Restructuring for the Twenty-First Century

Today, as the demographics and culture of America change, the demands made on any number of social, cultural, and educational institutions that had their origins in the traditions of Europe and earlier American history seem almost impossible to reconcile. The current demand that these institutions serve all members of American society—people of a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and interests—and at a higher technological level than ever before, gathers increasing weight, weight that threatens these institutions. At the same time, those with a vested interest in universities, museums, social services, and arts organizations desperately try to shore up their beloved institutions from within, with the result that no one is pleased. Reform attempts seem to lead to the creation of yet more bureaucracy, further stifling institutional ability to respond to the new needs. Goals apparently so simple and clear as "We must better educate our youth to compete in the new world economy" become complicated and muddled. To complicate all the more this process of "change"—to use the current buzzword—we are coming to realize that in tinkering with our traditional institutions, we no longer have confidence in the traditional ways of passing along our values, nor is there a strong consensus on what those values are. William E. Brock, chairman of the Wingspread Group, which was convened to study higher education, states that we must pass along to the next generation the "critical importance of honesty, decency, integrity, compassion, and personal responsibility in a democratic society." Who could disagree? The problem is that people of goodwill no longer necessarily define terms such as "integrity" and "personal responsibility" the same way. So while everyone of every political persuasion is able to agree that something must be done, it has become almost impossible to agree on what to do. Goals become either so idealistic that they are laughable or so watered down, in order not to offend any interest group, that they are useless. In today's political climate, it is clear that to call for "major reform" plays well in the press but can actually forestall any needed change.

Some Thoughts on Curriculum and Change

It should go without saying that in the twentieth-century history of American higher education, each significant curricular reform movement has had a distinct political agenda. This is particularly true for initiatives designed to create decisive changes in the shape of the undergraduate curriculum. In those circumstances in which a political movement and an institutional initiative have coincided, a distinct political purpose can be discerned in what the institution required of its students and how the program was articulated. The historical moment was certainly at issue in the case of the reforms of the 1930s. Men such as Robert Hutchins, Stringfellow Barr, and Scott Buchanan saw in the idea of a core curriculum a way to realize their ideal construct of democracy. The Great Books concept and the variants of the core at Chicago had at their root a notion of natural rights and the social contract. Inherent in that framing of the body politic were concepts of freedom and civic responsibility. The objective was clear: one needed to educate young Americans—the elite of the nation—to steer the country away from the extremes of fascism and communism. Radical reform was imperative, since during the Great Depression both of these alternatives appeared politically viable. In the post-World War II era, the Cold War framed most of the discussion about the curriculum. This claim may seem odd, but on closer inspection, beginning with Harvard's general education reform from the early 1950s, the concept of the university, until the late 1980s, was substantially defined by a consciousness of how much the United States constituted an alternative to political unfreedom. The elective-course system in its new Harvard form, combined with distribution requirements and an enormous premium on undergraduate specialization, was a kind of metaphorical mirror of the idealized free marketplace of ideas. We were convinced that we were training young people to cherish the advantages of free choice and liberty in a world in which the grim alternative of totalitarianism was not a mirage but a present danger.

The Student as Scholar

While I thought about this conference, my mind drifted back to fall 1956, when I became academic dean at one of the world's smallest higher learning institutions, a tiny college of arts and sciences in southern California. During my first month on the job, the faculty curriculum committee met to review the college's requirements for graduation. In an act of unrestrained innocence, I asked why we had a "distribution requirement" for all students. A senior professor replied, "We borrowed it from Pomona College" (our prestigious neighbor down the road). I then asked where Pomona got it and was told, "From Harvard"—which gave me a basic lesson about higher education policymaking that's stood me in good stead for almost forty years. Liberal education is one of the most enduring and widely shared visions in American higher learning. Almost everyone agrees that beyond acquiring competence in a special field, undergraduates must be broadly informed, discover relationships across the disciplines, form values, and advance the common good. It's also true, however, that this inspired vision of liberal learning, which is powerfully reaffirmed in almost all college mission statements, is under siege on many fronts. The decline in the quality of the nation's schools surely has weakened liberal education, as has the growing emphasis on careerism and credentials. Also, the cultural fragmentation in America today makes it especially difficult for academics to bring to undergraduate education a sense of coherence and shared purpose. In 1920 Archibald MacLeish diagnosed the problem this way: 'There can be no educational postulates so long as there are no generally accepted postulates of life itself." Beyond all of these impediments, it is my own impression that the most serious challenge to liberal education on most campuses is the system of faculty rewards. And I remain convinced that liberal learning will be renewed only as faculty members who teach undergraduates and spend time with incoming students are rewarded for such efforts. But before considering how this ambitious goal might be accomplished, I would like to take a backward glance and reflect on how priorities of the professoriate have changed through the years.

