A Method, Not a Major
Arguments for liberal arts education are not necessarily arguments for "the liberal arts"
Matt Yglesias buried a bit about education in this paywalled mailbag post, but then helpfully excerpted it in a tweet, giving academic Twitter something to yell about that isn’t related to the Middle East. This has produced a fair amount of good stuff, a lot of it coming my way via Tyler Austin Harper (who is reliably interesting; see also this thread), including this long thread from Jennifer Frey, that I will screenshot because billionaires are petulant and won’t embed tweets properly any more:
First of all, props to her for including physics and math (we’ll overlook the “even”…). And there are some lovely ideas in there; the awkward aspect ratio of the screenshot is to let that last tweet sneak in there, because I like it. A similar line (also with some lovely ideas) is in this thread from a couple of years ago by Aaron Hanlon. “[Y]ou will still come home after work to confront the void.” is a great image.
But, still— and you knew there was going to be a “but, still…” coming in here— I find this a little slippery in the way that these arguments all too often are, at least when they’re deployed at the level of institutional politics. The issue is that these are fundamentally arguments in favor of liberal arts education, but they’re presented as if they’re arguments for the cluster of academic disciplines that get shorthanded as “the liberal arts” (which have substantial overlap with but are not identical to the cluster of disciplines shorthanded as “the humanities”).
The crucial distinction between these is that liberal arts education is a mode, an approach to education rooted in the idea that students should be “well-rounded,” with a basic grounding in a wide range of subjects, not merely well-trained in a single narrow specialization. It’s the principle behind forcing STEM majors to take literature classes and— just as importantly— forcing literature majors to take STEM classes. At an institutional level, this is the stuff of “Vision Statements” and general-education curricula: all high-level priorities with few concrete requirements.
“The liberal arts,” on the other hand, are a collection of academic specializations of varying widths, some very narrow and deep, others broad and interdisciplinary. At an institutional level, they’re ways of chopping up metaphorical real estate: majors and minors, departments and programs, tenure lines and research budgets.
These are very different things, and an argument for the former is only indirectly an argument for the latter. That is, a convincing argument for the importance of liberal arts education as a mode is not an argument for majoring in one of “the liberal arts”— it’s not even really an argument that one should have any particular academic department offering any one of those majors and faculty whose job is to study and publish in those fields.
You can make an argument that it’s impossible to provide an adequate grounding in any of the “liberal arts” fields without supporting faculty to do active scholarship. That’s downstream of the argument about liberal arts education, though, and opinions may vary about how persuasive it is.
The argument that Frey and Hanlon and Harper and others are making is, I think, a strong and elegant argument for liberal arts education. I find it compelling, but then I would, given that I’ve spent the last thirty-mumble years associated with elite institutions that are committed to liberal arts education. It’s often presented as an argument for “the liberal arts” at an institutional level, though, and it’s much less successful in that role. It’s not that hard to imagine a set-up that could, say, provide STEM majors with a basic grounding in culture and history that doesn’t involve allocating tenure lines to a Department of Culture And/Or History.
This is a Hard Problem, and as a physics professor at a school that grants degrees in engineering, it’s one that’s familiar to me. Of the standard STEM disciplines, physics is arguably the one with the least obvious connection to a future career— our only real competition in that area is from Math (thus my earlier parenthetical about the “even”). There aren’t many job opportunities in physics proper that don’t require some graduate study— we don’t use lab techs as heavily as folks in the life sciences do— and a lot of the direct-to-employment options have “engineer” in the job title. Which makes it a bit of a tricky sell to parents asking why their child shouldn’t just major in engineering and cut out a step. Far too many of our answers to “Why major in physics?” amount to “Well, you won’t hurt your long-term career prospects by doing it…”
I wish this experience left me with a bunch of great tips to offer my colleagues in “the liberal arts,” but alas, we’re pretty much just muddling through. In the end, I think the only answer is that found in this branch off the original argument, from Zena Hitz (I’m cropping out the thing she’s quote-tweeting because it too easily slides into an irrelevant slapfight):
At some level, most of what any academic discipline can offer is “This is awesome!” When that connects with students, they’ll be willing to study the subject in depth in a way that blows past arguments about intellectual skills and job prospects. When it doesn’t, no level of institutional support or curricular mandates can stop the bleeding.
I feel a bit like I’ve written this exact thing before, but this is one of those topics where I suspect I could do a weekly post on it and they’d all land about the same. Anyway, if you’d like to see next week’s version, here’s a button:
And if you want to take issue with any of the above, the comments will be open:
The problem with The Big Questions is that they are easily answered. Nothing means anything and we're just monkeys climbing the Maslow Pyramid. The rest is commentary.
So indeed - when it comes to studies, keep an eye on monetization but also just study what you love.
That said, this is pretty far from Matt's point, which was that universities going woke was going to end up like Hollywood doing so i.e. going broke. And that, if you wanted to reverse society's hostility to academic funding, it would be useful for universities to make themselves more palatable to a broader range of the public.