Higher education is under attack in this country. President Trump ordered the Department of Education to be dismantled on March 20. To totally dissolve the Department of Education, of course, can not happen without the consent of Congress, which created it in the first place. Regardless, a great number of workers have already been dismissed and the Department of Education has been made effectively impotent.
More chillingly, colleges that have been insufficiently effective at squashing protests on campus are now under investigation, alongside individual protesters and student media members. While this is personally alarming for me, as it is likely personally alarming for the staff of college newspapers across the country, it should also be alarming for everyone involved in higher education.
Students are no longer safe to express their political opinions. This is not exaggeration or hyperbole but evident fact, and it is getting worse by the day.
Those who control the finances of colleges and universities are not blameless in this quasi-war on higher education. They have strong armed colleges into going along with government investigators, shifting the danger from the institutions to the students who depend on their schools to protect them. In the name of their own interests, colleges are sacrificing their most important shareholders. They are sacrificing their students.
Enter John Charles Meditz.
On March 17, Mr. Meditz, a Fairfield alum and member of the Board of Trustees, donated $50 million to Fairfield University, raising his total donations to an amount exceeding $75 million. In recognition of this, Fairfield has renamed the College of Arts and Sciences after him.
If it were anyone else, this would be alarming.
Donors, and particularly trustees, have a disproportionate influence on the schools they give money to. The trend has been reported on quite repeatedly in the past year, with Philanthropy Roundtable doing a particularly compelling report on the subject. The possible consequences of this have been made exceptionally clear to every college student in the country over the past few months.
John Charles Meditz is not one of those donors.
“John Meditz is a man of deep integrity and has dedicated his time, talent and treasure to ensure that Fairfield and the College can fulfill its mission,” Dean Greenwald wrote to me, after respectfully but fiercely defending Mr. Meditz in the face of my inquiry.
The quality of Mr. Meditz’s character is apparent through his own words, as well.
“The purpose of education is to broaden one’s mind. You shouldn’t necessarily just leave being one-sided. Education should be multidimensional,” Mr. Meditz said in the announcement video that accompanied the donation. “I do honestly think that the student body does appreciate the Jesuit tradition. They see that their education should be bringing meaning to their life. That they should be, in fact, good citizens, standing up for what’s right as opposed to just accepting things the way they are.”
These are not the words of a man who does not appreciate the sanctity of higher education. Instead, they are the words of a man who truly values the liberal arts, and understands why they need to remain independent and sacred.
With higher education under attack from all sides, it is invaluable to have someone who not only cares about the sanctity of the liberal arts but is also able to fund and defend them. If more investors, like Mr. Meditz, cared more about students than the bottom line, colleges around the country would be safer, more welcoming and more effective educational institutions.
So I am proud to be a part of the John Charles Meditz College of Arts and Sciences, and I can only hope that more schools find a defender with as much dignity and care as Mr. Meditz has.
As Dean Greenwald said, “He truly wants us to soar.”