introduction about liberal education

American Academy for Liberal Education

Advancing Excellence in Liberal Education

What is Liberal Education?

The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) welcomes readers to its on-line resource, What is Liberal Education? , a collection of essays and commentaries on topics of interest pertaining to the value and practice of liberal education and addressing the question: What is liberal education?

Current Topic: Liberal Education and the K-12 Curriculum

Jacques Barzun. “Why We Educate the Way We Do”

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012), one of the founders of the American Academy for Liberal Education, is recognized internationally as one of the most thoughtful commentators on the cultural history of the modern period. After receiving his PhD from Columbia University (NY) in 1932, Barzun was appointed to the history faculty. During his tenure at Columbia, he served as Dean of Faculties and as Provost. He was granted the title of University Professor in 1967.

Barzun is the author of over 30 books and countless essays on historical, cultural and educational topics. Among his writings are Critical Questions (a collection of essays 1940-1980), The Use and Abuse of Art (1974), and From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Life. 1500 to the Present (2000). The American Scholar called From Dawn to Decadence a “masterwork” by a “man whose entire life has been spent acquiring the perspective that only wisdom, and not mere knowledge, can grant.” His works on education include Teacher in America (1945) and The American University: How it Runs and Where it is Going (new ed. 1993). Barzun’s professional activities included membership in the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of Arts. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003.

Jacquez Barzun was interviewed by Ruth Wattenburg of the American Educator in 2002 on the subjects that form a K-12 education. The interview is reproduced here with permission from the Fall 2002 issue of American Educator , the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, under its original title: Why We Educate the Way We Do .

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liberal education

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Originally, and literally, an education which liberates the pupil or student from errors in their thinking by encouraging the acquisition of genuine knowledge through a process of rational thought and reflection. The liberal knowledge thus gained is seen as quite distinct from the types of learning which are acquired through practice or whose purpose is to equip the learner with the ability to carry out particular tasks or activities. This distinction, which draws on Plato's theories of education and the acquisition of knowledge, may be expressed in today's terms as the difference between the acquisition of ‘knowledge for its own sake’ and the acquisition of instrumental knowledge designed for a specific end such as skills for employment. A liberal education, then, is one which is not designed to equip the learner for a job or the means to earn a living, but one which presents education as a ‘good’ in itself. The current differentiation in status between academic and vocational provision and qualifications, sometimes referred to as the ‘academic–vocational divide’, has its roots in this historical idea that the most valuable and genuine knowledge is liberal—or liberating —knowledge, gained purely for its own sake. The educational ideal formed the basis of school and university provision for the sons of ‘gentry’ in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The curriculum was made up largely of Latin and ancient Greek, its only purpose being to produce ‘gentlemen of culture’. A curriculum which diverged from this liberal model, for example by introducing an element of instrumentalism, such as science or modern languages, which might better equip the learner with skills needed to earn a living, was considered suitable only for classes below the level of gentry, whose circumstances meant they might have to take paid employment. This class distinction between the provision of liberal and instrumental knowledge reinforced the idea that a liberal education was inherently of higher status. Instrumental, or useful, knowledge became closely associated with ‘trade’ and the artisan classes and with narrowness of purpose, while liberal education maintained its elite status and later became associated with a broad and life‐enhancing curriculum and with the principles of learner‐centred education which aims to support the development of individual potential. This distinction was illustrated clearly in the 1960s and 1970s by the provision of an additional and eponymous liberal studies curriculum for students on skills training courses in technical colleges (now colleges of further education), designed to broaden their minds and enhance their experience of learning.

A liberal education is associated with the acquisition of knowledge which is theoretical rather than practical, reflective rather than instrumental, and valued for its own sake rather than acquired for some use. It is often understood today to be synonymous with a general education or academic education, inasmuch as these terms, too, are used to express the opposite of ‘vocational’ in the context of educational provision. It is, however, as much an ideal or a philosophical construct as it is a type of curriculum. To describe a model of education as ‘liberal’ is not only to state something about its purpose and curriculum content, but is also implicitly, and unavoidably, to ascribe a value to it.

From: liberal education in A Dictionary of Education »

Subjects: Social sciences — Education

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J.S. Mill's idea of a university, and our own.

An auto repair shop in which mechanics and owners could not distinguish a wreck from a finely tuned car would soon go out of business. A hospital where doctors, nurses, and administrators were unable to recognize a healthy human being would present a grave menace to the public health. A ship whose captain and crew lacked navigation skills and were ignorant of their destination would spell doom for the cargo and passengers entrusted to their care.

Yet at universities and colleges throughout the land, parents and students pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support — liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being. To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate in their scholarship and courses doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission?

To be sure, universities and colleges put out plenty of glossy pamphlets containing high-minded statements touting the benefits of higher education. Aimed at prospective students, parents, and wealthy alumni, these publications celebrate a commitment to fostering diversity, developing an ethic of community service, and enhancing appreciation of cultures around the world. University publications also proclaim that graduates will have gained skills for success in an increasingly complex and globalized marketplace. Seldom, however, do institutions of higher education boast about how the curriculum cultivates the mind and refines judgment. This is not because universities are shy about the hard work they have put into curriculum design or because they have made a calculated decision to lure students and alumni dollars by focusing on the sexier side of the benefits conferred by higher education. It’s because university curricula explicitly and effectively aimed at producing an educated person rarely exist. 1 1

Universities do provide a sort of structure for undergraduate education. Indeed, it can take years for advisors to master the intricacies of general curriculum requirements on the one hand and specific criteria established by individual departments and proliferating special majors and concentrations on the other. The Byzantine welter of required courses, bypass options, and substitutions that students confront may seem like an arbitrary and ramshackle construction. In large measure it is. At the same time, our compassless curriculum gives expression to a dominant intellectual opinion. And it reflects the gulf between the requirements of liberal education and the express interests of parents, donors, professors, and students.

The dominant opinion proclaims that no shared set of ideas, no common body of knowledge, and no baseline set of values or virtues marking an educated human being exist. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of all American colleges adopt a general distribution requirement. 2 Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, with perhaps a dollop of fine arts thrown in for good measure. And all students must choose a major. Although departments of mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences maintain a sense of sequence and rigor, students in the social sciences and humanities typically are required to take a smattering of courses in their major, which usually involves a choice of introductory classes and a potpourri of more specialized classes, topped off perhaps with a thesis on a topic of the student’s choice. But this veneer of structure provides students only the most superficial guidance. Or rather, it sends students a loud and clear message: The experts themselves have no knowledge worth passing along concerning the core knowledge and defining qualities of an educated person.

Take two political science majors at almost any elite college or university: It is quite possible for them to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same materials. One student may meet his general distribution requirements by taking classes in geophysics and physiological psychology, the sociology of the urban poor and introduction to economics, and the American novel and Japanese history while concentrating on international relations inside political science and writing a thesis on the dilemmas of transnational governance. Another political science major may fulfill the university distribution requirements by studying biology and astronomy, the sociology of the American West and abnormal psychology, the feminist novel and history of American film while concentrating in comparative politics and writing a thesis on the challenge of integrating autonomous peoples in Canada and Australia. Both students will have learned much of interest but little in common. Yet the little in common they learn may be of lasting significance. For both will absorb the implicit teaching of the university curriculum, which is that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know.

The interests of the different groups involved in producing, purchasing, and consuming higher education also create obstacles to reforming the contemporary curriculum. University education is a peculiar good. Generally speaking, and particularly at elite universities, those who receive the service, the students, do not pay for it. Instead, the cost of undergraduate education is borne by parents, wealthy donors, and taxpayers through exemptions and government grants for faculty research support. At America’s finest private universities, parents pay about $ 50,000 a year to put their children through college, or approximately $ 200,000 for a bachelor’s degree. For that hefty price tag, parents understandably want a credential that enables their sons and daughters to land good jobs and gain entrance to valuable social networks. But what of the character and quality of their children’s education? No less an observer of the American scene than Tom Wolfe recalls an unplanned opening remark he made in 1988 to a group of graduating Harvard seniors:

You know, I come from a town, New York City, where families are rated according to whether or not their children get into Harvard. But I have never met a single parent — not one — who has ever shown the slightest curiosity about what happens to them once they get here or what they may have become by the time they graduate. 3 3

Distant and dispersed, parents can monitor their children’s academic performance, which is measurable by grades, but even if they were concerned they would be in a weak position to evaluate, much less influence, course content and curriculum structure. Besides, professors and administrators are the experts.

At most elite universities, student tuition rarely covers more than two-thirds of the full cost of education. Much of the other third comes from alumni through new gifts and investment earning on endowment or old gifts. Alumni establish chairs, fund buildings, and sponsor university-wide programs and initiatives. As with parents, alumni interests do not necessarily coincide with the requirements of a liberal education. Having made their mark in the world, alumni look at the university suffused with warm remembrances of their carefree college days. They may donate out of a commitment to basic research and liberal education. They may also donate for a variety of other reasons: to give back to the institution that helped launch their adult lives, to reconnect with their youth, and, not always least, to provide a dramatic demonstration to fellow alumni of their worldly success. Universities aggressively encourage alumni to give large sums of money but frown upon their playing a role in overseeing how the money is spent — for professors and administrators are the experts.

The capacity of alumni who seek to ensure that their donations are spent in accordance with their intentions, particularly if their intention is to promote liberal education, is extremely limited. For example, in 1995 Yale University was forced to return a 1991 gift of $ 20,000,000 . Donor Lee Bass wanted to support the creation of a program for undergraduate study in Western civilization. One would have thought that such an undertaking would fit easily with Yale’s mission. But during the four years that Yale held the Bass money, the faculty could not come to agreement about the benefits of such a program or how to implement it. Many members of the faculty regarded a program on Western civilization to be so narrowly conceived or political in character as to infringe on their right and responsibility to make curriculum decisions on academic grounds. In addition, faculty complained loudly to the administration about a request made by the donor, late in the controversy, to have a voice in the approval of university decisions about how to fill professorships created by his gift. For they are the experts.

This brings us to the impediment posed by professors to the reform of the contemporary curriculum. In fact, whereas parents’ and donors’ interests may fail to coincide with the requirements of a liberal education, professors’ interests increasingly diverge from those requirements. Because advancement in today’s academy is closely tied to scholarly achievement and publication record, it is in professors’ interests to teach narrowly focused and highly specialized courses. Here, professors assign scholarship that underpins their own approach, examine cutting-edge contributions to the field, and perhaps review work that is critical of their way of doing things. Such courses can be a valuable ingredient in an undergraduate education. But generally and for the most part these courses, which often represent a substantial portion of departmental offerings, serve to advance professors’ research programs and to train professional scholars, though few undergraduates will go on to be professors.

Finally, one must consider students’ interests. On the one hand, often just having left their parents’ home but not yet having become responsible for supporting themselves, students are as fresh and open to learning as they will ever be. On the other hand, like their parents, they are, with reason, credential conscious, keenly interested in launching their careers and gaining access by means of their college degree to the right people and the right networks. And they present a classic case in which expressed preferences or interests and actual interests are likely to differ. This is because the capacity to make an informed decision about the structure and value of a liberal education itself depends on a liberal education, or on a knowledge of the subjects — history, literature, philosophy, natural science, ethics and politics broadly understood, and religion — that have for at least 150 years been thought to stand at its center. Many are the students at fine American colleges and universities who have remarked wistfully in the days before graduation that only now, as they prepare to depart, do they feel capable of choosing wisely and cobbling together for themselves out of the hodgepodge of university offerings a coherent slate of classes. But even those days may be passing, as universities increasingly fail to give students more than a dim intimation that a liberal education has a distinctive shape and a coherent and cumulative content. 4 4

Of course, if parents, alumni, professors, and students are happy, why worry? So what if universities, for lack of a standard, are unable to say whether their graduates are well-educated? A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers. If universities continue to offer parents a good return on investment, donors a pleasant place to practice philanthropy, professors good research opportunities, and students a convivial four years in which to get ready for their careers, why not leave well enough alone? And supposing that some harm is inflicted on students through exposure to foolish ideas and sloppy intellectual habits, the fact is that undergraduate education lasts only four short years. How seriously in that brief time can university education injure students? In any case, once they leave campus, graduates will encounter the everyday world of work, spouses, mortgages, and children. Won’t their new responsibilities, by focusing their minds and disciplining their habits, overcome any lingering bad effects of their educations?

This way of thinking about the university is common and dangerously complacent. We would not be content to learn that our auto repair shops cause no permanent damage to our cars, our hospitals are not systematically making patients sicker, and our captains and crews are not sinking their ships. So why should we be content to conclude that our universities do no lasting harm to the country’s young men and women?

In fact, universities can cause lasting harm. In many cases, the mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, assign weight to competing claims and values, and judge matters to be true or false and fair or inequitable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for both public and private life.

Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. And the nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for — and limits to — realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation’s foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens’ acquiring a liberal education.

In no small measure, the value of a liberal education comes from a distinctive quality of mind and character that it encourages: the ability to explore moral and political questions from a variety of angles. This involves putting oneself in another’s shoes, distinguishing the essential from the contingent, imagining the contingent as other than it is, and reasoning rigorously without losing sight either of what is or what ought to be.

John Stuart Mill was convinced that cultivation of the virtue that in On Liberty he called “many-sidedness” 5 is at the heart of a liberal education. Mill defends this conviction most fully and forcefully in a little known but remarkable work, originally entitled “Inaugural Delivered to the University of St. Andrews on February 1 st 1867 .” 6 Mill was 60 , and the delivery of a formal address on liberal education was an obligation that came with his election by students to the post of honorary Lord Rector of the University, which he held from 1865 to 1868 (during which time he also served as an independent member of Parliament). Although he never taught at or even attended a university, Mill was among the best-educated men then alive, perhaps England’s premier public intellectual, and certainly its leading student of modern liberty. At the same time, he was intimately familiar with commerce and foreign affairs, thanks to the more than 30 years he had spent working in the office of the British East India Company. So he was well suited to take up the challenge of exploring the contribution that a liberal education, well understood, can make to the many dimensions of life in a free society.

Yet it is not Mill’s “Inaugural Address” but Cardinal John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University that has come to be regarded as the classic statement on the aims and benefits of a liberal education. A collection of lectures delivered to Irish Catholic laymen in Dublin between 1852 and 1858 , The Idea of a University certainly deserves the high regard in which it is held. Still, its preeminence is surprising. Newman’s contention that liberal education culminates in the acquisition of religious truth rests on assumptions about knowledge and faith very different from those on which most university education in America today rests. This does not undermine the value of Newman’s analysis, least of all from the perspective of a liberal education. But it does suggest that Mill’s short essay, which both rests on assumptions about knowledge and faith shared by most university education today and challenges the contemporary university curriculum, has a distinctive contribution to make.>

Like Newman’s mid-nineteenth-century discourses, Mill’s essay from the same period requires some translation, some separating of educational principle from particular conclusions about the appropriate content of the university curriculum. For example, Mill suggests that “the leading facts of ancient and modern history” should not be taught at universities because if students have not mastered the facts by the time they get to college, then it’s too late for them to learn. For an age such as our own, in which universities do not expect, much less require, students to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of history, Mill’s judgment will sound absurdly harsh. Yet his underlying point, that historical knowledge is an essential component of a liberal education and that it must be acquired in order to progress to later and higher stages of understanding, does not depend on contingent features of a Victorian English sensibility. Rather, it reflects a compelling opinion about the enduring structure and abiding imperatives of a liberal education.

