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Journal of College & Character VOLUME IX, NO. 2, November 2007lookahead
The Most Important Cour in the Universit y
Donald A. Crosby, Colorado State University1
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Abstract
Three types of freedom are distinguished, discusd, and related to one another. The types of freedom are argued to lie at the heart of liberal education and to elucidate esntial meanings of the term “liberal” in that context. The freedoms of a liberal arts education are also shown to bear crucially on the intellectual, moral, and spiritual development of undergraduate students in the university.
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hat is the most important cour in the university? Some would say that it is a cour in economics or business, since that is what most jobs, at bottom, em to be about. Others might want to argue that it is a cour in mathematics or computer science, since so many of the jobs in our world are becoming scientific and technological. Still others might claim that it is a cour in English composition, critical thinking, or speech, since clear and effective communication is so esntial in any job.
But the most important cour at the university is none of the above. It is the cour of each student’s own life, what in Latin is called curriculum vitae. This is where the tradition of the liberal arts puts its emphasis. The proper answer to the oft-heard question “What can a person do with a liberal education?” is to respond that the more appropriate question is “What can a liberal education contribute to the formation and development of a person’s life as a whole?” A liberal education is more than a means to obtaining and keeping a good job, as undeniably important as that is. It is intended to equip a person to live life in all its dimensions—job, family, friends, social relations, civic responsibility, volunteer work, avocation, recreation, and, yes, continuing and ever deepening questioning, contemplating, and wondering—and to live it responsibly and to the fullest as a human being. It follows, therefore, that development of moral character in students is not an appendage, aft
erthought, or mere by-product of the process of liberal education, but something that lies at its very heart. Proper development of a student’s character can enable that student to e beyond education merely as certification and preparation for a job to the critical importance and value of a life that is lived well in all of its dimensions, a life that continues throughout its cour to develop and sustain a n of purpo and fulfillment in onelf and the satisfaction of contributing responsibly and effectively to the wellbeing of others.
The focus of a liberal education is on what the philosopher Aristotle called eudaimonia, the flourishing of a complete human life. This flourishing includes being
Donald A. Crosby is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Colorado State University. His current fields of special interest are philosophy of nature, American philosophy, process philosophy, philosophy of religion, and history of Western philosophy.
2 Journal of College and Character VOLUME IX, NO.2, November 2007 qualified for the workplace but ts that commendable goal in the total context of an enriching, challenging, and contributing human life. Why, then, should we not speak of “eudaimonian education” or “life education”? Why should we continue to u the term “liberal education”? As the La
tin word libertas implies, a liberal education aims at the liberty, freedom, or emancipation of tho being educated. I want to suggest that the freedom made possible by liberal education is of three main kinds: a freedom from, a freedom of, and a freedom for.
First, it is a freedom from ignorance and therefore from the shallowness, superficiality, and susceptibility to crass manipulation that is the frequent accompaniment of ignorance. Second, it is a freedom of inquiry and of therefore of preparation, competence, and motivation to rai the hard and arching questions that resolute inquiry often requires. Third, it is a freedom for rvice and therefore for the well-informed, responsibly committed engagement with the needs of others and the affairs of the world that effective rvice requires. Teachers and administrators in the tradition of the liberal arts regard the three types of freedom as esntial to human excellence and flourishing and to the highest development of human character. Let us consider each of them in turn. We begin with freedom from ignorance.
Freedom from Ignorance
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reedom from ignorance means having general knowledge of one’s past and prent culture in its maj
or areas: artistic, scientific, political, economic, moral, religious, and the like. It also means having knowledge about outlooks and cultures other than one’s own, and about commonalities and differences relating the other outlooks and cultures to one’s own convictions and traditions. It means inquiring into how aspects of the other perspectives, and their particular inner logics, can enable one to think critically and creatively about the continuing development of one’s own point of view. It means exploring in some depth the problem of how people with different outlooks and backgrounds—some of them radically so—can work and live together, making the compromis and adjustments required to maintain a constructive civil order. It means learning critical lessons from the devastating failures of the past as well as from the positive achievements of human history.
