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In Defense of the Liberal Arts
by Jon Meacham, Newsweek, January 9, 2010
At Jon Meacham’s alma mater, the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, many students and faculty members wear academic gowns to class, and the campus is steeped in the traditions of the school’s long history. When Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, recently listened to the university’s new vice chancellor make an acceptance speech, he was struck, he writes, with “the difficulty of making the case for something so expensive and so seemingly archaic.” But the liberal arts are critical to the creation of wealth, jobs, and a just nation, and “cutting the liberal arts is a false economy.” Meacham suggests that the creative, entrepreneurial thinking that comes from a liberal education may help write the next chapter of the nation’s economic life. He highlights public honors colleges at institutions like the Universities of Michigan and Georgia as examples of more cost-effective and democratized liberal education, as well as online courses that are accessible to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Some students’ lives will be shaped by the education at a school like Sewanee, as his was, Meacham writes, while others will be influenced by one of these newer providers of liberal learning. But the unifying theme, he argues, is straightforward. “If the country is to prosper—economically, culturally, morally—we have to trust in the institutions, old and new, that nurture creativity, and then hope for the best.”
The full text of the opinion piece is available online.
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