An address by Paul N. Courant to Swarthmore College alumni at their 2003 reunion
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A great deal of what I do for a living, and what the leadership of colleges and universities across the country do, is to try to persuade those who pay for the activities of those colleges and universities that they ought to be willing to shell out liberally for liberal education, and for its cousin, basic research. We are pressed to give measured reasons – to be accountable, in today’s buzzword (and to be buzzword compliant in general.)
So maybe trying to answer the question about why liberal education endures will help to persuade parents and legislatures and boards and foundations, and even alumni, to keep supporting this very expensive and troublesome set of activities in which we engage.
Note that I said “set of activities,” not “business” or “enterprise,” because I didn’t want to turn anyone off. But of course higher ed. is a business and an enterprise. Our ability to support liberal education would be improved, I think, if faculty and others who believe in liberal education would come to the view that it’s ok and even useful to talk about the business of higher education. (Kurt Vonnegut once suggested, more extremely, that if there are such things as angels he hoped they were organized along the lines of the mafia.) At the same time, I’d like to persuade business and government types that the value of higher education cannot be exclusively denominated in dollars – that we should be accountable to more than the bottom line.
Money is almost never the only thing that matters, and it’s rarely the most important thing, but it’s really hard to get anything done without it.
So back to the question: Why does liberal education endure in the world of the bottom line? (And why should it?)
Here are three answers:
• Liberal education turns out be a more practical form of vocational education than vocational education itself, at least a good deal of the time. (This is a variant of William James’s old remark that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.)
• Liberal education is valuable because we don’t know what the next problem is going to be, and liberal education gives us the best shot at figuring out how to solve it anyhow. Basic research gives us the best chance of knowing something relevant when the next problem comes along.
• Liberal education is the best way we have to help young people (and older ones) to construct interesting and fulfilling lives.
I’m going to amplify on each of these reasons and make some arguments about how we should try to sell liberal education honestly insofar as we can. But let me tip you off to the mechanism that undergirds all three, and it’s as old as the hills and as American as apple pie.
Liberal education – liberal learning -- is really hard work. Its fundamental requirement is intellectual honesty and you can’t do it – can’t even know what it is, without continual questioning of a kind that is hard on both body and soul. Students and teachers (and there is less difference than might appear, we are all doing the same things) have to be open-minded and willing to push on that which puzzles and troubles and interests them, and to push on each other. This set of abilities and inclinations makes for great problem-solvers.
So let me spend a little time on each of the arguments.
1. Liberal education is practical: As you may know, the use of affirmative action in the admissions policies of the University of Michigan is being challenged in the legal system, and the cases are currently before the Supreme Court. Somewhat surprisingly, the practicality of liberal education emerged powerfully during the course of the lawsuits. Some 30 corporations in the Fortune 500 filed amicus briefs on Michigan’s side. Here is what GM said when asked why they did so.
“In doing research on whether GM should involve itself in this lawsuit, we have been impressed with a growing body of research that concludes that college students who experience the most racial and ethnic diversity in classrooms and during interactions on campus become better learners and more effective citizens. Those are exactly the types of persons we want running our global business -- better learners and more effective citizens."
Michigan’s argument for diversity is based in no small part on our conception of liberal education. What is striking is that GM’s argument so closely mirrors our own. The logic of our case for affirmative action derives from a conception of liberal education in which difference is vital to learning.
It is no surprise to experienced schoolteachers that difference is essential to learning and to productive activity. (And to the avoidance of terminal boredom in the classroom). It’s more surprising that the public debate over affirmative action turns out to be a battle that divides the front page and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. They care about profit on the front page, and if you read between the lines it is pretty clear that corporate America has come to the correct conclusion that diversity and liberal learning are actually good for the bottom line.
2. Because we don’t know what the next problem is going to be. One of our biology faculty recently suggested that this is the argument for basic research. It’s the best one-line explanation for both basic research and liberal education that I have ever heard.
