Does it have a use?
A recent report in the New Yorker documents a precipitous decline in liberal arts in colleges and universities. The number of students in history, English and philosophy are in decline and many departments in those colleges have closed entirely. A report replicates the same finding and adds that some politicians are disparaging liberal arts, one suggesting that students majoring in liberal arts pay higher tuition. The author of this and the other article cited are not good, however at explaining why this has come about, the New Yorker article scattershot in blaming it on Sputnik and also the difficulty of children to become fluent at reading. The article entitled “Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools”, written by Melanie Lembrick and published in the NYT on April 2, 2023, seems to argue but only in an abbreviated manner that the decline of liberal arts is due to poorer people entering college and so not able to indulge such frivolous pursuits as liberal arts. As a product myself of the liberal arts and having devoted my life to it, I want to go more deeply into explanations and not just the facts of the decline and I conclude that there is a cultural mind shift whereby you don’t need to get educated so as to become a fuller human being and the significance of that new mindset, should it be sustained, is staggering to what it is to be a human being and a society, more important than Artificial Intelligence learning how to write an essay.
First off, though, expand the theory already offered that levels of income explains the decline of the liberal arts. It is true that prior to the Second World War only five percent of college age children were in college. They could be presumed to be the children of the wealthy who could afford the luxury or were expected or required by their parents to do so so as to enter into professional or high business careers. Yes, there were state schools and local schools like CCNY that provided for low or no tuitions, but a first time in college family had to forego a son, usually a son, making an income during the college years , and so a privation the poor could not afford, whatever the prestige and new opportunities of a degreed. Only the exceptional might be granted that privilege. After the Second World War, private and public colleges expanded and also available was the G. I. Bill of Rights to pay people for ex-warriors whose experiences had liberated them from the working class slumber whereby young people started out at a company and stayed there until they retired. The new entrants in college would be sharp to pick out majors that would make them financially successful and would lead them away from the liberal arts.
But that is not what happened. The expansion of higher ed meant that a generation of graduates could become employed as professors. The Fifties through the Seventies were when liberal arts flourished and the generation after that of first time college family students could fill their degrees with gut majors like sociology and social work and communications believing that any college graduate could get a job, a lag between what was thought to be the facts and what the facts now were. So the demise of the liberal arts is extended into the next millennium, which is quite a stretch from when poor people got into college. There is always a problem in extrapolating a trend line into a causal inference. Yes, inflation goes down after raising Federal Reserve interest rates, but how much and in how many months? The Fed can’t say and so it estimates what happened after it happened. Yes, liberal arts declined, but was it the consequence of the G.I. Bill or any number of things, like a middle class lifestyle given to creating jingles rather than art or the intervention of bad trends in literature like deconstructionism or an interest in making literature just an opportunity for advocacy rather than a love of literature?
I am not out to dismiss the trend approach to the decline of liberal arts but to refine it, first by consulting the qualitative approach of Parsonsian functionalism, especially the idea that social institutions, especially of long duration, do something useful and even essential for any society. The liberal arts are very long standing even if subject to controversy. Soctates was condemned to death but that did not mean philosophy and literature didn’t flourish, subject to yearly contests as important as the Academy Awards. The educated residents of Byzantine were familiar with the Greek classics even if they didn’t produce much of their own. Monasteries and then universities in medieval Europe flourished in the studying of ancient texts, as did the rabbis in post-biblical Israel, as did the Chinese who crammed for exams on the classics so as to get political appointments. It is easy enough to explain the usefulness of such an enterprise. The liberal arts encourage moral reflection and vicarious experience so as to hone the abilities in statecraft and entrepreneurship, expanding new topics and techniques as scholarship will allow, so that statistical techniques are added to history ever since Hume, who estimated the populations of ancient Greek cities.
A good functionalist would think that long lasting institutions are somehow necessary, providing some utility, even if not recognized, the liberal arts a necessary part of communal values, just as law is necessary for dealing with social and personal conflict, and that to get rid of or seriously alter a necessary institution is a major upheaval. Neal Smelser, the next and last generation of functionalist sociologists after Parsons, argued that way. He thought Nineteenth Century England was undergoing a great educational transformation whereby science was pushing out the humanities or at least challenging its priority as the main way to think about things, and it is easy enough to stretch the period of science back to Galileo and certainly to Newton and to the present day when business majors are required to do a course of statistics rather than Thucydides or some other treatise on the art of war. Thucydides will warn you not to trust your competitors. But how do you account for this gigantic change in what is considered vital other than just presuming the utility of science over the utility of the liberal arts is self-evident? Well, employers may insist on statistics, but that might be dismissed as a fad or as just a sorting device just to get smart people through the door, as happens when organic chemistry is required for medical school just so to make sure that medical students are good at memorizing. Let us go more deeply.