Constraints and Opportunities

Liberal education has always proved a challenge to deliver systematically, if only because by its very nature it is difficult to specify. In the United States, institutions that seek to offer liberal education on the threshold of a new century operate under new or, at least, significantly more chafing constraints. This article examines some of these constraints and suggests ways in which they can be relieved or accommodated. The principle constraints discussed here are those of shrinking material resources, expanding and accelerating expectations, and increasing heterogeneity across the student body. In the face of these constraints, academic institutions from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities are no better able than other institutions to adapt themselves to changing circumstances—and perhaps a little bit less so. Resource constraints stem from internal and external causes. The internal causes, I will argue, are the result of an economic anomaly. It is not possible for the direct delivery of liberal education to become significantly more efficient in the same way that other economic processes do, at least in part because liberal education is not something that can be "delivered": thus, there is a productivity lag behind other sectors in the economy. The institution cannot fully compensate for this lag by making improvements in the efficiency of other activities (e.g., computing or building maintenance). The external causes, in the public sector, arise from the insistent demands for other uses of public funds, combined with continued popular resistance to tax levels comparable to those of other industrial democracies. In the private sector, the external cause is the declining capacity (or willingness) of families and individual payers to meet even a partial share of the cost of liberal education. Other constraints result from expanding and accelerating expectations as students and their families demand that they be prepared for specific jobs or get a leg up on specific postgraduate professional training. In a sense this is the other side of the coin of employers' broader demand for higher education. As the proportion of jobs requiring undergraduate and graduate degrees has increased, the vocational aspect of higher education has increased accordingly.

Technology and Computer Literacy

What is "computer literacy," and what is its place in liberal education? Liberal education is incomplete if it does not prepare educated people to address the presence of technology and, more important, the presence of technology's information products, in an informed and critical way. There are four reasons I say this. First, the traditional liberal arts understanding of technology as machine, merely an "object" in relation to human "subjectivity," is an essentially aristocratic attitude that fails to acknowledge the way technology and information saturate the modern world in which educated people live and work. Second, defining the computer as a mere machine is an uncritical ideology that enhances the technological mythology that computers are more objective than humans, thereby masking and legitimating the social power of technicians. But, third, there is a deeper reason as well: technical objects are created within a technical culture that contains a powerful (if tacit) critique of liberal education, one that has the potential to replace liberal education in the modern world. Finally, liberal education's dismissal of computers as mere machines distracts attention from the fact that technology's information products define modernity: mass communications mediate most of the information in our culture, and digital technology produces the images and information that saturate everyday life. If liberal education is to come to terms with the significance of technology in the modern world, or to subject technology-mediated communication and information products to critique, liberal education must also become self-reflective about the technical objects that shape its own communications and information. What is the origin of the book form, as it has evolved from the codex, the journal, and the social organization of education around printed objects (the bookstore, the lecture, the library, the disciplinary society, scholarly publishers, the college)? What are the origins of the concept of creativity stemming from individual genius, and of the social construction of the "author" as property right holder? In some ways, higher education is the last social institution primarily organized around print technology and still resistant to information technology.

The Search for American Liberal Education

When Charles William Eliot launched his radical reforms at Harvard in the late 1870s, he was convinced that the fixed curriculum, based on English liberal education models, was ill-suited to the democratic spirit, the cultural diversity, and the rapidly changing circumstances in America. By introducing the free elective system, he hoped to develop in students the habits of self-reliance that he regarded as essential to the American democratic system. Seventy years later, in a post-World War II climate of concern about the "unifying purpose and idea" for American education, Harvard issued a new version of liberal education in its famous Redbook. To address the new American circumstances, these reforms reduced rather than increased choices for students. These benchmarks of American higher education notwithstanding, the final chapter of a widely respected study by Bruce Kimball, published in 1986, opens with the observation that there is no "distinctively American view of liberal education. This observation contains an irony that raises interesting and significant questions. After such high-profile efforts as those made at Harvard, why is there no clear model of American liberal education? And if there is no such model, do we need to develop one, especially in the context of the dramatic changes affecting American society today—changes that in many ways are more radical than those faced by Charles William Eliot? Why, in this latest round of debates about the core curriculum in our colleges and universities, has the issue been posed in terms of the primacy and purity of Western civilization rather than in terms of the adequacy of our educational models to address the realities of America in the late twentieth century? These questions are even more striking when one considers the almost complete reversal of roles and the dramatic changes in orientation that have occurred in the relationship between the United States and its cultural ancestors in the Anglo-European world.

Introduction

Liberal education has always had its full share of theorists, believers, and detractors, both inside and outside the academy. The best of these have been responsible for the evolutionary development of the concept of liberal education, for its changing tradition, and for the resultant adaptation of educational institutions to serve the needs of society. This book is the result of a meeting, primarily of believers, held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 1994. The reason for calling it was not simply to consider the unpleasant omens for liberal education that have been appearing as the end of a millennium is reached. A pessimist would include among them the end of the long period of economic growth for colleges, the decline of public support, the discovery that financial aid for tuition can be an Achilles' heel in times of rising costs, and the increasingly uncritical dependence of the public on the mass media and information technology, as well as a host of other external pressures and internal confusions. The meeting was called primarily to inspire further reflection on how liberal education can best continue to serve the healthy functioning of democratic society despite these apparent obstacles, for this concept still deserves a central pedestal in the educational pantheon. Presidents and chief academic officers of eighty liberal arts undergraduate institutions participated in the meeting, along with a dozen scholars and a few leaders of educational associations. Nine of the presentations from the symposium are included in this volume, accompanied by a statement prepared by all of the participants representing their general agreement about liberal education. The four-day symposium was sponsored by the Educational Leadership Program of the Christian A. Johnson Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. The Educational Leadership Program conducts research and seminars for college and school administrators. The American Council of Learned Societies supports scholarly research in the humanities.

