By Jude V. Nixon
Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

The essays appearing in this issue of ASpect, different and distinct as they are, coalesce nicely around the value of the humanities and a liberal arts education. There has been no shortage of essays and books in the last year coming to the defense of the humanities and the liberal arts, including Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities and Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System.[1] What is driving this veritable flood remains unclear, for the liberal arts have always been under attack and under stress; and there is no indication that the present threat to its viability is any more cataclysmic than in the past. Writing in the 1 December 2008 issue of the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-roth/whats-a-liberal-arts-educ_b_147584.html), Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, touts not the research done at large universities but the quality of our undergraduate studies in the liberal arts, which, as he rightly claims, “continues to inspire admiration around the globe. . . . Liberal arts in the USA provide not only a pipeline of talented and prepared students to the great graduate schools, but also a model for life-long learning that other countries are beginning to emulate.” Roth is right.

As I pointed out in a previous issue of ASpect, the University of Warsaw began an experiment by introducing something brand new, a college of liberal arts, Collegium Artes Liberales, into its mostly scientific, technological, and discipline-specific curriculum. The university invited some of us academics from the U.S. to present papers on the general education curriculum as it relates to the larger discipline-specific requirements, what in Salem State jargon we call the “left and right side of the flow sheet.” U. Warsaw wants to create a curriculum in line with that in American universities (and, by the way, out of step with UK and Continental universities), believing, and rightly so, that the American educational system is foundational to our democracy (a point at the core of both Nussbaum’s argument, where she insists that “Education creates autonomy, preparing citizens for political participation”) and to the nation’s cultural, technological, and economic strength. Clearly, they felt, this type of education is what made America the envy of all nations and contributed to its openness, practicality, robust middle class, and especially its model of racial, gender, and ethnic inclusion. Needless to say that I find it ironic that the educational model (largely technical and professional) on the ascendency in the U.S. is the very one now under examination and in some cases being dismantled in UK and European educational institutions, which they find inadequate to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century that require, as Roth puts it, “the capacity for critical inquiry” in the liberal arts “on which to draw for continual learning, for making decisions in one’s life, and for making a difference in the world.” I quote even more fully from Roth: “A liberal education remains a resource years after graduation because it helps us to address problems and potential in our lives with passion, commitment and a sense of possibility. A liberal education teaches freedom by example, through the experience of free research, thinking and expression.”

These values are precisely what the folks at the U. of Warsaw recognized and why they went through the enormous expense of flying us over and hosting us. Interestingly, not one of the professors invited came from any of the professional schools (I suspect too that they did not want someone from business given the state of our economy; and they tied our entrepreneurial talents as a nation not to our professional degrees but to the creativity emerging from our liberal arts education). Four of us faculty members from Boston College, Brown, the University of Wisconsin, and Salem State who were invited to speak at the conference were surprised not only by the seismic educational shift in policy and practice at U. Warsaw and other Eastern-block universities (chiefly in Russian and Belarus) but also by how energized and energetic even happy their graduate students were in seeking degrees in the liberal arts at the very time that our American universities are experiencing fewer graduate students and diminishing available jobs upon graduation, whereas their graduates are finding jobs and are in great demand. So while the number of our liberal arts degrees is shrinking (a statistic David Brooks points to in his 7 June 2010 New York Times op-ed “History for Dollars”), citing the “nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation,” and a trend that is “bound to accelerate”), theirs is experiencing tremendous growth. We contemplated writing a joint article on this brave new world, which, regrettably, we have not undertaken but perhaps still should.

