Wilson Bailey is a junior at Colby College studying government and political philosophy. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review and The Dispatch. 

Colby College, where I am a junior, has been on quite a run since President David Greene came to campus in 2014.

Since then, the acceptance rate fell from 28% to 7%, the endowment grew by 50%, we’ve bought islands owned by the Wyeths and we practically own downtown Waterville. We’ve built the best athletic facility in Division III, the school now controls one of the most productive lobstering waterfronts in the country and state-of-the-art glass buildings pop up on campus like mushrooms.

At this rate, by 2040, we’ll have planted the Colby Mule flag on Katahdin.

It is defensible to say that Colby has the most momentum of any school in the country; this is undeniably true among small colleges in the Northeast. It’s this momentum that made me pick Colby. But the longer I have been at Colby, the more I have realized that material momentum has come at the cost of a clear vision for the education of its students.

The college’s bet is that an overwhelming appearance of prestige and influence will attract better students who will create an attractive and authentic institutional identity as an inevitable byproduct. But it just doesn’t work like that, especially not in higher education.

There must also be a consistently executed, guiding idea as to what Colby is actually for. To the extent that Colby does have a positive vision, it is a socially progressive one that is paired with but ultimately misaligned with its neoliberal, gentrifying, vaguely imperialistic projects.

And contrary to the college’s goals, this does more to expose contradictions in the progressive understanding of the university than demonstrate consistency. It is a confused vision, so it is no vision at all.

A change in the college’s academic and institutional priorities would require almost superhuman humility from administrators who have had the wrong institutional priorities for decades. But it also is simultaneously simpler, cheaper and, I believe, more rewarding than material changes.

It would mean a renewed attention to genuine liberal education, which employs our great works of philosophy and literature to strip away childhood prejudices so that when we return to society upon graduation, we do so more moderate but also more thoughtful and interesting.

Before our public research engines, it was this method of education in rural New England that set the American university apart and was championed by men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke on its importance at Colby on two occasions.

It is no secret or accident that the humanities are in trouble not just at Colby, but nationwide. This is because in my lifetime every elite college — ironically this is most true with liberal arts colleges — has abandoned the time-tested philosophy of education I described. They have taken liberal education to mean the opposite of its original definition.

The quest for the truth has been replaced by accommodation of your truth so defined by “lived experience,” which may be deployed as a trump card over any text that does not align with the intersectional identity hierarchy of the day.

The well-known fact of Colby’s ambition and the well-documented recent fatigue for
oppression-studies-style humanities combine to provide an interesting and revealing test case about the future of New England liberal arts colleges.

If Colby is looking for another fixer-upper, if it wishes to truly lead, Colby should look no further than to the sad state of the humanities on its own campus. American democracy is under threat — from many different directions — yet my college does not offer a course that examines the American experiment and its tensions as a whole. We have more courses dedicated to the possibility of a canonical writer being homosexual than we do to a canonical writer’s actual books.

But Colby hasn’t so much as considered the path I laid out, despite the administration’s
professed goal of transformation and leadership. This should perhaps invite questions about its competence in understanding the evolving landscape of higher education. Or perhaps it should raise suspicions about whether the administration actually has contempt for the liberal arts tradition of which they are stewards.

More importantly for all of us, it also raises the question: If not Colby, who among the NESCAC schools will have the courage to change and what does that mean for the New England college’s place as the model of American intellectual life?

Colby’s ambition is noble and is probably on the whole good for the state. But it would also be good for higher education and liberal education if Colby directed its ambition correctly.

David Greene is a serious person and he is making Colby a serious place. I can think of no other president so valuable to their institution. But for his transformation to be meaningful, the education must match the bells and whistles. We should all be well-wishers of Colby and hope its leaders do what it really takes to “dare northward.”