Liz Coleman's call to reinvent liberal arts education

I have been a liberal arts generalist all my life, even during my professional moments of technical expertise. The reason I am not a full-time academic is because my beliefs in the role of the liberal arts generalist and the basic interconnectedness and interdisciplinary nature of those studies were not welcomed nor supported during my graduate school years by my mentors in an elite Ivy League university, where my interest in teaching and crossing disciplines was seen as quaint at best, and a professional liability at worst. Which, it turned out, it was, for my future in that profession, though not for me as a person.

The generation of Trilling and Barzun were my exemplars, and I even had the good fortune to know one of the finest men of that tradition, Ainslee Embree. But such a tradition was of no avail to aid me as I realized my only option for acceptance in the academy was to abandon such ideas for the minutiae of over-specialization and research. Instead, I choose the alternate path of technology, at least professionally.

So, for me, Liz Coleman's words of critique are powerful thoughts I recognize as my own, long abandoned, which raise pangs of regret for what might have been, but was impossible twenty five years ago in my life and situation.

In particular, the death of the voice of the learned generalist has been silenced in the public sphere, abandoned to an academy of the specialized who speak only with each other, with no one to speak to or for the public - a void, as Coleman notes, happily and opportunistically filled by ignorant theocratic ideologues.

I hope her words may be heeded so that others in the next generation will have options I did not.

Comments

[Michael Gough]

I really like this, being a graduate from a liberal arts education. In a sea of experts, no know is able to shepherd them all to solve a problem because no one knows a little about every field. The big question is how do we give Americans a basic "liberal arts" education so that they can become proactive in our commitment to change?

[Randy Thornton]

Michael,

Thanks - sounds like we have very similar ideas. In a way, the Taylor model of specialization of work has been applied to academia, so only "experts" and specialists are produced, and the well educated and rounded are excluded - not coincidentally so we cannot challenge the way things are done. Crossing boundaries is a way of
challenging the status quo.

R