Comments on: Brinkmanship

By: sibyl

sibyl — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:15:55 +0000

Thanks for this post. I think that you may have answered one of your own questions. How can a SLAC create alternate pathways for professional advancement to complement disciplinary ones? Precisely by calling on, and rewarding, faculty for concentrating on other kinds of problems: either the managerial problems of operating the institution, or on open-ended efforts to address problems that cross disciplines. As for the former: could teams of faculty find ways to cut the costs of retirement benefits by having business professors and math professors developing new ways to support retiree incomes through reverse mortgaging or microlending, or by having psychologists and philosophers develop meaningful roles for retirees to play in new student orientation or new faculty development? As for the latter: could the college decide to address, let’s say, environmental challenges by starting with biologists and engineers but also including historians who describe how environments have changed in response to human society and behavioral psychologists who talk about how humans tend to relate to nature and political scientists who can examine the forces working against meaningful public investment in alternative energy technologies and economists who can identify useful incentives for reducing human impact on the environment? This could be a year-long theme, or even an institutional emphasis (“if you are interested in the environment, young lady, you ought to apply to Zenith College; they do great stuff there”).

If a college could do a good job of the latter, it could also be a model to its students of how broad-based learning and multidisciplinary approaches can best be applied in the workforce and in life. Which would actually address the final problem, convincing people that the liberal arts are the best (or even a viable) way to approach education.

Hmm. Maybe you answered two of your own questions.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:04:18 +0000

I think you (and Fussell) are essentially right in many respects. And this would be an even better reason to think that a defense of the liberal arts that is essentially a defense of the cultural capital of a vanishing postwar elite is both ethically indefensible and institutionally suicidal.

So what’s left, I think, is a different vision of “practicality”, which is why I get so frustrated with the deep reservoirs of hostility to words like “competencies” and “skills” among humanists. I think Ferrall sees the issue somewhat similarly: that a person becomes most skilled at creating, making, innovating, thinking, in ways that have value in existing professions *and* in life through indirect means. Studying communication doesn’t make you a better communicator, studying entrepreneurship doesn’t make you a better entrepreneur, and so on.

But this has huge, huge implications as a perspective for the content and practice of “liberal arts” as an educational object. It means for one that you can detach it from any specific mandated core subject matter (that’s the old ‘cultural capital’ of postwar American elites talking, mostly) but it also has implications for pedagogy. Maybe learning to do things (creating, innovating, expressing, etc.) isn’t advanced by anything resembling intensive study of a fixed body of knowledge, but by doing. That’s a bit of what we already mean to do in reading and writing, but it would be a much bigger change to embrace this as a thorough vision of pedagogy in a liberal arts environment.

By: thm

thm — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:26:30 +0000

I think the historical narrative that's touched upon in Paul Fussell's ha-ha-only-serious Class which I think gets to the root of much of the what-is-the-present-role-of-SLACs question. That is: sometime in the early-to-mid 19th century, the colleges that did exist transformed, more or less, into finishing schools for the upper classes, and stayed that way until approximately World War II. This is not to say there wasn't serious scholarship going on, but rather that the focus of the scholarship was inculcated with upper-class values, and served to perpetuate them. Notably, everyone who would go on to be the faculty and administration at all the institutions that were created in the great boom of college-founding the the late 19th and early 20th centuries would have been trained in this sort of environment, and would have taken those values with them and propagated them anew. And this is how what we now refer to as the liberal arts curriculum is essentially a reflection of upper-class values--chiefly the disdain for the practical. So art and poetry and fiction and Latin are valued, nonfiction is rarely found in the English department, and engineering is considered so vulgar that's it's either relegated to it's own school or absent altogether. This is perhaps an uncomfortable perspective; faculty in liberal arts departments generally don't think of their mission as promulgating upper class values, and it would be politically untenable to openly say so. But in a roundabout way, it is perhaps the reason why a liberal arts education is, in fact, good preparation for many white-collar jobs--not so much for the reasons offered in the usual Jedi mind tricks, but because of the acculturation that goes along with it.