About three minutes into her opening speech at a symposium here on Thursday about the value of the liberal arts, Sen. Susan Collins addressed an underlying theme of the gathering with a blunt statement:
“The importance of the liberal arts to a free and democratic society was known to antiquity,” said Ms. Collins, a Republican from Maine. “Why is it that we need to keep reminding ourselves — and, more to the point, the public — of its value?”
The symposium, with the Phillips Collection’s modern-art masterpieces as a backdrop, was set up as the culmination of a nearly three-year campaign that the Council of Independent Colleges has waged to publicize the value of a liberal-arts degree, the main offering of many of the council’s member colleges. That might feel like an uphill battle, given the nation’s recuperating economy and the tone of the discussion around a degree’s return on investment.
Just last weekend the Obama administration unveiled its revised College Scorecard, which highlights graduates’ earnings. In recent years, policy makers and pundits have breathlessly heralded the ascent of vocationally oriented online courses and other forms of technical training. Even Barack Obama denigrated art-history majors.
Recently, attitudes about the liberal arts may have taken a turn. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have not turned out to be the promised panacea for higher education, and for-profit colleges have experienced an industrywide meltdown.
Meanwhile, a steady stream of studies and news articles has highlighted the long-term value of the liberal arts. In late July, for example, Forbes magazine noted that a liberal-arts degree is the “hottest ticket” in the technology sector, which has a dire need for employees who can connect with customers, ask pertinent questions, and think creatively.
Attendees of the symposium — many of them administrators at liberal-arts colleges who hardly needed persuading anyway — got those perspectives in session after session. For example, William T. Newsome, director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, said that his time as an undergraduate at Stetson University in the 1970s had influenced his work on the intersection of the humanities, religion, and science.
“There is a lot of utilitarian emphasis, and not enough attention paid to How I can make a difference,” he said. “It’s incredibly important to have people who understand science and can talk intelligently about science. We need them in the newspaper business, in government, in teaching, and in business.”
Not About Answers, but Questions
Speaking at another session, James B. Stewart, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, told of when he was assigned Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” in his first literature course as a freshman at DePauw University.
“The teacher came in and said, ‘What does water mean?’” he said. (Up to that point in his life, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead had been Mr. Stewart’s favorite book.) “We ended up spending a week discussing the symbolic meaning of water in ‘The Open Boat,’ and I started learning to read that day.”
Learning is not about getting the answers, but about asking the right questions, Mr. Stewart said. “Two things have infused all of my work since going to DePauw,” he said. “One is to take the depth of literature and try to apply that to nonfiction writing, and two, to try to expand our knowledge by asking questions, not regurgitating material that we already know. That’s particularly relevant in the world of the Internet, where almost everything is regurgitated.”
Of course, he was preaching to the choir. But while industry still has plenty of people who think that English majors are destined to become shoe salesmen, Mr. Stewart’s point of view would resonate with a number of prominent voices in business.
Take, for example, Ryder Daniels, an entrepreneur who graduated from Washington College in the early 1990s and founded various businesses in technology, consulting, and marketing, some of which he sold to larger firms. He retired last year at age 45.
His major at Washington College? Theater. He also took a lot of courses in philosophy and creative writing. These days he spends some of his time talking to young people about what to study in college, and he consistently advises going after creative, liberal-arts disciplines.
“The softer, squishier things were about managing teams, communication, philosophy, reading — Washington College had a heavy reading and writing component to everything,” he said. That training helped him pull apart and think through complex requests for proposals in his first business. “I haven’t been on the stage since I left Washington College, but in many ways I am onstage every day — in techniques in learning how to sell, in how to communicate effectively.”
To be sure, Mr. Daniels also had some practical training. Long fascinated by computers and programming, he worked in the college’s computer center. That helped him develop skills that would lead him to start his first company, in desktop publishing. Some of those technical skills are now as outdated as the computers he used in college. But the ability to talk to clients, to analyze a business proposal, are not.
The ‘Shelf Life’ of Technical Training
Jerry Kaplan — a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Legal Informatics, and author of Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence — says that technical training has a “shelf life.”
Conventional wisdom says that if you get a degree in programming, you’ll make a bunch of money in Silicon Valley — and to some extent, that’s still true, he says. But thanks in part to technological advances, the engineering teams needed to create new apps and programs have shrunk significantly. Meanwhile, the jobs involving softer skills have grown.
There is no doubt that the cost of college and the constrained job market since the recession have contributed to a critical look at the value of a liberal-arts degree. And even advocates for a liberal-arts education, like Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, have argued for giving students more practical training. Mr. Roth — author of Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters — has said that a college education’s power lies “in the tension between the practical and the broadly conceptual.”
But advocates for the liberal arts would resist reducing that education to merely its practical value — a point that William Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, made during lunchtime remarks at the symposium.
“The most important challenges that we face in this country are not fundamentally technical problems,” he said. Questions about our culture, our history, our values, and citizenship are at the fore.
“We can’t have strong culture and citizenship,” he went on, “without an understanding of history, without an understanding of the fundamental principles of democracy, and increasingly in this country, without an understanding of the cultural diversity and complexity of the world that’s being created before our eyes.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
