Why cities are the future for liberal arts education

There are two main questions about the future of liberal arts colleges.  The first focuses on relevance, and wonders whether in an increasingly technological and career-centered world, there is any room for a major that doesn't lead directly to a particular job. The second frets about cost, and wonders whether, in the future, students will be able to afford to enroll in a liberal arts college, most of which, being private, are very expensive.

These are important and useful questions, both of which I have written about in the past.  But there is another question we ought to be asking, one which, if schools get the answer right, can help them respond to the first two queries.  It is this: Where is the future of liberal arts colleges?

You can start to understand the importance of the question by asking where the present of liberal arts colleges lies.  The answer is, by and large, in rural communities east of the Rockies.  This is true of top liberal arts colleges like Dartmouth and Middlebury and Grinnell.  But it is equally true of little known liberal arts colleges, which are sprinkled by the dozens through the towns of New England, the Midwest, and the upper south.

Those towns were important population and cultural centers when their home colleges were founded, mostly in the 19th century.  And for much of their histories, the small colleges mostly enrolled students from the local region. But today, the population of those regions has dwindled, and large public universities have swallowed up much of the enrollment in the state.  A a result, small, rural liberal arts colleges struggle to either raise their profiles by competing with nationally known liberal arts colleges on amenities and cost, or they struggle to stay alive. (The parallel with mainline protestant congregations is instructive.  Those congregations often planted colleges in the farming towns of the New England diaspora.  Now those churches struggle to stay alive in places where the population is aging and shrinking.)

You might also ask where liberal arts colleges are not.  They are not east of the Rockies, by and large, with the exception of pockets in Seattle, Portland, and California.  And they are not in the burgeoning cities of the sunbelt and West.  There is one liberal arts college in Salt Lake City--Westminster College.  There is one in Denver--Colorado Christian.  There are none in Phoenix, or Las Vegas.  There are only a handful in the cities of Texas, Georgia, and Alabama.

This matters for two reasons.  First, students enroll in colleges close to home.  If the vast majority of the American population lives in or near cities, the vast majority of students will pick urban institutions.  Second, cities contain both the employment opportunities and the amenities that make it possible for students with liberal arts degrees to find employment, and for colleges to keep costs low.  If you run a rural college and want to attract students interested in theater, and athletics, and restaurants, you have to build them.  But if you run an urban liberal arts college, those opportunities are within walking distance of campus.

In fact, if I had to build a new liberal arts college right now, I would build one in the heart of a city.  Instead of erecting a gym and a library and a cafeteria and taking on those costs, I would make arrangements with the local Gold's gym, and the public library, and surrounding restaurants for my students to use their facilities at a cost.  The college supports local economic development, and connects deeply with the local community,  reduces its own costs, and heightens the range and diversity of the learning experiences of its students.

In memoriam: Vaclav Havel

For maybe an hour the big news Sunday was of the passing of the Czech playwright, dissident, and President Vaclav Havel.  Then Kim Jong Il died, and Havel's passing slipped out of the news and into the margins.

That is a shame, for Havel's life and work teach two important lessons that we will never get from the death of the North Korean dictator.

Havel was a humanist who retained his humanism as President. While it is increasingly rare for people with humanities backgrounds to ascend to political leadership (unless one retains a romantic view of the law as a humanistic discipline), it is almost unheard-of for them to keep the perspectives of the humanities while in office.  Consider, for example, Newt Gingrich, who though once a historian, eschews all of the tentativeness, contingency, and love for questions that makes history a discipline that matters for humanity.  In its place he inserts the vague, laudatory references to a few leaders of the past that suggest only that he has read more than we have, so we best shut up. Havel, though, never allowed his political power to eclipse his commitment to the humanities.  Perhaps this was because the humanities had cost him so much, getting him imprisoned and leading to scorn during Czechoslovakia's communist period.  Or perhaps it is because the humanities are so easy to come by in America today--mandated in schools and less challenging than science--that we have forgotten how valuable they are in leaders.

Havel was also a politician who remembered that there are things more important than politics.  In this, his background as a playwright and essayist served him well, and while the rigors of political leadership pressed him he continued to call for space and time in public life to assert the importance of non-political things.  In the US we rarely hear this sort of thing from anywhere in public life.  One is either encouraged to believe that politics are the most important thing out there, or that much of the rest of life is essentially political anyway, and distinguishable from electoral politics only in the way that power is allocated.  For Havel, though, and for   a few conservatives and people dedicated to the notion of a good life that extends beyond the political, human life and social relations are much bigger an more satisfying than politics.

We would be wise to recall this fact, and to demand it. When communism flourished people in the West could suggest that it was the only political system that threatened to consume all of public space. But in the aftermath of its fall, it is clear that organized politics, regardless of their ilk, look to seep into those parts of life that are best kept apart from politics--the home, the civic organization, the church, the book club, and the other third places that develop the perspective, patience, discipline, joy, and maturity to keep people free.

My favorite non-fiction works from Havel are Disturbing the Peace and Summer Meditations,  the latter written while he was President, but calling for citizens to recall the importance of morality and civility even in the face of political systems that threaten those virtues, either by destroying them or by claiming them as the realm of politics.