II. MILL’S IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

In the opening lines of his address, Mill calls attention to the vastness of his topic and the need to combine learning and freshness of mind in exploring it. Indeed, among the chief benefits that flow from studying Mill’s address on liberal education is the lesson he provides throughout in combining goods often thought to be mutually exclusive. By stressing at the outset the wisdom of custom along with the need for creativity and insisting on the riches of what has been said about education in past ages and also the challenge of carrying the conversation forward into the future, Mill highlights the dependence of liberal education on both conserving and progressing.

As the serious study of education encourages a liberal mind, so too does it require one:

For, of all many-sided subjects, it is the one which has the greatest number of sides. Not only does it include whatever we do for ourselves, and whatever is done for us by others, for the express purpose of bringing us somewhat nearer to the perfection of our nature; it does more: in its largest acceptation, it comprehends even the indirect effects produced on character and on the human faculties, by things of which the direct purposes are quite different; by laws, by forms of government, by the industrial arts, by modes of social life; nay even by physical facts not dependent on human will; by climate, soil, and local position. Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not, is part of his education.

While it does not nearly cover the whole of education, the university’s mission, which is to provide a liberal education, is essential to preparing students to understand the other constitutive elements of education, or the variety of material, moral, and political forces that form the mind, shape character, and direct judgment.

Liberal education concerns “the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising, the level of improvement which has been attained.” Professional education is something different. The professions belong under the superintendence of the university, but they are not part of, and must not be allowed to displace, “education properly so-called,” or that cultivation of the mind and transmission of knowledge on which further progress depends. Mill does not mean to denigrate the professions or to deny that there is a vital moral dimension to the practice of law, medicine, and business. The question is the most effective manner in which higher education can contribute to making professionals moral: “Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.” In other words, the cultivation that they bring to professional schools from their liberal education goes a long way to determining whether professionals practice their trade sensibly and decently.

Nor should a university, Mill argues, be concerned with elementary instruction. Students ought to acquire the basics before arriving so that universities can concentrate on providing students with a “comprehensive and connected view” of the fields of human knowledge, “the crown and consummation of a liberal education.” Yet he acknowledges that universities must adjust to realities. When, as in mid-nineteenth-century Scotland, high schools fail to perform their part, universities have no choice but to play a remedial role. At the same time, universities must sometimes break with tradition, as those in Scotland led the way in doing by incorporating in their curricula the study of natural science and the systematic study of morality. In deciding what to include in the curriculum and how to establish priorities, universities should focus on their role in “human cultivation at large,” or the making of an educated person. It is to this task that Mill devotes the remainder of his address.

The content of the higher education curriculum was hotly debated in Mill’s time, and the liberal education he championed represented a serious correction of traditional university education. The controversy was over whether general education should be classical and literary or scientific. This was a continuation of the early modern quarrel over whether the university should focus on the ancients or the moderns, immortalized in Jonathan Swift’s A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday, between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library ( 1704 ). In Mill’s view, the quarrel had a clear and compelling solution: Teach both.

But wasn’t study of classical languages a tedious and consuming undertaking? Mill was acutely aware of the sterile manner in which universities taught Greek and Latin, concentrating on rote memorization, mechanical translation, and mindless verse composition. At the same time, having learned both languages before he was ten, he insisted that the teaching of the classics at the university level could be made considerably more efficient, creating room to study the natural sciences, and considerably more educational by concentrating on the content of classical writings. Of course, dividing the curriculum between literary studies and science meant that students would be unable to specialize in either. But from Mill’s point of view, this was a salutary consequence. He regarded specialization, the learning of more and more about a single subject, as a potential enemy of liberal education. If practiced prematurely, it dwarfs individual minds and threatens human progress. In contrast, liberal education aims to teach students a subject’s “leading truths” and “great features.” Such knowledge does not make students masters of a field or discipline, but it does enable them to recognize the masters and form intelligent judgments about expert opinion. It also fits them for study of “government and civil society,” which Mill considers “the most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human mind.”

Mill would confine literary study at the university to classical languages and literatures. This is not because he doubted that knowledge of foreign languages and literatures in general was valuable. Indeed, he observed a half-century before Wittgenstein that such knowledge is intrinsically valuable because it prevents the confusion of words with objects and facts and enables us to understand other peoples by understanding the terms through which they interpret the world. But a university must establish priorities. Although students should know modern languages, they learn them best, Mill insists, out of school through a few months living abroad among native speakers. Accordingly, liberal education should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of Asia, “so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them”). On the other hand, their writings are rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent “the perfection of good sense.” Moreover, the complex logical structure of the grammar of classic languages disciplines the mind. And classical authors do not embroider. In their writings, “every word is what it should be and where it should be.” Yet to rely entirely on the classics, he is keen to point out, is to miss an important dimension of humanity. They lack that appreciation, which characterizes modern poetry, of the mind as “brooding and self-conscious.” Nevertheless, Mill concludes that like the learning of modern foreign languages, so too the study of modern literature can and should be undertaken outside the university.

As with classical languages and literatures, Mill gives the natural sciences a place of honor in a liberal education, both because of their content and because of the intellectual discipline they foster. While it is not to be expected that many will achieve mastery of the laws to which the physical world is subject, students should acquire the basics that will enable them to distinguish those who are competent to provide the public advice on scientific and technological matters. In addition, science provides “a training and disciplining process, to fit the intellect for the proper work of a human being.” This is because “the processes by which truth is attained, reasoning and observation, have been carried to their greatest known perfection in the physical sciences.” Mill would not scant the study either of empirical science or mathematics and logic. He would also include in the curriculum an introduction to what he regarded as a young and imperfect science, physiology, because of its usefulness in making decisions about public sanitary measures and personal hygiene and because its subject, the physical nature of man, sheds more light on social and political life than any of the other physical sciences. He would also include psychology, which overlaps with physiology and explores the laws of human nature. The great philosophical controversies to which psychology gives rise, Mill maintains, in no way disqualify it as a subject fit for study at the university. To the contrary: “it is a part of liberal education to know that such controversies exist, and, in a general way, what has been said on both sides of them.”

The literary and scientific studies that form the foundation of a liberal education should culminate in “that which it is the chief of all the ends of intellectual education to qualify us for — the exercise of thought on the great interests of mankind as moral and social beings — ethics and politics, in the largest sense.” These great subjects have “a direct bearing on the duties of citizenship.” Students should begin with the close and familiar, the major civil and political institutions of their own country, and then move outward in their studies to the civil and political institutions of other countries. Then they should learn about the laws of social life, particularly political economy, which deals with “the sources and conditions of wealth and material prosperity for aggregate bodies of human beings”; jurisprudence, or the philosophical, moral, and institutional foundations of law; and the law of nations, which “is not properly law, but a part of ethics: a set of moral rules, accepted as authoritative by civilized states.” The principal readings on ethics and politics should be drawn from both contemporary authorities and what today we would call the great books, but only “on condition that these great thinkers are not read passively, as masters to be followed, but actively, as supplying materials and incentives to thought.” Here too, Mill stresses, liberal education can only provide an introduction. But the well-crafted introduction to ethics and politics in the largest sense confers a benefit “of the highest value by awakening an interest in the subjects, by conquering the first difficulties, and inuring the mind to the kind of exertion which the studies require, by implanting a desire to make further progress, and directing the student to the best tracks and the best helps.”

The “inevitable limitations of what schools and universities can do” comes into focus in considering the place of morality and religion in the university curriculum. It is not the place of schools in general and universities in particular, Mill holds, to provide the principal instruction in these matters:

It is the home, the family, which gives us the moral or religious education we really receive: and this is completed, and modified, sometimes for the better, often for the worse, by society, and the opinions and feelings with which we are there surrounded. The moral or religious influence which a university can exercise, consists less in any express teaching, than in the pervading tone of the place.

The tone is set by the manner and spirit in which professors discharge their duty to seek truth and transmit knowledge:

Whatever [the university] teaches, it should teach as penetrated by a sense of duty; it should present all knowledge as chiefly a means to worthiness of life, given for the double purpose of making each of us practically useful to his fellow-creatures, and of elevating the character of the species itself; exalting and dignifying our nature.

Professors teach by example, but the most important example they set involves the integrity they bring to learning and thinking.

In teaching the history of morals and religion, professors must resist the powerful temptation to proselytize for their favorite moral and religious — or immoral and irreligious — doctrines:

There should be, and there is in most universities, professorial instruction in moral philosophy; but I could wish that this instruction were of a somewhat different type from what is ordinarily met with. I could wish that it were more expository, less polemical, and above all less dogmatic. The learner should be made acquainted with the principal systems of moral philosophy which have existed and been practically operative among mankind, and should hear what there is to be said for each: the Aristotelian, the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Judaic, the Christian in the various modes of its interpretation, which differ almost as much from one another as the teachings of those earlier schools. He should be made familiar with the different standards of right and wrong which have been taken as the basis of ethics: general utility, natural justice, natural rights, a moral sense, principles of practical reason, and the rest. Among all these, it is not so much the teacher’s business to take a side, and fight stoutly for some one against the rest, as it is to direct them all towards the establishment and preservation of the rules of conduct most advantageous to mankind.

But then liberal education requires professors both to maintain an open and flexible mind and to favor the great liberal and Enlightenment aspiration to articulate universal principles of right conduct. Does it not thereby take the side of the moderns against the ancients, of reason against faith, of liberalism and Enlightenment against romantic and conservative critics? And is this not a contradiction or an invitation to hypocrisy?

In fact, tensions inherent in liberal education do present a stiff challenge for educators. A liberal education reflects and reinforces a modern, liberal, and enlightened sensibility, and it does serve democracy based on equality in freedom. Faculty, Mill suggests, should be self-aware and candid about these presuppositions of the education they provide. At the same time, liberal education as he conceives it is particularly well-equipped to resist the descent into didactic or dogmatic education provided that it heeds its own imperatives to appreciate what modernity owes tradition, the knowledge of diversity and common humanity acquired through study of the classics, and the dependence of freedom on studying the history of rival and incompatible teachings on ethics, politics, and religion.

Although professors must never compel their students to embrace one or another side in the great historical debates about how human beings should organize their private and public lives, they cannot help but make judgments about truth and falsity in teaching the history of moral and religious ideas:

There is not one of these systems which has not its good side; not one from which there is not something to be learnt by the votaries of the others; not one which is not suggested by a keen, though it may not always be a clear, perception of some important truths, which are the prop of the system, and the neglect or undervaluing of which in other systems is their characteristic infirmity. A system which may be as a whole erroneous, is still valuable, until it has forced upon mankind a sufficient attention to the portion of truth which suggested it. The ethical teacher does his part best, when he points out how each system may be strengthened even on its own basis, by taking into more complete account the truths which other systems have realized more fully and made more prominent. I do not mean that he should encourage an essentially skeptical eclecticism.

But the encouraging of a “skeptical eclecticism” is more of a danger inherent in liberal education than Mill allows. Passing from the examination of one system of morals and religion embraced by its proponents as the whole truth to another and then on to another and another can be disorienting. Professors must be able to place ideas in context without reducing them to their context, which requires knowledge of both and a sense of proportion. Indifference, hastiness, or haughtiness — to name a few of the vices to which professors may be prone — at the head of a class on the history of morality and religion risks engendering in students a moral relativism that treats all ideas as equally valid or a nihilism that holds all claims about justice and the human good to be equally false. Thus does the abuse of liberal education produce the opposite of a liberal spirit.

Liberal education requires professors to make evaluative judgments in the classroom because they are essential to the teaching of the great systems of ideas about how human beings should organize their private and public lives. However, these judgments must be put in the service of forming students capable of fashioning their own judgments:

While placing every system in the best aspect it admits of, and endeavoring to draw from all of them the most salutary consequences compatible with their nature, I would by no means debar him from enforcing by his best arguments his own preference for some one of the number. They cannot be all true: though those which are false as theories may contain particular truths, indispensable to the completeness of the true theory. But on this subject, even more than on any of those I have previously mentioned, it is not the teacher’s business to impose his own judgment, but to inform and discipline that of his pupil.

While a liberal education unavoidably reflects the needs and ethos of a liberal society, the needs and ethos of liberal society call for an education that is essentially Socratic in character. But a Socratic education, in its classical form, requires a Socrates for a teacher and students of surpassing gifts. The liberal education that deserves public support in a liberal democracy represents a democratization of Socratic education insofar as it is made widely available. But it also preserves an aristocratic root, remaining dependent to a high degree on virtue, or the qualities of mind and character that teachers and students bring to it.

Liberal education is the civic education, or education for citizenship, proper to liberal democracy because it aims to form a human being fit for freedom:

The proper business of a University is . . . not to tell us from authority what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty, but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings, who seek for truth at all hazards, and demand to know all the difficulties, in order that they may be better qualified to find, or recognize, the most satisfactory mode of resolving them.

By remaining aloof from narrow partisan politics, liberal education makes a critical political contribution, doing its large but limited part to form citizens capable of both conserving and improving a free society.

But liberal education aims at more than civic education, in part because in a free society citizenship is not the only, or in many cases the highest, sphere in which individuals reasonably hope to flourish. Liberal education also prepares students for, though it does not provide, what Mill calls aesthetic education, or “the culture which comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful.” Indeed, at the end of his address, Mill exhorts the students of St. Andrews to appreciate the deepest and most enduring benefits of a liberal education:

Now is your opportunity for gaining a degree of insight into subjects larger and far more ennobling than the minutiae of a business or a profession, and for acquiring a facility of using your minds on all that concerns the higher interests of man, which you will carry with you into the occupations of active life, and which will prevent even the short intervals of time which that may leave you, from being altogether lost for noble purposes. Having once conquered the first difficulties, the only ones of which the irksomeness surpasses the interest; having turned the point beyond which what was once a task becomes a pleasure; in even the busiest after-life, the higher powers of your mind will make progress imperceptibly, by the spontaneous exercise of your thoughts and by the lessons you will know how to learn from daily experience. So, at least, it will be if in your early studies you have fixed your eyes upon the ultimate end from which those studies take their chief value — that of making you more effective combatants in the great fight which never ceases to rage between Good and Evil, and more equal to coping with the ever new problems which the changing course of human nature and human society present to be resolved.

The highest justification of liberal education is that by forming free and well-furnished minds it prepares students to fashion for themselves a good life.

