Liberal arts fight to survive

Last month a special commission wrapped up the first national assessment of the liberal arts since 1980. It called a vibrant culture of liberal arts education "instrumental to understanding the past and the future," and recommended increased government funding for the humanities and social sciences.

The report to Congress couldn't come at a better time. Each year more students abandon the study of history, philosophy, English, and languages in favor of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, fields that they believe - rightly or wrongly - will offer them lucrative business, technology, and engineering jobs. Statistics show that nationwide, less than 8 percent of bachelor's degrees were awarded in the humanities in 2010, half as many as in 1966. In a report issued in June, Harvard University reported that last year, 18 percent of incoming freshman planned to concentrate on the humanities, compared with 27 percent a decade ago.

While enrollment in humanities programs has fluctuated several times since the 1940s, the current decline is playing out against a partisan backdrop - with attacks on the liberal arts coming from both ends of the political spectrum. Federal efforts to reform public education during the Obama administration have furthered the Bush legacy of delegitimizing the classical ideal of universal education, while forcing public schools that once made room for arts, music, and social studies to funnel their dwindling resources into standardized test preparation.

Meanwhile, liberal arts colleges continue to endure criticism from conservative scholars who argue that the field has been devalued by moral relativism and multiculturalism. The most resounding of these critiques came in April, when a National Association of Scholars report accused Maine's Bowdoin College of sabotaging the liberal arts by replacing reasoned argument with "illiberal dogma," and promoting a cafeteria curriculum where "any subject is as good as any other when it comes to learning how to think critically."

Lost in the noise is a conscientious discussion of what a modern liberal arts education should look like and why it still matters. While it is tempting to write off conservative criticism as narrow-minded Eurocentrism, it is not unreasonable to question the relevance of a body of study that has drifted so far from its classical foundations that a student can graduate with a liberal arts degree without ever having read The Republic. Likewise, it is fair to question what role the study of Medieval art and Enlightenment history has in a multiethnic, skills-based society where higher education is viewed more as a commodity than an end in itself.

It's hard to dismiss the argument that the curriculum has fallen prey to a postmodern affinity for deconstruction that has a tendency to discard the roots of the liberal arts tree in favor of an ever-increasing number of branches.

That being said, the core values advanced by a liberal arts education - self-reflection, the search for knowledge, and the pursuit of the "good life" - have always been progressive in nature, and, as humanistic pursuits, are immune to the vagaries of race, ethnicity, or sexual identity. The question is, can these values be properly ascertained without paying homage to the educational traditions that for centuries have enabled them to bear fruit? The answer is most likely yes, but I would argue that a better system for relaying them has yet to be devised.

I am joined in that belief by the Community College of Philadelphia (where 75 percent of the student body is black or Latino), which in the fall of 2009 expanded its honors curriculum into a degree program grounded in the classical liberal arts. Students spend at least two semesters in an interdisciplinary program of study on subjects including classical philosophy, rhetoric, law, history, and English. Professors rely on a foundation in the "Great Books" tradition to inspire critical thinking and intellectual vibrancy. The majority of honors students go on to four-year programs in a range of disciplines.

While the fields of science, mathematics, and technology are vital to ensuring American competitiveness, innovation is hollow without a keen understanding of why it is we innovate. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein noted that the value of a liberal arts education lies not in the learning of many facts but in "the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." Or, to put it another way, as the Italian humanist Vergerio observed six centuries before Einstein was born, the liberal studies are "those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which our minds are disposed toward the best things."

No matter what profession a student falls into post-graduation, having a mind thus disposed will only be an asset.