I have a new (short) essay in America magazine about the idea of “mission” at small, financially-precarious Catholic colleges. (The argument probably also applies to smallish, financially-precarious colleges of all creeds — or no creed at all.)
Several small Catholic colleges have closed their doors in the last year, and more, unfortunately, will follow. These schools depend heavily on tuition, so they need to keep enrollments up. But they are disproportionately located in areas with declining college-age populations. The Catholic share of younger Americans is also declining. So these colleges will have to get creative.
Some are pursuing expansive agendas, trying to do more in order to attract more students, often while cutting liberal-arts disciplines like languages and philosophy. I think this is a mistake. As I argue in the essay, these colleges would be better off trying to do less, but do it better:
The prudent strategy for financially precarious Catholic colleges, I am afraid, is to do less, both to conserve resources and to avoid the burnout that can come from trying to do the same things with a smaller staff. But that “less” must be guided by a principled understanding of their unique calling, not just what seems financially expedient in the moment.
Here, too, Catholic colleges and universities face a choice. They can try to compete with their public and private peers by becoming more like them, or they can identify what makes them distinctive and seek a niche where they can flourish. Pursuing a niche will not save every troubled Catholic college—the economics for some may just be too dire—but it may be the only way, given the intense competition among schools, to make a college worth saving.
I live in Dallas, where there is only one tiny Catholic college, the Unviersity of Dallas, which has indeed attempted to find a small niche (great books and a fairly conservative brand of Catholicism) where it can flourish. Dallas/Fort Worth, with a metro population of eight million, could use a couple more Catholic colleges. A truly bold and imaginative college president would figure out a way to move a struggling one from Philly or Buffalo down here. There have been attempts to open branch campuses of Midwestern Catholic colleges in the Phoenix area — I wrote about that for America in 2019 — but I don’t know of any such efforts in Texas. Could be worth a try. Here’s the new essay again.
I also have a review of John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s new book, Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living just out in The Hedgehog Review. The review is currently behind a paywall. There are two things you can do about this situation. One, you can subscribe to the magazine (and read not just my essay but essays by many far better writers and thinkers). Two, you can wait until it temporarily comes out from behind the paywall. I don’t know when that will be. Subscribe to the magazine’s newsletter (scroll to the bottom of the page), and they will tell you. [Note, 7/28/2023: It’s now unpaywalled.]
I eagerly accepted this review assignment because I consider Thoreau one of America’s most interesting thinkers on work and have repeatedly leaned on him for insight about work and much more. One of the book’s coauthors, John Kaag, has written several well-regarded books on philosophy for general audiences, including Walking with Nietzsche. I figured he would be up to the task of turning Thoreau’s disparate thoughts on work into a concise, engaging, and appropriately radical book.
I was wrong. The book he and van Belle wrote is lazy, conceptually confused, and petty. The authors evince a thin, patchy understanding of Thoreau, whom they seem to view as a Matthew Crawford type (he of Shop Class as Soulcraft), a writer who wants to reaffirm the value of a hard day’s manual labor.
Yes, Thoreau worked a broad range of jobs in his life, from surveyor to pencil-maker to bean-hoer. (“I have as many trades as fingers,” he wrote in Walden.) But throughout his writing, he contends that most of the work people do in industrial societies is not worth doing. It’s killing our spirit. We don’t need better work, Thoreau thought, we need to do things that are not considered work. From the essay:
With the life he sketches in Walden, Thoreau shatters our conceptions of work’s proper role in life. Leisure—whether standing in a doorway, contemplating a sandbank, or watching two ants fight—looks, to the industrious mind, like loafing. Thoreau shows that, from a higher perspective, spending time this way might be what life is for. His neighbors in Concord would accuse him of laziness, “but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.”
Kaag and van Belle also have a weird hangup about muffins. They spend a full page complaining about a twee coffee shop in Stowe, Vermont, where the barista brags about the “cruffins” (croissant-muffins) on offer. (Reliable sources tell me no such cafe exists in or around Stowe.) A couple chapters later, they’re praising a shop in Massachusetts for the dedicated employee who makes the muffins that are fresh at 6:00 am. I don’t know if Thoreau ever ate a muffin. But it all makes me think of another Boston-area icon, Steven Tyler, and “Walk this Way.”
The book began as a Fast Company essay that did pretty well. That’s a not-uncommon origin story for nonfiction books these days, but it’s a risky one. Not every essay can be a book. Not every essay-author has sufficient interest in their essay topic to sustain a book. So they end up throwing all kinds of nonsense in it.
Look, I would love few things more than to write a nice little essay, see it go massively viral, and then be approached by a publisher to say the same thing in 25 times the number of words and for vastly more money. That is almost literally my wildest dream. But that is not a recipe for writing a good book. David Graeber’s nice little essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” is almost perfect. Reading it was like finding the key to a cabinet I’d inherited and figured I’d never be able to open.
The essay eventually became Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. It was not good. (I reviewed it for America.) Graeber reproduced the essay at the beginning of the book and referred to it constantly throughout. He had no new ideas.
(And yet: the Bullshit Jobs book gets cited all the time, mainly because of the title. Same goes for a much better book, Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back, which is a great title, but it’s clear that few people who cite the book actually read it, because they never have anything to say about its main topic: women’s workplace organizing. How do I know? I reviewed that, too.)
Kaag and van Belle might just make a bad team. Two years ago, they wrote an essay for Times Higher Education arguing that first-generation and other college students from marginalized backgrounds have a chance to thrive in remote classes where they can be somewhat anonymous. This opinion is completely wrong. The exact opposite is true. Anyway, these authors also published an anthology of William James’s writings earlier this year. Maybe it’s better.
A student from my recent class on academic writing for the public, Valerie Ragsdale, just posted an essay to her Substack that she had workshopped for the class. Valerie is a line cook in a restaurant in Manhattan. She works hard because she cares about her customers — even though she hardly gets to see them and definitely can’t speak to them.
I may not be by the diner’s side, but as a cook, I show my love for the guest through the careful way I prepare their plate. You see, as they arrive, I warm it. Nothing is worse than a cold plate and a warm entree. In the hot throes of a busy service, I season and taste each entree—multiple times… I check the lamb for doneness; holding a hot cake tester to my lip, like a mother checking a warm bottle of milk on her wrist before serving it to her baby.
Valerie contributes a lot to the joy people take in the dining experience, yet she cannot, by law, receive so much as one cent of the gratuity they leave. As a result, she earns just a fraction of what the servers in her restaurant make.
Valerie’s essay opened my eyes both to the work that goes on in high-end kitchens as well as the frustrating pay inequities in the restaurant business. She is an exciting new voice in food writing. Check out her newsletter, Vegarie, which mostly focuses on women in the food industry:
And as always, please share my newsletter with anyone you think will appreciate it. It’s the best way to keep up with what I’m writing and thinking about. I have several essays coming out in some of my favorite venues in the coming months. You won’t want to miss them.