Rediscovering the Liberal Arts

The tone is aggressive, the rhetoric insistent (and the syntax a bit shaky). "We believe that the conditions of our time force us to recognize the distance between what we say liberal arts can do and what it is now doing," declares the Manifesto of Liberal Arts College Presidents. Colleges have merely educated students to be consumers of the status quo, not innovators, the manifesto charges, while college presidents have become "mere managers, not educators." Furthermore, it asks, do students who come to college "without the skills to read, to think critically and to express themselves leave our institutions with these skills?"

The manifesto, issued last week by the new presidents of four small liberal arts colleges (Bard, Bennington, Scripps and Wheaton), is the latest salvo in a major debate now roiling many academic institutions. With the tuition cost of a private liberal arts education soaring to as high as $5,500 a year, colleges are finding it increasingly difficult to justify the expense--particularly since many of their graduates cannot find jobs. Practical "vocational" programs have become popular. Just last year T.H. Bell, then U.S. Commissioner of Education, declared, "It is our duty to provide our students with salable skills."

Such exhortations worry many liberal arts educators. Not only do they feel the pressure to provide "salable skills," but they also suspect that the traditional liberal arts goal of producing a "wellrounded" graduate has become blurred. The widespread relaxing of course requirements as a result of the turbulent '60s has meant that many students no longer acquire learning in any systematic way outside their major field. "There is a lot of concern about whether liberal arts graduates are as literate as we said they were," admits John Chandler, president of Scripps College.

Harvard began a reappraisal back in 1974, when Henry Rosovsky, dean of the faculty, issued a gloomy letter to his professors. The B.A. degree was becoming little more than a "certificate of attendance," he charged, while grade-conscious students were choosing easy courses "out of primitive self-interest." He ended by calling for a total re-evaluation of undergraduate education.

Harvard has not yet reached a verdict on its curriculum. But judging by a preliminary report from a committee headed by Political Scientist James Q. Wilson, it seems likely that all students will be required to take "core" courses in eight specific areas ranging from mathematical reasoning to studies of non-Western cultures. The committee's purpose: to make students "think effectively, communicate thought, make relevant judgments, discriminate among values."

The movement is catching on. A faculty study at Cornell has recommended making each student take a series of interdisciplinary courses and seminars outside his or her major area of study. Georgetown will in the future stress "value education, moral and philosophical education." Students at Middlebury must take a freshman writing course and three sweeping "foundation" courses. "Parents and alumni love it," Middlebury President Olin Robison says candidly, "because it reaffirms the idea that the institution knows where its values lie. And yes, what their money is being spent for." Even new U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest Boyer has joined in advocating a "core curriculum."

Still, some critics argue that a return to required courses is like picking so many cans of soup off a shelf. One such critic is Leon Botstein, 30, the outspoken president of Bard College and a main, force behind last week's manifesto. "Distribution requirements don't provide a coherent experience," he argues. "Furthermore, institutions have lost contact with social and political problems."

Looking Alike. What alternatives do the manifesto signers advocate? Botstein, for one, calls for a curriculum that would include a mix of history, science and active arts like painting and acting. But, cautions Alice Emerson, president of Wheaton College, "the end result of structuring the curriculum is that most colleges look like all of the others." Instead, she is searching for a "way to communicate values, the sort of issues that President Carter is addressing."

Some institutions now take pride in never having given up their course requirements in the '60s. "It's as if we'd been a turtle all these years and suddenly everyone is turning back and we're first," says Charles Oxnard, dean of the college at the University of Chicago. The most pleased of all turtles, though, is St. John's in Annapolis, Md. Since 1937, when St. John's adopted its so-called program, the college has had no lecture courses, no final exams, no departments. Instead, all 675 students (400 at Annapolis, another 275 at an adjunct campus in Santa Fe) study a fixed curriculum of 130 great books (the Bible, a heavy number of Greek and Roman authors, almost no 20th century writers), learn Greek, and take four years of math and three of science.

"In 1937 some people thought that all of this was nonsense," says Curtis Wilson, St. John's slight, white-haired dean. "But today they tell us, 'You have a program that's well defined and you know what you're doing.' " A few problems intrude. The dropout rate, for example, has sometimes run as high as 50% of all freshmen. Still, there is an overweening sense of purpose that other colleges now envy. "Either we're stuck in the mud and blind to everything, or we've really found something important," says Robert Bard, soon to be dean of the Santa Fe campus. "Stuck in a rut," he muses. "But you know, it doesn't feel that way at all."

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