LiberalArtsOnline Volume 5, Number 8
August 2005
Business and the liberal arts—some would say they’re like oil and water. Institutions frequently distinguish between liberal arts, pre-professional, and technical degrees, but how clear is this distinction really? A brief review of college websites reveals that some liberal arts institutions only mention business to explain why they do not offer pre-professional programs, while others offer business administration, accounting, and management majors, and sometimes even a combined BA/MBA degree. What can the liberal arts offer professional programs? Is a business program at a liberal arts college different from business programs elsewhere? Jeffrey Nesteruk, professor of legal studies at Franklin & Marshall College, addresses these questions as he describes his department’s recently redesigned business program and suggests ways institutions can successfully integrate liberal arts and professional education. Have you seen other programs that attempt to merge these two areas? Opportunities for liberal arts to enrich professional education may pop quickly to mind, but take a moment to also consider the issue from a different perspective—how might professional programs benefit liberal arts education? As always, I invite your thoughts on this subject.
--Kathleen S. Wise, Editor
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A Liberal Model for Professional Education
by Jeffrey Nesteruk
Professor of Legal Studies
Franklin & Marshall College
The future of professional education may depend on some decidedly "unprofessional" sources. In fact, the tradition of liberal learning offers unique opportunities for the renewal and enrichment of professional programs. Throughout my tenure as a business professor at Franklin & Marshall College, the possibilities for innovative business education at a top-notch liberal arts college have intrigued me. While many of my colleagues and I have long pursued these possibilities in our individual courses, the strictures of a conventional business curriculum limited us. Over the past few years, we’ve begun a new venture, reinventing ourselves as a department. In the process, our traditional business administration program developed into the Department of Business, Organizations, and Society, an innovative, broadly focused program exploring work, commerce, and organizations.
As the process is far from complete, I’m not sure what the future may hold. Doubtless, our new department will face challenges and transformations we don’t yet foresee. At this juncture, however, I do see some lessons not only for reforming business education, but also for rethinking professional education more generally. Many of us who value liberal education are sometimes uncomfortable with students’ current emphasis on vocational preparation and career advancement. But as the potential of our new department suggests, liberal education can occur even under the most professional of guises, if pursued creatively.
The reinvention of our department has its roots in a new model of integration for business and liberal education. This new model rejects a "bridging" notion of integration in favor of a "blending" concept as described in a recent issue of Liberal Education, where E. Byron Chew and Cecilia McInnis-Bowers call for "blending these domains, rather than bridging the phantom yet palpable chasm between" them. [1] Key to the blending idea is rethinking the bridging model’s underlying assumption of business and the liberal arts as two separate domains.
From my department’s efforts, I’ve come to believe the blending that Chew and McInnis-Bowers hope for requires more than tinkering with the practical aspects of courses. The blending they envision requires a distinctive philosophic conception of professional disciplines to develop fully within professional education. This involves seeing professional disciplines through a new lens, one with three notable features. The new lens must:
1. Reframe professional disciplines to enlarge their scope of inquiry.
Professional knowledge typically includes conceptual models, analytic tools, and specialized information drawn from more general liberal arts disciplines. Reframing professional knowledge in a way that exposes its roots in the more fundamental disciplines of liberal education brings into view its wider significance. The business discipline of marketing, for example, draws on the perspectives of psychology, anthropology, and sociology in constructing its theories. Framed broadly as a synthesis and extension of these three disciplines, a marketing course becomes more than training for a business career. It can provide significant contributions to liberal education, challenging students to think more deeply about motivations, behavior, and values in a highly commercialized culture.
2. Reconceptualize professional disciplines as area studies.
Exposing the roots of professional knowledge in the more fundamental disciplines of liberal education can reveal the rich multidisciplinary character of such knowledge. Professional disciplines are often more structurally akin to American studies than traditional liberal arts disciplines such as history or philosophy. This structural affinity between professional knowledge and area studies exists because both draw from multiple disciplinary frameworks to understand more focused domains of practical experience. American studies, for example, attempts to understand the dynamics of cultural identity. Similarly, marketing attempts to illuminate the dynamics of large-scale persuasion.
