ISI Faculty Resource Center

Gwyn Morgan is the retired founding CEO of Encana Corporation, one of North America’s largest natural gas suppliers.  He has also established himself in the media as a gadfly critic of the inefficiencies of universities, especially their business of teaching the liberal arts.  His outstanding accomplishments in business and in public life make him well qualified to comment on the characteristics and skills necessary for people to succeed in the economy and as citizens.  His basic critique is that universities are producing too many liberal arts majors who end up under-employed, and producing too few engineering, information technology, and health care graduates which are fields in which employers have great difficulty finding employees.  Universities need to shift resources toward these vocational programs from the liberal arts, which don’t seem very useful.

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Joseph Epstein has some sensible comments on the case of psychology professor, J. Michael Bailey, who had a woman demonstrate the use of a sex toy before his undergraduate class.  Epstein uses this “teachable moment” to reflect upon how little academic freedom means these days on account of the confusion in higher education as to the nature of education.  Instead of being intellectual authorities, universities, and their professors, have now become pimps, and university presidents their enablers.

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Our society tends to regard the university professor of liberal education as parasitic to the wealth creation of the laborer and CEO.  This false view neglects the moral economy in which each of them participates, and to which each adds his own unique value.

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A common perception in our society has it that people who create wealth directly, such as the businessman or the laborer who works with his hands, produce more wealth than a university professor, who is seen as a parasite on their efforts. The university professor, especially one who teaches humanities and social sciences and thus does not invent some machine that enhances industrial production, produces nothing of value.  It’s even worse if he teaches at a public institution, because then he draws his inflated salary from the backs of those who actually work for a living. A recent encounter of mine challenges this perception in a fundamental way.

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Fourth in a brilliant series on Eva Brann's book. Must read if at all serious on the liberal arts!! [editor]

In an age of perpetual innovation – frequently identified with the very core of modernity – it can be difficult to defend tradition as a depository of wisdom.  However, Brann proposes to take what is strong and weak of the modern republic’s lax attitude toward tradition, and use them to illuminate the advantages of liberal education for the republic.

Fourth in a brilliant series on Eva Brann's book. Must read if at all serious on the liberal arts!! [editor]

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Third in a series of reflections on a vital book.

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