Light & Truth: George Weigel on Liberal Arts Education, Classical Education & Human Flourishing

Light & Truth: George Weigel on Liberal Arts Education, Classical Education & Human Flourishing 

In this episode of Light & Truth, UDallas President Jonathan J. Sanford sits down with George Weigel to discuss why a liberal arts education—especially a Catholic liberal education rooted in classical education—still matters in an age of confusion about the purpose of education and the meaning of human flourishing.

Weigel argues we’re living through a civilizational crisis—and that recovering the great ideas of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome through serious study is essential not only for forming students, but for defending (and in that sense, helping save) Western civilization.

They explore why students need a shared Western “civilizational vocabulary” to reason together and sustain a healthy public life, and why a post-literate culture becomes a post-rational culture.

In this conversation:

- Why liberal arts education prepares young people for “anything” by forming minds, souls, and character
- How classical education anchors students in the canon of Western civilization
- Why faith and reason belong together in a truly Catholic liberal education
- What to look for when evaluating top Catholic colleges, top Catholic universities, and top liberal arts universities

#liberalartseducation #classicaleducation #purposeofeducation #humanflourishing #catholiceducation #catholicliberalarts #udallas 

00:00 Introduction to Catholicism and Liberal Education 

01:10 Recovering Liberal Arts Education in America

12:08 University of Dallas is Committed to Faith and Reason

19:30 The Problem Today

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

It's my distinct pleasure to have George Weigel with us today. George is the distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the chair of Catholic Studies, the author of 30 books, the most significant biographer of the life and thought of Pope St. John Paul the Great, and probably the most significant lay Catholic voice in America and maybe even the world today. And so I am honored that you have spent some time with me. And it's wonderful to sit down with my friend George Weigel.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, it's always great to be here at the University of Dallas. I have had two daughters graduate from this excellent school, and my grandson is now here and flourishing here. So I'm a big UD guy on top of all the other lies you just told me about being there.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Trevor Burrus So why UD? I mean, why why did you want your daughters, why did you want your grandson to come to the University of Dallas?

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Trevor Burrus Because this university has taken and is taking liberal arts education seriously, and liberal arts education in a Catholic key, which I believe prepares young people for anything. It forms souls as well as minds. It forms characters as well as fills out CVs. And I think my two daughters are good examples of that. My older daughter went from here to Johns Hopkins Medical School and is now a practicing pediatrician, wife and mother. My younger daughter went from here eventually to New York University for a Master's in arts education. She now runs the education program at the largest arts center in New York City. That's all possible in no small part because of what they were given here. So I'm a big, big fan, as I said. And I believe this university is a model for the reform of American higher education, not just Catholic higher education, but American higher education.

unknown 2:20

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yeah. I won't call them lies because I actually think they're true. They really are. And then there's just a whole host of ideologically driven engagement that happens on a number of university campuses. But the public perception is that all universities have gone the way of Harvard. All universities have gone the way of Columbia. Well, the University of Dallas, the day after October 7th, 2023, did not have protests on our campus. And we actually think that we should be teaching people how to think, not stuffing them full of ideological ideas and then saying, okay, now you've had an education. So how do we recover liberal arts education in America? What are its prospects?

SPEAKER_01 3:46

My latest book, as you know, is a collection of commencement addresses, two of which I gave here, and lectures I've given in university settings in North America, South America, and Europe. And in one of those, I quote a former president of Harvard, Dr. Drew Faust, at her inauguration. And as you know, the Harvard seal or crest has the word veritas on it, truth. It used to say veritas Christo Ecclesiae, Truth for Christ in the Church. They ditched Christ in the Church in the late 19th century. And if you read Dr. Faust's inaugural address, you might ask the question of whether they've gone the full punch as pilot and ought to put a question mark after Veritas. What did she say? She said when this institution was founded, it was believed that truth was a possession. And now we think and know, she said, that truth is an aspiration. Well, if you think truth is only an aspiration, that there are no truths built into the world and into us, except stuff like 2 plus 2 always equals 4 in the base 10 system, then you eventually get under-educated, overprivileged snowflakes camping out in Harvard Yard or at Columbia, spouting nonsense because they have not been immersed in Western history, Western literature, the philosophical tradition, and I will dare say the theological traditions of the Western world. So you have people who have been, in my view, robbed of their civilizational inheritance. The real sadness in this, it seems to me, is the parents who have bought the canard that if the kid doesn't go to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Duke or whatever, they're ruined for life. The graduates of this fine university are the living refutations of that. But the propaganda has been rather successful from the high-priced schools. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

