enemies of the liberal arts

Jennifer Frey, until recently the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa:

An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.

The leadership of the University of Tulsa has for some years now despised its liberal-arts tradition and has intermittently tried to eradicate it. It looks like this time they will succeed.

The key point here — and it’s not the key point at Tulsa only — is that student interest, high enrollments, and donor support mean nothing to trustees and administrators and (often enough) faculty in other programs who have “succeeded” through a completely instrumental approach to education, employment, and indeed life itself. A thriving liberal-arts program is a standing reproach to their frivolity and greed, so they must eliminate it.

So far the administration of Baylor has been thoroughly supportive of our attempts, in the Honors College here, to do the kinds of things that Frey and her colleagues practiced at Tulsa. But what we do is so profoundly counter-cultural, in today’s flailing and failing American academy, that it’s hard not to peek over our shoulders from time to time to see if something is coming for us.