In two weeks I’ll be traveling to a small liberal arts university in the midwest to deliver two days worth of talks. I’ll be addressing the whole student body, the executive leadership, academic leadership, and the faculty. The purpose of my trip is to convince them of one of my most deeply held beliefs, that the future of liberal arts education depends on finding ways to integrate the study of professional skills and the humanities. Students are increasingly demanding a personally transformative experience from their college education, and one that is holistic, humanistic, and that thoroughly prepares them to successfully pursue meaningful work in the context of a flourishing life. This is a big ask. Exactly the sort of ask you’d make of an institution that you’re giving $150,000 to $250,000 dollars to, and — more importantly — four of the most precious, formative years of your life. I believe that colleges can meet this demand, but that it will require strategic, agile, and creative thinking at a number of different levels.
The Backdrop:
Our students expect a lot from college; so do their parents, communities, and our society at large. We expect universities to build on (and go way beyond) what young people are learning in high school. We expect it to be fun and liberating. We expect it to be the stage against which growth and transformation from late adolescents to adulthood takes place. We expect it to be a place of learning and contemplation, but also training in hard skills, a broadening of horizons, a place of spiritual fulfillment, and a non-stop party. There’s never been a time, I would argue, when we’ve expected more from a university education.
And students aren’t the only stakeholders in the higher education enterprise. Parents expect universities to keep their children safe, to teach them how to flourish. Administrators and trustees expect colleges to operate with fiscal responsibility, not to incur debt, and to serve as a stable investment (in many senses) for those who are funding the enterprise (alumni, donors, parents, sometimes taxpayers, and almost always the students themselves). Faculty expect universities to be places of professional accomplishment and disciplinary advance. They expect to be rewarded for their intellectual work, and find fulfillment themselves. They expect resources to flourish in their own work, and to care for the students they serve in the classroom. Staff expect something similar.
The Challenges: Against this backdrop, a number of specific challenges arise. Some are challenges that any financially stretched institution will face, e.g.: How do universities keep costs down while providing working conditions for staff that are consistent with their (often lofty) humanistic missions? Some are very particular to this moment, though, and to the unique demographics of the stakeholders mentioned above. Here are three of the biggest ones (in my view):
The Utility Mindset: Because universities are theaters of aspiration, and because every stakeholder stands to lose or gain much of tangible worth, it’s easy for everyone involved to develop a “utility mindset” that is fundamentally incompatible with a genuine liberal arts community. Students can start to see the decision about which majors or minors to pick up in purely economic terms (as can their parents). Administrators can start merely comparing class size with facilities that will attract alumni donors. Faculty can start to see teaching simply as a distraction from researching the thing that gets them the status, money, and agency they want. While they’re nothing wrong with considering utility in any of these cases (or even being “utility minded”), the Utility Mindset is all consuming. It makes genuine choices — like whether you should take that esoteric literature class just because you’re curious — look foolishly simple.
Corporate Drift: Universities in the modern world are mostly non-profits operating on a business model, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of this fact. Some of them are more like corporations or even franchises. Because of this fact (and it is a fact), they need to act like businesses. But, like other non-profit (like philanthropic foundations or service organizations), it serves a higher purpose than mere solvency. (Perhaps all companies do, let’s argue about that another time.) So it can be easy for universities to slip into what I call Corporate Drift, and start acting like they are merely businesses (this is the institutional equivalent, I suppose, of developing a particularly bad case of Utility Mindset). This is never more true than when there are serious financial pressures or other scarce resources. But Corporate Drift threatens to undermine the very thing a university is. It might be cool to attend a four-year-long, quarter million dollar luxury stay away camp, but no one should be under the illusion that such an experience is — in any deep sense — educational.
Disciplinary Esotericism Driven by Academic Status Anxiety: Perhaps you can tell I’m getting lazier in trying to cut down the names for these challenges. But this is one of the most serious problems threatening certain institutions (especially elite liberal arts institutions, like, well, mine). Disciplinary Esotericism occurs when faculty start thinking that their research matters for its own sake. It’s frequently (in my view) the bad-faith manifestation of status anxiety; it’s easier to write a meaningless contribution for the fourth iteration of a pseudo-philosophical literature if you think the act of doing so is simply self-justified. “We’re just coming to know the fundamental elements of some aspect of reality,” might be true (in some cases), but: (1) this hobby is being paid for by students who expect you to connect your intellectual pursuits to their education, (2) it’s probably not true, (3) even if it is true, I’m enough of a pragmatist to believe that — in 99% of cases — academics who can’t connect their research to the real world are necessarily doing bad research (shot through with conceptual confusion about the phenomena they’re studying).
