Why Tradition Matters

Eric Rozenman’s tale of his daughter’s exposure to falling standards and intellectual twittery at Goucher College reminds us of why tradition matters.

Yet, at neither the honors ceremony nor graduation in 2006 did any speaker mention a standard by which all things could be tested, or the definition of good, which obviously, if tacitly, included a sense of the sacred… Therein lies the weakness of a thoroughly secular liberal arts education. Without a Judeo Christian ethical anchor, without a foundation in Anglo-American history and literature, without intellectual diversity tested by discriminating debate, it becomes a scholastic flea market. Its articulate graduates are not likely to recognize or sustain the forces that nurtured American society, including institutions such was those granting their own degrees.