The
Liberal Arts as Guideposts in the 21st Century
By
Nannerl O. Keohane
The
very broad, capacious form of education that we call the liberal arts
is rooted in a specific curriculum in classical and medieval times.
But it would be wrong to assume that because it has such ancient
roots, this kind of education is outdated, stale, fusty, or
irrelevant. In fact, quite the contrary. A liberal-arts education,
which Louis Menand defined in The
Marketplace of Ideas as
"a background mentality, a way of thinking, a kind of
intellectual DNA that informs work in every specialized area of
inquiry," lends itself particularly well to contemporary
high-tech methods of imparting knowledge.
We
all wrestle with the challenges of educating students who are used to
multitasking, doing their homework while listening to music and
texting on their iPhones. For such students, the Web-based facilities
of exciting liberal-arts courses are particularly salient. What would
Aristotle or Erasmus or Robert Maynard Hutchins not have given for a
technique that allows one to tour the world's greatest museums,
looking closely at the details of countless masterpieces; explore the
ruins of ancient castles and pyramids and forums; join archaeological
digs at your desk, turning objects around to see all sides of them;
visualize problems in geometry or astronomy or mathematics in several
dimensions and work out their solutions.
An
excellent example of the power of multimedia coupled with the liberal
arts is "Imaginary Journeys," a general-education course
sometimes taught at Harvard University by Stephen Greenblatt. The
course is described as being "about global mobility, encounter,
and exchange at the time that Harvard College was founded in 1636.
Using the interactive resources of computer technology, we follow
imaginary voyages of three ships that leave England in 1633. Sites
include London's Globe Theatre, Benin, Barbados, Brazil, Mexico."
With this kind of course in mind, it seems that the liberal arts
could almost have been designed for sophisticated online learning, so
far from being stale or fusty are these ways of knowing.
This
kind of education has become more and more appealing to students and
teachers at universities around the world. Donald Markwell, the
warden of Oxford's Rhodes House, recently gave a series of lectures
in Canada entitled "The Need for Breadth." He referred to a
"surge of interest" in liberal education in "many
other countries." He cites a major address in London by Yale's
Richard Levin in which Levin noted that "Asian leaders are
increasingly attracted to the American model of undergraduate
curriculum," specifically because of the two years of breadth
and depth in different disciplines provided before a student chooses
an area of concentration or embarks on professional training. Levin
described liberal-arts honors programs at Peking University, South
Korea's Yonsei University, and the National University of Singapore;
he also referred to liberal-arts curricula at Fudan University,
Nanjing University, and the University of Hong Kong.
Yet,
as we know, the trends in the United States are in the opposite
direction, and this is not just a recent problem. Menand cites
evidence that in the United States, "the proportion of
undergraduate degrees awarded annually in the liberal arts and
sciences has been declining for a hundred years, apart from a brief
rise between 1955 and 1970, which was a period of rapidly increasing
enrollments and national economic growth." Thus, paradoxically,
as a liberal-arts education becomes more appealing to leaders and
families in Asia and elsewhere in the world, it is losing ground in
our own country.
At
least three factors are at work in this decline: a) the creation of
increasingly specialized disciplines, and the rewards for faculty
members for advancing knowledge in those areas; b) the economic
premium that is thought to reside in a highly technical form of
preparation for careers; and c) a growing focus on graduate education
from the early 20th century to the present day. These developments
have clearly not been beneficial for American undergraduate
education.
"Liberal
education in crisis" is a tiresomely familiar theme, and
countless commissions, reports, and study groups have attempted to
address it. I am under no illusions that I have the magic key to
resolve a problem that has stumped so many brilliant educators. But
these are not just theoretical quandaries, they are the issues we
confront almost every day: How do we defend liberal education against
the skeptics—parents, potential students, the media, the
marketplace, even some trustees and students?
The
first, most practical defense is that the liberal arts (and sciences)
are the best possible preparation for success in the learned
professions—law, medicine, teaching—as well as in the less
traditionally learned but increasingly arcane professions of
business, finance, and high-tech innovation. So my first defense of
liberal learning is what you are taught and the way you learn it: the
materials a doctor or financial analyst or physicist or humanist
needs to know, but taught in a liberally construed fashion, so that
you look at the subject from many different dimensions and
incorporate the material into your own thinking in ways that will be
much more likely to stay with you, and help you later on.
This
way of learning has several distinct advantages: It's insurance
against obsolescence; in any rapidly changing field (and every field
is changing rapidly these days), if you only focus on learning
specific materials that are pertinent in 2012, rather than learning
about them in a broader context, you will soon find that your
training will have become valueless. Most important, with a liberal
education you will have learned how to learn, so that you will be
able to do research to answer questions in your field that will come
up years from now, questions that nobody could even have envisioned
in 2012, much less taught you how to answer.
The
second, slightly less utilitarian defense of a liberal-arts education
is that it hones the mind, teaching focus, critical thinking, and the
ability to express oneself clearly both in writing and
speaking—skills that are of great value no matter what profession
you may choose. It's not just that you are taught specific materials
in a liberally designed context, but more generally, the way your
mind is shaped, the habits of thought that you develop.
