Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz recently told a group of Republican Women in Weber County that a legislative goal during the next session was budget reform in higher education. Schultz was vague on specifics, but he did say that he favored a 10% cut at the university level, to be achieved through downsizing or eliminating programs that in his opinion were “inefficient.” His preferred goal was to funnel money to “high-demand” areas such as computer science, engineering and nursing.
“You have these huge demands that the workforce and businesses are clamoring for, and yet higher ed’s focused on all this other stuff,” Schultz said. “So, let’s cut out the other stuff. Let’s reallocate that money back into things that actually matter.”
While I am fully appreciative of computers, engineers and competent nurses, and I have no idea where Mr. Schultz was educated, I wonder if he knows the definition of a university. I wonder if he truly knows what that “other stuff” really is, that “stuff” he is so willing to throw away, because it doesn’t “actually matter.”
What about great literature? Is that what should be eliminated in Schultz’s view? The students don’t really need Shakespeare or Milton or Keats or Donne, do they? And then there’s philosophy. What a waste of time and money that is! Aristotle? Who needs him? And who was this fellow Plato, who said, “What is honored is cultivated.” Does that stuff actually matter? Maybe it is art and music Schultz was talking about cutting. Or perhaps history? Yes, it was probably history. Surely, our students have learned enough about that, heaven knows.
However, before Speaker Schultz and our Legislature flippantly dismiss the “other stuff” that our fine state universities offer, I would plead with them to consider the fact that our country, our Constitution and our democracy were built and have been maintained by people who were trained in the very areas that are potentially up for elimination. The finest leaders in our history were men and women who knew the Great Books, the great philosophers, the great thinkers of our past.
As the journalist David Brooks recently reminded us, Lincoln knew how to empathize with the common man and tell us that “all men are created equal” because he had read the poets. Churchill could inspire England and the rest of us during World War II because he had read Shakespeare. Robert Kennedy quoted Aeschylus after the death of Martin Luther King because he had studied philosophy in school: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” President Reagan knew how to comfort us after the Challenger tragedy. A great man or woman knows how to “draw on the common sources of our civilization,” according to Brooks, “the stores of wisdom that bring collective strength in hard times.”
And even for folks who don’t become presidents, great words linger and remain. They affect our thinking and our lives. They make us better than we were.
This is the “other stuff” great universities teach. It is the “other stuff” that provides a moral conscience for the nurse, the computer genius, the engineer and all the other students Mr. Schultz and his legislative colleagues wish to educate. But perhaps our Legislature will be satisfied if our students simply learn technology and the skills of real estate and business.
Expose students to the classics or the great philosophers and they might begin to wonder if we have lost our way, especially as they read what Malcolm said in Act IV of “Macbeth:” “I think our country sinks beneath the yoke. It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.” Or the students might consider our re-elected president who, according to his fellow Republican David Brooks, “is unlettered, has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw on in a crisis.”
Too bad.
I guess, in school, Donald Trump somehow missed “the other stuff” that helps give one a moral conscience. That’s kind of scary for the rest of us.
(Lynne Larson) Lynne Larson was an award-winning educator during her long teaching career. Now a writer of historical novels, she lives with her husband, Kent, in American Fork.
Lynne Larson was an award-winning educator during her long teaching career. Now a writer of historical novels, she lives with her husband, Kent, in American Fork.
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