The subject of the liberal arts and its value is not a partisan issue, not something proclaimed only by so called “liberals,” if one is to judge from the conservative New York Times and PBS News commentator David Brooks (whom, by the way, I like, even though our politics are different). Brooks’ column begins with the rather jaw-dropping rhetorical concession: “When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge [and I take issue with the use of the word “indulge,” for a degree in English, history, or biology is no less an indulgence than a degree in pharmacology] in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.” Still, despite my urge to applaud Brooks’ essay, he reduces the study of the liberal arts to what most of us would see as important but none the less trivial stuff—improving the ability to read and write, discerning meaning in a paragraph, writing a clear and concise memo, drawing on the emotions, developing a wealth of analogies, and perhaps worse yet the maudlin “rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities”—all the while failing to appreciate the more salient values of a liberal arts education. I resent this maudlin approach to the liberal arts because there are examples enough of the myopia of the humanities and liberal arts. (Ask me sometime about the composition of the contending parties in the Governor Eyre controversy/Jamaican Insurrection/the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the myopia of those from the humanities coming to Eyre’s defense— Drew Darien in this issue of ASpect is a lot more enlightened than they). Unaware of it, Brooks does comes close to the real value of a liberal arts education—the development of problematic thinking and reasoning, asking profound questions for which there are no clear or certain answers, and, even more importantly, the ability to frame hypotheses, how to live with the provisional and contingent, what Michael Deere (who will be well advised to read Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, given its challenge to Deere’s teasingly for-profit liberal education) in his article in this issue of ASpect describes as “not knowing the answers to the questions that we pose”—when Brooks wonders out loud: “The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way?” Michael Roth states it more compellingly: “One learns that successful inquiry is rigorous and innovative. . . . Learning through the liberal arts energizes capacities for innovation and for judgment. Those who can imagine [and the imagination is key] how best to reconfigure existing resources and project future results will be shapers of our economy and culture. . . . Inquiry is never finished. Educators in the liberal arts aim to develop habits of mind that thrive on ambiguity,” not unlike the ambiguity only someone trained in the liberal arts like Drew Darien would find when he discovers in his piece  that the philosophical, almost sacred retreat space that is the Aspen Institute was a former plantation built by African-American slaves, and African-Americans were the very people serving visiting scholars at the Aspen Institute during their retreat—that not much has changed.

The liberal arts prepares students for a world of work and for the engagement into the complexities of that work, and here I agree with Michael Roth’s Chronicle piece: “A pragmatic, reflexive approach to liberal arts (including the sciences) would be open to political relevance as well as to making a contribution to the public good. A pragmatic, reflexive approach would allow for profit as well as for self-examination—for practical, measurable success at specific tasks as well as for self-consciousness and empathy. A pragmatic, reflexive approach to education would enable students to discover what they love to do, to get better at it, and then to be able to explain why what they love to do might be of interest to somebody else.”  (And I don’t believe at all that this is eating your proverbial cake and still having it). John Stuart Mill, in his “Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews” (1867), to me, puts it best in his description of the fundamental goals of a university education. A university, says Mill, is

…not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining them livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers or physicians or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings. It is very right that there should be public facilities for the study of professions. It is well that there should be Schools of Law and of Medicine, and it would be well if there were schools of engineering and the industrial arts. The countries which have such institutions are greatly the better for them; and there is something to be said for having them in the same localities and under the same general superintendence as the establishments devoted to education properly so called. But these things are no part of what every generation owes to the next, as that on which its civilisation and worth will principally depend. . . . Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or merchants or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians. What professional men should carry away with them from a university is not professional knowledge, but that which should direct the use of their professional knowledge and bring the light of general culture to illuminate the technicalities of a special pursuit. Men may be competent lawyers without general education, but it depends on general education to make them philosophic lawyers—who demand, and are capable of apprehending, principles, instead of merely cramming their memory with details. And so of all other useful pursuits, mechanical included. Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses. (4-5)

What such an education does, Mill concludes, is “give the pupil a comprehensive and connected view of the things which he has already learnt separately,” a “philosophic study of the methods of science, the modes in which the human intellect proceeds from the known to the unknown. We must be taught to generalise our conception of the resources which the human mind possesses for the exploration of nature; to understand how man discovers the real facts of the world and by what tests he can judge whether he has really found them.” (5-6). Mill perhaps could have added that a liberal arts education is about discomforting one’s comfortable positions, what Liz Duclos-Orsello describes in this issue of ASpect as “what I knew, what I thought I knew, and what I thought about what I thought I knew”; that is “not good enough to find one answer and accept it; it [is] necessary to take contradictory evidence and deal with it.” It is about defamiliarization, what Wordsworth describes as removing the veil of familiarity as a pre-requisite for sight and in-sight. The essays in this issue of ASpect show that we in the liberal arts have a very clear sense of the value, economic and otherwise, of the education we provide our students, that we do not, contrary to what Perry Glasser writes in his article for ASpect, “require a new, shared vision of the purpose of the liberal arts.” 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. And here Perry is absolutely right, cynical as it might sound, for when it comes down to it, “The liberal arts have no intrinsic value. Neither does anything else.” 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. I entertain, fondly perhaps, the false conception that Apple and Steve Jobs have been successful not because of the technology they make available to us but because that technology grew out of Jobs’s flirtation with mystical (Buddhist) belief systems in which communication is something much more complex than technology; that our desire to communicate is something instinctual, natural, communal (just look at our obsession with social networking—I tweet, I friend, I LinkedIn), even spiritual.

