Opinion Piece: Stabbing a Hole in “Holistic Education”

(Photo courtesy of the University of Dayton’s verified Instagram account @universityofdayton)

Sam Smith | Contributing Writer

When I presented at the University of Dayton’s Catholic Intellectual Tradition Symposium in early February, I talked about how important a holistic education is in preventing and standing up to fascist regimes. My Instagram caption of my post about the Symposium reads that as a little kid, I “[believed] that Nazis and anti-Semitism only existed in history books,” and as a call to action (and as a nod to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award winning musical), “history has its eyes on us.” Rather than making you read my 14-page research paper, I’ll give you the skinny: getting people on-board with fascism takes time, and it starts with devaluing and gutting educational institutions.

Let me be clear: I am not, by any means, calling Spina, or any other administrators Nazis because of the faculty cuts they imposed. What I am saying is, along with a multitude of other universities, both private and public, UD is pandering to a presidential administration that is showing all of the textbook red flags of a fascist regime. We are failing an open-book history exam, not to mention abandoning our ideals of providing a “holistic education.” We’re renovating a less than 20-year-old gym, but cutting concentrations for English majors, including Technical Writing and Rhetoric. Our basketball coach makes over $2.4 million each year, but our History Department just got gutted, despite a number of professors retiring at the end of this academic year. “Holistic education,” Dayton preaches, but only if the coaches get to keep their Oakwood mansions.

This isn’t just earth shattering for our majors in humanities subjects. CAP classes—which are general education courses, à la UD—are being bastardized. Intro Religion, Intro Philosophy, Intro History, and Writing Seminar I & II are being “mainstreamed” into something that’s trying to be CORE (a monolith class that knocks out first year requirements), but without the necessary manpower. Under this new system, it seems, professors with their PhD in English would be made to teach religion, history professors would teach philosophy, and vice versa. I had personally anticipated that the Theology Department would stand untouched, since this is a Catholic Marianist university, after all, and we only brag that fact every change possible. But as it would turn out, this is not the case.

So what’s next? It’s unclear. If this trend continues, we could turn into an exclusively Business and Engineering school; since that’s what brings in the most money, those are apparently the subjects that are the most important. While we send out engineers to design high-speed subways, prisons continue to see human rights violations because there wasn’t a professor to explain the effects of over-policing low-income neighborhoods. Businessmen sign billion dollar contracts, at the cost of revoking healthcare for transgender people because they’ve never been made to consider the sanctity of all human life. We’ve seen where this leads before. I’ll say it again: we’re failing an open-book test.