The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

The Crisis in Liberal Education

Thursday, March 31, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

Do research universities relegate undergraduate education to the margins? Last year Harvard University made headlines when it announced a plan to change its core curriculum. This year the Association of American Colleges and Universities has begun trying to spark discussion of what a "liberal education" is across different types of institutions.

Can such efforts succeed? Are faculty members at research universities ever likely to be superior undergraduate instructors? Given the increasing breadth and complexity of disciplinary knowledge, and the splintering of disciplines into specialties, should undergraduate education emphasize a common knowledge or a way of learning? How can administrators, forced by economic realities to prize efficiency in undergraduate education, deal with such questions? Do changes in the nature of the university preclude substantial change?

» Liberal Education on the Ropes (4/1/2005)

Stanley N. Katz, director of Princeton University's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, offers his views on this topic in an essay in this week's Chronicle Review.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Malcolm Scully (Moderator):
Good Afternoon and welcome to our live discussion about the health--or ill health--of liberal education at major research universities. I'm Malcolm Scully, The Chronicle's editor at large, and I'll be moderating. Our guest is Stanley N. Katz, director of Princeton University's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. In an April 1 article in The Chronicle Review, he asked whether liberal education can succeed in the modern research university and suggested that incremental reforms like the ones proposed in recent years do not go far enough to address the changing landscape of higher education. Thank you for joining us, Professor Katz.

Stanley N. Katz:
I am looking forward to this Colloquy, but I am a little apprehensive about it, never having done anything of this sort. So please bear with me. Basically, however, I publish in the Chronicle because I get such wonderful response from the paper, and this seems a great enhancement to the feedback I usually get. The initial response to my article on liberal education is that I am too pessimistic. I would be delighted to be convinced that is true. I am aware that people my age can become nostalgic, and as an historian I know the false allure of arguments for golden ages in the past. But I have thought a lot about liberal education, and it has been my primary concern as an educator since I first began teaching as a graduate student in 1957 -- nearly fifty years ago.

I mention in the article the fantasy of having a golden wand to change undergraduate education as I would wish, and several people have asked me what I would do. I want to answer that in a way that will frustrate many of you, since my response is that what I would do would probably be different in every research university (my chosen arena). I feel strongly that there are no general institutional solutions to these problems. The problems are general, but the solutions are necessarily local, dependent upon the nature and place of the institution, its history and mission, its particular student body, and so forth. I think the challenge is for those of us who care deeply that something beyond vocational and disciplinary education be part of undergraduate (and especially underclass) experience feel empowered to work within our institutions for workable, pragmatic reforms.

I certainly do not believe that there is a specifiable, limited body of knowledge that must form the core of liberal education. But I do think that some body of knowledge about Western culture is essential in this country, that at least one other culture be attended to, and that a small number of intensive explorations into large intellectual problems (defined as problems, not disciplines) need to be part of the process of underclass education.

Beyond that, I am very interested in your suggestions.

SNK

Question from Carol Geary Schneider, AAC&U:
Two questions -

In one campus study (at a public university widely praised for its general education program) over 50% of the faculty said that they "frequently" talk to students about liberal education and its importance. But only 12% of the first year students and 13% of the seniors said that they frequently hear from the faculty about liberal education. What advice would you give the faculty of that university?

Do you think liberal education can ever be a priority for students if we discuss it mainly or exclusively in terms of general education? Wouldn't it make more sense to tie the aims of liberal education (inquiry and analysis, communication, civic and ethical responsibility, integrative learning) directly to students' majors?

Stanley N. Katz:
Carol, I have a mini-lecture entitled "the department as the enemy of education." Disciplinary departments can do an excellent job of disciplinary training, but the reason why I am concerned with general education is that if we do not empower students to learn generally, they will never learn liberally. I think there is a tension between general and departmental education. I think we need both. But if the department dominates, as it now does, I do not see how we are going to provide a significantly general education.

SNK

Question from Maura, Public Research Intensive University:
Is the current fuzziness of the academy's definition of a liberal education in someway linked with the increased emphasis on the "commercialization" and "privitization" of the public university?

Stanley N. Katz:
Yes, I think so. This is something that both David Kirp and Derek Bok have written about recently, and I am in general agreement that the commercialization of the university has created both values and institutional arrangements that run athwart liberal education. On the other hand, commercialization does not make it impossible for faculty to try to articulate what is going wrong, and to propose solutions to revive or enhance liberal education. Jerry Graff always talks about "teaching the conflicts," and that is not a bad strategy here. If faculty can point out what they think the contradictions and tensions created for liberal education by commercialization are, that may be one of the ways in which we can begin to address the problem meaningfully. I think the burden is on those faculty who care to carry the battle for liberal education forward.