Great speeches: The generosity of Terry Tempest Williams

I've heard four great speeches in the past two weeks--three of them at the  Federation of State Humanities Council conference that concluded this evening. The speech and its classroom cognate the lecture, have settled into a period of disrepute, and rightly so.  Speeches are often given without regard to the audience, and without concern for the learning of the people present.  At many events they are simply an opportunity for someone who is rightly famous for something else to remind us why they are not famous for speaking. (Think, for example, of every awards ceremony you have ever seen on television.)

But done well, a speech is powerful.  More than many "active learning" pedagogies, speeches have the power to convey an emotion that advances an argument.  The activist and writer Terry Tempest Williams does this better than most, using generosity to buttress her view that the only viable future is one based on empathy between humans, other species, and the planet.

Generosity shaped her Federation speech in three ways.  First, while her speech included portions of stories she has told many times before, it was clearly assembled during the first day of the conference, and reflected the discussions, concerns, and hopes of the conference.  This meant the speech was ragged, but it also demonstrated Williams' humility and concern for the well-being of the event and its attendees.  Second, she made sure to acknowledge and thank more than a dozen members of the conference audience with whom she had spoken briefly.  The thanks did not come at the beginning, as they do in the ritualized awards ceremony  speech.  Instead they were sprinkled throughout the speech, and used as supporting evidence for her thesis that active citizens can influence the direction of society for good.  Third, she gave a gift to each member of the audience--a lily bulb to symbolize that love for living things could return humans to right relationships with nature and each other.

I've met Williams several times (she is a Utahn).  Generosity is essential to her nature.  And so the gestures in her speech, which might seem disingenuous coming from other speakers, are natural coming from her.

Generosity is particularly powerful against the dogmatic friends and foes of environmentalism.  It reminds supporters that dogmatic positions are inhumane because they lack generosity.  And it demonstrates to dogmatic opponents that environmentalists can love people as much as they love the land. In both of these acts Williams' generosity makes deeper engagement possible. Put another way, small acts make a passive genre--the speech--into a spur to activity and learning.

The sad future of the Provo Tabernacle

On December 18, 2010, the Provo Tabernacle, a historic meetinghouse in the heart of Provo, UT, burned to the ground.  Yesterday, the LDS Church announced that it would rebuild the tabernacle as a temple. The response to the announcement was effusive--with civic leaders and church members thrilled that the building would be restored.

Let me dissent.  It is a good thing that the building will be rebuilt; it is a bad thing that it will be rebuilt as a temple.  The tabernacle was a public building of sorts--owned by the LDS church but open to the community for concerts, meetings, and the occasional funeral of a big-name local.  The temple is a private building, open only to certain members of the LDS Church.  So while the city will have a sparkling new "historic" building that attracts Mormons downtown to shop, sightsee, and visit; the city has lost a public place--a venue where people could gather to sing, and play music, and talk.

Once, 20 years or so ago, St. Francis of Assisi parish in Provo had a series of structural problems with its building that made it impossible for the parish to hold Christmas services there.  The parish moved those services to the Provo Tabernacle, and so on Christmas eve thousands of Catholics and well-wishers celebrated mass in a Mormon building.  That will never happen again.

The tabernacle wasn't a perfect community center.  Its capacity was a bit large for most local arts groups, and the acoustics were sketchy, and it didn't have much in the way of green rooms for performers to warm up in.  Now it won't be a community center at all, though.  That is our loss.

humanities and perspective

Anonymous wrote the following (thanks for the comment!) in response to my last post wondering whether perspective can be taught:

I think that is what the humanities are for! Think where we would be if we had to experience all of life's possible heartaches in order to understand them! Life would really be unbearable then. But the humanities are becoming less important, considered less useful, even in the context of the liberal arts. It's a shame. (Perhaps one day, the humanities will be back, along with friendship, and letter writing in long hand! What do you think?)

Anonymous' comments hit home for me. My family is an arts and humanities family--lots of books around the house, everyone a musician, and kids who like their courses in the humanities. I sit on the board of the Utah Humanities Council whose mission is to improve public life through the humanities. And I've done some surveying of freshmen about their views on the humanities as part of general education.

There are some interesting (and hopeful) things afoot with young people and the humanities. The bad news is that they are relatively uninterested in traditional approaches to the humanities--survey classes in history or art history for example, or public lectures by renowned humanists. (UHC is struggling to find ways to get young people to its programs, for example.

But my sense is that there is a flowering of "doing humanities" among young people.

• Memoir, for example, is a simple thing using the internet or scrapbooks, and Facebook can be seen as an act of self-creation as significant as autobiography and journal writing.

• Young people have a growing interest in spirituality (as opposed to formal religions), with the latest Pew survey suggesting that more and more Americans are constructing their own religious beliefs out of several formally separate traditions.
• Mash-ups, be they in music or art or literature, can be profoundly creative and provide new insights into older works of art.

All of these trends, and Anonymous' comment which linked them in my head, make me think that the humanities may be a key pathway to perspective for college students. They also make me think that we need to re-think our humanities curricula. Can courses in those key disciplines be as much about doing as about learning? If so, then they would link the experiential components of perspective with the educational components that we are established to provide.