From the beginning of the 20th century, students have studied philosophy, mathematics, English, chemistry, sociology — indeed, the full range of the liberal arts — in all kinds of access-oriented institutions of higher education: vocational programs, night schools, technical institutes, adult extension programs, teachers’ colleges, branch campuses of state universities, and community colleges. But public discussions of higher education increasingly imagine that these kinds of institutions focus solely on an instrumental, economy-determined training in skills required for specific jobs. In fact, teachers and students at schools like these engage in disciplinary debates and undertake original research. They apply the lessons of the liberal arts to their lives, and use their everyday experiences to test, temper, and challenge what they learn in classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. In these respects, they are much like their peers at fancier places.
We tend to assume that liberal education and vocational education are natural opposites, an assumption dating back to at least the first decades of the 20th century. In 1918, Thorstein Veblen described “vocational training” as “training for proficiency in some gainful occupation” having “no connection with the higher learning, beyond that juxtaposition given it by the inclusion of vocational schools in the same corporation with the university.” More recently, Stanley Fish opposed the “love for learning” central to the “university” to whatever it is he imagines happens at “trade school.” The assumption is that liberal education and vocational education — and the students associated with each — belong to different worlds.
Administrators at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently invoked this rhetoric when they declared a return to the institution’s pre-World War II vocational mission as a justification for cutting staff and majors in history, art, English, philosophy, sociology, political science, French, German, and Spanish.
Students pursuing vocational education are learners, not only trainees; liberal and vocational education are part of the same story.
But Stevens Point course catalogs tell a very different story about the school’s history. In 1913, students in the domestic-science course of study took European and U.S. History, Civics, Biology, and Drawing in addition to courses like Millinery, Bacteriology, and Invalid Cookery and Laundering. In 1928 we find students in vocational programs taking classes like English 302: Current Fiction; English 303: Vocal Interpretation of Shakespeare; and History 303: Industrial History of the United States. Apprentice teachers enrolled in Art 203: Picture Study and Education 402, a “summary of the relationships existing between school and other social institutions and the possibility of education as a means of social progress.” In 1938, students could read Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne in English 213: The New England Circle, learn about the French Revolution in History 210, and study the constitutional history of the United States in History 216. In 1949, Stevens Point students in all kinds of programs could sign up for Rural Sociology or attend an interdisciplinary seminar “in which instructors from different departments participate with the students in the discussion of important books which have influenced the development of western civilization.” In 1952 students in the Conservation and Forestry program took Art 102. Students preparing for dental school had two years of French.
The Stevens Point catalog is a single draw from the mountain of evidence that the liberal-arts disciplines have long played a role in all kinds of institutions. So why have we fallen into the trap of believing that liberal-arts education lives only in elite institutions available to the few? And why are we allowing vocational education to be redefined to mean the narrowest kind of job training?
Partly because we’ve enshrined the liberal-vocational opposition in the way we talk about education. In covering topics like the emergence of new disciplines, changing classroom technologies, community-based learning, and speech on campus, feature articles on the culture of education draw on anecdotes from a small number of elite colleges. Meanwhile, writing about mass education uses data sets to represent students as groups and populations in stories about the price of college, student retention, and changes in majors and enrollments. These different kinds of evidence create the impression that students at elite institutions are individual learners connected to disciplines, while everyone else is a victim or vector of financialization in need of training, a bundle of responses to economic conditions.
This polar view of education serves the interests of those who profit from the idea that mass education can be scaled, commodified, and privatized, and those who make political capital out of culture wars and class polarization. But it does not reflect the reality of higher education, and it does not serve the interests of students. Teachers and students know that in practice, people pursuing vocational education are learners, not only trainees, and that liberal and vocational education are part of the same story.
What would it mean to refuse this polarized vision? Some researchers are pointing the way; the work of Sara Goldrick-Rab and her collaborators, for example, hopes to shift the public understanding of what a “real college” student is. The #RealCollege project reminds us that despite popular anecdotal representations, most students are not 18-year-olds embarking on full-time four-year B.A. degrees on residential campuses. The average student is more likely to live at home and to be studying part-time while juggling jobs and domestic work, and more likely to be enrolled at an access-oriented institution than a selective one.
Turning our attention to these real college students’ intellectual lives makes it very clear that, like their peers at elite colleges, they too think, explore, engage the disciplines, and produce knowledge. A revised history of the liberal arts would take institutions like Stevens Point as central to the project of American higher education. Instead of assuming that liberal education — especially the humanities — was born in and belongs to elite schools and occasionally spreads democratically outward after the middle of the 20th century, we could step back to tell a much richer, and much more accurate, narrative.
This story would also reveal that what students have done in classrooms of all kinds is part of the history of the disciplines they have studied. The Stevens Point course catalogs show this to us clearly: Teacher training, it turns out, is part of the history of art history and economics; management studies is part of the history of sociology; forestry has shaped the development of biology and literary studies. The liberal arts were not once pure and autonomous and only belatedly adapted to the more pragmatic needs of mass education. On the contrary, vocational and liberal education have been cultivated in the same field. Liberal disciplines bear the marks of this history, but they will be visible only once we view the classrooms at vocational programs, night schools, community colleges, and technical institutes as part of their intellectual history.
We need to take that past seriously if we hope to have a future that serves students first — a future that puts both their learning and their economic security ahead of the interests of state governments, student-loan providers, accreditation agencies, and the careers of higher-education administrators. Before this polarizing vision of higher education is further hardened into a widespread reality, we must understand the intellectual lives of all students — not just an elite few — as central to the past, present, and future of the work we do.
Laura Heffernan is an associate professor of English at the University of North Florida. Rachel Sagner Buurma is an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College.