It's it's remarkable. And I'll even be in conversation with friends who recognize that it's a canard and yet want their kids to go to those schools, because there's a perceived social advantage to going to those schools and having that name attached to your name, your resume for the rest of your life. When in fact, your your daughters are a great example. The current U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See is a 97 alumnus of the University of Dallas. Many of the finest physicians, surgeons, entrepreneurs, and others in this country are graduates of the University of Dallas. Twelve bishops have graduated from the University of Dallas. The thing that matters is the quality of the education that you have received. And over time, our reputation will continue to climb. What we need to be deeply concerned to do as our star rises is not to abandon what has made us who we are. So there are temptations that can arise as a result of brand awareness success. That doesn't mean we don't want to achieve greater brand awareness, to put it in business terms. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Well, I think as long as the administration and the faculty remain committed to the view of Catholic higher education laid out in John Paul II's great text Next Corte Ecclesiae, things will be fine. About 10 years ago, maybe 15 now, I was speaking to the Parents Association of a very prominent and well-regarded preps Catholic prep school in the Midwest. And I got enormous pushback from the parents to this notion that the kid has to go to I said, No, this isn't true. I induced the evidence of UD and my daughters. The next morning I was having coffee with some of the monks who weren't teaching at this Benedictine school. And they said, Thank you for saying that last night. We've been trying to communicate this for years. Do you have any suggestions? So I thought for a moment and I said, yes. Give the parents of every incoming senior next year a copy of Tom Wolfe's novel, I am Charlotte Simmons. I said it's pretty raw at a couple of points, but it will actually have a catechetical effect as well as a sobering-up effect. Because in that novel, this young innocent who goes to what's obviously supposed to be Duke intellectual corruption precedes moral corruption.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Trevor Burrus, Jr. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

She goes to a class and is told there's nothing called the truth, it's just your truth and my truth. And 300 pages later, she's in all sorts of trouble with the head of the lacrosse team or the basketball team, whatever it is. Trevor Burrus That's a point you want to drive home to people. Intellectual corruption precedes moral corruption.

unknown 9:19

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

You know, and the other side of this, and I'm I'm wondering what you think about this observation. Umlando Lakes, late 1960s, many Catholic universities abandoned their commitment to the to the Church, at least with respect to the structure of their boards, the sense that they are in a unified mission with the Catholic Church in the way that it had been conceived before. And that was really driven by a fear that you could not be really committed to your identity as a Catholic institution and excellent as an education of higher or an institution of higher education. The number of institutions that bought into that is in some ways surprising, particularly given the fact that the university itself is a Catholic thing, right? It was Catholicism that gave birth from its very heart, as Excordia Ecclesiae makes clear, um, uh from the very heart of the church. And yet American Catholics have always felt themselves to be on the margins. They they wanted to be part of these great institutions that divorced themselves from their institutional roots in order to become great. The reaction in some places to that has been we don't care about being academically excellent. We'll just claim our, you know, in this case, Catholic identity or whatever other church identity, that too is a mistake. So what I think a place like the University of Dallas needs to do is to show how those two are not just complementary, but if you take seriously your Catholic identity as an institution of higher education, you ought to be excellent in every respect. And um the the um um uh the way in which, and I'm interested in in how you see this happening, or you said earlier in this conversation that you think the University of Dallas provides a model, not just for other Catholic universities, but higher education in general, right? So I'm I'm I'm wondering about how how we affect that, right? How do we root ourselves in our Catholicism, continue to aspire and achieve genuine excellence at the very highest level in terms of how we form our students and in terms of the research and achievements of our faculty, and project that in a way that will help shape higher education in general. Do you have any suggestions?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Well, the the fundamental uh truth that the University of Dallas embodies is the truth taught by John Paul II in another encyclical, Fides at Razio, Faith and Reason, where in the very first sentence he says faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to a contemplation of the truth. I mean, these are two complementary parts of the same human yearning to be in touch with truth, goodness, and beauty, the three great transcendentals. I think the UD commitment to a core curriculum is absolutely uh uh essential to the identity of this place, but the notion of a core curriculum in which students are exposed to the greatest works of Western literature, philosophy, religious thought, history uh is uh even more critical in this civilizational moment in which we find itself. We are in a civilizational crisis in the Western world today. That's for sure. If the only way we can say the democratic project, the free market, um uh an understanding that human rights are built into us and not benefices granted by the state, all of all of those things. The only way we can defend that is to say, well, it just works better. It's not gonna work for very long. Uh if you don't if you haven't spent some time in your formative years wrestling with the ideas that from Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome gave birth to what we know as Western civilization, you're not gonna be able to defend it. Because there are other civilizational projects out there that want to run the world. There's a Chinese project, there's an Islamist project, there's a Russian project, at least under President Putin, there's a high-tech project. Uh none of those, at least in their rawest form, are compatible with what we know as Western civilization. That's right. So uh we need people who can defend the West with all of its warts and problems as a noble expression of all that is best in the human yearning for truth, beauty, and goodness. You can't do that unless you have read Homer and Virgil and Dante and John Milton, and studied the history of the Western world, and wrestled with Augustine and Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas. You just can't do it. And that that that wrestling, as I said a moment ago, will prepare you to do anything else.

