The relativism that’s fashionable in high schools is rarely, if ever, seriously challenged in the classroom, either because no one (not even the professors) wants to give offense or because we don’t recognize that our play in ideas might eventually have consequences. It’s fun to challenge convention and scandalize the bourgeois, to play devil’s advocate (so to speak), and we can’t imagine that our students would ever really take us seriously.

This isn’t the way it was meant to be. Once upon a time, liberal arts colleges acted in loco parentis, actually caring for and about their students in ways of which their parents could approve. What’s more, the whole notion of liberal education supported that undertaking, for it was understood to prepare students for a life befitting a free human being, a life of responsible self-government, which, it went without saying, was a life of virtuous self-restraint. Moral philosophy wasn’t just an elective, but rather a requirement whose spirit pervaded the entire institution. Education was, for the most part, meant also to be edifying.