SNK

Question from Robert Benedetti:
In years past the hallmark of a liberal education was sufficient breath to appreciate a wide range of possible experiences and to treasure learning for its own sake, much as Henry Adams might have done. Is the foundation or justification for a liberal education undergoing a shift away from definitions which value the development of the individual self to definitions which focus on the making of democratic citizens? In other words, is the new standard for a liberal education closer to one that would satisfy Cicero than Henry Adams? Is the liberally educated person today more likely to be engaged in the public square than to be swept up by an aesthetic or spiritual epiphany?

Robert Benedetti
Executive Director
Jacoby Center
Universtiy of the Pacific

Stanley N. Katz:
An interesting question. I don't see the contradiction, though. I think that at least from the beginning of the twentieth century U.S. higher education has been committed to the creation of a democratic citizenry. Certainly the World War I emphasis on general education at Columbia and elsewhere was at least partly inspired by explicit democratic imperatives. And of course Dewey always insisted upon the link between education and democracy (at all levels of education). But the sort of values-oriented version of liberal education (call it Adamsish if you like) should enhance the democratic version. After all, there is no inherent conflict between democracy and meritocratic elitism, and I believe that liberal eduation should form the basis for both.

SNK

Question from Dee Abrahamse, California State University, Long Beach:
Why does the discussion of liberal education, like so many issues, focus on the dichotomy between major research universities and small liberal arts colleges? The largest number of students will graduate from comprehensive universities, and it is here that the focus of the future of the liberal arts will succeed or fail. Will these universities adopt research models with over-specialized curriculum, or will they become national leaders in championing new models of liberal education for undergraduates?

Stanley N. Katz:
This is an important question, and a number of respondents have asked related questions. My article focuses on research universities only because I am a fish that swims in that particular pond. But I know that there are other fish and other ponds, and they are equally important. But I know a lot less about them, and do not want to pretend more than I actually know.

My strong impression is that liberal education is alive and well in the four year liberal arts colleges, although it is clear that they have a multiplicity of different approaches. I believe that the most selective of the colleges have the easiest time in being self-determining as to their curricula, and therefore as to the extent to which they can explore different strategies for achieving liberal arts education. Wonderful work is being done here.

But I think the less selective colleges have a big problem with vocationalism, since job training is what parents (and students) want, and since a diploma from a lesser known college may not be perceived as being as intrinsically valuable as one from the best known and most selective colleges. Ernie Boyer pointed this out some time ago.

Ernie was very enthusiastic about the general or comprehensive universities. I have done a little work with a couple of networks of these institutions, and from that experience I know that many of them are seriously committed to liberal education (as well as to vocational and disciplinary approaches). I think in some ways they may be doing better work than the research universities, in part because faculty disciplinary professionalism is a less dominant influence on faculty behavior and administration response.

I think we need a lot more empirical information to be sure.

SNK

Question from Richard Guarasci,President , Wagner College:
Given the impressive list of curricular innovations, such as learning communities experiential and service learning as well as many new pedagogical classroom strategies, are large universities monitoring the newest and successful practices at the smaller liberal arts colleges where curricular effeciency and substantive learning are prized? Are the different sectors talking with and learning from each other?

Stanley N. Katz:
I do not really know the answer, but I suspect that to ask this question is to suggest that they are not. That would be my guess. I think you point to something important in higher education, and that is what I take to be an increasing fragmentation of the different levels of higher education with a consequent difficulty of communicating across the levels -- much less moving across. It would be worth a serious study, but my hunch is that we as faculty are now even more compartmentalized in particular types of educational structures than we were a generation ago. More important, it is currently so hard to import new curricular strategies into any large institution that even better ideas might not solve the problem. Of course, if there are presidents like you who care, that would make a decisive difference on their campuses!

SNK

Question from Jack Meacham, University at Buffalo, SUNY:
Stanley Katz raises the question of whether research universities can purport to offer undergraduates a liberal education. I would rephrase the question to ask whether ANY college or university can purport to offer undergraduates a liberal education. Katz concerns himself primarily with how liberal education has been defined. My concern is primarily with whether we will be able to find any qualified professors to provide the liberal education curriculum, regardless of how defined, to today's students. Our nation's research universities have largely abandoned their commitment to liberal education and now train doctoral students--and the coming generations of assistant professors--only narrowly within sub-disciplines. These newer, younger generations of professors have had no exposure to a liberal education in their own education. They have no conception of what a liberal education might entail, of how to construct and maintain a liberal education curriculum, or of how to engage their students as Thomas Kuhn did so well for Stanley Katz. The transmission of the vision and reality of liberal education from professor to student, who then becomes a professor, has been broken. How can we restart this cycle? If our nation's four-year liberal-arts colleges truly wish to offer their students a liberal education, they must join together and insist to the research universities that they will no longer hire new doctorates who are narrowly trained and poorly educated. We must work together to transform the graduate programs at our nation's research universities so that those who aspire to teach will themselves have been the beneficiaries of a liberal education. My question: Is Princeton University graduating any doctorates who are truly prepared to provide undergraduates with a liberal education? If not, what can Princeton University do to strengthen its doctoral training programs?