III. LIBERAL EDUCATION AND MILL’S LARGER LIBERALISM

The central importance to Mill’s idea of a liberal education of drawing truth from rival systems of opinions and goods reflects the spirit of the larger liberalism to which his voluminous writings are devoted. For example, in Principles of Political Economy ( 1848 ), he seeks to give both the free market and government intervention their due. In On Liberty , he shows how the formation and flourishing of free individuals depend on the discipline of virtue, education, the family, and civil society. In Considerations on Representative Government ( 1862 ), he emphasizes the need both for a party of order, whose main tasks are to maintain the basic framework within which political life takes place and to conserve what society has achieved, and a party of progress, whose guiding purpose is to implement more fully a free society’s promise of liberty and equality under the law. In The Subjection of Women ( 1869 ), he makes an impassioned case for the formal equality of women while respecting differences between the sexes. And in his Essays on Religion ( 1874 ), which Mill chose to have published posthumously, he seeks to give expression to a religious sensibility that respects the power as well as the limits of reason. 7 7

But nowhere does he more forcefully demonstrate the practical and theoretical necessity of combining presumed contraries than in his tributes to the progressive rationalist Jeremy Bentham ( 1838 ) and the conservative romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 1840 ), which Mill published while editor of the London and West Minster Review . 8 To appreciate the audacity of his contention that both the thought of Bentham and the thought of Coleridge are essential, imagine a contemporary progressive intellectual declaring in a left-of-center journal that, say, both John Rawls and Allan Bloom are indispensable thinkers of our age.

In Mill’s judgment, Bentham’s progressive rationalism was blind to the intricacies of human affairs. But in part because of that blindness, Bentham was able to focus his intellectual energies, expose much nonsense in the common language used to discuss morals and politics, and bring to light inefficiencies and injustices in the organization of social and political life. At the same time, Coleridge’s conservative romanticism, Mill contended, was blind to the positive features of modern society and to the advantages of modern systematic empirical inquiry. But, again, in part because of that blindness, Coleridge could concentrate on discerning the wisdom embodied in traditional practices and on making vivid the shared values and social bonds on which political life, even liberal and democratic political life, depended. Through his appreciation of their strengths and weaknesses, Mill aims to demonstrate the necessity of the progressive and conservative minds, and the superiority to both of the liberal mind.

In his tribute to Coleridge, Mill observes that the manner in which Bentham and Coleridge each supplied an essential perspective lacking in the other illustrated “the importance, in the present imperfect state of mental and social science, of antagonist modes of thought.” Lest one think that Mill wrote in the expectation that anytime soon such need would diminish, he instead looks forward to when it “will one day be felt” that antagonist modes of thought “are as necessary to one another in speculation, as mutually checking powers are in a political constitution.” In fact, this necessity is enduring, and for good reason. It is not grounded in “indifference between one opinion and another,” but rather in the irreducible diversity of knowledge’s sources and the abiding process of comparing and contesting ideas by which truth comes to light.

Twenty-five years before he delivered his St. Andrews address and sketched the liberal education that can be seen as a fortification against it, Mill warned in his tribute to Coleridge of “the besetting danger” to which moral and political understanding was subject:

All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied and that, if either could have been made to take the other’s views in addition to its own, little more would have been needed to make its doctrine correct.

This suggests a test to determine whether the education a university provides is liberal in the large sense. It is to be expected, and indeed welcomed, given differences in background, talents, and tastes, that some students will, on reflection, become progressives and some conservatives. But universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents.

For Mill, the virtues cultivated by a liberal education sustained a higher form of toleration. Of course the political toleration involved in suffering the expression of an opinion one knows to be false or foolish is indispensable to liberty of thought and discussion in a free society. But respecting a person’s right to be wrong is not the only form of toleration. Respecting a person’s right to be right about truths one is inclined to find awkward or disconcerting is imperative to the flourishing of thought and discussion in a free society. A liberal education transforms this imperative into a pleasure.

IV. REFORMING THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY UNIVERSITY

Mill’s nineteenth-century analysis of liberal education is relevant to the twenty-first-century university not for the specific curriculum he proposes but because of the larger principles he outlines and the greater goods he clarifies. His analysis suggests several lessons. First, a liberal education aims to liberate the mind by furnishing it with literary, historical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge and by cultivating its capacity to question and answer on its own. Second, a liberal education must, in significant measure, provide not a smorgasbord of offerings but a shared content, because knowledge is cumulative and ideas have a history. Third, a liberal education must adapt to local realities, providing the elementary instruction, the stepping stones to higher stages of understanding, where grade school and high school education fail to perform their jobs. Fourth, the aim of a liberal education is not to achieve mastery in any one subject but an understanding of what mastery entails in the several main fields of human learning and an appreciation of the interconnections among the fields. Fifth, liberal education is not an alternative to specialization, but rather a sound preparation for it. Sixth, a liberal education culminates in the study of ethics, politics, and religion, studies which naturally begin with the near and familiar, extend to include the faraway and foreign, and reach their peak in the exploration, simultaneously sympathetic and critical, of the history of great debates about justice, faith, and reason. Seventh, all of this will be for naught if teaching is guided by the partisan or dogmatic spirit, so professors must be cultivated who will bring to the classroom the spirit of free and informed inquiry.

What might a four-year curriculum for a liberal education, devised in accordance with these lessons, look like? No doubt a variety of reasonable answers is possible, particularly in a nation as large and diverse as the United States, in which students can choose among private research universities, small liberal arts colleges, state universities of many sizes and descriptions, and religious colleges. And owing to differences in aptitude and interest, a liberal education will not be for everybody. Nevertheless, some elements are simple and straightforward and will be common to all colleges and universities that wish to provide students a liberal education worthy of the name. For starters, in view of the sorry state of high school and grade school education in the country, 9 the curriculum will need to contain a large remedial element. In view of the need created by our advanced economy for depth or specialization, the curriculum will continue to require students to choose a major to concentrate in during their last two years. Most importantly, in view of the need for breadth, or knowledge of the civilization of which one is a part and of other civilizations, the curriculum should have a solid core.

As with the other parts of the curriculum, the structure and content of the core will be subject to legitimate dispute and reasoned compromise. Also, as with the rest of the curriculum, the core must strike a balance between the realities of education in America and the enduring imperatives of liberal education. It should not revolve around any single one of the main models for a core curriculum — general distribution requirements, great books, survey courses, or the modes of inquiry approach — but should partake of elements of all four. 10 And it should not suppose that there is one right path or a single correct syllabus for the courses it contains. But faculty should fashion common core courses whose purpose is to awaken interest, sharpen critical thinking, and provide students with a shared store of essential knowledge and fundamental questions.

Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who met its requirements would also have acquired a common intellectual foundation that would enhance their understanding of whatever specialization they chose, improve their ability to debate politics responsibly, and enrich their appreciation of the delightful and dangerous world in which they live.

It is a mark of the clutter of our current curriculum and the confusion that it spreads that these requirements will strike many faculty and administrators, and perhaps also students, as so onerous as to be a nonstarter for a serious discussion about curricular reform. Yet assuming four courses a semester and 32 to graduate, such a core could be completed in the first two years of undergraduate study. Students who met the foreign language requirement through high school study would have time left over in their first two years for four elective courses. Moreover, the core would still allow students during their junior and senior years to choose their own major, devote ten courses to it, and take six additional elective courses. And for students majoring in the natural sciences, where it is necessary to take a strict and lengthy sequence of courses, options should be available to enroll in introductory and lower level courses in one’s major during freshman and sophomore year and complete the core during junior and senior year.

Nevertheless, reform confronts formidable obstacles. The principal one is professors. 11 Many will fight such a common core because it would require them to teach classes outside their area of expertise or reduce the number of students for boutique classes on highly specialized topics. Moreover, one can expect protracted battles over the content of the social science and humanities component of the core of the sort that eventually led Yale to return that $ 20 million gift that was meant to support study of Western civilization. Meanwhile, as I have noted, students and parents are poorly positioned to effect change. Students come and go in four years, and, in any event, the understanding they need to make the arguments for reform is acquired through the very liberal education of which they are currently being deprived. Meanwhile, parents are far away and otherwise occupied and have too much money on the line to rock the boat.

But there are opportunities for those who will seize them. Change could be led by an intrepid president, provost, or dean of a major university who knows the value of a liberal education, possesses the eloquence to defend it to his or her faculty and the public, and has the skill and clout to wield institutional incentives on behalf of reform. 12 Change could also be led by trustees and alumni at private universities who acquire larger roles in university governance and by alumni who connect their donations to reliable promises from universities that their gifts will be used in furtherance of liberal education, well understood. And, not least, some enterprising smaller college or public university, taking advantage of the nation’s love of diversity and its openness to innovation, might discover a market niche for parents and students eager for an education that serves students’ long-term interests by introducing them in a systematic manner to the ideas and events that formed their civilization, the moral and political principles on which their nation and those of other nations are based, and languages and civilizations that differ from their own.

Reforming the university is as urgent as the obstacles to it are formidable. Citizens today confront a mind-boggling array of hard questions concerning, among other things, the balance of liberty and security at home; war and peace in faraway lands; the challenges some civilizations face in achieving liberty and democracy and others face in promoting them; the extent of the public’s responsibility for the poor, the sick, and the elderly; management of the extraordinary powers science provides for caring for, and manipulating, nascent human life, the unborn, and the frail and failing; the worldwide threats to the environment and appropriate national and transnational measures to combat them; the impact of popular culture on private conduct; the meaning of marriage and the structure of the family; and the proper relation between religion and politics. No citizen can be expected to master all the issues. But liberal democracies count on more than a small minority’s acquiring the ability to reason responsibly about the many sides of these many-sided questions. For this reason, liberal democracies depend on colleges and universities’ supplying their students a liberal education. Today’s educators could scarcely find a better way to begin to recover an understanding of the aim of a liberal education and their obligation to provide it than by studying John Stuart Mill’s Inaugural delivered to the University of St. Andrews in 1867 .

1 1 1 Derek Bok, who served as Harvard University president from 1971 to 1991 and has exercised a commanding position in American higher education for 35 years, has written the most authoritative recent book on the troubles that beset undergraduate education. Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (Princeton University Press, 2006 ) is in many ways illuminating. But there are bright lines that Bok, currently interim president at Harvard, cannot or will not permit himself to cross. He breezily dismisses charges leveled over the past 20 years, mainly by conservatives, most influentially by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind ( 1987 ), that the undergraduate curriculum lacks a unifying purpose, that intellectual standards have been allowed to deteriorate, that undergraduate education is increasingly oriented toward preparing students for jobs, and that faculty neglect students in favor of scholarship. Against the conservative critics, Bok assures us that he “find[s] good reason for the satisfaction of most alumni with their education.” Yet he undercuts his assurance by proceeding to describe an alarming array of failures in undergraduate education that belie alumni satisfaction and fit well with the conservatives’ critique: “Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, nontechnical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems” ( 1–8, 310–312 ). In response to these failings, Bok argues effectively that universities should “conduct useful studies to evaluate existing educational programs and assess new methods of instruction” ( 320 ). And he is right to insist on the need to improve the quality of teaching and learning on campus ( 324–325 ). But he provides no reason to believe that progress will be made without reforming the compassless curriculum and the politicized classroom.

2 2 Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges , 257. .

3 3 Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, eds., Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005 ), xi.

4 4 Bok contradicts himself on what can be learned about higher education from the opinions of students and parents. First, he asserts that undergraduate education can’t be as bad as the critics contend because parents continue to pay the bills and students and graduates continue to express satisfaction with their college experience ( Our Underachieving Colleges , 7–8) . Then he subverts his defense of the status quo by acknowledging that students’ concerns about social and professional advancement deflect their attention from questions about the quality of the curriculum ( 26–27 , 36–37 ). Similarly, Bok mocks those who doubt that students are the best judges of the quality of their education and then endorses the proposition that they are not (compare 6–7 with 310–312 , 325–326 , 334 ). Concerning parents, Bok subsequently agrees that they are in a poor position to form a responsible opinion about the quality of their children’s college education: “The faculty’s reputation has far more to do with research than with education, since few people outside a campus have any idea how effectively its professors teach, let alone how much its students learn” ( Our Underachieving Colleges , 328).

5 5 On Liberty , in Essays on Politics and Society , J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1977 ), 252 .

6 6 The address appears in Essays on Equality, Law, and Education , J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1984 ).

7 7 This section draws on Peter Berkowitz, “When Liberalism Was Young,” Claremont Review of Books , Summer 2006 .

8 8 Both appear in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society , J.M. Robson, ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1969 ).

9 9 “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” a Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings (September 2006 ), 7–8 .

10 10 For a discussion of these and their limitations, see Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges , 255–280 .

11 11 See also Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges , 31–57, 313–320, 323–325, 334 . .

12 12 See also Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges , 335–343. .

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Liberal Arts Education, Going Global

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Kara A. Godwin 3

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Curriculum ; Education philosophy ; General education ; Interdisciplinary ; Liberal arts ; Liberal arts and science ; Liberal education ; Multidisciplinary

Liberal education is both a curriculum and an educational philosophy whose central tenet is to empower postsecondary learners with a mindset and skill set that enables them to be critical contributors to a complex, diverse, and changing society ( Association of American Colleges & Universities ; Godwin 2013 ). The common understanding of liberal education is bound by three fundamental components: liberal education is multidisciplinary; it has a “general education” component; and it strives to engender elemental skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis, communication, etc. (Godwin 2013 , 2017 ).

Introduction

Liberal education, also known as “general” or “liberal arts and sciences” education, is both a curriculum and an educational philosophy. Its central tenet is to empower learners with a mind and skill...

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Rothblatt, Sheldon. 2003. The living arts: Comparative and historical reflections on liberal education. The academy in transition . Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

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Godwin, K.A. (2020). Liberal Arts Education, Going Global. In: Teixeira, P.N., Shin, J.C. (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8905-9_219

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From On the Horizon, in the Carnegie Foundation’s “The Big Picture: Assessing the Future of Higher Education”

By Robert A. Scott, President, Adelphi University

From On the Horizon , in the Carnegie Foundation’s “ The Big Picture: Assessing the Future of Higher Education ”

Introduction

What is liberal education? What is liberal about a liberal education? Does this term suggest a political orientation? Can STEM education (science, technology, engineering and math), so encouraged by policy leaders, be a part of liberal education, and vice versa ?

I believe that undergraduate education is and must be as much about character and citizenship as it is about careers and commerce. In this essay, I will comment on ( i ) the philosophy of liberal education and its structure; ( ii ) the goal of general education in fulfilling the goals of liberal education; and ( iii ) four key elements. These four include the “liberating” aspects of liberal education; the need for an emphasis on questions more than on answers; the meaning of a global perspective; and the connections of each of the above to extra-curricular experiences and engaged citizenship.

The American Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC+U) describes liberal education as “an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity and change…” “It helps students develop a sense of social responsibility as well as strong and transferable intellectual skills such as communication, analytical and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in a real-world setting.” With a liberal education, “students can prepare for both responsible citizenship and a global economy by achieving the essential learning outcomes.” We will explore these outcomes.

