the future of liberal arts education
Every few years a columnist somewhere gravely declares the death of liberal arts education, then susses out the murderer. Return on investment, parental demands, bleak job markets, disciplinary outmodedness, dwindling student demand, diminishing attention spans, AI, and unclear professional trajectories have all been assigned the bloody knife.
I understand concerns about the viability and adaptability of liberal arts degrees. A constellation of humanities, social sciences and natural sciences disciplines, the liberal arts invite interdisciplinary study but don’t typically offer a strong sense of career path: they are not preprofessional training in the way that business or engineering are. And the world is changing rapidly, engendering all kinds of anxiety about carers and futures. Artificial and augmented intelligence have transformed the workplace in ways that we are still unsure about. Some liberal arts focused institutions now exceed $100K per year as their price tag: no wonder students and families are asking hard questions about value and career rewards. I teach and lead at an institution that welcomes a great many first generation and nontraditional students. They often enter our programs bearing the weight of a community’s hope upon their shoulders — and so I’m sympathetic to their worries about the connections between what they study, what they love, and their ability to build a secure future.
But are the liberal arts dead? I have always found these perpetually repeating moments about the viability of these disciplines to be more revealing than alarming, reminding us that every generation reconsiders whom higher education serves, and what knowledge a flourishing society (and flourishing individuals) require. The history of the liberal arts is a chronicle of innovation, adaptation, expansion, and reinvention under historical circumstances that can shift swiftly. What remains constant is the fostering of skills (chief among them curiosity, epistemic humility, analytical prowess, and sustained attentiveness) that enable those who study them to participate vigorously in communal governance and lifelong intellectual growth.
Liberal arts study is ancient, albeit in constricted forms that have grown and changed over time. The artes liberales reach back to classical Greece and Rome, where education was understood as preparation for participation in civic life for the free man (liber). Note all the exclusions built into that term, given that most of the world would be excluded from the category. Yet the strength of the liberal arts did not reside so much in content conveyed but in their ability to foster the capacities that citizens need to contribute meaningfully to their communities: communication, reasoning, ethical judgment, quantitative ability, literacy, an understanding of the complicated world.
Medieval universities organized liberal arts learning around the trivium and quadrivium — humanities with science and the arts. Renaissance humanists emphasized language, history, and moral reflection. Modern universities expanded the curriculum to include new kinds of natural sciences, the omnibus designation that social sciences offers, and new forms of interdisciplinary inquiry. That work continues.
Over the centuries the liberal arts widened that world and invited some difficult questions about identity and civic participation. Every age creates the liberal arts it needs. What remains constant is the underlying purpose of education: preparing people to participate thoughtfully and responsibly in the communities to which they belong. The liberal arts are essential to civic participation and a thriving democracy — and so their mission feels especially urgent today.
The jobs many of our students will hold ten years from now largely do not yet exist. Others will be transformed by technologies in ways we can scarcely predict. Education therefore can’t simply prepare students for their first job, but prepare them for continual adaptation, for the eight to twelve positions the arc of which will form their career.
What constitutes necessary knowledge changes over time. Content-wise, much of what a student learns in college will be out of date within a few years. The liberal arts cultivate students to ask questions relentlessly, analyze evidence and arguments with rigor, converse humanely across disagreement, identify and understand context, and make ethical judgments amid uncertainty and change. Curiosity, sustained attentiveness, and a learner’s mindset are all affordances of liberal arts education. The student who studies literature develops sophisticated analytical and interpretive skills. The student who studies history learns to work with incomplete evidence and competing narratives. The student who studies philosophy becomes adept at identifying assumptions and constructing logical arguments. The student who studies languages learns cultural fluency and communication across difference. A software engineer who can communicate clearly, understand human behavior, and navigate complexity is a stronger engineer and a better person in the world. A healthcare professional who understands history, culture, and narrative becomes a more effective caregiver. A business leader who can think critically, analyze competing perspectives, and communicate a compelling vision that is rooted in the common good is better equipped to lead. These skills are as essential to career success as they are to self and communal advocacy and agency.
The liberal arts never stood apart from professional life. They have always prepared people for meaningful work and purposeful living by helping them understand people, systems, history, and themselves. This conviction has shaped much of my work around career integration into liberal arts study at ASU. Too often academics get stuck in a false binary of general versus preprofessional training when our best way forward is to include both. Intellectual development and career preparation are entwined pursuits. An education that is meaningful and an education that is practical are the same education.
Career integration reveals the practical power of liberal arts study even as the liberal arts serve purposes that transcend employment. We live in a moment of profound polarization, accelerating technological change, and unprecedented access to information. Democratic societies depend upon citizens who can evaluate evidence, engage respectfully across disagreement, and imagine futures different from the present. The liberal arts cultivate these habits of mind: encouraging wonder as well as epistemic humility, fostering understanding and discernment within judgment, teaching us to encounter new perspectives with a bent towards learning more, and with the conviction that our own assumptions may well be incomplete. In a culture that emphasizes velocity, the liberal arts remind us of the value of reflection and sustained, careful, challenging attention. In a culture that rewards seeming certainty, they cultivate intellectual nuance, humbleness before complexity, and a thirst to know more.
Every age creates the liberal arts it needs. Our age requires graduates who can work with emerging technologies while understanding their all too human consequences. We need citizens who can navigate intransigence and complicatedness without surrendering to cynicism, leaders who can connect specialized expertise to a movement towards the communal good. We need people who understand that education is preparation for participation in the world — and for widening of that world, just as the liberal arts themselves have widened.
A beautiful Latin convergence is hidden within the phrase “liberal arts.” The noun liber carries two unrelated meanings, from two different Indo-European stems. On the one hand liber means “free.” On the other, liber designates the bark of a tree, one of first writing materials, and therefore the word that becomes “book.” The liberal arts are as practical and as necessary as a public library. Although linguists will remind us that the words arise from different linguistic roots, I have always appreciated the happy accident of their confluence. The liberal arts are, after all, about both. They are rooted in books, ideas, inquiry, and learning. They can as easily be accessed in a public space as a highly selective college. But their ultimate purpose is freedom: the freedom to think critically and generously, to act responsibly, to imagine alternatives, and to participate fully in the life of a community.
