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Ten Qualities of a “Liberally” Educated Person

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The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a long and proud history as a leader in public higher education. On the website of the Letters and Sciences (L&S) Honors Program at UW-Madison, Professor William Cronon, history professor, former Director of the L&S Program, and winner of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Bancroft Prize, describes the 10 qualities of a liberal education. He could as well have been describing the highest purpose of all honors colleges and programs. We repeat his words below:

1. They listen and they hear.

This is so simple that perhaps it doesn’t seem worth saying, but in our distracted and over-busy age I think it’s worth declaring that an educated person knows how to pay attention–to people and to the world around them. They work hard to hear what other people are saying. They can follow an argument, track logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear the emotions that lie behind both the logic and the illogic, and ultimately empathize with the person who is feeling those emotions.

2. They read and they understand.

This too is utterly simple to say, but very difficult to achieve, since there are so many many ways of reading in this world. An educated person is literate across a wide range of genres and media. They’re able to read and absorb the New York Times, including the front page, the arts section, the sports section, the business section, the Tuesday science section, and the editorials; they can read not just Time magazine but Scientific American, the New York Review of Books, Better Homes and Gardens, The National Enquirer, and the Reader’s Digest, they can enjoy reading popular fiction ranging from the latest bestseller or detective novel or comic book to a work of classic literature; and they’re engaged by works of nonfiction ranging from biographies to debates about current public policy to the latest discoveries of science. But skilled readers know how to read far more than just words. They know how to enjoy wandering through a great art museum, and are moved by what they hear in a concert hall; they recognize the extraordinary human achievements represented by contemporary athletes working in fields as diverse as tennis and gymnastics and football; they are engaged by classic and contemporary works of theater and cinema, and they find in television a valuable window on popular culture; they can wander through a prairie or woodland and recognize the creatures they encounter there, the meaning of the rocks, and the lay of the land; they can look out across a farmer’s field and know the crops they see there; they can appreciate good food whether they encounter it in a four-star French restaurant or the Pardeeville Watermelon Festival; they recognize fine craftsmanship whether in carpentry or plumbing or auto mechanics; and they can surf the World Wide Web. For an educated person, all of these are special forms of “reading,” profound ways in which the eyes and the ears and the other senses become attuned to the infinite wonders and talents that make up the human and the natural worlds. As with the other items on my list, none of us can possibly attain full competence in all these ways of “reading,” but the mark of an educated person is to be competent in many of them, and curious about all of them. Encountering the world as a fascinating and extraordinarily intricate set of texts to be read and understood: surely this is one of the most important marks of an educated person.

3. They can talk with anyone.

An educated person knows how to talk: they can give a speech, they can make people laugh, they can ask thoughtful questions, and they can hold a conversation with anyone they meet, whether that person is a high school dropout or a Nobel laureate, a child or a patient dying in a hospital, a factory worker or a farmer or a corporate CEO. Moreover, an educated person participates in such conversation not because they like to talk about themselves but because they’re genuinely interested in the other person. A friend of mine says that one of the most important things his father ever told him was that in having a conversation, his job was “to figure out what’s so neat about what the other person does.” It would be hard to imagine a more succinct description of this key quality of an educated person.

4. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly.

What goes for talking goes for writing as well: an educated person knows the fine craft of putting words on paper.

I’m not talking about the ability to parse a sentence or compose a paragraph or write an essay. I’m talking about the ability to express what is in your mind and in your heart so as to get it across to the person who reads your words so as to teach, persuade, and move that person. I’m talking about writing as a form of touching akin to the touching that happens in a wonderfully exhilarating conversation.

5. They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.

This ability to solve puzzles and problems bespeaks many skills. These include basic numeracy, an ability to handle numbers and to see that many problems which appear to turn on questions of quality can in fact be reinterpreted as subtle problems of quantity. These days a comparable skill involves the ability to run a computer, whether for word processing or doing taxes or playing games. I could go on, but the broader and more practical skills I’m describing here are those of the analyst, the manager, the engineer, the critic: the ability to look at a complicated reality, break it into pieces, and figure out how it works, with the end result of being able to do practical things in the real world. Part of the challenge in this, of course, is the ability to put reality back together again after having broken it down into pieces–for only by so doing can we accomplish practical goals without violating the integrity of the world we’re trying to change.