unknown 15:09

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Without a doubt. The way in which faith is interwoven into that, right? So the the two wings image is, I think, particularly significant. And and you know, we're we're friends with the University of Austin and Texas. Yes. Um they're doing some really interesting things there. What they don't have and can't have by institutional definition, it's a a deep embrace of a faith tradition. Yeah. Is it possible to um imagine an institution like that sustaining an engagement with the literature of the West in a way that gives an orientation to a life well lived? Or do you do you need the deep roots in a faith tradition in order to sustain that effort?

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Well, if you if you cut Jerusalem off from Athens and Rome, then we see what happens. If you lose the idea, which comes from biblical religion, that this world of ours is not a fortuitous accident of random cosmic biochemical forces, but is the creation of a creator who, if you will, impressed his reason into this world so that there are things we can know about this world. This world has a knowable structure built into it. That's the foundation of any notion of science. Right. That notion comes from biblical religion. That's right. If you don't have that, then reason begins to doubt its own capacity to get at the truth of that. That's right. You get your truth and my truth, nothing called the truth. And then you get what Joseph Ratzinger called in April 2005 the dictatorship of relativism. Trevor Burrus, Because if our truths collide and there's no way we can settle the argument because there's no the truth, then you're going to impose your power on me, I'm going to impose my power on you, or one of us is going to get the state to impose its power on the other guy. Ratzinger was very, very clear on why faith and reason need each other. Faith challenges reason to open, keep open the horizons of its aspiration. Don't think low, think high. Ask the big questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is our destiny? How do we how do we discern good from evil, noble from base, and then live that? Reason, on the other hand, purifies faith from superstition. Faith is always in danger of degrading into superstition. So the two together are the powerful engine that, as you say, correctly created what we know as a university in the 12th and 13th centuries in Western Europe, and created science. I often tell audiences think about this, two of the most consequential scientific ideas of the last two hundred years were fought by Catholic priests. Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk, discovers what we know as genetics and all that's come out of that. Georges Lemait, Belgian priest, thinks through to the Big Bang Theory, which is the fundamental premise of astrophysics and cosmology today. Those guys didn't think they were living with split minds. You know, where they go to the same mass in the morning and then go to the lab. These are two different things. No. They were integrated personalities. And that should tell you that faith and reason can work together in a very powerful way. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Can and really need to to sustain the kind of progress that we're talking about. And I'd love that reflection on what happens when faith is eroded or eviscerated, right? We lose our faith in reason at that point. You know, that's the conclusion of Fidas at Razio. John Paul II lays out the case for that. The um this age is in such need of the kind of education that we provide here. And yet there are many people who have a deep skepticism about higher education, both because of what's going to be studied, right? Is it is it in fact valuable? And I think we've said some things to push back on that. Um, is it going to enable me to find a job? Well, just look at our our own placement rates. We're we're at the very top of the heap when it comes to the first destination numbers they're called for our graduates being launched into careers. We've got the highest med school placement rate in the state of Texas. Where you can look at all of these accolades, and yet when people hear liberal arts, the kind of native or knee-jerk utilitarianism that that runs rampant in our society recoils and thinks, oh, we're going to waste our time reading books, um, uh sitting in a lab, going to Rome and spending a semester, right? It's so inefficient. Why can't we just take some AI-generated coursework and have the information that we need really downloaded into our into our brains, and then off we go to live successful lives? Of course, um raising the question of what it is to live successfully has been bypassed here. But what uh what do you think is going on with that kind of um uh deeply set utilitarian mind frame? And do you see ways to um uh militate against it?

