Several years ago, a group of colleges held focus groups to discover what people thought about liberal education and liberal-arts colleges. The results were not pretty.
I sat on the other side of a one-way window watching two groups of 10 parents whose sons or daughters had just gone through the college-search process. Nineteen of the 20 parents had definitions of “liberal arts” that no educator would even recognize. They agreed that liberal arts referred to either studying soft, “touchy feely” subjects, like psychology as opposed to physics, or studying something “leftish” that “came out of the 60s.” Ouch.
On top of the misconceptions, they had no understanding of the outcomes—for instance, that science Ph.D.'s disproportionately start their educations in liberal-arts colleges.
Something had to be done, but what?
One response, a kind of capitulation, was noted years ago by the economist David Breneman. He reported that more liberal-arts colleges were simply abandoning the field, becoming preprofessional in everything but name. Since then, programs like criminal justice, medical technology, and nursing have proliferated in liberal-arts colleges, based on the premise that, especially in hard times, students and parents are desperate for the practical. The Chronicle recently reported that at a large gathering of liberal-arts-college deans, all the talk was of adding more preprofessional programs.
That is the reality, even though all college presidents, including me, always spout the rhetoric of liberal education. We do so without even having to doff our college-logo softball caps. But presidential rhetoric alone is hopelessly inadequate, as I’ve learned from my own experience.
The rhetoric 15 years ago surrounding Ursinus College was as high-flying as at any liberal-arts institution. But, not atypically, our market studies revealed that no one had any particular image of our college. So our faculty members, impatient with up-and-down applications and perceived market pressures to go “all practical,” took matters into their own hands. What resulted is our new best hope for the liberal arts.
What our faculty members did was simple: They adopted a concept that was all the rage during the years that America was envying quality control in Japanese manufacturing. The Japanese word for it is “mieruka"—making all things visible. Our professors set out to craft a set of programs that made all the virtues that we claim for liberal education clear and transparent. I’m pleased to say that the strategy has worked.
Some colleges have long demonstrated the substance of liberal-arts education—for instance, the senior-thesis requirement that has distinguished the College of Wooster since the 1940s. Other examples are the 85-year-old curriculum at Reed, with its combination of “great books” and independent study, and, more recently, Goucher College’s emphasis on study abroad marking the education of every student. In the case of Ursinus, it meant dropping some pragmatic programs, like an accounting track and an athletics-training certification. It also meant moving a pre-med program away from its old emphasis on memorization and rote learning of histology and anatomy to a new focus on undergraduate research and pure science. But the real key is not in the negatives; it is in what has been created in their stead.
We had plenty of skeptics, particularly among older trustees. They feared the loss of our traditional appeal for students. But faculty members forged ahead. They had two goals: One was to produce those autonomous learners and responsible adults that we all talk about as the outcome of liberal education. The other—more subtle, but equally important in terms of mieruka—was to craft a program that showed prospective students and parents how such outcomes come about.
As first steps, Ursinus eliminated a make-work summer school, then phased out a heavily business-oriented evening program. More important, it replaced summer school with undergraduate research fellowships involving as much as 25 percent of the rising senior class. For two months, each student now works full time, one-on-one, with a faculty member. As expensive as such summer programs are, they are proliferating just because they are so effective at both producing liberally educated students and showing what it means to do so through the results: the research that the students produce.
The next step was even bigger: The faculty developed a two-semester program required of all first-year students, what became known as the “Common Intellectual Experience.” It involved professors from across all the departments teaching in small sections, having students reading seminal thinkers from East and West to confront the “big questions"—those reflecting on the meaning of life, purpose, and values.
Over the years, writers like Plato and texts such as Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, and the Bhagavad Gita, along with those by Descartes, Darwin, and other leading thinkers have ignited heady discussions among students.
Creating that two-semester course around the big questions supposedly at the heart of liberal education was more or less a leap into the pool without checking for water first. It was an act of faith. But it turns out that what we suspected all along is, in fact, true. Anyone spending time with 18-year-olds knows that they are consumed with moral questions, mostly in terms that Immanuel Kant would recognize. They want to know about their obligations to their families, girlfriends, boyfriends, or teammates. They wonder if being rich will bring happiness, or whether happiness will be found in relationships or through serving others. Of course, they also wonder if they will be good at something—good enough to make a decent living or even to excel—and whether they will become wealthy or famous.
But as the focus groups demonstrated, it is not enough for us to say that a good liberal education will help students answer such questions. Nor do we have much credibility when we suggest that a broad array of traditional, disciplined-based courses will get the job done. That approach does not reveal what is expected.
