The Value Of A Yale Education

Jonathan Berry (ES '05) has a review of God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America by Naomi Schaefer Riley at townhall.com. Though not bad relative to the standard townhall.com piece, the review is pretty miserably written. I'll look past that because I'm late for a meeting and there are several substantive points I want to make.

Conservative hatred of "the elite" can only extend so far, and hyping obviously inferior, often non-accredited "universities" is way beyond that point. Berry should be ashamed of himself for lending even a bit of cover to Bob Jones University.

But the densest point of his article is the notion that by virtue of their "spiritual unity," religious colleges are somehow able to get beyond the "arguments over first principles" that are the apparent sticking point for "secular" institutions.

Whatever. First principles are where it's at. I know from experience that Berry would prefer it if we could simply agree that truth and beauty are identical, accept the rest of Thomist metaphysics, and then constructively spend our time deducing the objective criteria of aesthetic justification (taking time out to calculate the number of angels that could fit on the tip of Pius XII's mitre), but there's a world of philosophy that he seems to take pride in missing out on, and his prescription for the rest of us---act like ostriches about the 14th century onward---is simple philistinism.