6. They respect rigor, not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.

This is to say, truly educated people love learning, but they love wisdom more. They can appreciate a closely reasoned argument without being unduly impressed by mere logic. They understand that knowledge serves values, and they strive to put these two–knowledge and values–into constant dialogue with each other. The ability to recognize true rigor is one of the most important achievements in any education; but it is worthless, even dangerous, if it is not placed in the service of some larger vision that renders it also humane.

7. They practice respect and humility, tolerance and self-criticism.

This is another way of saying that they can feel and understand the power of other people’s dreams and nightmares as well as their own. They have the intellectual range and emotional generosity to step outside their own experience and prejudices to recognize the parochialism of their own viewpoints, thereby opening themselves to perspectives different from their own. This quality of intellectual openness and tolerance is among the most important values we associate with liberal education. From this commitment to tolerance flow all those aspects of a liberal education that celebrate the value of learning foreign languages, exposing oneself to the cultures of distant peoples, learning the history of long-ago times, and encountering the many ways in which men and women have known the sacred and have given names to their gods. From a deep encounter with history and geography and culture comes a rich sense of how very different people are from each other and how much they share in common.

8. They understand how to get things done in the world.

In describing the goal of his Rhodes Scholarships, Cecil Rhodes spoke of trying to identify young people who would spend their lives engaged in what he called “the world’s fight,” by which he meant the struggle to leave the world a better place than one finds it. Learning how to get things done in the world in an effort to leave it a better place is surely one of the most practical and important lessons we can take from our education. It is fraught with peril because the power to act in the world can so easily be abused? But we fool ourselves if we think we can avoid acting, avoid exercising power, avoid joining the world’s fight. Not to act is to abandon to others our own responsibility for trying to make the world a better place, even in the face of what we know to be injustice. And so we study power and ask ourselves what it means to act rightly and wrongly in our use of power. We struggle to try to know how we can do good and avoid doing wrong.

9. They nurture and empower the people around them.

One of the most important things that tempers the exercise of power and shapes right action is surely the recognition that no one ever acts alone. A liberally educated person understands that they belong to a community whose prosperity and well-being is crucial to their own, and they help that community flourish by giving of themselves to make the success of others possible. If we speak of education for freedom, then one of the crucial insights of a liberal education must be that the freedom of the individual is only possible in a free community, and vice versa as well. It is the community that empowers the free individual, just as it is free individuals who lead and empower the community. The fulfillment of high talent, the just exercise of power, the celebration of human diversity: nothing so redeems these things as the recognition that what seem like personal triumphs are in fact the achievements of our common humanity.

10. They follow E. M. Forster’s injunction in the novel Howard’s End: “ONLY CONNECT.”

More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections so as to be able to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. All the other qualities I’ve described here–listening, reading, writing, talking, puzzle-solving, seeing through other people’s eyes, empowering others, leading–every last one of them is finally about connecting. A liberal education is about gaining the power and insight and the generosity and finally the freedom and the wisdom to connect. If one could pick just one phrase that would answer the question of what it means to be a liberally educated person, surely this would be it: “Only connect.”

How Alive Are the Liberal Arts in Honors Programs?

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The short answer: very alive.

After an extended period during which more and more students have felt the need–regardless of personal interest and aptitude–to major in business, engineering, or computer-related fields, the liberal arts, especially the humanities, have faced declining enrollment.

The impact that this trend has had on personal growth and enlightened participation in civic life is evident, given the tone and outcome of the presidential election.

In the meantime, several prominent public universities have endured attacks on their humanities departments and commitment to learning for learning’s sake, most notably UT Austin, Florida universities, and, very recently, UW Madison. Most states have dramatically reduced financial support for their universities; some regents have used the real or manufactured budget crisis as a pretext for attacking non-vocational disciplines.

But the liberal arts and, yes, the core humanities that are essential to the liberal arts, have survived in public honors colleges and programs. Some students express resentment that, in order to be in an honors program, they must take a series of interdisciplinary seminars and electives in the humanities. Under pressure from parents or highly focused on their chosen vocational discipline, they want “to  get on with it” and reach a point where they can start making real money and pay back those student loans.

