The contemporary threat to the liberal arts endangers American democracy.
The issues facing higher education in America extend far beyond financial pressures. State legislators are trying to direct students into majors of the legislators’ choosing. Boards force short-term educational fads onto established, prestigious institutions. Administrators turn to corporate sources of funding, and accept the restrictions on knowledge that such funding inevitably bestows. What is at stake now is the identity of the university itself. And with it, the fate of knowledge and citizenship in America.
The conflict is between two different visions of what the university should be. The tension is between economism, propounded by those who assign a dollar value to everything, and humanism, propounded by those who believe that many goods far exceed any financial value-added.
Economism is different from economics. Economics is a social science that studies the production, distribution and consumption of goods. Economism is a comprehensive worldview that reduces all things to their dollar value — including people.
Powerful political forces in America have embraced economism. In higher education, they demand deep cuts to traditional programs that, in their view, do not produce sufficient wealth. Most recently, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point proposed cutting thirteen traditional liberal arts majors, including English, History, Philosophy, Sociology, and Political Science. According to the beleaguered administrators, these are small programs that do not bring in research funding. On a business ledger, they come out in the red.
So, from a bottom-line, cost-cutting, budget-balancing perspective — from the perspective of economism, which reduces all things to their dollar value — these small, traditional programs should be gotten rid of.
Dangerously, most university governing boards subscribe to the worldview of economism. This situation is not surprising. To get onto a university governing board, a PhD in education or administrative experience in higher education does not help. Instead, you have to give a lot of money to a politician who will appoint you to the board. To give a lot of money to a politician, you have to be rich. To get rich, you (usually) have to pursue business, which has a bottom-line, cost-cutting, budget-balancing perspective. That mentality seems to work well in the business world — contemporary capitalism has produced remarkable prosperity. However, its success in business does not transfer to universities, because universities exist for a different reason than businesses.
Businesses exist to make money by providing a good. Universities exist to expand human knowledge. For this reason, the western concept of the university has always rejected economism and embraced humanism. Universities are bastions of the Enlightenment, which advocates the free (“liberal” means “free,” not left-wing), rational investigation of all realms of human knowledge, not just those with practical outcomes. The Enlightenment ideal insists: If it exists, then humans should understand it. Today, that vision includes fields such as Greek tragedy, biochemistry, German philosophy, systems engineering, astrophysics, medicine, and sociology.
Just as importantly, according to the idea of the university, these fields of knowledge should be studied in community and placed in relationship to one another. Specializations are necessary, but they should be borderless and complementary, engaged in one ongoing conversation. Investigation, experimentation, dialogue, and debate produce advances in knowledge that spill over into all areas of human endeavor. This unrestricted, unboundaried expansion of knowledge is the traditional ideal of the western university.
Budget-cutting advocates of economism have a very different vision for the university. Their vision seems to be informed by corporate America. Concerned about the bottom line, they want to enlarge programs that bring in research dollars and large donors — engineering, medicine, the hard sciences, law, and business. And they want to cut those programs that do not (often) produce wealthy alumni, such as the humanities.
We should all beware: This vision risks turning America’s universities into extremely sophisticated and wealthy technical institutes.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Education is the anvil upon which democracy is forged.” He and America’s Founding Fathers knew that an uneducated populace could not sustain a successful democracy. Western education, alongside western democracy, has always valued the liberal arts (the “free skills”) of dialogue and debate as the key to sound knowledge, good decisions, and a wise citizenry. In an era of alternative facts and aggressive irrationality, America has more need than ever for the critical thinking inculcated by the liberal arts. The public good of an educated citizenry cannot be assigned a dollar value. It is essential to democracy—to peace, prosperity, and progress.
Unsurprisingly, politicians whose views cannot withstand critical analysis seek to defund the liberal arts. They need emotional voters, not rational citizens. Corporations then plug the funding gap, helping the university become a technical institute. Now, students get their brains trained to make money, but not to question the irrational claims of demagogues. This enforcement of economism, and rejection of enlightenment values, constitutes a rejection of the Western educational tradition. More importantly, it represents a real threat to America.