An institution I recently worked for just eliminated their Liberal Arts program and is focusing on something it is calling “leadership studies.” I do not know the entire situation and motivation behind this decision and I certainly do not intend to disparage this particular university. It very well could be that they are still strongly committed to a humanities or liberal arts education and the program, as implemented, just did not work out for whatever reason. I fully understand the economic factors involved (I teach a class on the economics of information), but I do think this institution made a significant error of judgment. As important as the economic situation is for any school, at what point do those of us as educators—those who believe in the enduring achievements of our Western intellectual heritage—stand up and say there might be very good reasons to have our future leaders be broadly, liberally, and generally educated? Of course, specialization is an important reality of our knowledge economy and we all must specialize to some degree. Time is always scarce and brings with it the ever-present reality of opportunity cost. Specialization, which in many cases amounts to vocational training, should not preclude one from being generally educated. In our knowledge economy, it is far too easy to develop what we call leaders into technological bureaucrats. A humanities based education will help address this concern.
Whenever a university eliminates a liberal arts program it makes a tragic mistake. Without a background in the humanities or liberal arts, it becomes harder for the student to specialize and make important intellectual connections because they simply will not have the foundation and skills to do so, and it will be more difficult for the student to understand and comprehend the masters in his or her field if the student decides to make that extra step. The classes I teach draw upon the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and technology. I have found that even my most motivated students have difficulty understanding how the great thinkers and innovators of the past have contributed to their own field of study. I firmly believe that an education which includes logical reasoning that corresponds to reality (not all approaches to logic succeed at that), and an exploration of the human element which always shapes our artistic and technological reality, is the best educational service that a school or university can provide to their students. After all, technology brings with it that most peculiar and vexing trait of the human condition itself—it is always an amalgam of good and evil. With an education that includes the liberal arts, STEM students will be better prepared to understand why the great ethical questions that surround our technological society matter and will come to an understanding of what it means to live a meaningful life.
I recently re-discovered how a brilliant mind can influence a field when reading through A.N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. Whitehead, of course, is a great early Twentieth Century logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Whitehead draws on early Greek thought, Roman Stoicism and legal theory, and even shows how medieval Benedictine monks contributed to science and technology. In short, he uses illustrations from literature, philosophy, and history to demonstrate how math and science have contributed to the world we live in today. It is true that Science and the Modern World is not Whitehead’s most significant work, but it is his most accessible and rewarding work for the generally educated reader or for one who wants to be. Those specializing in mathematics will certainly be (or should be) familiar with his work, but I wonder how accessible his examples are for those without a broad liberal education? The same could be said of Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, or Albert Einstein—all intellectual leaders of their fields and well versed in the great Western thinkers that shaped so much of our philosophical, artistic, and historical understanding. We need leaders and specialists in STEM fields but we must give them the foundation and conceptual tools to help them understand the masters of their own field. It does not matter where one falls on the cultural or social spectrum either. Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx were all classicists and broadly educated. Freud, of course, used his foundational knowledge to develop an entirely new area of study, analytical psychology and, along with Marx, became one of the most influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century. How will universities who eliminate the liberal arts help our future leaders understand these great social and philosophical influences of our day and aid them in carefully weighing their ideas? Similarly, it is easy to see how Whitehead, Planck, or Heisenberg became specialists in their respective fields. They were able to draw from history, literature, and philosophy to make significant contributions to math, physics, and science. They built their theories using tools given to them from those who came before them. Their generalization prepared them for specialization. The insights of Planck and Heisenberg were so profound that they contributed to a re-birth of Aristotelian metaphysics—a significant accomplishment considering the previous four hundred years of intellectual and scientific history.
A generally educated student will be able to make connections, weigh evidence, communicate clearly, and understand what went right and what went wrong in the past. These insights and skills will serve students very well as they specialize in any field. The intellectual historian Irving Babbit reminds us, “The discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. If scientific discipline is not supplemented by a truly humanistic or religious discipline the result is unethical science, and unethical science is perhaps the worst monster that has yet been turned loose on the race” (Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 1919, 383). Given that science and technology are so fundamental to our human situation today, why would any school or university seek to eliminate a program which focuses on the greatest of human achievements and helps us to understand what it means to live a deliberately meaningful life?
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