A liberal arts education
might be viewed as a metaphor for entrepreneurship.
The humanities suggest that the entrepreneur is an artist.
History might see entrepreneurs as the true revolutionaries
of technological, economic, and social change. A liberal
arts education is rich in metaphors that are capable
of capturing the multifaceted life of an entrepreneur.
A course in film or the theatre might suggest that the
entrepreneur is a stage or film director, while a course
in physical education might reveal the entrepreneur
as a coach. . . . Undergraduate entrepreneurship education
should not be viewed as a narrow careerist pursuit,
but as giving new life to the traditions of a liberal
arts education.
—Dennis Ray, “Liberal Arts for Entrepreneurs”
Many campuses are experimenting
with introducing entrepreneurship into their curriculum
in addition to empowering students through campus leadership
programs and civic engagement projects that cast students
and faculty in entrepreneurial roles. Leadership studies,
student programs for responsible civic engagement and
service learning, and entrepreneurship programs provide
a nexus for new initiatives that will enrich both liberal
education and the study and practice of entrepreneurship.
The following assumptions underlie
my analysis. First, entrepreneurship is a legitimate
area of scholarly inquiry and a curricular component
that need not be limited to certain departments or schools
or to colleges of business. Second, the fundamental
elements of a liberal education are essential to the
development of an “entrepreneurial mindset.”
And third, both the study of entrepreneurship and the
goals of liberal education can derive mutual benefit
from curricular and extracurricular initiatives that
seek to link the two enterprises.
The ideal liberally educated student
of the twenty-first century is a lifelong learner who
is open-minded, tolerant, intellectually curious, courageous,
self-actualizing (with the capacity for attaining personal
growth, physical and mental health, and spiritual well-being).
He or she values education for its own sake, the natural
world, the rights of other individuals, the richness
of diverse cultures and peoples, the need for community,
and the common good. As a learner and citizen, the liberally
educated person is actively engaged with the world in
all of its complexity, diversity, and dynamism. Such
an individual is characterized by an attitude of openness
and curiosity, and seeks to make a positive contribution
to the future of humankind. In discussing liberal education
in comparative and historical contexts, Sheldon Rothblatt
observes that one of the traditions of liberal education
has been leadership: “As one of the oldest traditions
of liberal education, preparation for political leadership
dates back to the Greeks and is connected to holism
and character formation” (2003, 28).
Civic Engagement
One of the most powerful developments
in liberal education in recent years has been the emergence
of a renewed commitment to service learning and civic
engagement on campuses across the country (for an overview
of these developments, see Schneider 2000). One of the
most visible examples of this is the organization Campus
Compact (www.compact.org), which currently boasts one
thousand member institutions with a wide and growing
array of programs designed to promote civic engagement.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities
(AAC&U) has produced numerous publications and initiated
several programs designed to help colleges and universities
link liberal education to citizenship and work and encourage
experiential learning and applied research through faculty-student-community
partnerships. In fact, in 2003, Campus Compact and AAC&U
partnered to establish the Center for Liberal Education
and Civic Engagement to help put civic learning at the
heart of students’ academic experience and faculty
work. One of the best examples of this kind of institution
is Portland State University, which is a model of the
engaged, urban university that builds on a general education
foundation in the liberal arts and extends to a plethora
of programs designed to immerse students in their community
in mutually beneficial ways. (For other examples, see
the list of colleges and universities provided in Colby
et al. 2003.)
As more liberal arts colleges and
universities encourage this kind of engagement, students
will become better informed about the many challenges
we face in society and will understand why new ideas,
new techniques and technologies, and new solutions are
called for. When coupled with the empowering liberal
education they are receiving on campus, these off-campus,
cocurricular learning experiences will prepare them
well to take on responsibilities of leadership and to
become the entrepreneurs we need in both our workplaces
and our communities.
Entrepreneurship
According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation (2001), “Today, more than 1,500 colleges
and universities offer some form of entrepreneurship
training. . . . Interest in entrepreneurship education
has spread to non-business disciplines, where students
in engineering, life sciences and liberal arts are interested
in becoming entrepreneurs.” Although liberal arts
is mentioned in the Kauffman documents, the reality
is that relatively few institutions that are committed
to liberal education have participated in this dramatic
trend, outside of business programs and engineering
and the life sciences. If entrepreneurship education
is to realize its full potential, this last group—the
liberal arts—must be drawn into the dialogue.
The burgeoning new field of entrepreneurship education
includes not only business-related entrepreneurship,
but also social entrepreneurship. The more recent concept
of social entrepreneurship resonates particularly well
with the goals of liberal education. Gregory Dees (1998,
5) suggests that social entrepreneurs play the role
of change agents in the social sector by
- adopting a mission to create and sustain social
value (not just private value);
- r ecognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities
to serve that mission;
- engaging in a process of continuous innovation,
adaptation, and learning;
- acting boldly without being limited by resources
currently in hand;
- exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability
to the constituencies served and for the outcomes
created.