Finally, freedom from ignorance means having more in-depth knowledge of some particular field of study and understanding of how that field relates as a significant part to a larger whole to the general knowledge one has also gained. This last point is the rationale for the requirement of a major in the context of general education. So voluminous and detailed has knowledge in many special areas of study become in our time, however, that there is constant danger of the general context being overshadowed or largely eclipd by the cour requirements of the particular major. Such subordination is a reversal of priorities and a violation of the concept of liberal education, where the
emphasis is always on the relations of special areas of knowledge to one another and to the whole of thought and life.
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In the perspective of liberal education, a major isolated from the full range of knowledge, awareness, and experience is like an organ torn from its body, unable to function as it should and deprived of its true nature and meaning. Or to u a different
好听的法语歌曲The Most Important Cour 3 image, it is like an animal parated from the ecosystem on which it depends, from which it benefits, and to which it contributes. A major field of study cut off from its relations to the larger whole is analogous to the exotic fish one es in some restaurants, parated from their richly structured natural environments and drifting listlessly to and fro within the narrow confines of their water tanks.
Such a major is still viable as a field of knowledge, but only barely so. It has lost much of the vital purpo and significance that it gains from its intimate relationships to other kinds of intellectual inquiry and other important modes of knowing, expressing, and experiencing. Instituting or allowing this kind of major within a university also tends to instill in its students the mistaken notion that life can or should be lived in aled-off compartments, that one can be just a banker, just an engineer, ju
st a physician, just a musician, or just a computer expert, for example, with no n of esntial relations to or responsibilities for the whole of life or the multiple aspects and interrelations of one’s society, culture, and world. The liberal arts tradition calls for concentration on the appropriate maturation and development of human beings possd of full consciousness of the complexity of the world and not solely or even primarily on acquisition of a highly specialized kind of knowledge or a t of particular skills.
This kind of focus is especially critical at the undergraduate level of higher education, where students are typically in late adolescence and living away from their families for the first time in their lives. As such, they can be expected to be keenly concerned for exploring the world and the kind of life they want to live in the world. They arch naturally for a satisfactory worldview, not just a body of specialized, isolated knowledge. Their education should support and encourage them in this all-important pursuit by providing them with the broadest possible context of knowledge and awareness, a context that draws upon many different academic disciplines, the rich resources of their own culture and its history, and the visions, insights, and discoveries of other cultures prent and past. This kind of education can rve as a much needed counterweight to tendencies of family, friends, or the student’s society to view higher education as little more than a necessary means to such things as making large amounts of money in one’s job or being qualified for a particular line of work.
A major task of the university, at least one that eks to operate in the tradition of the liberal arts, is to help students find their moral and spiritual bearings and to assist them in the critical task of orienting themlves in the world. It does so not by attempts at indoctrination or by trying to tell students what to think and believe, but by providing them with inten exposure to various domains of thought and expression—scientific, literary, artistic, historical, philosophical, religious, and the like—and encouraging and guiding them to think critically, constructively, and comprehensively about how to draw upon the domains and their interconnections in order to fashion their own outlooks on the world. Such encouragement and guidance are the responsibility of both faculty and administration in the university.
Sadly, however, the integration of disciplines and the arch for a holistic vision of life is left in the typical modern university largely to students and is more a topic of dormitory bull ssions than of formal class ttings. Professors are often too busy qualifying for tenure, working for promotion, and building their reputations in special
4 Journal of College and Character VOLUME IX, NO.2, November 2007 fields or increasingly narrow subfields to give sufficient attention to, or to concentrate on helping their students to think about, the problem of how various academic disciplines relate to one another or ho
w they relate to the whole of life. Still less do typical professors, either singly or in cooperation with one another, devote explicit and well thought-out attention to the issue of how to help students discover meaningful world views and to learn how to live morally responsible, fulfilling lives. This is not just a problem of the inattention of individual professors to a fundamental aspect of undergraduate education in the liberal arts tradition; it is an entrenched structural problem that deeply affects the outlook and behavior of professors—especially new tenure-track professors from whom so much is expected so quickly in the way of rearch and publication in their particular fields.
