I had an interesting conversation with some students the other day, while trying to get them to imagine what the phrase "liberal arts college" might mean -- aside from a basket-weaving school for Democrats, which is pretty much what it sounds like to most people. They made some good efforts, for example “a college where you study a little bit of a lot of things,” which I suppose is one way to get at the idea of becoming broadly educated. Others suggested that it has something to do with studying art and having an inclusive spirit – both good things in their own right, but not quite the liberal arts in the relevant sense. Consider the terms separately:
Liberal: “Liberal” here is not opposed to political conservatism, but is rather the opposite of (intellectual) slavery. Such an education, when successful, liberates you, especially your mind, to think, learn, inquire seriously for yourself, responsible to and (ideally) dependent on no authority but the truth and your own well-honed skills (discernment, attention, reasoning, intuition, imagination). This prepares you to figure out what you need to know to make a living, but more importantly it liberates you to be a free citizen, a participant in political and cultural deliberations, and a free creator of your own life.
Arts: These skills (discernment, attention, reasoning, intuition, imagination...), or rather these skills along with the disposition to deploy them regularly and wisely, are the “arts” in the liberal arts. So it's not the disciplines as such that define the arts, but the abilities and dispositions that the students acquire by engaging those disciplines (hence the importance not only of breadth – “studying a little bit of a lot of things” – but also depth, engaging one or more areas of study with intense scholarly rigor. [Incidentally this is what I see as the greatest potential of our honors program, insisting as it does that serious students to do deep, difficult work outside their departmental comfort zones.] Building lifelong habits of curiosity and rigorous inquiry is serious work, not mere dilettantism.
College: A college (Latin collegium) is not just a school but a council or community of equals -- colleagues -- pursuing shared goals in a context of mutual respect and trust. When this works as it should, the students and their professors become team members with a common objective, not pupils beholden to teachers for their pearls of wisdom and grades.
Putting this all together, we might describe a liberal arts college as, at root, a community for fostering the skills and habits of intellectual freedom. Not much of a bumper sticker, but it’s a place to start thinking about it.
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Exactly. Would be nice to see this sort of rigorous analysis of who we are/what we do published along side of our glossy admissions material.
To expand a little on the relation between the disciplines and earning a living: every student will eventually have to make her or his way in the world, and the breadth of education in the disciplines matters directly. No physician can afford to be without an understanding of literature, no computer programmer without an appreciation of and commitment to the performing arts (and so on – social workers need epistemology, novelists need calculus, carpenters need horticulture, engineers need political theory, biologists need ethics, homemakers need psychology…). The necessity for this has two bases. In the first place no-one is ever just a professional, but always also a citizen, traveler, consumer, neighbor, lover, gardener, or parent, and liberal education is for the whole person and the whole life, not just the worker while at the office. In the second place, genuine professionalism in any field needs constantly to be cross-fertilized and re-conceived from outside the box if it is to remain, or become, vital and responsible.
It is of course preposterous to imagine anyone acquiring a sophisticated understanding of all these areas of study in four or five years of college, indispensable though they all are. Hence my emphasis above on skills and dispositions in preference to disciplines. Ideally, one gets a enough of a taste of each cluster of skills, ideas, methods, and findings for a preliminary comprehension and to awaken curiosity, and one delves as deeply as possible into one or two, by way of honing the methods and patience for inquiry. We call graduation ‘commencement’ because, if we have done our job, it represents not the completion of learning but its inauguration, now reasonably well-equipped to move forward on its own.
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