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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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Conference on The Future of Liberal Education October
15-16, 2005 |
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Liberal arts colleges are among the oldest institutions of higher education in the U.S., rooted in traditions much older than that. Throughout their history their mission and form have changed in response to intellectual currents and cultural shifts. We asked three former or current ACM college presidents to reflect on these developments, and what they might tell us for the future of the liberal arts college. Here are the comments from Richard, Warch, former president of Lawrence University. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this morning's panel and this weekend's conference and appreciate the invitation to make a brief comeback for the occasion. President Phifer and I are sorry that Brian Rosenberg is not able to be with us, though as Jim noted, we hope his absence is not a metaphor for the future of the liberal arts college. When I learned that President Rosenberg was also to be on the panel, however, I was tempted to see myself in terms provided by Dickens, his favorite author, cast in this instance as the Ghost of Christmas Past, invited to say a few words about the "shadows of things that have been." More precisely, as this conference is to consider how liberal arts colleges should respond to actual and anticipated changes in students and society, now and in the future, I have been asked to offer some historical perspective and observations about how liberal arts colleges have adapted to prior changes and challenges; though I want to insist that, contrary to the views of some, I did not personally witness all of those prior changes, challenges, and adaptations. In any case, my assignment is a tall order, especially since Jim and I have been allotted about fifteen minutes for the assignment; as a number of you here know, it can take me that long just to clear my throat. But in any case, here goes. In focusing on the liberal arts college, we do well to remember and celebrate that we are dealing with an educational construct that is particularly American. The liberal arts-or the liberal arts and sciences, or liberal education-have other and more venerable lineages and embodiments, deriving from the ancient trivium and quadrivium and persisting through the centuries in various intellectual permutations and curricular expressions. We probably could have a spirited, if not necessarily productive, conversation about the liberal arts, which we seem to be assuming for today as a well-understood descriptor of our colleges. The fact, of course, is that we could argue endlessly about the liberal arts, as people have been doing time out of mind. Some years ago, a graduating senior at Lawrence reflected with me on his intellectual odyssey at the college by noting that he had come a long way since his freshman year. "When I came to college," he said, "I really had no idea what the liberal arts were. I just thought there would be a lot of Democrats here." He made his wry confession in good humor, of course, but his remark has deeper import. The liberal arts are not widely or well understood, which is one of the challenges our colleges have faced for a very long time. For the lack of understanding is not new, as even the proponents of the liberal arts do not always mean the same thing when they invoke the term. Over 100 years ago, the president of Cornell University noted that the absence of "clear-cut notions of what a liberal education is and how it is to be secured" is "a paralysis affecting every college of arts in America." And the lack of consensus on the nature and identity of the liberal arts college, cited by the American Council on Education 1921, is still with us today. In defining the liberal arts and liberal education, I suppose we can borrow from Louis Armstrong's response when asked to define jazz. "If you gotta ask," Satchmo said, "you'll never know." That's clever, though perhaps not useful. For our purposes this weekend, then, we might agree-simply and thus perhaps inadequately-that the liberal arts and liberal education are the present curricular manifestations that are centered on the so-called "classical" or "standard" arts and science disciplines, on the one hand, and an educational program that involves not just teaching about any particular body of knowledge (in literature, physics, or economics, for example) but teaching students how to learn and helping them attain and master a set of intellectual skills and competencies that will serve them beyond the college years, on the other. We would also agree, I think, that the liberal arts are avowedly not "vocational" in the narrow sense of the term-a battle we have fought for centuries-though are so in a more comprehensive way, and that a liberal education is designed not only as a private benefit but as prompting and enabling the recipient to contribute productively to the common good, both nationally and globally. We might at some point during the day have conversations about the liberal arts and liberal education, but I'd like now to turn to the liberal arts college itself. As I mentioned a moment ago, it is, first and foremost, an institution established on these shores and, for the most part, restricted to them. One is hard pressed to find many liberal arts colleges elsewhere on the international educational map; it is a distinctively American form of higher education and for many decades it was the prominent and preeminent form. But for all of their ubiquity in these United States, liberal arts colleges have long been deemed threatened and endangered, and often dismissed as