Making the Case for Liberal Education

The Civic Renewal of Liberal Education

Theodore E. Long, president of Elizabethtown College
Convocation Address, August 24 2000

Liberal education is at a crossroads. Once the centerpiece of the American system of higher education, the liberal arts and sciences are widely perceived to be on the decline. The classical "liberal arts college" is almost an extinct species, there being only 5.5% of U.S. colleges which grant more than half their degrees in the liberal arts and sciences (Basinger, in The Chronicle). Over the last half century, programs of professional training have experienced dramatic growth, and the composition of faculties and curricula has shifted away from the humanities and general education. These same trends and concerns are manifest here at Elizabethtown, especially in this era of change, and many wonder if we can really call ourselves a liberal arts college any more.

I believe we can renew liberal education for the twenty-first century, but not in the way that many might expect —or advocate. For the trends outlined above mark a true sea change in American higher education, reflecting its success and expansion. Calls to protect the liberal arts from the encroachment of professional study or to guarantee their historic place in the academy run against the tide of history and cannot invigorate liberal education for the challenges of this new era. Instead, liberal education must be extended beyond the academy's classical liberal arts to embrace a larger civic purpose that can inspire, renew, and integrate all aspects of collegiate study, including professional training. Rebuilding liberal education on a new touchstone of civic purpose will make it the heart and soul of our enterprise once more, rejuvenating faculty work and student learning in the process.

The Focus of Liberal Education

There is no one philosophy or model of liberal education. As Bruce Kimball points out, "the tradition of liberal education is not uniform and continuous but full of variety, discontinuity and innovation. It has been and is a conflicted tradition" (Kimball, in Farnham and Yarmolinsky, p.29). The closest thing to a common reference point in liberal education is not its educational content but its relation to the world around us. For whatever reason, we have located liberal education primarily in reference to the academy, not society at large. Within the academy, moreover, liberal education has identified itself with a particular set of disciplines set apart from professional study - first the humanities and then the natural and social sciences. These disciplines emphasized "knowledge for its own sake" and defined educational programs on their own terms, eventually making the preparation for graduate study an ideal of liberal education (Robert Orrill, in Kimball). "While many in the academy regard liberal education as the opposite of academic specialization," Frank Wong has noted, "in recent decades, liberal education has tended to become a separate academic specialization in itself." (Wong, p. 68)

Analogous to the dynamics of religious groups, liberal and professional disciplines have increasingly seen themselves in tension, even opposition. Having once successfully defined what it meant to be educated, the liberal arts have now been sequestered as a mere preliminary to education in the major, particularly the programs of professional study. The historic virtues of liberal education have thus been set at odds with professional training over students' allegiance. Ironically, the professions were once grounded in liberal studies, but as they were democratized, they were also "secularized" by accommodating themselves to the values of the marketplace. The liberal arts thus often see the professional disciplines as having abandoned the true faith for worldly success. Indeed, as Bill Sullivan has pointed out, the professions have recently neglected their historic sense of service to the client, ethical practice, and public responsibility in favor of technical expertise for personal gain.

Those of us, like myself, who argued that professional study was grounded in the principles of liberal education were once right, but the estrangement of liberal and professional studies has made that a hollow truth. As a result, we are now faced with the choice of defending a faith whose time has past or finding a way to renew liberal study by embracing worldly success. I for one believe that the future of liberal education rests on embracing the world rather than denying it, finding a new way to invigorate all of education with the values of liberal study.

A Civic Frame for Liberal Education

Liberal education cannot simply embrace any value or point of view but must align itself with a worldly interest consistent with the best of the liberal spirit. It is a happy coincidence that a deep public concern about higher education today intersects with one of the historical emphases of the liberal arts and professions: the formation of citizens for the public good. As Bart Giamatti -- a Renaissance scholar, Yale President and Commissioner of baseball -- has argued: "the purpose of education . . . is to lead us to some sense of citizenship, to some shared assumptions about individual freedoms and institutional needs, to some sense of the full claims of self as they are to be shared with others." (1988, p.213)

Martha Nussbaum has observed that this conception resonates with Seneca's historic view of education as the production of free citizens of the world, citizens "whose primary loyalty is to human beings the world over" (p. 9) and who are free because they "can call their minds their own" (p. 293), not because they are "freeborn" and not because they have gained wealth or fame. That classical conception of liberal education finds its contemporary counterpart in the public's expressed desire for colleges and universities to prepare students for citizenship. More than simply an ideological wish for graduates of a certain mindset, these sentiments represent a deep concern for the welfare of the community, a desire that graduates leave college with the capacity to address the vexing questions of the day, that they emerge prepared to contribute to the common good, however that is defined.

Grounding liberal education in that civic ideal establishes a large and worthy purpose for our work. It is large by virtue of its generality, which extends beyond the boundaries of the traditional liberal arts to embrace professional studies as well. All disciplines can find a home for their expertise in the house of civic purpose, where all the diverse intellectual strands of the academy can make common purpose. The civic ideal is worthy by virtue of its significance for human life, which offers teaching and scholarship the possibility of building civilization, not just inducting the young or extending our disciplines. There is no higher calling for the life of the mind than to contribute to a common good, to employ reason in the service of others with whom we share a community.

On a more practical level, embracing a civic purpose will rejuvenate liberal education and re-establish its public credibility and attractiveness. Reorienting the life of the mind from the timeless to the more timely, from "knowledge for its own sake" to knowledge accountable to human purpose, will introduce new topics and perspective to liberal study. It will sharpen our questions and answers and give our scholarship and teaching greater accessibility and applicability. As a result, our work should become more lively and engaging, for us and for others. Within the academy, I believe, it will enable us to expand and draw new attention to liberal study. Outside the academy, the public will gain greater confidence in our work, which will give it more notable and lasting influence in human life. In so doing liberal education will regain its prominence in American higher education, in our college, and in the lives of all those it encounters.

