LiberalArtsOnline Volume 5, Number 7
July 2005
Take a moment to think about how higher education, especially liberal arts education, has changed during your time in the Academy. What will liberal arts education look like 20 years from now? George Allan, professor of philosophy emeritus and former dean of Dickinson College, surveyed four years of predictions and proposals in two prominent higher education publications to determine how people are talking about liberal arts education in the 21st century and what the future might have in store. Do you agree with what the authors said? Have you witnessed any of these changes on your campuses? If so, what impact have they had?
Several readers responded to my invitation last month and shared their thoughts on Bob Connor’s essay "Is Liberal Education Hypocritical?" We have posted their remarks on our website in order to continue the dialogue on this intriguing topic. I welcome your continued comments on this or other subjects discussed in LiberalArtsOnline.
--Kathleen S. Wise, Editor
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The Liberal Arts in the 21st Century, According to Change and Liberal Education
by George Allan
Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
Former Dean of the College (Provost)
Dickinson College
The waning years of the last century encouraged megareams and terabytes of speculation about what the new millennium had in store for the liberal arts. At this writing, we are five years into the 21st century, time enough to see how things are going. I’m interested not in what’s actually happening in higher education these days, but rather in what last century’s speculators are now saying. To find this information, I’ve browsed through copies of AAHE’s (American Association for Higher Education) Change Magazine and AAC&U’s (Association of American Colleges and Universities) Liberal Education published since January 2000. What follows is an interpretive summary of what I found.
Most of the authors seem to agree that we are living in a period of rapid change, indeed of accelerating change, and that higher education needs to adapt accordingly—rapidly, far faster and far more fundamentally than it ever has before. Ironically, however, there has been little adaptation over the last four years regarding what these changes should be or how they should be addressed. Even 9/11 proved to be only an occasion for reiterating previously articulated proposals. Perhaps the elapsed time is too short, perhaps the infamous unherdable recalcitrance of academe requires that diagnoses and remedies be constantly reiterated. Nonetheless, as my reading steadily advanced toward January 2004, the diagnoses and recommendations seemed increasingly to be the same old same old.
What the Authors Say
Innovation is good, according to most of the authors I surveyed. We need to draw new maps, find a new compass, fashion a New Ivory Tower, a New Academy. A new holistic vision is what colleges and universities need in order to transform themselves in this manner, one calling for imagination, creativity, boldness, and an entrepreneurial spirit. What’s bad, what needs to be jettisoned from our educational ideals and practices, is hanging onto the status quo, hugging tradition, engaging in timeless and irrelevant musings, taking as our educational gold standard the nostalgic ideal of a small residential college in a bucolic setting, organized in terms of traditional fields of study.
These writers envision the New Academy as requiring three interconnected reforms in the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. The first is to redesign academic programs so they emphasize democracy skills, developing in students an interest in the public good, equipping them with the tools they need in order to make a difference in their communities. Democratic citizenship is a task not a right, a moral call to civic engagement for the sake of meliorative ends. Although some authors only mention skills and attitudes, a few—notably the AAC&U president, Carol Schneider—insist that content knowledge is also important: studying American democracy "historically, cross-culturally, comparatively, prospectively," because understanding is the precondition for appropriate action.
The second reform that is key to the emergence of a New Academy is "education for pluralism," teaching students how to interact effectively in the pluralism of pluralistic contexts in which they dwell or unavoidably soon will dwell. "Diversity education" involves not merely a subject matter to be studied but relationships to be cultivated. This means diversifying an institution’s student body and faculty, and bringing students into sustained collaborative contact with people both on and off campus whose concerns are not only different than theirs but are often in conflict with them, thus building "coalitions across differences."
The third reform required is to make "global education" central to the undergraduate experience. This involves foreign language study, study abroad, and cross-cultural studies. As most authors interpret it, global education is diversity education on an international scale: learning to appreciate other cultures and the people who inhabit them, while also learning how to negotiate differences, how to cooperate with others for a common good.
