a future beyond disciplinary replication

Not all that long ago I visited the English department of a university where the faculty were deeply worried. Their literature program, they stated, was no longer rigorous. Retirements, dwindling majors and budget constraints meant that they were now down to one specialist in 19th Britain — and that scholar worked on prose. Although this professor was not often able to mount a class with a robust roster of students, it seemed clear to department faculty that a specialist in 19th C poetry was the only way to maintain their excellence. (Ideally they would also have liked a second prose or drama specialist since early 19th C and late 19th C Brit Lit are different worlds, but they knew resources were limited.) That a threat more existential than the absence of coverage might exist was a possibility few seemed willing to contemplate. A department with curricular integrity but no students is not likely to endure as long as its community would like.

Also not on the table was defining “curricular integrity” as something other than comprehensive period and genre expertise.

An English department that defines its identity, no matter how quietly, as English and American literary history faces a difficult but inevitable reckoning in an era when that ambit no longer interests all that many students. Yet a future beyond replication of the discipline into which we have been trained seems almost impossible for many faculty to contemplate. Integrity and rigor are too often invoked to mask a deep seated conservatism, an unspoken or unspeakable unwillingness to contemplate what an English Department might look like if its primary design was not to train the next generation of doctoral researchers. What would an English department look like that embraced a wider educational mission — and began its self reinvention with undergraduate engagement and success at its heart?

I’ve been thinking recently about the future of liberal arts education — by which I mean, a wide-ranging and curiosity driven education that stresses significant study across the disciplines as well as intense work within a smaller set. In business such experience is often described as possessing T-shaped skills, but we may as well call such grounding breadth within depth. A liberal arts education emphasizes learning how to learn, fostering a lifetime of intellectual humility (the vastness of the world will always exceed the limits of the known — and that is an invitation not a cause for despair); and a training into epistemic challenges the way an athlete exercises into physical ones (a lifelong regimen that should in the long run feel satisfying because of what it builds and enables). A liberal arts education is for all time. As I have written elsewhere, democracies require well informed citizens who can evaluate evidence together before making decisions for their communities, listen and learn across disagreement, and imagine futures better — devoid of nostalgia and with a bias towards the common good. Because the liberal arts cultivate habits of mind like wonder, openness, a bent towards learning, a conviction that our own assumptions may well be incomplete, they are exactly what is needed to solve the most intractable problems we face, from climate change to national belonging. In a culture that emphasizes velocity, the liberal arts remind us of the value of reflection and sustained attentiveness. In a moment that rewards brash certainty, they stress nuance, complexity, and curiosity. In a world where inertia will impel us towards catastrophe, the liberal arts stress navigational agency. In a time impatient for the new, the liberal arts remind us that we have worked hard to forget the wisdom of the past.

When I think ahead to the future of liberal arts education, I have a difficult time imagining that what is true of disciplinary configurations at the moment will be forever true. That might seem like an obvious statement but it runs contrary to much thinking in higher education, which tends to assume that the past and the present are the future. We scholars are trained to love the disciplines that formed us. The fields that certified us as intellectuals when our doctorates were conferred and the professional societies that validate the rigor, excellence and singularity of what we study encourage us to think of disciplinary training as identity. On the one hand many of these identities are actually inherently interdisciplinary (environmental studies, comparative literature, medieval studies, digital humanities, religious studies); on the other, even these interdisciplinary arrays have their own professional societies, conferences, journals and book series that vouch for the distinctiveness of these confluences-become-disciplinary-things. On the one hand many of our disciplines are less than a hundred years old; on the other most predate the scholarly formation of those who now work beneath their aegis and so they seem timeless. On the one hand these disciplines have in practice long been undergoing profound changes in contours and content; on the other, isn’t this the time when questioning futures rather than fortifying bulwarks against the attacks of the enemies of higher education plays into hostile hands? You could get seasick from all this back and forth but as my liberal arts training encourages me to say: it’s complicated. There are no easy futures, and if I am being pragmatic it does not seem to me that the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences will in fifty years be composed of as many distinctive disciplines as they hold at present. (And I should add: as they are “at present” pertains only to some very large institutions: many colleges have never been able to support the full array of disciplines, for reasons of finance as well as scale).

I’ll always advocate for proactive educational design based in shared strategy and aimed at student success over reactive change in the face of resource challenges and institutional constraints. For many colleges and universities, the future likely brings a diminishing ability to offer the full array of deep disciplinary training that an ideal institution might provide. Yet at this point few universities can offer (for example) an English major that is designed for launching students into doctoral programs. To put it more positively, the typical English major is most likely headed not to a PhD at Yale but towards a successful and satisfying career as a lawyer, entrepreneur, writer, CEO, manager of a company, VC investor, teacher, consultant, marketing specialist, project manager, or (most likely) some job that has not yet been invented. A disciplinary grounding will serve this student well — but so will breadth of study and the cogent array of skills and strengths that a liberal arts education builds. An infrastructure that enables career thinking should be designed into the degree.

Students should be given the opportunity to activate their agency as shapers of their own future, choosing with guidance (and sometimes with challenge) the best path for themselves that combines deepening their knowledge, growing their interests, and stoking their imagination and curiosity. If a student wants to follow a theme across the humanities and the sciences (as environmental study demands), they should be enabled to do so. If a student wants to use their time in college to solving a problem that demands the study of ten fields of knowledge, they should be able to do so. We can arrive at a post-disciplinary (which is to say, trans-disciplinary) liberal arts study by inertia (in which case it will be shallow), or by design (in which case it will be rich, catalytic, and possibility-laden). I’d like to see us move towards the latter.