Killing Liberal Arts

Not too long ago, there was a big push for STEM, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, in college. STEM was our future, and not enough women and black people chose STEM. While you can’t make anybody choose a major or future, the point was made on a couple levels, that this was where the jobs would be and this was how people who couldn’t otherwise afford to go to college could pay off their student loans.

But the rise in interest in STEM, which many learned wasn’t quite as guaranteed as they were told, meant the loss of interest in other academic pursuits.

Is a university a university without the liberal arts? Marymount University seems to think so. The institution’s trustees voted unanimously in February to eliminate majors in mathematics, art, English, history and philosophy, among other fields. It is the latest in a very long line of defeats for the liberal arts. Between 2013 and 2016, across the United States, 651 foreign language programs were closed, while majors in classics, the arts and religion have frequently been eliminated or, at larger schools, shrunk. The trend extends from small private schools like Marymount to the Ivy League and major public universities, and shows no sign of stopping.

The steady disinvestment in the liberal arts risks turning America’s universities into vocational schools narrowly focused on professional training. Increasingly, they have robust programs in subjects like business, nursing and computer science but less and less funding for and focus on departments of history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and theology.

The reason liberal arts departments are being shut down is no huge mystery. Not enough students are majoring in literature to pay the cost. This is a function of both the lack of interest by students and the spiraling costs of academia, which now include an administrator for every academic to handle the myriad regulatory grievances.

In the good old days, elite schools like the Ivies were more finishing schools than vocational schools. Their graduates were well-read, could converse at dinner parties and knew what to wear for any occasion. But then, college grads were scarce resources, and hired for their breadth of liberal arts knowledge with the specifics of the job to be trained later. But here’s the unmentioned kicker: the number of grads was largely white males, so when women and minorities started getting degrees and entering the upper echelon of the workforce, there were no longer open jobs searching for candidates.

There were twice as many, maybe more, new grads looking for job, and employers did what employers are wont to do. They got greedy. They no longer had to accept liberal arts majors generally, but could hire people with highly specific educational backgrounds to save on training and gain a few years on their learning curve.

At the same time, liberal arts isn’t what it used to be. Instead of reading Shakespeare, you read Coates. The curriculum has shifted, which is fine but for the fact that it no longer provides a common shared classical liberal arts education. It’s been “reimagined,” and students want a future after accumulating all that debt just in case the president can’t unilaterally forgive all the loans.

This image is now quite old, a remnant of good old times when self-indulgence and denialism were validated by cute memes. Unfortunately, reality has bitten so many of the self-indulgent in the butt.

Students do not select majors and courses in a vacuum. Their choices are downstream of a cultural and political discourse that actively discourages engagement with the humanities. For decades — and particularly since the 2008 recession — politicians in both parties have mounted a strident campaign against government funding for the liberal arts. They express a growing disdain for any courses not explicitly tailored to the job market and outright contempt for the role the liberal arts-focused university has played in American society.

This misconstrued the problem. On the one hand, promoting academic majors that offer students better futures isn’t a bad thing, even if the result is students lacking the breadth of knowledge that had long been associated with a rigorous liberal arts education. On the other hand, this fails to note that the academy no longer offers a rigorous liberal arts education, but rather a tweaked, reimagined woke education where the classics are eschewed in favor of the latest pop fetish. Academics may think this is brilliant. Apparently, students are voting with their feet and academics just aren’t willing to accept the outcome of their vote.

Higher education, with broad study in the liberal arts, is meant to create not merely good workers but good citizens. Citizens with knowledge of their history and culture are better equipped to lead and participate in a democratic society; learning in many different forms of knowledge teaches the humility necessary to accept other points of view in a pluralistic and increasingly globalized society.

This is certainly true, or at least it once was. And it could be again, but it raises some questions. What are you teaching, to whom and why? Integrating liberal arts into a curriculum as part of the normal course distribution can be done. Heck, even engineers can be taught to read. But maybe offer them the liberal arts that will make them better citizens rather than critical queer black theory? Liberal arts hasn’t just died. It’s been murdered. If you don’t want college to become nothing more than a trade school, then cut the crap and bring back the rigorous core liberal arts curriculum that students need to become well-rounded educated citizens.