So the complaint has been made that at NRO my posts have become more strident and less humorous. Not to mention less personal.
The complaint has also been made that since I’ve taken an interest in higher education as a “critical national issue,” I’ve mentioned from time to time that Berry College is not perfect.
My apology is that I’ve never deviated from the truth is that Berry College is really good, and it has singular excellences worthy of the admiration of all. I actually have evidence that I may have made Berry seem more upscale that it really is.
A very thoughtful young man wrote on Facebook (where everybody who’s anybody meets — much like Waffle House or Panera Bread), against my polemic on student housing, that he had really enjoyed his experience living in the dorms at Gonzaga (of Spokane), and that the students in the dorms generally did better academically than the commuters. He added: ”Of course Gonzaga is not an elite college like Berry.” Well, his only knowledge of Berry is what I’ve written about it. On the elite meter, Gonzaga, a good Jesuit school, ranks about the same as — if not higher than — Berry.
So let me be clear that Berry, although ranked pretty high on the IQ meter, is not an elite school in the mode of Swarthmore or even Rhodes or Sewanee. We’re not preppy, don’t have frats or sororities, and almost every student works on campus for actual money. We’re even very short on Episcopalians.
In the same mode, Berry doesn’t have a dominant liberal-arts tradition in the sense of preparing cultivated ladies and gentleman for positions of leadership through the leisurely reading of great books and stuff like that. Our teams do now play in a preppy D-3 league, a fact that has enhanced (studies show) our liberal-arts reputation. Given that so many liberal-arts traditions seem to have morphed into decadence, maybe it’s good that the more “traditional” majors here flourish with a kind of countercultural edge. And Berry students aren’t wounded that much by the kind of cyncial indifference or slacker libertinism that seems to be the most recalcitrant impediment to experiencing the mixture of wondering and wandering (including the anxiety that is the prelude to wonder about oneself) that is at the foundation of genuinely liberating or “transformational” education. That might be another way of saying most Berry students were raised well.
Berry is pretty insistently about — probably too much about — cultivating a work ethic in students. It’s true our students in general come to college ready to work — or at least more ready than most students at most colleges. Still, I always tell them that college should mainly be about picking up knowledge and experiences that you can’t pick up on the streets of the global competitive marketplace. If it’s not about that, then I agree with Peter Theiel: Skip college and get right down to entrepreneuring.
That’s not to say Berry isn’t classy. Berry is ranked by a leading lawn expert as the best landscaped campus in the South. If you look at the picture the expert provides, you can’t help but agree. That’s the area around our (Gothic) Ford buildings, which were actually funded by Henry Ford himself in a rare philanthropic moment. But some of that lush grass was donated to the college by the people (including Denzel Washington, who donated one of the first and really expensive versions of the flat-screened TV to our guest cottages, because he wanted to watch a game one afternoon) who came here to film part of Remember the Titans. They judged that our grass, in places, wasn’t green enough to sparkle on screen.
And the campus as a whole isn’t all that uniformly green–in most places the color of the grass varies some with the seasons. Berry’s charm is to be landscaped, but not too landscaped. It achieves the pleasingly imperfect Southern level of cultivation, thanks to the work of our legendary grounds crew (which always includes plenty of student workers). Berry is the South’s most beautiful campus, if you take every facet of the diversity — both natural and architectural — of the 26,000 acres into account.
One major source of blight on our campus that has a singularly human cause is the unkempt wasteland that is my office. (Picture not provided.)