That we don’t know the next problem leads to an efficiency argument for liberal learning – and again, for diversity writ large – in a dynamic and uncertain world. Scott Page, a colleague of mine at the University of Michigan, has written a series of technical papers that formalize the idea that if you don’t know the next problem, you want to have a set of problem solvers who are diverse in knowledge, experience, and styles of thought. The idea is not new – it’s a version of Adam Smith’s division of labor, and of the logic that makes us want to have players with different talents on a basketball team. But the extension of the idea to experience and styles of thought IS new; for groups, it implies diversity. For individuals, it implies liberal education.
3. Because it’s the best way we have to help young people (and older ones) to construct interesting and fulfilling lives.
Better yet, for the joy of the life of the mind, as creation and recreation, as a calling at best, an avocation at least. There is nothing like puzzling through something, understanding it, “getting” a passage in literature or in a painting or a differential equation or the folding of a protein or the exquisite dissonance and consonance of different styles of music. Being transported by text, by symbol, by sustained argument.
(Here I want to digress for a moment on the fact that in the world of ubiquitous multimedia we older folks need to work with the youth to figure out exactly what we now mean by sustained argument, and how to recognize it and evaluate it. In our day, it was always text, with perhaps a picture or a diagram thrown in. Today’s students are every bit as smart and engaged as we are, but they use text in conjunction with other means of communication in a way that we do not. Something very important is going on out there, and a lot of us, including me, are a long way from understanding it. This area will consume a lot of energy on the part of students and teachers in the years to come.)
Liberal learning is good for the old because it keeps us young, because the young learn naturally, are wired for it. As we get older we reacquire the taste, if we are lucky, or if we are liberally educated (which is a form of luck.)
The continued joy of learning is a value not well measured in dollars, although I can say as a parent that I would pay a lot to assure that my children have it, and as a faculty member that my colleagues and I work hard to keep it and to promulgate it. (Which is to say that it costs money to produce it, even though the profit is not monetized.)
I cannot resist here quoting from an editorial published in the Ohio State Journal of 1870, at the time that the Ohio State University was founded: “…the lawyer who knows nothing but law, the physician who knows nothing but medicine, and the farmer who knows nothing but farming are on a par with each other. They are all alike, starved and indigent in the requirements of true culture”
Let me take a moment to tell a story that pulls together all three of the reasons I have given for liberal education.
In the 1850s, the University of Michigan built a structure called the Detroit Observatory (which still stands and is now a museum). It was called the Detroit Observatory because the money came from businessmen in Detroit. Back in the 1850s it was very important to know the exact time, because shipping on the Great Lakes required knowledge of longitude, and if you knew the exact time you could infer longitude from astronomical observations. The Detroit businessmen helped the University to buy two telescopes, one for research, and the other, a meridian telescope, for telling time. The astronomer would lie on a couch and look through the meridian telescope, which was perfectly aligned north-south. Knowing exact location, one can infer time from the transit of an astronomical body across the cross-hairs (made from spider silk) in the telescope. The astronomer would push a button, which would send a signal to the railroad station, which would then telegraph across the Midwest “Detroit Observatory Time.” A jeweler on the Detroit River, on receiving the signal, would drop a shape from a flagpole, so that the ships on the river would know it was exactly noon. In its day, this was high-bandwidth information technology.
The Detroit businessmen knew that they wanted to tell time, and they knew that only an astronomer could do it. And they were persuaded that a good astronomer would not be content to tell time, but would want to push the boundaries of his field. They were willing to support the pure work for the applied, but also for itself. They liked to come by and look through the observational telescope and talk with the astronomer about science. This alliance of academy and commerce is uniquely American, and it has persisted to produce a set of institutions of learning and research that are quite extraordinary.
Back to intellectual honesty.
