Western seems to me to suffer from a lack of purpose.

It is unclear to me just what this university hopes to accomplish. What ideas does it seek to instill in its students? What knowledge does it wish to pass on through its core classes?

It is of the utmost importance, when considering the successes or failures of an institution of higher learning, to contemplate the question—what is the purpose of the university? I wonder sometimes if the administrators here at Western have spent any time considering this question themselves. Perhaps if they had, things here would be much different.

It is ironic that the university which owes its very existence to the intellectual and moral traditions of Western culture no longer sees fit to pass those traditions along to the next generations.

Western cannot be said to offer a true liberal arts education. It has no core in which it instructs its students. In the absence of a core, it has instead turned itself into a glorified trade school.

It is instructive to take a good look at Western’s core classes—the General University Requirements (GURs).

The core classes at a university are its heart and soul—the foundation of a true liberal arts education. The idea is that every student, no matter what his or her eventual major becomes, will leave the university with a broad understanding of his or her place in the world and in society.

Western’s GURs, from my experience, do not provide a broad understanding of anything at all.

They are filler classes—things to keep the freshman busy so the university doesn’t have to increase class sizes in any of the courses that matter.

Sure, there are some truly inspired and inspiring courses to be found among them, but they are the exceptions and not the rule.

Western can teach a student how to teach. However, it provides no advice as to what a would-be teacher ought to teach.

This university can teach its students how to solve complicated math problems, but it will leave its mathematicians in complete ignorance of all else. The university’s deficit of a purpose is passed onto its students.

The problem this university faces is not that it is passing bad ideas onto the students, but that it is passing no ideas at all.

The GURs are not terrible classes, but they are, taken as a whole, utterly incoherent. In fact, the general intellectual environment at Western strikes me as being utterly incoherent.

It is time that this and every other university in America to rediscover its soul.

I hope that one day, Western will again embrace the traditional role of the university and pass on a coherent intellectual heritage to its students.

Until it does its best efforts to educate will always be confused and meandering.

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