| |
A speech to faculty,
administrators, and guests at the National University of
Singapore, November 8, 2004
I am going to talk about the
liberal arts college -- in many ways a uniquely American
institution -- and what it has to offer to the global
professional world of today. Today’s fast-paced global
economy, with the value it sets on mobility and innovation,
may seem to demand increasingly professional education. Many
would advise a young person beginning her education, “As
soon as you can, specialize. Study, first and most of all,
to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, an architect, a banker.” As
sensible as this advice seems, I am not sure that it is the
best advice for a world that is changing as fast as ours
is. Today I am going to give you a history and an argument -- a
history of the liberal arts college in the United States
and an argument about the ways in which it prepares young
men and women for our constantly changing, ever shrinking
world.
Before I begin, let me tell you a little bit about my own education. I went to
a liberal arts college solely for women. I enrolled with the intention of majoring
in music, but in my second year, I changed my major to English literature. I
then went to Yale University for my doctorate in English. I held my first teaching
position at the University of California at Berkeley, in the English Department.
After almost twenty years on the faculty, I began to become involved in administration.
At first I was responsible for fields close to my own area of scholarship -- the
departments in the humanities. But as I took on increasingly high positions,
I became responsible for a much broader scope of disciplines -- at first not
only for the humanities but also for the social, physical, and biological sciences;
later for all the professional schools and colleges -- the College of Engineering,
of Public Health, of Natural Resources, of Business, of Law, of Optometry. It
wasn’t specialized knowledge that I relied on in this job, but my broad
education and my general abilities in writing, in speaking, and in critical analysis.
I had the quintessential impractical liberal arts major -- English -- but
it prepared me well for a career at the top of a large research university. That
job, in turn, was the ideal preparation for the presidency of a liberal arts
college.
Before I talk about why I believe that liberal arts education is so uniquely
valuable a preparation for today’s world, let me place the liberal arts
college in the context of the history of American higher education. The liberal
arts college is a quintessential American institution. From the seventeenth through
the nineteenth centuries, scores of independent liberal arts colleges were established,
concentrated largely in the eastern half of the United States, many in fairly
rural places. This pattern of development of higher education was very distinct
from that of Europe, where universities developed in urban centers and gradually
assumed government support. What gave rise to the American pattern? The need
to educate clergy and teachers for a broadly dispersed population, whose economy
until the mid-nineteenth century was essentially agricultural. Many of these
colleges were affiliated with a specific Protestant denomination.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the legal foundation was laid for
the other distinctively American institution of higher learning -- the public
research university. In 1862, the Morrill Land-Grant Act established the provision
for land grants designated to enable each state to establish a state university
to educate its growing population. The great public universities in the United
States -- the University of California, the University of Illinois, the University
of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Washington, and dozens
of others, trace their origins to this federal act. The vision shaping these
universities was quite different from the vision shaping the liberal arts college;
land grant universities had a more democratic impulse at their base -- to
educate a growing population in what were then termed the agricultural and mechanical
arts, in order to increase prosperity and class mobility. They were not private
but public; they made higher education available to large segments of the population,
and they had a more pragmatic and professional focus. Nonetheless, the idea of
liberal arts education, which had developed in the private liberal arts colleges
throughout the eastern states, shaped much of the undergraduate curriculum even
in these state universities.
What was the idea of the liberal arts that had so powerful an influence? When
people use the term “liberal arts,” they often assume that they are
identifying a core of humanistic disciplines that has been stable for many centuries -- the
classics, history, philosophy, mathematics. Yet any history of the American college
curriculum shows that the idea of a stable central core constituting the liberal
arts is a myth. In 1754 a prospectus for the new King’s College, later
to become Columbia University, announced that the course of study would include
surveying, navigation, geography, history, husbandry, commerce, government, meteorology,
natural history, and natural philosophy. When Thomas Jefferson (who later became
the third president of the United States) reorganized the curriculum of the College
of William and Mary in 1779, he abolished professorships of divinity and oriental
languages and added professorships in public administration, modern languages,
medical sciences, natural history, natural philosophy, national and international
law, and fine arts. These lists show us several interesting things. First, they
demonstrate that ideas changed about what subjects constituted the liberal arts.
