I can tell you who won’t be surprised: incoming freshmen who are enrolled in BYU’s new required UNIV 101 class. This class, like the changes to hiring and employment, is intended to help BYU become the “Christ-centered, prophetically directed university of prophecy” that it can be. While some would have BYU deemphasize its distinctiveness, recent changes at BYU reflect a desire to give students a more robust and authentic Latter-day Saint experience, one that integrates their faith with their academic studies. 

Other changes at BYU are worth investigating and highlighting (see here for a useful summary), but I believe UNIV 101 is a useful indication of where the university is headed—and why many students are choosing BYU. By leaning into its distinctive heritage and beliefs, BYU seeks to create a meaningful alternative to the education offered at other universities. Rather than constraining students and faculty, the changes at BYU give people a choice they wouldn’t otherwise have: the choice to study in an environment that is unabashedly committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

UNIV 101

But what is UNIV 101, and why is BYU now requiring it? This course responds to challenges that many students face when beginning their university studies: moving away from home, adjusting to a new environment, meeting new people, and adapting to the rigors of academic life. Additionally, a key goal of this carefully cultivated model at BYU is to help students integrate their faith and academic lives, learning how to face the challenges of the world with the peace and perspective that come from living the principles of the gospel.

New students no longer participate only in large general education lecture halls but are part of a smaller, more intimate group that fosters collaboration and connection. One professor emphasized that this community-driven approach helps students feel a sense of belonging. They also feel safer and are more willing to ask questions and share experiences. “It’s essential that students not only excel academically but also feel like they belong and that their voices matter,” he said. 

A key challenge in integrating spiritual values into a secular academic environment is finding ways to make faith a meaningful part of the academic experience. Part of the opportunity for all BYU faculty is to recognize that spiritual principles are not compartmentalized but woven into the fabric of every discussion, assignment, and group project. As this becomes familiar to the students through this course, they will hopefully look for it and even inspire it as they progress through other courses on campus. As one professor shared, “Our goal is not just to teach them facts but to help them see how their education can prepare them for both temporal and eternal challenges. When students understand that their academic pursuits are part of their eternal journey, they are more likely to engage with the material in a meaningful way.”

Building Community through Faculty Collaboration

A striking feature of the Learning Communities program is the collaboration required of faculty members from different departments who are involved in teaching the same cohort of students. This is no small feat. To make this work, schedules must be coordinated across departments, and instructors must be trained to teach in a way that aligns with the university’s values. Even professors who have never taught undergraduates, such as law professors who typically teach graduate students, are being called upon to teach these classes with a new approach that encourages participation, openness, and vulnerability. 

The result is a classroom environment that feels more personal, more intimate, and more aligned with the gospel principles that BYU holds dear. This process can be challenging, as many of these 18-year-old freshmen are entering a new world of ideas and perspectives for the first time. Some have expressed how difficult it can be to find the courage to speak up in class, but through small group discussions and peer feedback, students gradually warm up to the environment. For this model of learning to succeed, faculty must also be prepared and committed to the vision of the university.

Thoughtful faculty development does more than ensure effective teaching; it also nurtures the growth of professors as individuals. Many instructors find that teaching in this kind of setting challenges them to reflect on their own faith and teaching practices as well. As one professor shared, “Teaching here has been transformative for me. I’ve had to think deeply about how I teach and how my faith informs my role as an educator. It’s been a humbling and rewarding experience.”

What Makes This Experience Unique?

This initiative began with a fundamental question: what should incoming BYU students know from the outset of their BYU experience? Faculty and administrators, including the leadership of the university at the time, such as then-President Kevin J. Worthen, Academic Vice-President President C. Shane Reese, and AcademicVice-President of Undergraduate Studies Richard Osguthorpe began brainstorming what would make a BYU education truly unique. The first iteration enrolled about 60 students and was launched two years ago. These early pilots were carefully planned to determine what worked best. After testing and refining it down to a more manageable group size of 24, the program was ready for broader implementation. As of the Winter semester 2024, the Learning Communities initiative launched on a grand scale, enrolling over 1,800 incoming students—a milestone that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

Today the program is designed to address several needs simultaneously: academic rigor, community building, and spiritual growth. Students are placed in courses that span multiple disciplines—everything from sociology to Book of Mormon studies—and those students take these core classes together as part of their Learning Community. By grouping these courses together, students are able to collaborate on their experiences across different subjects, draw connections, and share insights in a more personal way.

Evaluation of Outcomes

One of the major questions on everyone’s mind is how its success will be measured. How will long-term impacts, like retention rates or spiritual and academic growth, be assessed?

For BYU, success will be defined not just by academic performance or graduation rates but by the overall impact it has on the students as they move through their college years. Are they more spiritually attuned? Do they view their academic pursuits through the lens of faith and discipleship? More importantly, how will they apply the lessons learned in these small, supportive communities to their future careers, families, and lives? Will they carry forward the lessons of unity, collaboration, and spiritual reflection into their later years? This is a question that won’t have an answer for a while, but the excitement around this program points to the potential for lasting impact.

While the students I spent time with spoke highly of the class and its impact, they also shared constructive ideas for improvement. While the class did a great job of merging faith and scholarship in some respects, students expressed a desire for further clarity on how to bridge these two aspects in practical, everyday contexts. For example, as one student remarked, “I loved how we connected spiritual principles with career goals, but sometimes I felt like the connection could have been clearer, more grounded in what we’re learning academically.” This suggests that while the framework is present, students may benefit from more explicit examples or guidance on how to consistently weave spiritual values into both their studies and future careers. 

Another area for improvement pointed out by students was although they appreciated the sense of belonging and the integration of faith, some felt that a more structured approach to exploring complex spiritual issues would enhance the learning experience. For instance, one shared, “Sometimes I felt like we could have gone deeper into the doctrine behind what we’re discussing, especially when we talked about ethics or leadership. A more focused discussion on how our faith relates to those topics would have been helpful.”

Preparing for the Second Coming, Together

In the October 2024 LDS General Conference, President Russell M. Nelson said, “Now is the time for you and for me to prepare for the Second Coming of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.” This caught my attention, and I’ve reflected on it many times. How are we, as individuals and as a community, preparing for the second coming of Jesus Christ? 

I was reminded of President Nelson’s words again as I sat as a visitor with eager freshmen in a section of UNIV 101. President Nelson’s message felt especially relevant as I observed members of the rising generation engaging with not just academic content but with their faith and peers in ways that are seemingly unique to this campus. I could see how this learning community—a space where academic rigor meets spiritual growth—was not only preparing them for future careers but for eternal purposes. 

One student shared a powerful insight about how the class helped her reconcile her professional aspirations with her spiritual values. She explained, “This class really helped me see that my future career isn’t just about personal success, but it’s about using my talents to make a positive difference in others’ lives. It’s about aligning my professional goals with my spiritual values, and that connection has given me a deeper sense of purpose.” 

UNIV 101 shows how the light of the gospel can inform academic life and provide a distinctive approach to higher education. Many students and faculty choose BYU precisely because it allows them the ability to pursue sacred and secular studies simultaneously. The Doctrine and Covenants teaches that “he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day” (D&C 50:24). Rather than “dark days” at BYU, recent changes portend a brighter future for LDS students and faculty who want an authentically LDS university experience.

The post Redefining Higher (and Holier) Education: BYU’s Fusion of Faith and Learning appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

The word choice was clever, for who could be against a “comprehensive” approach? The framing divides curriculum choices across the country into categories of “haves” and “have nots,” and it doesn’t take any imagination to know what side you should be on. It was truly a smart move for the comprehensive sex ed team.

The truth is, regardless of what type of sex ed your school advocates, your children are likely missing out on some of the critical facts they deserve to know. And the research is clear—whether you hope your child will embrace abstinence until they reach adulthood or you anticipate a sexually active but healthy teenager—the more information you give them, the more likely you are to achieve your goals. 

So, what should kids know when it comes to sex? It’s important that parents be consciously reflective of their own ideas in conjunction with their own environments, values, and children. But here are some facts that teenagers deserve to know as part of a truly comprehensive sexual education. 

Abstinence is the Default

First and foremost, kids deserve to know that not everyone is doing it. While it may be hard to believe, partnered teen sex has plummeted in the last few decades, with 62% of high schoolers claiming their virginity is intact. Your child may not hear from their fellow teen virgins, but they can rest assured that a large number of them exist. And those non-virgins? The majority of them wish they had waited. Overall, despite what teens may be saying to their friends, less than one-third of them report being sexually active on confidential surveys. 

Sex is Emotional

Your child may know about sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, or progesterone, but it’s oxytocin that throws a wrench in the casual sex playground. As sex elicits the release of oxytocin, people feel (or want to feel) an emotional connection—an element inherently lacking in noncommittal relationships. This may be one reason casual sex (like one-night stands and “friends with benefits”) and individual sex (like masturbation and pornography use) can lead to conflicted feelings, loneliness, or depression.

Teenage Abstinence Correlates with Happier Marriages

Most teenagers say they hope to be married someday. They deserve to know that earlier sexual debuts and more previous sexual partners predict lower happiness in marriage. So does premarital cohabitation—even if you cohabit with the partner you eventually marry. In fact, couples who wait until after they are married to have sex with each other are more likely to be happy in their relationship, and married people are more likely to be happy with their sex lives. Of course, these are only general trends, but if kids want to improve their chances of a happy marriage later on, they deserve to know.  

Casual Sex is Worse for Girls

When it comes to sex outside of a long-term, committed adult relationship, girls should know they often get the raw end of the deal. Women are more sexually complicated than men. During sexual debuts and casual sex, men are much more likely than women to reach a climax or even have an enjoyable experience. A woman’s first negative sexual experience in the back seat of a car can have a lasting impact on how she thinks about sex. Because men and women both tend to prioritize the man’s pleasure during casual sex, for women, a long-term, committed relationship offers the best chance for positive sexual experiences.

