I also agree with your “by accident” point, although I’d phrase it differently. I think the skills one learns in Liberal Arts studies do help, but they help in a non-linear and not always obvious way. They’re part of a life experience which builds one’s abilities and for which there often (maybe even more often than not) is a payoff in more worldly terms. The problem is it’s hard to tease cause and effect. That’s probably why so many examples of “here’s how a liberal arts degree can help you” veer toward the anecdotal. The skills are so narrowly tailored to the person (and time, and place) in question that it’s hard to generalize.

My main goal in warning against what we* promise is that it’s very easy to promise and it’s very easy for a young person contemplating a major to accord a high degree of confidence in the promise, that we might be misleading them or setting them on a path that will foster resentment and bitterness and lead to a feeling that the promises were false or made in bad faith.

I realize that mine is a paternalistic approach and perhaps doesn’t respect the young (by which I mean, traditional aged) student’s critical capacities and ability to choose for himself/herself what he/she wants. That paternalism bothers me, but wide-ranging promises bother me, too.

*For disclosure, I say “we” above, but I’m not currently in a teaching position.

I even think there is a kind of hedgehog who is an adaptable hedgehog, as opposed to an immobile and static one–a hedgehog who can persuasively fit the one thing they know to many new environments and landscapes.

The longer version of my comment was partially to the effect that there are foxes and hedgehogs. Although foxes deserve some admiration for being willing to learn new and varied things, sometimes a lifetime focused on “hedgehogness,” or one style of learning (i.e., staying within the strictures of the discipline one was trained in), can be good, too. But again, it goes back to what my “gist” argument: be careful what you/we promise. We can’t guarantee that studying liberal arts will make the student successful. We can guarantee a competency in some skills (for history: writing, research), but we should avoid saying, “this will make you more adaptable, etc.”

Mark S: Well, you’ve recalled a point I often make here, which is why heterogeneity is so unbelievably crucial as a design principle in liberal arts institutions–that faculty achieve collectively what they don’t necessarily embody personally. Though that also seems in some ways less by design and more by accident, or at the least, is an emergent outcome that is hard to perceive or predict when you look at the individual components that drive it.

The incentive structures are the million-dollar prize for all of this. You can scarcely begin to try and align individual faculty practice with what what we collectively maintain to be our goals until we change the reward structures. An individual faculty member who tries to be more like a “liberal-arts intellectual” is in many ways making themselves unemployable or at least unmarketable.

As an aside I think that 1 is the hardest for me – I think I can do a number of things and be adaptable – and I am in certain situations – but I wonder if I have the personality and risk aversion for it.

Anyways, I have two questions on this.

1) Isn’t some of this mitigated by the use of an entire curriculum and an entire faculty/department? Sure, maybe I am not the person to give a student a good look at certain types of thinking but the guy down the hall or the gal across the quad is. So while I take your point, having breadth in your faculty also seems important.

2) It also seems that the major reason why we may not see this is the way in which career incentives are laid out in academia (as you have talked about elsewhere of course). Some of that has to do with the individual professor, some her training and senior colleagues, but much else is also administration or outside forces that control funding or demand certain things. Research, for instance, usually has to have a disciplinary home to be published and therefore prolific researchers would find it hard to practice what you say and still be prolific researchers.

You have to have a careerist bent to be able to teach the liberal arts but this bent as it currently stands takes one away from the ideal you mention and toward specialization, making it harder to be an effective educator in the liberal arts. So as it stands you have to be careerist then be able to throw this off at some early enough point so that you can become a better practitioner of the liberal arts. I find myself willing to do this but I have yet to hit the jackpot, so to speak. These two things may not be unrelated.