This is understandable. But honors educators know that almost every bright student is in many ways unformed and searching for paths of meaning in their lives. One course in history, or philosophy, or literature, or maybe in religious studies or film, can guide a student toward a lifetime of serious inquiry, self reflection, and greater compassion for others. These and other courses in the liberal arts reinforce the application of informed judgment to facts that are often contradictory or in flux.

Consensus is emerging that for many students, “We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.” Indeed, this is one of the two or three major advantages of honors programs. STEM majors who otherwise would take few liberal arts courses (and an extremely small number of humanities classes), must take them as members of a university-wide honors college or program.

But one other major–business–could likely benefit even more from greater exposure to the liberal arts and, again, to the humanities

Recent research shows that “critical thinking,” measured after adjusting for entrance test scores, shows the greatest gains for students in the liberal arts.  Engineering and technology students have high raw entrance test scores and strong critical thinking ability, but after adjusting for the effect of the high test scores, their critical thinking skills are relatively lower.

Business majors do not receive high raw or adjusted scores in critical thinking. Given that a plurality of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in business subjects, this is a matter of significant concern.

English is the discipline most offered by honors programs. This is so because many of the required English classes have a heavy writing component, often associated with the study of rhetoric. In these classes the humanities and vocational mastery come together in a way, for the most successful and most fulfilled professionals often have outstanding communication skills and a heightened sensitivity to the thoughts and needs of others.

So what are the “liberal arts”? The answer to this question varies, but here we will include the following disciplines, all of which are traditional core offerings in liberal arts colleges (humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences):

Humanities: English, history, philosophy, fine arts, foreign languages, religious studies, film, classics. Sciences: math, biology, chemistry, physics, geology. Social Sciences: sociology, anthropology, gender studies, psychology, communications, political science, economics, and geography.

(One can see that many of these can be, and often are, “vocational” in themselves.)

Using the above as our “liberal arts,” we used data gathered for our most recent book, Inside Honors, which included 4,460 honors sections. Of these, we found that 59% were in the liberal arts, not counting interdisciplinary seminars, which accounted for another 26% of sections. Most of these seminars had a humanities focus, so about 85% of honors sections were in the liberal arts.

By discipline, English had the highest percentage of sections, even when sections in business, engineering, and technology are included. Math and business disciplines combined had about the same number of sections as English.

The STEM disciplines are strongly represented, however, accounting for 25% of honors sections. (But the science and math sections counted here are also part of the overall liberal arts group.)

Engineering and technology, considered separately, make up  8% of honors sections. Admittedly, the “regular” courses in these disciplines are usually rigorous enough in themselves.

Not all of the humanities are strongly represented, however, with classics, film, and religious studies combined counting for only 1.4% of honors sections. In fairness, the classics do feature prominently in many interdisciplinary seminars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Florida History Faculty Fights to Sustain Liberal Arts

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Note: This article by our editor, John Willingham, was originally published by the History News Network on December 21.

In Florida, a task force commissioned by Gov. Rick Scott has proposed lower tuition rates for STEM majors, allegedly in the interest of the state’s economy, but many of the state’s historians see the plan for what it is—a threat to the humanities.

Historians from the University of Florida and supporters across the country have responded with a formal protest and a petition campaign in late November that so far has obtained more than 2,000 signatures.

“The punitive differential tuition model will lead not only to a decimation of the liberal arts in Florida,” the historians said in the petition. “It will also have a destructive impact on the essential and transferrable skills that these disciplines teach.”

On November 16, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin joined Scott in proposing state university performance measures to ensure that students are “getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to give us?”

Disentangling what is merely unwise and superficial about these plans from some of the disturbing motives behind them would require an interdisciplinary panel including not only historians but political scientists, economists, philosophers, and, yes, scholars from the STEM disciplines that the plan enshrines.  But some very recent analyses of the Florida plan are an excellent place to begin.

An excellent article by Michael Vasquez in the Miami Herald on December 8 questions the extent of the demand for STEM grads as well as the notion that higher salaries will be their reward.  “Petroleum engineering majors are doing very well these days; biologists and chemists are not,” he writes.

