Introduction: How the Liberal Arts Work

This cluster of essays, How the Liberal Arts Work, emerged from a well-received panel at the 2023 MLA Annual Convention in San Francisco. The presidential theme Working Conditions prompted the participants to ask, In an era of neoliberal restructuring, political division, widespread misinformation, rising costs, and skyrocketing student debt, how and why and when do the liberal arts “work”?

College is variously seen as a provider of skills for the workplace, a laboratory for democracy (i.e., where students learn to be citizens), and a place where students may pursue learning for its own sake and in the process learn about themselves. The liberal arts constitute the acknowledged nucleus of college as an idea, if not statistically the source of the most majors. But how can college in general, let alone the liberal arts in particular, be all these things to all people? Indeed, liberal arts subjects have always been avowedly nonvocational, with an aim to teach young people to learn how to learn. But even as early as an 1828 report from Yale University (then Yale College), institutions of higher education have felt a need to explain their resistance to a curriculum “better accommodated to the business character of the nation” (Report 6).¹

Common wisdom affirms—and statistics confirm—that those with college degrees earn higher incomes: economists call this the college dividend. If one subscribes to the idea that the main reason to go to college is to get a high-paying job, it is easier to argue that nonvocational degrees (in literature or philosophy instead of engineering or business) are luxuries for elites. Abundant data show, however, that the notion that humanities degrees lead to the unemployment line is a canard. As the Humanities Indicators Project and other studies have shown (see, e.g., “State of the Humanities”), students pursuing humanities and liberal arts degrees do tend to end up in financially and personally rewarding careers. They are also better prepared to weather changes in the workplace and changes in the nature of work itself. Finally, they are more likely to commit themselves to the public good.

The essays in this cluster take several new approaches. The authors explore how and why the liberal arts work; the work liberal arts graduates do; and how scholars, instructors, and university leaders work to foster habits of mind, social commitments, and ways of seeing the world that come from the liberal arts. Those of us who work in higher education recognize that students from all backgrounds need to find jobs, but we also hope that each of them will find a vocation or calling in life. And, ideally, studying the liberal arts inspires graduates to find work that will benefit the public. Given the need today for solutions to pressing economic, environmental, social, and political problems, we need the liberal arts more than ever—which makes declining liberal arts enrollments a problem for everyone.

Leonard Cassuto’s “The Conflicted Role of Skills in Liberal Arts Education: The Case of the English Department” opens the cluster with an exploration of the antipathy in academic circles to the idea of skills development, and a broader resistance to the idea of learning outcomes and assessment, in conversations about the liberal arts. Encompassing historical reasons for this resistance (going back to German research universities that influenced the development of their American counterparts) as well as the practical fears about losing the liberal arts’ very raison d’être, Cassuto argues we need to overcome these fears if humanists (and scientists) are to follow a sustainable path forward in exigent times.

In “Valuing the Liberal Arts: Alumni Lessons,” Ricky Shear and I consider what works and what is not working in liberal arts education at a large public research university (University of Texas, Austin, where we both work), based on a survey of alumni who obtained a liberal arts degree between five and twenty-five years ago. Reading quantitative and qualitative data against popular and scholarly discourses on the value (pecuniary and otherwise) of majoring in the liberal arts, Shear and I reflect on the practical and less instrumental public and personal benefits of majoring in the liberal arts, as well as on specific ways in which alumni, in retrospect, assessed the value of their course of study. We give special attention to the ways that alumni say their liberal arts education prepared or failed to prepare them for their future work and lives.

Finally, in “Leading Generously: The Liberal Arts and Tools for Transformation,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that a reconsideration of leadership may help higher education face its panoply of crises. Many of these crises have origins external to our institutions, stemming from the larger political, economic, and environmental calamities that surround us. Others, however, have internal roots, stemming from profound misunderstandings about the nature of leadership and how it manifests in academic environments. Fitzpatrick’s essay considers ways the liberal arts may shape a reevaluation of the meaning and practice of leadership that might allow us to emerge from the current morass.

Note
1 The Yale Report, as it has come to be called, features a staunch defense of classical education.

Works Cited

Report on a Course of Liberal Education. Yale College, 1828. Internet Archive, ia600309.us.archive.org/35/items/reportsoncourseo07yale/reportsoncourseo07yale.pdf.

“State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce and Beyond.” The Humanities Indicators Project, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nov. 2021, www.amacad.org/publication/humanities-workforce-beyond.