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June 6, 2025 - Epoch Times

04:20

University of Austin Provost Jacob Howland on Repairing America’s Broken Universities

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	I designed the intellectual foundations program at the University of Austin.
	And what is that?
	It's one of three elements of our curriculum.
	In the freshman and sophomore years, students take roughly two-thirds of their courses are in intellectual foundations.
	And the idea is that these will provide foundations for any future work you do.
	So when I was asked to design this, it was very interesting.
	It's like, put together, you know, 15 courses.
	And at the time, it was very clear to me that our institutions were broken.
	You know, the news media is supposed to report news not to serve as an arm of government propaganda.
	The CIA and the FBI are supposed to protect Americans, not spy on them.
	Universities are supposed to educate and not indoctrinate, etc., etc.
	And I decided that what's wrong is a lack of sound judgment, you know, a lack of being able to see things whole.
	Institutions had forgotten what their purpose is.
	And what we needed to do is educate students who were capable of repairing these institutions.
	So how do we do that?
	And the only way I could think of was, look, get students to connect multiple disciplines in a coherent way.
	Give students, what I was talking about earlier, a sense of where we've come from and where we're going in the West.
	So the Intellectual Fundations has a kind of historical arc.
	We organize these courses around fundamental questions, like first term, freshman ticket course, chaos and civilization.
	What is civilization?
	Where did it come from?
	It turns out that the Greek poets and the Hebrew scripture both begin with chaos.
	They have very different accounts of how the chaos is ordered, right?
	Or, of course, on the beginning of politics.
	What is politics?
	What is law?
	why do we need it?
	And so equipping them with these capabilities and But we follow through every time we're looking at these fundamental issues in the first year.
	We've got a biblical text and we have Exodus in the beginning of politics and we have Herodotus and Thucydides.
	We have a course on Christianity and Islam.
	And finally we get to modernity.
	But the idea here is I'm reminded of a saying by John Henry Newman.
	In the idea of the university, he says that the point of a university is to form individuals who can make an instinctive, just estimate of things as they pass before us.
	That's the idea.
	And to do that, and that's a goal that obviously is unattainable by any human being, but you can move closer toward it.
	You really have to To have a sense of where we've been and where we're going.
	So when we get to the second year, we have a course on modernity and its discontents.
	We have a course on ideological experiments of the 20th century.
	We have a course on the uses and abuses of technology.
	And I should say, by the way, technology, that's sort of the outgrowth of what I was saying, Athens, right?
	In other words, this is a rational project.
	How to understand the abuses of technology?
	Well, that would require a philosophical anthropology, by which I mean a basic understanding of what it means to be a human being, of what human flourishing is, of what the human good might be.
	And we're going to need that understanding, which has got to be informed by the biblical sources, as well as Greek philosophical sources like Socrates, when we face things like AI.
	How do we avoid the abuse of AI?
	Well, we've got to understand what a human being is.
	That was my conception of how to put together this intellectual foundations program.
	How did I get to it?
	Well, you know, I was lucky.
	I had good teachers, and I studied ancient philosophy, and I was at the University of Tulsa, and they decided, right after I got tenure, to put together the philosophy department or the religion department.
	So I wanted to get to know my colleagues, and we started reading Kierkegaard, and I said, "I'm going to write a book on Kierkegaard." So I wrote a book on Plato and Kierkegaard, sorry, Kierkegaard and Socrates.
	And then I got into studying the Talmud, and I wrote a book on Plato and the Talmud.
	And then I got interested in literary things, and I've written a bunch of literary articles about everything from Beowulf to Jorge Luis Borges to Dostoevsky.

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