The Liberal Arts as a Bulwark of Business Education

By William G. Durden, from The Chronicle of Higher Education

In his editorial, Dickinson College President William G. Durden notes a perceived split in American higher education between the interests of industry and education. This split exists despite the fact that many look to higher education to set future corporate on a straighter path. He says he has encountered many liberal-arts education alumni who are “embarrassed that they hold jobs in the business sector.”

Administrators and faculty members, Durden says, should “embrace with pride their graduates who pursue careers in business and finance and to incorporate, both philosophically and structurally, business into the intellectual core of the liberal arts curriculum.” He feels institutions that don't consider business one of the “pure” liberal arts are more closely aligned with the old-world education tradition of elitism, not in line with American ideals of higher education borne during the American Revolution.

The crux of his argument is based on the ideas of social critic and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush. Rush offered a new, “scrappy” nation a vision of an “ultimately practical vision of the liberal arts.” The colonial father and friend to Thomas Jefferson wished for students to study living languages such as German and Spanish instead of the dead Latin and Greek. A premium, he believed, is to be placed on “usefulness,” and showed a disdain for England's higher education system, which prided itself on being ornamental and elitist, decidedly reserved for the wealthy and privileged. Whether one balks or not at the notion of burying the classics for good, Durden says that Rush's legacy was a blueprint for a uniquely American form of higher education—“designed to prepare and commit college graduates to the useful responsibilities of building a democracy—through work in commerce and government as well as in cultural and spiritual institutions.”

“It is time for the leadership of undergraduate liberal-arts institutions to move beyond the arguments for pursuing liberal arts exclusively on the basis of ‘intrinsic worth' and to embrace instead an imperative derived from the historic compact among the liberal arts, business, and democracy,” says Durden.

To read the AAC&U report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, which argues for a new integrative approach to liberal education that brings together analytic, practical, ethical, and engaged goals for college learning, see www.greaterexpectations.org.

The articles featured in AAC&U Perspectives do not necessarily represent the views of AAC&U staff, its board of directors, or its membership.