Turning Away From the Liberal Arts
Continuing the previous discussion on the liberal arts. I began with this pessimistic claim that the liberal arts might be removed from the modern university even if they continue to show their educational value in a high-tech era.
But why might the liberal arts might be eliminated even if they remain one of the best options for teaching people how to think? Ross Douthat’s interview a few weeks ago with Jennifer Frey (“A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.”) had a few answers.
Frey made a name for herself a few years ago as as a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa, a private school where she started a prominent liberal arts, Great Books-style intensive track for students of all majors. By her telling, the program was popular–even oversubscribed–and included large numbers of engineers, business majors, and various pre-professional types. These are the students whose paths are taken to be incompatible with liberal study, who are held up as examples of the safe and smart route to take through higher education instead of the liberal arts.
Frey tells a story of a program that managed to sidestep the traditional trade-offs between practicality, future earning power, and curricular silos at the university. When you give students like this a chance to provide for their future as wage earners and think on a higher plane, it seems that there is a population that wants to stretch itself and do both. Nonetheless, it wasn’t enough to save the program, which was dissolved by the University of Tulsa administration after a few years. Frey reflects in her interview with Douthat:
…I would say that we can learn a few things. One is that student interest and demand simply does not matter. And it’s important to see that. There’s this standard story that students can’t do this and they don’t want to do it. I’m here to tell you that I think that story is false. And I think we should talk about the fact that it can be the case that students want to do this even though it’s hard and very challenging, and it’s totally voluntary. They don’t have to do this. And it can still be disinvested.
“Disinvested,” that is, by university leaders. Frey made the same point in a New York Times opinion piece the previous year:
An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.
The reasons for cuts in the humanities and liberal arts are overdetermined. In addition to all the practical objections,1 there is a growing percentage of the institutional leadership class that rejects this type of learning in spirit. That is, they reject its ethical mission: the dignity of the individual, freedom of thought, the power of the searching, conscientious mind to find the truth. An educational movement that seeks to shape people to think well, with originality and unpredictable results, would obviously not always work to the benefit of the authorities. Compliant, uncreative, scared people are quite useful to the working of many institutions. The actions of this type of person are easier to plan around; that person is easier to manage.
We might be more successful at making the case for original thinking if it had predictable boundaries, if it were confined to solving technical challenges and whatever other people think is required for “innovation” in the sense of invention, for other consumers and for industry. But open-ended thinking, with no immediate application, except an improvement in spirit and capacity for the students themselves? Thinking that isn’t motivated to by the immediate benefit to a collective body, that might even be powered by intrinsic enjoyment? One of the most attractive things about the liberal arts to students is that this is an education for them. Not an education to provide workers for industry that says it needs more numbers in aggregate today (no guarantees about tomorrow). And not an educational factory where most of the students in the room don’t believe in what they are doing, where they show up because someone else says they ought to.
I’ve been inside of both high-concept humanistic programs and vocational, skills-based teaching settings, and while I have seen many events that surprised me (good and bad) in both, I’ve also found that the signs that the institution doesn’t care about teaching–doesn’t care about its students–are often the same. They include environments and (large) scales where people get lost, teachers who are just putting in the time and who don’t care (don’t even know) if they reach anyone, testing and evaluation that isn’t taken seriously and doesn’t actually measure anything. And from what I have seen, it often works out that the safe and “correct” route through the educational system, the one most often sanctioned by authorities with power over it, is filled with these warning signs. Put differently, it’s amazing how poor your education could be if you actually follow the standard advice about how to get a good education.
Like I wrote before, maybe the most under-discussed part of any successful education is being recognized by your teachers. People learn so much more, and are equipped to take their learning into their own hands for the rest of their lives, if at one time, even briefly, someone thought they were worthy of being taught.
At its best, the liberal arts is an educational program that sees everyone in the room and takes them seriously. It’s for the people in the room. I have seen the reaction from students who are not used to this kind of classroom. They are surprised and delighted at how they are treated, that the classrom speaks to them, and asks them to speak back. The exercise of the mind is a prize that teacher and student model in the back and forth. We are pursuing a type of freedom: you are free because you are allowed to think what you want, and tell others what you actually think and feel. Not what you are supposed to, or what other people say is right. Compared to other educational methods, the liberal arts might be more likely to create educated people who care about truth for its own sake. The consequence is that those people also feel an unresolvable discomfort when they are made to live within contradiction or an obvious lie. This can easily make for confrontation with authority. I have to concede that a liberal arts education doesn’t necessarily make your life easier, even if it might be better.
On powerful objection at the administrative level is the projection that liberal arts graduates will have lower earnings on average, and be less likely to donate to the school they attended. ↩︎