Three thoughts on the latest brouhaha re: Thomas Aquinas College: 1. I visited in 2019, and observed a stunningly healthy campus culture, ordered to developing young men and women who “put away childish things.” That doesn’t mean they don’t drink or smoke or etc., — they do. But nothing like the manic, ultimately alienating way I remember from my own big-college days. The feasting is situated within human domesticity and sociality and ultimately presented as an echo of the Banquet of the Lord. That itself is a HUGE win and has lessons for other institutions (*cough-cough* see today’s major college-related story). 2. The humanities curriculum is rich and rigorous and deep in a way that the pamphlet making the rounds doesn’t capture. Students come out with a sense of how ideas unfold in history, rather than (again) the haphazard curricula characteristic of most other schools (“a little existentialism, now back to Descartes, now a little analytic mind-and-body problem, now neoclassical econ — congrats here’s your diploma!”). 3. However, I do worry the science curriculum is deficient, and have said so. Aristotle on biology or “Goethe’s scientific notebooks” may be valuable in a history-of-science component, but you can’t teach that stuff earnestly in a science course. To be well-rounded and competitive, students need to have some encounter with what’s happening in evolutionary biology, physical cosmology, computational science, etc. TODAY. And then to test what they’ve learned in the classically oriented philosophy and theology courses against the immense achievements of modernity — fearlessly, in the way the post-conciliar church urges, and not in the manner of cornpone evangelicalism. American Catholicism needs this. And I’ve said before that I worry about a certain type of classical education producing ONLY tweedy assistant professors of theology or people who might go to law and policy, but not STEM and adjacent fields. Thus, at the risk of scandalizing some, if today I had the choice for my kids to pick between Georgetown or TAC, I’d still pick Georgetown. But that can change! FIN.