Secondly, they show that the liberal arts have always included branches of study
that we think of us professional. Educators were asking not whether to mix the
academic, the practical, and the professional, but how to do so. Furthermore,
fields of study that Americans now regard as essential components of a liberal
arts education, like the modern languages, entered the curriculum in comparatively
recent times as disruptive innovations.
Throughout the nineteenth century, there were fierce debates in the higher education
community about what subjects should constitute the core of the liberal arts,
the mandatory curriculum all students were required to take. In the late nineteenth
century, Ezra Cornell, after whom Cornell University was named, and Charles William
Eliot, the legendary president of Harvard, each introduced the elective system
to their universities in order to defuse these fierce arguments about content.
That system, which quickly spread throughout American higher education, introduced
greater diversity into the curriculum and allowed students to choose the courses
they would take. In a history of the Yale curriculum published in 1901 -- more
than a century ago -- John C. Schwab described the result at Yale: “The
history of the Yale curriculum is the story of a medieval workshop, with its
limited range of simple tools, all of which the apprentice learned to master,
developing into a modern factory, well-equipped with a large stock of tools and
machinery, no two of them alike in their construction or use, many of them delicate
and complicated, and few of them fully understood or manipulated by all the employees
of the shop.” In the modern factory that Schwab describes, students would
no longer study a uniform core curriculum. They would focus on a major -- a
concentration in a single field of study located in one section of the factory -- but
they would also be required to take a set of electives, distributed across the
curriculum, to ensure a broad familiarity with different fields of knowledge.
This idea of the curriculum places as much emphasis on general knowledge as on
mastery of a specialization.
Let me now turn to the value of this concept of education. However, before I
do so, I would like to dispel a few common misconceptions. Some assume that the
liberal arts are all arts, and no science. From the very beginning, the sciences
have been central disciplines in the liberal arts. In medieval times, mathematics
and astronomy were part of the quadrivium, as it was then called. In more modern
times, as science has become increasingly important, it has taken a larger place
in the liberal arts curriculum. At Smith, we are being praised for the innovative
way in which our new engineering program, the first such program at a U.S. women’s
college, is meaningfully integrating the liberal arts into an engineering major.
The philosophy of our engineering major emphasizes learning engineering in the
context of the liberal arts, understanding technical problems in their social
context, understanding their intersection with policy and with social values.
It’s also important to dispel the myth that liberal arts education is for
the rich, the province of a privileged few. At one time this may have been the
case. A gentleman who was assured a place in the family firm could afford not
to focus on a trade. Today, liberal arts colleges enroll students from all walks
of life, all socioeconomic backgrounds, all ethnic heritages. At Smith, almost
two-thirds of our students receive financial aid, and about 15 percent of them
are the first in their families to attend college.
But the most important myth to dispel is the belief that the liberal arts are
impractical, that they don’t prepare students for today’s increasingly
competitive workplace. Let us stop for a minute to think about what young men
and women need to be able to do to succeed in today’s world.
As you well recognize, arguably better than we do in America, they need the kind
of cultural sensitivity and fluency that enables them to work across different
cultures, both within their own countries and across the globe. Most businesses
today have a global reach. Businesses can no longer remain local, and the young
men and women who enter them must understand the different cultures in which
they work.
The young men and women entering today’s workforce must also be prepared
to tackle multifaceted problems that require more than a single discipline for
their solution -- urbanization, climate change, large-scale human migration.
They must become skilled at understanding what different frames of intellectual
reference, different methodologies, different disciplinary tools have to contribute
to the solution of complex problems. Most of the important problems that we face
do not come in neat disciplinary or professional boxes. You need to become adept
in stepping out of your own particular frame of reference to understand what
others might offer.