Watching Porn Makes Sex Worse

Healthy sexuality requires some self-confidence, realistic expectations, and desire for intimacy. Our kids are swimming in a sea of sexualized media content, and they deserve to know that taking our sexual cues from the media can create unhealthy and unrealistic expectations about normal bodies, increasing the likelihood of body shame, low self-esteem, eating disorders, and depression. Those unrealistic expectations also make sexual experience a much more difficult arena because real women and men don’t look, respond, or behave like the scripted actors in the media. While it may seem counterintuitive to some, researchers have found that viewing pornographic material makes relationships more difficult to navigate, and kids deserve to know. 

Sex has Dangers

All fear tactics aside, kids deserve to know the dangers of sex are real. Sexually transmitted diseases infect 26 million people in the US, with nearly half of those being young people under the age of 25. Kids should know that STDs can cause life-long issues, that abstinence (by both partners) is the only sure way to protect oneself, and that 100% condom use reduces the chance of infection by 30% (for genital herpes) to 80% (for HIV), and inconsistent or incorrect condom use makes the chance of infection impossible to predict. And they should know that, just like with COVID tests, a negative result does not guarantee the absence of disease. Teens may still choose to take risks, but at least they won’t be able to say no one gave them the stats.  

The Accepted Wisdom on LGBT+ Has Changed

Regarding LGBT+ issues, kids deserve to know that the “born that way” conversation has now become “things change.” In long-term studies, from 25% to 65% of women and men who originally identified as non-heterosexual report changes in their sexual orientation. Even some people who have medically transitioned to another gender later detransition, wishing they never had surgery. Your child deserves to know that having a sexual thought about a person of the same sex does not mean they need to embrace a different sexual identity and that being uncomfortable in their body may be a passing phenomenon. In fact, for most people, it is. Kids deserve to know that waiting to make life-altering decisions can be a viable option. Things change.

Sex Has Moral Implications

Kids hear from just about every corner of their world—possibly including their sex ed teacher—that sex is a right to be claimed and an open world to be explored without any restraint except the ever-present standard of consent. Yes, sexual feelings are healthy, but consent is a bar set way too low, easily coexisting with manipulation, self-centeredness, trickery, use, and abuse. For obvious reasons, those do not lead to happier teens. Instead, lower sexual restraint can lead to psychological distress and fewer chances of relational success. Your child deserves to know that saving sexual experiences for relationships that promise love, compassion, connection, and support is the most likely route to sexual fulfillment—and an important step toward a rewarding life.

The post The Missing Truths of “Comprehensive” Sex Education appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

I confess, however, that even after having observed these programs in Utah and other states and reading reports about dozens of other programs elsewhere, my optimism and pessimism neurons are fighting with each other. Part of me delights in the solid education these needy individuals and couples are getting to help them work on their relationships, not just let relationship fate have its way. These kinds of relationship-strengthening programs have a long, replicated track record of helping couples, privileged and less so. It seems my optimistic side should be winning this battle. However, the other part of me frets that we are expecting and hoping for too much. How can a set of weekly classes, most with an average dosage of only about 8 hours, overpower the cultural forces—not to mention the personal challenges—that laugh heartlessly at these stressed and distressed couples’ bold aspirations of strong and stable relationships? And even if these programs are more potent than my skeptical scientific self allows, how can we reach these aspiring couples and co-parents in the kinds of numbers that could really move the needle on healthy, stable families in our society? 

For now, my working answer to the first conundrum is this: I think there are meta-messages that sink in and stick with participants in all these relationship classes offered through these various programs, including Healthy Relationships Utah and the Utah Marriage Commission. Sure, a few person-specific golden nuggets of content can hit home, stick with a participant, and make a positive difference in their relationship. Even with this possibility, however, I can not help but think that the secret ingredient to helping participants with their relationships is a crucial meta-message they get. Regardless of the educational content and method, relationships are not particularly natural. They are hard, they take work, and people can learn how to do them better because there are good resources to help them learn. These educators are passionate, idealistic hope-mongers for healthy relationships. That hope seeps in and motivates imperfect efforts to work on imperfect relationships, not just passively accept the status quo.

I’m not sure what other cultural levers there are to pull. I’m not optimistic that the media will take up the cause of strong marriages and stable families in the same way they have helped, say, to promote the cultural value of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In fact, it seems the media questions whether promoting strong marriages is consistent with that agenda. Similarly, I doubt higher education will adopt a pro-marriage agenda despite reams of research showing its salutary effects on children and adults. Progressive ideologies that have been baked into academia tend to frame marriage, at best, as just a lifestyle choice or an elite institution out of reach of too many people these days and, at worst, as an intransigent force of patriarchy and injustice. Institutional religion generally preaches the value of strong marriages, of course. However, the data are pretty clear that contemporary young adults in their family formation years are not drawn to the pews in the numbers of past cohorts. Even if young adults were drawn to religious organizations, according to John Van Epp, a prominent relationship education program developer, most religious congregations have been fumbling the ball on effective support of marriage, anyway.

Despite these cultural complications, under both Republican and Democratic stewardship, the government has been experimenting on a small scale with what can be done directly to help individuals and couples gain the knowledge and skills needed for healthy relationships. This is in addition to all the other indirect policy efforts to improve the social and economic soils in which committed love can take root and grow. Access to good jobs, education, career opportunities, affordable housing, and improved healthcare are things that can indirectly impact relationships and are the target for many changing public policies. And let’s be clear-eyed about why: every day government picks up the bill for the considerable societal costs of family instability. One now-dated study (2008) conservatively estimated these societal costs in Utah alone at $276 million a year (about $400 million in 2024 dollars) and more than $100 billion nationwide (about $160 billion in 2024 dollars). I hold out hope that all these government-funded efforts can reach beyond actual class participants and digital consumers to nudge the broader culture towards smarter relationship formation strategies and fighting relationship entropy, saving taxpayers’ money.  

Usually, culture trickles down from the advantaged to the disadvantaged. But while the advantaged personally invest in marriage and receive its dividends, many recoil at promoting this stock to others less fortunate. If government efforts to enhance family stability and marriage among those who are least able to access its benefits can yield some modest success—and they are—maybe all this good education will defy social gravity and trickle up into the broader cultural conversation to change attitudes and behaviors. A solid indicator that the culture is changing in the right direction would be greater numbers of people seeking help for their relationships. In one study I conducted with some colleagues, we found in a nationally representative sample of married people who had some recent thoughts about divorce that only about a third had sought help from a marriage counselor, and only about 15% had invested in a marriage enhancement class like the ones offered by Healthy Relationships Utah. Less than 10% sought out help from religious leaders. Rates of informal, private help-seeking (e.g., reading a book, browsing a website) were considerably higher, however. Therefore, we should not scrimp on efforts to get reliable information out on easily accessible platforms. The Utah Marriage Commission fits this bill well. 

I think Utah could be a model for how public policy efforts can create more healthy, stable families. This model includes establishing an in-statute Commission formally directing efforts hosted by a land-grant university skilled at delivering high-quality information and classes to a broad swath of the population and doing so with state and federal grants, marriage license fees, private revenue streams, and philanthropic donations. Utah’s new Office of Families, too, may add a crucial element to this model. 

Still, with all my years of experience and expertise, I’m keenly aware of how our do-gooder policy aspirations often fall short of solving the problems they are intended to fix and sometimes even exacerbate them. The distance between design and performance is often wide and discouraging. It’s as if some of our social problems have become resistant to our best policy antibiotics. To name just one underwhelming success, the well-known Head Start program was supposed to eliminate the school-readiness gap between disadvantaged and advantaged children. But 50 years and a generation of research has shown how we have struggled to achieve this worthy goal. Head Start has provided only small gains for disadvantaged children, and those gains tend to dissipate over time. Yet the program remains popular and well-funded. Even with disappointing results, we keep trying. What would it say if we collectively threw our hands up in the air and said that we can’t fix this school-readiness problem, especially when good education is so central to opportunity and fairness in our society?

These are profound complexities to address as I debate in my own head the effectiveness of this new social policy initiative to fight family instability. Stable families do make essential contributions to opportunity and fairness. What does it say if our elected representatives shrug off this major social problem that impacts millions of children’s chances in life, derails many adult lives, and costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year? What other major contemporary social problem is outside the bounds of public policy concern? Government funds are fighting rising rates of childhood obesity and skyrocketing levels of teen depression and anxiety. On an even more personal level, fertility rates have fallen well below population replacement levels, and national legislators are wringing their hands about what appropriate measures can be taken to supply the next generation of needed workers and citizens. And, of course, government is already heavily involved in trying to ameliorate problems caused when healthy relationships fail to form or fall apart. It may be trite, but inexpensive fences at the top of the cliff are better than costly ambulances at the bottom. It seems to me that we need to engage and try to address the problem of family instability, even with all its complexity and uncertainty of how to fix it, delicately balancing potential collective gains with individual freedoms and diverse values. There are smart people who disagree with me on these important topics. Despite these divergent voices, I think we need to keep trying. Disengagement seems like sticking our heads in the sand.

The post The Cultural Divide: Reconciling Relationship Education with Contemporary Society appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

MotherWise Denver

 Just over the Front Range to the east is a unique program under the label of MotherWise that serves mostly low-income pregnant women and new mothers in the Denver area. MotherWise is the flagship program of Thriving Families and the on-ramp for a set of other valued services for these lower-income moms. A class in English or Spanish begins almost every week, so moms can start the program right away. Teen moms have their own separate classes, using a different curriculum, Love Notes (which is also used in Healthy Relationships Utah). The curriculum is designed for individuals rather than couples, although many of these moms are in romantic relationships, married, and all have children. MotherWise is a 6-week, 12-hour educational program focused on gaining knowledge and skills for healthy relationships using the well-researched Within My Reach curriculum. It also includes information on mothers caring for and connecting with their babies. Many of the participants have experienced trauma in their lives growing up and/or within their romantic relationships. For some, the class alerts them to the reality that they are in a dangerous relationship which can help them make decisions and plans for exiting the relationship safely, if they choose. The Within My Reach curriculum used in the program was designed with sensitivity to how trauma can impede learning and change. In-person classes resumed summer of 2022 (after the pandemic disruption), but program administrators learned a lot about online delivery of their classes and continue to offer that popular delivery option as well. The opportunity for online classes provides fewer logistical challenges for moms and is more economical for MotherWise. 