The term liberal education describes a set of outcomes from college learning, no matter what the major course of study, and as AAC+U says, “general education is that part of a liberal education which provides a broad exposure to disciplines shared by all students, no matter what their major.”

Finally, I will discuss the value of liberal education in careers and in life, and the future of liberal education in a job-focused world that gives more value to what can be immediately counted and useful.

In addition to majoring in a subject, and in order to fulfill the purpose of a university education, undergraduate students must learn about and consider the natural world of air, water, and soil we meet upon birth; the world we make, including literature, history, business, architecture, and manufacturing; and the means by which we mediate between the world we meet and the world we make, including philosophy, ethics, religion, psychology, and stories of compassion. This is advanced education, a liberating education, a transformational experience of questions, not training focused on answers. This is the foundation of general education because, as James Baldwin said, we must find the questions hidden by answers.

There are those who argue for the “old-fashioned” liberal arts and sciences, the trivium and quadrivium of the ancients: language and reasoning, but updated to today’s needs. Still others argue that the best preparation is in a licensed field, such as accounting, nursing, teaching, or another field of study that leads to certification and a career. Both routes can be appropriate, but the optimum approach is to combine the two. Many universities do this by requiring even accounting and nursing students to take a substantial number of courses in what is called General Education, a contemporary approach to language and reasoning. Others encourage students in the arts and sciences to participate in internships and supplement classroom and laboratory work with community experiences.

One way to think about the question of what to study is to reflect on contemporary issues and ask what lessons have been learned. A quick survey of the past decade shows that too many people in even sophisticated roles lacked a knowledge of history, and did not have the personal or professional memory in which to place contemporary assumptions and assertions. This was particularly evident in certain fields where even seasoned experts forgot to take risk into account, or to question assumptions about risk.

Therefore, history is an essential subject if we are to know about the past and the foundations of the present, and to understand the different ways people “know” the truth, whether by evidence, by epiphany, by emotion, and how they challenge assumptions and validate assertions.

Imagination is also essential. The exercise of imagination permits us to see patterns, to see where they diverge and when they converge. It requires us to listen, to understand, to tolerate the silence and to comprehend before we respond. It seems clear now that even high profile people confronted new problems without seeing the connections between different variables, without visualizing or forecasting directions, without approaching issues with creativity. They had not developed the capacity to wonder, to imagine, to both look and to see. They could look and not perceive, hear and not know.

The third area to develop is that of compassion, the ability to be empathic. Compassion is the ability to listen, truly hear and comprehend another person’s perspective, and be fair and just, attributes often undermined by our systems of electronic connectivity. Empathy is the ability to put oneself into another’s position.

What is needed?

The skills and abilities needed in the world today are not only knowledge of balance sheets and how to analyze them, but also understanding the dynamics of cultures and how people interact. Too many adults seem to lack self-awareness and any preparation in critical reflection and thinking. The study of literature and history is designed to help us see the questions and assumptions so often hidden by answers, and develop a meaningful philosophy of life.

At a recent meeting of lawyers, physicians, bankers, accountants, and physical therapists, convened to help us at Adelphi do an even better job of preparing students for life after college, I asked about the attributes these alumni most desired in job applicants. I was surprised at how little emphasis was given to subject matter knowledge. This was taken for granted. Instead, they emphasized the ability to speak and write clearly and with persuasion, to listen with care, to be able to analyze questions and problems and propose alternative approaches to find solutions and solve problems, to work successfully in teams, to be adaptable and able to tolerate ambiguity, to be presentable in dress and demeanor, and to be able, as one person said, “to represent me in a meeting with others, including a diverse set of others.” Internships were suggested as ideal sources of preparation.

In fact, I advise students to study that for which they have a passion, and tell their parents that doing so is the best path for academic success. I then say that it is our responsibility as educators to provide opportunities for internships and other “real world” experiences beyond the classroom and lab to help ensure preparation for life after graduation.

Many academic programs tied to particular professions focus on “how to do” things — training — rather than on “how to analyze, comprehend, and communicate about” ideas — the purpose of education. They focus on how to engage in a transaction, whether a stock sale or a real estate acquisition, instead of on a transformation — i.e. finding a synthesis of existing ideas, or imagining new ones, and by elevating one’s thinking beyond the immediate to a more universal, purpose-guided level.

This more universal approach prepares students for a full, well-rounded life as a professional, citizen, and family member, and for work that has meaning and provides fulfillment. Using these thoughts as a guide, students and families should look at academic programs that have a strong grounding in the liberal arts and sciences, and that give the student an opportunity to master a subject matter to a sufficient degree to enter a profession either directly upon graduation, or after graduate school, and gain a network of fellow students and alumni who can become life-long links to careers and social life. They will be composing a life even as they prepare to earn a living.

A Liberal Education

A liberal education fosters the ability to distinguish between what is true and what is false, with a number of different analytical perspectives: the scientific, the artistic, the humanistic, the quantitative, and the qualitative. It helps students to appreciate that which is the best that has been thought and said, to recognize the true, the beautiful and the good, no matter the culture or time. It helps students understand that to measure something indicates it is valued, but that not everything of value can be measured. I call this a liberating education, liberating students from their provincial origins, no matter what their station in life.

This is a program for citizenship, a civic degree. It is liberal in its form of inquiry; it honors no revealed truth but intellectual growth. This curriculum is a preparation for living, for wondering why and reflecting on meaning. It purports not just to teach one how to earn a living, but how to live. It offers instruction and experience in both technique and vision.

Retired Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, a Medal of Honor winner and the man who organized American prisoner-of-war resistance during his nearly eight years in Hanoi prisons, expressed the major characteristics of what I call a civic degree by stating,

A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

This style of education has surprisingly diverse attributes. From it, students gain the confidence to take initiative, solve problems, and formulate ideas; they develop skills in language, learning, and leadership. They also learn about domestic and foreign culture, history, mathematics, science and technology. This approach emphasizes reasoning in different modes; clear and graceful expression in written, oral, and visual communication; organizational ability; tolerance and flexibility; creativity; and sensitivity to the concerns of others and to ethical and aesthetic values.

These are its aspirations: to teach the “ordinary” student to be a cultured person; to develop in students the capacity to check assumptions and to understand the value-laden choices that await them as consumers, decision-makers, and arbiters of ethical choices at home, at work, and at the ballot box; to help students understand and build a civilization compatible with the nature and aspirations of human beings and the limitations of the environment. These are ideals which are open to students of any age or station, and to any faculty; they are not the province of a particular department or school. The foundations for this form of study can be set in secondary school, but advanced instruction is necessary.

At most institutions, the Bachelor of Arts curriculum, and to a large extent, the Bachelor of Science curriculum, is organized structurally around a major course of study; cognates, or related courses; general education requirements designed to provide breadth and an introduction to the various departmental majors; and electives, choices drawn from almost any department as a matter of curiosity or interest. General education requirements are often fulfilled by the use of distribution requirements detailing a certain number of courses in certain areas of knowledge, such as arts and humanities, languages, mathematics and science, social science and history.

General Education

There have been many attempts to define the optimal freshman year and four-year General Education program. After years of experience and consideration, I have formulated my ideal approach. It would consist of three clusters of topics to be addressed in the first year of college study and then extended over the four years as part of the General Education curriculum.

The three clusters would include, first, “The World We Meet” upon birth, that is earth, air, and water, the natural world, including biology, chemistry, physics, and all else subsumed by these subjects.

A second cluster would address “The World We Make”, that is, culture and creative endeavors, and all that they include, especially history, literature, sociology, international relations, business, technology, manufacturing, economics, etc., all of which are products of human enterprise. This also would include an introduction to the different forms of scholarly endeavor, including discovery or pure basic research, applied research, integrative approaches combining the results of different fields, and pedagogy, that is, the improvement of teaching and learning.

The third cluster would include the systems of thought by which we mediate between the world we meet and the world we make. These include the methods by which we make moral choices, ethical decisions, general judgments, and compassionate responses, and all that informs them, such as philosophy, religion, and psychology.

By organizing the General Education curriculum around these three clusters, we would require extensive reading, writing, listening, and oral presentations, as well as the use of technology. This would help prepare students for all courses of study they would take in subsequent years, and the methods used, such as group work, thus fulfilling our pledge that while we cannot teach everything, we can prepare students to learn almost anything.

The cluster related to the natural world would include faculty in the sciences prepared for interdisciplinary teaching. Likewise, the cluster of courses related to culture would provide an interdisciplinary approach such as that developed by programs in International or Area Studies. Finally, the cluster related to mediation would call upon faculty in philosophy, ethics, and religious studies, and others who use literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives, depending upon their expertise and interest, to address questions of law, morality, and ethics, and how they differ in mediating values.

In each case, extracurricular clubs, organizations, teams, internships, voluntarism and service learning, on and off campus, provide opportunities to apply learning, learn from additional sources, and advance in knowledge, develop skills and abilities, and refine a set of values, even for students who must work or study part-time.

By organizing the curriculum in this way, we can reduce the effect of departmental and school silos, and encourage cross-disciplinary study, critical thinking and analysis, and a focus on writing. By the way, one of the complaints I hear from faculty is that they are not prepared to teach writing. To that I say, “don’t”. Teach thinking and then assess the ability of students to express their thoughts with clarity, comprehensiveness, persuasiveness, and logic. Doing this, focusing on thinking and the written and oral expression of thinking, will assist students in becoming better writers.

Such a curriculum must be designed; it cannot just happen. It is a means, and its ends, or purposes, must be considered as part of the basic design. As Raymond Loewy might say, simplicity must be foremost; humane values must transcend technological values; and democratic — nay, civic values must overcome the desire for exclusivity.

These are the benefits of an education that liberates students from their provincial origins, from prejudices masquerading as principles, no matter what their nationality, socioeconomic status, age, or religion. They, and we, grow up in mostly isolated, two-generation, mono-cultural communities, and have little experience with those some think of as the “other.” They lack a global perspective.

The goal for such a system is to introduce students to the broad range of the liberal arts and sciences, thus fulfilling the notion of breadth before a student focuses on a concentrated course of study, a major. While the goal may be to introduce students to varied forms of knowledge and varied modes of analysis, too often the introductory courses selected to fulfill general education requirements are the same courses used as the first step for the major, which often is designed as the preparation for graduate study in the field. In this way, a requirement intended to encourage breadth and thinking across disciplines can actually end up being overly focused and pre-professional, the opposite of liberal.

A Liberating Education

For liberal education is intended to encourage free inquiry about life and meaning through a variety of lenses, not expertise in a discipline as a first step. It is intended to prepare an articulate free person who can participate broadly in discussions. It focuses on questions and the pursuit of meaning rather than on professional, vocational, or technical subjects which focus on answers rather than on inquiry. A liberal arts education is designed to help the technical person identify a problem and consider how to approach a possible solution using the tools of the expert.

The liberal arts and sciences, then, indicate not only selected subjects but also an approach that encourages self-reflection and questioning rather than answers and mastery. This approach has been shown to be useful in all majors, including the professions, and is cited as valuable by business leaders and others.

Many colleges and universities structure their general education requirements so that they are fulfilled over a four-year period. They become a “signature” component of the institution’s identity for undergraduate education, although one that can be challenging if the institution enrolls many students as transfers from other colleges.

While the liberal arts are often associated with small colleges (which often are called “liberal arts colleges”, even when more students study marketing than mathematics or leadership than literature), they can be just as important and as vital at large research universities and two-year community colleges.

I think of this kind of undergraduate liberal education as consisting of words that begin with the letter “i”. These words are: inquisitive; interdisciplinary; international; and involvement.

By “inquisitive,” I mean of course questioning, a focus on questions. Remember the wise one, perhaps apocryphal, who asked the child upon returning home from school not, what did you learn today, but what questions did you ask today? We learn by asking as well as by doing.

By “interdisciplinary,” or integration, I mean how does our teaching and learning make connections across various categories of knowledge? While schools and colleges are organized around departments, we do not organize our brains this way. As professionals, when confronted with a puzzle or a problem, we do not metaphorically reach into a history “box” or a sociology “box.” Instead, we draw upon all that we know in an effortless, interdisciplinary, integrated method, often in teams. Since we think and act this way as professionals, we should teach our students in the way they will think and act.

By “international,” I mean thinking and reading beyond our national and natural borders. This is a true multicultural approach, for we and our students live in a world of many cultures not only in the news, but in our neighborhoods.

By “involvement,” I mean to suggest that learning is reinforced by doing. Involvement can be achieved through internships, study teams, voluntarism, or study “abroad” — whether in another country or another culture in our own country. This learning by doing is also called “experiential” learning, learning by experiencing.

Both liberal education and majors can be enhanced by “independent study” with a professor. In this way, students and faculty create their own course and class. Some students are able to develop this approach into a custom-designed major.

I am a strong advocate for liberal education. Unlike others, I believe the “liberal arts” are dead. On virtually all of our campuses, what we call the liberal arts excludes the sciences and is provided by 100-level courses designed as introductions to an academic major which is modeled as a stepping stone for an advanced degree in the discipline. To top it off, at many campuses these courses are taught by part-time instructors.

However, the origins of the liberal arts, the trivium and quadrivium, still have life. They organized the seven courses of study which served as the classical foundation for language and reasoning, the essential ingredients for individual freedom and liberty in any democracy at any time.

Therefore, I would return to these principles and formulate a “liberating” education based on mastery of language and reasoning. This education would help “liberate” students from their provincial origins and their limited view of humanity, including their own, without regard to age, station, or place. This liberation would be based on knowledge, skills, abilities, and values. Our focus on the international and intercultural, the interdisciplinary and the experiential, would support this goal.

A Global Perspective

Unfortunately, we have educators who believe that international and multicultural education are different arenas, for different populations. They believe that one is broadening and the other is parochial. They believe that these themes can be left to ad hoc individual faculty interests.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. These two themes are siblings in the same family, a part of the truth whose pursuit we espouse in our mission statements. They should be offered as partners, by design, as part of an institution’s priorities. The imperatives for international understanding, peace, economic competitiveness, and mutual environmental concerns, among others, assume a domestic stability based on respect for diversity within our borders as well as beyond them.

Many people, even educators, seem to think that “international” refers to “over there,” while “multicultural” refers to populations in our cities, both marginalized in the process. But the United States is part of the world — it is “over there” to our colleagues across both oceans — and we have a great diversity of ethnic, racial, and national groups in our midst. Indeed, this is our nation’s heritage.

One explanation for the lack of interchange between international and multicultural education may be related to their different inspirations and stages of development. International education, by and large, was the initiative of faculty, institutional leaders, national associations, federal programs, major foundations, and foreign governments. This relatively long-term base of support has been an important platform for recent efforts to make international education even more pervasive across the curriculum and extracurriculum.

