Reactions to Frey New York Times op-ed on dismantling of TU Honors College

A follow-up to my previous post to capture reaction to ousted University of Tulsa Honors College dean Jennifer Frey's New York Times op-ed and her conversation on the Classic Learning Test's Anchored podcast, plus a few other notes of interest.

Here are the X quote-tweets commenting on Frey's tweet announcing her op-ed.

St. John's College tutor Zena Hitz, founder of the Catherine Project, writes:

Everyone in higher ed -- the higher the position the better-- should be asking themselves two questions:

1. Why did Tulsa eliminate a very successful program?
2. Why were such programs rare to begin with?

Hitz also writes:

Jennifer is not the first victim of powerful morons who wreck excellent programs of study. We are lucky she has the freedom to speak openly about it!

"Powerful morons" is an apt description of Tulsa's ruling class.

Ollie Lash-Williams writes:

Hiring managers also want [students educated in the liberal arts]. In the age of GenAI and GPTs I need team members who have a training in logic, evidentiary analysis, and argumentative discourse.

Christopher Frey, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Tulsa and husband of ousted dean Jennifer Frey, spells out in an X thread what TU administration has done to the Honors College (full thread, PDF):

1. Honors class sizes have already been increased by at least 33%. This vitiates the seminar format that was essential to these classes being successful.

2. It is not just the dean position that is gone. There is no longer an assistant dean, a service learning coordinator, a program officer, a director of admissions... The admins made these changes without a succession plan in place and now need to find a new director by the summer's end that will have to do the work of multiple full time employees.

3. The admins' choices led directly to the honors college losing access to major gifts and grants. These gifts and grants funded programs that will no longer be available to students.

4. At least 5 of the most experienced and beloved honors professors will not be teaching in the college next year.

It is important--for students, parents, and the public at large--for the facts to be plainly stated.

A word about the seminar format, from our family's experience with St. John's College, the university that pioneered the seminar-based Great Books curriculum: Rather than a professor lecturing from the front of the class, a dozen-and-a-half students will sit around a table, having read the text before the seminar, with two faculty members, called tutors. One tutor will ask an opening question, and the students carry the conversation from there, with tutors intervening at times to keep the conversation on topic or to elicit a response from more reticent students.

The conversation is required to stay within the "four corners" of the text, which is a primary source, a classic text of Western Civilization; that restriction excludes modern commentaries and critiques, attempts to dismiss the text entirely based on the author's race or sex or class. The conversation takes the author and the text at face value.

The seminar format does not allow a student to hide behind test-taking or AI-prompting skills. Your preparation or lack thereof, your engagement with the text is exposed for all to see in seminar. Nearly all of a St. John's education is conducted in seminar form with great books as source material. For example, freshman math begins with Euclid's Elements, and students must come to class prepared to go to the chalkboard and work through and explain one of the proofs from that session's assignment. Students are evaluated on written work, and there's a major paper due annually, but at the end of each year, a student's tutors all meet and talk about her performance, with the student present. I tell people that I considered St. John's when I was in high school, but it seemed too intimidating (so I went to MIT instead).

What TU Honors was offering was a four-course sequence (ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern) of Great Books seminars spanning "from Homer to Hannah Arendt," to be taken alongside a standard major, with a residential element (two floors of Hardesty Hall) and a community service requirement. Here's the description from the Honors College website at the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year:

UTulsa's Honors Program invites students to join a centuries-old conversation about what makes for a meaningful and well-lived life. Through participation in our Socratic-style seminars, you will become exceptional in the arts of communication and dialectic, learn to respectfully challenge yourself and others, and become more discerning with respect to the most important intellectual and ethical issues that confront us as human beings and citizens today. Key Features

• Four classic text-based seminars engaging the greatest thinkers, writers, and artists who have contributed to the "great conversation."
• Disciplinary Honors courses that deepen your understanding of the foundations of that discipline, whether in STEM, health sciences, business, or the humanities.
• Honors electives that allow you to go deeper with a perennial question, genre, thinker, etc.
• A minimum of 80 hours of service, in which you put into practice what you have learned about human nature and community, contributing meaningfully to the common good.
• An Honors Senior Project that may complement your major, in which you explore the questions that have moved you most deeply as a student of classic texts.
• Rich study abroad experiences, in which you will walk in the very places where the people you read lived and created their works.
• Complements any major at The University of Tulsa.

