I was speaking today with the head of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, who mentioned a widely perceived tension between the liberal arts (as traditionally conceived) and the professional training that MCLA offers in many of its programs. I vigorously reject the notion that these are in tension, reasoning in the following way:
By the liberal arts we mean, in the words of the Visitor in Plato’s Sophist, the habits, skills, and knowledge of free people. For people without trust funds who hope to remain free, such knowledge surely includes knowing how to make a living. Thus dispositions, skills, habits, and understanding useful for earning one’s keep, and for doing so with integrity, flexibility, imagination, and active concern for others, is wholly consistent with liberal learning properly understood, and in no way conflicts with serious scholarship or the love of learning for its own sake.
To take this one step further, it seems to me not only requisite that a public college of the liberal arts should engage students in conversation about earning their livings, but equally mandatory that it do so in the fullest possible context of history, economics, morality, literature, aesthetics, and other realms of discourse implicated in the struggle to live well – for how we make our livings is never wholly separate from what we make of our lives.
So we need to be bold, I think, in the ongoing re-visioning of our mission at MCLA. Instead of defensively coupling the traditional liberal arts with professional programs as though the two were uneasy bedfellows, we can imagine our role as helping every student discover a calling, and begin developing that calling into a creative and fulfilling life and career.
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4 comments:
I think what you are saying makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to know why professional training would be considered at odds with a traditional conception of liberal arts.
The above comment was from me. I was accidentally logged in as someone else.
I was invited to attend the student luncheon and meeting with the Commissioner of Higher Education and I also noticed the perceived tension between liberal arts and professional training. Like you I agree that this tension does not exist, and if anything, the collaboration between liberal arts and professional training only make us stronger as an institution. They do work hand-in-hand.
In talking to the Commissioner and his Deputy I did catch a line of though dealing with our reputation that did deeply disturb me. Before my college search in high school I did not know that MCLA existed, or where North Adams was for that matter. As an Admission Ambassador I know that this lack of knowledge about the college prevails, after all, it does take a little while to recover from a name change. Still, I just thought that we only had to get the word out; every tour is like a battle to inform the hearts and minds of prospective students about our school in a way that offsets things like our facility appearance and our perceived ‘middle of no-where’ location. However, after talking to the Commissioner and other students in our panel I discovered that MCLA does not just have a visibility problem, it also has a reputation problem.
Athletes told stories about how our sports teams are never taken seriously among other state schools. Other students talked of how their friends from home would brush off their college accomplishments under the reasoning that MCLA was ‘easy’. The Deputy Commissioner told us that the common idea in the legislator and in the general population is that State Colleges are in tier two compared to the state universities for competitiveness and degree value… putting MCLA precariously close to a grouping with community colleges. All the things that I was afraid of came out during our panel meeting.
In the end I realized what our reputation problem was: a lack of understanding of what liberal arts means. Of course every student on the panel knew what it meant, evidenced by all our varied, yet nonetheless accurate, descriptions under the Commissioner’s prodding. I believe that coming into the meeting the Commissioner himself did not know what liberal arts meant, and sadly that seems to be the prevalent theme throughout the rest of the state – including policy makers and prospective students. A liberal arts education at MCLA is deemed as ‘easy’ and ‘worthless’, which I find ironic because we are so close to, and so modeled after Williams College, one of the première private liberal arts colleges.
The Commissioner told us that he is committed to fixing our reputation problem. After telling him all about the many benefits of MCLA, primarily the opportunities available here, I think that he truly understood what we are about. However, fixing this problem is no easy task, and that is what distresses me. I totally believe in this school and I have experienced so many benefits. More than just worrying about the value of my degree, it hurts that my school is so devalued by others when I know their view is incorrect and uneducated. Still worse are the implications of such a reputation, such as a lack of funding and overall support from Boston. The Commissioner said that a new level of inter-connectedness between state colleges and MCLA could solve our reputation problem. Instead, I think that explaining liberal arts would be more useful, but I am unsure about the best way to do that. It certainly has to be more of an effort than our current, rather meaningless, branding.
The next topic brought up by the Commissioner was the proposal in the State to ‘truly’ unify and make more competitive on a common ground all of the state colleges under the name Universities of Massachusetts. I hope that this is not his solution to creating a stronger system of inter-connectedness between MCLA and other State institutions. According to the deputy, this new system would be similar to the higher education system employed by many other states. To me this would defeat the purpose of many institutions, particularly MCLA, and be a true stretch of the university definition. You can call a dog a cat, but it will still be a dog. If this is the Commissioner’s idea to change MCLA’s reputation, it would be very sad indeed.
After rambling about the details of our meeting, I agree with you that liberal arts and professional training go hand-in-hand, and our future success as an institution hinges on us effectively explaining that value. How independent we are to do that, and how much people in control actually desire to do that, is what scares me.
Once upon a time, liberal arts education -- and college in general -- was restricted to a very small slice of the population, mostly the wealthy. The leisure to study languages, history, the arts, philosophy, literature and the like was once thought impractical and unnecessary for those who had to work for a living, and generally presumed to be beyond their capacity in any case.
Now we think differently, and have widened access to college considerably. What we have not yet done well, however, is unify the skills and dispositions of a worker with those of a trained intellectual, and many colleges have little relationship between their professional schools and their traditional liberal arts disciplines.
There really is a gap to be bridged here, though we certainly can and should bridge it.
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