| The following remarks by Gettysburg College President Katherine Haley Will were delivered before an Oct. 29 plenary session at "Liberal Arts Education in America and the World," a conference sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa and the American Conference of Academic Deans and held at George Washington University:
I was very pleased when I was asked to speak to you today about the liberal arts because this audience is one I know shares my passion for this topic. And I was honored to serve on the ACAD board when I was the provost at Kenyon College.
 I want to begin my remarks in a way you might not expect, and that is by calling up a fictional character: Mrs. Jellyby.
When I saw the guiding questions for this conference— “Should American Colleges and universities export the liberal arts to international settings?” and “Can they offer the liberal arts in service of democratic ideals, while deflecting charges of cultural imperialism?”—I immediately thought of Mrs. Jellyby.
The liberal arts teach us to draw broad implications from focused disciplines. So in that spirit, I was immediately reminded of a favorite novel from my own area of study, the Victorian novel. And I particularly was drawn to consider the connections of these issues to Charles Dickens’ 1853 novel Bleak House and his piercing, unforgettable, hilarious send-up of British imperialism and what he called “telescopic philanthropy.”
Mrs. Jellyby, Dickens devotees may recall, is:
…a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa, specificallyBorrioboola Gha on the left bank of the Niger.
In Mrs. Jellyby’s own upper-middle class home, which emits a strong marshy odor, chaos prevails. The living room is strewn with papers. The house is without hot water or a kettle and even if there were a kettle, the boiler is out of order. She has many children, all neglected, and as we meet her, we hear the youngest of her large brood of unkempt, uncared-for children tumbling headlong down the stairs, head banging on each step. Mrs. Jellyby scarcely notices.
Her eyes, Dickens tells us, “had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa.”
Mrs. Jellyby explains:
The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies, and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species.
…It involves the devotion of all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so that it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day.
Mrs. Jellyby is a model of “telescopic philanthropy,” as Dickens names it. Her heart is full of feeling for the abstract needs of “the natives” and blind to the very concrete needs of her own children underfoot.
She is, of course, a personification of imperial Britain, whose own society was much in need of reform and its citizens much in need of support, but whose imperial ambitions and far-flung empire led it to engage, to Dickens’ mind, more in conquest and cultural imperialism than to attending to the welfare of its own citizens at home.
Bleak House, of course, is England itself, and much of the novel focuses on the poverty and corruption of London. Fog and mud are, not surprisingly, recurring motifs in the novel.
When we talk about the advisability of exporting our distinctly American values of the liberal arts to other parts of the world, we must be mindful that we don’t gaze—as Mrs. Jellyby would surely and exclusively do—abstractly into the distance.
We must be sure both that our “liberal arts” house is in order, our “home” well attended to—and we must be sure that we do not thoughtlessly, imperialistically impose it upon the world, even if the world seeks it. But I believe the liberal arts, because of what they are and call us to be, will not allow that to happen. If we are true to them.
Of course, then, we must reject the attributes that Mrs. Jellyby so dramatically embodies—arrogance, paternalism, ethnocentricity—the very characteristics that marked the British Empire’s march into the colonies with a mission of wholesale Anglification.
We must ask ourselves the very questions this conference addresses: Is our desire to export our model of the liberal arts just thinly disguised imperialism or is it open-hearted and open-minded support of budding educational systems in countries that are developing their own brand of freedom, human rights, and democracy? Unlike Mrs. Jellyby, we must be sure our own house is in order. If we embrace our own liberal arts tradition and pass on the values it has taught us to our students—and others—all will be well.
What are these values? We know them well. Humility, a collaborative spirit, open mindedness, respect, adaptability and flexibility, and mindful listening. I believe these are invaluable travel and survival skills for our students to pack for their journey in this global world and for us to pack as well. And they are the very tools we as educators need as we venture out to offer liberal arts models to the world.
I would posit that in our understandable but sometimes paralyzing fear as academics to avoid cultural imperialism, we sometimes fear to have a point of view at all— and seem to dream that we should attempt to be neutral, open, and spongelike.
What I say is that we must not go out into the world rudderless. We must have a point of view. We all know that the liberal arts approach, when used to its fullest, demands that we hone our own perspective by listening and learning about the views of others in the world.
It does not demand that we have no perspective at all.
This year, at Gettysburg, our common reading for our students was In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong by Amin Maalouf, which was published in 1996, years before 9-11, although it provides exceptional insights that help explain the violence against America on that day.