In contrast, multicultural education is a more recent initiative which, by and large, has evolved from Black Studies programs created in the 1960’s after large numbers of black and other minority students were recruited to higher education. These and related programs of ethnic and women’s studies were added to institutions at the initiative — some would say insistence — of students, and did not have the benefit of a previous institutional base or a welcoming institutional attitude. Nor did they enjoy the extra-institutional bases of support available to international education.

However, as ethnic and women’s studies have developed, it is clear that the imperatives for their inclusion are as valid as for international education. After all, it is just as important for students to understand and be able to articulate the cultural diversity of American society as it is for them to appreciate and articulate the depths of diversity in other parts of the world. It is for these reasons that I refer to “global” or “intercultural” education, rather than strictly to international education or multicultural education. I believe that our goal is to enhance the abilities of all our students to learn and pursue truth on their own, and in groups, in an increasingly interdependent and intercultural world. To do this requires knowledge, skills, abilities, and values, including the ability to understand the “other” and to communicate with an “other.”

The need for such understanding seems self-evident. It is highly likely that our graduates – all of them – either will supervise or be supervised by someone of a different ethnic, national, or racial background. It is likely that the activities of their employers will be affected by suppliers, customers, or others who are of a different cultural background. In addition, it is likely that the neighbors of our graduates, or the schoolmates of their children, will be of a different heritage. That is, we expect that the lives of our graduates will be affected by our increasingly diverse society and interdependent world community. A simple review of economics and demographics makes this clear.

The objectives for global education were well expressed by the Atlantic Council in 1989:

To provide students with a sense of time and place
To challenge students to appreciate the complexity of issues and interests that bear on relations among nations, regions, and power groups
To prepare students to take account of the new and changing phenomena that affect international relations
To encourage critical thinking and inquiry about contending concepts and theories of international relations
To “de-parochialize” students’ perspectives on international affairs
To heighten understanding that international relations are not static, but subject to constant change 1

That is, our students should know and value other cultures, and be competent in communicating with other people.

It is important for people as citizens to be aware of international and intercultural differences and similarities because so many communities are home to new immigrants from other countries. Citizens cannot be fully responsible unless they are more knowledgeable about and sensitive to the differences in culture which are becoming so prominent in our communities and school populations in the realms of food, family life, public health, business practices, etc.

It is also essential that citizens be knowledgeable about philosophies undergirding the dominant religions and economic systems in the world. What is the diversity of thought within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions? What are the differences and contradictions between and among democracy, capitalism, socialism, and communism? These are essential elements to citizenship.

Most students will work with individual entrepreneurs, small business owners, and corporate executives either before or after they go to graduate school, if that is their goal. They will need access to timely and accurate information and high quality training for setting up business in other countries, selling to foreign markets, importing goods and materials, gaining access to foreign capital, and entering into joint ventures, both here and abroad, with international firms.

The imperatives for global education include issues of national security; peaceful, respectful relations between and among people and nations; economic competition and cooperation; environmental interdependence; diversity in our midst; foreign-owned employers; international trade and currency efforts; and graduates who will supervise or be supervised by people of different ethnic, national, or racial backgrounds. All neighborhoods are affected by international influences, including population, products, petroleum, prices, and peace.

Therefore, faculty need to know how to incorporate a crosscultural, international perspective in the curricula of virtually all subjects. This includes the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, business, other professions, etc. This is more than language competency, but also includes cultural awareness, social knowledge, geography, economics, and history.

Knowledge, skills, abilities, and values

The mission of every college or university should be to advance students’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and values for this new world. By “knowledge,” we refer to the content of general and specialized education, including knowledge to the point of competency of both one’s own culture and a culture other than one’s own, whether gained by formal instruction or by experience which is then assessed. In this way, students can learn about the commonalities between and among groups as well as the differences, just as the ancients did.

By “skills,” we refer to language, i.e. writing, listening, speech, and reading, as well as foreign languages, computation, collaboration, and the use of computers and other technological tools. By “abilities,” we refer to reasoning; formulating hypotheses; critical analysis; seeing connections between disparate events, ideas, and truths, which is the essence of interdisciplinarity; relating to others; imagining oneself as the “other” or imagining a problem in a totally new position; formulating alterative views; leadership; learning on one’s own and in groups; and developing natural talents. These skills and abilities are enhanced by our approach to education.

By “values,” we refer to inquisitiveness, a commitment to learning, teamwork, ethics, discipline, a philosophy of service to others, involvement as a citizen, a balance between material and non-material goals, caring for others, empathy, tolerance, and respect for diversity. This preparation, together with advanced knowledge, skills, and ability, is necessary for citizenship and lifelong learning in an increasingly interdependent and intercultural world.

While this curriculum must embrace all of the social sciences and humanities, as well as of the sciences and quantitative reasoning, I emphasize “culture” in this discussion because it is such an inclusive term. To ignore values and beliefs, customs and institutions, both over time and from place to place, and only to dwell on the unfortunate and painful aspects of the past of a people, is to make it seem as if human nature is the same everywhere, that only the form of “colonial rule” is different. 2 This is short-sighted. We must move beyond “correcting” history to comprehending and interpreting it. As Robin Lovin put it, “We cannot educate free people by disowning the past, but neither should we let the past own us.” 3

According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “the image of a constant human nature independent of time, place and circumstance, of studies and professions, transient fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion, that what (humans) are may be so entangled with where ( they are), who (they are), and what (they believe) that (their nature) is inseparable from them. It is precisely the consideration of such a possibility that led to the rise of the concept of culture and the decline of the (Enlightenment’s) view of (human nature) … (humanity) unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist, (and have) never existed,” says Geertz. 4 “This makes the drawing of a line between what is natural, universal, and constant … and what is conventional, local, and variable extraordinarily difficulty” to discern. 5 The conclusion is that humanity is as various in its “essence” as it is in its “expression.” And that goes for “us” as well as for “them.”

What seems clear as well is that while essence and expression vary widely across cultures, there are many commonalities as well — identification with a group, grounding in a place, acculturation of values and beliefs, and the need for respect, safety, and hope.

Unfortunately, the courses and activities called international education and multicultural education at many colleges seem to deny these conclusions. Instead of aiming to understand the essence as well as the expression of another people, commonalities as well as differences, even of those in our own communities, educators tend to deal in broad generalities and negative comparisons.

As I have said, I believe the goal of intercultural education should be for students to attain proficiency, mastery, or competence, however defined, in a culture other than their own. That is, through learning, experiencing, and communicating, students should attain and enhance the knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes necessary to discern and articulate the essence of another culture, in terms of economics, politics, literature, history, etc., as well as to recognize and explain its expression, and in deep ways to compare both to their own. To do so, they must attain at least the same level of understanding of their own culture, in order to be able to discern its essence as well as its expression, its commonalities and differences when compared to others.

But what do many colleges do? They provide a superficial survey of Western history and lump all of Women’s History to special programs in March and African-American heritage into a “Black Studies” course for the 28 days in February. They do the same with Latino heritage and Asian heritage, when they do anything at all. In so doing, they deny students the opportunity to know the rich diversity of cultures within the African, Latin, and Asian experiences. These educators meld dozens of different “essences’ into three forms of “expression.”

There are other serious educational consequences that result from these approaches. After all, our understanding of what we mean by international and multicultural education affects our thinking about the campus mission and about policies related to the curriculum, degree requirements, student and faculty recruitment and retention, affirmative action, and student, faculty, and staff orientation upon arrival at and departure from the college.

International or Multicultural?

It is for these reasons I say that colleges and universities which espouse international and multicultural education often ignore complex issues, including the fact that African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Latinos are not monolithic groups, as college programming often suggests; that relations between and among these groups, and between and among them and international students and faculty, are often complicated by prejudices brought to this country; that there are important lessons to be learned by studying ethnic or intergroup relations in other countries; and that the study of history in every case must include the trials and achievements of women.

Too many students think of Africa as a single nation instead of as a home of nations. Few students know of the African diaspora and the existence of African heritage in scores of countries. With so little understanding, how can they make sense of the term “African-American?”

The same can be said for Asian and Latino heritage and also for European history. Our students know so little, and often we are to blame. In our courses and in our celebrations, we must peel back the layers of meaning to reveal the richness of diversity.

We also are often to blame for our students’ ignorance because we organize our curricula and activities as if the international is bilateral: the U.S. and the Far East; the U.S. and Africa; the U.S. and Latin America, etc. We seem to forget — except in a few classes — that other nations have relations between and among themselves independent of the U.S.; that the geographic orientation of countries is not the same around the world (to wit, the Far East is not the far east from everyone’s perspective), and that inter-group relations forged elsewhere, especially when based on limited awareness and antagonism over scarce resources, may cause difficulties even in a third country.

The lessons to be learned by studying inter-group relations in other countries seem to be lost on our institutions. Clearly the relations between and among ethnic, national, and racial groups in our country can be illuminated by studying intergroup relations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America as well as in North America. But why is one the subject of international education, while the other is considered multicultural education? The international and the multicultural are threads in the same cloth. After all, what is multicultural to us is international to others. That is why we must understand ourselves to understand others.

In summary, I wish to emphasize three points drawn from these thoughts. First, as educators, we must ensure that our students understand the depths of diversity. They must know about commonalities as well as differences, values as well as practices.

Now, I understand that there are limits to what we can teach and what we can require. That is why I emphasize that our mission is to enhance the abilities of students to be reflective, to engage in critical thinking, to learn on their own and in groups. We can promise to prepare students to learn anything, but we cannot promise to teach them everything. Our goal should be for students to understand the “other,” any “other,” not attempt to offer courses in the extensive array of cultures represented throughout our world. Each college should decide on the limited number of particular cultures it will emphasize, given its heritage, location, and the demographics of its students, and use off-campus experiences to supplement the curriculum.

Second, we educators must ensure that our students understand and appreciate that they are the “other” to many in this world. They must know that we need to know ourselves — the history, literature, and heroes of the rich diversity of peoples who built our civilization, our institutions and our values — if we are to understand our commonalities and differences when compared to others. Without this knowledge of others and ourselves, we are left with ignorance: fertile ground for suspicion, fear, and prejudice.

Third, we educators must ensure that our students develop a level of competence in a culture other than their own. Only by knowing our own culture, by having an appreciation for “us”, and by having some degree of mastery of another culture, can one begin to put himself or herself in the boots or shoes or sandals of another. A superficial survey course cannot accomplish this. Not even proficiency in a foreign language studied in the best labs with the best teachers can assure this. And not all students can afford to study for a year in another country, or take the “Grand Tour” upon graduation.

Technology as Teacher

But all colleges can use three strategies to help students gain this knowledge. The first is through the curriculum, courses as well as requirements. The second is through experiences, periods of study and work in another cultural setting. Finally, telecommunications, especially videoconferencing, can be an inexpensive way to make it possible for students of all backgrounds to discuss similarities and differences with students, village officials, and educators in other settings.

Taken together, courses, lectures, field experiences, joint projects, and electronic meetings can help us and our students see that international and multicultural education are part of the same fabric, complementary measures to prepare graduates for an increasingly interconnected and intercultural world – here and there.

This is a good example of how technology can supplement what we can do in a classroom. As Robert Johnson, the president of Bowdoin College, said, “It is time to stop talking about replacing the traditional college experience with online learning, and to start talking about making that experience available to every enterprising individual. That means more than making it affordable, it means making higher education relevant, connected, and engaged with the changes that are sweeping our society … the revolution we need is the one that connects the best and brightest students from every level of our society to the immersive, nurturing environment of college campuses.” 6

This is an acknowledgement that the transformative, liberating experience so highly valued in undergraduate education requires a faculty member and a student engaged in learning. I call such an approach the “curriculum as a covenant”, general education as a commitment for a new age.

This commitment must include an introduction to the uses of technology, including online learning. This tool has utility in the classroom as a new source of supplementary expertise, just as now garnered from visitors, videos and visits to labs, concerts, museums, studios and factory sites. We can gain a “sage on the stage” through technology, but we do not give up our role as the essential “guide on the side” who is available for instruction and advising.

In addition, institutions of higher education must be ready to receive requests from current and prospective students for advanced placement and credit toward general education and major requirements for online courses taken elsewhere. They also should be prepared to offer advanced education and training to graduates no matter where they are located, taking advantage of alumni affinity and the technology platform that exists and is already used on campus.

This is another reason why we should be preparing students for the world they will enter upon graduation. We want them to study that for which they have a passion, as a “free” person, because this is most likely to lead to academic success; but then we must fulfill the obligation to support internships, service learning, and other engagements beyond the campus so that students are prepared for their next steps, whether employment or graduate school. These internships, if sufficiently long and demanding, foster learning by doing, learning from doing, and learning and doing in teams; and they can encourage a lifetime of involvement with the larger society.

After all, while our mission is certainly to prepare students for careers and commerce, it is also true that our vision is for the development of good character and the encouragement of engaged citizenship.

Finally, as a last effort to encourage readers to contemplate the essence of a liberal education, I offer a quote from a moving personal story by a profound professor of English, now deceased.

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.7

To me, this quote captures the meaning of liberal education.

1 Post World War II international Relations as a component of general education in American Colleges and Universities . The Atlantic Council of the United States, Washington, D.C., 1989, p.7

2 Geertz, Clifford. “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures . New York: Basic Books, p. 35.

3 Lovin, Robin M. “Must We Disown Our Past to Become A Multicultural Society?” Liberal Education , March/April, 1992, Vol. 78, No. 2, p. 8.

4 Geertz, p. 35.

5 Ibid. p. 36.

6 Johnson, Robert E. “Higher Education: The Revolution That Really Matters.” Huff Post, College, January 12, 2013.

7 Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 144.

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Redesigning Liberal Education

edited by William Moner, Phillip Motley, and Rebecca Pope-Ruark foreword by Michael S. Roth

Redesigning liberal education requires both pragmatic approaches to discover what works and radical visions of what is possible. The future of liberal education in the United States, in its current form, is fraught but full of possibility. Today's institutions are struggling to maintain viability, sustain revenue, and assert value in the face of rising costs. But we should not abandon the model of pragmatic liberal learning that has made America's colleges and universities the envy of the world. Instead, Redesigning Liberal Education argues, we owe it to students to reform liberal education in...

Written by experts in higher education, the book is organized into two sections. The first section focuses on innovations at 13 institutions: Brown University, College of the Holy Cross, Connecticut College, Elon University, Florida International University, George Mason University, Georgetown University, Lasell College, Northeastern University, Rollins College, Smith College, Susquehanna University, and the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Chapters about these institutions consider the vast spectrum of opportunities and challenges currently faced by students, faculty, staff, and administrators, while also offering "radical visions" of the future of liberal education in the United States. Accompanying vision chapters written by some of the foremost leaders in higher education touch on a wide array of subjects and themes, from artificial intelligence and machines to the role that human dispositions, mindsets, resilience, and time play in how we guide students to ideas for bringing playful concepts of creativity and openness into our work.

