Us? I won’t speak for anyone else, but I see no need to “describe/define/delineate ‘liberal arts’” beyond what has already been provided.
Also, for clarification, the passage to which I referred was this one . . .
Histories are told, and taught, in many different versions all around the world. Not only conscious and unconscious biases are inevitable, but histories are often written, or at least heavily influenced, by the victors or those in power. Does that contribute to at least some students, who would otherwise be interested in studying history, gravitating toward STEM, where truths are often more easily verifiable? The same may apply to some social sciences where different, even opposite, conclusions can often be drawn because of their heavy reliance on statistics, which can be manipulated to tell different stories.
There’s a difference between “college” and “university.” That’s true whether we’re talking about a liberal arts “college” or a “college” within a research university with aspirations of providing a liberal arts education. In both those cases the defining feature is whether the education and curriculum are oriented towards forming a specialist intelligence or a non-specialist intelligence. The latter is what constitutes an undergraduate liberal arts education. This has been said in many ways in many different times, and it’s rather an old-fashioned ideal in the contemporary educational world. However, I’ll go with the way a great and influential English literary critic of midcentury, F.R. Leavis, put it: “Its special - but non-specialist - discipline is to be literary-critical, a discipline of sensibility, judgment, and thought which, of its essential nature, is concerned with training the non-specialist intelligence.”
What happens in grad school or professional schools is something else. But the raison d’etre of these few precious undergrad years is to think freely (the root of the word “liberal”) about the meaning, beauty and underlying structure of the world. The time comes soon enough to enter the iron cage of professional life with all its obligations, but why are we in such a hurry to rush our children in to it? They will find it soon enough. And, yes, considering, thinking and wondering for their own sake, and not for anything else they can lead to, are efficient causes of a good life (vide Aristotle).
Let me try to summarize the positions of those who claim “liberal arts” are well defined. They basically assert that “liberal arts” are described or defined by one or more of the following:
This suggests that the other (non-“liberal arts”) disciplines lack such qualities. If that’s what they believe, it suggests not only a lack of understanding of the other disciplines but also a lack of critical thinking skills.
What are the standards to measure whether a field is vocational or not? Are all branches of engineering vocational? There’re some who pursue PhDs in engineering (and please don’t tell them that they’re getting some vocational training). BTW, I’m not an engineer so this isn’t about my own feelings.
I said before that, instead of delineating schools based on whether their approaches are sufficiently “liberal arts” or not, it’s better to categorize them based on the breadth of their general education or core curricula and the depth of their major-specific requirements. However, defining “liberal arts” only as “broad” and “non-specialist” would exclude many disciplines that are already in the traditional “liberal arts”. To study math, physics, chemistry, etc. (all part of traditional “liberal arts”), a student has to specialize (or s/he wouldn’t be very good).
Moreover, the concept of “liberal arts” is almost entirely American. No other Western liberal democracies with much longer histories (not to mention the other parts of the world) have this concept. Either we believe we’re uniquely superior (perhaps very American way of thinking?) or we’re fooling ourselves. Even Oxford’s PPE degree specializes in a few subjects.
It helps to be concrete. Here’s an example from my own experience.
It was in a liberal arts program in college that I first encountered the Sonnets of Shakespeare. I read them with excitement and intensity. They were a revelation of what language and the human heart could be capable of. I read as carefully as I could, summoning all the sophistication I was then capable of, assisted by the insights of the prof and my fellow students. However, I was a novice in all things literary and human. It was the beginning of understanding, not the thing itself, certainly not the end. I knew I had only half-comprehended what was in these poems. However, I got enough to be well and truly shaken up. In all this I was not thinking of any use to which I could put whatever I was gleaning from this experience of great art. The experience was its own reward. I was, in short, not reading as a professional but an enthusiast, an amateur even.