I had the opportunity to observe an in-person class last October. The class was held in Thriving Families’ downtown Denver office in a nondescript office building next to the state courthouse. The building also houses offices for the local Family Justice Center that serves survivors of domestic violence. Moms arrived with babies, older kids (free childcare provided), strollers, and diaper bags in tow. Many took advantage of free Uber rides to classes that Thriving Families pays for. This was deemed an important expense for the program because transportation issues are a big challenge for moms to attend weekly classes. What seemed like a large classroom quickly becomes tight with about 8 moms, 5 babies in carriers, and all the accompanying baby gear. One mom is missing (she gave birth two days ago), and breastfeeding war stories are the informal topic of conversations as participants get settled before class begins.

I was also impressed with how Collette fielded comments and questions and sometimes skillfully steered conversations back to the lesson. Despite the large amount of group participation, she was able to cover the scheduled curriculum for the class that day. She taught without notes, keeping constant eye contact with the moms, and even occasionally bouncing a participant’s baby on her hip. There was clearly a positive group dynamic among the participants, something many relationship education experts believe is crucial to good outcomes of these kinds of classes. The class ends with a list of infant care resources in the Denver area from which moms could benefit. The participants enjoyed being with each other and listening to other women’s stories and comments. One participant offered a ride home to another one at the end of class instead of her calling an Uber. 

MotherWise is just the gateway to other valuable supports. Thriving Families, the non-profit that runs MotherWise, also offers individual, couple, and family therapy for the moms who go through MotherWise. These voluntary therapeutic opportunities allow these women to work on problems that can go beyond what a group class can help with. Trauma-informed therapists offer 30-40 sessions a week on-site and virtually for participants. Additionally, Thriving Families offers postpartum depression prevention groups because these low-income moms are at especially high risk for postpartum depression. Some participants want more help with parenting, so there are regular parenting classes as well. Once a month, there is also a group session with a certified doula to answer questions about pregnancy and childbirth. About a third of MotherWise moms will participate in these additional support services. Overall, MotherWise enrolls 400-500 moms a year. 

Of course, navigating this array of internal services can be a challenge for overwhelmed moms. Therefore, the classroom instructors can do double duty as their “family support coordinators” by working one-on-one with participants outside of class to connect them with additional internal and community resources as needed and wanted. This may be one of the key ingredients of the program’s success that other programs might want to follow. Another key ingredient may be the drive for continuous improvement of existing services to meet the needs of their clients. However, the ‘secret sauce’ in all this, according to multiple MotherWise program administrators, is their ability to hire deeply caring and professional staff with low turnover rates. Dr. Galena Rhoades, an internationally known scholar of relationship education and a research professor at the University of Denver, provides overall leadership. She writes the grants to fund these programs and gives strategic vision to the operation and, additionally, is one of the most impressive practitioner-scholars I’ve ever known. While her role is essential, she relies on the Director of Programs and Community Outreach, Jessica Purcel, as the COO of Thriving Families, and other dedicated staff, to make the program dream an operational reality. Purcel came to MotherWise with a client services background in business, not the typical social services career history.

Sometimes, when I observe these kinds of classes, I find myself wondering whether they really have sufficient ‘oomph’ to lift participants’ relationships and family lives above their challenging circumstances. In this case, however, I could sense how this kind of class—along with the additional services—would be a powerful support system for moms going through stressful times and provide a real lifeline for some. Program administrators told me that for some of the moms, MotherWise was really their only support system. As more research evaluating this program emerges over the next few years, I expect it to prove its merits and cost-effectiveness. 

Family Expectations and True Dads—Oklahoma City

Further east is a program in Oklahoma City. On an unusually balmy December 2022 evening, I sat in on Family Expectations and True Dads classes in Oklahoma City. This program is offered through Public Strategies Inc. (PSI), a private human services company that delivers relationship education, fatherhood and co-parenting education, and workforce development services to lower-income individuals and couples in Oklahoma City. PSI is one of the premier providers of these kinds of educational services in the country. Kathy Edin, Princeton University professor and one of the most important social policy scholars in the country, believes that PSI’s work is one of the most important local social policy laboratories in the country right now. She argues that what they do is a beacon for other social policy efforts nationwide to improve the lives of disadvantaged families. Given their programming experience, skill, and innovation, the federal government’s Office of Family Assistance also contracts with PSI to consult with other similar federally funded programs.

PSI’s founder and president, Mary Myrick, has been leading this work for 25 years now. She is a home-grown resident who speaks in a slow Oklahoma drawl that belies a keen mind that is equally adept at managing the minute details of providing high-quality services to lower income families and executing the rigors of social policy evaluation studies. Additionally, she more than holds her own in esoteric ruminations about how to build a better social welfare system. PSI’s work in this field started in the late 1990s as a unique state policy initiative to strengthen marriage and reduce divorce rates. During this time, Oklahoma’s divorce rate was outranked only by Nevada, and then-Governor Frank Keating wanted to do something about it. Myrick’s public relations firm was tasked by the governor to build a statewide infrastructure for providing marriage education services to Oklahomans. She built an impressive operation in the early 2000s before the Great Recession, and big budget cuts forced her to focus resources on a more limited area. From that point, federal grants supported continuing services in Oklahoma City. During the Obama administration, program providers were also urged to offer employment services to program participants, and Myrick embraced this opportunity to help couples financially as well as relationally. Both fathers and mothers have the opportunity to improve their employability and find work. Employment challenges and financial stresses are a big factor in why lower income families may struggle to stay together. With another grant, PSI eventually added a fatherhood and coparenting program to their portfolio, enabling them to serve low-income families better regardless of the status of the parents’ relationship. Each of these services—couple, father/co-parenting, and employment—is integrated with the others, and program participants often use multiple services. PSI is a valued partner with the Oklahoma Department of Human Services in an effective private-public partnership to serve disadvantaged families in Oklahoma City. 

At the end of one Research Advisory Group meeting, I stayed an extra evening to observe the Family Expectations and True Dads classes being taught in their renovated facility on the edge of the trendy redeveloped Bricktown downtown area of Oklahoma City. Couples slowly gathered in their respective classrooms, bringing in a modest meal of pasta and salad, which was provided to the couples due to the late start time of 6 pm. Onsite childcare is provided as well when needed, so couples don’t have that added expense and can concentrate on the curriculum and activities. Eventually, about 5 couples settled into the Family Expectations classroom’s comfortable chairs, each well representing the racial and ethnic diversity of Oklahoma City.

After a PowerPoint lesson on building babies’ brains, I follow the men upstairs to another room for “baby boot camp,” where they practice on life-like infant dolls. Marlon dials down his strong voice to a softer, earnest mode to help the men understand that they need to be out ahead of their female partners in childcare. “Before you come home from work, you call her and ask if you need to pick up anything for the baby or dinner on your way home,” he commands more than suggests. “And those dishes in the sink when you get home are your responsibility. Later, when she is nursing the baby, you are there rubbing her feet or talking to her. She is not alone in this; she has a full partner. This is father-of-the-year stuff, men,” he preaches. Then, he patiently teaches them how to swaddle and hold an infant, practicing it with them three times. He doesn’t leave out the high-pitched baby talk so essential to infant linguistic, cognitive, and emotional development. His father-in-waiting trainees are fully engaged now. I can’t help but smile at the scene of five wide-eyed young men—probably equal parts excitement and terror as they anticipate their coming baby—gooing and smiling at their infant dolls as they carefully wrap and tuck them in their upside-down triangle baby blankets and gently slip their hand under the doll’s neck and head to lift and cradle them.

After enjoying this optimistic scene, I slip out of this classroom and into the room next door, where a session of True Dads is going on. Again, a tall African-American man with a large fedora hat is facilitating, regularly calling on the men and their partners by name as he circumnavigates the room, asking them to respond to a question or say what’s on their mind. They are talking about “Amy” and “Flo,” animated characters in a video they just watched that represent the different parts of the brain that are involved in emotion regulation and our “fight or flight or freeze” response. I recognize this material from the PREP relationship-strengthening curriculum out of the University of Denver, from which the True Dads program draws a healthy sample of its content. The 5 or 6 couples and a few “stag” men in the room are trying to learn how to harness their emotions and avoid destructive communication patterns that break apart coparenting relationships and make it hard for men to stay engaged in their children’s lives. A second facilitator, a grandmotherly African-American woman with a constant smile and encouraging demeanor, leads a discussion on depression and getting past the stigma of asking for professional help. I get a sense that these True Dads participants are not quite as engaged and upbeat as the expectant couples in the Family Expectations class downstairs. Probably most of them are no longer in romantic relationships but are trying to hold together a workable relationship as co-parents of a shared treasure.

 Where other programs artfully dodge the close-up lens of evaluation research, PSI has enlisted in three federally funded, rigorous evaluation studies. Family Expectations was evaluated twice, once focusing on unmarried couples and a second one looking at married couples. In the first study with unmarried couples, Oklahoma City was one of eight couple-relationship-strengthening programs evaluated across the United States. This multi-year study, labeled Building Strong Families, was the first to assess the effectiveness of these new programs serving disadvantaged couples. It studied them right at the beginning while the program administrators were still on a steep learning curve. In most sites, many participants who signed up for the program never showed up, and only a small percentage had a substantial dosage of the intervention, but this was not the case in Oklahoma City. Building on several years of experience, Myrick and her team had already figured out how to recruit and retain these stressed couples. Most of their recruited couples received a strong dosage of the intervention. Maybe this is why the Oklahoma City site was the only one to see some positive results at the end of the study, finding a statistically significant difference in the percentage of Family Expectations couples who were still together three years after beginning the program (49%) compared to control-group couples who did not receive the intervention (41%). However, no programs in the study found a difference in the percentage of couples who decided to marry during the course of the study.

