What we do and Why we do it
Sadly, this isn't a terribly unfamiliar situation for me. The tiny History program I tought for at Livingstone College was threatened with disillusion on an annual basis by the administration on the grounds that we didn't have enough majors. The letter informing us of this risk always offered that faculty from the program would be given the opportunity of being"retrained" to serve the college in some other fashion. Oh, joy.
Even at my beloved
NKU, the faculty fought long and hard a few years back to defeat a General Education revamp which effectively wrote History, Philosophy, and Literature out of the (required) curriculum. The new plan was to replace them with a series of"interdisciplinary" courses which (I thought) boiled down to"University 101, University 102, University 201, Univesity 202... etc.).
All of this, however, raises a much more important point, which is the place of Liberal Arts in the curriculum of non-elite public institutions (for reasons that should become clear, I have no fear at all that the Liberal Arts will vanish from the halls of elite institutions, public or private, anytime soon).
If you look at the comments in the Post U. story, you will see a lot of familiar arguments for why the Liberal Arts are so important. They make us deeper and more thoughtful people. They teach us critical thinking skills. They make us productive citizens. All true, methinks... or at least mehopes.
But, I would like to add another argument to the pile. The Liberal Arts also train people to be leaders. When it comes down to it, the ability to identify a problem, gather information, analyze that information, formulate a solution to said problem, and then create a persuasive case for how and why your solution should be implemented, is the essence of what the Liberal Arts seeks to train people to do. As academics we tend to apply these skills in fairly obscure and esoteric locations in time and space.
For the most part, though, I hope my students will apply the same skills in the real world. I want to give the the opportunity to become leaders in whatever they do. I don't expect all or even most history majors to become historians. That would be absurd. But, if they go on to work in a bank, I would hope that rather than remaining a teller forever, they would use their skills to move up the professional food chain. The same goes for just about any "real world" job you can think of. A technical school or vocational program can teach you to get a job. A university is supposed to give you the tools to be a leader in your field, if you so desire.
Thus, what frightens me about the process of"privatization" which we are witnessing in American Higher Education (not only in the form of for-profit schools like Post, but also in the ongoing shift of the costs of Higher Education to tuition) is that it forces even public institutions to act like for-profit institutions.
And here is the crux of my argument. I believe that perhaps the greatest revolution in American education during the 20th century was the expansion of a university system that made the Liberal Arts available to children of non-elite families. Thus, in my view, the Northern Kentucky Universities and similar second and third tier schools are our country's truly radical institutions -- and places like Yale and Berkeley are the old guard, still training, by and large, the rich and connected. Inexpensive, high quality public institutions thus gave common folks access to the tools necessary to challenge their wealthier peers. Not only might they become managers or movers and shakers in the private sector, but ideally they might also become leaders in the public and political sectors as well.
Of course, not all students at schools such as NKU understand matters, especially as Freshmen. Many came to college simply in hopes of racheting a notch or two up the professional scale. Nothing wrong with that. But, it is when I see the gleam in a student's eyes that says he or she understands that a Liberal Arts education can be a transformative experience that can open up a world of opportunities and provide access to a rare and beautiful sort of individual sovereignty... that's when I know I'm doing my job.