A Christian whose mother tongue is Arabic, Maalouf was born in Lebanon and now resides in Paris. Of his mixed background and experiences, Maalouf states:
So am I half French and half Lebanese? Of course not. Identity can’t be compartmentalized. You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique to me, just as other people’s identity is unique to them as individuals.
Maalouf emphasizes that everyone has multiple identities:
A person’s identity is…like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.
Maalouf sees a focus on any one aspect of our multiple identities—such as religion or national origin—as the source of much of the violence in the world. In its most healthy state, he sees identity as a negotiation among multiple identities and new ideas and developments.
He speaks of emigration as a dialectic of perspectives, each giving the other clarity and authenticity:
The more you steep yourself in the culture of the host country the more you will be able to steep yourself in your own...[and] The more an immigrant feels that his own culture is respected, the more open he will be to the culture of the host country.
So it is with the liberal arts. The more open you are to listening to and understanding the ideas of others, the sharper your understanding of your own ideas. And the more the other feels heard and respected, the more receptive she will be to yours.
There is danger, however, when one culture or one perspective dominates all others, as could be argued—and Maalouf does argue so—our Western culture currently dominates. As he says:
Wherever on the planet one happens to live, all modernization is now westernization. And this trend is merely accentuated and accelerated by technical progress. True, monuments and other great achievements bearing the imprint of other civilizations are to be seen everywhere. But everything that is newly created—buildings, institutions, aids to knowledge or improvements to life-styles—all is produced in the image of the West.
When one perspective dominates the globe as western culture and technology have, it poses a threat to the identity of the multitudes who are then cast as “the other.” Violence can be the result.
This reality is experienced differently by those born in the dominant civilization and those born outside it. The former can change, advance in life, adapt without ceasing to be themselves. …For the rest of the world’s inhabitants, all those born in the failed cultures, openness to change and modernity presents itself differently. …modernisation has constantly meant the abandoning of part of themselves…it has never been adopted… without a profound identity crisis.
The dominance of our culture demands that we tread softly in the world.
We have to NOT be Mrs. Jellyby.
In fact, a liberal arts education is our best defense against being Mrs. Jellyby—and our best preparation for navigating in such a world, for it has the potential not only to bring us to self-knowledge but also to sensitize us to the complexity and the value of the identities of others.
Martha Nussbaum has written widely about the responsibility of liberal education in the United States. She sees part of its role as a means to burst a student’s “bubble of American-ness” to prepare them to become global citizens who can think creatively about the problems of today’s world.
In “Liberal Education & Global Community,” she asserts that while a liberal education is primarily an American idea, it is emerging as a force around the world. The reason, she postulates, is the force of globalism and the need for a form of higher education that does a better job of forming citizens for a pluralistic society.
She articulates three qualities that a liberal education needs to instill in students if we are ever to realize the possibility of a stable peace among nations: First, the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions; Second, an ability to see oneself as not simply a citizen of a local region or group but also as a human being connected to others by ties of recognition and concern; the third is narrative imagination—the ability to think what it might be like to see the world through another’s eyes.
These three outcomes of a liberal arts education are a large part of the reason why I am an avid advocate.
My own relationship with the liberal arts spans multiple decades and multiple roles—student, faculty member, dean, provost, and now president. Three of my four daughters graduated from liberal arts colleges. The one who broke ranks went to Purdue, and we’ve learned to live with that. Over the years, home for me has been a series of campuses—Tufts, Carleton College, the University of Illinois, Augustana, Kenyon and Whittier colleges, and now Gettysburg College. These are all very different institutions, but the experiences I’ve had at each have reinforced my own passionate commitment to the liberal arts.
We all care passionately about the status of the liberal arts here at home.
I’ll use my own institution, Gettysburg, as an example, but I know that the higher education community has a pretty common approach—and that all institutions face common challenges.
At Gettysburg, we focus on building a sense of connection to a set of communities from day one. We celebrate the arrival of our first-year class with three events: Move-In Day, where everyone in the campus community gathers to move our new students in in record time, a day of service projects in the borough, and the First-Year Walk.
The “First-Year Walk” is an event unique to Gettysburg. The 700 first-year students and the campus community come together to walk through the streets of Gettysburg, retracing the path Gettysburg College students took 142 years ago as they followed President Lincoln to Cemetery Hill on November 19, 1863. At that very site, they hear the Gettysburg Address, which offers some of the most important words of our democracy. Lincoln’s focus on the reconciliation of warring parties, views, and cultures on that November day serves as a superb model of the liberal arts. His words invite dialogue and mediation and affirm the values of human justice and democracy.
