Inside the fight to save American college from runaway careerism

The war against the great American tradition of a liberal arts college education — rich in the arts and literature, asking life’s deep philosophical questions — feels like it’s being waged right now on more fronts than the battle lines of World War II.

The assault on learning for learning’s sake has even hit the presidential campaign trail. In Iowa last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — avatar of the far-right’s so-called war on woke in the university classroom — told an audience in rural Salix that as president he’d put colleges on the hook for their students defaulting on their loans. That way, DeSantis proclaimed, schools “would make sure the curriculum was designed to produce people that can be very productive. You’d have a heck of a lot less gender studies going on.”

But while fiery GOP politicians grab the headlines, the biggest and most insidious threat to a liberal education comes from within: from students, often urged by their parents, totally focused on a career in business or technology that will pay back the massive cost of a university education in the 21st century, and fearful that classes in Romantic poetry or philosophy will get in the way. The number of students majoring in fields like English or history has plummeted by as much as half in little more than a decade since the Great Recession. Professors have been laid off, and some schools have shut down entire programs such as classics.

“The biggest overall climate threat is an increasingly transactional view of education, where colleges increasingly think of themselves and the public sort of thinks of colleges, as career services — as a place where you go to get job skills,” Roosevelt Montás, senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for American Studies, told me last week.

Montás, author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, is a leader in the growing campaign to save liberal learning on college campuses. Like most experts, he agrees that career training will always be a critical part of higher education, but the danger is that it becomes the only part. “It pushes students,” he said, “to think of it as an investment, as an outlay of financial resources for which you expect compensation, some kind of reward.”

Montás was one of about 40 top academics attending a two-day symposium at Ursinus College, located about 25 miles northwest of Philadelphia, called Revolutions in Liberal Education, which focused on how to better define the liberal arts and thus better market the concept. The leafy Collegeville campus seemed a perfect spot for such an event. While Ursinus is not immune to national trends — its first-year enrollment was off about 12% in the just-finished academic year — the school is also viewed as an innovator in the renewal of the liberal arts.

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Ursinus is widely praised for a program it launched in the late 1990s called the Common Intellectual Experience, or CIE. The idea is to require first-year students to take two classes — no bigger than 16 students, to facilitate discussion — that cover great texts from the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita through Plato and Descartes right up to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. It asks what the college describes as “the central questions of a liberal education: What should matter to me? How should we live together? How can we understand the world? What will I do?”

Paul Stern, a professor of politics at Ursinus deeply involved with the CIE curriculum, said the initial goal was to reconnect a liberal arts college with its core mission, but he agrees that the concept of turning students into critical thinkers has taken on new importance in a modern age of disinformation. “You develop a better BS meter when you have a little skepticism about what you’re being told,” he said, but he also alluded to the rapid rise of AI. “Another thing to try to develop, with all these technological advances — the technology is not going to tell you how to use it, whether to use it. Those are ethical, political judgments we have to make ...”

These are powerful arguments, but the message from America’s leaders tends to be the 180-degree opposite, and not just from the nattering nabobs of the far-right. Even President Joe Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona seemed to embrace the notion of college preparing cogs for a capitalist machine when he tweeted last year: “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.” It seems that both Republicans and Democrats have fallen behind Ronald Reagan’s famous 1967 declaration: “Taxpayers shouldn’t fund intellectual curiosity.”

The subsequent privatization of American higher education — no longer a public good but a personal benefit to be funded by students and their families, even as tuition went through the roof — has led many students to accept the runaway careerism of modern college. In 1969, when public university was ridiculously inexpensive and humanities majors were at their peak, a whopping 82% of first-year students told UCLA’s annual nationwide survey that the chief purpose of college is “to develop a meaningful philosophy of life.” A small fraction responded with “career preparation,” but by the 1980s those numbers flipped, and never looked back.

“Most students really think of college as a place of earning rather than as a place of learning,” the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Wendy Fischman, coauthor of a massive study of attitudes among stakeholders at 10 diverse schools published last year as The Real World of College, told the Ursinus gathering. The research finds that the bulk of first-year students view college as more transactional than transformational, although opinions do evolve somewhat after four years on campus.

Yet the transactional side is still winning, big time. In a much-discussed article earlier this year entitled, “The End of the English Major,” the New Yorker’s Nathan Heller crunched the grim numbers — campus studies in English and history have fallen by one-third in the past decade. He also talked to students at both Harvard and Arizona State with a yearning to read the Great Books but were facing pressure from home, or their rising loan balance, that steered them toward job-oriented majors in fields such as computer science or finance.

One of the Ursinus presenters, Joseph Bagnoli of Grinnell College — the small, prestigious liberal arts college in Iowa — filled about 20 feet worth of whiteboard with a massive list of all the modern threats to liberal education, then pivoted to how schools like Grinnell or Ursinus might best market what they do in such a climate. His suggested pitch aimed to sell young people on the notion that critical thinking and moral values are crucial to solving problems that seem intractable in American society, such as reducing mass incarceration or taking climate change seriously. Some praised the approach; others thought it played into those critics — like DeSantis — who complain that liberal education and liberal, progressive politics are too synonymous today.

Perhaps, but the reality is that we’re about two generations into the social experiment of careerism dominating our college campuses, with a fading emphasis on critical thinking and promoting citizenship. So we’ve seen the results, including the world’s highest rate of climate denial and a growing willingness to accept disinformation, from the dismissal of lifesaving vaccines or the seriousness of the pandemic that caused the premature deaths of one million Americans to the Big Lie of election fraud that nearly crashed U.S. democracy on Jan. 6, 2021.

One takeaway from my day at Ursinus is how rarely we think about the true meaning of the word liberal — rooted in the Latin word liber, which means, simply, “free.” How ironic that we live in a time when the politicians who blubber the most about freedom are the same ones with the most narrow and closed-off ideas about what our young people should be learning. It’s hard to imagine America getting back on the right track without the liberation inherent in the promise of a liberal arts education: the freedom of one’s mind.

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