It was also possible to take a full major in the Honors College, called Humane Letters, which added two more required seminars, "The Foundations of Natural Science" and "Aesthetic and Ethical Foundations of Music," which correspond to the classical quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, music), and a senior thesis "in which you explore the questions that have moved you most deeply during your time studying the classic texts."

As an aside: In taking my three children on campus tours over the last decade, I'm struck by how common honors programs had become. It seems to me that American universities have tried to re-create a pre-World War II college experience with a smaller group of serious students in community, surrounded by what has become the typical American college experience where large numbers of students are there just because it was the next step or for the social life or for vocational training. They can't dismantle the larger institution that is no longer serious about learning or thinking, but they can use it to create and subsidize a small intellectual community, and in turn the small honors community lends academic respectability to the university as a whole, particularly in statistics like median test scores and National Merit scholars attending.

What was the TU board's part in all this? In January, TU's Board of Trustees was one of five institutions that received the 2025 Nason Award for Board Leadership by Association of Governing Boards. The self-congratulatory press release cites the Honors College and the new president (Carson) as part of the foundation for a positive future.

Amid profound challenges, The University of Tulsa Board of Trustees redefined itself as a model of strategic leadership in higher education. Facing accreditation warnings, financial instability, and campus unrest, they conducted a self-assessment to create a smaller, more active body with diverse skills and a commitment to shared governance....

Bold decisions, such as appointing interim and permanent presidents aligned with the university's strategic goals, and fostering faculty collaboration, drove reforms, including revitalizing academic programs, launching an Honors College, and achieving record-breaking National Merit scholar enrollment. A unified strategic plan led to a clean accreditation report, stronger finances, and a boosted national reputation, ensuring a vibrant and sustainable future.

It would be interesting to compare the lists of board members from, say, April 2019, when "True Commitment" blew up, September 2023 when Jennifer Frey arrived, February 2024 to January 2025, when the board won its award, to the present, to see if there were any notable additions or deletions that might suggest an explanation to the board's pendulum swings between hating and loving the liberal arts.

(Robert Thomas Jr. is listed as Chief Investment Officer, but his affiliation is not listed. He appears to be CIO of West River Group, a venture capital firm based in Seattle, but he was previously a portfolio manager for the Bill Gates Investment Office (10 years) and Chief Investment Officer for the George Kaiser Family Foundation (15 years).)

MORE:

Peter Biles, a Ph.D. student at Oklahoma State University, can't shed any light on what's happening at TU, but says that the liberal arts are worth pursuing even if you make your living in a different field:

Recently, as I was debating whether to pursue a PhD in creative writing, a friend told me about a man he knows who got his doctorate in the humanities and went on to be a firefighter. Did he regret it? To the contrary. He was grateful for the education. He learned, grew, and deepened his knowledge and character. And now he protects his community by fighting fires. My friend's anecdote encouraged me to pursue the PhD.

If you attend a liberal arts college only to go back to your hometown and inherit your father's auto shop, does that make you a failure? Not by the liberal arts standards. If you came into contact with great books, grew in virtue and character, and experienced a vision of the good life, you can translate such intrinsic value into just about any life situation or career track.

Biles notes that assistant dean Matthew Post is listed as interim director of the Honors College, but Dr. Post will be leaving TU for a new opportunity later this year.

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In September 2020, former TU philosophy Professor Jacob Howland, a leader of the revolt against the 2019 effort to dismantle the liberal arts, noted the coming demographic and financial tsunami threatening higher ed, and outlined the characteristics of new universities that should take the place of those that are closing. He was confident that a new university founded in this way would attract faculty, students, and donors:

Newman famously described the university as "an Alma Mater, knowing its children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill." The university that lives up to this forgotten standard, nourishing its children on knowledge painstakingly preserved, cultivated, and transmitted from generation to generation, will not fail to attract excellent faculty and students and to produce grateful and generous alumni.

Indeed: any prestigious university that stuck entirely to sound education would be such an anomaly today that it would become a beacon for serious students and teachers.

For higher education, as for the nation as a whole, no future good can grow without turning the rich soil of the past. We still have the tools to do what is necessary, and it would be supremely foolish to let them rust from disuse. Let's get to work.