As debates over campus free speech and ideological conformity dominate headlines, writer and professor Joseph Bottum says the deeper crisis in American higher education is more fundamental: students no longer experience the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic richness that college once promised. Appearing on Chicago’s Morning Answer with Dan Proft, Bottum—currently the Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado’s Benson Center—offered a stark diagnosis of the modern university and a surprisingly hopeful glimpse at what can still be salvaged.
Bottum is conducting a classroom experiment of sorts this year: a rigorous seminar requiring undergraduates to read a full novel every week, from Defoe and Fielding to Flaubert and Dickens. The aim is simple—test whether students, given the chance, can still engage in deep reading and conversation the way previous generations could. The results, he said, have been both inspiring and heartbreaking. “These kids are desert plants,” Bottum explained. “You give them the least amount of intellectual rain and they soak it up. They’ve never been given it before.”
He blames several forces for the collapse of classical liberal education: scientism, which persuades students that only empirical data matters; moral relativism, which dismisses inherited wisdom; and the bureaucratic expansion of the university, which reduces education to job training measured by quantifiable outcomes. But Bottum adds two more culprits: a sprawling university administration that views students as hotel guests, and the rise of artificial intelligence, which he believes will further erode genuine learning. “Everything in the last 30 years has been a blow against the trillion-dollar temple that was the American university system,” he said. “And I want to weep.”
Yet the students in his course—many of them engineering majors—have shown that the hunger for meaning is still very much alive. Bottum said they are drawn not just to the intellectual challenge, but to beauty. “They so rarely encounter the beauty of human endeavor,” he said. “Academia has lost the sense that we are engaged in the pursuit of civilization.” What they get instead, he argues, is either skills-based job preparation or ideological lectures from professors who no longer believe in the inherent importance of their own disciplines.
But Bottum rejects the modern assumption that students must choose between the humanities and employability. “Forty percent of my students are engineers,” he noted. “They’ll have jobs the moment they graduate. But they feel the thinness of the world they’ve inherited—the idea that the only meaning in life is political.” His goal, he said, is to reintroduce them to literature as a way of understanding themselves and the world. Through novels like Madame Bovary and David Copperfield, he shows students how the modern mind came to be and why fiction became the chief medium through which Westerners explained themselves to themselves.
Bottum also discussed his recent Wall Street Journal essay, “Three Cheers for Purgatory,” which uses theology to illustrate how modern life has been flattened into something small and bloodless. He argues not for doctrinal acceptance but for recognition of what ideas like purgatory once accomplished—making the world feel “thick with meaning,” populated by the dead, the living, the not-yet-born, and the divine. Today’s students, by contrast, move through a world stripped of spiritual and historical depth. “They have no reality around them they trust is real,” Bottum said. “No sense of a world thick with their ancestors or with God. Everything is politics, and it’s madness.”
Despite the grim assessment, the Benson Center has already asked him to stay for a second year—proof, Bottum hopes, that the hunger for real education can still be met if the will exists. “These students long for a world in which classics professors think Latin and Greek matter,” he said. “In which historians believe their discipline is essential. In which English professors think poetry is the highest achievement of civilization. They want seriousness. They want beauty. And they know they’re not getting it elsewhere.”
Whether universities nationwide recognize that same longing—and act on it—is another question entirely.