Philosophy Dies Twice in Tulsa
There is, believe it or not, a University of Tulsa. I’ve never been there, but I did heard of it once, in the previous decade. It came to mind again today, because intellectual celebrity & professor of philosophy Jennifer Frey just announced that TU will destroy her Honors College there, two years after they got her to move her family to Oklahoma, teach there, & design, implement, & bring to success a liberal arts program. You can read her thread on X, she says she’s devastated—I can only imagine.
A remarkable professor of philosophy, Jacob Howland, who’s now at University of Austin Texas, wrote about TU back in 2019—so, pre-Covid history—about how the admin there destroyed his department of philosophy. Read all about it in City Journal. You can also listen to Howland talk about it on the CJ podcast.
You don’t have to be a philosopher to suffer the fate of Socrates; even talking about Socrates might suffice to get you fired, your work destroyed. Of course, on the bright side, you get to keep your life & figure something out. I sometimes think maybe reading about Socrates should teach you how not to end up like him.
Do admins & perhaps much of the faculty hate education? Which institutions are safe from these calamities & how can we find out?
By the way, our own Carl Eric Scott wrote at length about Howland’s study of Plato’s Republic.
Jacob Howland on Plato’s Republic
We are probably obliged to say that Plato’s Republic is the greatest of the Great Books, or at least, the work that most sets our expectations of what such a book should be. To agree with that statement is not to say that you’re not liberally educated if you haven’t studied it, nor that a person who nourishes herself more on a book like Aquinas’s
Prospero (in the Tempest) forgives his enemies. Were I one of the academics who served the highest things at Tulsa, especially in its latest configuration which itself involved a lot of forgiving of past sins, I would find it very hard to forgive those responsible for this.