President John Garvey of The Catholic University of America delivered his final commencement remarks this past weekend. He’s stepping down next month as president after 12 years and Peter Kilpatrick will assume the presidency. President Garvey spoke on wisdom:

I was struck by President Garvey’s mentioning of Job 28. MaryKate and I chose this for the First Reading at our Wedding in September, specifically Job 28:12-15, 23-28:

But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man does not know the way to it, and it is not found in the land of the living. The deep says, “It is not in me,” and the sea says, “It is not with me.” It cannot be gotten for gold, and silver cannot be weighed as its price. … God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens. When he gave to the wind its weight, and meted out the waters by measure; when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder; then he saw it and declared it; he established it, and searched it out. And he said to man, “Behold, the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”

Job comes to realize that despite his righteousness he nonetheless falls short of the glory of God, in what I read as a sort of foreshadowing of the necessity of God’s gratuitous grace for our hope of salvation. Job’s challenge to God amidst the ruins of his life, amidst his suffering and loss, is the pitiable challenge of “a faultfinder contend[ing] with the Almighty.” Job’s humility and repentance in the sight of God, the author and source of all life, all goodness, is the beginning of wisdom:

Job answered the LORD: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

Humility sets us on the path home to God, a radical path that requires the continual humbling of our powerful but frail ego in order to attain the happiness upon which no sun sets.

Jonathan Malesic writes from Dallas on his experience teaching in a (not quite) post-pandemic culture at Southern Methodist University, where his experiences of student disengagement are said to mirror those being experienced by professors nationally. Malesic compares that disengagement and general loss of momentum to the University of Dallas, which went remote only during the early weeks of the pandemic and which has been operating normally and in-person since the Fall 2020 semester:

To the people I spoke with at the University of Dallas, the personal, relational character of education is inseparable from high intellectual standards. Ms. Capizzi recalled a literature course she took with a professor who was known as a hard grader. She visited his office at least once a week to talk about the material, and even more often when there was a paper due. “Him having a high standard for each of us was good, but then we have the standard for ourselves,” she said. “It’s difficult, but you want it to be difficult, and you want to be a part of it because it’s difficult.”

Ms. Capizzi’s comments echo those of the sociologists Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, who in their 2014 book, “How College Works,” found that students learn when they’re motivated, and “the strongest motivation to work on basic skills comes from an emotionally based face-to-face relationship with specific other people — for instance, the one-on-one writing tutorial with a respected professor who cares about this student’s work.”

Those relationships are much harder to forge remotely, and students who don’t discover early on that they learn through relationships will never know to seek them out. Even Mr. Vancil, who wishes he could take all his classes remotely, said he learns a great deal from his frequent visits to his professors’ office hours.

Professors must recognize that caring for students means wanting to see them thrive. That entails high expectations and a willingness to help students exceed them. Administrators will need to enact policies that put relationships at the center. That will mean resisting the temptation to expand remote learning, even if students demand it, and ensuring that faculty workloads leave time for individual attention to students.

“Young people are the hope of the world,” Dr. Crider told me. Current students, he added, “are capable of rising to the same standards as before, and we do them a disservice when we presume they’re too mentally ill or too traumatized to function.”

A mantra of teaching, at any level, is “Meet the students where they are.” But if education is built on relationships, then colleges must equally insist students meet their teachers where they are. The classroom, the lab and the office are where we instructors do our best and where a vast majority of students can do their best, too. Our goal is to take students somewhere far beyond where they meet us.