Later, in grad school, I again studied the Sonnets. This time I spent a lot more time on them, learned a lot more about the cultural background they came out of, analyzed more rigorously their interrelationships, pondered their autobiographical elements, wrote a long paper. I was attempting as best I could to get to the edge of what it was possible to know about them. And I was doing this in a way that felt different than the first time around. This time I had objectives beyond the experience itself. This time I wanted subsidiary things - to become a scholar, gain a graduate degree, have a professional career, become, in short, a specialist. That brew of objectives had its own satisfactions, but it was qualitatively different from a first encounter with great poetry.
I’m pretty sure the same relationship between beginnings in college and endings in grad or professional school exists in other fields. Others here could tell similar tales.
A PhD in anything (including what are typically considered liberal arts subjects) is vocational training for research and academic jobs in the subject.
When my fellow alumni come back for reunions, the one thing we all agree about our four years together is the amount of freedom we had to be “bad” at things, meaning we weren’t all going to become anthropologists, but we’re glad we took Anthropology; we weren’t all going to ever become musicians, but we were glad we took Music 101 together. And, I knew I was never going to become a scientist, but I sure am glad I was forced to read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (Kuhns) in the years after it was first published.
And just to clarify things further, we’re talking about the B.A. degree (or, as some places prefer - the A.B. degree) It doesn’t matter whether it’s being awarded by a “university” or a “college”. So, the question becomes why are some majors considered suitable for the Bachelor of Arts degree and others, most notably Engineering, are not? I think it’s probably the amount of specialization required in order to become really proficient at it. Not everyone wants to dive right into their freshman year fulfilling prerequisites for something they’re pretty sure they would be bad at. It’s not just a matter of whether something is “vocational”; it’s whether you have that tiny interval of space that may only be a year, maybe two, that allows you to freely explore other options. It all comes back to the “free” part (“Liber” is Latin for “free”.)
This is another misconception. Getting a PhD from a reputable program is about doing original research in an area of interest and some significance, and about demonstrating and succeeding in extending human knowledge and pushing the boundaries of knowledge in that area. A PhD is hired for her/his general ability to think creatively and to innovate in extending new knowledge and pushing new boundaries (not just something s/he did in grad school). Getting a PhD doesn’t necessarily lead to a particular career or its associated financial reward. In fact, only a small fraction of them become academicians. Even for those who do, they almost always have to spend years in post-doctoral training and further preparation.
You are right that getting a Ph.D. is about doing original research, but in doctoral programs, that is vocational training. The reason only a fraction of Ph.D.s become academics is that the academic job market is a disaster, not because Ph.D.s don’t want these jobs. The jobs simply aren’t there. In some fields, Ph.D.s end up using their training in private research enterprises (engineers, many STEM fields) - and maybe they prefer to do so, because they money is better. But most Ph.D.s are training for jobs in academia, whether or not they actually get one. So in that sense, a Ph.D. really is vocational training, even if it looks very different than other kinds of vocational training (like BAs in accounting or education). You’re learning to do a job that involves teaching and original research and requires a high level of broad content expertise. The purpose of a post-docs is not so much to acquire further training of the same kind but rather to have a chance to get a jump on the next phase of one’s research (in some cases while gaining teaching experience). In other words, they’re more like proto-faculty positions than medical residencies or similar.
Essentially, the point of vocational training is to become qualified for a specific job, right? So is the point of a Ph.D. program. A Ph.D. is hired for the both for the skills acquired in the graduate program (teaching, research) and the potential for greater contributions to the discipline and institution.
The purpose of getting a PhD isn’t necessarily to become qualified for the specific job, an academician. Maybe in history it is. My son is currently pursuing his PhD in AI because he loves it, not because he wants to become an academician. I have a PhD in physics and I’m not doing anything related to physics.
As I said, in STEM fields it’s often different, because there are more jobs outside the academy. But in many disciplines, the purpose is, in fact, to become qualified for a specific job. The awful academic job market has only recently prompted many programs to reevaluate and offer training in non-academic tracks, but the implication is that these tracks are alternatives due to necessity, not preference.
