Historian Bret G. Devereaux asks, “Is a university a university without the liberal arts?” Here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home we have been asking this question for nearly a decade and a half.
Here is Devereaux at The New York Times:
The steady disinvestment in the liberal arts risks turning America’s universities into vocational schools narrowly focused on professional training. Increasingly, they have robust programs in subjects like business, nursing and computer science but less and less funding for and focus on departments of history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and theology.
America’s higher education system was founded on the liberal arts and the widespread understanding that mass access to art, culture, language and science was essential if America was to thrive. But a bipartisan coalition of politicians and university administrators is now hard at work attacking it — and its essential role in public life — by slashing funding, cutting back on tenure protections, ending faculty governance and imposing narrow ideological limits on what can and can’t be taught.
Students do not select majors and courses in a vacuum. Their choices are downstream of a cultural and political discourse that actively discourages engagement with the humanities. For decades — and particularly since the 2008 recession — politicians in both parties have mounted a strident campaign against government funding for the liberal arts. They express a growing disdain for any courses not explicitly tailored to the job market and outright contempt for the role the liberal-arts-focused university has played in American society.
Conservative assaults on higher education and the liberal arts often grab headlines, but cutting education funding — or selectively investing only in vocationally inclined departments — is a bipartisan disease. Scott Walker’s assault on higher education in Wisconsin when he was governor formed the bedrock of many later conservative attacks. His work severely undermined a state university system that was once globally admired. Mr. Walker reportedly attempted to cut phrases like “the search for truth” and “public service” — as well as a call to improve “the human condition” — from the University of Wisconsin’s official mission statement. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attack on academic freedom in Florida, which has captivated the national press, alongside his preference for vocational classes, is from the same playbook.
Read the entire piece here.
I agree with these criticisms of vocationally-centric “education” but perhaps what students are asking for is an alternative to the traditional liberal arts siloed structures. At present, one might major in “history” and spend a great deal of time in history courses taught by history specialists who reside and publish solely within a history department. Mixing this major with, say, accounting or even other liberal arts can be a challenge due to the web of required courses and prerequisites. For those who do manage to navigate the rocks of dual majors, it often takes them five years to graduate. An alternative is to integrate liberal arts courses within broad departments of liberal arts and to offer a menu of courses tailored to various levels of commitment and interest. A “liberal arts studies” course integrating history, philosophy, and English might be offered to those focused mostly on vocational studies. A “liberal arts minor” with more intensive and targeted courses might be for those with more interest and a traditional major for those with deep interests in specific liberal studies. To do this, the cultural and structural basis of liberal arts colleges needs to change… departments must be merged, new focus on teaching integrated courses must develop, and faculty need to understand that the academic planet has shifted on its axis and they need to radically change their approaches. Adapt or die.