At Ursinus we recognized that we needed a simple, clear menu, with those big questions as the main course. Given the ignorance about liberal education, we knew that we had to develop palpable programs—ones that would clearly and unequivocally draw students into engaging the central issues of human existence.
Students are clearly ripe for such courses. I have had conversations with first-year and second-year students on my campus, who range from those from lower-income families living in the inner city to those who are affluent and have attended elite private schools. And I have been struck by how open they all are to the idea that education is exploration and, as one of them put it, how limiting it would be to study only courses that point to a single career. That’s the case even for a career in medicine, which for generations had been Ursinus’s strong suit. (Indeed, as a recent accreditation team from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education wrote, “The Ursinus of old, known for preparing physicians and scientists and for preprofessional education, is now a national leader in its commitment to the high-impact practices that facilitate deep and long-lasting learning by students in the liberal arts.”)
Consider that an inner-city African-American student is taking Japanese with no goal in mind. A football player said he loved arguing with classmates and suite mates over such questions as the role of love in affording us happiness. Another student said that she wanted to explore and “get a taste for everything,” and that she looked at the world differently after having taken the fall course, in which she and her classmates examined big questions through classic readings.
Their comments do not mean that prospective students will automatically flock to courses such as the “Common Intellectual Experience,” but it does mean that if their concerns about how to live a meaningful life are taken seriously, they will respond.
That certainly has been my experience. In the 10 years that the program has existed, Ursinus’s enrollment has increased 40 percent, SAT scores have soared, and applications have increased fourfold. Writing in The New York Times several years ago, Andrew Delbanco, a professor of humanities and director of American Studies at Columbia University, singled out Ursinus’s experience and added that other institutions that put questions of meaning at the center of the curriculum, such as Columbia and the University of Chicago, have seen their applications climb as well.
Carrying out such courses is not easy. Faculty members must do the heavy lifting and deal with all the academic trends in the humanities—the specialization in their disciplines, the inclusion or noninclusion of certain texts—that weigh against courses like the “Common Intellectual Experience.” It is far easier to offer extensive department-based smorgasbords than to make explicit the aim of having students sink their teeth into questions dealing with the meaning of life.
Further, the changes went well beyond the curriculum. We wanted students not only to grapple with those big questions in class but also to weave such grappling into the entire fabric of their first-year experience. To extend and amplify the conversation, to make Ursinus a real living-learning community, we also decided to have all first-year students live together in six residence halls. Instead of the rhetoric—"the unexamined life is not worth living"—we began putting the goal of liberal education at the center both of the curriculum and of first-year living arrangements. We now have data and anecdotal evidence showing that the late-night dialogues, like those of 18-year-olds everywhere, are indeed about the most trenchant questions of human existence. At Ursinus, however, the discussions are fueled, at least some of the time, by wisdom accumulated through time.
We have also worked to meet the oft-stated second goal of liberal education: that of preparing students for the myriad careers that await them, including those that we cannot even envision. We wanted to offer programs that demonstrably produce autonomous learners and responsible adults. Thus the second all-college requirement: The faculty created the Independent Learning Experience to go with the “Common Intellectual Experience.” The Independent Learning Experience was an expectation that every student would do significant undergraduate research, study abroad in certain programs, student-teach, or have an academically legitimate internship. We did not know it at the time, but those are exactly the kind of activities that the National Survey of Student Engagement has found to be the most likely to produce autonomous learners and responsible adults.
To avoid getting sidetracked, we committed to only one planning goal: supporting and promoting anything that fostered student achievement. When we chose among competing projects, it was only a matter of selecting the project that fostered this most. In that context, replacing summer school with summer fellowships, for example, was a slam dunk.
The rhetoric of liberal education will not save our liberal-arts colleges. But students and their parents understand the idea of small, intense classes looking at big questions. They understand the value of directed independent study, of study abroad, of undergraduate research, of having students doing lots of writing. Surely we have to pay attention to marketing. But it is the programs that we need to market, not the rhetoric.
So we invite prospective students to hear the papers of our student researchers, to see their poster sessions, to read their works. We circulate summaries of student research, and we have students themselves, always, talk about how they are engaging ideas. And we use all the comparative data we can get our hands on.
Thoughtful commentators agree that the nation needs the liberal arts, but that if they are to survive, colleges must make visible at all times what they are and how they contribute to the lives of students. Nationally we probably have done what we can with rhetoric to illuminate the essence of a liberal education. Now the time has come to listen to the focus groups and provide real programs that answer their concerns. When an institution can show what the experience of becoming liberally educated actually consists of, students will beat a path to its doors.