These three reforms are interrelated; they are all facets of "border crossing." Prolific author Martha Nussbaum’s notion of "cosmopolitanism" is celebrated by many of the authors, with the added nuance that it be a rooted cosmopolitanism, one that takes seriously, "the reality of lives at a distance—without losing its moorings in family and local loves." Thus, being a patriotic American and being a citizen of the world are one and the same, for democracy means openness to difference, the United States is an ethnically pluralistic democracy, and the forces of globalization make it crucial that we find ways to connect with one another across national and cultural differences. Through the liberal arts, students should discover the liberating effect of "an education that opens up a worldview," one that clarifies their "place in a global community and commitment to a global common good."
Border crossing is a vivid image, and so it has become a portmanteau able to carry all sorts of novel ways of connecting. Authors capitalize on the metaphor to advocate interdisciplinary cooperation and the creation of "borderlands" where new miscegenated disciplines bloom. It is even used to characterize a curriculum with no distribution requirements or grades, because such a curriculum encourages productive conversations that cross back and forth among disciplines, fashioning a community of differences. Stepping across traditional boundaries is also the metaphor used with regard to distance learning, service learning, and other educational initiatives aimed at nontraditional students or occurring in nontraditional settings. Educational technologies are extolled for their "boundary-crossing capabilities." Something there is moving across today’s educational landscape that doesn’t love a wall.
These curricular innovations clearly need to be matched by complementary pedagogical innovations, and they are. Approaches to teaching suited to learning democracy, diversity, and globalization skills are described as learner-centered, hands-on, experiential, collaborative. They involve the formation of "learning communities" or "learning collaboratives." These are "intentional communities" formed for specific purposes, in which the perspectives and expertise of all the various participants are crucial to the success of the common endeavor. A significant number of the essays dealing with pedagogy are by cognitive psychologists who emphasize, in homage to Piaget and Perry, developmental stages of learning, often noting that student engagement is the key to student learning. If the campus ethos is supportive—caring, open, tolerant, nurturing—students will feel like they are part of that community and, invited to do so, will contribute to it, thereby becoming engaged in the community. Thus, in their development as persons, and upon graduation, they are prepared to be contributing, engaged citizens.
The emphasis on learning general skills tends to coalesce in the notion of literacy. Literacy is not taken in the traditional liberal arts sense, however, of familiarity with the great ideas of one’s culture. It is a matter of method, not content. Although a literal sense of literacy is implied, the orientation is toward metaphorical extensions of the notion: quantitative literacy or "numeracy," foreign language literacy or "linquacy," and information literacy or "new-media literacy." Composition courses, which are often discussed in Change and Liberal Education, are focused on developing communication skills. Teaching "e-communication" is said to be a neglected subject.
When literacy is fragmented into "literacies," competency-based education cannot be far behind, and, of course, it isn’t. Those who advocate a competency approach find it essential to the New Academy, for it allows educational institutions to be flexible and adaptive in the ways they must be to tailor their efforts to the specific services their students seek. This also meets the expectations of "stakeholders," those who pay for these students’ education: their parents, private benefactors, business and government contractors, and public taxing authorities. The "entrepreneurial university," also called the "proactive university," has restructured itself to serve this clientele. Its leaders understand the credits and credentials it provides as commodities traded in a global market, and its faculty as managed professionals hired as demand justifies to perform particular educational tasks. This "unbundling" of faculty work, this freeing of the university from having to pay for underutilized labor and unproductive overhead, is one of the efficiency strategies by which it is able to succeed in a competitive global economy while traditional schools, except for an elite few, flounder. The message to the left-behind departments, most of them in the humanities, is to either adapt by becoming entrepreneurial profit-making centers themselves or perish.