These
skills were well described by a former dean of the Harvard Law
School, Erwin Griswold, cited in a recent speech by the current dean,
Martha Minow. Griswold was discussing an ideal vision of the law
school, but his arguments fit a liberal education wherever it is
provided: "You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as
for arts or habits; for the art of expression, for the art of
entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the art of
assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual position, for the
habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of
indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of
regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what
is possible in a given time; for taste, for discrimination, for
mental courage, and mental soberness."
My
third argument is that a liberal-arts education is the best education
for citizenship in a democracy like ours. In her book, Not
for Profit,
Martha Nussbaum points out that from the early years of our republic
educators and leaders have "connected the liberal arts to the
preparation of informed, independent, and sympathetic ... citizens."
Nussbaum argues that democracies need "complete citizens who can
think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the
significance of another person's sufferings and achievements."
Among the skills a liberal-arts education fosters, she notes, are the
ability "to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not
just that of one's local group," and "to see one's own
nation, in turn, as part of a complicated world order." At a
time when democracy is struggling to be born in countries around the
world, and countries that have long enjoyed democracy are struggling
to sustain it against pressures of multiple varieties, this may be
the best of all the arguments for a liberal-arts education.
My
fourth argument I borrow from Michel de Montaigne, who thought of his
own mind as a kind of tower library to which he could retreat even
when he was far from home, filled with quotations from wise people
and experimental thoughts and jokes and anecdotes, where he could
keep company with himself. In his essay "Of Solitude," he
suggested that we all have such back rooms in our minds. The most
valuable and attractive people we know are those who have rich and
fascinating intellectual furniture in those spaces rather than a void
between their ears.
Virginia
Woolf used a different spatial image to make a similar point in her
book Three
Guineas,
when she talked about the importance of cultivating taste and the
knowledge of the arts and literature and music. She argues that
people who are so caught up in their professions or business that
they never have time to listen to music or look at pictures lose the
sense of sight, the sense of sound, the sense of proportion. And she
concludes: "What then remains of a human being who has lost
sight, and sound, and a sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a
cave." So my fourth argument for a liberal-arts education is
that it allows you to furnish the back room of your mind, preparing
you for both society and solitude.
My
final argument is that the liberal arts admit you to a community of
scholars, both professional and amateur, spanning the ages. Here I
would quote one of my predecessors at Wellesley, Alice Freeman (later
Alice Freeman Palmer). When she presided over Wellesley in the last
part of the 19th century, it was quite unusual for girls to go to
college (as indeed it still is today in some parts of the world). In
a speech she gave to answer the repeated question she got from girls
and their families, "Why Go to College?" she said: "We
go to college to know, assured that knowledge is sweet and powerful,
that a good education emancipates the mind and makes us citizens of
the world." The sweet and powerful knowledge imparted by a
liberal-arts education is specifically designed to fulfill this
promise.
But
how can college presidents today best go about making the case for
the liberal arts? First and most obvious, they should use the bully
pulpit of the college presidency deliberately and effectively—at
convocations, commencements, groundbreakings for new buildings, in
speeches to the local Rotary Club or the state 4-H club convention,
and addresses to alumni clubs. This is a truly precious opportunity
that few other leaders have, to address the community in situations
where there is likely to be respectful attention to their message, at
least for a while! They should use the opportunity with zest!
The
second way is by using their fund-raising skills and obligations to
raise money for exciting programs like Greenblatt's "Imaginary
Journeys." They can make this case effectively to foundations
and generous alumni who remember their own liberal-arts education
fondly, and thus enhance the resources available for this purpose.
Presidents
can demonstrate their support of the liberal arts in how they honor
faculty members. With the teaching awards and other distinctions
their colleges offer, they should single out for praise and support
those who have been most effective in advancing the liberal-arts
mission. And then they can ensure that these awards and recognitions
are appropriately highlighted in college publications and in messages
to parents and prospective students.
And
perhaps the most effective way presidents can use their leadership to
offer support is to speak from a liberal-arts perspective in their
own discourse, both formal and informal, by citing examples of fine
literature, drawing on instances from history, referring to the arts,
and describing learning in the sciences in liberal terms. Rhetoric
was one of the original artes
liberales,
and it can still be one of the most transformative.
Taking
my own advice about larding language with liberal learning, I will
conclude with a poem by Imam Al-Shafi'i, which I discovered in a
brochure on a recent visit to the Georgetown University School of
Foreign Service, in Doha, Qatar:
According
to the measure of hardship are heights achieved,
And
he who seeks loftiness must keep vigil by night;
As
for he who wants heights without toil,
He
wastes his life seeking the impossible—
So
seek nobility now, then sleep once more (finally),
He
who seeks pearls must dive into the sea.
As
this poem reminds us, a liberal-arts education is not always easy; it
involves paying close attention, taking risks, exploring uncharted
territory, diving into the sea. But despite these challenges, the
deep rewards of a liberal education are surely worth our best efforts
on its behalf.
Nannerl
O. Keohane, a former president of Wellesley College and Duke
University, is a visiting professor in the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs and the Center for Human Values at
Princeton University. This essay was adapted from a speech she
gave this year at the Council of Independent Colleges' Presidents
Institute.
John Freed, Ph.D
freed@brandman.edu
Associate Professor of Humanities/Liberal Studies
Brandman University
a member of the Chapman University System
