At a recent conference at Williams College its former president, Frank Oakley, characterized many of the changes that have taken place in liberal arts education over the past few decades as a “narrative of decline”. The phrase (and the rest of Oakley’s talk which he was kind enough to share with me) set me thinking -- suppose we thought of the situation of liberal education not as history but as narrative, that is, as a story we tell ourselves about where we are coming from and what we are up against. Then suppose we analyze that narrative to see what assumptions, exclusions and implicit messages are embodied in it. Would that change the way we think and act about the liberal arts? The following pages are a probe in this direction. I fear my literary critical friends will think it quaint that I invoke the now obsolescent “deconstructionism” as an approach, but perhaps that will simply stimulate them, and other readers to do better, and to let me know what they discover using other approaches.

Narratives of decline about the liberal arts take many forms. Often, however, they evoke a past Golden Age when education was pure and unsullied and then go on to describe its loss:

 

 

 

The narrative then often goes on to point out that many other colleges, while retaining the phrase “liberal arts” somewhere in their self definition, shifted emphasis toward vocational courses and majors. Of the 637 colleges in the 1994 Carnegie classifications of “liberal arts” colleges, about a third award at least 40% of their degrees in the arts and sciences. The other majors are fields such as Business, Communications, Parks and Recreation, Protective Services and other majors aimed at facilitating students’ transition into the work place. [David Breneman, as summarized by Oakley p. 6] Business majors are particularly prominent in these institutions, indeed in American higher education as a whole. [Twenty per cent of all BA degrees are now awarded in that field, as Menand points out. It is not uncommon for Business and related majors (Marketing, Communications, Accounting) to amount to over a third of all undergraduate degrees.] The number of colleges devoted exclusively or even predominately to the core disciplines of the humanities, and the social and the natural sciences is smaller, and apparently diminishing.

The movement away from the liberal arts can be seen with some clarity among colleges in the Carnegie classification now called “Baccalaureate Colleges, General”. The nomenclature is revealing: these colleges were formerly called “Liberal Arts II”. These colleges still produce a substantial number of majors in liberal arts fields, currently about 40% on average. [Sarah Turner of the University of Virginia, communication of November 2003, the figures must be regarded as a “first approximation”, there may have been a modest increase over the past decade.] Many of these institutions indicate that they feel pressure to turn to more vocational offerings.

The situation of the liberal arts disciplines in these colleges can be gauged in various ways but I find it especially revealing to track the percentage of degrees conferred in humanistic subjects. In the mid 1960s that number was over 25 per cent; by 1993 it had dropped to about 10 per cent. [Kernan, Figure 8, p. 254]

These figures apply only to the humanities and I do not have comparable ones at hand for the natural and social sciences. But it is clear that the decline in humanities majors was paralleled in most of the natural sciences (with the notable exception of biology), and the social sciences (with the exception of psychology). The shift, in other words has affected all the liberal arts in these institutions and probably in many others as well.

Where did all the majors go? Louis Menand in a much quoted article in the New York Review (October 18, 2001) shows us where to look

In 1970, nearly 25,000 students received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics (about 33 per cent of all BAs) and 1,621 received bachelor’s degrees in fields categorized as “parks, recreation, leisure and fitness studies.” In 1997, 12,820 students graduated with degrees in mathematics (only 1 per cent of all BAs) and 15,401 took degrees in parks, etc.

 

 

As Eli Weinberg has pointed out to me, this is in part a paradoxical narrative: The colleges with the “purest” liberal arts curricula (Williams would be a good example) have some of the highest application to admission ratios in American higher education. It appears, however, that significant numbers of students who were eager to be admitted to these colleges end up attending institutions with relatively diluted curricula, and majoring in fields unrepresented at the college of their first choice.

The Little Dutch Boy? This is a sad and troubling story, with distressing implications for many aspects of American society, including the supply of scientists, scholars and leaders with a high sense of civic responsibility. It is also a rather despondent narrative, for although many of those who hear it say “Something ought to be done!”, the narrative contains few clues about what precisely ought to be done. From a foundation’s point of view the implicit message may well be “Run for the Hills!” for foundations usually do not want to be the Little Dutch Boy, finger in the dike, trying to stave off imminent disaster. This is not just because they prefer programs that are trendy, sexy, or sure winners (although many foundations want just that.) Responsible philanthropy has to be sure that it is making not just a good use, but the best use of scarce resources. (The resources include of course not just money, but experience, visibility, expertise etc.) Above all, a foundation serious about its mission has to be sure that its funds will not be wasted in pursuit of commendable but unattainable goals.

II. Deconstructing the Narrative

But before despairing and then turning our backs on the liberal arts and sciences, we would do well to look more closely at the stories we tell about them. For example, what’s behind the narrative of decline we have just been describing? What’s left out? What are its constituent units? How are they structured? The actors, as we have seen, are institutions or groups of institutions “classified” and grouped together by Carnegie fund. Individuals figure into the story only collectively, through statistics about where they apply, enroll, major and graduate. Little attention is paid to what individual students actually gain through their colleges years –where they were on entering and where they are on graduating. (This is, to be sure, not just a feature of the narrative; American colleges do not on the whole do very much to determine a base line for individual students when they enroll and then attempt to measure what they have achieved at various stages of their college experience.)

