ways is by building a better College of Liberal Arts, which is functionally what Hamilton is.

And so you asked, what do I think of this project?

There have been a lot of these schools.

They're very important as reform germs.

But what you really want is to go much bigger and say...