a  message  from     the  chair   Why the Liberal Arts ? By JAMES HOPKINS,  Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor and Department Chair

 

A father of a student once told me that he could not support his daughter’s wish to major in one of the liberal arts because it simply wasn’t practical.  Unfortunately, there was nothing new about his concerns.  Over the years I have had a number of similar conversations with students and parents. 

 

Today the liberal arts find themselves on the defensive in colleges and universities across the country.  Frequently accused of being marginally relevant, if at all, to the future of our students, courses of advanced study in history, English, or other liberal arts disciplines must be “sold” to student “customers” in the curricular marketplace. Parents and students doubt the wisdom of studying subjects that do not appear to lend themselves to immediate, well-remunerated employment after graduation. 

The responses to these concerns are quickly forthcoming.  One frequent retort is that no matter how distanced the liberal arts seem from the “real” world, some 40% of the chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies are liberal arts graduates.  Following this is the standard and accurate, if incomplete, judgment that a course of study in the liberal arts  teaches a  student how to think clearly, ask good questions, consider issues from a multiplicity of perspectives, and communicate effectively.  Therefore, it can be persuasively argued that an understanding of the process of inquiry, which is at the heart of a liberal education, rather than acquisition of soon-to-be-outmoded skills, is a defensible undertaking, particularly in light of predictions that today’s graduates will have no fewer than eight career changes.

 

But the study of the liberal arts, and in this instance, my own subject of history, should represent a good deal more than a shrewd career move.  The study of the past invites students not only to master a tool box of learning behaviors that will brighten their economic futures but,  rather, to see themselves as more completely realized  human beings in that future.  This runs in the face of the propensity of many institutions to see students as   “customers” who are the product of their testing arithmetic—SAT, GPA, GRE, LSAT, MCAT.  This rattle of acronyms reminds Charles Dickens’ fans of his character, Mr. Gradgrind, a teacher in Hard Times, who refused to address his students by name but only by number, thus leaving him blind to them as individuals.  By contrast, the focus of the liberal arts and, ideally, of those who teach them, is concerned with the examination of who we are in the world.  What is a well lived life?  What can study of the past tell us about our present and future? 

 

The second question is not satisfactorily answered by George Santayana’s famous warning: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  The past does not repeat itself.  Each historical moment has a specific context that cannot be duplicated.  It is with peril, for example, that those whose world view was forged by the struggle against fascism in the thirties and forties should apply the “lessons” learned to the Suez Crisis of 1956 or Vietnam or today’s Iraq.  The past is an endlessly dynamic environment of factors, many of them not even understood by its own historical actors, and, most certainly, not a template that can be applied to the present.  But the past can be and should be our teacher, and we must explore it assiduously if we are to give shape and heft to the “flattened” world in which we live, in which knowledge of the culture, languages, and, yes, the history of others, as well as our own, is essential.
 

Tellingly, the study of history encourages us to think and imagine our way into the lives of those who for the most part we will never know, encouraging an empathetic intelligence that stretches the boundaries of our own lives to include and be informed by the experience of others.  For example, to understand fully the issues that Benjamin Disraeli faced when he swung the Conservative Party behind electoral reform in 1867 is to see a fascinating and successful example of a trying but ultimately happy marriage between principle and politics, a lesson certainly for many of our political leaders today.

 

A life of intellectual inquiry faces inward and outward, inward in the pursuit of self-knowledge and outward to the public good.  Some have argued that it should be one direction or the other.  The head of the National Center for Atmospheric research has a sign over his door that says “Do both.”  Robert Weisbuch, the President of Drew University, concurs:  “We need to do both—we need to provide each person with the inner life of the arts and sciences, with the hunger for self-knowledge and for losing the self in the appreciation of otherness, and we also need to bring our learning from the pastoral grove to bear upon our social urgencies.” 

 

Therefore, though the study of the past is an endless, fascinating, and joyous enterprise to be appreciated for its own sake, it can also challenge our students not just to live prosperously in the world but to reflect critically on their opportunities to understand themselves in it, to adjust more successfully to it, or change it to the measure of their ideas and ideals, which, to be persuasive, must be driven by argument and evidence, and sometimes by clarifying historical analogy.

 

Students of history can be found in the business world, government, the classroom, indeed in such a range of occupations that even the most reluctant father of a putative history major should be reassured.  Thinking back over my more than 30 years at SMU, I can see the faces of those who became doctors and lawyers; investment bankers; entrepreneurs; scientists; policy analysts; teachers; Peace Corps, Teach for America, and Peace Corps Volunteers; faculty members in departments of history; public historians in museums; and even CIA agents, as well as many others.  The trajectories of their careers are sometimes breathtaking to behold.  A graduate from last spring recently sent me a glowing review of her performance in a leading role in an off-Broadway play that appeared in The New York Times.  However, in this fifth anniversary of 9/11, I think particularly of one of my most gifted and accomplished students who arrived in New York after May graduation to take a position with a leading Wall Street investment firm shortly before the tragedy.  He witnessed it at excruciatingly close quarters, and found himself at the epicenter of a transformed world.  I can’t help but believe that his efforts to reassemble its many disparate pieces into a coherent new whole were deeply informed by his decision to study history.