Enter Professor Dallas Willard, a kind and thoughtful Christian philosopher who has been teaching at the University of Southern California for the past forty years. Professor Willard is a breath of fresh air to students passing through USC as he encourages rigorous thinking, and honest reflection about the worldviews that color the bulk of what goes on in the classroom today. tothesource asked Julia Thompson, a student who has taken several of Professor Willard's courses, to interview him the day before this year's graduation on May 13.

tothesource:  Tomorrow is graduation here at USC and I imagine you've been to your share of ceremonies and heard lots of commencement speakers!  You've often said that character and morality are not considered to be valid parts of a university education so it seems curious that, upon graduation, we students hear a lot of speeches and comments urging us to go on to live "good lives" as "good people" and "good citizens" now that we are equipped with college degrees.  What sense can we make of this? 

Dallas Willard: Two things.  Number one the issue of being good people leading good lives is so important that it cannot be ignored.  When it comes time to address students at commencement even those who claim that they do not believe in moral instruction, or passing down values through education, cannot help but address the importance of being good people and leading good lives. 

The second thing is that the leaders in the university do not understand what has happened; they are unaware of the split that has developed between the content that faculty present as knowledge, and notions of morality, character, and values.  While leaders and faculty may operate day-to-day within the university setting, observing the subculture and interacting with students, in many cases their thinking has not explicitly crystallized around the fact that morality has been totally cut out of education.  Derek Bok (former president of Harvard University) commented, upon hearing of Harvard graduates' junk bond frauds, that the church and families don't seem to be doing too well with character education--perhaps the university ought to take a stab at the task?  Within today's university, such a suggestion sounds foreign, novel, and controversial. The university's heritage in classical colleges, teaching about truth, beauty, and goodness seems to have been forgotten.

tts: Has the university abandoned "capital T truth"?

DW: Yes!  The university has explicitly abandoned the project of the search for Truth--despite remnants that suggest the contrary such as Harvard's seal that sports the Latin word for truth ("Veritas").  In fact in an address to entering freshman at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer made it clear what were and what were not the goals of the educational institution.  The goals were: to encourage critical thinking, to broaden intellectual horizons, and to encourage self-awareness.  The NON-AIMS were equally explicit: "Not only is there a powerful imperative at Chicago to stay away from teaching the truth, but the university also makes very little effort to provide you with moral guidance.  Indeed it is a remarkably amoral institution" (149, Mearsheimer).

tts: Does this sentiment permeate secular universities in general?

DW: Yes!

tts: Given that the university rejects the role of working out and teaching morality, how can it defend its steadfast dedication to "diversity, tolerance, and radicalism"?  You have mentioned that these values can have no basis apart from the truth of Judeo-Christian roots. How does the university defend this seemingly self-defeating stance?

DW: This position finds footing in politics.  Instead of coming out explicitly as moral values, "diversity, tolerance, and radicalism" sneak under the radar labeled as "political issues" legitimized by the "will of the people".  In today's culture it is easy to assert that diversity is simply a positive political development in a sophisticated society that is in tune with the desires of the public.  But is that enough of a basis for a pluralistic society that expects all people to be treated with dignity, regardless of differences?  Test it out: Look for a nation without Christian roots that truly supports diversity, undergirded by a sense of essential human dignity.  You won't find one.

tts: From your upcoming book, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, is there any advice that you would offer to university graduates as they move into the world of work, and begin to build lives in today's culture?

DW: Try to understand character, human character because that's what it's all about.  We don't have to have every underpinning worked out completely in order to start living good lives.  Observe people!  Observe people who manage to happily do what's right.  As you live and watch, believe what you see.  Don't believe high-blown theories that try to explain away what you learn to be true in real human life. 
If you are intrigued by a particular theory, take the time to see how it plays out in peoples' actual lives.  If you find Nietzsche's assertions appealing, look at Nietzsche's life--a consistent expression of his ideology.  Nietzsche experienced the tremendous burden of trying to make sense of everything through the self alone, and he died alienated, crazy, and broken.

When new information comes about that seems to change the face of everything, keep in mind that nothing has fundamentally changed about the options available to human beings in this life.  The supposed change that blew Nietzsche's mind, a new theory of cosmic evolution, turned out to be a far-fetched, unsubstantiated claim!  In reality, nothing fundamentally has changed. 

tts: What advice would you give to parents and churches as they prepare to send youth off to universities across the country?

