By Richard Ekman

The venerable and related concepts of “liberal arts” and “liberal arts colleges” were given fresh attention in two recent conferences, and in the process several important points were made about independent colleges and universities. The first conference, November 13-15 at Williams College on “Liberal Arts Colleges in American Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities,” was organized by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The origins of the conference lie with Frank Oakley, the former president of Williams who served for a period as interim president of ACLS following the untimely death of John D’Arms. Oakley understands from his experience leading a small college how important it is for the learned societies to pay attention to their members who serve on the faculties of all kinds of colleges and universities, not only research universities. He also understands how important it is for faculty members at small colleges to have both a clear dedication to teaching and a connection with larger intellectual communities. In conceiving the conference, Oakley understood that, thanks to the vagaries of the academic job market over 20 years, superbly trained individuals now teach at all kinds of institutions, to the great benefit of students.
     While some of the eternal verities about liberal arts colleges surfaced during the conference, much of what was said was new to many of those present. Lucie Lapovsky, president of Mercy College (NY), explained the dangers of escalating tuition discount rates to an audience that included few who had heard her speak on this subject previously. Roger T. Kaufman, professor of economics at Smith College, presented his startling analysis of subsidy-per-student from endowment and expenditure-per-student for several dozen colleges. Christina Sorum, academic vice president of Union College, outlined the history of the liberal arts curriculum with a fresh perspective on the often stale “liberal arts” versus “preprofessional” debates, and George Kuh, director of the National Survey of Student Engagement, in which so many CIC members already take part, presented cogent evidence of the reasons why all colleges should participate in NSSE. Long-time CIC member, Anne Ponder, president of Colby-Sawyer College (NH), and I also had “speaking parts.”
     Some probing questions were posed. What must we do to ensure that faculty members understand their responsibilities to one another, to fulfill the ideal of the liberal arts college as an integrated community in which faculty members get to know individuals and subject matters beyond their own departments, and volunteer to have their newest courses, classroom teaching, and scholarly efforts critiqued by colleagues? How can we maintain the kind of intellectual community that makes a college an environment for students in which learning pervades everything both inside and outside the classroom? It was noted that it is comparatively easy to begin an interdisciplinary program at a liberal arts college, but an easy launch doesn’t guarantee that faculty members will be as integrative in their own work as they sometimes expect students to be. And deans and presidents, Oakley argued forcefully, need to work harder to create the conditions in which integrative thinking will thrive—through such devices as seminars for faculty members to share work or centers for interdisciplinary study by students and faculty members working together.
     From CIC’s vantage point, the conference was particularly important because it gave welcome recognition by the national federation of disciplinary societies in the humanities and social sciences that all of us are part of the same professional world and share many of the same concerns—whether our principal perspective is that of a learned society, a research university, or one of the 637 liberal arts colleges in the U.S. The commonalities among all small, private institutions are much greater than the differences, and the differences that do exist are more often of degree, not kind.
     The second conference, which was organized by CIC and held at Elmhurst College (IL) on November 20 with the support of the James S. Kemper Foundation, brought together equal numbers of college presidents and corporate leaders to address the connections and the gaps between the expectations of liberal arts colleges and those of businesses regarding the usefulness of a liberal arts education for business careers. This is hardly the first such conference on this subject. Indeed, two in particular—one organized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Association of American Colleges in 1983, and another organized by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (on alternate careers for PhDs in the humanities) in the 1990s—shed light on the topic. At Elmhurst, most of the truisms were not repeated; rather, the two dozen participants spent much of their time articulating specific ways both business and higher education can do better to help one another. Study of the liberal arts offers no innoculation against unethical behavior or bad judgment in aesthetic matters—all agreed—but these fields of study do provide the breadth of perspective, cultural understanding, and analytical and language skills that are needed for success in work after graduation. The liberal arts bring the accumulated wisdom of the past into a student’s mind in a way that should help him or her function with greater imagination and insight when dealing with issues of the present. (View article.)
     It is now clear that any follow-up to the Elmhurst conference by CIC will require research, not mere rhetoric. For example, we need updated information on patterns of career mobility for graduates of particular institutions, in particular fields of study, and in particular companies. Nothing has been written that displaces Robert Beck’s 1981 longitudinal study of AT&T’s management employees, which suggested that those who studied the liberal arts advanced further over their careers than those who had studied other fields and—even more telling—those who studied other fields (such as engineering) in liberal arts college settings went further in the company than those who had studied the same fields in more narrowly focused institutions. The Wabash College Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts is fostering potentially useful research on several aspects of these questions.
     But rhetoric has its place, too. The connections between the liberal arts and business, conferees agreed, need to be articulated more loudly and more often by both business leaders and college presidents, restoring the previous public confidence that we are partners in pursuit of a better society, not opposing cultural forces with largely incompatible views of a desirable social order. CIC, we came to recognize during the conference, working alone and with such groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, may be able to do more to advance the discussion than we initially thought possible.
     ACLS will eventually publish the papers from the conference at Williams; and CIC plans to publish a summary of the Elmhurst conference. For now, we owe many people outside liberal arts colleges—especially the ACLS and the business leaders who met at Elmhurst—our gratitude for bringing new and stimulating perspectives to our enterprise.