Commentary
Have Western educators turned their backs on the traditional foundations of liberal education? If so, why does it matter?
These are questions at the heart of Canadian scholar Patrick Keeney’s insightful new book, “Liberal Learning and the Modern University: Reclaiming the Intellectual and Moral Foundations of Higher Education.” The answers have implications well beyond the college campus. If democratic governance requires citizens who are capable of sound judgment, deliberation, and civil discourse, liberal education is a cultural imperative.
Professor Keeney focuses on the West’s unfortunate departure from traditional higher education. Universities have grown larger, more bureaucratic, and more expensive. They increasingly speak the language of competencies, outcomes, and efficient management. At the same time, their problems run deeper than misguided priorities. Ideological conformity and bureaucratic overreach have become matters of serious concern. In fact, the modern university appears to have lost all sense of purpose.
The author asserts that liberal learning—the cultivation of judgment, imagination, and intellectual freedom—is the essential foundation of our civilization. It isn’t merely preparation for a career, or a conduit for cultural fashions. At its best, it’s an introduction to enduring questions about human existence: What is truth? What is justice? What is a good life? What do we owe one another? What does it mean to be free? What kind of people should we become?
Keeney draws particularly on British philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of education as an initiation into the conversation of mankind. It is not just the accumulation of information. It’s an encounter with the intellectual inheritance of previous generations, and ideas that might challenge our own.
Civic Implications
The condition of the modern university has profound civic implications. Liberal democracy can’t depend entirely on constitutional frameworks. It requires citizens capable of listening, weighing evidence, distinguishing argument from assertion, changing their minds, and disagreeing without treating disagreement itself as illegitimate. These habits do not arise automatically. They must be cultivated.
Ultimately, Keeney’s apprehension about the demise of liberal learning leads to a concern about the consequences for society. Students can graduate with valuable credentials and technical competencies, yet with little experience in the disciplined examination of ideas. Such graduates might be prepared for employment, but they are woefully unprepared for mature citizenship. This is an increasingly vital issue in a political culture marked by polarization, competing claims of victimhood, and an abundance of unreliable information.
Weaker Habits of Mind
Keeney holds that the fundamental purpose of a university is to cultivate the intellectual virtues needed to navigate our world: humility, independence, courage, honesty, curiosity and a willingness to follow an argument wherever it leads. These virtues coexist uneasily with a present-day culture in which disagreement is automatically experienced as injury. He is particularly concerned about the tendency to treat offence as a form of harm and to favour institutional intervention over intellectual discourse.
The question is not whether students should be treated with courtesy and respect—of course they should. The question is: can a university fulfill its educational purpose while prioritizing the protection of students from intellectual discomfort? If not the university, who will prepare them to encounter difficult questions?
Functional democracies require citizens who can disagree without turning every disagreement into a moral conflict. If universities insist that uncomfortable ideas must be suppressed rather than answered, they weaken the habits of mind on which political deliberation depends.
DEI and Uncertain Managerial Objectives
Keeney’s discussion of diversity, equity, and inclusion raises a related point. He does not disparage the legitimacy of equality, or the value of broad participation in higher education. His concern is about what happens when the pursuit of diversity moves beyond widening access and becomes an ideological framework through which students are compelled to interpret all social and political issues.
Demographic diversity, he observes, does not produce intellectual diversity. A university can become a more diverse demographic while becoming less diverse about the ideas considered acceptable for discussion. A democracy requires citizens capable of engaging with people who think differently, and a public square in which discourse does not immediately become a contest among competing identities and claims of oppression.
His criticism of managerialism is connected to the same argument. His objection is not simply that universities have too many administrators. It is that managerial thinking is gradually displacing academic thinking. Academic inquiry is necessarily uncertain; it depends on questioning assumptions, following unexpected evidence, and tolerating differences of opinion. Administrators, by contrast, seek consistency, measurable outcomes, compliance, and risk management.
When managerial priorities are dominant, the university begins to value orderliness over understanding and institutional harmony over intellectual freedom. The result, in Keeney’s view, is a loss of traditional priorities. Universities continue to teach, research and award degrees, but are increasingly uncertain about the objectives that guide their endeavours.
Indifference Is Not an Option
College matters concern more than professors, students, and administrators. Universities are vital institutions through which a democratic society transmits its intellectual inheritance. What they do affects the general quality of public life.
Keeney’s arguments deserve serious attention even from those who may question parts of his diagnosis. He is asking whether a society committed to liberty can remain indifferent to the kind of education required to exercise freedom responsibly. University reform may prove to be harder than we think, but Keeney makes a compelling case for getting started. If liberal learning is to be restored universities must do some things differently? He offers a compelling list of first principles we should return to—freedom of thought, rigorous inquiry, intellectual humility, the intrinsic value of knowledge, and the cultivation of character.
The professor’s message is clear. Liberal learning is not an ornamental luxury reserved for students of philosophy, history, or literature. It’s part of the intellectual infrastructure of a well-ordered society. The vital question this brings to mind is: are there still enough people who believe that education has a purpose beyond credentials, employment, and the pursuit of personal interests?
One thing is certain: Liberal democracy will not be sustained by institutions and procedures alone. It will depend on citizens who are capable of using their institutions intelligently—individuals who can distinguish truth from falsehood, understand opposing arguments, and recognize that liberty involves responsibilities as well as rights. Universities can’t guarantee that all graduates will measure up to these ideals. But as a society, we can choose to cultivate them rather than neglect them.
Education produces consequences well beyond the realm of schools, colleges, and universities. Ultimately, it will impact our future itself. Indifference, therefore, is not an option—that’s why the subject of Patrick Keeney’s book should be everyone’s business.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