DW: Be encouraged, and encouraging about the fact that Jesus is present on the college campuses.  Jesus is the smartest mind in any and every field, and in him are contained all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  Jesus, despite any voices to the contrary, is the "Big Man On Campus"!  A student sitting in a philosophy class listening to the teacher rant on about the absurdity of the Christian faith may be encouraged by an anecdote such as this: Walter Martin tells the story of Sydney Hook lecturing against Jesus in a class at New York University.  With a moment's reflection, answer the question: "How many people have died for the sake of their dedication to Sydney Hook?"

Professor Willard congratulates USC philosophy graduates

DALLAS WILLARD is a Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has taught at USC since 1965, where he was Director of the School of Philosophy from 1982-1985.

He also lectures and publishes in religion. Renovation of the Heart was published in May 2002, and received Christianity Today's 2003 Book Award in the category of Spirituality. The Divine Conspiracy was released in 1998 and selected Christianity Today's "Book of the Year" for 1999. The Spirit of the Disciplines appeared in 1988, and Hearing God (1999) first appeared as In Search of Guidance in 1984 (2nd edition in 1993).

"Welcome to the University of Chicago. We bring all of you here, brim full of needs and desires and hormones, let you loose on each other like so many animals in a wildlife sanctuary, and hope for the best."

The Aims of Education Address for the class of 2006
By Andrew Abbott

"Now people who think about formal education have focused on cognition and have paid remarkably little attention to what we might call the moral and emotional curricula of college, which are “taught”—for the most part—in your work life and your extracurricular life. This is not because the emotional and moral curricula lack importance. Recall that in my earlier remarks about the professions I said that professional elites often require moral and emotional skills like leadership, understanding, and organization far more than they do cognitive skills like analytic thinking and clear writing. So these are important skills indeed.

But in practice our moral curriculum boils down to some brief discussions about getting along in dormitories and some politicized and often phony class discussions about race, class, gender, and so on. My friend John Mearsheimer had the guts to stand where I am standing four years ago and argue forcefully that college education is not moral education.

Theoretically, Professor Mearsheimer may have been right—he argued from a strong libertarian and cognitivist viewpoint—but empirically he was dead wrong. Willy-nilly, moral learning will be central in your college experience. You will do a lot of moral learning even in the classroom, much of it learning to dissemble your real views in discussions that are more apparent than real. Sad to say, you will find this skill extremely useful in later life.

Our emotional curriculum is in an even worse state. Basically, we bring all of you here, brim full of needs and desires and hormones, let you loose on each other like so many animals in a wildlife sanctuary, and hope for the best. Why we should have arranged cognitive learning so that intergenerational transmission is highly effective but emotional learning so that every generation has to start over from the beginning is beyond me.

Now my point is that for you as individuals, your responsibility to yourselves for finding education is not limited to the cognitive matters to which the University—following Mearsheimer’s argument—largely restricts itself. You need to become educated in morals and emotion as well. And in those areas, I am sad to say, we do not really provide you with anything like the systematic set of exercises in self-development that we provide on the cognitive side. So you are on your own."

How the University Marginalized Morality

In this complex and well-documented account of the transition from the classical college to the contemporary university, Julie Reuben, a Harvard School of Education professor, traces the origin and effect of the college reform movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how crucial it was in shaping academic culture today

"The division between knowledge and morality was formally elaborated in two philosophical movements that gained wide acceptance in the United States in the 1930's. The first of these, logical positivism, asserted that value statements were meaningless in science. Morality, therefore, lay outside the realm of scientific knowledge. The second, emotivist ethics, maintained that ethical judgments were distinguished by their emotional rather than their cognitive meaning. The intellectual and institutional changes of the preceding half-century--the spread of objectivism among natural and social scientists, the development of the modern humanities and the relegation of morality to extracurricular activities--helped prepare Americans for logical positivism and emotivist ethics. By the 1920s academics had already accepted the central premises of these philosophies: that science excluded values and that morality was determined by feeling rather than intellect. Hence, logical positivism and emotivist ethics made "sense" to American intellectuals. They readily accepted the major tenets of these philosophies, even if they did not fully understand their intricacies."

Page 268
The Making of the Modern University

When "bad news" spreads like wild fire!

"Newsweek magazine's retraction of its story alleging U.S. soldiers desecrated copies of the Koran has done little to cool the anger of many Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Muslims in both Afghanistan and Pakistan say they still believe U.S. soldiers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, abused copies of Islam's holy book in a bid to get terror suspects to talk.

U.S. officials say investigations have uncovered no indication the events took place and stressed such abuse would be reprehensible and contrary to U.S. policy. Newsweek magazine on Monday retracted its story making the allegations."

Acknowledging the need to review sourcing rules, Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker remarked, "We care about the credibility of every word, and this is a sobering reminder that even a few sentences can have a huge effect."

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