precious and irrelevant. Speaking to the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education in the West in 1851, one Absalom Peters noted the profusion of colleges springing up in the newly settled states and territories and concluded that "it is therefore placed beyond all doubt that our country, in the whole extent of it, is to be a land of colleges." He was right. By the Civil War, approximately 900 colleges and universities had been founded in the colonies and the new nation, though the majority proved evanescent, succumbing no doubt to a dearth of students and a lack of financial resources. As early as 1829, one observer said "Colleges rise up like mushrooms in our luxurious soil. They are duly lauded and puffed for a day, and then sink to be heard no more." Lots sank. Though precise figures are unavailable, one student of higher education found that only 182 of the 900-plus pre-Civil War colleges were still around in 1928. Nine ACM colleges are in that category, having been founded before the Civil War, with four established after the Civil War, one in 1866 and three in 1874; the University of Chicago, one of our number but not identified as a liberal arts college, was incorporated in 1890. Obviously, small colleges suffered not only from a kind of market-driven attrition, but have also found themselves fighting for their place and purposes against those who argued, variously, for the primacy of seemingly practical or vocational education, on the one hand, and for specialized professional or primarily graduate education on the other. In the nineteenth century, liberal arts colleges were threatened first by the land-grant institutions (think Big Ten) founded in the wake of the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862-with their avowedly practical and vocational bent-and then by the importation of German models of the university in the latter years of the century. Championed at such places as Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Cornell, and Harvard, this educational venture responded to the explosion of new knowledge, was characterized by the adoption of an elective system that replaced the old set curriculum, and was bolstered as well by the advent of specialized graduate training in the disciplines and the creation of professional academic societies. These characteristics were in many respects antithetical to the character and identity of the liberal arts college and, according to some educators, such institutions were consequently at risk. At the turn of the last century, for example, the presidents of Chicago, Columbia, and Stanford, reflecting the heady confidence that the university model would prevail in the United States, each suggested that the small college was doomed. The president of Stanford summed up the case when he said of American colleges-at that time, almost all could be considered liberal arts colleges-that "the best will become universities, the others will return to their place as academies." Many liberal arts colleges survived that death sentence, but I believe they did so by proving able to change with changing circumstance. But it is only proper to note that they did not survive easily, at least not in all cases. There is no one explanation or analysis that can encompass the myriad ways colleges have coped with change and challenge in the past. Over the centuries, colleges such as those represented here survived by a wide variety of adaptive strategies, some short-lived. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for example, Lawrence tried such survival strategies as dropping its tuition to zero to compete with the University of Wisconsin (an approach whose fiscal lunacy soon became apparent), introducing a variety of so-called practical and/or vocational programs (business and missions, for example), and flirting with the pre-internet version of distance learning, then known as a correspondence course. In short, one might argue that in this instance Lawrence was seeking to emulate some features of-and thus to survive in competition with-the land-grant universities, to be both practical and vocational, at least in part. Happily, those experiments were short-lived, which explains why Lawrence can be counted among the nation's liberal arts colleges today. But other institutions that were once identified as liberal arts colleges engaged in survival strategies that turned out not to be short-lived and that effectively caused them to change their character and identity by modifying their curricula and academic programs. They survived, but at the expense of their traditional missions. If and as they exist today, they might profess the liberal arts, but they are no longer listed-at least by the Carnegie Foundation and hence by US News and World Report-as liberal arts colleges, but as general baccalaureate or master's colleges. Of the 3,856 post-secondary institutions classified by Carnegie in 2000, 228 were liberal arts colleges (around 20 of them public); according to this year's US News, that number has dropped to 215 (itself not an encouraging sign). This is the group to which the ACM colleges belong, that is, those that award at least half of their baccalaureate degrees in the liberal arts. These are the institutions that have persisted as liberal arts colleges. They persisted by proving agile and adaptable, not by holding fast to a rarefied and time-bound view of liberal education and the liberal arts and sciences but by creatively accommodating new features and perspectives while holding on to the basic principles and premises of liberal learning. Lawrence, for instance, was hardly alone in taking note of the sea change in higher education brought about by the importation of the German model of the university. Following the lead of other educational