RE: “‘Let Them Be Born in Wonder’”

Josh Herring’s article “‘Let Them Be Born in Wonder’” (8 September 2025) brought to my mind my own path to a liberal-arts education. Perhaps my experience can encourage today’s high-school principals and guidance counselors to be alert for those who seek that path, even when they don’t know that it is there.

When I graduated from South High School in Salt Lake City in 1960, I was the only graduate in a class of about 900 to matriculate at a liberal-arts college. I did so with very little idea of what the “liberal arts” were, or higher education, for that matter.

I was the first member of my family to attend college; my father had not even graduated from high school. To the extent that I can trace the events that led me to Columbia College, they included Steven Frohmeyer, my eighth-grade algebra teacher, who pleaded with us math students to take his Latin class next year, “so I won’t have to teach algebra again.” I did my part, but it was not enough. Mr. Frohmeyer also wrote letters to the editor, which taught me that teachers had an existence outside the walls of the school and that I could participate in that conversation. I still do.

In tenth grade I took another year of Latin from Mrs. Marshall, who hailed from Baltimore, and then first- and third-year French from Madame Du Bois (ironically, she complained about Americans having “mouths of wood” when it came to speaking her language). There was also Mr. Remington, my AP history teacher, who introduced me to The Reporter magazine.

At about this time, I read in a magazine (perhaps The Reporter) that Columbia University taught more languages than any other university in the country, and since I then intended to learn them all, I made up my mind to go there.

The point of these wanderings through my past is to show that I was not a typical high-school student and that, frankly, my guidance counselor was not equipped to deal with students like me. Following his advice to “just go up to the U, like everybody else” would have been—well, not exactly disastrous, I suppose, but profoundly disappointing to me. I craved the excitement of new and different cultures, the search for beauty and meaning that I was unlikely to get at any Utah college.

In every student body there are students like that. Not many, perhaps, but a few. They may be a little dreamier than the average, a little more prone to unpredictable behavior, a little bit inclined to show off bits of esoteric knowledge they have gleaned from (these days) the internet, or from the Frohmeyers, Marshalls, Remingtons and Du Boises of today. There are always one or two students who are looking today for the same thing I was then: an education focused on learning for its own sake, on the Great Conversation, on the Great Books and ideas.

This kind of education is not a dead end. Future lawyers, businessmen and women, doctors, writers and teachers, even politicians, need the kind of broad-based education that a traditional liberal-arts curriculum provides. What is a dead end, it turns out, is what my guidance counselor was steering me towards. The kind of training for jobs that are already becoming obsolete under the AI onslaught.

This morning’s news brings a notice that the University of Utah is cutting 22 programs in its College of Humanities. The university can no longer afford to provide this kind of niche education. What was once the raison d’être of the university has now been almost completely supplanted by training, leaving those one or two students who are like I was with nowhere to go.

My hope is that any high-school principals or guidance counselors who happen to have read this far will have already recognized from among their students a few of the kind I am talking about. I know that my principal, Mr. Backman, would have immediately applied that description to me, back in 1960. Let me ask, as a favor to those students, that they tell such young men and women about John Adams College, as well as other non-traditional small colleges not mentioned in Herring’s article.

-Gordon S. Jones, cofounder, Mount Liberty College, now named John Adams College, in Provo, Utah.