Goucher College’s commencement speaker is to be Matthew Modine. The actor doesn’t own a television or car and “to save moviegoers from dorky Cold War cinema,” in the dorky words of a Baltimore Sun columnist, rejected the Tom Cruise role in “Top Gun.”

In 2007, Goucher graduates were treated to “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau. The year before it was Harry Shearer, voice of “The Simpsons” cartoon characters Ned Flanders and Montgomery Burns. Graduation 2005 featured U.S. Rep. (now Speaker) Nancy Pelosi. And that about covers the “global perspectives” touted by Goucher’s president, Sanford Ungar.

Four years before hearing Shearer’s innuendoes about Bush administration Iraq and Hurricane Katrina skullduggery, while moving my daughter into her freshman dormitory, we discovered a flier. It advised that the resident assistant:

“Has a first aid kit in her room; can give you condoms (free and anonymous); has extensive knowledge and experience with tattoos, piercings, and other body modifications; a passion for elephants, punk rock, movies, and leopard print.” She also “can help you with academic papers, creative writing, and journalism articles.” One got the impression — strengthened by pajamalike undergraduate clothing — that inmates ran the asylum.

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Not so. Under slogans of diversity and cross-cultural awareness, the administration controlled decision-making authority. Goucher’s cultural laxity and language and science classroom rigor left Ungar — formerly of Voice of America — free to flog “border-crossing” while raising tuition annually and installing cable television in all dorm rooms. “Major?” “Biochemistry.” “Minor?” “MTV.”

There is something to be said for the expensive Goucher experience: Small classes and not-infrequent personal attention on the part of faculty, emphasis on writing in many courses, opportunity for self-discovery in numerous extracurriculars and a sense of community.

Yet one could graduate without a general course in U.S. or English history, or in U.S. or English literature, let alone all four. At the end of 115 years in which the world and America’s place in it have been and are shaped by the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, including Korea and Vietnam, and now the struggle against Islamic imperialism — Goucher offers no military history. Students can pass four years without encountering Lincoln’s observation that the United States is mankind’s “last, best hope” — except perhaps as an object of deconstructionist derision.

Goucher does not delve into what it was about the founding Anglo-Protestant civic culture (Horrors!) that gave rise to the world’s largest, most prosperous, longest-running experiment in freedom — including our plethora of private, liberal arts colleges.

During my daughter Jordana’s four years, the only conservative speaker of note was then-Gov. Robert Ehrlich — and a few faculty members groused he had no business on academia’s hallowed grounds.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also appeared, but she had long since cast off her early Reaganite ballast.

After a speaker trained by the terrorist fellow-traveling International Solidarity Movement delivered an anti-Israel rant, Jordana, then a senior, e-mailed President Ungar. Where was Goucher’s much-invoked “diversity,” she asked. Where was its “equal time” response?

President Ungar didn’t answer Jordana’s March 16 e-mail. He didn’t answer an April 3 follow-up. Seven weeks later, when he handed Jordana her diploma, he recognized the would-be troublemaker (another benefit of a small school). “I owe you a response,” he acknowledged. Twenty-two months later, she’s still waiting.

Goucher’s approach seems to violate its motto. The dictum is “prove all things, hold fast to that which is good,” from Thessalonians I, Chapter V, Verse 21. Goucher’s coat of arms features the New Testament open to this citation.

Yet, at neither the honors ceremony nor graduation in 2006 did any speaker mention a standard by which all things could be tested, or the definition of good, which obviously, if tacitly, included a sense of the sacred. God did squeeze into 2006’s baccalaureate program via Psalm 8. It includes King David’s existential question, “What are human beings that Thou art mindful of them, and mortals that Thou dost care for them?” However, the printed program lower cased “thou,” transforming the Lord of the Psalms into a big RA in the sky via the familiar second person, “you.”

Therein lies the weakness of a thoroughly secular liberal arts education. Without a Judeo-Christian ethical anchor, without a foundation in Anglo-American history and literature, without intellectual diversity tested by discriminating debate, it becomes a scholastic flea market. Its articulate graduates are not likely to recognize or sustain the forces that nurtured American society, including institutions such was those granting their own degrees.

Eric Rozenman is a Washington, D.C.-based news media analyst. Reach him at erozenman@cox.net.