After nearly 18 years, the Intellectual Journey will finally be laid to rest following next semester.
In 1998, a team of faculty and staff created the Intellectual Journey as an effort to offer a course grounded in Bonaventure’s great work, The Mind’s Journey into God. The course highlighted the Catholic-Franciscan tradition within a liberal arts framework.
Yet, more than anything, the Intellectual Journey taught students to think for themselves and prepared them to discover the good, the true and the beautiful in the world around them.
Unfortunately, with the university’s abandonment of the Clare College swiftly approaching, Bonaventure students will lose a great deal more than they will gain. Students will have no knowledge of the Franciscan Church Doctor who this university is named after. St. Bonaventure will be reduced to words on buildings and sweatshirts rather than revered as the intellectual patron of this academic institution.
When the Intellectual Journey is gone, where will students go to gain the wisdom of St. Augustine and Cicero? How will students see the beauty in art without the lyrical verse of John Milton or Dante Alighieri? How will students broaden their horizons without the perspectives of the Hindu and the existentialist? Whose insights will replace those of the feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud?
A course filled with centuries of intellectual giants will be replaced by pathetic excuses for academic courses.
Courses like SBU 101 – a cheap imitation of the already useless University 101 that teaches students skills they should’ve learned in high school – and two non-academic diversity courses. What “diversity” means exactly, advocates of the new curriculum still have not specified.
Religious Texts and Catholic Franciscan Heritage will also be scrapped from the curriculum. Even the more integrative Composition and Critical Thinking courses will be replaced with the milk-toast Writing I and II. It’s only a matter of time when the new curriculum needs “updating,” and writing will be replaced with “Learning Your ABC’s” and SBU 101 with “Coloring Within the Lines.”
Exaggeration aside, these new classes demonstrate a clear turning away from the intellectual legacy that the Clare College attempted to leave behind.
While Phillip Payne, chair of the new curriculum committee, has rightly said that “Curriculum… needs change,” the nature of change should bring a university to a fuller expression of its academic mission.
The new curriculum marks not only the end of the Intellectual Journey, but possibly the end of the identity and greater intellectual tradition of this university.
Tyler Grudi is a staff writer for the Bona Venture. His email is
gruditj15@bonaventure.edu
