By Robert E. Brown
Communications Department

Rob Brown

No. Not that L word – the stigmatizing term that has scared many principled people into avoiding being called “liberal,” and rebranding themselves as “progressive.”

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.
As that  cultural icon of twentieth century liberal education, the  poet T.S. Eliot, asked in the exhausted voice of despairing modernity, is it “worthwhile” to have “squeezed the universe into a ball/To roll it toward some overwhelming question.”

But squeeze we must.

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. It’s university presidents like Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, blogging in the December 1, 2008 Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-roth/whats-a-liberal-arts-educ_b_147584.html): “What does liberal learning have to do with the harsh realities that our graduates are going to face after college?”

What, indeed.

Roth answered his own question. ‘The development of the capacities for critical inquiry associated with liberal learning can be enormously practical because they become resources on which to draw for continual learning, for making decisions in one’s life, and for making a difference in the world.”

Full disclosure: While I’ve been a professor of communications for a quarter century, and a corporate communications practitioner and consultant, I’m a product of the liberal arts.  As an undergrad, I majored in Sociology and minored in English. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on a poet.

The net asset value of my “skill set” is the result of a liberal education. Or, in the language of Salem State University, I’m a product of both sides of the flow sheet.

It’s hard to blame students and their parents for dissing a liberal education.  After a generation of anti-liberal politicization, polarization, propaganda and soaring college costs, liberal education has come to sound impractical. But I’ve always found it to be quite pragmatic. Let me explain.

Before I began a quarter century of teaching communications, I made a living as a magazine editor, corporate speech writer, marketing manager and PR agency executive. All these jobs were the direct or indirect result of my liberal education.

The offer to be a magazine editor came from the leader of a poetry-writing group I was attending. After that, it was interest in sociology and philosophy that got me the chance to be a contributing feature writer for a social science magazine.  Most improbably for a poet and journalist, I was subsequently hired to write speeches for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.  What the giant corporation really wanted, I learned, wasn’t a specialist, but someone who had a broad and abiding interest in current events, could write clearly about complex matters, and had enough sense to avoid embarrassing the management.

My job interviews with corporate decision makers were never about business. They were about poetry, politics and baseball.  The reason: Top-level business managers were themselves liberally educated, which made them what used to be called “well-rounded.”  My favorite job interview: I was hired to manage the publications department of a global accounting firm because I was able to recite the 1956 batting statistics of my boyhood hero, Mickey Mantle.  (The interviewer, the head of the marketing department for the Northeast region, was a baseball fanatic. He caved.)

Advantage: Foxes

The liberally educated essayist Isaiah Berlin wrote famously that “the fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.”  Liberally educated students are foxes. And in a world as global, diverse, complex, contingent, chaotic and rapidly changing as ours, the advantage goes to the foxes. Foxes are imaginative, improvisatory. They think on their feet and in their dens.  They play well with others.

In the digital age, when the world comes rushing at us, foxy assets pay off.

When it comes to the skills valued in the career marketplace, none is more prized than critical thinking under pressure, sound judgment and strong communication skills.  These skills of the fox are byproducts of a liberal education.

True, you wouldn’t want to be a fox if you listened to the understandable anxieties of parents calculating the payback time for a $200,000 tuition bill. Sociology? You’ve GOT to be kidding!

Nor would your faith in liberal education be unshaken if you listened long to the rhetoric of politicians and the business community. You might think that you’d be crazy not to major in Hedgehog. Specialize in finance. Or web development. Get that MBA!

Not – as Seinfeld liked to say – that there’s anything wrong with those brainy professions. Many’s the fox who became a brilliant economist, technologist, scientist, surgeon, lawyer, entrepreneur, or out-of-the-box innovator at Google and Twitter.

In reality, the wide world is not nearly so divided as some have made it appear. There’s a bit of the hedgehog in us foxes, and vice-versa. Why should we settle for life in the forbidding world of either-or when we could embrace the capacious world of both-and?  Foxes don’t have to be hedgehogs to do the work of hedgehogs.

It could be the mission of our university’s School of Arts & Sciences to bring to the lofty professions of science, technology and business the traits of the fox: communication skills, critical thinking, and a passion for the emerging world of many splendid things, not just one great thing.

As faculty, administrators, parents and friends, we should make sure that no student shies away from the left side of the flow sheet, the better to grasp the right. For in these revolutionary times, that is the student who will truly be left behind.

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