Liz Coleman - A call to reinvent liberal arts education
Friday, March 12, 2010
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A little snippet from Liz Coleman's talk:
We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has dethroned the educated generalist, to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. Expertise has for sure had its moments. But the price of its dominance is enormous. Subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure. We have even managed to make the study of literature arcane. You may think you know what is going on in that Jane Austen novel. That is until your first encounter with postmodern deconstructionism. The progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus. Learning more and more about less and less. This, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things.
Click here to view the comments made by various individuals. I am still trying to grapple the essence of her argument... And I find that some of the commenters still do not understand the crux of it either.
Her stance is that specialization is the death of liberal arts education... and that generalization is the breeding ground for innovation (I'm paraphrasing)... Individuals have become to narrow-focused to see the bigger picture?
Is she claiming that specialized and "obscure" academic pursuits turn scholars into dispassionate drones, lacking the will for civic engagement? And if so, how? How did she jump to such conclusion? How is it even accurate to use the type of education as a determining factor for civic leadership potential? Does personality of the individual no longer count? (See Max Weber's classification of authority / leadership)
Is she arguing that if we are narrowing the focus of our studies, we cannot see the bigger picture of what is going on in the world? If she does, then I think she doesn't give arts students enough credit for having the acute ability to analyze world events.
Having said that, her statement here still makes me wonder about whether my contributions to the classrooms in the past 4 years have been rigorous enough to even be considered "postmodern deconstructionism":
You may think you know what is going on in that Jane Austen novel. That is until your first encounter with postmodern deconstructionism.To me, her argument is very well articulated, and in theory, I find it very appealing. It's a fresh concept to me, and to many of those who commented, but I still find that my understanding of her speech to be very superficial. Maybe I need an appreciation of her history, experience the 60s (when civic engagement was very much alive), or go back in time when liberal arts education was holistic and cross-disciplinary rather than specialized.
Here's a bit of her bio. I've read it and understand a bit more of where she is coming from, but am still clueless...
If you followed higher education news in the 1990s, you have an opinion on Liz Coleman. The president of what was once the most expensive college in America, Coleman made a radical, controversial plan to snap the college out of a budget and mission slump -- by ending the tenure system, abolishing academic divisions and yes, firing a lot of professors. It was not a period without drama. But fifteen years on, it appears that the move has paid off. Bennington's emphasis on cross-disciplinary, hands-on learning has attracted capacity classes to the small college, and has built a vibrant environment for a new kind of learning.
Coleman's idea is that higher education is an active pursuit -- a performing art. Her vision calls for lots of one-on-one interactions between professor and student, deep engagement with primary sources, highly individual majors, and the destruction of the traditional academic department. It's a lofty goal that takes plenty of hard work to keep on course.
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