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New York Times
7 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Students Want the Liberal Arts. Administrators, Not So Much.
University students, we're told, are in crisis. Even at our most elite institutions, they have emaciated attention spans. They can't — or just won't — read books. They use artificial intelligence to write their essays. They lack resilience and are beset by multiple mental health crises. They complain that they can't speak their minds, hobbled by an oppressive ideological monoculture and censorship regimes. As a philosopher, I am most distressed by reports that students have no appetite to study the traditional liberal arts; they only understand their coursework as a step toward specific careers. Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa's Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I've seen little evidence of these trends. The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum. Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students. Sadly, this education has fared less well with my university's new administration. After the former president and provost departed this year, the newly installed provost informed me that the Honors College must 'go in a different direction.' That meant eliminating the entire dean's office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars. (A spokesperson for the university told The Times that while it had 'restructured' the Honors College, the university believes that academics and student experiences will 'remain the same.') The stated reason for these cuts was to save money — the same reason the University of Tulsa gave in 2019 when it targeted many of the same traditional forms of liberal learning for elimination. Back then, the administration attempted to turn the university into a vocational school. Those efforts largely failed, in part because of lack of student support for the new model. An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It's not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it's out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won't fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
USA Today
11-07-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Tulsa football coach Tre Lamb qualifies for Oklahoma amateur golf championship
Between practices, team meetings and film sessions, it's understandable that a lot of college football coaches would want to escape to the golf course in their offseason free time. But one coach in the heartland has turned that escape into a pretty impressive feat. Tre Lamb, the head football coach at the University of Tulsa, earned his spot in the Oklahoma Golf Association's State Amateur Championship by firing a 3-over 75 in a qualifying event Thursday at The Club at Forest Ridge in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Lamb, 35, has yet to coach a game for Tulsa. He joined the program in December, replacing former NFL wide receiver Ryan Switzer, who took over as interim head coach for Tulsa's final game of the 2024 season after the school fired Kevin Wilson. Lamb spent the better part of a decade as an assistant with a few different programs before landing his first head coaching job at Gardner-Webb, an FCS team. He needed just three seasons to lead the Runnin' Bulldogs to their first Big South championship in nearly 20 years. Lamb now looks to recreate that same success at a Tulsa program that has struggled recently. The Golden Hurricane have a combined record 7-17 over the last two seasons. Before he can begin that turnaround, though, he has some business to tend to on the golf course. The Oklahoma State Amateur takes place at Cedar Ridge Country Club in Broken Arrow and features an 18-hole qualifier on Monday, July 21, to determine the field for the 32-man match play bracket, which will be played out July 22-24. Tulsa recently made headlines when it reinstated its men's golf program, which is set to begin competing again in 2026 under the tutelage of newly-named head coach Brandon Wilkins.
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Tulsa football coach Tre Lamb qualifies for Oklahoma amateur golf championship
Between practices, team meetings and film sessions, it's understandable that a lot of college football coaches would want to escape to the golf course in their offseason free time. But one coach in the heartland has turned that escape into a pretty impressive feat. Advertisement Tre Lamb, the head football coach at the University of Tulsa, earned his spot in the Oklahoma Golf Association's State Amateur Championship by firing a 3-over 75 in a qualifying event Thursday at The Club at Forest Ridge in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Lamb, 35, has yet to coach a game for Tulsa. He joined the program in December, replacing former NFL wide receiver Ryan Switzer, who took over as interim head coach for Tulsa's final game of the 2024 season after the school fired Kevin Wilson. Lamb spent the better part of a decade as an assistant with a few different programs before landing his first head coaching job at Gardner-Webb, an FCS team. He needed just three seasons to lead the Runnin' Bulldogs to their first Big South championship in nearly 20 years. Advertisement Lamb now looks to recreate that same success at a Tulsa program that has struggled recently. The Golden Hurricane have a combined record 7-17 over the last two seasons. Before he can begin that turnaround, though, he has some business to tend to on the golf course. Gardner-Webb Runnin Bulldogs head coach Tre Lamb walks the side lines in a game against the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers at Brooks Stadium. The Oklahoma State Amateur takes place at Cedar Ridge Country Club in Broken Arrow and features an 18-hole qualifier on Monday, July 21, to determine the field for the 32-man match play bracket, which will be played out July 22-24. Tulsa recently made headlines when it reinstated its men's golf program, which is set to begin competing again in 2026 under the tutelage of newly-named head coach Brandon Wilkins. Advertisement This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Tulsa coach Tre Lamb qualifies for Oklahoma amateur golf championship
USA Today
16-06-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Tulsa reinstating men's golf program after 9 years; set to begin play in fall of 2026
