Executive Summary: Defining Liberal Arts Education

In this short paper, we will outline both the rationale for and the implications of our approach to understanding liberal arts education.

Terminology: The First Hurdle
For many, the terms "liberal arts education" or "liberal education" encompass all of the very best pedagogies, goals, and accomplishments in higher education. Although striving for the "best" is certainly a laudable goal for liberal arts education, we propose that a more precise definition of liberal arts education is needed if the term is to distinguish a certain form of education, as opposed to referring to any education that is good or has good components.

As a first step towards clarifying our discussion, we will use "liberal arts education" rather than the more popular "liberal education." We believe that "liberal education" points to so many different kinds of programs in higher education that, in our view at least, it points to nothing. We will take a different path and start with a small set of goals, and call the combined effect of these goals "liberal arts education." This will differentiate our work from the many different, and interesting, projects that focus on a much broader set of educational objectives. This is a purely practical move apart from the histories behind both terms.

Empirical Approach
One of our aims in this project is to expand the range and quality of the methodological tools that we will apply to the question, "What is a liberal arts education?" We will use both quantitative and qualitative research to bring together ideas that now often are separated in education research by disciplinary and epistemological boundaries, in order to develop and test a definition that captures the richness of many of the philosophical claims for the liberal arts.

Implications of adopting an empirical approach
We believe that adopting an empirical approach will shape our work in the following ways

(1) Our definition of liberal arts education will have to be falsifiable.
We must be sure to put our cherished ideas about liberal arts education at risk.

(2) Our definition, and our theories, will develop over time as we learn from our research.
This means that we will begin with a simple and necessarily imperfect definition and work from there. We will

1. identify goals of liberal arts education,
2. hypothesize the means by which those goals may be attained and what outcomes would constitute achievement of the goals,
3. use a diverse set of empirical methodologies to test those hypotheses,
4. consider how we should alter our definition in light of our findings, and
5. begin the cycle of testing again.

At the same time, we also will work with more open-ended, exploratory approaches to develop our understanding of other goals that might be included in our definition of liberal arts education.

(3) Quantitative data will be a necessary component of our assessment of liberal arts education.
We raise this point here not to exclude qualitative research, which will play an essential role in our work, but because we believe that many advocates of liberal arts education will be strongly opposed to the use of quantitative methods in our studies. While it is appropriate to raise concerns about whether we can develop quantitative measures that are sufficiently rich to capture some of the claims for liberal arts education, we do not believe this concern leads to the conclusion that we should not try.

(4) It is important to differentiate between liberal arts colleges and liberal arts education.
The term "liberal arts college" is used to refer to a particular kind of institution in higher education. However, we will start by examining institutional practices, cultures, and settings, and work towards determining if these correspond with current institutional designations.

(5) We have to limit the claims for liberal arts education.
It is much easier to think about, discuss, and ultimately promote the value of something that has sharp and distinguishing qualities.

Operational definition
In August 2002, we invited an elite group of educational researchers to discuss the current state of knowledge on the effectiveness of liberal arts education. Our participants argued that our understanding about the effects of liberal arts colleges and liberal arts education remains sketchy.
With that background, our first step is to develop, or at least make explicit, a theory of liberal arts education that we can use to guide our research. This provisional theory constitutes a first pass on the ends and means of liberal arts education, and will become more sophisticated as our work proceeds.

Theory of Liberal Arts Education
We'll hypothesize three "factors" or conditions that must co-exist to support liberal arts education. They are:

1. An institutional ethos and tradition that place a greater value on developing a set of intellectual arts than on developing professional or vocational skills.
   
2. Curricular and environmental structures that work in combination to create coherence and integrity in students' intellectual experiences.
   
3. An institutional ethos and tradition that place a strong value on student-student and student-faculty interactions both in and out of the classroom.

This three-factor theory will serve as our starting point both for our discussions and our research. We will, of course, be developing our ideas on each of these components as our work proceeds.

In the paper, we will describe some of our initial thoughts on the theory and each of the components. Read the full paper.