Tag Archives: liberal arts

Liberal Arts Lamentations

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I teach at a smallish, private liberal arts university that’s $5m in debt. Our president has “resigned”. A special faculty committee has been formed to determine which programs and tenure-track or tenured faculty should be eliminated. The guess is 20-60 faculty will be let go in one year’s time.

I’m skeptical of our newest religion, data analytics, because I reject data’s omniscience. I’m partial to stories. Numbers can tell stories, but the emotionally rich stories that resonant most deeply with me are told with words, photographs, video, film, dialogue, music, and acting.

My university’s ability to turn things around is complicated by the resistance of Religion, Language, Music, Philosophy, Art, and English faculty to change. My militant liberal artist friends are struggling mightily to accept their declining influence. Here are just a few recent signs of their struggle:

• At Faculty Assembly, a faculty member stands and says, “Many people don’t realize it, but some departments aren’t nearly as productive as they once were.” A religion professor turns to his colleague, makes air quotes, and quietly and derisively mocks the speaker by repeating, “productive”.

• A faculty leader from the Religion department writes a letter to the Board informing them that they should hire an interim-President for two years, not the planned for one, so that the campus can spend two years on the search for the next president. Humanities faculty dominate the growing list of signatories.

• Following an administrator’s decision to cut one liberal arts department’s budget, the chair says, “Are we going to become a trade school?”

We are not going to become a trade school, but we are not immune to the disruption that’s riddling wide swaths of the economy. At the price families are paying, it’s understandable that they want a “return on their investment”. And yet, business phrases like “return on investment”, and “productive”, and “market forces”, really anything related to the business model, set my militant liberal artists friends’ heads spinning.

The MLA’s (pun-intended) are trusting that our University’s mission will save their bacon. And I’m confident the most economically successful departments will continue to subsidize some especially mission-critical academic majors and programs. But not nearly as many as in the past and not nearly as many as the MLA’s are hoping.

 

The Birds Have Flown the Coop

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With apologies to Adrian Peterson, Walter Mondale, and Prince, I’m really starting to hate Minnesota. Saturday it swallowed up Second Born. Now instead of aggravating us one minute and entertaining us the next, both our daughters are college students inside Minnesota’s borders. Now, the house seems too large for My Bethrothed, the Labradude, and my sad sack self.

I laid in bed too long on college move-in day, so after a 1 mile warm up, I decided to run a timed 5k on the school track. For those keeping score at home, Dave and Travis, after a 1 mile warmup I posted a 21:51, 7:10, 7:00, 6:51, :50. I had to hurry because the fam was loading up the college’s Zip Car with Target largess. Bright and early we drove to the dorm to meet the roommate, move-in, and start independent semi-adult life.

The roommate was nowhere to be found, the room was small even by college dorm standards, and it was hella hot and humid. When no one was looking, I slipped out, choosing instead to hang out in some shade in front of the dorm. It was a great perch from which to reflect on life changes while watching Second Born’s dormmates and their parents enter and exit with hands full.

I loved Knee High Black Socks neighbor’s look. Sun dress, knee high black socks, thickish glasses. A wonderful mix of independence and eccentricity. And then there was The Athlete, 6’2″, slender, perfect posture. She walked out, grabbed a road bike leaning against a Subaru, and took off. She returned five minutes later, tossed it back against the car and said to her family, “Okay, now I feel better.” The swim-bike-run sticker on the car made her my front runner for fav dormmate. Another had cross-country skis in her room, which puts her in the running too.

I was parent watching too. Amazing how all of the moms and dads looked so much older than me. The veggie burger and M&M cookies at lunch were great, the dean of student’s talk (“you can find it on the website”), not so much.

Who knew moving in was a marathon? I returned to my front porch perch and met Amy, one of Second Born’s Resident Assistants. Amy is a junior from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but she spent the summer as a counselor at a fine arts camp in Michigan (not the most prestigious one). She’s a music education major who plays the clarinet. Bright, personable, genuinely interested in Second Born and myself, a pure delight.

