A Tale of Two Universities
After attending Ohio State University for two years, Patrick Seaworth came to "the realization that [his] education could go no further as a student in Columbus." For his third year of higher education, he made the transfer to The King’s College this fall.
“It is a place nestled away deep in New York’s Financial District, just steps from Wall Street’s iconic landmarks. A place where an individual’s worth is determined by an adherence to excellence and not an adherence to a particular political belief. A place where students are encouraged to examine their own views, without being handed an acceptable view for them to follow. A place where students are encouraged to follow their passions in humble servitude to their fellow man, and God if they so choose.”
These are the words of Patrick Seaworth, a student at The King’s College for his first semester, explaining the virtue of this new institution that he encounters in light of the old one that he left.
After attending Ohio State University for two years, Patrick Seaworth came to “the realization that [his] education could go no further as a student in Columbus.” For his third year of higher education, he made the transfer to The King’s College this fall. Two months into his first semester at King’s, Patrick writes that there could not be a starker difference between the two educations, “one consumed by the worst of our time, the other by the best”:
“At The King’s College, we begin each day with the notion that each of our passions is a purpose given to each of us (by God if we so believe, as many of us do), which when combined with an education and our individual talents is preparation, which allows us to be the manner of citizen Ohio State’s motto proclaims – and at one time must have been the standard – Education for Citizenship.”
“It is the difference between an education where faith is not persecuted and the free market of ideas is cherished and one where it is not. There could not possibly be a starker contrast within our modern higher education system than between what an education is meant to be and what an education consumed by propaganda becomes.”
Seaworth writes that students at The King’s College examine each day “the simple notion of what is right and just,” and that, here, worth is determined by act rather than by adherence to “liberalism’s hyperbolic absurdities”:
“Each day, we are asked only one thing at King’s, we are asked to believe in American Exceptionalism, in the humblest sense possible, to have care for our fellow man and the disadvantaged, and never to lose sight of the fact that what we do can never bring fulfillment if it is done out of greed or ill will.”
Nathan Harden of National Review is not wrong in saying “the lesson here is – know what you’re buying.” The King’s College does not merely offer “superior academics” or an alternative to mainstream liberal academia, but, from the heart of New York City, King’s stands for something bigger: leadership based on principle.
In the words of Emily Schatz ‘11, now a writer for the New Jersey Family Policy Council, “more important than being great is that [we] love great things.” The King’s College educates leaders in ideas that will change the world.