Ultimately, Redesigning Liberal Education reveals how humanizing forces, including critical thinking, collaboration, cross-cultural competencies, resilience, and empathy, can help drive our world. This uplifting collection is a celebration of the innovative work being done to achieve the promise of a valuable, engaging, and practical undergraduate liberal education.

Isis Artze-Vega, Denise S. Bartell, Randy Bass, John Bodinger de Uriarte, Laurie Ann Britt-Smith, Jacquelyn Dively Brown, Phillip M. Carter, Nancy L. Chick, Michael J. Daley, Maggie Debelius, Janelle Papay Decato, Peter Felten, Ashley Finley, Dennis A. Frey Jr., Chris W. Gallagher, Evan A. Gatti, Lisa Gring-Pemble, Kristína Moss Gudrún Gunnarsdóttir, Anthony Hatcher, Toni Strollo Holbrook, Derek Lackaff, Leo Lambert, Kristin Lange, Sherry Lee Linkon, Anne M. Magro, Maud S. Mandel, Jessica Metzler, Borjana Mikic, William Moner, Phillip Motley, Matthew Pavesich, Uta G. Poiger, Rebecca Pope-Ruark, Michael Reder, Michael S. Roth, Emily Russell, Heather Russell, Ann Schenk, Michael Shanks, Susan Rundell Singer, Andrea A. Sinn, Christina Smith, Allison K. Staudinger, William M. Sullivan, Connie Svabo, Meredith Twombly, Betsy Verhoeven, David J. Voelker, Scott Windham, Mary C. Wright, Catherine Zeek

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This book is a treasure trove of innovative institutional examples and forward thinking about ways to increase the relevance and value of liberal education for both students and society.

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A wide-ranging exploration of institutional and learning innovations, this is an illuminating study of how educators are transforming liberal education today. Even more importantly, it offers valuable perspectives on the future as liberal education must continue to evolve to meet the needs of learners in a rapidly changing world.

Redesigning Liberal Education explores the urgent question of how to give twenty-first-century students the sort of holistic, transformative learning they need and deserve. At once radically innovative and deeply grounded in the values of liberal learning, the collected case studies and essays offer a provocative, inspiring guide to the best possibilities of change.

Book Details

Foreword, by Michael S. Roth Acknowledgments Introduction. A Radical Vision for Redesigning Liberal Education William Moner, Phillip Motley, and Rebecca Pope-Ruark Part I. Case Studies Chapter 1. Problem-Focused Liberal Education in a First-Year Learning Community at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay Denise S. Bartell, Alison K. Staudinger, and David J. Voelker Chapter 2. Attending to Local Context, Culture, and Language at Florida International University Isis Artze-Vega, Phillip M. Carter, and Heather Russell Chapter 3. The Experiential Liberal Arts: An Integrative Model for Twenty-First-Century Education at Northeastern University Chris W. Gallagher and Uta G. Poiger Chapter 4. Creating Connections: An Intentional, Integrated Liberal Education at Connecticut College Michael Reder and Ann Schenk Chapter 5. Building a Developmental, Interdisciplinary General Education Curriculum for the Future: Foundations in the Liberal Arts at Rollins College Emily Russell, Susan Rundell Singer, and Toni Strollo Holbrook Chapter 6. Exploring the Borderlands: Using Interdisciplinarity to Build Civic Literacy at the College of the Holy Cross Laurie Ann Britt-Smith Chapter 7. Redesigning Learning through Multidisciplinary Teaching: Voices from a Sophomore Core Experience at Lasell University Michael J. Daley, Dennis A. Frey Jr., and Catherine Zeek Chapter 8. Intergenerational Partnerships to Support Liberal Learning Goals at Brown University Mary C. Wright, Maud S. Mandel, Jessica Metzler, and Christina Smith Chapter 9. The Design Thinking Initiative at Smith College Borjana Mikic Chapter 10. Immersive Learning in the Studio for Social Innovation at Elon University Rebecca Pope-Ruark, William Moner, and Phillip Motley Chapter 11. Failing Forward: Writing, Design, and Organic Curricular Change at Georgetown University Maggie Debelius, Sherry Lee Linkon, and Matthew Pavesich Chapter 12. Educating Business Leaders for a Better World at George Mason University Lisa Gring-Pemble, Anne M. Magro, and Jacquelyn Dively Brown Chapter 13. Educating for Global Civic Participation and a Career: German Studies in the Twenty-First Century at Elon University Scott Windham, Andrea A. Sinn, Kristin Lange, Derek Lackaff, Anthony Hatcher, Evan A. Gatti, and Janelle Papay Decato Chapter 14. Pursuing Major Passions: Innovative Minors That Blend Professional Skills and Liberal Education Values for Civic Pursuits at Susquehanna University John Bodinger de Uriarte and Betsy Verhoeven Part II. Visions for the Future of Liberal Education Chapter 15. The Future Has Gone Soft on Skills: Why Campuses Should Be Working Harder to Cement Personal and Social Development with Learning Ashley Finley Chapter 16. Can We Liberate Liberal Education? Randy Bass Chapter 17. Aligning Liberal Education for an Age of Inequality William M. Sullivan Chapter 18. Slow: Liberal Learning for and in a Fast-Paced World Nancy L. Chick and Peter Felten Chapter 19. Shifting Paradigms: College Admissions as a Lever for Systemic Change in Liberal Education Kristína Moss Gudrún Gunnarsdóttir and Meredith Twombly Chapter 20. Scholartistry: Creativity and the Future of the Liberal Arts Michael Shanks and Connie Svabo Afterword. The Age of Connectedness Leo Lambert Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Contributors Index

William Moner

Phillip motley.

Rebecca Pope-Ruark, PhD

Michael s. roth.

with Hopkins Press Books

Introduction: What was a liberal education?

An introduction to our special issue on education.

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The real difficulty in modern education lies in the fact that, despite all the fashionable talk about a new conservatism, even that minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude without which education is simply not possible is in our time extraordinarily hard to achieve. —Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

To be deceived about the truth of things and so to be in ignorance and error and to harbor untruth in the soul is a thing no one would consent to. —Socrates, in The Republic

“ Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” —The Dodo, in Alice in Wonderland

When I ponder the recent itinerary of education in this country—not just college education, but the whole shebang—I often think of that old advertisement for a brand of cigarettes designed to appeal especially to women: “You’ve come a long way, baby!” How right they were. But a distance traveled is not necessarily progress logged. It was not so long ago that Cardinal Newman’s enumeration of the goals of a liberal arts education in The Idea of a University could have been taken as a motto by the American academic establishment. Newman spoke of “a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life” as being the chief “objects of a University” education. Quite normal in the 1850s. But today? Or consider the observation made by the philosopher John Searle in the 1990s that “the idea that the curriculum should be converted to any partisan purposes is a perversion of the ideal of the university. The objective of converting the curriculum into an instrument of social transformation (leftist, rightist, centrist, or whatever) is the very opposite of higher education.” Until the day before yesterday, Searle’s warning was regarded as common sense. Now it is uncommon, and highly provocative, wisdom.

I am not suggesting that in the past our educational institutions always lived up to the ideal that Newman enunciated, or that they always avoided the perversion against which Professor Searle warned. But they aspired to. Indeed, until at least the early 1960s there was robust agreement about the intellectual and moral goals of a liberal arts education even if those goals seemed difficult to achieve. There was, for example, a shared commitment to the ideal of disinterested scholarship devoted to the preservation and transmission of knowledge—which meant the preservation and transmission of a civilization—pursued in a community free from ideological intimidation. If we inevitably fell short of the ideal, the ideal nevertheless continued to command respect and to exert a guiding influence.

The essays that follow provide a series of pathologist’s reports on contemporary liberal arts education in an age when traditional ideas about the civilizing nature and goals of education no longer enjoy widespread allegiance. It would be difficult to overstate the resulting intellectual and moral carnage. Everything about Newman’s description—from its lucid diction and lofty tone to its praise of the dispassionate cultivation of the intellect—is an object of derision in the academy today. Likewise, Professor Searle’s insistence that the curriculum not be reduced to a tool for partisan propaganda, “leftist, rightist, centrist, or whatever,” is now widely derided as hopelessly naïve or insidiously reactionary.

The truth is that despite widespread concern about the fate of higher education, and despite many and various efforts to call attention to and remedy the situation, the situation is in many ways far graver today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s when exotic phenomena such as Afrocentrism, “Postcolonial Studies,” Queer Theory, Critical Legal Studies, and the attack on science by so-called humanists were just beginning to gather steam. And despite the rise of alternative voices here and there, those dominating the discussion at most institutions are committed to discrediting the traditional humanistic ideals of liberal education by injecting politics into the heart of the educational enterprise.

Consider the phenomena of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. (I use scare quotes because what generally travels under the name of “multiculturalism” is really a form of monocultural animus directed against the dominant culture.) The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. Hence the sensitivity of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness. Multiculturalism is a paralyzing intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of ignorance and blighted good intentions. As the essay by Alan Charles Kors shows, the crucial thing to understand about multiculturalism is that, notwithstanding its emancipationist rhetoric, “multiculturalism” is not about recognizing genuine cultural diversity or encouraging pluralism. It is about undermining the priority of Western liberal values in our educational system and in society at large. In essence, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington has pointed out, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization. . . . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.” The most ironic aspect of this whole spectacle is that what appears to its adherents as bravely anti-Western is in fact part of the West’s long tradition of self-scrutiny. Indeed, criticism of the West has been a prominent ingredient in the West’s self-understanding at least since Socrates invited his fellow Athenians to debate with him about the nature of the good life. No civilization in history has been as consistently self-critical as the West.

Anti-Americanism occupies such a prominent place on the agenda of the culture wars precisely because the traditional values of American identity—articulated by the Founders and grounded in a commitment to individual liberty and public virtue—are deeply at odds with the radical, de-civilizing tenets of the “multiculturalist” enterprise of political correctness. A profound ignorance of the milestones of American (or any other) culture is one predictable result. The statistics have become proverbial. Huntington quotes one poll from the 1990s showing that while 90 percent of Ivy League students could identify Rosa Parks, only 25 percent could identify the author of the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” (Yes, it’s the Gettysburg Address.) In a 1999 survey, 40 percent of seniors at fifty-five top colleges could not say within half a century when the Civil War was fought. Another study found that more high school students knew who Harriet Tubman was than knew that Washington commanded the American army in the Revolution or that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.

Political correctness also fosters an atmosphere of intimidation and encourages slavish moral and intellectual conformity, attacking the very basis for the free exchange of ideas. Even worse, it encourages a kind of intellectual sentimentality that makes it difficult to acknowledge certain unpalatable realities—the reality, for example, that not all cultures, or indeed all individuals, are equal in terms of potential or accomplishment. It insinuates that “lie in the soul” Socrates warned about in The Republic . The consequence, as Charles Murray sets out in his essay below, is a species of educational “romanticism” that may be motivated by good intentions but has disastrous results.

It almost goes without saying that the tenured or soon-to-be-tenured radicals now controlling nearly all of the most prestigious humanities departments in this country reply that their critics have overstated the case. Really, they say, there is nothing amiss, nothing has happened that need concern parents, trustees, alumni, government, or private funding sources. On the issue of enforcing politically correct behavior on campus, for example, they will assure you that the whole thing has been overblown by “conservative” journalists who do not sufficiently admire Edward Said and cannot appreciate that the free exchange of ideas must sometimes be curtailed for the higher virtue of protecting the feelings of designated victim groups. And the curriculum, they will say, has not been politicized, it has merely been democratized: opened up to reflect the differing needs and standards of groups and ideas hitherto insufficiently represented in the academy.

The aim of such objections is not to enlighten or persuade but to intimidate and pre-empt criticism. The truth is that what we are facing today is nothing less than the destruction of the fundamental premises that underlie our conception both of liberal education and of a liberal democratic polity. Respect for rationality and the rights of the individual; a commitment to the ideals of disinterested criticism and color-blind justice; advancement according to merit, not according to sex, race, or ethnic origin: these quintessentially Western ideas are bedrocks of our political as well as our educational system. And they are precisely the ideas that are now under attack by bien pensants academics intoxicated by the coercive possibilities generated by their self-infatuating embrace of political correctness.

One of the most depressing features of the long-running epic saga called “educational reform” is how intractable the problems seem. A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay in these pages called “Retaking the University.” One thoughtful internet commentator responded with an alternative that I must have had somewhere in the back of my mind but had never articulated explicitly. This forthright chap began by recalling an article on military affairs that poked fun at yesterday’s conventional wisdom that high-tech gear would render tanks and old-fashioned armor obsolete. Whatever else the war in Iraq showed, he observed, such tried and true military hardware was anything but obsolete. The moral is: some armor is good, more armor is better. “It makes sense,” this fellow concluded, “to have some tanks handy.”

He then segued into my piece on the university, outlining some of the criticisms and recommendations I’d made. By and large, he agreed with the criticisms, but he found my recommendations much too tame. “Try as I might,” he wrote, “I just can’t see meaningful change of the academic monstrosity our universities have become issuing from faculties, parents, alumni, and trustees.” What was his alternative? In a word, “Tanks!” He called his plan Operation Academic Freedom. It has that virtue of forthright simplicity:

We round up every tank we can find that isn’t actually being used in Iraq or Afghanistan. Next, we conduct a nationwide Internet poll to determine which institutions need to be retaken first. . . .

The actual battle plan is pretty simple. We drive our tanks up to the front doors of the universities and start shooting. Timing is important. We’ll have to wait till 11 A.M. or so, or else there won’t be anyone in class. Ammunition is important. We’ll need lots and lots of it. The firing plan is to keep blasting until there’s nothing left but smoldering ruins. Then we go on to the next on the list. If the first target is Harvard, for example, we would move on from there to, say, Yale. So fuel will be important too. There’s going to be some long distance driving involved between engagements.

Well, perhaps we can call that Plan B, a handy expedient if other proposals don’t pan out. And there have, let’s face it, been plenty of other proposals. The task of reforming higher education has become a vibrant cottage industry, with think tanks, conferences, special programs, institutes, and initiatives cropping up like mushrooms after a rain. I think, for example, of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or Robert George’s Madison Center at Princeton University, which has become a model for many seeking institutional reform.

Naturally, many of these initiatives tend to run into stiff resistance. In his melancholy essay below, Robert Paquette tells the sorry tale of attempting to start an Alexander Hamilton Center, dedicated to “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism,” at Hamilton College in upstate New York. An obstreperous and politicized faculty intimidated a pusillanimous administration and the center had to be started off campus without college affiliation.

I applaud all of these initiatives. But I wonder what lasting effect they will have on the intellectual and moral life of the university. They are important in any event because, even if they remain relegated to the sidelines of academic life, they demonstrate that real alternatives to reflexive academic left-wingery are possible. I suspect, however, that they will remain minority enterprises, a handful of gadflies buzzing about the left-lunging behemoth that is contemporary academia. Why? There are several reasons.