Tulsa reinstating men's golf program after 9 years; set to begin play in fall of 2026 The University of Tulsa announced Monday it was reinstating its men's golf program after a nine-year hiatus. The program, which was discontinued following the 2015-16 season, will begin play starting in the fall of 2026. Tulsa athletic director Justin Moore says a national search for a head coach is underway. "We are thrilled to be able to bring men's golf back to the University of Tulsa in a city and region recognized for its passion for the game and home to some of the nation's best golf courses," Moore said in a release. "The generosity of our donors – including several alumni who first established the legacy of Tulsa men's golf – has allowed us to bring the program back and compete immediately for championships." Per the release, a transformational leadership gift was made by Tulsa alumni Sharon D. Prince and Robert P. "Bob" Prince, who was a member of the men's golf team during his time at Tulsa. Additional support for the relaunch of the program was provided by the H.A. & Mary K. Chapman Foundation, Al Walker, Mark Marra and Don Quint Jr. Tulsa has been to the NCAA Championship 10 times in school history, with seven of those trips under former coach Bill Brogden, who led the Golden Hurricane for 30 years until the program was eliminated. "Sharon and I are thrilled to help establish an endowment for men's and women's golf at TU," Bob Prince said. "Given the rich tradition of golf at TU and the support of the community, wouldn't it be great to have women's and men's golf take the NCAA title in the same year?" "Thanks to a lengthy team effort and the immense generosity of certain alumni donors, the University of Tulsa's men's golf program has been re-established!" said Marra, a member of the University of Tulsa Board of Trustees. "With the continued support of the Tulsa golfing community, the program will be competing for championships in no time!" The news may come as surprising to some, especially in an era of college athletics when many golf programs are worried about their future. Just last month, Stephen F. Austin announced it was eliminating its golf programs immediately. The Tulsa women's team has had plenty of success in recent years, including trips to the NCAA Championship in 2023 and 2024. And starting next fall, the Tulsa men's program will return and become the 12th men's team competing in the American Athletic Conference.
New Statesman
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The ghost of Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark's memoir, Curriculum Vitae, published in the spring of 1992, concludes in 1957 with the appearance of her first novel, The Comforters. The memoir looked back to her beginnings; by the time of its publication Spark was, aged 74, thinking about endings and how best to control her own. She therefore invited Martin Stannard to write her biography. Spark made an art of beginnings and endings. We see it in The Girls of Slender Means, which begins and ends with the line 'long ago in 1945', and in her use of flash-forwards, so that the manner of a character's death is revealed at the start. The schoolgirl Mary McGregor, for example, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 'who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame… at the age of 23, lost her life in a hotel fire'. Lise in The Driver's Seat, who selects a stranger to murder her, will be 'found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.' The Driver's Seat might be seen as the blueprint for the game Spark set in motion with Stannard, whom she handpicked after reviewing the second volume of his biography of Evelyn Waugh. Stannard, Spark wrote, was 'a literary critic and a scrupulous scholar', who understood the relationship between a writer's life and his work. When she first invited to him to her home, Stannard assumed it was to interview him for the job, but Spark had decided already that this stranger was the man she wanted. Because she was a hoarder who had thrown away nothing on paper for 40 years, there was little research for Stannard to do: the facts of Spark's life were organised into box files equivalent in height to an airport control tower, in length to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and in width to the wingspan of a Boeing 777. Her vast archive, now divided between the National Library of Scotland and the McFarlin Library in the University of Tulsa, was her legal defence. 'The silent, objective evidence of truth' would 'stand by me', she wrote in Curriculum Vitae, 'should I ever need it'. Before she became a novelist, Spark had been a biographer herself and the omniscient narrators of her novels were born from writing biography, because the biographer sees both the beginning and the end. Her first full-length book, published in 1951, was a life of Mary Shelley called Child of Light. 'Mary Shelley was born in 1797 and died in 1851,' Spark wrote. 'However variously the whole story is interpreted, no one can take these facts away.' Muriel Spark, who shared the initials of both Mary Shelley and Martin Stannard, was born in Edinburgh on 2 February 1918, the day and month on which Mary Shelley died. Aged 19, after a first-class education at the school on which she modelled Marcia Blaine in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark sailed to Southern Rhodesia to marry a schoolteacher who suffered, she soon discovered, from a severe mental illness. By the time her son, Robin, was born, the marriage was over. Leaving Robin in a convent in Gwelo, Spark returned to England in 1944 and worked, for the duration of the war, in black propaganda. She then, for 18 months, ran the Poetry Society, after which she set herself up as a biographer and critic. Until the end of the Fifties she lived from hand to mouth in bedsits, pitching ideas to publishers who then went bust. She wrote The Comforters soon after she converted to Catholicism in 1954, an event which coincided with a mental breakdown brought on by an excess of diet pills. Spark's fame was instant: by the 1960s her years of hardship were over. Twenty-one further novels, each flawless, appeared on a regular basis. The biographer's task, Spark believed, was to summarise the facts. Biography is, after all, the art of summary and summary was the art in which Spark excelled: her novels, short stories and poetry, biographies of Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë, critical study of John Masefield, editions of the letters of Cardinal Newman, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, selection of Emily Brontë's poems and Wordsworth criticism measure two feet on the shelf. Each of Spark's brief books grew out of a mountain of paperwork, firming up the plot, pinning down the characters, lacing it all together with the elegance of a sonnet. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'Treat me as though I were dead,' Spark told Stannard. This did not mean don't let me get in the way of your research, but assume I'll be ghost writing my own biography. Ghosts are everywhere in Spark's fiction, where they terrorise the living. Needle, the narrator of 'The Portobello Road', is smothered to death in a haystack and then haunts her murderer. In 'The Executor', which Spark considered, alongside 'The Portobello Road', her most satisfactory story, a famous Scottish novelist, living in an isolated house in the Pentland Hills, asks his niece and executor to sort his lifetime of papers into box files, which she does with impressive efficiency. 'There's little for me to do now, Susan, but die,' he says with a sly smile. Shortly afterwards he does die and Susan sells the archive to a foundation, withholding the 12 notebooks which contain his unfinished final novel 'The Witch of the Pentlands', about the trapping and trial of a witch. Why not write the ending herself, Susan wonders? But when she opens the 12th notebook, whose pages had previously been blank, there is a message in her uncle's handwriting: 'Well, Susan, how do you feel about finishing my novel? Aren't you a greedy little snoot, holding back my unfinished work, when you know the Foundation paid for the lot?' His concluding chapter, Susan discovers – where the witch out-foxes her persecutors – had been secretly written before his death and deposited earlier with the Foundation. Stannard went about his task as he understood it: interpreting the documents, conducting interviews and putting together a portrait of his subject. Nine years later, in 2002, he delivered his first draft to Spark. It was what she called 'a hatchet job; full of insults', 1,200 pages of 'slander' and 'defamation' which she was sending to a libel lawyer. She did not recognise the humourless woman described; she had been turned into a fictional figure. Determined to prevent publication, she did what she could to spoil the book and hold up its progress. The biographer and his subject were yoked in a danse macabre of pursuer and pursued, the plight of each resided in the other. Her distress, Spark's friends say, effectively killed her, and when she died aged 88 in 2006, Stannard, now into the 14th year of his impossible task, was at work on the third draft. Muriel Spark: The Biography, which received stellar reviews when it finally appeared in 2009, is indeed the work of a literary critic and scrupulous scholar. 'What Spark wanted,' Stannard reflected, was 'to write the book herself.' So why didn't she write the book herself? Even he didn't know the answer. 'Why this intensely private person should have invited someone to write her biography remains mysterious,' Stannard says in his preface. But Spark had written the book herself several times: not as the story of her life, but as the story of her relationship with her biographer. In The Ballad of Peckham Rye, published in 1960, Dougal Douglas, the horned stranger who creates havoc in south London, is ghosting the autobiography of the retired actress Maria Cheeseman, but she doesn't recognise herself: 'That last bit you wrote,' Miss Cheeseman complains, 'it isn't ME.' The book is meant to be factual, but Dougal keeps adding fictional details: she was born in Streatham, for example, and not Peckham. 'There's the law of libel to be considered,' Dougal explains. 'A lot of your early associates in Streatham are still alive. If you want to write the true story of your life you can't place it in Streatham.' Despairing of his subject's interference, Dougal throws down the gauntlet. 'I thought it was a work of art you wanted me to write… If you only want to write a straight autobiography you should have got a straight ghost. I'm crooked.' Spark was crooked too, and biography and autobiography are crooked arts. Curriculum Vitae, like all CVs, is built on evasions, and biographies, as Spark well knew, are more than Wikipedia entries. She was a richly imaginative biographer herself, with trenchant views on the genre. In an article about Charlotte Brontë, Spark argued that 'biographical writing which adheres relentlessly to fact' distorts the subject, 'because facts strung together present the truth only where simple people and events are involved, and the only people and events worth reading about are complex'. Mary Shelley was both a complex and a conflicted character, and 'if we are to see the whole woman', Spark insisted, 'we must witness the conflict'. This is similarly the case with Spark, who left instructions throughout her work for her biographer to follow. In Child of Light, which contained the first full-length study of Frankenstein, Spark saw in the scientist and his creature the model for the biographer and his subject. Like Boswell and Johnson, they are linked for eternity. 'There are two central figures – or rather two in one,' she explained in a brilliant analysis of Mary Shelley's first novel, because the Monster and his creator are bound together: 'Frankenstein's plight resides in the Monster, and the Monster's in Frankenstein.' So 'engrossed' are the couple, 'one with the other', that they are no longer individuals but 'facets of the same personality'. When the book became a film, it was unclear, for example, which of them was called Frankenstein. A further reflection on biography can be seen in The Comforters, where Caroline Rose, a writer and Catholic convert recovering, as Spark was, from a breakdown, believes that her thoughts are being recorded by a ghost at an invisible typewriter. 'I have the feeling that someone is writing the story of our lives,' she tells her boyfriend. 'Whoever he is, he haunts me. The author records everything that's important about us.' Increasingly terrified, Caroline insists that, 'I won't be involved in this fictional plot if I can help it. In fact, I'd like to spoil it. If I had my way I'd hold up the action of the novel. It's a duty.' While Spark's first book described the writing of her own biography, her first novel described the horror of being trapped in a book. From the very beginning, she foresaw the end. Frances Wilson's 'Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark' is published by Bloomsbury Circus [See also: English literature's last stand] Related
