If, as I asserted in my previous post, the study of the humanities—history, literature, philosophy—is vital for the repair of our decadent western society and for the reform of the church, how might one go about reclaiming its historic position at the core of a college or university curriculum?
Jennifer Frey defines the study of the liberal arts as “a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person and the cultivation of those capacities as it were for its own sake, because it is good and important to cultivate them because we’re human.” The problem, according to Frey, “is that we have lost our ability to understand the intrinsic value of engaging in that sort of self-cultivation.”
In a 2018 essay, “Higher Education Is Drowning in BS,” Christian Smith spreads the blame around. From his long list, which you should read if you can access the essay behind the Chronicle of Higher Education’s paywall, I mention two:
“BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity. … BS is the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the “practical” enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy.”
Smith attributes many of society’s ills to higher education’s BS problem:
“Ideas and their accompanying practices have consequences. What is formed in colleges and universities over decades shows up for better or worse in the character and quality of our public servants, political campaigns, public-policy debates, citizen participation, social capital, media programming, lower school education, consumer preferences, business ethics, entertainments, and much more. And the long-term corrosive effects on politics and culture can also be repaired only over the long term, if ever. There are no quick fixes here. So I do not speak in hyperbole by saying that our accumulated academic BS puts at risk decent civilization itself.
What is needed, Smith suggests, is a thorough-going clean-up operation:
“Many thoughtful people in higher education today are well aware of different piles of BS around them. Fewer seem to recognize the magnitude of the mounds of it that have accumulated and how badly they defile us. … In my view, genuinely positive changes in higher education, if they ever do happen, will have to combine some forms of visionary traditionalism and organizational radicalism. We will need people with the capacity to retrieve and revitalize the best of higher education’s past and restructure it organizationally in ways that are most effective in the future.”
Ben Sasse, echoing the sentiments in Smith’s essay, blames those responsible for teaching the liberal arts:
“So many universities have had liberal arts colleges captured by ideological activists that really only want to speak to eight or 10 or 17 other ideological activists …. Their power … is increasingly just to compel students to take their classes through the core curriculum. But the classes aren’t very good. They aren’t very big, they aren’t very rigorous. They aren’t big in terms of grand questions. They’re not trying to help people fall in love with the good, the true and the beautiful.”
William Deresiewicz suggests the answer is to recenter teaching at the core of the university’s mission:
“Most college teaching is mediocre at best and often far worse. … Under the research model, faculty are incentivized to do a single thing only: create knowledge. Publish or perish. When good teaching happens, it happens by accident, and often at a cost to one’s career. … [I]f general education is going to be resuscitated—and undergraduate education in general improved, and academia despised a little less—colleges and universities need to start seeing themselves, to an extent they never have before, as teaching institutions.”
There is reason for hope. Deresiewicz’s ideal appears already to exist at St. John’s College, an American liberal arts college that adopted a Great Books curriculum in 1937. I quote from a recent profile of St. John’s College published (behind a paywall) in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“The tiny campus offers only one undergraduate major. It has no cutting-edge disciplines or high-tech classrooms. In fact, none of the trappings of modern teaching exist here. Instead students make their way in tandem through a series of texts — most of them foundational to the disciplines — over four years together. The cornerstone is the annual seminar. But students also take four years of math, two of Greek, two of French, two of music, and three of science. St. John’s approach may be unfashionable, but the college has something that many envy: a student body that strives to grow intellectually, embraces ambiguity, and revels in deep reading"
“While there is a tenure process, there are no departments, electives, or expectations that faculty members conduct research …. Tutors [i.e., faculty members] are expected to teach all subjects at some point in their time at St. John’s. As a result, they are fellow learners — reading foundational works and teaching courses in sequence, just as their students take them. … Preparing for class is time-consuming because most subjects are outside tutors’ areas of expertise. Even if you taught the same course before ... you have to prepare as if you haven’t. Because classes are discussion driven, you don’t control where the conversation will go.”
The University of Tulsa honors college that Jennifer Frey helped create was envisaged as a “mini St. John’s.” According to Frey, the program “was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms.” It was also a financial and numerical success: “we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum” as well as “major financial gifts.” Unfortunately, the University of Tulsa’s new administration did not share her vision and the program was gutted two years after it got off the ground. Frey concludes:
“The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.”
Coda
(1) What about the cost? It is fair to say the voices I’ve been listening to on the liberal arts are insiders—liberal arts believers operating within or adjacent to the North American higher education system. And it is fair to wonder how much of the conversation about the importance of the liberal arts is self-serving or at least solipsistic. To take one example, the conversation tends not to talk about the financial cost of getting a traditional liberal arts education. Do conversation participants just assume that everyone (who matters) will go to college or university anyway?
(2) Keeping the Faith: I am a liberal arts believer. I am also, and more importantly, a Christian believer. Where can one go to get a solid liberal arts education that is not held hostage by ideologues or actively destructive to Christian faith?
(3) I note in passing that the Christian college where I teach has a fairly robust Arts & Science core, and offers a 4-year BA degree in English, a 3-year Bachelor in General Studies with a strong humanities emphasis, and a one-year certificate in Arts & Science. If you include Biblical Studies (my own field) and Theology, as I do, your liberal arts degree options increase, and the liberal arts core is strong indeed.
(4) The Liberal Arts and liberalism: You won’t find Briercrest advertising itself as a “liberal arts” college, partly because our constituency hears the word “liberal” and worries that the school has strayed from its evangelical Bible college roots. For the record, (a) “liberal arts” does not mean or require liberalism in any sense; (b) Briercrest has not abandoned small-e evangelicalism or its emphasis on the Bible and Christian ministry.