It is training and practice in research, which can be done in both academic environments and in industrial or (non-academic) government environments (if industry or government wants to do that kind of research).
Each faculty member at a research university supervises N graduate students to PhD completion over the course of a career. If N is significantly greater than 1, then the number of PhD graduates exceeds the number needed to replace retiring faculty members at research universities. Of course, some PhD graduates go to other academic jobs (less-research colleges and universities, community colleges, etc.), but the tenure track jobs there do not seem to use up anywhere close to all of the PhD graduates.
It’s not quite that simple – some departments grow, others shrink; some fields become more or less popular over time, so candidates in growing fields will have an easier time getting jobs. Sometimes there might be a wave of retirements (though these are more often anticipated than actual). But the biggest problem right now is a perfect storm: anticipated population cliff of college age students, universities’ decisions to consolidate/contract/discontinue many programs, and the trend of hiring adjuncts to replace tenured faculty.
Just for the sake of testing this, would you then say that a Bachelor of Science degree in Real Estate (offered by the University of Washington out of its college of the built environment) and a BS in Mathematics are equivalent in terms of their specialization? If they are, then either Math should be dropped from the concept of liberal arts, or real estate studies should be added to it.
One of my kids studied physics, and I would not call her a specialist. What she wound up studying in grad school, a branch of mathematics that has a lot of practical application in industry, was much more focused and narrow in scope.
I think it’s just a matter of degree of specialization. Sure, she had to take more physics courses than, say, bio-feminism courses to claim the major. But I don’t think she was a specialist in anything when she graduated. She was broadly educated with an emphasis, rather than a narrow focus, on physics and astronomy.
My preference is to focus on what “liberal arts” means, regardless of the school, and only when that’s settled move on to whether XYZ university or college is a liberal arts institution.
I generally don’t like to talk about myself, but I’ll make a small exception here. The training (through PhD) that I received in physics has been extremely valuable in almost everything (not just in physics) that I’ve encountered over the years, just like what some in this thread have claimed the “liberal arts” education has done for them (which I believe).
I agree with you. I’m frankly still not sure what “liberal arts” should include and whether the concept should be broadened.
We all live under constraints. Both colleges and students have to make some tradeoffs. Breadth vs depth is one such tradeoff. If “liberal arts” just mean some fundamentals in math, sciences and humanities that every student, regardless of her/his specialization, must learn, I’d be okay with the concept. One never knows what one would encounter later in one’s career and life. But that isn’t necessarily the case, even at some so-called “liberal arts” schools (the example I used before is Amherst). There’s also a question about depth, or specialization. Some here would probably argue that it isn’t necessary in a “liberal arts” education and that depth or specialization can be attained later in grad schools. This is where I beg to differ. Especially in STEM. Knowledge in STEM is much more hierarchical than, say, in the humanities. Once a student is significantly behind in STEM, it’s much harder (and often impossible) to catch up.
I don’t think there’s much to disagree with here. It’s a matter of how much specialization you can shoehorn into four years. A lot of people here balk at the idea of a 5-year degree in Engineering. Wesleyah has tried for years to get people interested in graduating after three years, if cost is a factor in their lives. There haven’t been a lot of takers; people in general, or at least the market that LACs have cultivated over the centuries, like studying the liberal arts and sciences.
If Oxbridge can squeeze a full college education into three years, I’m not sure why we couldn’t do it in four. An extra year to become familiar with the direction one wants to pursue should be sufficient. The probability is high that those who can’t figure out (with lots of effort, of course) after one year won’t figure out after two. Like everything else in life, there has to be some constraints (including financial ones) even with a “liberal” approach.
I guess. Of course, you’d have to commit a heck of a lot more resources to secondary school education in this country which IIRC is somewhere close to the bottom of the Western industrialized world.