Administrators in complex modern universities, for their part, often tend to be so preoccupied with budgetary matters, their relations to other administrators, crisis management of various sorts, and the day-to-day mechanics of administration, as not to devote enough careful attention to how to liberate students from the kind of disciplinary isolation or idiot-savant specialized education that cuts them off from the resources of a richer, more complex vision of the world. Administrative leadership in this regard is critically required, if the ideals of liberal education are to be realized, but the structural pressures working against such effective leadership are admittedly formidable. Student affairs people, coaches, counlors, advisors, chaplains, and others who work directly with students outside the classrooms have both unique opportunity and obligation to help students to reflect on the mollis
unity of knowledge and to think about the focus and meaning of their lives, as well as to guide them in the understanding of their moral responsibilities to their peers, to faculty and other members of the academic community, and to the world beyond the university. The role of this group of leaders on campus is thus an integral and esntial part of a liberal arts education.
Thoroughgoing curriculum revision is needed to address the problem of increasingly fragmented, over-specialized education, and it requires urgent faculty and administrative attention. The usual cafeteria style of superficial exposure to academic disciplines that are allowed to remain insulated and parated from one another does not constitute the kind of radical revision required. It is of great importance that faculty members in the various disciplines learn how to interact creatively with one another and one another’s disciplines in teaching and rearch, and that they t impressive examples for students in the interactions of what it means to be an educated person in the full liberal arts meaning of that phra. If faculty are not whole persons with well-informed and thoughtfully integrated outlooks on the world, but are themlves narrowly specialized and compartmentalized in their purview and work, they can hardly expect to inspire their students to become that type of person.
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One reason the liberal arts ideal of the human being is so important is that crass manipulation of tho
ught is unfortunately a booming business in our society. We e it at work in politics, in business, in the media, in religion, and elwhere. The best insurance against succumbing to such manipulation—which often bends the truth and us subtle tactics of psychological motivation and ductive but fallacious reasoning—is breadth of knowledge, asoned facility in reasoning, strength of character, a strong moral compass,cofee
The Most Important Cour 5 and independence of mind. Cultivation of the traits is a central task of universities functioning in the spirit of the liberal arts.
Where the traits are lacking, a society is in imminent danger of falling prey to faddishness, superficiality, and the whimsical pleasures or distractions of the moment—with little or no regard for enduring values or for its own long-lasting integrity and wellbeing. A society made up of shallow, unthinking, uninformed, easily manipulated persons also becomes extremely vulnerable to the allure of fanatical preachments by charismatic figures—whether religious or cular—and to the wily machinations of would-be tyrants and demagogues. Jeremy Waldron, commenting on the writings of political theorist Hannah Arendt, notes that in such a society “[t]he paraphernalia of thoughtlessness is legion. Clichés and jargon, stock phras and analogies, dogmatic adherence to established bodies of theory and ideology, the petrifaction of ideas—the are all devices designed to relieve the
adam levinemind of the burden of thought . . .” (Waldron, 2007, p. 12). His description calls to mind disturbing tendencies of our prent society in the United States. A sound mind in its citizens is esntial for a sound body politic, and the fundamental aim of a liberal arts education is to be a significant source of the requisite sound mind.
The first type of freedom emphasized in the liberal arts tradition of higher education is thus liberation from a debilitating narrowness of vision and paucity of understanding. Such freedom enables one to grasp in the history of one’s cultural heritage what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls “tho future possibilities which the past has made available to the prent” (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 207). Furthermore, it empowers one to enter imaginatively into the thought-worlds of other cultures, times, places, and persons, enabling the other perspectives continually to challenge and enlarge one’s own commitments, beliefs, and values. It should be obvious that this first kind of freedom is desperately needed if one is to live with assurance and effectiveness in a complex, volatile, and shrinking world.
