As a retired, prize-winning history professor at Utah State University, I raise my voice in protest of the priorities and purposes of those governing higher education in Utah.
Supposedly, these leaders are interested in strengthening those aspects of USU that lead directly to post-graduate employment. But even a casual look at programs cancelled or suspended at USU belie this claim.
Who would argue that the state’s economy would benefit from fewer men and women trained to deal with the needs of the deaf or environmental engineers able to address the toxic destiny of a shrinking Great Salt Lake? Only those captured by indifference to the everyday realities facing Utahns today.
And the recently enacted Center for Civic Excellence, with its mandate to design and conduct a narrow great books program required of every student, is another evasion of the real needs of USU’s students.
Certainly, they would benefit from exposure from contact with these books — but in context, so that the students can understand the practices and experiences that provoked the convictions of past thinkers and those who acted on them. Otherwise, our classes will not get under the skin and our future leaders will be as insensitive as those governing higher education in Utah today.
Leonard N. Rosenband, Emeritus professor of history, Englewood, Colorado
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