The whole point of liberal arts is that a person is not fully formed by mid-adolescence. They still need to hone their character, their personality and their skills even if we can also claim that what a person is reveals himself or herself to be in their early childhood as articulate or considered or moody or temperamental. The idea is that any sort of education on the collegiate level will do because any course of study will do, whether history or literature or chemistry because any of them will require careful reasoning, the evaluation of evidence and a disinterested approach to truth, erven if it is difficult to fit science requirements into the distribution requirements that would make a graduate a “well-rounded” person, someone intellectually cosmopolitan rather than parochial because science was hard and so there were courses on physics for poets while scientists managed to get by on humanities requirements. Even before the broad college curriculum, there was the Grand Tour whereby the rich could find out about the world (at least of Europe) and poorer folk were apprenticed so that they could develop work discipline as well as a particular trade. The young adult has to work hard at gaining the necessary competencies to be a full adult. That was the theory and it collided against those who thought they were not insufficient as people if they had ended school with their high school graduation. It is hard to argue, however, that college does not make a difference for people. Recent years show that college educated people voted Democratic while high school graduates went Republican. There is a great divide on the point of view of those who are college educated, not just because the better educated make higher incomes, which might lead them to vote republican so that they will get better tax breaks. This is a cultural difference.
The break with the idea that people needed to improve themselves as well as their skills through college education was not just a matter of finding college distribution requirements as burdensome. It has to do with a self becoming independent of those who free the shaping of the young, a version of consumerism whereby the students are to be king over their educational fates and that there is no need for them to be schooled in morals and cultural cosmopolitanism. These matters are otherwise appropriated and often regarded as unnecessary. You may need to know how to read but you don’t have to learn how to tread deeply. You may have to master technical manuals but you don’t have to have read Vergil, even though it has been standard reading for educated people in Western Europe for a thousand years. What was necessary was now unnecessary, not a functional prerequisite of a civilization. As a professor of business said to me, “First get rich and then you can buy books”. Another professor of business asked me how a person could be getting a dissertation on Calvin who is from the Seventeenth Century? What Calvin said has been all worked out and who cares, when people could be productive at deciding what kinds of plastics and lids should be used on toys and pills.
I think the impetus or maybe the result of this sea change against the humanities was the vast extension of community college two year programs in the Eighties. And those are the students addressed by the Lembrick article. They wanted skills like bookkeeping and paralegal work and refrigerator repair work so as to become lower middle class rather than gain professional and quasi-professional occupations. An additional impulse, I think, was the consumerism in entertainment where previously there had been a compromise between the movies moguls who wanted to educate their audiences about the world by making their drama tasteful and ar the same time titillating with the endless avarice film audiences wanted for sensationalism, the wholesale concession to sensation overcoming the movies this century. That did not have to be in that young people could have continued to embrace the idea that there was a hierarchical ordering of tastes and that people could rise as far to the top to the extent it as possible to do so rather than regard taste in art and literature as a personal taste, an idiosyncrasy, rather than an expression of character. Demographic changes may set the conditions for a cultural change but those cultural changes are by definition free choices in that they are part of history, which can be defined as what didn’t have to happen.
There is a deeper and perhaps epistemological aspect about currently thinking about thinking that is beyond reducing the topics and techniques of the liberal arts as necessary. It has to do with how to establish facts as true. It does not mean that we now live in a fact free age where people can say anything to be true. Facts remain facts. The difference concerns the basis of facts, which are established in the humanities through discovery and debate. Instead, people will rely on their facts to be true on the basis of custom and supposition, as when people believe the 2020 election was rigged, a set of urban myths similar to those on both the right and left who thought that JFK was killed by one conspiracy or another, the question being why they might prefer to believe that rather than any evidence that might be presented. Faith as the basis of facts are part of religion not humanistic discourse but it finds its way into politics and into intellectual discourse in that people, including students, are so convinced of their convictions that to suggest otherwise is an insult, the instigator of unrest rather than to arrive at a judicious answer. Moreover, voting is not disqualified by a lack of education but the Founding Fathers believed that an educated citizenry would pick and sort between political arguments and emotions to get it right, even to the point that John Dewey thought that the practical intelligence of getting a lathe to work, requiring ingenuity in dealing with the recalcitrance of things, would lead to a dispassionate approach to a democratic politics, but the present moment is one where certainty is based on rumor and hatred. What are we to do?
Do not despair. Don’t engage in apocalyptic thinking even if the catastrophe is the decline of liberal arts rather than a biological or atomic catastrophe. There is likely to be a functional alternative or even a resurgence of the older institution. There might be a reprise of “Sunrise Semester” whereby great teachers lectured on the Greeks or American history and got college credit by showing up for an exam. Universities are making available online curricula on the usual liberal arts subject matters like political science and literature and not just computer science and refrigeration. The Chicago statement, spread to eighty major campuses, asserts that freedom of speech, which after all is a necessity for liberal rafts discourse, is to be defended even if some students find some points of view as offensive. The liberal arts aren’t dead yet. Students have to struggle with the views of others and with oneself. And there are so many movies available on streaming services that some worthy ones can be seen if only there were a way to sort out quality as happened with the Academy Awards and when first run movies played for many weeks until they moved on to second runs with neighborhood theaters. Maybe “Rotten Tomatoes” is a reliable critic and used by streaming services to filter screening options. There are flexible ways to accomplish essential things.