A second rigorous study of Family Expectations concentrated on the married-couple participants. Again, Oklahoma City was one of eight program sites across the country testing the effectiveness of these marriage-strengthening programs. This time, most sites, including Oklahoma City, found a reliable pattern of positive but relatively small effects on couple relationships. However, there was no difference between the treatment and control groups in the percentage of married couples who were still together at the end of the 30-month study.

I think it is worthwhile to note that the Family Expectations program has survived two rigorous tests now showing positive effects. This is especially impressive because the ‘norm’ of these kinds of social policy evaluation studies is finding “no effects,” particularly when they are done at the early stages of program development like these studies were. From these results, a confident PSI launched another rigorous study to test the effectiveness of its new fatherhood/co-parenting program. Serious evaluation of these kinds of fatherhood programs was lagging behind the couple programs. For a third time, a PSI program demonstrated its skill with results that noted a decrease in fathers’ psychological distress, improvement within their coparenting relationships and parenting practices, and, perhaps most impressively, improving children’s psychological well-being. Showing the positive effects of these adult education programs on children’s well-being has been the holy grail of this work because their ultimate purpose is to improve disadvantaged children’s lives.

My University of Wisconsin colleague, Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin, has gone beyond the numbers and conducted in-depth interviews with these program participants. They talk about their hopes for and experience with the programs in more personal terms. “Tiana knows life will spill many more ‘glasses of milk,’” Halpern-Meekin writes in her book, Social Poverty, “and so [Tiana is] banking on Family Expectations to provide them with some tools so such mishaps are not ‘catastrophic.’ And it’s essential to her that [her partner] Stefan is by her side through all this.” Additionally, Halpern-Meekin further explains the primary motivation she found for why parents enroll in these classes: 

“Parents often explained that one of the life experiences they most wanted to give their children was that of growing up with both their parents in a loving and healthy household —they saw this as a social resource. An investment in their own relationship, therefore, was a guard against their children’s social poverty.” 

Or as one mother put it, “I still want my son now to see that it’s us, and we’ve got a strong bond, and we can communicate . . . so that they have some kind of grasp of, you know what, people can make relationships work. That not every relationship fails.” 

Backed by scientific inquiry as well as through these personal testimonials, the programs I have highlighted here possess the ability to change the landscape of interpersonal relationships for some low-income families. From either a conservative or progressive perspective, there is much to be gained from public investment in these types of programs.

The post Breaking Cycles: How Education Lifts Families appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In addition to feeling the constant push and pull of the humanities and the natural sciences, psychology is a key site where the intellectual tug-of-war between modernism and postmodernism plays itself out in academia. Scientism has a long history in mainstream psychology, manifest most clearly in the discipline’s abiding devotion to a positivistic philosophy of science and its attendant privileging of objectivism, reductive naturalism, the quantification of behavioral phenomena, deterministic explanation, and an essentially technical-utilitarian ethic.

Despite this long tradition of scientistic thinking in the discipline, however, postmodern activist thought and critical theories of all stripes have been steadily gaining ground in recent decades. At least since the latter half of the 20th century, deconstructionist, social constructionist, and critical theoretical perspectives have been increasingly advanced in some of the discipline’s most highly visible and influential venues. Many postmodern psychologists have not only articulated their own intellectual framework but have engaged in sustained and often penetrating critiques of the basic assumptions, practices, and therapeutic aims—not to mention the unacknowledged ideological, political, and moral commitments—of their more mainstream modernist counterparts.

Although difficult to characterize in any unitary sense, postmodern psychology—like postmodern thought generally—is often characterized as being “heterogeneous; it emphasizes differences and continual change of perspectives, and it attempts to avoid dichotomized or reified concepts.” It is, as one of its earliest and most influential voices has said, a psychology that not only manifests but encourages “a loss of belief in an objective world and an incredulity towards meta-narratives of legitimation.” Indeed, many postmodern psychologists call for a radical “de-centering of the subject,” focusing less on the individual psyche and more on the various contingent and local social forces, cultural contexts, and power structures that construct both persons as the sorts of psychological beings they are, and the “science” employed to study them. In this way, postmodern psychology “moves out of the archaeology of the psyche and into the cultural landscape of the present world . . . accepting the open, perspectival and ambiguous nature of knowledge and validation of knowledge through practice.” In so doing, the postmodern perspective in psychology necessarily encourages a “multi-method approach to research, including qualitative descriptions of the diversity of a person’s relations to the world and a deconstruction of texts that attempt to describe this relation.”

In recent years, in response to the discipline’s ongoing “replication crisis,” there has been an intensification of calls for improved scientific rigor, more precise methods of quantification, and stricter adherence to the canons of objectivity. At the same time, however, we have also witnessed increasingly fervent demands for the “decolonization of psychology” by encouraging greater activism to destabilize traditional scientific methods of inquiry and “decenter” psychology’s traditional focus on explaining the behavior of the decontextualized, individual Self. 

Unfortunately, it is not clear how heeding both of these calls could lead the discipline toward any greater theoretical or methodological coherence. Indeed, the “contest of wills” taking place between the modern, scientistic vision of psychology and the postmodern, activist one only seems to be demonstrating the inability of both approaches to seriously address the discipline’s deepest and most pressing questions. Indeed, both perspectives seem to be advancing the spread of the cynical nihilism each ultimately entails. In as much as neither modernist scientism nor postmodern activism is capable of adequately articulating a viable account of what it means to be a human being or providing any fruitful answer to why anything we do genuinely matters, both are incapable of sustaining meaningful psychology. And, insofar as that is the case, both traditions are equally unworthy of our intellectual allegiance.

None of this is meant to imply that psychology, per se, is unworthy of serious intellectual investment. On the contrary, I am convinced that psychology, broadly conceived, is uniquely situated to provide us with a genuinely safe haven from which to begin to reclaim the greater educational and character formation mission of the university.

Ultimately, the psyche, the human soul, refers to our nature as embodied moral agents—intentional, purposive, meaning-making, relational beings who are always already “underway” in a world of possibilities suffused with moral significance. More than just a “study of” (fill-in-the-blank), as it is typically defined in introductory textbooks, the logos of psychology reminds us that psychology is best understood as reasoned discourse about the soul in the context of, and always guided by the truth. It is in this sense that psychology is the study of the soul, and, therefore, it is the study of the whole human person. Understood in this broad sense, then, psychology is nothing less than the rigorous and relentless pursuit of truth regarding the nature of human nature, of what it means to be human, to be a soul.

Once understood this way, it is possible to see psychology as a foundational discipline. As a foundational discipline, psychology provides a platform of concerns and a direction of inquiry from which we can work outwards and reclaim higher education and our larger culture from the nihilism, relativism, and cynicism that both modernist scientism and postmodernist activism have infused into our world. Rather than looking to either physics (scientism) or political ideology (activism) to ground psychology as an intellectual pursuit, the approach I am suggesting here seeks first to ground all inquiry into all human endeavors in rational, informed, imaginative discourse about the soul as our very embodied, agentic, and moral being, and always in light of the reality of knowable truth, goodness, and beauty. 

Psychology, thus conceived, can be seen as foundational to physics and politics, as well as all other intellectual and practical endeavors, because such pursuits are fundamentally human pursuits and flow out of particular understandings of the human soul and human purpose. To forget this simple truth, however, all but ensures that the perils—and subsequent ruins—of scientism and ideological activism will be unavoidable. Only a psychology that takes the unique reality and possibilities of the human soul seriously will be a psychology capable of genuinely enlightening us about ourselves, our world, and its meaning. Further, only such a psychology is sufficiently secure and intellectually vibrant to contribute meaningfully to the redemption of higher education by calling us back to its original and most noble and meaningful purpose: the truthful enrichment of the whole person and the crafting of flourishing souls.

In conclusion, then, if we are to redeem higher education from the moral and intellectual muddle into which it has descended and, in so doing, save it from itself, a radical return to foundational principles is in order. Where skepticism, cynicism, and moral and epistemological relativism have come to reign, we must do all we can to demonstrate the insufficiency and implausibility of such things and expose their inherent contradictions and inconsistencies. We must carefully and relentlessly make the case for truth as the very substance of moral agency and the possibility of real meaning and purpose that flows therefrom. The endeavor must occupy the university as a whole and must span across and animate every discipline, from the humanities through the social sciences and even the physical sciences. Only with a core commitment to the pursuit of truth in its own right can higher education transcend the temporary, political, and random fluctuations of natural history to create the proper environment wherein human freedom can be nurtured, guided, and enlarged.

The horrors of the 20th century and the pervasive and angry discord of the 21st stand as profound testimony to the inability of either modernist scientism or postmodernist activism to lift the human spirit beyond the immediate. In place of the metaphysics of power and the ethics of nihilism, the university must strive to reorient and ground itself with stable sources of both intellectual and spiritual fortitude and, thereby, develop a rejuvenating resolve to stand firm in defense of the truth of human being and human possibility. To do any less is to abandon ourselves and our future, and our children’s future, to the final stages of moral, cultural, spiritual, and intellectual implosion—out of which only chaos and barbarism can arise. If higher education is to be redeemed from its fatal follies, we must go forward in love and humility, with rigor and care and conviction, to make the best case we can for a viable vision of human freedom, a vision rooted in education as truth-telling and moral action.

