Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English, author, mentor and conservative thinker at Dartmouth, asked the question “What is a College Education?” in 1998 in The Dartmouth Review, that university’s leading journal of conservative-libertarian thought.

I found Hart’s arguments for a liberal and character-forming collegiate experience to be particularly compelling in contrast to the alternative view of higher education, the “multiversity” view, which promotes the idea that students are merely components within a larger system designed to train individuals for their trade who will later go on to support and maintain the nation’s military-industrial complex.

What Is A College Education? (The Dartmouth Review) September 30, 1998 — A notable Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey often expressed the matter succinctly, “The goal of education,” he would say, “is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.”

He meant that in quite large a sense. He did not mean that you had to master all the specialties you can think of.

He meant that you need to be familiar with the large and indispensable components of your — this — civilization.

This certainly does not mean that you should not study other cultures and civilizations. It does mean that to be a Citizen of this one you should be aware of what it is and where it came from.

…

But the main job in getting a college education is to make sure the large essential parts are firmly in place, after which you can build upon them.

Jeffrey Hart has been an influential figure in the rise of modern conservatism at Dartmouth and mentored, among others, Dinesh D’Souza, a founder of The Dartmouth Review during his undergraduate years and prolific author and speaker, best known for books like What’s So Great About America and The End of Racism.

I found Hart’s article on the purpose of college to be a decent primer into the subject of modern higher education and whether, by and large, its aim run concurrent with The Idea of a University as famously explained by John Cardinal Newman.

The broad question of the purpose of the modern university is something I’ve struggled to answer as an undergraduate at Penn State University. Especially for a school like mine, which has a land-grant mission to educate the poor and middle class young men and women of Pennsylvania, it’s not always easy to ascertain whether we’re getting our bang for our buck, so to speak.

(These questions are a key reason for my founding Safeguard Old State, an advocacy and educational group based out of State College, Pa. with the mission of revitalizing the Pennsylvania State University by seeking to “rekindle the spirit of the classical university within the structure of the modern research institution.”)

Ben Casnocha recently posted a few links to some excellent articles, including P.J. O’Rouke’s commencement speech published in the Los Angeles Times and an in-depth article by Roger Kimball in The New Criterion that explores the same fundamental questions on college education by asking the question, “What was a liberal education?”

There are great minds out there asking fundamental questions about the nature of higher education and because of that I’m confident that our universities will not remain forever rudderless, left to drift in the water, swaying toward one ideology or another depending on the waters of the day.