LiberalArtsOnline Volume 4, Number 10
November 2004
This month’s author argues that the essence of the "Good Life" is not merely a topic for debate in an ethics class or late night discussion over a glass of wine. Instead, it is a critical component of liberal arts education and campus communities. As such, the author’s concept of the Good Life has implications for faculty and staff at liberal arts colleges. Reading this essay, I thought about the frequent inclusion of "preparing students for full and rewarding lives" as a goal in college mission statements. Although individuals will ultimately differ in their ideas about the nature of a rewarding life, institutions must be able to make some claim about its characteristics, in order to achieve this goal. What is your view of the Good Life and how does it impact your work? Does your institution promote a vision of the Good Life? I invite you to share your perspectives and experiences illustrating the affirmation of a vision of the Good Life on your campus.
--Kathleen S. Wise, Editor
------------------------------------
Liberal Education and the Good Life
by Jeffrey Nesteruk
Professor of Business Law
Franklin & Marshall College
As an ethicist, I’ve done my share of esoteric thinking about the nature of the "Good Life." But in my years of teaching at a liberal arts college, I’ve come to see how the issue is more than a technical problem indulged in by individuals with a philosophic bent. For those of us committed to liberal education, this classic philosophic problem has a particular practical significance. If liberal arts colleges are to meet the challenge of a highly commercialized educational environment, they must grapple anew with what it means to live well.
In an educational era driven by student choice and market demands, the coherency of the liberal arts curriculum is at risk. It is at risk because these external pressures push in multiple directions, limited only by the diversity of individual preferences. A curriculum fueled by this multiplicity of needs lacks philosophic coherence. It can be responsive without being responsible.
But it is crucial to recognize that these external pressures threaten more than the coherency of the liberal arts curriculum. Ultimately, they threaten the conception of community embodied in the aspirations of liberal arts colleges. Because the risk is to the kind of communities liberal arts colleges strive to be, an effective response involves more than curricular strategies, whether aimed at individual disciplines or general education. An effective response requires, most fundamentally, the affirmation of a distinctive vision of the Good Life.
In his discussion of community, philosopher Robert Solomon captures the special significance liberal arts colleges attribute to membership in their communities. "What it means to be part of a community," Solomon writes, "is something more than cooperation, something more than having something (‘a commons’) in common. It is, among other things, to identify yourself and your interests in and with the community. It is, simply, to become a different person." [1]
More than their professional counterparts, liberal arts colleges are communities that aspire to make those who choose to join them different persons. At their best, liberal arts colleges focus not only on the information and skills their students acquire, but the kind of individuals they become.
If liberal arts colleges are to be true to this goal, then the relationships they establish with students must be more than market transactions. This is because the essence of a market transaction is an exchange in which the character of its participants remains constant. The goal of a market exchange is the satisfaction of current preferences, not the transformation of those preferences through personal growth. Markets exist to give effect to a person’s choices rather than subject them to reflection and evaluation.
Nowadays, the greatest risk of reducing student to school relationships at liberal arts colleges to market transactions stems from the significant role these colleges play in pre-professional training. For many students, the attractiveness of liberal education today is the way it serves as a prerequisite to graduate degrees and professional success in such fields as law, business, and medicine. To be sure, a liberal arts education is excellent preparation for such fields. But when students see the value of liberal education only instrumentally, simply as a necessary means to larger professional ambitions, the college’s relationships with its students become merely market transactions. They serve solely to satisfy the preexisting preferences students bring to their college experience rather than to transform such preferences through this experience.
For the relationships at liberal arts colleges to be more than market transactions, they must be embedded in a community informed by a distinctive vision of the Good Life. This distinctive conception is one that sees the Good Life as more than simply the satisfaction of our desires—whatever they may be. It insists the Good Life involves a commitment to elevating our desires, to becoming more capable of desiring worthy things.
Of course, what is worthy—what is worth desiring—is not something a liberal arts community should authoritatively prescribe. Liberal arts colleges need only a robust conception of the Good Life as more than simply satisfying our desires, without a more substantive determination of its meaning. For the liberally educated, an integral part of the Good Life is reflecting (and conversing and arguing) about the nature of the Good Life, including that which is worth desiring.
Because communities animated by this distinctive vision are necessary for liberal education to address effectively its mission in our market-oriented society, faculty members at liberal arts colleges need to reorient the attention they have traditionally given to the curriculum. For those of us teaching at liberal arts colleges, the centrality of the curriculum derives from its role in providing students with a high-quality liberal education. But if the core of a liberal education is not the curriculum it offers, but the community in which it transpires, then there’s a need to attend more fully to the broader role of faculty members at liberal arts colleges.
At the most fundamental level, faculty members at liberal arts institutions are the caretakers of the kinds of communities their colleges become. If we wish liberal education to flourish in an era dominated by student choice and market demands, we need to be sure our caretaking involves more than simply satisfying student preferences. A central aspiration of liberal education is to foster the development of a distinctive kind of individual. If we are to continue to affirm this aspiration, we need to work to provide our students with ennobling relationships, communities in which they are capable of becoming their better selves.
The mark of such individuals is in their fundamental dispositions, their basic ways of being in the world. These dispositions include awareness of the needs of others, respect for their differences, recognition of the dignity of all, and engagement with the common good. These fundamental dispositions are virtues, in Aristotle’s sense of the term.
And as Aristotle taught us a long time ago, such virtues do not come to be in isolation, but only develop within communities. Social relationships serve to encourage some actions, discourage others. It is the actions encouraged that are more likely to develop into habits, which in turn contribute to the evolution of character.
Ennobling relationships—relationships that contribute positively to the evolution of character—are possible in a number of college programs. They often occur spontaneously in such traditional academic settings as athletic teams and theatrical productions. When thoughtfully pursued, they also can happen in more innovative venues, such as community-based learning courses and residentially structured seminars.
In each instance, the key is the creation of an immersion experience for the student. Such an experience calls upon the student to enter into a new set of social relationships and collaborate with others to achieve a demanding common goal. These demanding, collaborative settings promote the forging of relationships that inspire a deepening awareness of others’ needs, differences, dignity, and common aspirations. In this way, the experience helps to foster the development of the kind of individual that reflects the fundamental promise of liberal education.
There are no guarantees here, of course. While liberal arts colleges can create settings and foster relationships, students will in the end make their own decisions and chart their own destinies. Even when they make regrettable choices, this is as it should be. But during their college years, liberal arts institutions owe students the chance to participate in special communities, communities in which who they are becoming matters greatly. Such communities require a distinctive conception of the Good Life, one that recognizes the value of striving to desire worthy things.
Reference
Direct personal responses to jeff.nesteruk@fandm.edu.
---------------------------------------
The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.