The story “The Million Dollar Profs” (July 8), relating the motivation for a retired faculty couple to donate $1 million to Southern Illinois University for philosophy, is both heartening and inspiring. The Boydstons, in directing their remarkable gift, note “a death of the spirit” in American universities, lament how “successful” programs in the sciences and social sciences are turning out “narrowly educated students” and point to the potential of philosophy to “give students some sense of their place in the world.”
As a British art historian in an American liberal arts college, I did not need to be persuaded of the acuity of their perceptions. However, the reality of them was brought home to me later the same day.
A student from none other than Southern Illinois University, a junior (biology major, art minor), interviewing as a prospective transfer student, stated that her motivation to transfer arose from her inability to find in her SIU program any integrating view of life or any values that made sense of the unrelated information she had been asked to digest. What she proceeded to describe fitted well with the Boydstons’ dismay at the death of the spirit in American universities.
Until the Boydstons’ gift bears fruit, I suspect that others, like this student, will keep coming to liberal arts colleges, which offer a more integrated vision of human knowledge, attempt to relate fact to values and help students find their sense of place in the world.