The post Is Psychology Facing an Identity Crisis? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Thus, higher education is rendered an essentially utilitarian matter insofar as knowledge is sought after (or maintained) not as a good in itself but rather as an instrument by which power and control are obtained, maintained, asserted, and employed in the pursuit of yet more power and control. With this perspective, knowledge cannot be seen as the complement of wisdom and beauty or as vital to the edification of the human soul and its flourishing. The fundamental and inescapably moral and spiritual context of both the pursuit of knowledge and of knowledge itself is disavowed at the outset by both the modernist and postmodernist approaches, predictably producing what some scholars have correctly identified as the contemporary “moral mess of higher education” and, thus, what others have convincingly argued constitutes “the death of learning.”

The “soul of the American university,” historian George Marsden argues, is at present in more than just profound disarray but actually in serious danger of ceasing to exist at all. Indeed, in large measure, the contemporary university has become an essentially soulless entity. Over the last century, we have witnessed what Marsden and other scholars have noted is the steady “decline of the secular university” as a center of moral orientation and instruction, a decline brought about by the university’s trivialization of its mission and (intentional) misunderstanding of its core purpose and meaning. Having been systematically unmoored from its founding (pre-modern, Christian) principles and spiritual core, the contemporary (i.e., modern and postmodern) university is a place of established unbelief. Even further, not just established unbelief in God but in the possibility of anything transcendent or soul-transforming, of belief in anything having anything more than simple utility in the service of entirely contingent human desires and self-selected ends. 

The university is now, to a stunning degree, a place where the pursuit of truth has been all but replaced by the pursuit of power. The moral summons to seek greater wisdom and develop virtuous character has been, in large measure, substituted with the self-serving quest for knowledge, and the power it affords, divorced from any substantive moral constraint. Indeed, as John Ralston Saul has noted, “the exercise of power, without the moderating influence of any ethical structure, [has rapidly become] the religion of these new elites.” Higher education has been rendered as either a purely technical enterprise of rational minds and amoral science or merely a breeding ground for permanent revolution and never-ending radical social change.

In the end, whatever other disagreements the modern and the postmodern might entail, things such as truth, meaning, knowledge, and morality are little more than the socially or personally useful constructions of implacable history and impersonal nature. Truth and morality are important only insofar as they manifest some degree of instrumental value in the face of our ever-changing needs and desires in a fundamentally meaningless and purposeless world. The inevitable consequence of such thinking is that not only does the university become a soulless and morally listless entity, but so too does all of culture and social life. In fact, it seems that the only thing left for us to do once either modern or postmodern thought is fully embraced is to work out the most useful ways of dominating one another, the best ways to shout down, cancel, and, ultimately, eradicate one another. Such is, I am afraid, the all-too-predictable endpoint of the theology of power and the ethics of nihilism currently reigning in contemporary higher education. 

I wish to conclude here by suggesting that things in higher education need not be quite as bleak as they seem at the moment. It is not too late to reverse the downward spiral of nihilism and discord into which higher education has thrown itself. I will argue that for higher education to achieve its fullest and intended purpose, it must first be seen as an intrinsic and virtuous good necessary to sustain an intellectually productive and morally fruitful culture. However, for such a view to make sense, our understanding of the purpose and meaning of education must be grounded in a deeper and more fundamental vision of human beings and flourishing than either modernism or postmodernism can provide. Higher education—if it is to be both truly “higher” and genuinely “education”—must offer an account of what really is “the case” (i.e., the truth) about our human “being-in-the-world,” and one that spans all disciplinary endeavors, methodologies, and aspirations. Granted, modern and postmodern educators might argue that this is precisely what they are doing. However, in as much as each actively rejects the possibility of transcendent truth and dismisses the moral nature of human knowing and being, they both abdicate the only viable path that can meaningfully ground the mission of higher education and, thereby, avoid continued crisis, discord, nihilism, and anomie.

A Return to a Pre-Modern Education

Significantly, what I am calling for here is a return to an essentially “pre-modern” understanding of the aims and meaning of education, one that is deeply attentive to learning in its moral, spiritual, intellectual, and practical totality—education as a matter of soul-formation. It is in this sense that I believe that higher education must serve more than just utilitarian ends or radical political agendas. For the university to fulfill its essential nature and purpose, it must be about the serious business of seeking and defending the true, the good, and the beautiful. It must also articulate (in as sophisticated and holistic a way as possible) the meaning of the good life as one of moral and intellectual excellence, virtue, and love.

In addition to providing an academic context in which truth can be sought, reverenced and humbly served, the university has equally another vital cultural and intellectual function to fulfill. Truth—the aim of any serious educational enterprise—necessarily involves the coherent articulation of the meaningful implications of truth and, in so doing, the illumination of the moral and evaluative element at the heart of any and all truth claims. Thus, higher education qua education must be centrally concerned with articulating the meaning of truth and ethics, differentiated from the grounding nihilistic assumptions of modern and postmodern thought. 

In this view, then, higher education is understood to be an intrinsically and inescapably moral enterprise, one whose central aim must and can only be the illumination, expansion, and transformation of the human soul. Only by being so oriented can higher education achieve its essential purpose of cultivating a flourishing society nurtured and sustained by virtuous, knowledgeable, and wise men and women. As BYU professor Daniel Frost reminds us, “Far from being the enemy of academic study, intellectual and moral commitments make meaningful inquiry possible. Commitments do not frustrate the search for truth; they are, in fact, necessary for it to proceed at all.” Indeed, I believe that it is in light of this central reality that we can begin to tackle the most profound question confronting higher education:  What does it mean to be a person?

An Alternative Approach

By way of an alternative to both the modern and postmodern conceptions of the purpose of higher education, the view I wish to defend is one rooted not only in an understanding of the nature of human nature as founded in a transcendent, divine reality but one which presumes human freedom to be constitutive of human existence itself, both its foundation and its aim. Indeed, the reality and the possibilities of human freedom are absolutely central to any meaningful conception of higher education. Only insofar as the academy endeavors to free us from ignorance and error, as well as towards a more fully expansive understanding of ourselves as moral beings whose lives have intrinsic worth, dignity, and purpose, can we even legitimately claim to be about the work of education in the first place.

In contrast, for the modernist and the postmodernist, while human freedom is spoken of, and often quite enthusiastically, in the final analysis, genuine freedom is denied by both. The scientistic presumption is that human beings are nothing more than particular parts of an all-encompassing causally efficacious, purposeless, and meaningless material universe and, thus, are beings whose lives possess only contingent worth and evanescent meaning. On the other hand, per the postmodern, critical theory view, freedom is an illusion foisted on beings who are, in reality, merely the arbitrarily constructed products of various impersonal structures and systems, the invisible and dominating operations of which are presumed to permeate all social, political, and cultural life and history. Genuine freedom, real purpose, and substantive and enduring meaning have no legitimate place in either of these conceptual formulations, and neither do such things as truth and morality.

Advocates of both perspectives declare their commitment to freedom through the stripping away of ignorance. In both cases, however, the reality they seek to unmask is one in which persons are reduced to simply being the playthings of all manner of impersonal forces, systems, structures, and material circumstances, subjects constructed and conditioned by the purposeless historical and biological happenstance. In place of ignorance, higher education in these models offers no real freedom but rather a painful awareness of our inescapable slavery to powerful and uncaring abstractions. In such educational visions, there is nothing truly human at work; there is no freedom to conform to the reality of the good, obey truth, or love beauty. Neither intellectual nor moral humility can find a “safe space” among the reductive schemes of either modern scientism or postmodern activism, as such attributes arise only in response to the call to goodness, virtue, and compassion. 

When the animating concern of higher education is the animating concern of truth, however, it becomes clear that not only is the academic endeavor to aim at an increase in knowledge but also the cultivation of wisdom and goodness. The cultivation of these attributes can only take place in a setting in which knowledge of ourselves and the truth of the world is never divorced from the moral and spiritual context of its discovery and application. Knowledge, in this view, is not power, nor is the search for knowledge the pursuit of power, but rather knowledge is always and only ever truly virtue, the correspondence of truth and action in the concreteness of one’s daily life and conduct. Beings intended to flourish in freedom, to be virtuous and wise, must be educated to aspire to and achieve the freedom and virtue they were intended to have. 

However, education must be such that truth and its moral implications are front and center in all our academic endeavors. Freedom, in this view, “is a function of our veracity; freedom does not mean arbitrary selection, but adherence to what is best.” In short, freedom is neither a comforting illusion foisted on us by evolutionary fiat or by the occult operations of unjust systems of socially constructed oppression, nor is it the exercise of arbitrary and unbounded will. Rather, freedom is found in “wanting what is truly good, not imposing what we want.” In a fundamental sense, it is the true, the good, the beautiful, and virtue itself, that grounds human freedom and makes moral aspiration both possible and genuinely meaningful. Indeed, as the Catholic philosopher D.C. Schindler has shown, “freedom is a condition for the continuing affirmation of the priority of the good.” In the end, then, it is not power that shall make us free, but only truth.

The post How Power Masquerades as Education appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Rather than a clearly defined system of thought, fixed body of ideas, or unified movement and set of agreed-upon critical methods and techniques, however, postmodernism is perhaps “best understood as a state of mind, a critical, self-referential posture, and style, a different way of seeking and working.” Indeed, a persistent rejection of scientific methodologies, moral understandings, universal truth, and reductive rationalistic explanation is a hallmark of the postmodern response to previously discussed scientistic aspirations of Enlightenment modernism.

Postmodern thinking emphasizes that epistemological destabilization opens up not only a space for the radical liberation and democratization of all knowledge and truth but also for the free, unbounded play of the imagination in every sphere of life and learning.

While postmodern thought has significantly impacted a wide variety of disciplines and areas of daily life, perhaps no area has been more significantly impacted than higher education. Professor of higher education Harold Bloland notes, “Postmodernism has captured our interest because it involves a stunning critique of modernism, the foundation upon which our thinking and our institutions have rested. Today, modernist values and institutions are increasingly viewed as inadequate, pernicious, and costly.” Bloland further emphasizes that “Because higher education is quintessentially a modern institution, attacks on modernism are attacks on the higher education system as it is now constituted.” Accordingly, then, for the postmodernist, “higher education is so deeply immersed in modernist sensibilities and so dependent on modernist foundations that erosion of our faith in the modernist project calls into question higher education’s legitimacy, its purpose, its activities, it’s very raison d’être.” Bloland’s conclusion is that “postmodernism presents a hostile interpretation of much of what higher education believes it is doing and what it stands for.”

