Harry Targ
(an earlier version of this essay was posted on September 22, 2016)
“… if we wait for reform from within the ranks of today’s liberal arts fields, we may wait forever, or at least a fatally long time. The concerns most often voiced about the current university scene—conformity of thought, intolerance of dissent and sometimes an authoritarian tendency to quash it, a rejection of the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines—these and other problems are not unique to the liberal arts departments, but a host of surveys document that they are most common and most pronounced there. A monotonously one-sided view of the world deprives students of the chance to hear and consider alternatives, and to weigh them for themselves in the process we call “critical thinking.” … Incidentally, the widely criticized policy of lifelong tenure was created to protect diverse viewpoints from discrimination; where is its rationale in schools where everyone thinks so exactly alike? “(Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. “Liberalizing the Liberal Arts,” Remarks Accepting The Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education, October 12, 2018, Washington D. C.
https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/ee/download/Re-liberalizing-the-Liberal-Arts.pdf
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 by the Koch brothers as an organization of corporations, lobby groups, and state-level politicians to propose and implement model legislation, prioritizing such policies as promoting educational vouchers and charter schools, limiting the role of trade unions, restricting environmental regulations, and instituting voter identification rules. In addition, ALEC has established networks of think tanks to address a multiplicity of other public policy questions.
A key
issue addressed by this rightwing network of organizations is education. And to
that topic the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), to which Purdue
President Daniels spoke, was created 25 years ago. ACTA defines itself as “…
the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education
leaders across the United States to support liberal education, uphold high
academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure
that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college
education at an affordable price.” Major funders of ACTA, which was co-founded
by Lynne Cheney and former Senator Joe Lieberman, include the Bradley
Foundation, the Walton Family, Donor Trust, the John Olin Foundation, and the
Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. These and others constitute a “who’s-who”
of sponsors of rightwing so-called “libertarian” organizations.
Professor
Stanley Fish reports that ACTA believes that curricular changes in higher
education, must be made at the
administrative level because, as Fish wrote, professors “...cannot be trusted”
to be “responsive to public concerns
about the state of higher education.” In short, ACTA, which claims to be
committed to academic freedom, is committed to circumventing faculty
participation in matters of educational substance in their universities.
In a 2015
article Lindsey Russell, an ALEC Director of its Education Task Force, wrote an
essay entitled “STEM-Will It Replace Liberal Arts?” In it he reports Bureau of
Labor Statistics projections that from 2012-2022 there will be a growth of 13
percent in the STEM related workforce. As a result, he poses the question
reflected in the title of his article. His answer, although he does not say so
directly is a qualified “yes.” Russell quotes a Forbes magazine
article that suggests that STEM graduates need “critical thinking skills” to
pursue their careers. These skills, the article asserts, along with those in
communication, are what a Liberal Arts education can provide. In an interesting
statement he says about STEM and Liberal Arts:
“STEM is
the present and the future, and STEM related fields are projected to grow by
more than 1 million by the year 2022…Liberal arts education may seem irrelevant
today, but it is necessary if America’s youth are to become successful members
of today’s STEM-dominated workforce.”
In the Daniels speech quoted above, the
Purdue President pridefully declared that “At Purdue, by our
land-grant heritage and by our current conscious strategy, the so-called STEM
disciplines predominate; more than 60% of our undergraduates and an even higher
share of our graduate students pursue engineering, chemistry, physics,
agricultural and biological science, and the like. We are by that measure the
third most STEM centric school in the country.” While Daniels, in his speech
recognized the importance of the Liberal Arts, he made it clear that existing
faculty in Liberal Arts fields are very unlikely to be responsive to any need
for changes in the substance of education; in fact, liberal arts faculty, he
asserted are monotonous, dogmatic, and authoritarian, and, reject
“…the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of
unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines.”
The controversies over Liberal Arts, shared
governance, and the vitality of non-STEM curricula resurfaced recently when the
Purdue University student newspaper reported that the Dean of the College of
Liberal Arts was freezing faculty hires in the English Department, downsizing
popular programs in the department such as Creative Writing, and requiring the
reduction of the numbers of admissions of new graduate students to its various
programs. Budget cuts imposed on the department threaten the survival of The
Sycamore Review, a highly regarded literary journal run by graduate students.
Faculty in STEM fields, Liberal Arts colleagues, and alumni of the Department of
English have publicly communicated their frustration with the Dean’s decision
to reduce funding for the English Department. https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_b04b6564-5772-11ec-8b9e-7f950e2bb4d0.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share
While
debates continue about how much STEM fields should be prioritized in the
educational process, a more important discussion should involve the substance
and role of what usually is called “the Liberal Arts.” Should Liberal Arts be
seen as only a training ground for honing critical thinking and communications
skills or does the Liberal Arts project go much deeper?
Henry
Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMasters University,
Hamilton, Ontario, posted an essay he called “Neoliberal Savagery and the
Assault on Higher Education as a Democratic Public Space,” on September 15,
2016. His critique of the growing connections between higher education and
market needs, as reflected in the public policy stances of Koch Foundation
organizations such as ALEC and ACTA seem relevant to the Purdue case. Political
pressures to change and marginalize Liberal Arts have their roots in the theory
and practice of neoliberal ideology, an ideology based on a crude vision of
markets, privatization of public institutions, and the reduction of all of
social life to commodification. Reinstituting older curricula celebrating
markets and the efficacy of United States political institutions are part of the
mantra of these pressure groups as opposed to what Daniels called “unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines,”
presumably curricular innovations that revisit issues of race, gender, class,
the environment, and war/peace.
The most
important element of Giroux’s essay is his assertion that the university
represents a “public trust” and a “social good.” He correctly asserts
that in an age of media concentration and a profusion of unsubstantiated information on the internet, the
university remains a scarce and valuable venue for exposing young people to
rich, complicated discourse and analyses of society—past, present, and future.
Giroux’s suggests that the university is “a critical institution infused
with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the civic imagination,
inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility, and the struggle for
justice.” Giroux quotes Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist, and Leonidas Donskis, a social
philosopher: “how will we form the next generation of intellectuals and
politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a
non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumental university is like?”
The tasks
cultural theorists such as Giroux lay out do not, or should not, suggest that
only through Liberal Arts can the civic responsibility of the university be
maintained. But, and this is critical, Liberal Arts should be seen as necessary
partners in the curriculum of every university, so that students are prepared
to be vibrant contributors to the larger society in which they live.
Conceiving
of Liberal Arts as just a limited instrumentality of a narrowly defined STEM
education, as advocates such as the ALEC spokesperson and their colleagues in
ACTA suggest, demeans not only the fundamental importance of the Liberal Arts for pursuing an intellectually curious and socially just society
but the basic
project of higher education. And English
Departments remain an important part of this project.
