Education Is Not a Commodity

In a recent opinion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Maryland classics professor Eric Adler observed that elite universities are “killing the humanities on purpose.” His claim was not mere hyperbole. The University of Tulsa dismissed the dean of its Honors College, Jennifer Frey, even though she had quintupled its enrollment by emphasizing the Great Books. The official reason was financial underperformance, though Tulsa’s endowment exceeds a billion dollars. Likewise, the University of Chicago has drastically restructured its humanities offerings, citing “historic funding pressures,” despite an endowment of more than $10 billion. If these institutions were genuinely hemorrhaging funds from their humanities programs, they could easily sustain them. Adler’s conclusion is that something deeper is at work.

What is at work is not simply financial mismanagement but a long-brewing cultural transformation. For more than a century, American higher education has been shaped by a Zeitgeist that disintegrates the liberal arts university. It denies that mathematics, the sciences, and the humanities form a unified whole ordered to human flourishing. Instead, it replaces integration with specialization, reducing education to a utilitarian enterprise. The result is that universities have increasingly forgotten what it means to be well-educated.

The reigning assumption is that the purpose of college is to produce workers, not persons; employees, not citizens; technicians, not thinkers. The great tradition of liberal learning—an education that frees the soul by opening it to truth, wisdom, and virtue—has been crowded out.

Many small and mid-sized colleges, particularly those with faith-based roots, bought into the hypothesis that they could survive by imitating research universities. They gutted their core curricula to expand specialized programs, hoping to attract more students. Yet this has proven a false promise. Why attend a small liberal-arts-in-name-only college when one can go to a large state university for less money, with shinier facilities and the prestige of Division I athletics?

Institutions that abandoned their liberal arts identity now find themselves struggling to survive. Meanwhile, those who have remained faithful to the liberal arts mission—though not wealthy—continue to attract students seeking an education that forms the whole person.

Even if the financial calculus were reversed—even if dismantling the liberal arts could generate more revenue—there remains a deeper principle: The purpose of a university is not reducible to market utility. To treat education as a commodity is to betray its essence. The genuine task of the university is the formation of free and virtuous persons.

A truly liberating education does what its name implies: It liberates. By grounding students in the Western tradition, such education acquaints them with the roots of our civilization—pagan, Jewish, and Christian alike. It teaches that the intellectual tradition is not a linear story of progress but a living, contentious, and fruitful argument across the ages. Within this argument, students find their own voices, contributing to the next chapter of discovery.

For Catholic institutions, this vision includes a still higher horizon: the harmony of faith and reason. However adventurous the intellectual journey may be, its ultimate destination is the Divine Author of both revelation and nature. This conviction fosters both confidence and hospitality. True Catholic education does not retreat behind barricades, anxious and defensive, but extends an open hand. The apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae insists that non-Catholics are essential contributors to the Catholic university. Confident Catholicism is capacious; it welcomes dialogue while never wavering in fidelity to the magisterium.

This confident Catholicism stands in contrast to the prevailing insecurity of secular institutions, which often suppress unpopular questions or cling anxiously to ideological conformity. By contrast, a university that knows its telos—its end—can be both faithful and free.

I was reminded of this during a recent summer term teaching philosophy abroad. Students do not merely study texts in isolation; they encounter them in the living context of Western culture. Standing in Athens, Rome, or Florence, they learn that education is not about acquiring data but about entering a narrative. They become not sightseers but cultural pilgrims.

A pilgrim differs from a tourist in that the former seeks meaning, not diversion. Our students, prepared in advance, arrive at historical and religious sites ready to see them within a larger story: the unfolding of Western civilization and the Christian tradition. They discover that they themselves belong to this story.

This difference between tourism and pilgrimage encapsulates the larger difference between utilitarian and liberal education. The tourist collects experiences; the pilgrim undergoes transformation. The technician acquires marketable skills; the liberally educated person learns how to live.

A paradox emerges: Much of what is most valuable in liberal education looks inefficient to the modern eye. Why send students across the ocean to study philosophy when they could just as easily take the same course at home? Why maintain a core curriculum when electives are cheaper and more popular? Why require languages in doctoral programs when translation software abounds?

By the metrics of commodified education, none of these choices makes sense. They are unnecessary, superfluous, and inefficient. And yet they are indispensable. They reflect an older conviction: that human beings are not made for efficiency but for excellence.

Consider the superabundance of Western art and architecture. Why so many churches adorned with frescoes, mosaics, and sculptures designed to last millennia? Why multi-course Italian meals when one would suffice? Because beauty, festivity, and wonder are not luxuries; they are expressions of our deepest longing for the eternal. So too with education. The “inefficiencies” of small classes, Great Books, and study abroad are precisely what make education transformative.

All this is to say: Genuine liberal education stands athwart the spirit of the age. The reigning Zeitgeist prizes efficiency, novelty, and utility. It urges students to “think for themselves” by severing them from tradition and faith. It regards the Western intellectual heritage as an obstacle to innovation.

True liberal education tells a different story. It insists that real freedom requires rooting oneself in something greater than oneself—above all, in truth. It teaches that creativity is born not only from novelty but also from disciplined imitation and practice. It orients students toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

In this sense, the stakes of education are nothing less than eternal. The Church Fathers spoke unashamedly of humanity’s destiny as theosis, or divinization. Education ordered to wisdom, truth, and virtue points us toward nothing less.

To what end do we educate? Not to produce employees for an economy that will forget them. Not to manufacture technocrats who mistake utility for meaning. Not to feed a culture of distraction with new diversions.

We educate so that our students may become free—free to think, free to love, free to worship. We educate so that they may seek wisdom, live virtuously, and glimpse the divine. We educate so that, in the words of St. Irenaeus, “the glory of God is man fully alive.”

Anything less is unworthy of the name of university.