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Aaron Powell Well, I think Catholic institutions like this can do and should do a better job at explaining what you've just explained. This is the kind of education that prepares you to do every anything and everything. And here are the examples. We need to tell our story. Uh we need to tell our story.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

And sometimes we're afraid to say that because we think we'll lose the substance.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

But secondary effects are are important.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Um I think part of the problem uh Today is that we are becoming an increasingly post-literate culture. I have been reading some really horrifying numbers recently. That, for example, if I think I have this right, the number of Americans who say they read books for pleasure regularly is like 24 percent right now, down from 40 percent X number of years ago, and obviously more than that before. A post-literate society is a post-rational society. If you want to know why our politics have devolved into an exchange of adolescent epithets in 140-word bytes, it has something to do with the fact that people aren't reading. Uh people aren't reading. Uh we're approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Eleven years after that, we'll have the 250th anniversary of the Constitution. Why could those guys from very different socioeconomic backgrounds different religious backgrounds come together in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787 and produce those two masterful documents? It's because they had a common Western civilizational vocabulary. Whatever their theological views, they had all been deeply formed by the King James version, the authorized version of the Bible. Most of them had read Blackstone's commentaries. A lot of them had been educated in philosophy. They had a common civilizational grammar and vocabulary that allowed them to work together. And that's what we don't have today. And that is one reason why our political space has become so rancid. We don't know how to talk to each other because we don't have a common vocabulary to talk to each other in.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Yeah, we don't have a common vocabulary. We we also have a lot of unhappy people. A lot of people who find themselves miserable. And it's it's not surprising. I'm thinking of the beginning of uh the prima secunde uh of uh the Summa Theologiae, where Aquinas very plainly lays out those four temptations to happiness, those four false happinesses, right? There's fame, there's power, there's wealth, there's honor. And um we live in an age in which those are projected as the only pathways to happiness. And the faster you find yourself on that pathway, the the happier you'll be. And we're rushing headlong into uh a kind of mass misery amongst people who wake up at 35 or 40 and realize I don't know what I'm doing with my life. And so many of the moral problems, in addition to the political chaos, seem to me to find their roots in those false idols of happiness. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Idols is the right word, because to borrow a neologism from the great social critic Irving Kristol, human beings are theotropic. There's something built into us that makes us want to worship something. And we know from the book of Exodus on: if you don't worship the true God, you're going to worship false gods, which come in many, many forms, including the four you just identified. Now, one of the things I find a sign of hope in the present uh disturbances is the number of young people who are finding their way into the Catholic Church precisely because of the emptiness that they have found in the dominant public culture. And I hope that a lot of those young people eventually find their way here to the University of Deltas. Because we will help here, you will help them fill in the blanks that they have felt in such a painful way that they're now reaching out for the transcendent and finding it in the beautifully celebrated liturgy, in the catechism of the Catholic Church. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

And in the in the canon of Western civilization. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Exactly. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Going into those roots. And it's so fitting that we're concluding on this note of hope. It was John Paul II who was such a witness to hope and remains so for us now. Thank you again, George, for joining us and being part of this conversation. Thank you for having me.