The highest ideals of higher ed are under mortal threat.
"...the smartest approach to college may be precisely the one that its trajectory of late has conspired against: range widely across subject offerings and focus not on a skill that could become obsolete but on intellectual dexterity and powers of judgment with better odds of enduring relevance. “A liberal arts degree is a preprofessional degree — you just don’t know what the profession is,” said Zimmerman, who teaches a seminar for first-year students at U. Penn. called “Why College?”
The answer to the question in that course title goes well beyond return on investment — or, rather, doesn’t define that return as narrowly as many politicians do. “It’s important to remember that a liberal education was originally meant to develop the capacity to think and act well as a free person,” Jenna Silber Storey, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has taught at the Buckley program at Yale and at the University of Chicago, told me. “The country could use more young people with these capacities now.”
They’d be a bulwark against the whirl of conspiracy theories, the welter of rage. But higher education as a blessing independent of any instantly redeemable credential bucks the zeitgeist. Under Trump, blunt materialism reigns, and such concepts as human rights, diplomacy and even democracy are suspect, the precious preoccupation of idealistic chumps. Do anthropology, philosophy and history stand a chance?"
Frank Bruni https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opinion/college-soul-ai-education.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WU8.SYy1.8TFnMxZ4EfU8∣=em-share
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