One reason is that the left-wing monoculture is simply too deeply entrenched for these initiatives, laudable and necessary though they are, to make much difference. For the last few years, I have heard several commentators from sundry ideological points of view predict that the reign of political correctness and programmatic leftism on campus had peaked and was now about to recede. I wish I could share that optimism. I see no evidence of it. Sure, students are quiescent. But indifference is not instauration, and besides faculties nearly everywhere form a self-perpetuating closed shop.

Something similar can be said about the fashion of “theory”—all that anemic sex-in-the-head politicized gibberish dressed up in reader-proof “philosophical” prose. It is true that names like Derrida or Foucault no longer produce the frisson of excitement they once did. That is not because their “ideas” are widely disputed but rather because they are by now completely absorbed into the tissues of academic life. (The same thing happened with Freud a couple decades ago.)

A few years ago, The American Enterprise magazine created a small stir when it published “The Shame of America’s One-Party Campuses,” providing some statistical evidence to bolster what everyone already knew: that American colleges and universities were overwhelmingly left-wing. You know the story: out of 30 English professors at college X , 29 are left-leaning Democrats and one is an Independent while in the economics department of college Y , 33 profs are left-leaning Democrats and 1 is, or at least occasionally talks to, a Republican. Well, that’s all old hat now. A few months ago, the Yale Daily News ran a story revealing that faculty and staff at Yale this election cycle have contributed 45 times more to Democratic candidates than to Republications. “Most people in my department,” said the one doctor known to have contributed to Guiliani’s presidential campaign, “are slightly to the left of Joseph Stalin.”

The key issue, I hasten to add, is not partisan politics but rather the subordinating of intellectual life generally to non-intellectual, i.e., political imperatives. “The greatest danger,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote in “What are Universities For?,”

is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself. . . . The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.

Indeed, it is this failure—the colonization of intellectual life by politics—that stands behind and fuels the degradation of liberal education. The issue is not so much—or not only—the presence of bad politics as the absence of non-politics in the intellectual life of the university.

I used to think that appealing over the heads of the faculty to trustees, parents, alumni, and other concerned groups could make a difference. I have become increasingly less sanguine about that strategy. For one thing, it is extremely difficult to generate a sense of emergency such that those groups will actually take action, let alone maintain the sense of emergency such that an outburst of indignation will develop into a call for action.

What’s more, those groups are increasingly impotent. Time was when a prospective hiccup in the annual fund would send shivers down the spine of an anxious college president. These days, many colleges and universities are so rich that they can afford to cock a snook at parents and alumni. Forget about Harvard and its $30 billion, or Princeton, or Yale, or Stanford, or the other super-rich schools. Even many small colleges are sitting on huge fortunes.

Consider tiny Hamilton College again. When Hamilton tried to hire Susan Rosenberg, the former Weather Underground member whose 58-year sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office, I reported the fact in The Wall Street Journal . The story appeared on the day that Hamilton kicked off a capital campaign in New York. My article was highly critical, and it generated a lot of comment. Donations to Hamilton, I am told, simply dried up. But so what? The college sits on an endowment of some $700 million. That is more than half a billion dollars. So what if the Annual Fund is down a few million this year? Big deal. They can afford to hunker down and wait out the outcry.

Some observers believe that the university can not really be reformed until the current generation—the Sixties generation—retires. That’s another couple of decades, minimum. And don’t forget about the self-replicating engine that is tenure in which like begets like. Deep and lasting change in the university depends on deep and lasting change in the culture at large. Effecting that change is a tall order. Criticism, satire, and ridicule all have an important role to play, but the point is that such criticism, to be successful, depends upon possessing an alternative vision of the good.

Do we possess that alternative vision? I believe we do. We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn’t that complicated. It doesn’t take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is patience, candidness, and courage, moral virtues that are in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant. In large part, those who want to retake the university must devote themselves to a waiting game, capitalizing in the meanwhile on whatever opportunities present themselves. That is Plan A . Of course, it may fail; there are no guarantees. But in that case we can always avail ourselves of the more dramatic Plan B outlined above.

A MESSAGE FROM THE EDITORS

Support our crucial work and join us in strengthening the bonds of civilization., your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries..

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion , Volume 26 Number 9, on page 4

https://newcriterion.com/article/introduction-what-was-a-liberal-education/

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12 Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education prepares students to examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, adapt, and collaborate.

January 17, 2020

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Liberal Arts. The term itself conjures up a wide range of definitions - ask 20 people what it means and you’re likely to get 20 different responses.

For some, the term “liberal” is a roadblock they can’t get past. Which is unfortunate, because although it includes the word, not all liberal arts students are liberal in their political views. Some are. Others are ultra-conservative. The rest fall somewhere in between. A liberal arts education is not rooted in politics, but rather the desire to broaden the mind.

Of course, there are others who zero in on the term “arts” and assume that a liberal arts education excludes STEM and business fields. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Naturally fine arts, including music and theatre, play a major role in a liberal arts education. But so do science, math and computer sciences and many others. In fact, plenty of tech industry leaders have been quoted touting the benefits of a liberal arts education. Turns out developers that can code AND have an eye for visual details – or engineers that can analyze data from multiple points of view – are much better positioned to truly innovate and create real change in their industry.

Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education prepares students to examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, adapt, and collaborate. By combining multiple disciplines of study, liberal arts colleges expose students to a wide range of subjects, encouraging them to think outside a narrow focus and contribute to original solutions – all skills that are highly valued by top employers.

To help outline some of the pros of attending a liberal arts school, here is a list of 12 benefits of a liberal arts education:

1). Interdisciplinary approach to learning – A liberal arts education intentionally integrates different areas of study, exposing students to a wide range of subjects. Business majors will have classes in the arts, while pre-med majors may get a taste of sociology. This broad education prepares students to succeed in whatever career they choose. People that can view things from multiple perspectives, no matter their field, provide greater value to employers.

2). Relatively small size – The majority of liberal arts colleges are small, at least in in comparison to major public universities. In addition to creating a more intimate, “family” feel of camaraderie on campus, the smaller size creates multiple opportunities for personalized, individual learning experiences.

3). Get to know faculty – The professors not only get to know their students’ names, but their strengths, challenges and passions. They provide mentorship in a way faculty at larger institutions can’t always offer due to the sheer volume of students.

4). Interactive classes – The classes at liberal arts colleges provide a huge benefit. Rather than massive lecture halls with 200+ half-dozing students, students are more likely to find themselves in a small, interactive environment. A low student-faculty ratio and small class size allows for deeper connections and true learning. Student engagement is expected and questions are encouraged.

5). Exposure to cool things – Students are constantly exposed to interesting ideas, creative concepts and new experiences. Whether it’s studying abroad, community engaged learning or conducting peer-reviewed research with a professor (an experience often reserved for graduate work at other schools), students continuously have the opportunity to explore, take risks and try new things.

6). Teaches critical & innovative thinking skills – Through intentional experience and exposure, liberal arts colleges provide students with the all-important problem-solving and critical thinking skills. They focus on how to think, not what to think. Instead of memorizing facts and then forgetting the information at the end of the semester, students learn to examine, think and connect ideas. These valuable skills, practiced and reiterated throughout the entire college experience, are the skills necessary to innovate and create meaningful change in the world.

7). Strong alumni – Liberal arts colleges tend to have very active and involved alumni. While on campus students build lifelong friendships, and they continue to remain involved as mentors, donors and school supporters throughout their careers and life.

8). Financial Aid Opportunities – Liberal arts colleges often have generous financial aid options available for students.

9). Post-Graduation Jobs - Liberal arts colleges have some of the very best job placement rates, and for good reason. Graduates leave armed with the skills that employers value most – critical thinking, communication and the ability to view ideas from multiple perspectives. Best of all, they actively contribute to developing real solutions to real problems.

10). Graduate Program Acceptance - The idea that liberal arts are too, well, “arty” to be taken seriously is long gone. Today liberal arts have higher than average numbers of graduates being accepted into top graduate schools including medical school, law school, vet school and engineering programs. Why? Because the best schools know that liberal arts students are prepared to think, create, connect and come up with original solutions.

11). Prepares for Jobs Yet to be Created - Perhaps this should have been first on the list, because it’s arguably the most important. Not only do liberal arts colleges prepare students for their first job out of college, but they prepare them for future jobs that aren’t even jobs yet! It’s eye-opening to realize that according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 65% of current students will eventually be employed in jobs that have yet to be created , and 40% of current jobs will soon be a thing of the past. In twenty-five years, many of today’s college students will be in their mid-40s, working in jobs or fields that don’t yet exist. What is going to help them succeed in an ever-changing world? The ability to think, create, collaborate and adapt. These are classic liberal arts skills.

12). Social Responsibility – With an emphasis on civic responsibility and opportunities for community engagement, liberal arts students spend more volunteer hours than those at public universities. They open their eyes to the world around them, and how certain actions affect others. Whether it’s a service trip abroad during spring break or a class project working with a local non-profit, liberal arts students are engaged and committed to making the world a better place.

If you’re considering attending a liberal arts college, it pays to do your research and truly think about the relevant skills for the future. Not just your first job out of college, but the one you’ll have 20 years from now. Ask employers what they look for in employees, or what the most valuable skills are. The list often includes transferable skills such as the ability to collaborate, view things from multiple perspectives, adapt to changing demands and analyze and interpret data.

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EXPLORE SOUTHWESTERN

Higher Education Needs More Socrates and Plato

An illustration of a student looking in a book and seeing himself.

By Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Harun Küçük

Dr. Emanuel and Dr. Küçük are on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Emanuel is a professor and the vice provost for global initiatives and Dr. Küçük is an associate professor of the history and sociology of science.

The right attacks colleges and universities as leftist and woke. Progressives castigate them as perpetuating patriarchy and white privilege. The burdens of these culture war assaults are compounded by parents worried that the exorbitant costs of higher education aren’t worth it.

No wonder Americans’ faith in universities is at a low. Only 36 percent of Americans have confidence in higher education, according to a survey by Gallup last year, a significant drop from eight years ago. And this was before colleges and universities across the country were swept up in a wave of protests and counter-protests over the war in Gaza.

But the problems facing American higher education are not just the protests and culture war attacks on diversity, course content, speech and speakers. The problem is that higher education is fundamentally misunderstood. In response, colleges and universities must reassert the liberal arts ideals that have made them great but that have been slipping away.

By liberal arts, we mean a broad-based education that aspires to send out into society an educated citizenry prepared to make its way responsibly in an ever-more complex and divided world. We worry that at many schools, students can fulfill all or most of their general education requirements and take any number of electives without having had a single meaningful discussion that is relevant to one’s political life as a citizen.

Over the past century, what made American higher education the best in the world is not its superiority in career training, but educating students for democratic citizenship, cultivating critical thinking and contributing to the personal growth of its students through self-creation. To revive American higher education, we need to reinvigorate these roots.

In Europe and many countries elsewhere, colleges and universities have undergraduates specialize from Day 1, focusing on developing area-specific skills and knowledge. College students are trained to become doctors, lawyers or experts in international relations, English literature or computer science.

In the United States, European-style specialization for medical, legal, business or public policy careers is the purpose of post-collegiate professional schools. Traditionally, the American college has been about imparting a liberal arts education, emphasizing reasoning and problem solving. Those enduring skills are the critical ingredients for flourishing companies and countries.

Historically, students arriving on American college campuses spent a majority of their first two years taking classes outside their projected majors. This exposed them to a common curriculum that had them engage with thoughtful writings of the past to develop the skills and capacity to form sound, independent judgments.

Over the past half century, American colleges and universities have moved away from this ideal , becoming less confident in their ability to educate students for democratic citizenship. This has led to a decline in their commitment to the liberal arts, a trend underscored in the results last year of a survey of chief academic officers at American colleges and universities by Inside Higher Ed. Nearly two-thirds agreed that liberal arts education was in decline, and well over half felt that politicians, college presidents and university boards were increasingly unsympathetic to the liberal arts.

Today, there is almost no emphasis on shared courses among majors that explore and debate big questions about the meaning of equality, justice, patriotism, personal obligations, civic responsibility and the purpose of a human life. Majors that once required only eight or 10 courses now require 14 or more, and students are increasingly double majoring — all of which crowds out a liberal arts education. Ambitious students eager to land a prestigious consulting, finance or tech job will find it too easy to brush aside courses in the arts, humanities and social and natural sciences — the core of a liberal education.

The devaluing of the first two years of a shared liberal arts education has shortchanged our students and our nation. Educating young adults to be citizens is why the first two years of college still matter.

To that end, the so-called Great Books have long been the preferred way to foster citizenship. This approach is not, contrary to critics on the left and right, about sanctifying specific texts for veneration or a mechanism for heritage transmission.

Books by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman as well as Wollstonecraft, Austen, Woolf, Baldwin, Hurston and Orwell are worthy of introductory collegiate courses for students of all majors. These writers address the fundamental questions of human life. They explore the ideas of self-determination, friendship, virtue, equality, democracy and religious toleration and race that we have all been shaped by.

As students address those big questions, the Great Books authors provide a road map as they challenge and criticize one another and the conventional wisdom of the past. The Socrates of Plato’s dialogues is the exemplar — asking about beliefs and then subjecting them to respectful but critical analysis and skepticism.

These books are best studied in small seminar discussions, which model and inculcate in students democratic behavior. This discourse is an antidote to the grandstanding in today’s media and social media.

The teacher is less an expert in specific writers and more a role model for intellectual curiosity, asking probing questions, offering critical analyses and seeking deeper understanding. In an idealized Socratic fashion, these discussions require listening at length and speaking briefly and, most important, being willing to go where the argument leads.

Parents who are paying for college might question the value of spending $80,000 a year so that their son or daughter can read Plato, Hobbes and Thoreau instead of studying molecular biology or machine learning. But discussing life’s big value questions in seminars gives students personal engagement with professors that can never be reproduced in large lecture halls. Discussions among students on their deepest thoughts cultivates curiosity and empathy, and forges bonds of friendship important for citizenship and fulfilling lives.

Although we like to set ourselves apart from the past by appeals to modernity, the fundamental questions that we find ourselves asking are not always modern, and the latest answer is not always right. But how would you know how to think beyond the readily presented check boxes if you haven’t done the work of laying things out and putting them back together for yourself?

War was no less a concern for Thucydides, Tacitus and Thoreau than it is today. Discussing Great Books allows students to gain distance from the daily noise and allows their reason to roam free among principles and foundations rather than becoming absorbed in contemporary events. Our biggest problems are often best addressed not by leaning in but by stepping away to reflect on enduring perspectives.

Liberal arts education is not value neutral. That is why it is indispensable today. Freedom of thought, critical reasoning, empathy for others and respectful disagreement are paramount for a flourishing democratic society. Without them, we get the unreasoned condemnations so pervasive in today’s malignant public discourse. With them, we have a hope of furthering the shared governance that is vital to America’s pluralistic society.