Because liberal education is committed to educating
for responsible citizenship, there is a special affinity
between liberal education and social entrepreneurship,
as Bill Drayton demonstrates in his article in this
issue. As former CEO of General Motors Roger Smith concludes
in his article “The Liberal Arts and the Art of
Management,” “The ultimate impact of the
liberal arts on the art of management, then, is a major
contribution to the evolution of an ethical and humanistic
capitalism—a system that stimulates innovation,
fosters excellence, enriches society, and dignifies
work” (Smith 1987).
Creating the Synergies We Need for Innovation
As Dennis Ray has argued, the liberal arts college
or university offers the opportunity for a holistic
educational experience that is well suited to the needs
of the potential entrepreneur, primarily because the
would-be entrepreneur needs to encounter a wide variety
of perspectives, paradigms of inquiry, and ethical norms
and develop the critical thinking and communication
skills normally associated with the “liberally
educated student.” Proponents of liberal education
are equally dedicated to providing students with the
opportunity to become independent, active learners who
are capable of charting their own course over a lifetime
and are engaged in an ongoing process of learning. The
ideal liberal arts education models a process of continuous
adaptation and innovation that is manifest in one’s
personal and professional life. Thus liberal education
really is, as Ray contends, a “metaphor for entrepreneurship.”
When we link leadership, entrepreneurship, and civic
engagement, we recognize that although they are distinct,
they also can be combined to produce powerful results
that are greater than the sum of the parts. We need
a different type of leadership to achieve this. Capra
(2002) sees this as leadership that “consists
in facilitating the emergence of novelty. This means
creating conditions rather than giving directions, and
using the power of authority to empower others. . .
. Being a leader means creating a vision; it means going
where nobody has gone before. It also means enabling
the community as a whole to create something new. Facilitating
emergence means facilitating creativity.”
This is the kind of academic leadership and entrepreneurship
that we need to create new synergies between the discrete
areas we have been discussing. At one level—the
level of the curriculum—there are exciting possibilities
for exploring leadership and entrepreneurship in combination
with civic engagement. Leadership programs for students,
when combined with curricula that focus upon leadership
and entrepreneurship and then coupled with extracurricular
programs that engage students with their communities,
can produce liberally educated social entrepreneurs
who are committed to addressing social problems through
innovative solutions that are empowering and produce
value-added outcomes.
Building Campuses, Cultures, and Curricula
for Innovation
The study of leadership and entrepreneurship and the
“best practice” of civic engagement are
potentially linked in important ways. As Burton Clark
(1998) has shown in his study of five European universities
and as we know from initiatives taken at a number of
American institutions represented in this issue of Peer
Review, there are many opportunities for both profitable
ventures and for “social entrepreneurship”
directed toward solving social problems and meeting
consumer or constituent demand. Efforts to bridge the
liberal arts and the professions, far from threatening
either, can serve to create new, exciting partnerships
and interdisciplinary paths of inquiry and service learning
that will repay the effort for all involved. At the
College of Charleston, we are seeking to promote these
efforts through a Consortium for Liberal Education and
Entrepreneurship with funding from the Kauffman Foundation.
In doing so, we hope to capture what Alan Greenspan,
chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, asserts: “Creative
intellectual energy . . . drives our system forward
. . . . The liberal arts embody more than a means of
increasing technical intellectual efficiency. They encourage
the appreciation of life experiences that reach beyond
material well-being and, indeed, are comparable and
mutually reinforcing” (Greenspan 2003, 53).
Samuel M. Hines Jr. was a co-convener of the
pre-conference symposium, “Working Convergences:
Liberal Education, Creativity, and the Entrepreneurial
Spirit,” at the 2005 annual meeting of the Association
of American Colleges and Universities.
References
Capra, F. 2002. The hidden connections: Integrating
the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of
life into a science of sustainability. New York:
Doubleday.
Clark, B. 1998. Creating entrepreneurial universities:
Organizational pathways of transformation. New
York: IAU Press and Elsevier Science, Ltd.
Colby, A., T. Ehrlich, E. Beaumont, and J. Stephens.
2003. Educating undergraduates for responsible citizenship.
Change 35 (6): 40–48.
Dees, J. G. 1998. The meaning of social entrepreneurship.
www.fuqua.duke.edu/centers/case/documents/dees_SE.pdf
Greenspan, A. 2003. Remarks on the liberal arts. Liberal
Education 89 (3): 52–53.
Hines, S. M. 2003. Leadership studies, civic engagement,
and entrepreneurship: Exploring synergies on the practical
side of liberal education. Paper presented at the 2003
Annual Meeting of the Consortium for Liberal Education
and Entrepreneurship.
Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. 2001.
The growth and advancement of entrepreneurship in higher
education: An environmental scan of college initiatives.
www.entreworld.org/Bookstore/PDFs/Futures21/College_Scan.pdf
Ray, D. 1990. Liberal arts for entrepreneurs. Educational
Theory and Practice, (Winter): 79–93.
Rothblatt, S. 2003. The living arts: Comparative
and historical reflections on liberal education. Washington,
DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Schneider, C. G. 2000. Educational missions and civic
responsibility: toward the engaged academy. In Civic
responsibility and higher education. ed. T. Ehrlich,
Phoenix: American Council on Education/ Oryx Press,
98–123.
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