The young men and women entering today’s workplace must be able to make
decisions in contexts that are at once complex and volatile. The more intellectual
tools that you bring to the task, the more likely you are to succeed. John Schwab
described the Yale curriculum at the beginning of the twentieth century as a
modern factory, with a large stock of very different, complex, and delicate tools,
few of which any single employee would understand and use. I wonder if we might
imagine today’s curriculum in more electronic terms, as a World Wide Web,
in which links move us into different disciplines, different cultures, different
areas of knowledge, abruptly and with lightning speed. Professor Schwab’s
metaphor implies that you can manipulate your own set of tools in the factory,
engaging in your piece of its work, without a great deal of concern about your
ignorance of others. The World Wide Web requires that you continually change
your frame of reference. So many problems and questions today require interdisciplinary
and cross-disciplinary analysis, that students must acquire the ability to move
across disciplines. This is more than taking a course in music and a course in
English and a course in economics and a course in biology. It involves understanding
differences in methods of inquiry and argument and asking how the tools and materials
of one discipline can illuminate the subjects of another. How can biologists,
geologists, and engineers work together to understand watersheds? How can the
philosopher help biologists understand new capabilities in genetic engineering?
I believe that a liberal arts education is particularly suited to preparing students
for the complex world of the twenty-first century. Today’s world demands
particular skill in public speaking, in writing clearly and fluently, and in
reading, understanding, and absorbing complex material across a broad range of
disciplines. Whatever your profession, you need the capability of presenting
your ideas clearly and well to a small group, making a presentation of your product,
the strategy you recommend, the solution that you have developed. An education
that provides many opportunities and occasions to discuss and argue in small
groups, and to make oral presentations develops this ability. Liberal arts colleges,
with their low student/faculty ratios -- 10 to 1 is a norm -- offer many
opportunities for students to develop speaking skills in presenting and defending
their ideas in small seminars. A Smith alumna who has been very successful in
business told me recently, “I make presentations of my ideas every day
to audiences of 10 to 12 people. I learned to do that in seminars in college.”
Success in most any profession demands not only speaking well but also writing
well -- expressing ideas clearly, communicating persuasively and fluently.
Liberal arts colleges place a great deal of emphasis on writing.
Liberal arts colleges also teach students to read and absorb materials across
a wide range of disciplines. This is so critical a skill in business, in law,
in government, in engineering -- wherever problems have many dimensions. To
assess an investment in an emerging economy, you must understand not only balance
sheets but also political and cultural analysis. To manage a museum, you must
understand not just the art but also the finances. To work as a lawyer for an
international biotech firm, you must understand not just the law but also the
science, and not just the law and the science, but the culture and economy of
the country in which you work. I was recently speaking to a Smith alumna who
had achieved considerable success in a technical field, despite not having a
technical education. She told me why she felt she was more successful than colleagues
with greater technical knowledge than she. “I know how to solve problems,” she
said. “I can think critically, and I can think outside of the box of the
technical solution that most readily presents itself. I learned to do that through
my broad education.”
In addition to the basic skills, of writing, speaking, and critical analysis
that liberal arts colleges teach, they seek to develop a cultural fluency essential
in today’s world. In 1949, shortly after the ending of the Second World
War, Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the Smith student body. She spoke passionately
about the need for international study. She asked, “How well prepared are
we to live in a world that has constantly grown smaller and where we must rub
shoulders with people of different cultures, of completely different customs
and habits and religions, who live under different legal systems, whose languages
are different?” The need is even more urgent in 2004 than it was in 1949.
Liberal arts colleges encourage international study. They encourage the study
of language; they encourage study abroad. (About half of Smith’s students
spend part or all of their third college year in study outside of the United
States.) Furthermore, student bodies are diverse, with significant numbers of
international students, and of American minority students. Because most American
liberal arts colleges are residential communities, in which students live together
in college housing, they get to know one another well, and grow to understand
the ways in which a different experience shapes a different perspective.
In addition to developing cultural fluency, liberal arts colleges develop a fluency
across a range of disciplines. The distinguished chemist Tom Cech, who is currently
president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, refers to this as intellectual
cross-training. Using the analogy of athletics, where athletes perform a variety
of exercises not directly related to their main sport in order to improve their
overall strength and conditioning, Cech recommends intellectual cross- training
for the scientist, in order to develop the ability to collect and organize facts
and opinions, to analyze them and weigh their value, to articulate an argument.
