Thoughts on the last day of school
Higher education is much in the news these days. The New Yorker has an article about Stanford’s relationship with Silicon Valley. Frank Bruni worries about philosophy majors finding jobs, and Charles Morris worries that college is becoming a luxury item. In the latest Commonweal, Denis O’Brien reviews Andrew Delbanco’s latest book. (Delbanco’s book was on my to-read list before I read O’Brien’s review, and the review only made me want to read the book more.)
Part of our problem in talking about “college” is that it has become an umbrella term for a vast array of post-secondary education. A student studying information technology at a land grant Midwestern state university is in college, as is a student studying art history at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Students enrolled in two-year associate degree programs to become physical therapy assistants are in college, as are students enrolled in four-year business degree programs at Catholic universities in the northeast. Colleges are public and private, residential and commuter, sectarian or non-sectarian, for-profit and not-for-profit. I think this diversity is a great asset, and it makes American higher education unique in the world. Yet we should be clear students who attend these various schools are not looking for the same thing in their “college experience.”
Of the four different educational scenarios I’ve just presented, my guess is that the most difficult one to justify is the student who chooses to study art history at a small liberal arts college. Indeed, if your reason for attending college is to get a “good job” afterwards, spending a significant chunk of your college education studying the Parthenon frieze or the competition for the doors of the Florentine baptistry or the shift from abstract expressionism to pop might seem like a waste of time and money. Given the high cost of college, people need good reasons for choosing a broad liberal arts education. (And here, when I say “broad liberal arts education,” I mean studying English literature or classics or biology or mathematics or history, subjects that are not direct training for a career.)
The best justification I’ve read for such a choice comes from Mark William Roche’s book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Roche is a former dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, and he is currently a professor of German and concurrent professor of philosophy there. The book won the 2011 Frederick W. Ness book award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU). The AACU gives the award annually to “the book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education.” (I should note that Roche is my teacher, mentor, and friend. I read a draft of the book before it was published, and I was his assistant for his sophomore seminar “Faith, Doubt, and Reason.” He is one of the finest teachers I’ve ever encountered.)
Roche makes three overlapping arguments for choosing to study the liberal arts in college. First, he argues for “its intrinsic value, or the distinction of learning for its own sake”; second, “the cultivation of those intellectual virtues that are requisite for success beyond the academy”; and third, “character formation and the development of a sense of vocation” (10). For readers interested in answering the question “what kind of job can you get with a philosophy major?” Roche’s second argument offers a compelling answer. If readers are interested in answering the question “why would you study philosophy?” Roche’s first argument provides a cogent defense of learning for the sake of learning. And everyone should be much more interested in the deep connection between what you learn and what kind of person you can become because of that learning. Here, Roche’s third argument is particularly important. (Delbanco has made similar arguments; Anthony Kronman, in his fine book Education’s End, also stresses this part of education.)
As befits a book that makes three arguments for the value of a liberal arts education, Roche’s argument blends the philosophical, the factual, and the personal. Roche marshals arguments from Plato and the Bible, from Kant and Hegel, from Max Weber and Felix Frankfurter to paint his picture of the intrinsic value of a liberal arts curriculum. He cites numerous studies showing that the sorts of skills that employers desire – excellence in oral and written communication, intellectual curiosity, ability to analyze complex problems – are exactly the sorts of virtues that a liberal arts curriculum cultivates. And as an alumnus of Williams College, the University of Tubingen, and Princeton University, and a teacher and scholar at the Ohio State University and the University of Notre Dame, Roche draws on his own experience finding his vocation through the study of liberal arts and helping his students find theirs.
There is far too much heat and not enough light in our discussions of higher education in America. There are real and pressing questions about college costs and affordability, about what students learn and how they spend their time in college, and about the right balance between faculty teaching and research. Yet if, in the name of efficiency and cost cutting, we lose sight of the intrinsic value of learning and how learning forms the character of students, we end up cheating our students of an opportunity to encounter goodness and beauty and truth and shape their lives accordingly. We also cheat them out of moments of grace.
Perhaps it would be useful to discard the old three-piece model for thinking about “education”. Much “liberal arts” teaching could be done in the vast expanse of schooling years now dedicated to keeping children off the streets until the job market is ready for them. That time is, it seems to me, now largely wasted.
Scott –
Excellent point about calling all those sorts of schools “colleges”. It’s too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but maybe there could be an effort to classify the sorts of things accomplished in each sort of school or in the different sorts of programs within the schools. Let a Bachelor of Arts remain the name of what students get at the end of a liberal education by different names. For some “licence” would be appropriate”, for others “certification”. If necessary invent other words for Bachelors of Science (hey, there’s a good one). “Community college” might be a good name for schools that offered some general education beyoung high school, but not as much or as high level as colleges would.
I’ve always been a fan of Robert Hutchens, even when I was in college. He was the great books promoted at the University of Chicago. He recognized that different kids have different interests and potentials, but he thought all college students should require a two year core course of the great books of the West. Yes, they were practically all by dead white males, but not quite all (see St. Augustine). After two years a student would go into a major. He also thought that the smartest kids might be admitted early to college.
One problem is only now being addressed, I think. It’s the fact that in the sciences some traditional “majors” actually need three years. At the end, such degrees should have a different name showing that the students did something more difficult that other students. At my old school, for instance, a pharmacy degree now is a master’s. It used to be a bachelor’s, but necessarilly took three years, and I think that was quite justified.
To show the bad effects of such apparently trivial matters, about many ago the University Dean of my school tried to develop a better core curriculum and needed faculty input. The Dean of the Pharmacy school was downright vicious in his opposition, and in the end managed to scuttle a new core. It wasn’t because he disapproved of a better core, but he wasn’t about to allow a reduction in pharmacy semester hours for the sake of the core. And, in a way, who could blame him. But history has shown the Dean right — pharmacy really was a master’s level degree all along.