These three events—Move-In Day, GIV Day (the day of community service), and the First-Year Walk/Gettysburg Address—are designed to orient first-year students into a cohesive learning community committed to the shared values of the liberal arts.
We all have students who come to us with values rigidly frozen on one or another side of the cultural divide. They are weaned on a country carved up into blue and red states, and we challenge them to open their minds and hearts to ideas that come in a rainbow of more subtle hues. What we all seek to accomplish at our colleges is to unfreeze our students’ views, open their minds, and move them along in their quest to face the complexities of life—and make sense of them the hard way—by looking at data critically, analyzing carefully, and putting the pieces together in new ways.
Like many of you, we have a new curriculum at Gettysburg that represents the most significant changes to our program in nearly 40 years. Naturally, much of the curriculum revision is aimed at adapting the classic liberal arts approach to the issues we face in the 21st century.
Gettysburg’s new curriculum has four learning goals: multiple inquiries, integrative thinking, effective communication, and local and global citizenship. Critical thinking and communication skills are key to the curriculum—and we have underscored the importance of the ability to integrate multiple perspectives. We have also added more non-Western courses and enhanced foreign language requirements. The creation of online portfolios that include personal reflections are designed to weave a student’s experience—their multiple experiences and identities, if you will—into a meaningful whole.
As it is at Gettysburg, so is it elsewhere. The liberal arts are classic. The spirit and skills and ways of thinking are classic and immutable. But the curriculum evolves. Our programs evolve. Our approach and attitudes evolve. Evolution Adaptation. These are also key values of the liberal arts. As institutions, we must adapt if we are to live up to the spirit of the liberal arts—and we must invite, support, and expect that our students learn to adapt and change—and learn—throughout their lives.
We all believe this about the liberal arts. They are classic. They are essential to living a good life. They create citizens for democracy. We all believe and know this as educators.
But are we understood here at home? Do Americans “get it”?
The good news is that CEOs at major companies seem to “get” the value of a liberal arts education as well as anyone. They are looking for—and value—the very attributes we are designing our curricula to instill: competence in writing, critical thinking, collaboration, ease in negotiating diversity, teamwork, ethics, and lifelong-learning skills.
While CEOs see our value, I would assert that we are not succeeding in making our case about the value of the liberal arts to a broader public in the United States. This is another reason why, when we think about exporting the liberal arts, we need to ensure we are not neglecting important work at home—as Mrs. Jellyby did.
Many of our American students view their college education as a mere ticket to be punched along their way to a lucrative career. It is discouraging sometimes to see how the “market share” of liberal arts institutions has decreased and how little understanding of the liberal arts there is in our own country.
A national survey commissioned by Dick Hersh at Hobart and William Smith Colleges tells us that eighty-five percent of students and seventy-five percent of parents feel that the “ultimate goal of a liberal arts college is to get a practical education and secure a first job.”
The news is not much better in another national survey conducted last year by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Pre-college students were asked about a list of college outcomes and asked to choose which were the most important.
Maturity, work habits, self-discipline, and time management are all skills they value, which they believe college will help them master. Okay, that’s good. But when asked further about acquiring a deeper understanding of American culture and cultures outside the United States, they ranked these dead last. Sadly, these are key values in a global world—and would inoculate against the kinds of cultural imperialism and “ugly American” attitudes that we seek to avoid. We see everywhere a profound lack of understanding about what we are trying to do as educators in the liberal arts tradition. Consumerism and credentialism are rampant.
We must do a better job of telling our story.
The liberal arts have survived, but only because, over the decades, we have evolved and been responsive to the needs of the time. We will continue to change and adapt, but in our drive to refashion our institutions to meet the changing needs of our students, we must take care not to muddy the essence of the liberal arts. We all talk about balancing tradition and innovation, but it is true. This balancing is inherent in the liberal arts approach itself.
John Henry Cardinal Newman struck an essential chord when he said that the art of education is the “art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world.” A man of the 19th century, he assuredly did not mean “the world” in the sense that we mean “the world,” ( I am sure he was thinking “worldly” equals “sophisticated”), but the truth of his words nicely evolves to comprehend “globalism”—as should the liberal arts—as should we—if we embrace the liberal arts.
A liberal arts education truly is uniquely valuable preparation for our times and for approaching globalism. It is a powerful vehicle for fostering understanding, human respect, and social justice.