In rejecting the modernist vision of higher education, postmodern thinkers commonly advocate for an activist approach to education, one that seeks not only to destabilize traditional discourses about knowledge, the good, and the true in the scholarly world but to identify such discourses as inherently oppressive and unjust. Therefore, higher education, its foundational institutions, and the larger cultural and political expectations become an active and relentless target of dismissive critique, socio-political resistance, and moralistic contempt. In short, the purpose of higher education is to awaken young minds to the many ways in which they are and have been oppressed by others—by political, economic, and moral systems, by religion, history, and science, and indeed by culture itself—so as to engage in the utopian project of liberationist activism. 

At present, this vision of education is most commonly articulated through various formulations of Critical Theory (e.g., Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, etc.). It is a vision that has become so pervasive in academia that some commentators have suggested that “a new B.A. model—Bachelors of Advocacy—is emerging in higher education.”

Many identify the emergence of contemporary Critical Theory in the work of the Frankfurt School, a circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to identify and address what they took as chief disorders of society, particularly fascism and capitalism, in the first half of the 20th century. However, closer analysis shows that the origins of Critical Theory extend back to the early part of the 19th century with the rise of the “Young Hegelians” and the curious combination of their ideas with those of positivist philosophers like Auguste Comte (see here for a more detailed treatment of how this combination of seemingly antithetical perspectives came to be).

Because these powerful systemic forces are held to operate outside of subconscious awareness, it is usually asserted that the meaning of social reality as directly experienced cannot be taken at face value. The things of everyday life, no matter how innocent, are never quite what they seem to be. Rather, social and political life is always to be interrogated from the perspective of radical suspicion that Critical Theory fundamentally assumes. Following such a framework, social and institutional life is by its very nature oppressive and, even further, this oppression is inherently nefarious insofar as the primary means by which the oppression is accomplished is through the construction of the subject as fundamentally unaware of his/her oppression—and even, in many cases, unconsciously complicit in that oppression. 

For example, a woman who assumes a ‘traditional’ role of stay-at-home mom and who advocates for such a life is to be understood as being oppressed, whether she actually experiences herself as being oppressed or not. Indeed, for critical theorists, the clearest evidence that the woman is being systemically oppressed is the simple fact that she desires a life of traditional motherhood and finds joy and meaning in it. No other evidence or argument is necessary. The woman’s oppression, while obvious to the critical theorist, is entirely hidden from the woman herself by her having “absorbed the patriarchy.” Indeed, she has succumbed to such an extent that she completely identifies with her oppressors and, in so doing, is not only unaware of her enslavement but willingly participates in and perpetuates it.

As the theologian and historian Carl Trueman points out, “In one way or another, modern critical theory focuses on social construction and the manipulative nature of the dominant narratives cultures tell themselves.” Ultimately, only through a process of “consciousness raising,” whereby the “lies and illusions of consciousness” are exposed, does the individual become aware not only of his/her oppression but is also alerted to how they have been endorsing and contributing to that very oppression. In short, only by becoming “woke” can the individual be liberated from the unjust systems and institutions that have hitherto constructed them as an oppressed subject. Therefore, it becomes the role of a just society to educate those who are oppressed to free them from their own ignorance and cultural imprisonment.

At their core, Trueman argues, the purpose of education from the perspective of secular critical theories is “not merely to expose the world’s ideological captivity, but to effect its transformation.” Indeed, “the remaking of social reality—of the social world—is the aim of consciousness-raising.” Accordingly, the “activist teacher” operates as a “transformative intellectual in her classroom,” someone who can educate students in a way “that combines local knowledge with a critical awareness of the self and an understanding of the larger systems, phenomena, and promises that create societal injustices into a coherent action-oriented framework.” Employing a “critical pedagogy,” the educator as activist and trainer of activists, “eschew[s] traditional education characterized by a hierarchical teacher-student relationship and employ[s] dialogue and praxis in providing oppressed peoples with a tool by which they [can] achieve a critical understanding of their disadvantage and oppression, gain a voice and liberate themselves from the bondage of dominant ideology that [has] served to subjugate and ‘imprison’ them.”

The emancipation from one’s oppression brought about by the consciousness-raising facilitated through instruction in a “pedagogy of the oppressed” involves an exquisite concern for “how power, resources, and opportunities are distributed.” Critical theorists, and other postmodern thinkers, argue that consciousness-raising is “fundamental in the work of moving from a position of powerlessness, internalized oppression, and alienation to one of empowerment and individual and social change.” 

Ultimately, consciousness-raising is seen to be the essential first step in a longer, revolutionary process intended to bring about the political action necessary for broad social change to take place via the acquisition of greater personal and communal empowerment. This is perhaps no more clearly evidenced than when Ibram X. Kendi, a leading figure in contemporary postmodern, critical activist thinking, tells us:  “I became a college professor to educate away racist ideas, seeing . . . mental change as the principle solution, seeing myself, as educator, as the primary solver . . . [But] I had to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds. I had to start researching and educating to change policy.”

For the postmodern activist educator, empowerment—whether personal, social, or political—is ultimately a function of seizing the means of knowledge production. Additionally, the concept of empowerment adopts a basic critical theoretical interpretive lens through which all social, political, and economic life is to be understood as inescapably about power dynamics, oppression, and liberation. Indeed, as Foucault famously argued, power is rooted in knowledge even as power reproduces knowledge to serve its own ends. According to Foucault and other postmodernists, truth and knowledge are, in reality, only functions of power. For example, regarding the nature of truth, Foucault writes:

‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operations of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth.

Similarly, regarding knowledge, Foucault further argues:

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge . . . that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

Foucault frequently wrote of what he called the “power-knowledge couplet.” By this term, he sought to identify the ways in which a society validates knowledge through the deployment of power, and vice versa. Thus, he argues that what counts as knowledge is merely ‘societal knowledge’ and is ultimately only a production of those who possess the power to impose their vision and values on others to serve their own ends and maintain their own power and moral authority. It is in this way that the gatekeepers of knowledge—typically taken to be white, European males—subjugate and oppress the powerless, utilizing the very structures of social and moral life that everyone endorses as knowledge.

Indeed, because power constitutes knowledge and knowledge reinforces power relations for the postmodern, critical theorist, every aspect of social life is understood in terms of the relative possession or lack of power. It is in this way that oppression is defined as the lack of power. Oppression is to have no meaningful say in what counts as knowledge, what identities are real and valuable, or what societal arrangements and economic relationships are worth sustaining. It is to have one’s voice silenced and silenced in such a way that one is often not even aware of being silenced at all. Liberation, on the other hand, is necessarily defined as having the power (freedom) to enjoy the political and economic possibilities afforded by the reigning power-knowledge paradigm. The aim of liberation is for one’s personal identity to be affirmed, valued, and protected so that one’s preferred view of the world, social order, and human purpose is validated and granted the political value needed to permit the creation of one’s own moral and social world in whatever form one happens to wish, free from all constraint or limit. Defined almost entirely in the negative, the postmodern utopia of liberation is, Trueman argues, “utopian in the literal sense of urging us to work to create a ‘nowhere,’ a state of fulfillment lacking content.”

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Over the past century and a half, higher education has either been reduced to the scientific communication of presumably objective facts and information or a breeding ground for ideological activism. From a modernist perspective, education is taken to be a technological process whereby objective facts, separated from their moral and spiritual context, are conveyed by trained scientific experts to untrained young minds in a utilitarian enterprise of mastery over and rational control of the world. The philosophical roots of the modernist approach lie in what has often been termed “the Enlightenment project,” a term meant to capture the essential metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical aims found principally in the empiricist and rationalist intellectual developments of the 17th and 18th centuries. These developments not only gave rise to modern empirical science but have also profoundly shaped our current understanding of the nature of the self, epistemology, and moral authority.

While not every strand of what might be called “modernist thought” necessarily leads to an embrace of the logic of scientism, the breakneck pace of empirical discovery and technological advancement of the last three hundred years has provided powerful ammunition for those who would argue the supremacy of the scientistic worldview. The central tenets of scientific naturalism have, so the story goes, proven themselves so robust as to warrant universal acceptance of them. In this way, scientific naturalism is solidified as the only valid standard for discriminating between legitimate knowledge and mere belief, prejudice, and superstition. As such, scientific naturalism is taken to provide the only reasonable principles upon which to organize and govern a modern secular, technocratic society.

To put it somewhat over-simply, though not inaccurately, from a scientistic perspective, the fundamental purpose of education is to produce more scientists. Therefore, the purpose of rational higher education is often seen to be the production of individuals who approach the world in light of a singular methodology that is essentially characterized by its commitment to rational detachment, controlled observation, hypothesis-testing, precise measurement, structured experimental manipulation, fact-finding and reporting in an objective, value-neutral manner. It is claimed that individuals educated in this way are thereby enabled to critically evaluate various competing truth claims by sifting through them empirically and making data-driven judgments as to their respective worth solely based on empirical evidence. 

As Demetris Katsikis notes, such an approach constitutes a genuinely rational education, one in which students “are explicitly taught [across the curriculum] about scientific research and related methods of inquiry” and “learn how to test scientific hypotheses, how to measure what they speculate for and how to convert complicated statistical data into simple life facts.” Students are consistently taught to differentiate between facts based on scientific data and values based on emotion-based preferences. Katsikis further argues, “Rational education is each form of education that unconditionally helps people consciously make sense of life things, establishing and verifying facts of life, applying sheer logic in themselves, others and life, and adapting or justifying life practices, life values and beliefs for themselves, others and life based on new or existing [scientific] information.” In such an approach, to establish one’s beliefs and values, and justify one’s actions as rational, “one needs to base assumptions in empirical (is that true?), logical (does it make sense?) and pragmatic (is it factually helpful in the long term?) grounds.”

