To the Editor:
Scott Parker’s “We’ve Forgotten What College Is For” (The Chronicle Review, March 28) offers a stirring defense of liberal education’s intrinsic worth — of education pursued not for career advancement but for the cultivation of the soul. His voice is elegiac, and his concerns heartfelt: the commodification of college, the instrumentalization of knowledge, and the eclipse of meaning by metrics. And yet, for all its eloquence, Parker’s critique fails to interrogate the deeper cultural, institutional, and philosophical forces that have rendered liberal education so tenuous — and so often hollow — in our time.
Parker yearns for a return to education as “probing the human condition.” So do many of us. But the problem is not simply that we have adopted the “vocabulary of the marketplace”; it is that the modern university, stripped of transcendent reference points and moral seriousness, cannot convincingly defend the intrinsic good of education at all. What Parker treats as a matter of rhetoric — a failure to speak the right language — is in fact a deeper civilizational rupture. And until this rupture is acknowledged, his vision, however noble, remains wistful rather than practicable.
Parker rightly criticizes the transactional view of education — students as consumers, degrees as credentials, professors as service providers. But he blames this cultural shift almost entirely on market logic, as if the university were simply caught in the drift of neoliberal capitalism. This is a half-truth at best.
In reality, what enabled this drift was the abandonment of a shared moral and metaphysical framework that once grounded liberal education. The classical university saw knowledge as ordered toward truth, the soul, and the good. Today’s university treats knowledge as fragmented, provisional, and politically contingent. Without a telos, even the humanities become either empty formalism or ideological advocacy.
Students sense this. They may not articulate it in Parker’s elevated prose, but they recognize the performative hollowness of much that passes for education. Is it any wonder they retreat into careerism? If the university no longer offers moral seriousness or cultural rootedness, then maximizing ROI becomes the only rational path.
Parker laments that students are no longer reading Macbeth or Invisible Man. He’s right to mourn the decline of serious reading and sustained thought. But why have these vanished?
The answer lies not in economics, but in a broader cultural deracination. Over the past half-century, the academy has systematically deconstructed its own civilizational inheritance. The Western canon that has much prevailed has been demoted, not because it lacked pedagogical value, but because it was deemed ideologically suspect. Courses that once cultivated moral imagination now interrogate “power structures.” Students have not been taught to admire greatness, but to critique it.
This is not a failure of marketing — it is a failure of cultural stewardship. You cannot ask students to find meaning in literature when you’ve taught them to see meaning itself as a bourgeois illusion.
If we are to recover liberal education, we must first recover the courage to defend the civilizational tradition that underwrites it.
Parker waxes poetic about learning as a kind of play — like piano or soccer, pursued for its own sake. There is a measure of truth here, but the analogy fails precisely where it matters most. Education, unlike sport, is not just about delight. It is about formation. The ancients understood this: Education is not merely for enjoyment, but for virtue.
The university, at its best, disciplines desire, orients the soul, and cultivates prudence. But Parker, for all his paeans to poetry and philosophy, offers no substantive account of what the educated person ought to be. His defense of education as “fun” subtly capitulates to the very subjectivism he wants to resist.
A balanced defense of college requires more: It must assert that certain kinds of formation — moral, civic, even spiritual — are necessary for liberty, responsibility, and flourishing. Otherwise, we are left with aesthetic sentimentalism.
Parker is suspicious of education’s vocational relevance, but in doing so, he misses the point. The question is not whether college should prepare students for work — of course it should. The question is what kind of work, and in service of what vision of the human person.
A conservatively-inflected vision of vocational education would not reduce students to economic units. It would instead affirm work as a domain of moral agency and civic participation. The plumber, the nurse, the engineer — all can embody excellence and serve the common good. What we need is not a rejection of vocational aims, but their integration within a holistic vision of the person as capable, virtuous, and free.
Parker is right that we’ve forgotten what college is for. But the forgetting runs deeper than he admits. We have not merely become economic calculators — we have lost confidence in truth, beauty, and goodness. We have replaced the moral telos of education with ideological critique, and the sacred with the banal.
The way forward is not just to change our language, but to change our institutions. We must restore intellectual diversity, defend the tradition, and recover the moral seriousness that once made the university a true alma mater — a nurturing mother of the soul.
Only then can college again be the citadel it was meant to be — not of frolicking and indoctrination, but of formation and truth.
Philip Obazee
Reading, Pennsylvania