In closing, I took a very quick survey (because I always felt it would be interesting) to see the educational background of members of President Obama’s Cabinet, his inner circle, the men and women who set policies for our nation. Here is a wee sample (the emphasis is mine) chosen at random from the White House’s web site: the President Chief of Staff is Rahm Emanuel, who “Before being elected to Congress . . . worked at the Chicago investment bank Wasserstein Perella. He was a core member of the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1998, starting as the national finance director for the 1992 campaign and eventually becoming Senior Adviser to the President for Policy and Strategy. . . . Emanuel graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1981 and received a Master’s Degree in Speech and Communication from Northwestern University in 1985.” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/staff/rahm-emanuel)

Senior Advisor, David Axelrod: “Since 1988, Axelrod has been Senior Partner at the consulting firm AKP&D Message and Media, based in Chicago. In that capacity, he managed media strategy and communications for more than 150 local, state, and national campaigns, with a focus on progressive candidates and causes. Before entering politics in 1984, Axelrod spent eight years as a reporter for The Chicago Tribune, where he covered national, state, and local politics. In 1981, he became the youngest political writer and columnist in the paper’s history. He also served as the Tribune‘s City Hall bureau chief.” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/staff/david-axelrod)  Axelrod holds a BA in Political Science (Chicago).

Senior Advisor, Peter Rouse: “Rouse received a B.A. from Colby College, an M.A. from the London School of Economics, and an M.P.A. from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/staff/pete-rouse )

And here are the educational backgrounds of members of the President’s Executive Branch, his Secretaries: State, Hillary Clinton, BA, Political Science (Wellesley); Energy, Stephen Chu, BA, Mathematics, BS, Physics (Rochester), Ph. D, Physics (Berkeley); Commerce, Gary Locke: BA, Political Science (Yale); Labor, Hilda Solis: BA, Political Science (Cal State, Pomona), MPA (USC); Defense, Robert Gates: BA, History (William and Mary), MA, History (Indiana), Ph. D, Russian and Soviet History (Georgetown); EPA, Lisa P. Jackson: BS, Chemical Engineering (Tulane), MS, Chemical Engineering (Princeton); Housing, Shaun Donovan: BA and MA, Public Administration and Architecture (Harvard). Somewhat interesting is the fact that Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, holds a degree not in education but a BA in Sociology (Harvard), with a senior thesis entitled The values, aspirations and opportunities of the urban underclass.

And how about some of our industrial magnates? Steve Jobs (a Reed College dropout with a passion for calligraphy); Warren Buffet, BS, Economics (Nebraska), MS, Economics (Columbia); Bill Gates (a Harvard dropout); the Donald, BA, Economics (Penn); and how about one outlier, a former industrial magnate herself with HP, and candidate for governor of California, Carly Fiorina, BA, Philosophy and Medieval History (Stanford)? This liberal arts background holds true for most of our prominent political leaders as well as our industrial magnates, the vast majority of them holding degrees in what Michael Deere would call ‘thinking fields,’ but thinking as a key pre-requisite to doing. From this list the lesson is rather simple: If one is to find a successful career in life, one is left with only two options: become a college dropout or get a degree in the liberal arts.

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[1] I have not yet had the chance to read either work, so what I cite is a review essay, “Good and Risky: the Promise of a Liberal Education,” from 11 July 2010 in the Chronicle of Higher Education by the ubiquitous Michael Roth.

This article is part of ASpect’s September 2010 issue on Liberal Arts.

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