Although it is understood that not everyone will wish to become a laboratory scientist, nonetheless, it is often presumed that an ideal education will be one in which students are taught to think like scientists, to value an attitude of detached rationality and the empirical methods of science, and then employ their scientific mindset as the guiding framework for their engagement with and approach to all other interests and activities. Only in this way is it said to be possible to ensure that one’s individual conduct is truly rational and defensible. Likewise, it is thought that only a society composed of or dominated by such persons will be truly rational, productive, and progressive. The utopian dream of scientism, then, is of a world governed by the “supermind,” a term coined by the economist-philosopher Friedrich Hayek to refer to a scientific elite who, though careful training in the canons of empirical detachment and rationalism, have been able to grasp the complex workings of the grand mechanical system of the world and employ that privileged knowledge in the furtherance of their own technocratic ends. Indeed, as the well-known political philosopher John Ralston Saul has pointed out, “the development and control of intricate systems . . . has become the key to power.” Thus, we now find ourselves, as Saul also notes, “in the midst of a theology of pure power,” one in which the tenets of scientistic rationality have replaced the transcendent teachings of religion.

However, the religious impulse does not seem to be quite as easy to extinguish as the modernists have presumed. It seems, rather, to have mutated into a form more amenable to the scientistic mindset of the modern world, though no less recognizable for all of that as being fundamentally religious in nature and ultimate aim. Echoing Hayek’s description of the “supermind,” Saul correctly notes that “the new priest is the technocrat—the man [of science] who understands the organization, makes use of the technology, and controls access to the information, which is a compendium of ‘facts.’” He qualifies this assertion by describing at length the sort of human being the modern, scientistic approach to higher education is most successful in producing. Saul further observes: 

This form of education is not only applied to the training of business and government leaders. In fact, it is now central to almost every profession. If you examine the creation of an architect, for example, or an art historian or professor of literature or a military officer, you will find the same obsession with details, with the accumulation of facts, with internal logic. The ‘social scientists’—the economists and political scientists in particular—consist of little more than these elements, because they do not have even the touchstones of real action to restrain them. 

A key feature of the scientistic vision of education within any career, then, is its fundamental utilitarian approach to understanding knowledge, behavior, value, and its divorce of facts from the moral context of truth. In addition to conceiving knowledge as solely the product of objective, empirical investigation, the modernist ideology of scientism holds that the pursuit of knowledge is ultimately in the service of power and control, echoing the famous claim of the Enlightenment philosopher, and father of modern scientific method, Francis Bacon that “knowledge is power.” In this way, knowledge is taken to be truly valuable only insofar as it serves some utility and functions as an instrumental means to other ends—whether individual or societal in nature. Indeed, reason is typically described in terms of calculative and instrumental utility, commonly known as “means-ends rationality.”

The post The Lost Art of Curiosity: Education’s Ideological Confinement appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

It has become increasingly clear to thoughtful observers that over at least the last half-century higher education, particularly in the Western world, has lost not only its intellectual but its moral and spiritual bearings. As a result of this loss, the university as a foundational institution is in serious crisis, perhaps even catastrophically so. David Lyle Jeffrey, a fellow at Baylor University, correctly notes this crisis is intimately related to an overall “atrophy of wisdom as a subject for academic reflection, let alone as one imagined outcome of a good university education.”

D. H Davis, the editor of Educating for Wisdom in the 21^st Century, notes it was not that long ago that “it was generally believed that the essential purpose of a university education involved shaping both the moral and intellectual character of students in ways that led them to live and do well over their entire lives.” In many quarters today, however, such a claim is most likely to be met with serious skepticism, if not outright hostility. I believe that at the center of today’s crisis in higher education is a profound confusion regarding what exactly it is that universities are supposed to be doing, a confusion fueled by a lack of any clear and compelling metaphysical or moral vision of what education actually means, what the fundamental purpose of a university is, or what sort of persons we should expect to emerge after extensive immersion in the process of obtaining a university education.

Part and parcel of this identity crisis is the fact that the modern (primarily, but not exclusively, secular) university seems to lack not only any coherent grounding for itself and its educational project but also any genuinely ennobling and animating sense of what it means to be a person at all, what the aim of worthy human aspiration ought to be, or what human life—educated or otherwise—is really supposed to be about in the first place. As one thoughtful scholar has observed, the modern university has proven to be eminently capable of teaching students how to go about making money for themselves but seems to be entirely inadequate to the task of providing serious counsel as to what might be worth spending one’s money on.

What is missing, according to MacIntyre, is “any large sense of and concern for inquiry into the relationships between the disciplines and, second, any conception of the disciplines as each contributing to a single shared enterprise, one whose principal aim is neither to benefit the economy nor to advance the careers of its students, but rather to achieve for teachers and students alike a certain kind of shared understanding.” He further argues, “the conception of the university presupposed by and embodied in the institutional forms and activities of contemporary research universities is not just one that has nothing much to do with any particular conception of the universe, but one that suggests strongly that there is no such thing as the university, no whole of which the subject matters studied by the various disciplines are all parts or aspects, but instead just a multifarious set of assorted subject matters.”

Much of our contemporary predicament in higher education stems, then, from the progressive abandonment of those traditional intellectual, moral, and spiritual foundations that once provided the university with both the rationale for its institutional existence and the conceptual framework within which its fundamental purpose could be articulated and coherently defended. The steady erosion of the traditional intellectual and moral foundations of the university over the last century and a half has occurred, not surprisingly, as a direct consequence of the rise to prominence of two powerful ideologies:  modernism and postmodernism. These ideologies not only seek to eradicate more traditional—or what might be loosely called “pre-modern”—understandings of the nature and meaning of education but are equally hostilely opposed to one another, at both their most basic conceptual level and at the level of practice.

As these two movements have begun to exert a greater and greater influence on thinking in the academy, and subsequently, thinking in the larger cultural and political spheres, much of what were once taken to be the foundational virtues and to constitute the institutional telos of the university have increasingly become the object of open scorn. Prior generations’ understanding of the essence of higher education as a process of “soul-craft,” the formation of virtuous character through the accumulation of knowledge, in concert with the cultivation of wisdom as a result of sustained, disciplined pursuit of “the good, the true, and the beautiful,” has steadily faded as a serious concern of educational or cultural consideration. Ultimately, Davis observes, “Pursuing truth, knowledge, and virtue still sound like perfectly laudable pursuits, but they are not the first things—or even the second things—that define the life of the university.”

In particular, I will argue that because both the modern and the postmodern approaches conceptualize the purpose of higher education primarily in terms of the pursuit of power rather than the pursuit of truth and, concomitantly, deny the possibility of genuine human freedom, each encourages a nihilistic worldview that, if embraced, ultimately signals the ruin of the university as a meaningful institution. In conclusion, by way of alternative, I will briefly sketch out the broad outlines of a perspective in which higher education is seen to be, first and foremost, and across all disciplines, about the business of seeking truth, becoming good, and attending to the beautiful.

In this endeavor, I will argue that psychology, though currently largely beholden to both modernist and postmodernist thinking and methods, has a significant role to play in defending those richer and more vibrant conceptions of human personhood and freedom necessary for achieving these more worthy (and, indeed, more human) aims of and for higher education in our world today.

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Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, which is sharply lower than the two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%). The cost of college tuition is exorbitant, many students struggle to make friends, universities have become increasingly godless, and job placement is often determined more by connections and experience than a college degree. To top it all off, the overall quality of instruction has dropped significantly, specifically for general education.

Accreditation is the recognition from an accrediting agency that an institution maintains a certain level of educational standards. The accreditation model, which has long been the default, no longer represents the same quality as it had. Programs are judged by curricula and degrees held by faculty. Accreditation standards ignore the advantages of having professors who personally know a student and can attest to their quality and skills. Prospective college students are increasingly realizing just this.

What I loved was learning. However, I was worried about how my education might be undermined by the pursuit of grades, the need for busy work, and a narrow political agenda.

I worried I would pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn something I could easily learn on YouTube. I kept asking myself: what do I want from college? And is there any place that will be able to deliver what I want?

In October of 2022, the Church of Jesus Christ released a new guide to help young people in their decision-making. A section titled “Truth will make you free” spoke to my questions. Here, we are reminded that “You have both temporal and spiritual reasons to seek and love learning. Education is not just about earning money. It is part of your eternal goal to become more like Heavenly Father.” 

I’ve come to learn that this understanding of education is a foundational principle of Western civilization. This traditional view can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, for whom philosophy and the pursuit of wisdom were inherently linked to the divine. Plato, for instance, saw the acquisition of knowledge as a way to achieve a higher, spiritual understanding of the universe. This perspective was further embraced by early Christian scholars like Augustine and Aquinas, who believed that all truth is God’s truth, and thus, the pursuit of knowledge ultimately leads to a deeper understanding of the Creator. The medieval universities, established by the Church, were founded on the premise that learning was a sacred path to understanding both the natural world and God’s intentions for humanity. The early educational pedigree of the United States similarly pursued truth for God and the Church, as Harvard’s early motto proclaimed. 

Today, this principle has been largely forgotten in higher education. For example, The Barna Group estimates that roughly 70% of high school students who enter college as professing Christians will leave with little to no faith. Strada and Gallup examined students’ top motives for choosing their educational pathways, and 58% said that job and career outcomes were their primary motives.

If education is about our eternal goal to become more like our Father in Heaven, why do so many seek college degrees through universities that belittle and destroy this goal? 

There is an inordinate amount of pressure for high school students to not only go to college but select the right college. Students want to be normal, intelligent, popular, and capable. They want to attend the college their friends, parents, and loved ones have attended. We all want to prove to everyone else (including ourselves) that we are valuable and important. In my estimation, it’s this pressure that drives college enrollment, not the pursuit of education. And it is among the explanations for the rapid drop in enrollment.