There are more, but these are — in my opinion — the most existentially threatening. So what do we do about them?
Solutions:
We integrate professional training with a genuine liberal arts education. There are things that folks at every level can do:
Administrators…can invest in the core curriculum. Hire experts to create and consult on it. Identify talented faculty to teach it and give them agency. Reward this just as much as you would reward any esoteric disciplinary research award. Further, create a culture of multidisciplinarity and shared understanding. Read a book together (all together), hold debates. Show students that upper-level administrators are as interested in the “big questions” as they’d like everyone else in the community to be. Administrators can also be careful in collecting metrics and data. Make sure you’re collecting the right metrics and the best data. Reflect on this and reexamine it frequently. If your student evaluations mainly track whether or not students think a professor is an easy grader (or superficially organized) — as many now do — change it up. Above all: reward creativity, innovation, and dedication to the mission. With money, or status, or power, or all of the above.
Faculty…can start engaging in student-centered course design. We need to learn the basics of pedagogy and good user design, and to apply these to our teaching. We need to observe each other. Form curriculum committees or course design review boards with students and colleagues at the table. We need to develop a bit more of a “market mindset,” and start thinking about where our resources come from, who we are serving, all the various dynamics that affect our institution from the inside and out, and reflect this in the way we think about our work, our disciplines, our colleagues, our students, and ourselves. We need to create (and adhere to) a “No Entitlement Rule,” which entails that no one deserves to stop functioning in their role because…they got tenure, they are famous, they are tired, they’re more interested in doing something else.
Students…can educate themselves about these things. They can take on a liberal arts mindset before they even get to college (or in their dorm rooms or on the quad). They can demand that faculty and administrators provide them with the education they’ve been promised, and they can do their part to create a thriving community in which genuine learning can flourish.
Staff, alumni, parents, and the general public…can do much to provide support. Destroy the utility mindset while raising your own kids (or, at least, don’t instill it in them). Reward institutions who stay true to their mission. Engage with your time, treasure, and talents, and become part of the process of building up the kind of community our kids (and our society) needs to flourish.
Below I’ve included lots of resources that I’ve created (with colleagues at Notre Dame) in order to attempt to enact the vision I’m sketching here. The key, though, isn’t adopting my (or anyone’s) pre-existing resources. It’s understanding the value of the liberal arts, and then thinking and acting carefully enough to bring them to life.
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The Future:
God and the Good Life (and The Good Life Method book): A “big questions” core curriculum philosophy course that serves 1200 students per year, and asks them to open their minds to the types of questions only careful study of the liberal arts can help us answer in the context of our own lives.
Ethics at Work: An interdisciplinary effort — undertaken by Walter Scheirer, Megan Levis, and myself — that aims to populate the core curriculum with values-driven, student-centered courses at the intersection of work, meaning, purpose, and impact. See our project trailer below.
The Sheedy Family Program: A rigorous, cohort-based intellectual community at Notre Dame that integrates business and the liberal arts (through curriculum and programming) for students studying in the Mendoza College of Business and the College of Arts & Letters.
The Working Life: A second philosophy class at Notre Dame that asks students to think about the big questions involved in integrating work into our lives in pursuit of flourishing. TWL was developed through the Ethics at Work project and serves the Sheedy Family Program.
Coming Soon! The Philosophy Teaching Library (see this special preview for Substacker followers): A peer-reviewed, OER for educators and students interested in studying life’s deepest philosophical questions via expert-annotated philosophical texts.
There are more (perhaps too many more) projects, and they’re all interrelated. This is what I think it looks like to (re)design effective liberal arts education in the twenty-first century.
Parting Recs
Two book recs, both related to the themes raised here:
The Purposeful Graduate, by Tim Clydesdale, and
Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education, by a bunch of people.
I swear by the first and just picked up the second. Would recommend checking either or both out.
I think you're definitely on the right track. In my experience, one of the major tensions is between teaching people what to think and how to think. The esotericism you critique, in my experience, leads to students who have been told what to think lacking the skill to critique it. Students then either reject what they were taught outright (but may pretend during the term to get the grade) or accept it entirely, without realizing the weaknesses of the perspective. Teaching students instead how to think, by encouraging trying on different perspectives, allows people to develop intellectual qualities to engage with reality in creative ways. Another major tension, perhaps driven by my own experiences of elite institutions is getting the ends or the why wrong. Students become focused on expected utility and productivity over relationships and growth because the incentive systems they experience emphasize utility and productivity and undermine relationships (e.g., by treating success as competitive) and growth (because they often focus only on current performance). I find the work of groups like the Program for Education Research that Scales (perts.net) the start of a helpful corrective there, but there is lots more that can be done as well.