“That had explosive potential”: Yale Students and AEI’s Dr. Ben Storey on the Liberal Arts and Fixing Higher Ed

In the first episode of the spring semester, Lux et Veritas Leadership Fellows Audrey Bae ’28, Joe Gicante ’28, and Constantine Semka ’28 discuss the value of liberal arts, why they think it's worth it to pay Yale tuition to study the humanities, and what liberal arts can teach us about Trump and Venezuela:

• Semka: “I think maybe that liberal education sets you back in the first couple years, but it really gives you an advantage later in life because what we learn in liberal education is how to think. How do I acquire knowledge in a faster, more efficient way.”
• Semka: “Liberal arts gives you a very strong foundation on which you can build later your career and what many people from other countries lack is that strong foundation.”
• Gicante: “…it’s difficult to teach somebody to be creative. That's not something you can learn in a classroom, right? There’s no creativity 101. That has to come from learning how to think and thinking through different systems, which is what a liberal arts education really is.”
• Bae: “I would much rather take the time now to seriously reflect on the kind of person I want to be and the kind of life I want to lead, so that I can live my life with no regrets even if in this initial process it seems to be very slow or inefficient.”

American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ben Story discussed the liberal arts, the challenges facing higher education in America, and his current efforts to fix it:

• Storey: “In Iraq under Saddam Hussein there were plenty of people studying things like engineering, dentistry, medicine, so on and so forth. All that stuff that was fine, uncontroversial….When John started promoting the study of history, study of literature, study of philosophy, that had explosive potential.”
• Storey: “The overwhelming homogeneity of a discipline such as sociology makes it the case that the kinds of questions that progressives care about just get investigated again and again and again.”
• Storey: “The polite brush off has been the basic response of colleges and universities to conservative critics for a very long time. Well, you have to hand it to the Trump administration. They’ve actually gotten beyond the polite brush off.”
• Storey: “People on the right should remember that the new means that Trump has effectively legitimized by using them with respect to the universities, well, they’re probably going to be used in the other direction.”

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