These narrative units, colleges and groups of colleges, are then structured through a series of binary codes, rich and poor, prestigious and less prestigious, and above all, “pure” and vocational. The “narrative of decline” is then actually a narrative about the loss of purity, about virginity sullied by the crass realities of the marketplace.

This form of the narrative (not, it should be noted, the form that Oakley or Menand present) is, I believe, seriously misleading on three counts. First, it once again leaves individual students, and their legitimate concerns about entering a difficult economy, out of the picture. Second, it overlooks the fact that part of the enrollment problem in some private liberal arts colleges can be attributed to the fact that good public universities have often built into their curricula strong programs in the liberal arts. Third, the most familiar narrative of decline elides the record of success that liberal arts graduates have by and large achieved after graduation. One can and should problematize the term “success”. That is, insist that students examine their ideas, those of their parents and of society, about what success really is. (Would Socrates let us do anything else?) Yet even if one construes that tem in the most mundane sense, as financial success, liberal arts graduates have a good story to tell abut themselves, and it is not a “narrative of decline”. But stories about success, especially financial success, are often excluded from discussions of liberal arts education. One example: the Dean of the undergraduate college at a prestigious institution commissioned a study comparing the income earned by majors in the liberal arts to that earned by undergraduates in its highly ranked business school. Ten years out, the liberal arts graduates did consistently better than their business major peers. But only a highly expurgated version of the study was released, lest it exacerbate relations between the two programs.

Finally, in analyzing the “narrative of decline” it is worth asking what implicit messages it sends to those who hear it. We have already noted its potential effect on foundations; many of them hear messages of inevitability in it; the tide is inexorably rising; the dike cannot hold forever. That may account for the fact that several foundations have either moved out of higher education entirely, or restricted their giving to carefully defined programs in areas of special interest to them. But what about students and their parents, what does such a narrative say to them? Would it be surprising if they heard it as a warning not to expect too much attention to be paid to the needs of the individual they most care about? That is, of course, precisely the opposite of the message which liberal arts colleges try to send about themselves and the nurturing environment they provide for their students.

III. Alternative Narratives?

What sorts of narratives might be constructed that could break out of the constructions of this narrative of decline? That is a question for faculty members and administrators committed to the liberal arts, not for foundation officers or even literary critics, to try to answer. But I wonder what the range of possibilities might be. What would the constituent units be, the narrative structure, the underlying themes and metaphors? Might there be, for example, a narrative based on hunger and nourishment, the need for sustenance of mind and spirit to go hand in hand with the acquisition of skills that will provide for material needs? Surely the story we tell about the liberal arts does not have to be written in the binary code of purity vs. prosperity. In fact Louis Menand’s article, mentioned above, concludes by exploring another possibility:

Maybe …the wall between the liberal arts and the subjects many people now go to colleges and universities to study – subjects such as business, medicine, technology, social service, education and the law – [is] … too high. Maybe the liberal arts and these “non-liberal” fields have something to contribute to one another. [Menand p. 9]

 

I won’t try to evaluate Menand’s suggestion. But if he is right we should be using a very different form for our stories about liberal education. Much turns on the question of genre: What are the literary forms that might substitute for a story of a lost Golden Age? Surely the lament is not the only mode? Are sub literary forms more suitable -- the financial or sports story of the rebound? One might claim that the liberal arts and sciences have hit bottom and are ready for a turn around. There are, after all, some positive signs – the continued appeal of the institutions with the strongest commitment to the liberal arts. Recent data, admittedly fragmentary and ambiguous, suggest a slight increase in liberal arts majors over then past few years in some colleges where they were previously declining. Could the story be not Paradise Lost but Paradise Regained? Is there a narrative form that includes agents outside the academy, not just administrators, faculty and students, but, for example, the growing public insistence that colleges and universities look rigorously at where and how they “add value”. (Preliminary reports from the RAND based study of outcomes, suggest that majors in the liberal arts and sciences do extremely well in analytical reasoning and in the ability to convey their conclusions with a mastery of written and oral expression.)

Liberal arts education, I am convinced, has nothing to fear and everything to gain from rigorous assessment and analysis of outcomes.

In fact, one might claim that a liberal education has so much to offer that the right genre for discussing it is the manifesto, the affirmation that every student who pursues a Bachelor of Arts degree is entitled to a genuine liberal arts education and the demand that colleges and universities deliver the goods?

Or is it satire, the “dry mock” that ridicules and ultimately drives out those who degrade such an education either by letting it become stale or by watering it down and turning it into thin gruel?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I am certainly ready to hear something other than the narrative of decline.

W. R. Connor

Revision of 10 February 2004

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