If we are going to persuade those upon whose charity and kindness we depend to support this enterprise, it behooves us to do so honestly, to argue for both the practical and not so practical consequences of our endeavor. For one thing, we are so expensive that we need all of the arguments that we can get, and indeed this mix of reasons why we are worthwhile also undergird our being so pricey. For another, if we cheat, if we sell ourselves as only being practical, we risk being pushed into being accountable only for the measurable, and of losing the ability to pursue the life of the mind, or even research and teaching in domains that do not have easily foreseeable payoff.
So why are we so pricey, and what can we do about it?
Actually we are not only expensive, but we become ever more so, in that the cost of higher ed., especially at the highest quality, and tuition, typically rise faster than prices in general.
Actually it’s even worse than that, because tuition does not cover our costs, and the growth of tuition does not cover the growth in our costs.
There are two fundamental reasons for all of this bad news, among quite a few less fundamental but still consequential ones.
The first fundamental reason is something that economists call Baumol’s disease, after William Baumol, who first identified it in work he did on the economics of theatre.
The essential mechanism of rising standards of living is growth in productivity. As we get smarter, as we invent better gadgets, we are able to produce more goods and services per hour of work, and as a result wages can and do rise faster than prices, with the result that an hour of work buys more and more stuff. Competition in the labor market requires that wages for workers of a given set of skills and abilities get paid about the same for anything that they do that requires a given amount of effort. (Discrimination, monopoly, and all sorts of other relevant things get in the way of this result, sometimes with great significance, but let’s ignore them for now.) As wages rise in general, so too will the wages paid to actors and schoolteachers, approximately preserving their position in the income distribution unless there is great social change.
But technical change does not actually do very much for theatre or higher education. You still need two actors – one to play Romeo and one to play Juliet, just as you did 400 years ago. Their wages grow at the rate of growth of wages in general. Their productivity hardly grows at all, and the result is that the cost of putting on the play compared to goods and services on average rises, year after year.
The same thing happens in college teaching. To be sure, we use technology a lot, but except in the payroll office (where we surely have fewer employees than we did 20 years ago) we don’t use it to increase productivity. We use technology to increase quality. The ratio of students to teachers at Swarthmore hasn’t changed much since I was here, I would venture, while the wages of the teachers have gone up with wages in the economy as a whole. In more ways than one, higher education is like theatre.
The other reason that costs keep going up is that the scope of the enterprise grows without bound. At Michigan, I often assert, with only slight hyperbole, we are responsible for understanding, or at least chronicling and making accessible, the total of human knowledge and creative expression throughout all of history. As knowledge and interpretation change and grow, we in higher education are responsible for both the new and the old. General Motors does not need to keep the tools for ‘57 Chevys, and would have a hard time making a ’57 Chevy. No one knows how to make slide rules any more (I still have mine.) But at the University and the College we keep up with Latin and Greek, with the history of thought as well as with current thought. We are, and must be, museums as well as laboratories, conservators as well as innovators. Sure, we can do some compacting, but our mission grows every year. There is more to know today than there was yesterday, and there will be yet more tomorrow.
We owe it to our benefactors to be prudent with the resources that they give us. Liberal education is expensive enough without waste. Like the Mafia or General Motors, the purchasing department should be well run. But we must not compromise on the mission – we must not do less than what is required to give our students and our world the best chance of creating value, of solving new and surprising and important problems, of living fulfilling lives. We should be as businesslike as possible, but we should recognize, and vigorously articulate, that some of the time it’s not possible to very businesslike.
Liberal education is intrinsically trouble-making, something that I do not have time to amplify here; learning to deal with a certain trouble – with the conflict and hurt that comes with the rigor of intellectual honesty, is one of its benefits. But I would hate to leave you with the notion that it’s all sweet reason. Reason cannot be relied upon to be sweet.
To restate Wilcox: The best thing about my four years at Swarthmore is the thirty-five years since. Thirty-five years away from Swarthmore I find myself still living it, profiting by it, having one of those interesting and engaged lives, playing with ideas, trying to stay honest, still getting into trouble from time to time.
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