The Years before College

Participants in the past decade's discussions about precollegiate education speak informally of "waves" of educational reform. The first wave which took place in the early and middle 1980s, centered on attempts to ensure that students would secure the prerequisites for higher learning; this phase was often termed a quest for "basic skills" or the "basic literacies/' though sometimes commentators spoke more bluntly about "getting the little buggers to work harder." The second wave, which occupied the late 1980s, called for the professionalization of teachers and of building administrators. There should be a higher caliber of teachers, teachers should have more control over the events in their classrooms, and management should occur, as much as possible, directly on site. Commentators like Albert Shanker and Patricia Graham have pointed out that neither of these waves was controversial. No one could question the importance of basic skills, though the means by which they were attained, and the time by which they should be in place, merited discussion. By the same token, while some may have feared the negative consequences of too much teacher or building autonomy, it was scarcely correct politically to oppose this trend in too direct a fashion. One area of potential discussion has remained conspicuously absent from the first decade of discussions. This missing wave could be termed "the primary purpose of education." Various goals were implicit in many discussions, of course; they ranged from the preparation of a skilled workforce to the education of a wise citizenry. But there was understandable reluctance to make this discussion overt, because educators' goals are too likely to conflict with one another: the reformer who values well-roundedness or individual excellence might well clash with the reformer who values the graduate steeped in science or in the classics of Western civilization. Since reformers have needed all of the support and as much consensus as they could garner, it is not surprising that such discussions have taken place far more frequently in the corridors at meetings or in writings by individuals like Allan Bloom or E. D. Hirsch,1 who did not come from the ranks of precollegiate educators.

The Importance of Mission

In fall 1993 the University of Puget Sound Board of Trustees accepted an offer from Seattle University to assume sponsorship of the Puget Sound School of Law. Although we had not been seeking an alternative home for the law school, we board members responded to Seattle University's initiative as we did because we believed that transferring the law school would clarify to all our constituents the University of Puget Sound's mission as a national liberal arts college. We were also convinced that the law school— which had been established in 1971 and was located in a renovated department store in downtown Tacoma, a ten-minute drive from Puget Sound's main campus—would be better served by becoming part of an institution firmly committed to professional and graduate education. The action illustrates how two very different universities can work together to ensure that each offers those programs that best fit its mission. For Puget Sound, the decision further exemplifies our determination to focus our resources, financial and human, on what we do best—a determination that grew out of the awareness that we cannot (and should not) try to do and be everything. The aftermath of the decision, however, dramatizes something very different: that even though the rhetoric of higher education in the 1990s is characterized by calls for institutional focus and for funding only the endeavors that are central to that focus, the pressure from multiple constituencies makes it very difficult for colleges and universities to move beyond talk to action. Furthermore, although most universities are not likely to face the directly comparable choice of transferring a program, this situation demonstrates instructive principles to all institutions: it is essential that their governing boards be absolutely clear about institutional mission and ensure that resources are allocated accordingly,- it is equally important that institutional mission grows out of institutional strengths; and it is crucial that boards select and support presidents whose vision is consistent with their own. Puget Sound has deliberately been true to these principles for some time.

A Historical Perspective

While envisioning liberal education for the twenty-first century, we must not forget that our visions are shaped and conditioned by historical context, or tradition. Indeed, the very fact that we discuss something called "liberal education" demonstrates the influence of tradition. The general precept is well known, but the nature of this particular tradition is often misconstrued, due not only to neglect but also to genuine intentions to rescue or correct the tradition. To be sure, this particular tradition is long and complex, and it is doubtful that anyone can claim to understand fully the current situation of liberal education in light of its tradition, particularly in this era of postmodern interpretivism and deconstruction. This brief essay will therefore make two, more modest claims. First, I hope to demonstrate that, contrary to the conventional perception, the tradition of liberal education is not uniform and continuous but full of variety, discontinuity, and innovation. It has been and is a conflicted tradition. Second, I wish to argue conversely that innovative proposals made for liberal education at the end of the twentieth century often belong to the tradition, although this heritage is generally not recognized by either the proponents or their opponents. These two points, I suggest, indicate the richness and complexity of the tradition and its value, as well as its influence, for those seeking to envision what the next century of liberal education may and should hold. This is not to say that the tradition is boundless, that liberal education is all things for all situations, or that it is without blemishes or addictions, even cancerous growths. But liberal education is what we have and what we are, after centuries of trying to get it right, and we can no more wipe the slate clean and start entirely afresh here than we can in any other human endeavor. We can certainly try to change and improve in the coming century, but change and improvement imply understanding of and comparison with the past.