How the Liberal Arts Work

Mickenberg, Julia; Mickenberg, Julia

This panel on “How the Liberal Arts Work” builds on the theme of “Working Conditions” to ask: in an era of neoliberal restructuring, political division, misinformation, rising costs, and skyrocketing student debt, how and why and when do the liberal arts “work”? College is variously seen as providing skills for the workplace, as a laboratory for democracy (i.e., teaching students to be citizens), and as a place where students can pursue learning for its own sake, in the process learning about themselves. The liberal arts constitute the acknowledged nucleus of college as an idea, if not statistically the source of the most majors. But how can college in general, let alone the liberal arts in particular, be all of these things to people? Indeed, liberal arts subjects have always been avowedly non-vocational in nature, teaching young people to “learn how to learn.” But even as early as the 1828 Yale report, institutions of higher education have felt the need to explain their resistance to a curriculum “better accommodated to the business character of the nation.” Common wisdom (and statistics) affirm that those with college degrees earn higher incomes: economists call this the “college dividend.” If one subscribes to the idea that the main reason to go to college is to get a high-paying job, it is easier to argue that non-vocational degrees –in literature or philosophy instead of engineering or business–are luxuries for elites. But as the Humanities Indicators Project and other studies have shown, students pursuing humanities and liberal arts degrees do tend to end up in financially and personally rewarding careers. They are also better prepared to weather changes: changes in the workplace and changes in the nature of work itself. Finally, they are more likely to be committed to the public good.

The papers on this panel take several new approaches: to how and why the liberal arts work, to the work liberal arts graduates do, and to the way that scholars, instructors, and university leaders work to foster habits of mind, social commitments, and ways of seeing the world that come from the liberal arts. Those of us who work in higher education inescapably recognize that students from all backgrounds need to find jobs, but we also hope they will find their vocation, or calling in life. And, ideally, studying the liberal arts inspires graduates to find work that will benefit the public. Given the dire need today for solutions to pressing economic, environmental, social, and political problems, we arguably, then, need the liberal arts more than ever, even as enrollments decline.

Presenting on “The Conflicted Role of Skills in Liberal Arts Education,” Leonard Cassuto will discuss antipathy toward the idea of skills development, and the larger resistance toward the idea of learning outcomes and assessment, in conversations about the liberal arts. Encompassing historical reasons for this resistance (going back to German research universities that largely shaped their American counterparts) as well as the practical fears about losing the liberal arts’ very raison d’être, Cassuto will argue we need to overcome these fears if humanists and social scientists are to follow a sustainable path forward in exigent times. Next, in “Valuing the Liberal Arts,” Julia L Mickenberg and Ricky Shear will consider what works and what is not working in liberal arts education at a large public research university (UT Austin), based on a survey of alumni who obtained a liberal arts degree 5-25 years ago. Reading quantitative and qualitative data against popular and scholarly discourses on the value (pecuniary and otherwise) of majoring in the liberal arts, they will reflect upon the practical and less instrumental public and personal benefits as well as specific ways in which alumni, in retrospect, assessed the value of their course of study, with special attention to the ways in which it prepared or failed to prepare them for their future work and lives. Finally, in “Leading Generously” Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that leadership in higher education is facing a panoply of crises. Many of these crises have origins external to our institutions, stemming from the larger political, economic, and environmental calamities by which we are surrounded. Others, however, have internal roots, stemming from profound misunderstandings about the nature of leadership and how it manifests in academic environments. In this talk, she’ll focus on the ways that a reconsideration of leadership through the shaping influence of the liberal arts might allow us to emerge from the current morass.

61 How the Liberal Arts Work: Calls for Papers