A number of authors, more of them writing for Liberal Education than for Change, deplore this "marketization of education." They warn against its reductive character, its implication that the subtleties of teaching and learning, of mentoring relationships and character development, can be measured by quantifiable outcomes. They speak of the soul of a college as the liberal arts; they speak of learning how to think or of achieving contemplative insight as the essence of education. Yet they offer no genuine resistance to the thrust of the New Academy, which redefines the liberal arts in terms of the skills it teaches or of the outcomes those skills manifest. One author distinguishes the liberal arts, which are "specific disciplines: the humanities, social sciences, sciences and their bodies of ‘texts,’" from liberal education, which is "an education that employs inquiry to develop complex intellectual skills and capacities through engagement with rich and challenging ideas across a range of subject matters." Any subject matter, then, any discipline, can be the source of a liberal education: it all depends on how it is taught.
Thus Carol Schneider, announcing AAC&U’s "Greater Expectations" initiative, calls for reforms that will ensure that students "experience a liberal education that develops their talents, expands their cultural horizons, and prepares them to navigate the world they inherit." She soon elaborates on this triad to indicate that developing students’ talents includes developing analytical and synthetic judgment, that their expanded horizons are imaginative as well as cultural, and that their preparation is not only to navigate their world but also to do socially useful work. Bridget Puzon, the Liberal Education editor, characterizes this approach as humane and holistic, and adds to the roster of outcomes "joy in life’s multifacetedness, and a passion for justice in care for the others who share our planet—and our neighborhood."
In the nearly 20 years since publishing Integrity in the College Curriculum, AAC&U has shifted its focus from disciplinary skills to citizenship skills, from nine basic methods for knowing to three or so basic ways of engaging the world. Integrity emphasized method in explicit rebuke of the Reagan-era National Endowment for the Humanities chairs, William Bennett and Lynn Cheney, who emphasized content, lists of specific books and specific ideas. But both approaches defined the liberal arts in terms of what should go on in classrooms and laboratories. Today the emphasis is on life beyond the walls of academe, acquiring the skills by which to navigate effectively in a complex world and to do so in a principled manner, for the sake of humane values that regard all human beings as equally precious and the development of their varied potentials for personal and communal fulfillment as the primary aim of a liberal arts education.
Response
Some fundamental goods have been lost in this abandonment of an education in Great Books and Great Methods for the sake of an education in Great Outcomes, but some important goods have also been gained. It is surely the task of the Great Conversation, which is the precondition for these other great tasks, to compare the losses and the gains in this shift of aims, to weigh their differing worth, to explore better ways for balancing their competing claims.
There is an obvious tension in the understanding of the New Academy as articulated in the essays I considered. It reflects a deep tension in American culture. We value democracy with its need for participatory involvement and the reconciliation of differences in a workable consensus—but we also value aggressively entrepreneurial leaders, self-made captains of their own destinies, whose initiatives are self-interested and unashamedly elitist. We recognize the need for a shared holistic vision, for leaders able to inspire us to serve a common good—but we favor processes tailored to the needs of specific individuals, favor therefore fragmenting client-oriented approaches. We celebrate global cosmopolitanism—but we also celebrate regional diversity and ethnic differences.
These are tensions worth confronting, a clash of seemingly incommensurable goods, which resist simplifying solutions. The Great Conversation in which we must participate is unlikely to reconcile these tensions. But, by respecting them, taking them seriously, we may well respond to these changing times in a constructive, worthwhile manner. The secret, I suspect, is to recognize, as Donald Levine puts it, that our traditions are generative. They should be neither frozen in the amber of some putative status quo nor tossed aside as worthless relics of an irrecoverable past. Our educational traditions, insofar as they are generative, are the resources by which the transformations called for can be brought about, the old vines the source of new wine, the New Academy actually a Renovated Academy.
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Declining by Degrees: Tell Us What You Think
Have you seen the recent PBS documentary "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk"? This program raised serious concerns about the state of higher education in the United States and prompted vigorous discussions on college campuses. The Center of Inquiry would like to know your thoughts about this documentary or the companion book of the same name. We will include selected readers’ comments in a future issue of LiberalArtsOnline focusing on "Declining by Degrees." Look here for more information about this program or for instructions on submitting responses.
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