Recently I received an elegant little booklet published by the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Scholars at this private, non-profit organization dedicate themselves to improving higher education by helping educators and the public understand the failings of our universities and colleges, and how they might be corrected.

The cover of the booklet titled, "From Christian Gentleman to Bewildered Seeker," shows a young man dressed in coat and tie, seated on a porch. Beyond, a pastoral scene evokes quietude and contemplation. He holds a closed book in his lap and gazes thoughtfully outward. The sepia picture caption reads, "His thoughts dwelt upon serious things."

The young man pictured, nostalgically, reminds me of my maternal grandfather Samuel Stark. He looks surprisingly like pictures we have of my grandfather. This poignant memory and the essay by Russell K. Nieli sadly reminds me of how far our universities have fallen from their proud tradition and how they fail our young people who enter the halls with false expectations. It’s no exaggeration to say this institutional transformation has left a great intellectual void in our culture.

Dr. Nieli describes the historic foundations upon which our once great universities rested with "clear purpose, focus and coherence." Founded largely by Protestant Christian clergy, their goal was to "pass on the moral, intellectual and religious heritage of Christianity and Greco-Roman high culture to generations of the nation’s youth." Now they crumble under the self-imposed baggage of "alienating irrelevance."

I vividly remember my grandpa Stark, a thin, zesty man with a sense of humor. But infused in that old man was classic education. He and his father had both graduated from Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, Pennsylvania, a college prepatory school. The Seminary was founded in 1844 by Methodist Church leaders "to prepare students…for a course of professional or collegiate studies."

Sam Stark graduated from the Seminary in 1898 and went on to Ohio State University where, I remember mother saying, he "studied Greek and Latin," and played football. Family legend has it that grandpa Stark was a bit of playboy for those times. But he was solidly educated. In retirement he served as librarian in a small schoolhouse in Uniondale, Pennsylvania a little village about 20 miles north of Scranton. He gave me the first books I remember having before formal school.

Dr. Nieli’s essay reminds me also of my own experiences in higher education during the 1950s. I was part of the rapidly expanding student population encouraged by the G. I. Bill. I had served nearly three years in the U. S. Army and, thus, was able to afford college with this federal assist. I enrolled at the New York State College of Forestry located adjacent to the Syracuse University campus.

We were simultaneously matriculated at both institutions. The College of Forestry provided the technical courses—what we called applied sciences—in our chosen options. Syracuse University (founded in 1870 by Methodist clergy) contracted with the state to offer courses required in English, physical sciences and mathematics. The College rigidly required that each student follow a "core" curriculum of required courses. Until our senior year it was rare that we could take electives.

Although I wasn’t aware of it then, a great controversy about the mission and delivery of higher education had been raging between academic intellectuals for decades. A Harvard College report in 1945 defined what its faculty saw as a challenge: a "proliferation of courses and the expansion in student choice." Thus, they concluded, students seeking a liberal education had no clear, coherent path.

In the late 60s radical changes caused tumult at the academy. I was a college professor during those trying years. Even at our small, rural college dissident students began to pressure the administration to back off from faculty expectations of order in the classroom and self-disciplined study. Increasingly, students ill-prepared for college work were admitted. In frustration they rebelled at the hard work of learning. Anxious to add student bodies (and funding) our state university enabled these students by offering entry with "remedial" studies in English and math. Nieli writes that we professors were reduced to "servants of immature youths and their fickle minds."

All this and the failure to require a set of fundamental classic courses for undergraduates destroyed the integrity of higher education. The "whatever" mentality filtered into secondary schools. Author and former secretary of education William Bennett summed up this subverting phenomenon: "(O)nce colleges and universities decided the curriculum did not have to represent a vision of an educated person, the secondary schools and their students took the cue and reached the same conclusion."

Sadly, Dr. Nieli concludes his essay by stating that there is probably no way out of this now firmly entrenched academic dilemma: that so-called educated people do not know "what is worth knowing and what is important in our heritage." But, he says, compromises are possible and "the extreme curriculum incoherence and fragmentation that plagues most of our major universities today" may be alterable.

This booklet is worthwhile reading for all those interested in the history of higher education in America, and how our modern institutions bewilder and fail students trusting they will be shown the way to elevated understanding.