He argues that the humanities are important to the sciences, not because they
produce more cultured people but because they produce better scientists.
Cech writes, “In history, literature and the arts, one is presented with
diverse, mutually contradictory ‘data’ -- different points of
view due to incomplete knowledge or the different backgrounds of those doing
the viewing.” Scientists require the same skills as humanists to “cut
through misleading observations and arrive at a defensible interpretation” [From
Cech’s essay “Science at Liberal Arts Colleges: A Better Education?” in
Distinctly American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges, edited by Steven
Koblik and Stephen R. Graubard (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000),
210.] The same argument that Cech states so eloquently could also be made in
reverse: cross-training in the sciences produces better humanists.
Cech does not rely merely on arguments such as the one I have quoted to make
the case for the value of liberal arts colleges in educating scientists. He looks
at data identifying the undergraduate institutions attended by those earning
doctorates in the sciences and engineering. He finds that liberal arts colleges
are disproportionately represented, producing a higher percentage of graduates
going on to Ph.D.’s in science and engineering than many research universities.
Even more remarkable is the percentage of scientific leaders -- heads of major
American scientific institutions like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute or
the National Institutes of Health -- who have taken their bachelor’s
degree at a liberal arts college.
The final argument that I will make about the value of education at a liberal
arts college relates to the pattern of careers today. Several decades ago, people
expected to spend their entire working life in a single career, perhaps at a
single company. Now research has shown that individuals can expect to have not
just several different jobs, but several different careers. You can begin in
government service, move to journalism, and wind up in university administration.
You can begin in law, move to nonprofit management, and then to arts administration.
You can begin as an academic scientist, run a bio-tech company, and then head
an educational foundation. To prepare yourself for so varied a professional experience,
a broad education is invaluable. People now work for many more decades than was
the custom fifty years ago, often embarking on a new career in their 50s or 60s.
Intellectual fluency -- intellectual cross-training, to use Tom Cech’s
phrase -- prepares you well for such transitions.
Educators in the liberal arts continue to ask, “What does it mean to be
an educated person?” In my presidency at Smith, I have begun increasingly
to think that the answer to this question lies less in specific courses of study,
specific content areas, and more in basic capacities. My thinking on this subject
has been much influenced by my conversations with alumnae. Whenever I speak with
alumnae, I ask them, what in your experience at Smith has most profoundly influenced
you? what are the most important things that you learned in college -- the
things that had an impact on your future success? Much has surprised and interested
me about these conversations, but most interesting has been how seldom alumnae
talk about the subjects they studied, and how often they talk about what I would
term capacities -- powers of mind and imagination. The careers in which these
alumnae have achieved their most striking success often have little to do with
their undergraduate majors. The recently appointed head of Drugstore.com, Dawn
Lepore, was a music major at Smith; Shelly Lazarus, the CEO and chair of Ogilvy
and Mather was a psychology major. Janet McKinley, a fund manager for Capital
Research and Management Company, majored in history. Although all of these majors
seem irrelevant to the subsequent success of these women, none of them says she
wishes she had majored in something else more relevant to her future career,
and each of them gives the capacities that she developed at Smith major credit
for her success.
What should those capacities be? On the most basic level, students should graduate
with certain skills: they should write well; they should understand how to put
together an oral presentation and deliver it effectively; they should know how
to locate relevant information in printed and electronic form and credit it appropriately;
they should have some fluency in quantitative reasoning.
On a more profound level, they should be able to reflect upon and analyze the
cultures of their country, and they should have the experience of exploring at
least one culture other than their own. They should be able to think historically,
by which I mean have the ability to analyze a current situation in terms of its
historical roots and determinants. They should have an appreciation of works
of the imagination, not just in the classroom but also in museums, theaters,
concert halls. They should have sufficient scientific literacy to understand
public policy issues involving science. They should understand and be able to
justify their political ideas.
College should also give them the opportunity to develop capacities of character.