3. Approach professional disciplines from a critical perspective.
Vocationally-oriented courses often miss opportunities for liberal learning because they treat the conventional ends of their underlying professional disciplines as unquestioned assumptions rather than subjects for critical inquiry. If the end of the study of marketing is simply selling products, then provocative questions regarding commercial persuasion remain obscured. For example, are alternative ends for marketing possible? Should marketing, properly conceived, aim at, say, educating individuals or improving our quality of life? How would marketing so conceived affect its practices and values? What would then be its broader cultural impact? Raising such questions in a marketing course offers numerous possibilities for liberal learning, and they occur naturally once a critical perspective is brought to bear on the conventional end of the underlying professional discipline.
In the curriculum for our new Business, Organizations, and Society Department, we have attended to these three essential features in a number of ways. For example, the entry course to the new major is "Organizing in the 21st Century: Theories of Organization." In fundamental ways, this new course reframes the discipline of management to broaden its scope of inquiry. To quote the course catalogue directly, it:
Provides a broad study of the changing role, structure, functions, and practices of commerce, work, and organization, including trends in organizational strategy, structure, and how different institutional forms interact with and influence one another. Encourages students to explore the emergence of organizations as a means of coordinating work, market exchange, infrastructure, and sustainability.
As the catalogue language suggests, the premise of the course is that "the changing role, structure, functions, and practices of commerce, work, and organization" have helped to transform the general knowledge needed for acting in and reflecting upon today’s world. As increasingly large segments of our lives and society are permeated by organizational dynamics, managing such dynamics is more a part of one’s basic liberal education than simply a technical business field. Management as a discipline thus must evolve to reflect this broader focus.
We’ve also tried, in creating the new department, to be mindful of the ways in which business administration as a whole is a type of area studies. We’ve done this, for example, by including a depth requirement within the major. This encourages students to adopt a multidisciplinary focus, taking courses outside the department that link with and expand their professional interests. Thus, an individual aspiring to a career in international business might take a cluster of courses relating to the history, culture, and language of a particular region or country.
Finally, in a number of key areas, we’ve adopted a critical perspective in approaching professional disciplines. For example, a single new course, "Law, Ethics, and Society," has replaced our traditional business law classes. The richer, more integrative focus of the new course is designed to enable students to see business law doctrines as more than simply the means to facilitate business transactions. As this course’s catalogue description states:
This course will explore the nature of individual obligation and professional accountability in our complex, commercial society. We will begin by examining the minimal social expectations embodied in legal doctrines and principles. We will then turn to explore our broader social responsibilities by drawing upon the norms and values necessary for a vibrant civil society.
By drawing upon "the norms and values necessary for a vibrant civil society," the new course brings to bear a diverse set of perspectives on the rules of business law and thus enables the critical analysis of such prescriptions.
As a venture in progress, the ultimate value of our new Department of Business, Organizations, and Society still lies in its potential. From the steps we’ve taken so far, I can see the potential here is significant. Its value extends beyond business study, addressing our need for a richer conception of professional education. If we are willing to pursue the possibilities for liberal learning in professionally-oriented programs, we may discover that this blending can offer much to our students. In a world requiring broad integrative perspectives, cross-disciplinary training, and critical analysis, liberal education may be the key to professional success.
Reference
1. E. Byron Chew & Cecilia McInnis-Bowers. "Blending Liberal Arts and Business Education." Liberal Education, (Winter 2004) Vol. 90, No. 1, p. 56.
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Declining by Degrees: Tell Us What You Think
Does higher education need to reclaim a "social contract" with the public? The recent PBS documentary "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk" raised this and other questions about the state of higher education in this country, prompting vigorous discussions on college campuses. Did you see this documentary? What are your thoughts about the issues it raised? In a future issue of LiberalArtsOnline, we will publish reactions to the program and the companion book of the same name. To submit a response for consideration or for more information about "Declining by Degrees," review the information here.
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