Perhaps at the forefront of this new approach is that Mount Liberty is taking a new path to credentialing. Because of the program’s small size, professors can personally vouch for students in both going on to graduate programs and starting future careers. 

A liberal arts education calls back to the original purpose of learning — it teaches us how to be virtuous and free. Instead of engaging in surface-level tasks like job training, a liberal arts education questions why we do the things we do and if we should be doing them. I have learned many surprising things as I have participated in a different type of educational path. Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned is that the solutions to the problems of higher education aren’t necessarily found in big new laws, fancy updated buildings, or student debt forgiveness. All it takes is courage from normal, everyday young people to pursue something new.

Education is different today than it was 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Accredited Universities don’t deliver the same things they once delivered. Education remains as important as ever, but frankly, our university system can no longer be trusted to consistently deliver an education. As it says in the For the Strength of Youth handbook I referenced earlier, “You show that you value truth as you seek learning, live with integrity, and bravely stand for what you know is right — even if you have to stand alone.”

The post Lonely, Faithless, and in Debt: What is the Answer for Higher Ed? appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

What does servant leadership look like in higher education? How can we empower the next generation of servant leaders? Serving as leaders in higher education provides us with a vast opportunity to work as domestic missionaries, influencing students’ lives while focusing on their educational needs. To do this, we must earn students’ trust and enrich their lives by showing them compassion and respect, emphasizing the importance of hard work, honesty, integrity, and accountability. As servant leaders, we can assist in achieving a competitive advantage for our institution by building community relationships and improving student achievement and retention. We must support our students and practice flexibility in the classroom by utilizing various teaching methods to maximize students’ growth and learning potential to empower future generations of servant leaders. 

 Traits of Successful Servant Leaders in Higher Education

Respect for Others

Servant leaders respect others and treat everyone equally, regardless of their status in the workplace or community, which impacts our students’ lives, strengthens the institution, and makes the world a more compassionate place to live. As servant leaders in higher education, we should strive to become the type of leader that students want to follow voluntarily, despite our title or position. When we show our students respect, we create a unified culture in the classroom, and it encourages them to share their personal experiences and beliefs; students then put forth a more conscientious effort into their work so they can reach their greatest potential.

Ethical Character

Dwight Eisenhower once said, “The supreme quality of leadership is integrity.”  As servant leaders, we must consistently demonstrate exceptional work ethics and be held accountable for our actions in every decision we make. We must be forthcoming and display honesty and transparency when interacting with students, refusing to take advantage of opportunities for dishonest gain. Being influenced to possess highly moral and ethical characteristics allows students greater opportunities for lasting success, which motivates them to have a heightened sense of accountability toward their personal development and growth. A lack of integrity can be costly; therefore, ethical behavior must be practiced daily. It is the ethical characteristics we show students daily through our actions and words that empower our students to become future servant leaders. 

Balancing Focus with Flexibility

The world is constantly in motion and always changing; being flexible and willing to change is crucial for the success of institutions in higher education. Overcoming obstacles, such as COVID restrictions in 2020, revealed the importance of being flexible and willing to change to best serve students, as many institutions had to adapt the traditional classroom into an online learning environment quickly. Servant leaders must recognize the uniqueness of student populations so objective decisions based on current internal and external trends can be made. Servant leaders must also have the willingness to abandon any activities that prove to be futile. A one-size-fits-all approach to classroom management is not effective in maximizing the learning potential of our students. When determining the method for delivering lectures, we must consider the student demographics and classroom dynamics, as they affect a student’s ideal learning style. We must be flexible and willing to deviate from a lesson plan or alter a particular teaching style to provide a stimulating educational environment that can prompt a student’s understanding of the material being presented. Remaining versatile while leading is not always easy; however, building relationships with our students in the classroom can solidify trust where students feel they can share their own experiences, give their opinions, ask questions, and make mistakes without repercussions, which results in our students performing at their highest potential and ultimately empowering the next generation of servant leaders.

 Increasing Community Partnerships

As servant leaders in higher education, we should be active and consistently strive to build relationships with people in our community. Being engaged and committed to our community allows us to collaborate with other leaders and form community partnerships that will benefit our students. We can work closely with community partners to host events such as job fairs, where students can meet with employers in the community and apply for internships so they can gain real-world experiences in their field prior to receiving their degree. Students who form bonds in the community may choose to stay after graduation and seek jobs from a community partner or return to the institution for a graduation degree, thereby increasing student achievement and retention. The community partnerships formed will help students reach the goals they have worked so diligently to achieve while at our institution.  

Servant leaders should always remember we have been blessed by God with an invaluable gift. We must serve our students diligently as enthusiastic servant leaders have a contagious energy that drives student performance, and this impacts our institutional culture. All the knowledge in the world will not make anyone a great leader; it is the desire and willingness to help others and the love we show them that makes a great servant leader. True servant leadership lies in guiding our students to success, ensuring that they are all performing at their best, doing the work they are asked to do, and doing it well.

The post How Humility is Becoming the Next Revolution in Higher Education appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Much has been written about the fractious consequences of this loss. But anyone concerned about the ability of our democracy to survive should want to prevent the loss of another shared, trusted civic space: The Public Library.

The public library is a deeply American institution. While libraries have existed in some form for thousands of years, what we think of as a library today was invented in New Hampshire. Publicly available knowledge to a voting populace was important for democracy to thrive.

Today there are nearly 17,500 public libraries in the United States—more libraries than McDonalds.

Many librarians are frustrated by this and place the blame on opportunistic politicians and upstart right-wing media, while others embrace the political dynamics and cast themselves as the defenders of open discourse.

Both of these narratives are natural. But if adopted and stuck to, both narratives have the power to erode trust in our public libraries and consign them to the many institutions Americans can no longer share because they are not trusted to serve those across worldview differences.

Here’s the bottom line: Librarians aren’t neutral. In 2020, employees of the American Library Association (ALA) donated to democratic candidates and causes 100% of the time. And in the previous election cycle, all librarians donated to Democrats at a rate of 419:1.

This disparity in those who are attracted to the library as a career need not be fatal on its own. Many careers, such as pediatricians, have large partisan disparities but are nevertheless trusted to do their jobs. Librarians are, by and large, committed public servants with a strong ethic of neutrality. However, the lack of ideological diversity among the ranks of librarians can create groupthink that prevents librarians from recognizing what it means to be neutral. 

Today there is a comprehensive ideology that adopts premises from psychoanalysis and critical theory that many Americans largely accept, particularly on the political left. This ideology (or religion as I’ve previously described it) is largely viewed as self-evidently true, similar to how Jains view their faith, so the idea that it is an independent world-view that should not be given default preference is often difficult to conceptualize for those who adhere to this belief-system, especially those where there is not a significant amount of ideological diversity. 

Among the ideas of this ideology is that neutrality is impossible. The thinking here is that society represses marginalized groups (an ideology the new religion doubles down on with its Rogerian humanism) and that because attempting to be neutral allows that harm to continue, it is not, in fact, neutral. Librarians, who adhere to this worldview, replace neutrality in their ethical imagination with inclusiveness. Inclusiveness can feel as though it meets the ethical burden of neutrality because it welcomes everyone (as long as they hold the same worldview). 

While inclusiveness is a legitimate and important goal for public spaces, inclusiveness cannot replace neutrality without risking the legitimacy of the space.

This ethic of inclusiveness over neutrality can be found in the books that librarians have sought to remove from libraries. In addition, the books acquired for and weeded from library collections are often ignored in conversations about book banning. The end result can be a library that privileges certain worldviews and their criteria for which books to carry while decrying members of the public they serve for doing the same thing.

This ideological worldview not only informs library decisions on a sub-conscious level, but many voices are specifically calling for acquisitions and weeding to include these ideological considerations in these processes. 

This has led to a situation where members of one political party have near complete control over what appears on the shelves of local libraries and have functionally abandoned neutrality as a premise for those decisions. This is while those with concerns are being told they are the ones politicizing the library.

This naturally precludes those whose concerns were disparaged from seeing the library as a space where their ideas will be given an equal hearing.

This death cycle has a likely end that we have seen many times before, complete and total loss of institutional trust. And if you think your political opponent is an idiot now, just wait until they don’t go to their library for the same reason they won’t watch ABC News.

I imagine pointing out the reality of this cycle is frustrating for those pushing for libraries to replace neutrality with inclusivity. They likely conclude that it isn’t fair that those people on the other side will simply opt-out rather than continue to engage with an institution that they deem antagonistic. They likely see their views not as a distinct ideology, as I have framed them, but self-evidently true, and they should be able to pursue them in public institutions like libraries without dealing with the threat of losing even more trusted civic spaces.

I certainly sympathize with these concerns. Those who want a better world often seek out institutions they can use to help create that world. And I certainly don’t begrudge their desire to do so. Frankly, I hope they do create institutions where they can promote their ideas and work toward their solutions. But our few remaining neutral civic spaces are not the place. 

Neutrality may be difficult for an individual to create on their own. We all have our own biases. I certainly do. Librarians certainly do too. But regardless of your worldview about whether neutrality can be achieved, neutrality does exist as an ideal. Striving toward that ideal rather than being perfect at achieving it produces the conditions of trust that allow our shared civic spaces to thrive. 

So this is my plea. Librarians, we need you. You preside over one of the few areas still trusted by those on the right and left in our increasingly divided society. I understand that many of you have deep and strong concerns about how some in your community would choose books, events, and decorations for your library. The way forward is not to reject these community members in pursuit of a vapid “inclusiveness” that leaves half of Americans feeling unincluded. 

The answer instead is to recognize this new and predominant worldview as a distinct ideology that you must be neutral toward rather than a default. Our civic history is replete with examples of people setting aside their biases in pursuit of neutrality. If librarians can recognize the ideological pull at the heart of this conflict, they can also make efforts to correct this in how they conduct their work and create a library that is truly welcoming for all Americans.

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