Another school year has begun and an estimated 15 million young men and women will be pursuing studies at the college and university levels. However, this may not be as beneficial as we have historically believed higher education to be.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil." This point was echoed in a recent Dallas Morning News article under the apt heading, All Brains, no Soul. The author, Thomas Hibbs is a philosopher and dean of the Honors College at Baylor University.

Hibbs begins by quoting Plato's Apology in which Plato, quoting Socrates' defense of himself at trial, says:

You are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?

Hibbs makes the point that we Americans, are becoming like the Athenians that Socrates is addressing, especially when it comes to the object and aim of higher education today.

Few today attend university for the purpose of "gaining wisdom" or giving care to the state of their soul. Instead, the emphasis is upon obtaining a degree which, it is believed, will insure material success. In fact, the whole emphasis of higher education today seems to be of only an instrumental nature; a means to an end and not an end in itself.

W.E.B. DuBois, the most prominent intellectual leader and political activist on behalf of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century writing on the goal of higher education said, "The final product of our training must neither be a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure and inspiring ends of living, - not sordid money getting, not apples of gold." Lewis referred to this as "making men without chests!"

William H. Willimon, former professor and dean at Duke University, shares his observations at Duke's school of business:

For several years, students were asked to write a personal strategic plan for the ten-year period after their graduation.With few exceptions, they wanted three things - money, power, and things. Primarily concerned with their careers and the growth of their financial portfolios, their personal plans contained little room for family, intellectual development, spiritual growth, or social responsibility.(The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education, 1995)

By exchanging the nobler virtues for consumerist ends, Hibbs points out that the American university has become a setting for debauchery and hedonism virtually unparalleled. A recent Rolling Stone magazine article following the Duke Lacrosse team scandal offers chilling insight into the depraved culture prevalent on university campuses today. (I warn you that the article is quite graphic.)