The hazards of relocating the purpose of liberal education outside the academy are easy to identify, but they need not subvert good education if we take up civic purpose in a disciplined and sensitive way. Against the possibility that civic purpose could become narrow and parochial, we must insist on a broad and inclusive understanding. Against the tendency to reduce scholarship and teaching to applied problem solving alone, we must ensure that knowledge has a deep base in what we understand as pure research and theory. Against the danger that our work will become more ideological than intellectual, we must insist with Max Weber that making our work relevant to human values should not make it captive to any political correctness. All that noted, we cannot let our fear of losing control of the life of the mind prevent us from enriching both liberal study and our society by re-engaging liberal education with the world—and the people —we ultimately serve.

Implications and Opportunities for Renewal

What could such a renewal mean for us? Where does it call us, and where could it lead? Above all, I believe, truly embracing a civic purpose for liberal education would lead us toward greater connection, even integration, of the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs. We would understand liberal education as encompassing the entire curriculum, for the preparation of citizens and questions of the common good are just as compelling in the study of marketing as they are in philosophy. Liberal education, therefore, would not end at the boundaries of the core curriculum but extend into the curricula and courses of our professional training programs. And just so, liberal arts programs would find themselves called to address issues of vocation, both professional and civic, to help students understand how to apply and utilize their knowledge. It is just such mutual re-integration that Sullivan's idea of "civic professionalism" calls forth.

Programmatically, there are many ideals and approaches for nurturing citizens, but this college has long been committed to certain values, most notably peacemaking and service, which could give additional coherence to our curriculum. And as we contemplate new major programs, we should think first of those which are built around significant civic issues, such as the environment, in which liberal study and professional preparation find natural alliance. Guided by civic purpose, liberal education also bears some responsibility to address the great issues of the age. For example, no citizen can fail to understand global realities and their implication for human life. No citizen can turn away from the reality of diversity and the dilemmas it brings to our life together. Liberal education is one of the greatest resource human communities have for addressing such issues, and we should take the lead by drawing them to the heart of our educational program.

The civic renewal of liberal education will also have implications for teaching and scholarship. In the best sense, it will call us back towards the pragmatic tradition in which knowledge is more attuned to its publics, emerges from real-world issues, and is ultimately tested in practice (Kimball, 1995). More concretely, it means we will listen to more voices, that experiential learning will grow alongside academic study, and that the classroom will be extended into the co-curriculum, the community, and the world. As learning becomes richer, teaching and scholarship will become more fluid and adaptable, reaching beyond the boundaries of specialization to utilize the broader intellectual resources necessary to understand the multidimensional realities under study.

What does this conception of liberal education mean for students, most especially for the class of 2004? First, think of your whole educational experience as part of a liberal education preparing you for life as a citizen of this world. Do not believe that you have "gotten liberal study out of the way" when you finish your "areas of understanding" or that all you need to get from your business major is technical expertise. Second, practice integration and application by seeking the connection points among disciplines, by asking about the deeper significance of therapeutic interventions or video production, and by pressing for the implications of history and literature for life and work. Third, extend your education from the classroom "into the streets." Without abandoning the intellectual nourishment of the classroom, seek out other venues for learning and practice - study abroad, do original research, take a leadership position, give something back in service. Finally, listen to the multiple voices and perspectives you find here. Take seriously the differences you encounter, and learn how to address them even as you design a coherent viewpoint of your own. Treat your college experience itself as an education in citizenship that you will carry with you for a lifetime.

For Civic Renewal

The civic renewal of liberal education will bring new vitality to Elizabethtown and higher education, and it will return liberal learning to the center of our enterprise, even as it transforms it. Most of all, I believe, it will make clear once more that liberal education is a public good which has a pivotal role in building a better world. Recentering liberal education around civic purpose will make clear why we teach and what learning is for in a way that can mobilize energy across the disciplines and gain public support across the political and social spectrum. As we begin our second century and the world's new millenium, higher education and our society face dramatic changes. If we are to meet the challenges of change and capitalize on the opportunities it presents, we must renew our historic project of liberal education by infusing it with civic purpose - for the academy, for our students, and for our world.

References
Basinger, Julianne, "A New Way of Classifying Colleges Elates Some and Perturbs Others," pp. 31-42 in The Chronicle of Higher Education: XLVI, Number 49, August 11, 2000.

Giamatti, A. Bartlett, A Free and Ordered Space: New York, Norton, 1988.

Kimball, Bruce A., "A Historical Perspective," pp. 11-35 in Farnham, Nicholas H. and Adam Yarmolinsky, Eds, Rethinking Liberal Education: New York, Oxford, 1996.

Kimball, Bruce A., The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition: New York, College Board, 1995.

Nussbaum, Martha C., Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Liberal Education: Cambridge, Harvard, 1997.

Orrill, Robert, "An End to Mourning: Liberal Education in Contemporary America," pp ix - xx in Kimball, Bruce A., The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition: New York, College Board, 1995.

Sullivan, William M., Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America: New York, HarperBusiness, 1995.

Wong, Frank F., "The Search for American Liberal Education, pp. 63-90 in Farnham, Nicholas H. and Adam Yarmolinsky, Eds, Rethinking Liberal Education: New York, Oxford, 1996.

The Presidents' Campaign for the Advancement of Liberal Learning is supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. For more information contact Bethany Zecher Sutton at 202-387-3760.