Here on the ESN blog, we’ve often blogged about differing views of education, particularly the conflict between education as personal formation and education as professional training. I encountered these differing views in two articles recently. I expected to see competing visions of education to make an appearance in a column on faculty as role models for students, but it was a bit of surprise to find them in a light (so I thought) opinion piece on the “books for boys” genre.
First, the expected: last week, Inside Higher Ed published a column by Lee University’s Kevin Brown, under the unfortunate title Lacking the Mission(ary) Zeal. I say “unfortunate” because Lee is a Christian college, and the reference to missionaries only confused matters. The column actually addresses the mission of a university. Brown compares and contrasts his own university’s stated mission with that of four nearby secular institutions, focusing on universities’ vision for student formation and the role of faculty in that formation.
The conventional wisdom states that universities mostly gave up their in loco parentis role over the past few decades. Brown found that universities’ mission statements told a much different story. [Read more…] about Captain Underpants and Faculty Role Models