Physics Is a Liberal Art
On my second-least-favorite bit of higher ed jargon
My absolute least favorite bit of commonly used higher education terminology is shorthanding arts and literature as “the humanities,” for its implication (sometimes subtle, sometimes… not) that the study of scientific and technical subjects is inhuman. This often gets leveraged into talk about some branch of the arts as “The study of what really makes us human,” which is every bit as idiotically arrogant as STEM majors (incorrectly) deriding arts majors as future burger-flippers. It’s a battle that’s long been lost, I realize, but I will continue to pettily put “humanities” in scare quotes when I’m writing in my own space.
My second least-favorite bit of widely used academic shorthand is “the liberal arts,” used for approximately the same collection of disciplines. It’s taken me a little while to get to it because of work, but Inside Higher Ed ran a piece with the headline “What Are the Liberal Arts?” and subhead “New study shows most high school seniors have little idea” that is more or less perfectly targeted to raise my blood pressure.
The issue in this case is one of conflation, specifically misidentifying the collection of academic disciplines shorthanded as “the liberal arts” with the idea of liberal arts education, which is the notion that students should not simply focus in one narrow area, but study a broad range of topics. A range that, in any sensible formulation, includes math and science.
As a result, a lot of writing about “liberal arts education” is badly muddled, switching between the two definitions sometimes in mid-sentence. And that leads directly to statements like this one from the IHE article, right after a list of positive attributes (“class discussions, critical thinking, intellectual, problem solving, general knowledge, student/professor interaction, lifelong learning and broad education”) that students in the survey associate with the phrase:
While some of the qualities associated with the liberal arts would please advocates for liberal arts colleges, they aren’t exactly a definition. And they aren’t all accurate, even as descriptors. One could study engineering or business in a program with all the positive attributes.
Yes, says the guy with a faculty position at a liberal arts college with an engineering program, that’s exactly the point. “Liberal arts education” doesn’t mean “majoring in something involving literary analysis” it means “taking classes in many different types of subjects on the way to a degree in absolutely anything.” The idea of liberal arts education is absolutely compatible with majoring in engineering or even— quelle horreur!— business, provided that students don’t only study the one narrow area in which they’ll get their degree. It’s an attitude toward education, not a list of majors or even colleges.
In fact, getting those positive attributes into engineering and business (and science, and math, and economics, and…) degree programs is exactly what we should want. Another annoying trope of modern social media is the inevitable refrain that whatever policy or public relations blunder has most recently been made by someone from a technical background would’ve been fixed by hiring a humanities major to do it instead. That could charitably be called incomplete rather than wrong— what we need isn’t more people in decision-making roles who majored in “the humanities,” what we need is people with a liberal arts education. We need scientists with a strong technical background who also know something about history and culture, diplomats who understand the history of a region who also can read a graph and understand basic science, civil engineers who understand design principles and material properties who also have a basic understanding of culture of the places where they build.
Dividing academic subjects into “the liberal arts” and… not is a mistake, and one that’s ultimately self-defeating. If you’re doing it right, physics is a liberal art, computer science is a liberal art, mechanical engineering is a liberal art. Hell, even business should a liberal art, if you’re doing it right. We should want to expand the category, not complain that students don’t have a sufficiently narrow conception of what it is.
(Update, 9/22/22: I usually save these for separate posts, but I really like this response from Matt “Dean Dad” Reed, so I’ll add a link here for those reading on the web.)
A little rant-y, but I’ve been so slammed at work that I needed to be annoyed to carve out the time to blog. If you want more of this, here’s a button:
If you want to point out that this is yet another petty act of tilting at linguistic windmills, I assure you, I already know, but the comments will be open anyway:
Thanks for this. It OUGHT not have to be said but it's good to say it.
It's tempting to go on to polemicize who is the more sinned against than sinning, but you stopped at the right point.
Hear, hear! It's my job as a medievalist to point out, in support, that the original seven liberal arts were rhetoric, grammar, logic (the trivium), astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry (the quadrivium), so this idea goes way back...