And much of the demand in “strategic” fields comes from the healthcare industry, not from all of the STEM professions.  Vasquez writes that when healthcare was not counted, one recent report found that “Florida was one of six states with more unemployed STEM workers than available STEM jobs. Of those six states, Florida had the biggest oversupply of STEM workers.”

But is there any significant demand for liberal arts grads? Last year, Gov. Scott asked a business audience in Tallahassee a rhetorical question, well-reported in the Florida media: “Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology? I don’t.”

Yet Vasquez tells us that a recent defense department study emphasized the need for sociology and anthropology graduates because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have “highlighted the importance of sociology and anthropology” and the nation should have an “ongoing investment” in both disciplines.

Taking a narrow view based on what appear to be the demands of the present, the task force and the governor are missing subtleties and unintended consequences, the latter among the strongest lessons of history.

One consequence of the recommendations that is neither subtle nor unintended is that even more funding will be taken from the humanities and flow to the so-called strategic areas.  The tuition paid by humanities students already provides an indirect subsidy to most STEM students because the cost to educate students in engineering, technology, and physics is greater than the cost of educating students in the humanities.

Some institutions actually charge more for some STEM majors because of the increased cost.  The task force was aware of this development, according to Vasquez, yet decided to elevate the indirect subsidy to a direct one, knowing that their action would be even more detrimental to the humanities and social sciences.

The Florida historians note that the Florida Council of 100, a non-partisan organization of business leaders formed more than 50 years ago, “submitted a lengthy memo to the task force in which the Council noted the pressing need for ‘liberal arts grads with superior analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills who can quickly learn and apply industry/company specific skills.”

Knowing that liberal arts grads were in demand and that the differential tuition plan would further diminish the presence of liberal arts disciplines, the task force nevertheless persisted.  And this is where the “disturbing motives” mentioned earlier come into play.

Gov. Scott’s mocking of anthropology as a discipline is but one indication of an intense war going on between the most extreme conservatives advocating higher education “reform” on one side, versus major public universities and thoughtful supporters, including many in the business community, on the other side.

Where the perceptive business and political leaders, Republican and Democrat, see the economic value of research, its interplay with the best instruction, and the power of the liberal arts to foster critical thinking skills, the extremists see wasteful spending, pampered professors who should be teaching more classes, and humanities professors threatening the status quo.

The intended consequences of the extremists are to reduce publically-funded universities to second- and third-rate training institutions, leaving the strongest students to seek the best education in private universities, which are held up as models of excellence and free-market efficiency.  Gutting the humanities in public universities will inevitably reduce their ability to maintain first-tier standing, and the best students will go elsewhere.

Readers who may question the use of the word “extremists” to describe these individuals should consider what Thomas Lindsay of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Rick Perry’s designated “think tank,” told the National Review, as reported on December 13: “The higher-ed establishment is an industry that is ripe for disruptive innovation, and that’s what’s happening,” Lindsay said.

It is this kind of “innovation” that came to such ripe fruition at the University of Virginia, where regents bedazzled by the trendiest terms coming out of business schools decided to bypass institutional history, collaborative change, and sound judgment to take a giant leap forward—only to make fools of themselves.

Sound judgment—its formation and use, its value in every part of life—is what is truly at stake in this serious battle over the future of public higher education.  Historians, perhaps better than most, recognize that understanding what has happened, its relation to the present, and its likely impact on the future requires above all things careful and thoughtful judgment, based on a wide spectrum of information.  The development of this enduring asset has long been the aim of the best universities.  While the task force claims to know what constitutes essential information, the liberal arts caution against such assumptions, aware that truth often emerges from sources unforeseen.

Lillian Guerra, one of the Florida professors challenging the task force, teaches Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida.  In an interview with Colleen Flaherty, writing for “Inside Higher Education,” Guerra noted that the “Cuban state in the [1960s and 1970s] began to promote technical fields and the hard sciences because those are the fields believed to generate wealth for the collective aspiration, as opposed to an individual meditation on ideas.”

If someone on the task force had bothered to talk to Guerra or had taken a course in her highly specialized field, they might have glimpsed a surprisingly relevant lesson arising from the dismal performance of the Cuban economy since the 1970s.  Nevertheless, the task force might still be excused if it simply acknowledged that no one can always predict where the best answers might come from.