They should develop the capacity for empathy, the understanding of how another
person sees and feels things. You can develop this capacity in many fields of
study -- in literature, in the arts, in the study of other cultures, in the
social sciences. You can also develop the capacity for empathy outside the classroom -- in
living and working with other students, in building friendships.
Education should also develop the capacity for moral reasoning. You can develop
moral reasoning, like empathy, in many areas of study -- in literature, in
philosophy, in religion, in history, in social policy. Students can also develop
it outside the classroom -- in relationships, in regard to community issues.
Closely related to moral reasoning is commitment to and responsibility for a
larger community. Students should leave college with a sense of responsibility
to the larger community.
Education should develop curiosity -- -- a continuing interest in events
and ideas that means one never stops learning. A student should leave college
with a sense of intellectual breadth and adventure; with intellectual curiosity
that goes beyond professionally focused study; with a sense of books, art, music,
and ideas as part of the texture of one’s life.
Finally, education should develop self-confidence -- belief in one’s
capacities and abilities. This is critical to all young people, but of particular
value to women students.
Before I end today, I would like to talk about why a liberal arts college for
women holds particular benefits for them. Women’s colleges deliver a powerful
message to their students: that women’s voices matter. Women learn to develop
their capacity for argumentation and for oral presentation in seminars made up
exclusively of women. Women develop their capacity for leadership on campuses
where all the student leadership roles fall to women. Women’s colleges
typically have a larger percentage of women faculty than co-ed colleges, so women
have many role models. The success that the graduates of women’s colleges
achieve demonstrates the benefits of women’s education. Particularly in
male-dominated fields, the graduates of women’s colleges achieve success
in numbers far greater than one might predict in light of the percentage they
compose of college graduates. Although the graduates of women’s colleges
represent only 2 percent of all female college graduates, they constitute more
than 20 percent of women in the U.S. Congress, and 30 percent of a Business Week
list of rising women stars in corporate America. The figures for math and science
are particularly impressive. Undergraduates at women’s colleges major in
economics, math, and life science in larger percentages than do male undergraduates
at coed colleges. Compared to women at a coeducational institutions, undergraduates
at women’s colleges are three times more likely to earn a degree in economics
and one-and-one-half times more likely to earn degrees in life sciences, physical
sciences, and mathematics than. They continue toward doctorates in math, science
and engineering in disproportionately large numbers. The National Science Foundation
keeps a ranking of the top 50 producers of women recipients of bachelor’s
degrees who go on to earn doctorates in science and engineering. This is a ranking
by number of graduates, not percentage, so it gives the advantage to large institutions.
There are only five undergraduate colleges in that list; four of them are women’s
colleges. The analysis that Tom Cech has done of the role of liberal arts colleges
in producing scientific leaders is even more striking when one looks just at
the data for women.
We may all be confident about one thing -- that just as the curriculum in
the liberal arts has changed throughout history, it will continue to change as
we strive to provide students the best preparation for the rapidly changing world
in which they find themselves. As I was considering my visit to the National
University of Singapore, and what I would say here tonight, I found a speech
by your president, Shih Choon Fang, on your Web site -- the speech he gave
at the commencement dinner in July 2004. He described a vision of the university
that struck a chord in my heart -- “bringing together young and old
to create enriching experiences of learning and sharing with one another.” The
subject of his talk was the tension between the forces of globalization and the
forces of community, culture, and history. To reflect on this tension, he borrowed
a pair of metaphors from the American journalist Thomas Friedman -- the Lexus
and the olive tree. Friedman associates the Lexus with globalization and the
olive tree with community, culture, and history. I wonder if we might complicate
this metaphorical opposition a bit. The forces of globalization make us increasingly
aware of the olive trees in other countries and cultures, and the goal of material
prosperity embodied in the Lexus can lead to disregard of the larger health of
the world. The liberal arts, with their shifting and fluid connection between
the professional and the academic, with their emphasis on broad knowledge and
shifting frames of reference, can help us think about the Lexus and the olive
tree in the many different worlds and perspectives to which our experience increasingly
leads us.
|
|
Speeches & Writings
Letters
to the
Community
Senior Administration
Office
Staff & Hours
Biography
Community Advisory Board
|
