In the wake of a recent student conduct incident, President Harris Pastides has issued a call for members of the “Carolina family” to “reflect on our values and tell the world what we believe.” Mr. President, I have done so, and here is my conclusion.
The “Carolina family” shares no meaningful values. The university upholds no semblance of a unified system of beliefs. Evidence of this is found in its fragmented curriculum and the Carolinian Creed itself.
The university has abandoned the liberal arts and with it the connection between education and virtue. What was once a unified curriculum oriented toward the permanent, higher things through a study of philosophy, ancient languages and the literature and history of antiquity has dissolved into a collection of specialized fields tied loosely together by the “Carolina Core,” which boils down the age-old subjects that have composed the artes liberales to categories such as “Global Citizenship and Multicultural” and so sophistic a phrase as “Effective, Engaged and Persuasive Communication."
As a modern public institution of higher learning, the university would more appropriately be deemed a "multiversity," in which the unity of the liberal arts has been thoroughly abandoned in favor of utilitarian training. The university fails to impart virtue unto its students; it does not even encourage them to pursue it. Instead it trains them how to market a product or manage a sporting venue, yet it grants Bachelor of Arts degrees to students who know nothing of Plato’s allegory of the cave or Dante’s "Inferno." Questions such as “What is justice?” and “Is there an absolute standard of morality?” have been replaced with the important, wide-ranging inquiries of tourism management and fashion merchandising.
This abandonment of the university’s history and of the traditional meaning of education is manifested in the Carolinian Creed, a meaningless list of what our modern, liberalized culture has placed upon the throne of virtue. Prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude have been toppled, only to be replaced with such empty concepts as diversity and tolerance. Why should I strive to “learn from differences in people, ideas and opinions” if I am taught no absolute standard of what is right and just? Am I to learn from Islamic extremists? Am I to hold the ideas and opinions of fascists? They certainly have their differences. “Openness” for its own sake and with no moral guidance is flat out dangerous.
President Pastides, I have reflected upon the state of our institution, gazed upon the bland charter that is the Carolinian Creed and made my best effort to tell the world what we do and do not believe. It is clear that the university has succumbed to the pressures of modernity. Under your leadership and the guidance of the Board of Trustees, the university no longer makes an attempt to educate the whole person, instead desiring to meet the economic needs of the state, raise its statistics, churn out graduates and “compete” with other institutions. It has become an institution with no soul, and the Carolinian Creed — our ethical pact — is hollow as a result.
If you seek to stop what plagues our campus and student body, the problem lies beyond the Carolinian Creed; no reflection on its words can solve what ails the university. If you want to know why students keep making public racial slurs and perpetrating sexual assault, look at what our university fails to do, and what it does. Take a look at the many “No Limits” banners on campus. The university administration has indeed shown to all students that they have no limits, despite what our nature as human beings tells us.
If you desire students and faculty at the University of South Carolina to act with virtue and love for their fellow man, abandon the empty words of the Creed and work to reorient our school toward the constant, immutable things. Take down those “No Limits” banners and get rid of the gimmicks, so that our university can once again educate the whole person instead of seeking to merely manufacture graduates and compete with other schools.
Remind our students that, as human beings, we do have limits, and that there is a higher purpose to education than the salary that may follow. After all, learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel, or have we abandoned that belief, too?