How’ve you been?” I ask the Rev. John Padberg, an intellectual historian who directs The Institute of Jesuit Sources at Saint Louis University. He chuckles. “Was it George III who said, ‘Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Gibbon?’” (Reportedly so, upon being presented with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) “We just managed to get three books out in the last five weeks.” They span three centuries; he gives a précis of each, then asks whether I’ve read the latest New Yorker; there’s an article about an Italian princess with whom he’s talked philosophy, and the Caravaggio in her villa was…
All this in the first two minutes.
Padberg is 85, and his life—rich with ideas, study, conversation, and wit—remains a lively celebration of the liberal arts. Jesuit universities are famous for emphasizing them. Yet when I ask Padberg about the current debate between teaching liberal arts for their own sake and giving college students a more pragmatic job preparation, he surprises me by reframing the question.
“Since at least the 1580s, Jesuit schools have been interested in three things. One was certainly the liberal arts, the cultural acquisitions from the past, as a way to deepen understanding. The second was learning the liberal arts for pragmatic reasons, because they were almost requisite for advance. And the third, neither idealistic nor pragmatic, was turning out people who were good citizens.”
The idea’s not obsolete: In the 2010 book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes that “the sympathetic ‘ability to imagine…the predicament of another person, along with the ability to think for oneself,’ are the ‘skills that are needed to keep democracies alive.’” The irony is that only the elite seem able to afford an old-fashioned liberal-arts education anymore.
Just what is a liberal-arts education? Padberg defines liberal arts as “the subjects, first of all, that help people respond to the question, ‘How best is it to live?’” To that he adds “a healthy dose of cultural anthropology”; education in civic and social responsibility; “some understanding of the physical, natural world in which we live”; philosophy (“How do we know any of these things, and what difference does it make?”); perhaps theology, depending on the school’s orientation; and the fine arts, “plainly and simply, because we long for beauty.”
These subjects have held fast for centuries, changing only as content is refreshed. But will they withstand today’s economy, in which knowledge of liberal arts won’t get anybody a job, and the life of the mind equates, for most students, to a life in penury?
First-generation college students are shunning the liberal arts for more pragmatic majors. Books with titles like The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities are rolling off presses that once inked tomes of Shakespearean literary criticism. Public grant money’s drying up, and scholars are convening to fret about it. The top undergrad degree granted nationwide last year, and the most popular major for both men and women, was business.
Over two decades, though, the National Council for Education Statistics’ numbers paint a more complex picture. Back in the 1990–91 school year, there were 249,165 business majors nationwide, and that total rose to 347,985 in 2008–09 (the most recent data available). Majors in health professions and related clinical sciences more than doubled; so did majors in security and protective services. But majors in social sciences and history also grew significantly, from 125,107 to 168,500, and visual and performing arts majors went from 42,186 to 89,140.
At Washington University, the percentage of liberal-arts majors among undergrads is holding fairly steady, going from 61 percent in 2000 up to 64 percent in 2005 and down to 59 percent in 2010. There’s been a slight increase in engineering’s share of the pie, going from 16 percent to 22 percent in five years, and a rise in double and interdisciplinary majors, such as environmental studies and international studies. This spring, Washington University introduced a new global certificate that internationalizes any major, presumably making the coursework more marketable.
I asked Gary Wihl, dean of Arts & Sciences, if he’s seeing a crisis of confidence in the liberal arts.
“It’s come up primarily with parents,” he said. “A private university is a big investment.” The gnawing of parental knuckles isn’t shifting the numbers, though: “A lot of our students are high achievers, and they are going to go on and do some sort of postgraduate work. The advanced professional and postgrad schools are looking for students with a liberal-arts education.” A medical-school admissions committee might smile upon a classics major, Wihl adds, because the degree demonstrates the student was capable of mastering a difficult subject.
Two years ago, when Ralph Quatrano, a molecular biologist, took over as dean of Wash. U.’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, he expected to see students with highly structured courses of study. Instead, he found students venturing outside of their majors: More than half of the school’s 2010 graduates had either double-majored, minored, or concentrated in another subject. It’s because of these interdisciplinary backgrounds, Quatrano says, that many alumni graduate as engineers and wind up using their engineering acumen to solve complex problems in finance, law, or medicine. They are, in short, more employable.
The Social Science Research Council tracked 2,300 students at 24 universities, giving them a Collegiate Learning Assessment in their first semester and at the end of their sophomore year. The results, released in November 2008, indicated that 45 percent of the students had made virtually no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing. Those making progress tended to be the liberal-arts majors, who outperformed the students in business and other “practical” majors.
When The Annapolis Group—representing 130 private liberal-arts colleges—asked college graduates how they felt about their undergrad experiences, its alumni, steeped in the impractical liberal arts, were more likely than grads of other private colleges and top-rated public universities to say their alma mater had prepared them for their first job.
That data’s in the marketing materials now. Liberal-arts colleges are trying all sorts of gimmicks, like guaranteeing graduation in four years, or guaranteeing to find their graduates at least an internship if they don’t find a job right out of school. But the emerging consensus is that liberal arts are great, if you can afford to go on to graduate or professional school. If not, the bias in the job market is toward specialized undergraduate training for a particular kind of work.
“There is a conflict right now between the ideals of our society and the nervousness that pervades so many decisions,” Wihl says. “People don’t have a clear sense of what the future holds. And the nervousness can lead them to make short-term decisions, because they don’t know how to plan for 30 years ahead.”
The irony, he says, is that we’ve never needed the liberal arts more. “You can place your bet on a subject that looks safe, but who’s to say that subject isn’t going to disappear? What you really want is to have a knowledge base that is flexible.”
Liberal arts expose students to complex knowledge across the breadth of society. “I wouldn’t describe that as idealism or pragmatism,” Wihl says, “but as being capable of negotiating the complexities of living in a very advanced, industrial, multicultural society.”
