University Presidents-The Real Reason Liberal Arts Don't Matter

Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, posted an interesting editorial to CNN this weekend defending the preservation of liberal arts degrees in modern American higher education. Roth argues that the modern workplace demands the kind of convergence of disciplines and broad critical thinking only a liberal arts education can produce in a newly-minted American worker/intellectual. "We should think of education as a kind of intellectual cross-training that leads to many more things than at any one moment you could possibly know would be useful," Roth insists. As the president of one of the most distinguished liberal arts colleges in the country, Roth's argument is at once poignant, self-serving and vapid.

I have no problems with the importance and perceived benefits Roth bestows on a liberal arts education. It would be difficult for me to do so, receiving a great deal of my post-secondary training in the arts and "soft" sciences. The problem is with Roth's own colleagues, who he doesn't call out forcibly enough. In fact, he applauds members of his faculty for taking the initiative to establish chairs within their departments that laud their interdisciplinary achievements. This does not lead to the convergence of the problem-solving and analytic skills of English Lit courses invading the theoretical and scientific realms of Math and Science departments on college campuses. It allows the educators to believe they're preserving the ideals of a liberal arts education while encouraging the kind of specialization Roth argues is detrimental to the American education system.

In my second semester of undergraduate work at Belmont, I took part in what was called a "linked-cohort" class. In theory, these classes were supposed to link sub-fields that would ordinarily be thought of as the two poles of academic life. Chemistry and Political Science, Psychology and Art History, Biology and Religious Studies were linked together in ways that I suppose were meant to make administrators like Michael Roth feel like throwing a self-congratulatory knowledge party (I've been to a few of those, the dip sucks). The problem was, the students I knew always viewed the classes as a bit of a joke. No serious attempt was made by anyone to tie the concepts they learned in one class to another, and (more distressingly) none of the professors seemed too interested in that goal, either. The linked-cohort was something you begrudgingly fit into your schedule, completed, and then filed away somewhere near Pauly Shore movie trivia knowledge (I mean for a normal person, not for me where it's located directly adjacent to the mechanical motions of brushing one's teeth) for safe keeping.

Education is a service. It always has been, and it always will be. I'm not saying everyone should be a Faulkner scholar (mainly because forms at the DMV would be indecipherable if that were the case) nor should we all be automatons trained in one discipline. That's kind of what this blog is ultimately about. At the same time, university administrators should not pay lip service to the preservation of a liberal arts education if that's not what is demanded by their students. By ordaining a liberal arts education structure, college administrators make the decisions about what knowledge is necessary for their students. Isn't that the exact opposite of the goal of a liberal arts education in the first place?