A Year-End Message from President Kyle Washut: “America deserves better. She deserves colleges like Wyoming Catholic!”

Dear Friends of Wyoming Catholic College,

I’m sure that many of you have seen the appalling Congressional hearings that took place earlier this month, addressing the problem of antisemitism and the abuse that has been taking place at colleges and universities around the country. And I’m sure that many of you were disappointed by the three presidents’ stubborn refusal to condemn the protests taking place on their campuses, and by their decision to defend the “culture of inclusion” that has led us to this frightening reality. I, too, was disappointed, but I was also unsurprised. For years, this “Emperor has no clothes” moment has been coming for the bloated behemoths of American higher education. But now that it has arrived, it’s made things even clearer than I could have imagined.

Higher education in America is broken. Propped up by billions of taxpayer and donor dollars, it has cut itself off from a sincere pursuit of the truth, telling us instead that Academic Freedom and matters of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trump such “quaint” ideas as morality and justice and the common good. On every side, we see “legacy” educational institutions who have abandoned their once-great histories for the sake of the latest social fads. Even worse, we see them rejecting the very notions of truth upon which they were built, embracing instead a world of relativism and amorality that leads inevitably to the embarrassment of the recent Congressional hearings.

But here’s the reality they’re ignoring: Freedom depends on the truth, and on moral goodness.

No college or university can succeed in its most important aim—the education of our young people—without the guidance of those who have come before and without a genuine desire to embrace the True, Good, and Beautiful. Yetthat’s exactly where we find ourselves today.

I’ll be blunt. If you were discouraged or disgusted by the way higher educational institutions have acted over the last few months—if you see now that “the emperor truly has no clothes” and refuse to fund the insanity a moment longer—I ask you to consider making a gift to Wyoming Catholic College, here at year-end. Help reform the broken system of American higher education by supporting institutions that will remind us all of what true education can and must be.

America and her young men and women deserve better. They deserve schools like Wyoming Catholic College!

In a recent panel conversation I joined at The Heritage Foundation, “For the Promotion of Learning and Virtue: Moral Education in the University,” my fellow panelist, Dr. Jay Greene, reminded us of an important and encouraging fact. Several centuries ago, Americans were dissatisfied with the state of higher education, and they decided to do something about it. The result? The creation of new colleges and universities, explicitly founded to address and correct the failings of the existing ones. These foundings led, in turn, to the reform of the entire educational system.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing here at Wyoming Catholic.

We were founded in response to the failures of higher education in America, though even we did not envision those failures “coming home to roost” so quickly. Recognizing the profound distortion that reliance on federal money can bring to the picture of higher education, we rejected those funds. Identifying the challenges of an increasingly technocratic world, we asked our students to fast from their phones while here in Lander. Watching as the world pulled farther and farther back from the reality and the human interaction that lies at the root of all true learning, we immersed our students in the outdoors, in the Great Books, and in a community of prayer and friendship that hones their moral and intellectual gifts more deeply.

Most importantly of all, we refused to embrace the shallow, self-destructive disdain for tradition and truth that permeates so many of our college and university campuses these days—a disdain that leads directly to the destruction we’ve seen worked on and in the lives of so many unmoored students, professors, and administrators over the past few months.

We’re rebels in the world of higher education! We won’t cut ourselves off from the richness, beauty, and sincerity that once characterized true education in America, even as we step away back from the spigot of DEI-sanctioned funding that has destroyed so much of that richness and beauty.

It’s a clear and compelling vision, but a demanding one. Yet I’m optimistic, because what’s another encouraging thing that Dr. Greene reminded us? This is not a money problem. “We have the money, so this is not a financial problem. It’s a matter of will.” Stop funding bad actors, he says, and fund places like Wyoming Catholic College instead. That’s how educational renewal and reform came about in the 1800s, and that’s how it can happen today!

Again, I say, America and her young men and women deserve better. They deserve schools like Wyoming Catholic. And they deserve supporters like you, who have turned to us in response to the profound failure of the higher educational complex that dominates the American landscape.

And so, as this year draws to a close, I search for champions—for benefactors who are unwilling to prop up these failed institutions of higher learning a moment longer, and who are eager for the hope that places like Wyoming Catholic College provide for the future. Join us!

 

Professor Kyle Washut
President, Wyoming Catholic College
kwashut@wyomingcatholic.edu

P.S. Make a gift online at www.wyomingcatholic.edu/give with a credit or debit card up to 11:59pm on December 31st and have it count for this tax year!