Right-wingers attack universities for being left-wing and woke. Progressives denounce them as perpetuating patriarchy and white privilege. These culture war attacks are compounded by parents who worry that the exorbitant costs of higher education are not worth it.
It's no wonder that Americans have low trust in universities. A Gallup poll last year found that only 36% of Americans were confident in higher education, a significant drop from eight years ago. And this was before universities across the country were engulfed by a wave of protests and counter-demonstrations over the war in Gaza.
But protests and culture war attacks on diversity, course content, speech, and speakers are not the only challenges facing American higher education. The problem is that higher education is fundamentally misunderstood. In response, universities must reaffirm the fading liberal arts ideals that have made them great.
Liberal arts refers to a broad range of education that aims to produce an educated population prepared to navigate responsibly in an increasingly complex and divided world. We are concerned that in many schools, students are able to meet all or most of their general education requirements and take any number of electives without ever having any meaningful discussion related to our political life as a nation. .
Over the past century, what has made American higher education the best in the world is not its superiority in career education, but its ability to educate students in democratic citizenship, cultivate critical thinking, and develop students personally through self-creation. contributed to. To revive American higher education, we need to reinvigorate these roots.
In Europe and many other countries, universities specialize in undergraduate students from day one, with an emphasis on developing field-specific skills and knowledge. University students train to become doctors, lawyers, or experts in international relations, English literature, or computer science.
In the United States, European-style specializations for careers in medicine, law, business, or public policy are the focus of post-baccalaureate professional schools. Traditionally, American universities have aimed to provide a liberal arts education with an emphasis on reasoning and problem solving. These enduring skills are key ingredients for thriving businesses and countries.
Historically, students arriving on American college campuses spent the majority of their first two years taking classes outside of their planned major. This exposed them to a common curriculum that engaged with the thoughtful writings of the past in order to develop the skills and ability to make sound, independent judgments.
Over the past half-century, American universities have drifted away from this ideal and lost confidence in their ability to educate students toward democratic citizenship. This has led to a decline in commitment to the liberal arts, a trend highlighted by an Inside Higher Ed survey of chief academic officers at American universities last year. Nearly two-thirds agree that liberal arts education is in decline, and well over half believe that politicians, college presidents, and university boards are becoming increasingly indifferent toward the liberal arts. I feel that.
Today, there is little emphasis on shared courses between majors that explore and discuss big questions about equality, justice, patriotism, personal duty, civic responsibility, and the meaning of the purpose of human life. Majors that once required only eight or 10 courses now require 14 or more, and students are increasingly double majoring, all crowding out a liberal arts education. Ambitious students who aspire to land top consulting, finance, or technology jobs can easily ignore the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences courses that are at the core of a liberal education.
The devaluation of the first two years of a common liberal arts education left students and the nation wanting. Educating young people as citizens is why his first two years of college remain important.
To that end, the so-called Great Book has long been the preferred method for fostering citizenship. This approach, contrary to critics on the left and right, is not about sacralizing particular texts for worship or about mechanisms of heritage transmission.
The writings of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, as well as Wollstonecraft, Austen, Woolf, Baldwin, Hurston, and Orwell, are suitable introductory college courses for students of all majors. These writers address fundamental questions of human life. They explore the concepts of self-determination, friendship, virtue, equality, democracy, religious tolerance and race that have shaped us all.
As students grapple with these big questions, the authors of Great Books offer a roadmap for challenging and critiquing each other and past norms. Plato's Dialogues of Socrates is a classic example, questioning beliefs and subjecting them to respectful but critical analysis and skepticism.
These books are best studied in small group seminar discussions that model and inculcate democratic behavior in students. This discourse is an antidote to today's media and social media hype.
Rather than being experts on a particular writer, teachers are role models of intellectual curiosity, asking penetrating questions, offering critical analysis, and seeking deeper understanding. In ideal Socratic fashion, these discussions require you to listen carefully, speak briefly, and most importantly, be willing to move on to the conclusion of the argument.
Parents paying for college tuition may wonder why they should spend $80,000 a year to have their son or daughter read Plato, Hobbes, and Thoreau instead of studying molecular biology or machine learning. However, discussing life's important and valuable issues in a seminar provides students with a personal engagement with their professors that can never be replicated in a large lecture hall. As students discuss their deepest thoughts with each other, they develop curiosity and empathy, and build bonds of friendship that are important for citizenship and fulfilling lives.
We want to differentiate ourselves from the past by appealing to modernity, but the fundamental questions we ask ourselves are not necessarily modern and The answer is not always correct. But if you've never laid things out and put things back together yourself, how do you know how to think beyond the checkboxes that immediately appear?
War was as much of a concern to Thucydides, Tacitus, and Thoreau as it is today. Discussing good books allows students to distance themselves from the noise of everyday life, allowing reason to roam freely among principles and foundations rather than being absorbed in contemporary events. Our biggest problems are often best solved by stepping back and contemplating a permanent perspective, rather than leaning back.
Liberal arts education is not value-neutral. That is why it has become indispensable today. Freedom of thought, critical reasoning, empathy for others, and respect for differences of opinion are paramount to a thriving democratic society. Without them, today's vicious public discourse and unwarranted accusations become rampant. We join them in the hope of promoting the shared governance that is essential to America's pluralist society.
Ezekiel Emanuel and Harun Küçük are faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Emanuel is a professor and vice provost for global initiatives and Dr. Küçük is an associate professor of history of science and sociology of science.
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