中国教育考试网报名The cond kind of freedom, to which we can now turn, is also esntial. In keeping with the tradition of the liberal arts, the university should provide students with a wide range of freedom of inquiry and give them the maximum incentive to u that freedom to inquire persistently and deeply.
Freedom of Inquiry
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reedom of inquiry in a university tting is also termed “academic freedom,” and it applies not just to professors but to students. A liberal education provides a context within which students are encouraged to follow their curiosity and speak their minds and to develop the spirit of first-handed, open-ended questioning that Socrates recommends and exemplifies in his dialogues. A liberal education is not just a matter of memorizing predigested facts or formulas, or running conventional experiments, but of learning to think for onelf, to think boldly, creatively, and with originality. The process of doing so requires an atmosphere of freedom in which such independence of thought is not merely occasionally or condescendingly tolerated but actively and continuously nurtured. Also required is an atmosphere in the classroom and elwhere on the university campus
6 Journal of College and Character VOLUME IX, NO.2, November 200
7 where such inquiry is welcomed even when it may sometimes appear to be well on the way to dead ends or mistaken conclusions, becau all of us—including students—sometimes learn as much, if not more, from our mistakes as we do from our success in inquiry.
light beerWhen students make mistakes in reasoning, professors and other mentors of students are called upon to point out where the mistakes may lie, how they can be avoided in the future, and why particular routes to them are sometimes so ductive. However, the reasoning of professors and other mentors can sometimes be mistaken as well, and persistent questions from students can help to make that fact apparent and to direct both students’ and their teachers’ inquiries in more promising directions and toward more promising outcomes. An alert, active, and vigorous interaction of teachers and learners can in this way work to the considerable benefit of both.
Many of the ideas in books and articles I have published over the years in my career as a university professor have been inspired by the penetrating and sometimes vexing questions or obrvations of my students. Students have taught me that I did not know as much as I thought I knew about particular issues, ideas, or thinkers or had not en the problems I was interested in or working on from the most promising and productive angles. Their questions and obrvations have often nt me back to the drawing board in admitted frustration or puzzlement, but with satisfying eventual results. What I have been able to offer my students has been inspired and enriched by what they have been able to offer to me. My thinking as a teacher and rearcher would have been much poorer had I not allowed students ample freedom of inquiry and of continuing dialogue with me as th
eir teacher, and I am convinced that, in the abnce of an atmosphere of freedom of inquiry both in and outside the classroom, development of my students’ capacity for critical and creative reflection would have been riously diminished as well. Of cour, not all subjects lend themlves as readily to classroom discussion and dialogue as does the subject of philosophy, which happens to be my own area of special interest and experti. Teachers in various disciplines need to find ways to facilitate freedom of inquiry most effectively in their own classrooms and in fruitful interactions with their students. But find the ways all university teachers must if they are to uphold the ideals and goals of liberal education.
What faculty and mentors in the liberal arts are looking for, therefore, is not docile agreement with their own points of view or even uncritical acceptance of the ideas current in their particular fields, but a growing ability on the part of their students to develop and defend conclusions at which they themlves have arrived through their own responsible thought and investigation. Students are not, of cour, invited simply to dismiss the ideas of faculty and mentors out of hand, or to ignore what counts as established knowledge in a given field, but they are invited, among other things, to u the ideas and outlooks as frameworks for their own thinking. They should at least begin to understand, for example, not only the central claims and ideas of a scientific field and the rationale fo
r tho claims and ideas, but what it would mean to be a contributor to the field, to be a practicing rearcher in that area of science. A colleague in the natural sciences once told me, with evident sadness, that students often enter graduate school with a full background of undergraduate cours in science but with little or no
