The Liberal Arts and Social Responsibility

John Hallwas

            This is graduation weekend [May 15-16, 2010]  for Western Illinois University. Some 2,400 students have completed their degree programs, either in Macomb or at the Quad Cities campus, and most will take part in one of the several commencement ceremonies. The biggest contingent, some 1,900 undergraduates, will receive degrees today in more than fifty major fields and then head into the challenging job market or go directly on to graduate school.

            While their specialized study in this or that field is important, so they can compete for a job or be eligible for graduate school, it is also well to remember that that most graduates today will switch careers several times, which makes their specialized occupational training largely irrelevant, except to help them get started in some direction.

            What society needs to ponder, for that reason and others, is the continual decline in liberal arts education. In 1900, for example, more than seventy percent of American college students attended liberal arts institutions, devoted to rigorous general education programs, while today fewer than five percent of our students do. And in virtually all of our universities, there is enormous pressure to emphasize courses in major fields and de-emphasize, or trivialize, the general education requirements. As scholar Stanley Aronowitz has pointed out,

            “The crisis in American higher education consists not only in its budget difficulties . . . but in the new demand that it become a multi-layered, mass technological training institute.” 

          Moreover, recent surveys show that most college-bound high school students feel that the goal of higher education is just to get necessary training in order to secure a job. Simply put, today’s students tend to be career-oriented, as well as impatient for material rewards, and they place a premium on acquiring specific skills (in accounting, law enforcement, chemical analysis, etc.) that will credential them for a particular occupation.

           Those students are simply reflecting our culture at large---a culture that often sees liberal arts education as an expensive extravagance or a waste of time, a diversion from the “real world” of jobs, money, status, and power. No wonder many of them dread their college or university’s general education courses and don’t really engage themselves with those subjects. Hence, they diminish the complex transaction of self-growth that is the essence of higher education.

          As Associate Provost Beverly Kahn of Pace University said several years ago, “The challenge we face is to assure that our students have a real liberal arts experience, and become truly ‘educated,’ even when they are simply focused on careers.”

          She is exactly right, for here in America we believe---or have believed until recently---that higher education should cultivate the individual for contributing to a democratic culture. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum points out in a fine book on the liberal arts called “Cultivating Humanity” (1997), “Unlike all other nations, we have [traditionally] asked higher education to contribute a general preparation for citizenship, not just specialized preparation for a career. . . .”

           By “citizenship,” she means finding common values and purposes, or “drawing citizens toward one another by complex mutual understanding,”  in an increasingly pluralistic society. And that crucial effort calls for people with a background in history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and other fields that comprise the traditional liberal arts, or general education, curriculum.

            Moreover, the need for such a background has increased during recent generations. In the modern world---characterized by lingering prejudice, violent social conflict, selfish politics, rampant materialism, impersonal relationships, and a deteriorating environment---a liberal arts education must include critical reflection on the implications of participating in a global society. Our military, economic, and social ventures into other countries must be as ethically well-grounded and culturally sensitive as our handling of issues within the U.S., but that is commonly not the case. And if the decline of the liberal arts continues, we will surely lack the human resources to comprehend our enormous international challenges.

            What we need to understand is that the fate of liberal arts education is inseparable from the fate of multi-cultural America and, for that matter, the fate of the world. Teachers, students, parents, and others who believe in America’s deepest values and in our nation’s role as a global leader---a model and inspiration for social progress and cultural understanding---must encourage and support our traditional commitment to an effective liberal arts education. That’s the indispensable foundation for national and worldwide social responsibility.  

In our diverse and rapidly changing era, graduates who can see no further than the goals and procedures of their specialization, and no deeper than the provincialism of their own time and place, are not likely to be committed or successful collaborators for the common good.