Ezekiel Emanuel and Harun Küçük are on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Emanuel is a professor and the vice provost for global initiatives and Dr. Küçük is an associate professor of the history and sociology of science.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Education behind bars

First cohort of incarcerated students get Black Studies certificate

by Cristina Rojas May 24th 2024 Share

A man preparing to read a poem, while a woman looks on. Photos projected on the screen behind them.

For Theron Hall, the Portland State certificate means more to him than just a piece of paper. It means that he has worth. That he’s more than his gang past and the crime that landed him in prison as an 18-year-old more than 20 years ago. That he’s more than his disciplinary history.

He says he never saw himself as someone who could go to college. And yet here he is, with 16 college credits to his name. It’s something he’s proud to share with his nephew and niece.

“I set a standard for myself,” says Hall. “I rose to a level of new potential and I can’t make excuses anymore.”

Hall and 15 other incarcerated students at Oregon State Penitentiary make up the first cohort — on or off-campus — to complete coursework toward the revamped certificate in Black Studies as part of a partnership between PSU’s Black Studies department, the Higher Education in Prison program, Uhuru Sasa, a Black cultural group inside the prison, and the Oregon Department of Corrections.

In 2023, Black Studies revised its certificate, reducing the number of credits from 36 to 16 to make it more accessible to more students, including incarcerated students. The hope is that an early sense of accomplishment will encourage certificate students to continue on to a major or minor in Black Studies.

“If we want to change the environment in here and in our community, this is what we need,” said Dwayne McClinton, president of Uhuru Sasa. “We need more education. This can help transform minds.”

The men were celebrated April 9 at a ceremony inside the Salem prison that featured spoken-word poetry and testimonials about the impact the classes have had on them. They received a certificate of course completion and a copy of “Freedom Dreams” by Robin D.G. Kelley.

Black Studies Prof. Walidah Imarisha has been leading the efforts to offer a degree in Black Studies to incarcerated students.

Family of students seated, listening to poem. One woman is holding phone up on a video call.

Family members on a video call with Dwayne McClinton and other incarcerated students so they could join the event.

Kay Johnson was one of the students in PSU's Project Rebound, which supports students returning to the community from incarceration, to take photos of the locations that inside students chose for their narratives.

Profs. Lisa Bates, left, and Walidah Imarisha co-taught "Memory and Place in Black Portland" inside Oregon State Penitentiary.

Man looking at presentation, woman in foreground

Prof. Ryan Petteway, a poet and assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, also co-taught the class.

Man smiles, looking down as he reads poem

Kenny Hamilton served as the community liaison with the Uhuru Sasa and Project Rebound students.

Group of students, faculty and family members involved in project

Faculty, Project Rebound students and family members of incarcerated students pose in front of the photovoice project.

A DREAM COME TRUE

The effort has been years in the making with Walidah Imarisha, an associate professor of Black Studies, leading the way. Imarisha has volunteered with Uhuru Sasa for more than a decade and several years ago, the club leadership approached her to teach a Black culture workshop at the penitentiary. She worked closely with them to build a curriculum that met their needs and interests, and offered the first class during summer 2019.

Imarisha intended to offer it again the following year, but COVID had other plans as Oregon prisons were closed to visitors and volunteers for more than two years. By the time they reopened, Imarisha had rejoined Black Studies as a full-time faculty member and director of its Center for Black Studies.

Imarisha says it’s been her dream for Black Studies to be able to offer degree programs for incarcerated students. She didn’t think it would come together as quickly as it has but she credits the tireless dedication and energy of Deb Arthur and Nahlee Suvanvej from PSU’s Higher Education in Prison program and Sam Wilson, who until recently served as the coordinator of Project Rebound, PSU’s re-entry program. HEP has provided degree paths to students at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility since 2019. This was their first foray into the maximum-security Oregon State Penitentiary — and it won’t be the last.

Now that federal Pell grants have been reinstated for incarcerated students, HEP is facilitating the PSU admissions process for all the students so they can matriculate and officially be awarded the certificate — the first cohort in HEP to earn a credential.

“Let this achievement be the indicator of many accomplishments to come,” Suvanvej said.

TAPPING INTO THEIR POTENTIAL

For the last year, Imarisha has made the trek to Salem on Saturdays for the early 7:15 a.m. class start time. She taught four courses: Introduction to Black Studies; History of the Black Panther Movement; Memory and Place in Black Portland co-taught with Professors Lisa Bates and Ryan Petteway; and Afro-Futurism/Black Science Fiction.

Imarisha said the students are some of the most engaged she’s ever had the pleasure of teaching in her career — they read everything closely and often connect materials from one week to another, and engage in discussions so deep that they run out of time.

“I’m proud beyond words about what you’ve all accomplished and getting to say I’m your professor and you’re my students,” she told them.

Bates, a professor of urban studies and planning and Black Studies, says the class energized her and made her a better educator.

“What you as students have created was a level of intellectual and creative inquiry more than I could have imagined,” she said.

Final projects have included a zine that showcased Black culture and a photovoice project exploring Portland’s history of Black placemaking . For many of the students, this was the first time they were learning about Black history and contextualizing it within their own experiences, identities and communities.

Stressla Johnson, the cohort’s oldest student at 67, says it was refreshing to learn the truth and not a watered-down version. He proudly showed off his poster that connected slave ship roots to the Black Panther Party and the future of the struggle, what he calls the “unfinished revolution.” He’s become a mentor to the younger students, and began hosting weekly study and discussion sessions.

“It’s never too late to educate yourself,” he said, adding that he reads all the time now. “Spend your time doing something of worth, of value. We want to build assets to go back out into the community.”

community impact

Nevada Department of Education Nevada Department of Education

Office of Teaching and Learning
Academic Course Catalog

Introduction

NV School Courses is cataloged based on the SCED System. The goal is to:

Facilitate Student Record Exchanges - Ensuring transcripts are equivalent across the state.
Develop Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems - Ability to maintain and compare data from diverse systems without compromising data integrity.
Standardizing Reporting - Ensuring comparable accountability reporting across the state.
Facilitating Research - Identifying trends in course-taking and students’ access to educational experiences.
Managing Teacher Assignments - Strategically using data to optimize organizational capacity and increase learning opportunities.

The course catalog is integrated into the district’s Student information System (SIS) called Infinite Campus. The approval of this course catalog with it’s SCED Code is through the Infinite Campus Governing Board who is composed of the SIS administrators and curriculum directors, IC representatives, and Nevada Department Education. The district’s Infinite Campus opens and closes the courses for enrollment every school. District’s Course offerings are based on what IC have in their system.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) establish the SCED Code and is updated periodically. Nevada adopted its classification system in its course catalog. The current version is 11. Each time there is an update from NCES, there are new courses added to their classification and some minor changes. This triggers a need to patch the current School Information System (SIS) or Infinite Campus, and an opportunity to update the Nevada Specific Courses.

The content description, course level, credit, sequence, and instructional delivery of the new and old courses are then examined by the Office of Teaching and Learning at the Nevada Department of Education.
Then sent to Infinite Campus Governing Board (ICGB) for technical and input from districts and approval.
The Approved Course Catalog are patched into the SIS of every district.
The Nevada Department of Education Published the Course Catalog.

How to interpret the SCED Code?

Figure 1 below shows the SCED Code parts. The first two characters indicates the Course Subject Area. The third to fifth characters indicates the Course Number. The sixth character is a letter that indicates the Course level. The seventh to tenth character indicates either Available Credits (9-12 grades) or Grade Span (PK-8th grade). The eleventh and twelfth indicates the Sequence of Course. Lastly, the thirteenth indicates the Instructional Delivery Mode. Here’s a link for more information about SCED Code.

Figure 1. SCED Code Parts Illustrated what each character means.

The table below shows the different options and definitions on what the SCED Code Part should be depending on the course being identified.

Table 1. Different options for the different SCED Code parts.

Education Programs Professional Office of Teaching & Learning

SAIN Support Helpdesk

Assessments, Data, & Accountability Management (ADAM) Nevada Department of Education https://ndoesupport.freshservice.com/home

Links to the Course Catalog version 11 approved 04/19/2024 by Content Area

test title English Language Arts (ELA)
test title Mathematics
test title Science
test title Social Studies and History
test title Computer Science
test title World Languages
test title Fine Arts
test title Physical Education
test title Health Education

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Introduction

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The goal of this book is to develop a coherent liberal political theory of children's education provision. This goal is motivated by three observations: although people's intuitions about liberalism already guide their approach to education policy, their intuitions (and hence their policy stances) are often wrong; in liberal states, liberal political principles should and do have important ramifications for education policy; and educational outcomes have important ramifications for the health and preservation of the liberal polity. The book does not justify liberalism's value—instead takes that as given—but it does address the relationship between formal schooling and other forms of education, as well as discusses the difference between liberal and democratic theories of education.

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Clarence Thomas criticizes Brown v. Board of Education. It comes at an awkward moment

WASHINGTON − Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week criticized a piece of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision s that made racial segregation in schools illegal in arguing that courts should get out of the business of deciding if congressional maps discriminate against Black people.

His charge came just a week after the 70 th anniversary of the landmark case.

Thomas said the Supreme Court took a “boundless view of equitable remedies” when it told schools in 1955 how they needed to comply with the initial 1954 decision .

That may have justified temporary measures to overcome the schools’ widespread resistance, Thomas wrote. But it’s not backed up by the Constitution or by the nation’s “history and tradition.”

Federal courts, he said, do not have “the flexible power to invent whatever new remedies may seem useful at the time.”

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Thomas made that case in arguing that courts have no role in deciding if congressional maps have been unfairly drawn to discriminate against Black people.

The court’s conservative majority dismissed a challenge to a South Carolina district that a civil rights group said had been drawn to limit the influence of Black voters.

Thomas agreed with that decision but separately argued courts don’t have the constitutional authority to get involved. He blamed the second Brown v. Board of Education decision – an attempt by the court to enforce the first ruling -- for starting such “extravagant uses of judicial power.”

Thomas has made similar points in the past. In a 1995 concurring opinion , Thomas wrote that the “extraordinary remedial measures” the court approved because of its impatience with the pace of desegregation and schools’ lack of good-faith effort should have been temporary and used only to overcome widespread resistance to following the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas takes aim at 'judicial power' in landmark Brown v Board of Education decision

Justice Clarence Thomas , in the court's latest decision upholding a GOP-drawn redistricting map in South Carolina, took aim at a key, decades-old civil rights decision, calling it an "extravagant [use] of judicial power."

On Thursday, the Supreme Court sided with the Republican-led South Carolina legislature after it was challenged for alleged racial gerrymandering in drawing new redistricting maps.

In a 6-3 decision , written by Justice Samuel Alito, the high court said that "a party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith."

In a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas wrote that the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education – written by his predecessor, Justice Thurgood Marshall – introduced an "extravagant [use] of judicial power."

LIBERAL JUSTICES EARN PRAISE FOR ‘INDEPENDENCE’ ON SUPREME COURT, BUT THOMAS TRULY STANDS ALONE, EXPERT SAYS

The Brown decision said that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, and overruled the "separate but equal" legal doctrine.

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Thomas, who grew up in the segregated South, has repeatedly stated that the Constitution prohibits race-based discrimination, regardless of the intent, and its devastating effects.

In the case last year banning affirmative action in college admissions, Thomas wrote a concurrence "to offer an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution" and to "clarify that all forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution; and to emphasize the pernicious effects of all such discrimination."

"Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments," he said. "What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything — good or bad — that happens in their lives."

In 1995, Thomas wrote a lone concurrence in the case of Adarand Constructors, Inc v. Peña , stating that the government’s "benign discrimination" that tries to help racial minorities who are "thought to be disadvantaged" is another form of invidious "racial discrimination, plain and simple."

Thomas' point in his concurrence in the case decided Thursday is that federal courts are not qualified to determine how voting maps are designed.

"The Constitution provides courts no power to draw districts, let alone any standards by which they can attempt to do so," he said.

"And, it does not authorize courts to engage in the race-based reasoning that has come to dominate our voting-rights precedents. It is well past time for the Court to return these political issues where they belong — the political branches," he said.

Thomas said that "the Court once recognized its limited equitable powers in this area." The federal courts have the power to grant either legal remedies, such as monetary damages, or equitable remedies, such as compelling or prohibiting a certain act.

"We previously acknowledged that ‘[o]f course no court can affirmatively re-map [a State’s] districts so as to bring them more in conformity with the standards of fairness for a representative system. At best we could only declare the existing electoral system invalid.’"

CLARENCE THOMAS SAYS HE RECEIVES 'NASTINESS' FROM CRITICS, DESCRIBES D.C. AS A 'HIDEOUS PLACE'

But he said that the Brown decision – which was decided 70 years ago almost to the day of Thomas' concurrence – introduced "[t]he view of equity required to justify a judicial mapdrawing power."

"The Court’s ‘impatience with the pace of desegregation’ caused by resistance to Brown v. Board of Education 'led us to approve…extraordinary remedial measures,'" he said.

Thomas explained that in the follow-up case to Brown, the Court considered "'the manner in which relief [was] to be accorded' for vindication of 'the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional."

"In doing so," Thomas wrote, "the Court took a boundless view of equitable remedies, describing equity as being ‘characterized by a practical flexibility in shaping its remedies and by a facility for adjusting and reconciling public and private needs.'"

"That understanding may have justified temporary measures to ‘overcome the widespread resistance to the dictates of the Constitution’ prevalent at that time, but, as a general matter, '[s]uch extravagant uses of judicial power are at odds with the history and tradition of the equity power and the Framers’ design,’" he said.

"Ultimately, to remedy racial gerrymandering or vote dilution, someone must draw a new map. I can find no explanation why that ‘someone’ can be a federal court [and not the state legislature]," he said.

JUSTICE THOMAS RAISED CRUCIAL QUESTION ABOUT LEGITIMACY OF SPECIAL COUNSEL'S PROSECUTION OF TRUMP

Thomas went on to say that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in redistricting matters "puts States in a lose-lose situation."

He referenced the Court's decision last term that ruled in favor of Black voters in Alabama challenging the state’s GOP-friendly congressional map, which the court's majority found to be likely in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race.

But Thomas and two of his colleagues dissented, saying, "The question presented is whether [Section 2] of the Act, as amended, requires the State of Alabama to intentionally redraw its long-standing congressional districts so that Black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the Black share of the State’s population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it."

Thomas, in his concurrence Thursday, argued that, "Taken together, our precedents stand for the rule that States must consider race just enough in drawing districts."

"And, what ‘just enough’ means depends on a federal court’s answers to judicially unanswerable questions about the proper way to apply the State’s traditional districting principles, or about the groupwide preferences of racial minorities in the State," he said.

"There is no density of minority voters that this Court’s jurisprudence cannot turn into a constitutional controversy. We have extracted years of litigation from every districting cycle, with little to show for it. The Court’s involvement in congressional districting is unjustified and counterproductive," he concluded.

Original article source: Clarence Thomas takes aim at 'judicial power' in landmark Brown v Board of Education decision

Supreme Court by Justice Clarence Thomas Getty Images

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