In the same way, while “diversity” as we think of it today was never an explicit part of the classic liberal arts, diversity is a logical extension of the liberal arts, particularly in terms of the importance of dialogue and appreciating multiple perspectives.
We must continue to embrace a “diverse” sense of diversity on our campuses because of its power to enrich the learning environment. The encounter with people with vastly different histories and intellectual and cultural attitudes is critical to the process of becoming an enlightened and effective citizen in America and the globe.
Our campuses increasingly reflect the diversity of the society. Martin Luther King, Jr. evokes the metaphor of a “house”—a world “house,” in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech:
This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.
“Somehow we must learn to live with each other in peace.” Simple, but powerful words. Somehow, our global house, like our national house, must be in order.
When we think, as educators, what we can do toward this end, towards “living together in peace,” which is perhaps the key goal of fostering a global perspective, I believe the liberal arts offer hope. Our campuses must foster and support meaningful dialogue. That is powerful preparation for living in a complex diverse world and embracing life’s inherent conflicts and ambiguity.
But it isn’t enough to diversify our student demographics. We need to make sure that the various communities within our institutions engage in active dialogue rather than just sharing space with one another.
Dialogue, the cornerstone of the liberal arts learning process, has roots in the Socratic tradition. Dialogue still has the same power to enable us to see many perspectives, to open our minds to new ideas. Questioning. Careful consideration. Gathering information with impartiality. Thoughtful decision-making. These are the values of the liberal arts that create engaged citizens, capable of participating effectively in a democracy.
We need that for America. We need our house to be in order in order to export—better to say—offer—liberal arts to the world.
Thomas Friedman in his thought-provoking The World is Flat describes how he felt when he dropped his daughter off at college just last year.
I can honestly say it was one of the saddest days of my life. …It was the sense that I was dropping my daughter off into a world that was so much more dangerous than the one she had been born into. I felt like I could still promise my daughter her bedroom back, but I couldn’t promise her the world—not in the carefree way that I had explored it when I was her age.
He understands the changes that separate his childhood from his daughter’s as having been shaped by two competing forms of imagination:
…the creative imagination of 11/9 when the Berlin Wall came down and the destructive imagination of 9/11. One brought down a wall and opened the windows of the world…Another brought down the World Trade Center...putting up new invisible and concrete walls among people at a time when we thought 11/9 had erased them for good.
Those responsible for 11/9 believed in the potential of a world without walls where everyone could realize their full potential. Those who engineered 9/11 were at the opposite end of the spectrum—focused on killing as many innocent people as possible. Maalouf would say that the 9/11 terrorists were antagonized by American/Western hegemony into retreating into a singular identity—and to violence.
But Friedman also asserts America has much to offer—and much to learn:
On such a flat earth, the most important attribute you can have is a creative imagination—the ability to be the first on your block to figure out how all these enabling tools [technology] can be put together in new and exciting ways to create products, communities, opportunities, and profits. That has always been America’s strength, because America was, and for now still is, the world’s greatest dream machine.
My crystal ball is broken, but Nussbaum’s three outcomes that we hope result from a liberal arts education—the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions; an ability to see oneself as a human being connected to all others; and development of the ability to think what it might be like to see the world through another’s eyes—these are the foundations for the liberal arts—and for a peaceful and productive future in America and the world.
Because besides liberating individuals, the liberal arts are also about our responsibilities, our obligations to the world. The liberal arts bind us to the human community and insist on the responsibility we have to make a difference in the world.
To do that well, to make a difference, to participate in community and communities, we must cultivate the humility, open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, dedication to dialogue and respect for multiple perspectives that can and should support meaningful engagement with our own culture and with the world. This, I would say, is the best of the liberal arts.
It’s a tall order, but I believe a liberal arts education is our best chance to cultivate these qualities of mind and heart that can put our house, our houses, in order, and I thank you for your efforts to ensure that the liberal arts remain a vital and vibrant model for generations to come.
Sources
Charles Dickens. Bleak House. 1853. (New York: The Modern Library), 2002.
Thomas Friedman. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2005.
Peter Hart Research Associates, Qualitative Research for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, August 2004.
Richard Hersh, “Intentions and Perceptions: A National Survey of Public Attitudes Toward Liberal Arts Education,” Change. Vol. 29 (2), 1997.
Amin Maalouf. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. (trans. Barbara Bray 2000. New York: Penguin Books), 1996.
Martha Nussbaum. “Liberal Education & Global Community.” Liberal Education, Winter 2004. |
