What to do with Philosophy: The Economic Value of the Liberal Arts
By Michael A. Deere, Philosophy Department

Philosophy is a hard sell.  It offers uncertainty, doubt, and ignorance.  Its questions are those that any child can (and usually does) ask, and yet the answers that philosophy provides to such simple questions are fiendishly complex, often abstract, and highly questionable.  Philosophy cannot help you repair cars, bodies, governments, or financial markets.  It lacks the comfort and appeal of more career-focused disciplines, and philosophy will likely not solve the major problems of the day.

“Citizenship in the American and Global Polity”:  Wye Faculty Seminar at the Aspen Institute
By Andrew Darien, History Department

This past summer I had the honor of being one of twenty-five national faculty members elected to participate in the Wye Faculty Seminar at the picturesque estate of the Aspen Institute located on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.  The seminar consisted of a week-long series of facilitated discussions drawing on primary texts from antiquity to the present, both western and global.  For one week we roamed the classic works of literature, philosophy, and history, and debated their meaning from our own disciplinary and political perspectives.  Our focus was on citizenship in the American and global polity, examining texts from Machiavelli to Madison, Socrates to Said, Confucius to King.

A Disadvantaged School of Arts and Sciences
G. Else Wiersma, Sociology Department

To test national salary trends against patterns at Salem State College, I constructed a database consisting of tenure-track faculty hired since 1974. The database includes variables such as starting salaries, departmental affiliation, rank and year hired, academic degree at hire, gender, and other derivative variables. In this article, I limit myself to a ten-year period (1997 to 2007) and an analysis of starting salaries by comparing mean-averages among the Schools of Arts and Sciences, Business, and Human Services.

The Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts
by Perry Glasser, English Department

But when a weak economy makes funding anemic, the liberal arts are deemed an expensive luxury. At campuses where peaceful coexistence was the norm, the conversations become blood sport. Livelihoods are on the line. In academe, gripe sessions are held over vile coffee, letter writing campaigns organized, demonstrations with message-bearing placards are plotted; in the legislature, meetings are held in tattered offices where the coffee is equally evil and every decision is weighed for its net impact on the shrinking budget and the next election. Education needs a Third Camp, a place where competing visions of purpose become one. We require a new, shared vision of the purpose of the liberal arts.

Why it Pays to be a Fox: Rebranding the “L” Word of Higher Education
By Robert E. Brown, Communications Department

The liberal that concerns me is the time-honored and endangered institution: a liberal education. In the era of No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, and the stratospheric and escalating cost of college, a liberal education has been the victim of brand erosion. These days, it isn’t only poets who are nervously asking big questions about the L word. It’s college deans of schools of arts and sciences, university provosts, chairpersons and faculty of departments of English, History and Philosophy. It’s cash-strapped parents of college-bound children.

“Ruined for Life”: Conscience and Convenience in a Liberal Arts Education
By Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

The year following my graduation from a small, liberal arts college in New England in 1995, I served as a full time volunteer with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) in Kansas City, Missouri. I worked as an advocate and psycho-social therapist at a safe home for women and children who had fled domestic violence and I lived in one of the nation’s poorest neighborhoods where crime was high, unemployment was high, and love and community support flowed freely. The motto of this program is “Ruined for Life”.

“To know ourselves and the world”: The Value of the Liberal Arts
Jude V. Nixon, Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

I am convinced that we have that vision, and that perhaps what we need to do is to more clearly articulate it, to transmit those very values to the many students taking our classes whose academic plans and programs are often misdirected because others have made more compelling arguments on the value of their programs. … Essentially, I believe, one gets a job and gets paid for it based not so much on skill sets, on what one can do, but on the value to others and the market place of what one knows and how much of it one knows. One gets paid for ideas, not things.