Eventually, I headed for the Den, the student lounge where I watched Premier League soccer with several loud 18 year olds. Always a trailblazer, once I broke The Den age barrier other sports-starved dads followed course. We outlasted the youth, as the defacto leader I commandeered the remote, and then switched to the US Open and college football.

Finally, the roommate arrived from forty minutes away. Nice family, positive first impression, a sigh of relief from SB.

A college official made us say goodbye at 4:45pm CST. Tears were shed.

Choosing a College 1

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My daughter, known as A or 16, is beginning her college search. This is the first of several posts on how to choose a college. I do not want to make A’s decision for her, I simply want to share one insider’s perspective and stimulate her thinking.

Suggestion one: compare and contrast general education programs and choose a school with a thematic, interdisciplinary oriented general education program. Ask yourself, “Is the logic of the general education program self apparent and engaging?” And ask people at the college, “Does the sum of the general education sequence equal more than the individual parts?”

Five, six winters ago, two friends and I headed to a telemarking ski clinic. Free the heel, free the mind.

Friend one is a doc, a general practitioner. Friend two is a scientist who leads Washington State’s response team whenever there’s an oil spill or other type of accident that has serious ecological consequences. His team works with the groups responsible for the accident to restore the damaged area to it’s original state.

On the way home, One reflected on the limits of his medical education. Specifically, he wish he had learned how to run a business since that had proven to be the most difficult aspect of creating a thriving clinic. Two regretted being dependent upon an anthropologist who helped his team interact more thoughtfully with native groups every time their land was threatened by oil spills and other accidents. He wished there had been a little anthropology somewhere within his doctoral science program.

Now I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret. Some of my colleagues, let’s call them the “militant liberal artists” believe strongly that academics must reject any and all references to business model thinking. If you were to ask them, doesn’t a faculty that charges $100 to $200k for four years have some responsibility to equip graduates with skills that will enable them to earn a livable wage, they’d say, not really.  They’d point out that the economy is in constant flux and the purpose of a liberal education is to think deeply about the human condition, to question the status quo, to develop self understanding, to self actualize. Let the job market take care of itself and let technical colleges focus on marketable skills.

Economics department and business school faculty tend to think very differently about the purposes of higher education which can make for depressing faculty meetings. The business model folks, let’s call them “the utilitarians”, tend to think about higher education as an investment that should pay tangible dividends including a good job, health care, and material well being.

One philosopher of ed captures the different orientations of the “militant liberal artists” and the “utilitarians” by distinguishing between “education for being” and “education for having.” Getting faculty with wildly contrasting orientations to agree on general education requirements is exceedingly difficult because the MLA’s (pun intended) believe literature, art, music, religion, history, philosophy, and languages are most important while the U’s emphasize math, the sciences, economics, and business.

In large part, that philosophical divide explains why so many general education programs lack coherence and fail to inspire. Most people don’t understand that they are compromises. Keep some modicum of faculty peace, take one of these, two of those, and one of these. Students mindlessly check off each requirement as they go and the sum rarely equals more than the parts.

When it comes to undergraduate education, I’m more MLA in orientation; when it comes to graduate education, I’m more sympathetic to the U’s.  

A higher education is not a mutual fund; consequently, I’m not terribly concerned with whether undergraduate students and their families feel they receive an adequate monetary return for their investment. In my view, the more important question is whether graduates have sufficient interdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and sensibilities to make a positive difference in their communities. 

What would happen if the MLA’s and the U’s made nice and designed a general education program in response to One’s and Two’s questions: How does one provide quality medical care in an economically viable way? And how does one protect ecologically sensitive environments in culturally sensitive ways? The answer to one is by melding science and business, and to two, by melding science, humanities, and social science content.

The gen ed status quo requires students to take eight separate requirements in five, six different areas, but in those programs faculty typically don’t even read one another’s syllabi so students are left to themselves to connect dots between courses.

So A, if your goal is to graduate with the knowledge, skills, and sensibilities to improve the actual quality of life of people, seek a school with a thoughtfully designed, engaging, thematic, interdisciplinary general education program.