National Symposium on the Liberal Arts and Business

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National Symposium on the Liberal Arts and Business

November 19, 2002

Dear CIC President:

With support from the James S. Kemper Foundation, CIC is launching a project on the relationship of the liberal arts to business. A symposium is planned to foster discussion among leaders of the corporate community and independent colleges and universities so that both sectors might better understand their mutual needs and work together to make the case for the value of the liberal arts. Our plan is to publish and widely promote the main conclusions from the dual vantage points of the corporate and academic communities. The purpose of this letter is to seek your assistance in two facets of the project: identifying symposium participants and collecting written statements.

The symposium will be held on April 1-2, 2003 on the campus of Elmhurst College, which is close to O’Hare airport in Illinois. Approximately ten presidents and an equal number of CEOs of large corporations will participate. We very much welcome your suggestions of individual participants, both presidents and corporate CEOs. You may suggest yourself, of course.

Both for your fellow presidents and for any CEOs you wish to suggest, a sentence or two of explanation in support of your nomination would be most appreciated. With regard to the corporate CEOs, the ideal participant is someone who was a liberal arts major at a small, private college and who is known to have well-considered views on the subject of the symposium. There are, no doubt, also people you know who have different backgrounds and would be excellent participants. Please send suggestions, preferably before December 15, 2002, to Tom Flynn, CIC Senior Fellow and former president of Millikin University, who is directing this project. Tom’s email address is tflynn@cic.nche.edu and fax number is (217) 424-6204. You may also write directly to me. Participants will be selected by the end of January.

Whether or not you are interested in participating in the symposium, a second way in which I hope you will choose to contribute to the project is to provide a personal statement about the relationship between liberal arts and business. A number of CIC presidents have written on this subject and we would welcome receiving copies of those speeches and articles. Whether or not you have previously written on this subject, if you would now like to write a page or two, please do so. (Such statements will be particularly helpful in selecting symposium participants.) Our hope is to publish—along with a summary of the symposium—a large number of the presidents’ and CEOs’ statements about the relationship between the liberal arts and business. I look forward to hearing from you.

With best wishes,

Sincerely yours,

Richard Ekman
President

Council of Independent Colleges
Symposium on the Liberal Arts and Business
April 1-2, 2003
Elmhurst College, Illinois

Supported by a grant from
The James S. Kemper Foundation

For at least two generations, American colleges and universities have argued that the education gained through study of the liberal arts provides the best preparation for life. Colleges often assert that the disciplines of the liberal arts provide a cultural orientation to the world in which we live and that they equip students with transferable ideas, analytical and communication skills, and global perspectives, as well as the ability to make informed value judgments. The argument is that no matter what their chosen career, this grounding will serve students well and benefit society.

Business leaders have been equally vocal about the importance of a liberal arts education as preparation for career advancement and for the exercise of leadership in the corporate community. They cite high-level managerial employees who readily learn on the job many of their specific responsibilities, after having been broadly prepared by their liberal arts background.

At the same time, contrasting perspectives and recent developments have clouded this idealized view of the relationship between business and the liberal arts. On campus, for example, faculty members in the liberal arts often do not promote business careers to their students. In the business community, corporations that once hired liberal arts majors now prefer new employees with college majors in professional and technical fields—accounting and engineering, for example—because there is less time and money for specialized training within the corporation. Executives and mid-level managers have complained that new white-collar employees from all backgrounds arrive with insufficient competence in communication and analytical skills and lack necessary organizational abilities, and express doubt that colleges and universities are, in fact, preparing individuals for lives of civic responsibility and societal leadership. And the recent wave of corporate scandals has made clear to all that many well educated and successful individuals lack the ethical perspective necessary to keep their moral compasses pointed in the right direction.

In the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, the organizers of this symposium continue to believe that there is a connection between education in the liberal arts and the quality of American civic life. We believe that the success of American institutions, particularly those in the corporate sector, depends heavily on more effective performance by colleges and universities. And we believe that the liberal arts have a singular role in this relationship and that small, private colleges and universities are especially well positioned to be leaders in this effort.

The symposium in April will explore these questions. Rather than repeating what others have said in similar exercises, the purpose of the symposium will be to focus on the benefits of a liberal arts education, those problems that hamper a more effective relationship between the liberal arts and business, and those action steps that can make a difference. A summary statement of the main conclusions of the symposium will be published. The Council of Independent Colleges will take steps subsequently to promote these perspectives throughout higher education and the business community. The Council will also compile statements by a large number of college presidents and corporate CEOs, including some not participating in the symposium, about the symbiotic relationship between the liberal arts and business, and distribute this compendium very widely.