Radicalizing the Liberal Arts: Race and Racism at Small Liberal Arts Colleges

Introduction to the "Radicalizing the Liberal Arts" minicluster.

Top-tier liberal arts colleges in the United States and the struggle for racial diversity: re-stating the problem and re-crafting its solution

This study concludes that, despite a rising din of criticism, and despite the existence of alternate assessment frameworks, top-tier liberal arts colleges in the United States measure themselves along axes of wealth and exclusivity, and prioritize their operations accordingly. Paradoxically, though, they articulate diversity, particularly racial diversity, as a key goal. To reconcile their exclusivity with racial diversity, such institutions recruit students that, regardless of race, arrive on campus pre-acculturated to the dominant White culture—a self-defeating recruitment pattern that tends to exclude students not so acculturated. This study reviews various ways such institutions can go about discussing and resolving this inherent conflict at the institutional level and in so doing support minority students from more typical schools and neighborhoods, who become fully immersed in the dominant culture for the first time only upon initiating their post-secondary education.

Financial Stress and Health Considerations: A Tradeoff in the Reopening Decisions of U.S. Liberal Arts Colleges during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper presents empirical evidence on factors influencing choices made by members of the Annapolis Group of Liberal Arts colleges regarding whether to operate primarily in-person, primarily online or some flexible alternative during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. This paper examines the tradeoff between public health risks and financial standing that school administrators faced when deciding reopening plans. Because in-person instruction at colleges and universities had large effects on COVID-19 case rates, it is critical to understand what caused these decisions. We used binary and multinomial probit models to evaluate an original data set of publicly available data as well as data from the College Crisis Initiative. Binary and multinomial choice model estimates suggest that conditional upon the prevailing level of COVID-19 in their county, financially distressed colleges were approximately 20 percentage points more likely to opt for primarily in-person operations than less financially distressed colleges. These choices highlight an important potential tradeoff between public health and financial concerns present in the higher education sector and emphasize the need for public spending to mitigate adverse health outcomes if a similar situation occurs again.

Liberal Education

The sleepy liberal arts colleges that upperclassmen attended went through dramatic changes by the twenty-first century, both in the growth of numbers of students and in the focus of study: mainly technical, scientific, and commercial education. The liberal arts play a key role in Catholic education. The purposes of liberal education are discussed. One way to describe that purpose is not only to learn about history and literature but also, even more importantly, to learn from history and literature. In the Catholic intellectual tradition, moral formation, abandoned at most secular universities, remains important and strengthens virtuous habits, both intellectual and moral. Liberal education liberates the “fly in the bottle,” gives perspective through the study of history, and deepens human sensibility through literature and theological studies. In that tradition, the transcendent dimension expands the horizons of relevance and deepens sympathy for the human condition. In an age of social media, the relevance of liberal education becomes ever more obvious.

Teaching and Research

Despite many attempts, there is little agreement of what counts for effective teaching and research. The different styles of four great teachers are examined, compared, and contrasted. Some basic elements, hard to quantify, are nonetheless identified. Realistic expectations for faculty research are discussed, the relationship between the quality of teaching and research is explained, and the importance that faith and reason play in the types of research Catholic universities should support is discussed. Finally, different forms of scholarship and the different expectations for scholarly production as research universities, comprehensive universities, and liberal arts colleges are examined, concluding that rigor can be defined in a variety of ways, not just by the number of articles published in refereed journals.

Curating the Virtual Museum

Academic programs in ethnomusicology are almost exclusively oriented toward training students for tenure-track positions at research institutions and liberal arts colleges. However, the students that graduate from these institutions do not exclusively follow this singular, narrowly defined career path. Nor should they. If the field of ethnomusicology is to increase its relevance outside academe, it would do well to pay to greater attention to how it prepares its practitioners for nontraditional career paths. This chapter examines some of the themes and issues that the author has encountered as an ethnomusicologist working for a nonprofit organization focused on the preservation and dissemination of American Jewish music. In addition to outlining some of the key differences between working inside and outside academe, it argues for a view of applied (or public) ethnomusicology that bridges gaps between ethnomusicology and musicology, between the academic and the “real” world, and between the universal and the particular—with case studies illustrating specific examples from the author’s work. A discussion section considers the ubiquity of the term “curator” in the present cultural moment, and offers suggestions as to how to individuals can prepare themselves and their students for nontraditional career paths. Ultimately, it argues that the pursuit of traditional and nontraditional career paths should be complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—endeavors, and that working to bridge the perceived gap between the two will strengthen both.

Lemons Into Lemonade

In response to shifting demographics, financial strain, and an existential crisis about their value and place in the twenty-first century world, small liberal arts colleges are changing -- some choosing to close while others make drastic changes to curricular and programmatic offerings to demonstrate innovation and adaptation. This paper will present a case study of these tensions and responses through discussion of one college’s simultaneous commitment to Interfaith Engagement and discontinuance of the Religion Major and Minor. This reality crystalizes the tension and disconnect between the curricular and civic projects of interreligious studies and interfaith engagement. At the same time, this reality opens the door to a pragmatic solution that intentionally integrates these two in a manner that promises to provide both an effective response to a budget driven problem and a potential new paradigm for curricular and co-curricular integration and community-based learning for higher education as a whole.