Some of these problems are really semantic ones, or, rather, unwillingness to change the now meaningless names.
Thanks for your reflections, Ann. Of course, I think everyone can benefit from encountering the major thinkers and ideas who have shaped our world. And that encounter need not happen when one is between eighteen and twenty-two. As I suggested, though, (and I think you agree) my fear is that we are losing sight of educating a person for life instead of educating a person for a career. To be clear, I have nothing at all against educating a person for a career, but there is more to life and more to learn than that.
A problem that has developed with offering “a general education” is that we no longer live in a society that can or, it seems, even wants to, agree on what a general education ought to consist of. (Probably very few dead white males, Ann.) On the other side of the seesaw, it’s easy to develop curricula for the job market. So it’s understandable that jobs education is nourished and general education is left floating.
The idea that university should be a place where young adults just beginning to think for themselves should be exposed to an intense concentration of cultural knowledge seems very old fashioned. College graduation is still a commencement, but a commencement of a professional life filled with never-ending job education.
The notion that there is such a thing as a body of cultural knowledge worth studying for everyone is questionable, I think. A consensus on that would be very hard to come by, and, making the task practically impossible, the target would be constantly shifting as the media and the internet continually change the nature of people’s values and priorities.
The old ideas about educating the young are woefully out of date, but inertia and a perverted sense of democracy will probably prevent any concerted effort to update them. Maybe all will work out well enough in the end. Markets will see to it that new job-training models are made available as needed and general education will flourish or wither as the political consensus allows.
I would be curious to know what someone in HR thinks of the value of a more traditional liberal arts degree.
In the nonprofits that I headed, I always liked to see resumes from folks with a degree in English, Philosophy, History, Classics etc. My organizations were small (20 or less) so I didn’t have a huge volume of hirings, but I needed capable generalists who could absorb and analyze information and who could write and speak well. A degree in majors like English and History made it more likely that applicants would have those needed skills.
Re: David Smith’s comment: “A problem that has developed with offering “a general education” is that we no longer live in a society that can or, it seems, even wants to, agree on what a general education ought to consist of . . . The notion that there is such a thing as a body of cultural knowledge worth studying for everyone is questionable . . . A consensus on that would be very hard to come by, and, making the task practically impossible…”
A consensus would indeed be hard to come by, but impossible? In a public, secular university, perhaps, but a Catholic college or university has more leeway, with a rich tradition to draw on, and “old fashioned” in this context is not a demerit. David, would you argue that authors such as Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Newman, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, Simone Weil, Annie Dillard, Marilyn Robinson, Garcia-Marquez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Zora Neale Hurston (dead and living white and non-white males and females) to mention a few options, would not constitute a solid liberal arts education? And such works encompass more that “Catholic” texts, but embody catholicity. It is probably better to keep the focus on a “liberal arts” education, as Scott does, rather than a “general education” understood as the traditional “Great Books.”
Many of these issues came up at our term-end Gen Ed Division meeting yesterday. Someone (not me) had sent around a video made by KSU students for an anthro class. The responses among faculty was wide ranging and, at times, very visceral.
Some faculty saw implied criticisms of liberal arts requirements; others saw the need for a change in the way liberal arts curricula is offered. What I noted most (as one of the three oldest faculty members in the room) was the way Boomers have rejected the whole Pandora’s Box of “relevance” which they demanded in their own college years.
At any rate, it was THE liveliest division meeting I ever attended.
Here’s the video for anyone who is interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
Actually, all of these wonderful observations about te value of a liberal education are hardly unique to Mark William Roche. I hope his book generously cites to John Henry Cardinal Newman, who has made all of these points in his work The Idea of a University a century and a half ago.
It is obvious to me that anyone who is a product of a liberal education as Newman understood it is better prepared than the specialist to do any job to which that person puts his or her hand. It is equally obvious to me that students of a liberal education are best able to exercise their responsibilities as citizens.
Most importantly, however, an education should be the means by which we learn to be fully ourselves — and to be fully ourselves does not mean being an accountant, a lawyer, a scientist, or even a teacher. I like to say that as much as I find my work rewarding, it is not who I am. That is why I almost intentionally avoid reading or interacting with anything off the job that reminds me of my work.
What kinds of choices would we make about how to educate ourselves if we did not feel that our choices were compelled by the market’s invisible hand? Can our society make room for those kinds of choices? I think it should — by ensuring that jobs are available for anyone who wants to work, no matter his or her chosen field and even if the local, state, or federal government must provide the resources (i.e., money) to provide some of the jobs that the market will not.
My entire career was as a Consulting Actuary to major organizations around the world designing their employee benefit plans. The education to become a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries was entirely received after my college years and was equivalent to a PhD in applied mathematics. It was highly specialized, the total opposite of a liberal arts education. Yet the primary reason for my career success was my Fordham College liberal arts education. The philosophy, literature, and history courses developed a broader perspective on life that provided a significant advantage against my competitors, whose science degrees left them devoid of appropriately analyzing the actual real world situations to which the mathematics was to be applied. One strong vote here for a liberal arts curriculum.
Christopher K. –
When I attended a secular university parts of Newman’s “Idea of a University” were required reading in the freshman English course. I particularly remember his point that a real university requires that all sides of important disputed questions be taught fairly. Would that this had been true in the seminaries pre-Vatican II. In those days the Index reigned supreme. It’s no wonder that so many bishops are intellectually naive.
For all I know, seminarians are still being given a half-education, i.e., they get Rome’s side of important questions and Rome’s arguments against all else, except that I’m sure that now some non-Catholic theologians do get at least some appreciation.