institutions, in the late nineteenth century it offered a separate scientific course leading to the B.S. degree-thus responding to intellectual and societal changes while at the same time holding on to and protecting the so-called classical B.A. curriculum. Then, "following the lead of the great German Universities," as the catalog of 1884 put it, and like Harvard, the college moved away from a set curriculum to an elective system, and in the early decades of the twentieth century participated in the national effort to bring some order to the curriculum by devising a "group system" of graduation requirements. And simultaneously with these initiatives, the college recognized the significance of a thorough graduate training in the disciplines and began populating the faculty with men and women with advanced degrees. So paying attention to changing educational principles and practices was one way that colleges adapted. Let me put it this way, albeit oversimplifying the case: the traditional liberal arts colleges that we today view as liberal arts colleges tended to adapt to the German educational model, whereas the once-traditional liberal arts colleges that we no longer think of as liberal arts colleges today tended to adapt to the land-grant university model. There were other adaptations as well. All of our colleges, and indeed almost all national liberal arts colleges, owe their founding to the patronage of a Protestant denomination. But not all have retained that affiliation in anything resembling robust fashion, though many still have nominal relationships with a denomination. Many, I'm sure, saw their future constricted by a strict identification with a particular religious group and so moved away from their church patrons. As the country-and higher education generally-became more secular in the course of the last century (though times are changing on that front), many liberal arts colleges followed suit. Lawrence, again like many, though not all, of the colleges both in the consortium and nationally, loosened and eventually severed its denominational ties to the Methodist Church in the course of the twentieth century, became independent of church control and, inevitably, more secular, a move that was prompted in the 1930s by the fact that the Carnegie Foundation would not make grants to church-related institutions. Though there are exceptions, to be sure, most of the national liberal arts baccalaureate colleges are not what you would deem "church-related," a factor that suggests that, for many, secularization was an adaptive strategy to cope with changing conditions. The same might be said for coeducation. While a number of our colleges have been coeducational from their founding or became so early in their histories, other colleges have adopted coeducation more recently-most, and mainly on the east coast, in the late 1960s or early 1970s-adapting, in this case, to the social climate of the time (to say nothing of doubling their applicant pools). For the most part, these institutions retained their educational mission; they only changed the composition of the students to whom they offered it. At the same time, it must be said that some women's colleges have sought to survive by remaining single-sex institutions, and have banded together as the Women's College Coalition to further their collective futures. As for the men, well, Wabash stands alone. If the women's colleges have banded together, so too have others, in various arrangements, of which the establishment of the ACM in 1958 is a prime example. Through the ACM, since replicated in other consortia, our colleges sought to survive and thrive by collaborating to accomplish academic programs that no one of us could accommodate on our own, enriching and hence extending the academic reach of our colleges in ways that made them more vibrant and more viable. That collaboration has become even more significant over time, as it has enabled our colleges to respond in positive ways to the growing emphasis on international and global perspectives. Finally, with or without consortial arrangements, liberal arts colleges have also adapted to more recent changes and challenges by extending their educational reach to embrace such topics as gender, multiculturalism, ethnicity, and global perspectives, have fostered interdisciplinary connections between and among disciplines, have introduced subject areas relating to parts of the world long absent from their Euro-centric curricula, and have utilized information and instructional technology in its many guises. If the past can teach us anything, I think, it is that we should have the strength of our convictions in facing our present and future. We have dealt with past challenges not by abandoning the liberal arts or liberal education, but by retaining a commitment to the liberal disciplines and to the style of teaching and learning that have long characterized liberal education. We have not caved into the pressures for vocational "relevance" in the past, arguing instead for the long-term value of a liberal education. Nor have we adopted the university model as our guide, but have retained a fealty to a collegiate model of teaching and learning. Still, challenges to our place and purposes persist, though curiously one such challenge comes from the large research universities that have established honors colleges to emulate us. How we might assess the current condition and circumstances of liberal arts colleges and how they might anticipate and meet future challenges are the topics we will be considering together this weekend, and I turn now to President Phifer, who will talk about the current challenges we face in order to further our thinking about the future of the liberal arts college. |
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