The great conservative writer Russell Kirk has been gone for a quarter century. His voluminous writings included quite a few articles with his thoughts on higher education, and in today’s Martin Center article, legal scholar Allen Mendenhall surveys them.

To say the least, Kirk looked with disdain on the path our colleges and universities were taking in his day. He thought that federal subsidies in particular were inappropriate and harmful, “a step toward the centralization and consolidation of power” writes Mendenhall.


Moreover, Kirk saw that more and more students were going to college merely for fun and to obtain a “snob degree.” That was true back then and has become more and more so since his death.

For Kirk, higher education ought to be liberal. Mendenhall quotes him: “By ‘liberal education,’we mean an ordering and integrating of knowledge for the benefit of the free person — as contrasted with technical or professional schooling, now somewhat vaingloriously called ‘career education.’”

Why should a person go to college? According to Kirk “to seek wisdom, virtue, truth, clarity, and understanding.” At a few schools it’s still possible to do that.