Stanley N. Katz:
A fair question. I said in an earlier response that one of the answers has to be revamped doctoral education, one that both includes a serious commitment to training for teaching and a commitment to taking a generous ("liberal"?) view of graduate disciplinary training. One of our problems has been excessively specialized and narrow training and dissertation topics. But, as you suggest, it is a vicious cycle that we are in. I think that many institutions, especially liberal arts colleges (where many research u. PhD students go)are insisting more on teaching experience, curricular imagination, and breadth of view. We in the research universities need that pressure -- if faculty know they need to train their students differently to get them jobs, I think they will begin to do it. But it is slow. This is another issue, but I think we also need educational leaders to lead on this subject -- and speak out on the sorts of teachers we need to be training in the best universities. Where is Larry Summers when we need him?

SNK

Question from Raymond Rodrigues, Skidmore:
Could part of our difficulty in trying to determine how a liberal education would be achieved lie in our perceiving "general education" or "the core" or any other appropriate term as a foundation, a beginning? What if we were to attempt to conceive a liberal education as the result of an undergraduate education rather than the foundation for one? Then we would assess whether students had acquired a liberal education at the end of their four (or six or ten) years. Few faculty own general education, but all are committed to their disciplines. Wouldn't viewing a liberal education as the sum total of one's education do more to involve the disciplines, even granting the focus upon research in one's field?

Stanley N. Katz:
I understand, and what you are suggesting is enormously important if we are to take outcome assessment for undergraduate education seriously. In some sense, of course, all four years count. Agreed. But I confess that I am focused on the first two years, give or take, because I suspect that from the point of view of cognitive development what we do early on makes a decisive difference to longer term outcomes. But I am sypathetic to efforts to liberalize the last two years, especially with capstone seminars and the like. This needs more attention.

Question from Frank Forman, U.S. Department of Education:
I very much appreciate your making the distinction between content and cognitive process. I am very much a process man myself. I have asked countless adults to recall the quadratic formula they supposedly learned in the ninth grade. Almost no one can. The same forgetting is almost as true of other subjects. So why go to school beyond the eighth grade? Process is answer: you learn how to think. Alas, this is almost impossible to measure, so school reform continues to emphasize stuffing more content into kids heads. Let me ask you what a nearly pure process education would be like. I'm thinking of an eight-semester critical thinking curriculum. You can't get a semester's course in medicine, but if you did, students would learn about the *process* of diagnosing failure in a complex system. A semester's course in law would be about the process of making fine distinctions (legal vs. illegal). Economics is about keeping cost and choice uppermost in mind. Engineering is about making do with rules of thumb. Marxism is about group struggle. Add or substitute your own. Archeology uses everything. In fact, life uses everything. How does this sequence sound to you as part of a liberal education?

(Disclaimer: I'm not speaking for the U.S. Dept. of Education.)

Stanley N. Katz:
I am a process guy, and I am in substantial agreement. But I think there is a nexus between process and content. It is not so obvious with the quadratic equation (I think I still remember!), but it is certainly true in much or most of science, social science and humanities. Process is what helps us learn about content, and we do internalize, criticize and reuse content. I think the dialectic between process and content is what forms the core of liberal education. I take it that this is what Lee Shulman and Howard Gardner are talking about when they speak of the importance of content knowledge in cognition.

SNK

Question from Naomi F. Collins, Consultant:
How can the concept and content of liberal education be expanded to incorporate a global perspective? That is, how might liberal arts fields incorporate a broader vision; and how mightliberal arts methods and approaches be "used" to provide a broader perspective on the impact of globalization (that that provided by business, market, and economic approaches and forces)?

Stanley N. Katz:
Well, Naomi, I would not privilege "globalization" anymore than I would privilege "diversity," although I would think of diversity as a value and globalization as a social process (that needs to be studied and understood). I cannot imagine that a rich portfolio of general education courses would not contain a great deal of material on globalization, starting with approaches to global history, and coming up to present developments.

SNK

Question from Karen Winkler:
If simply reforming the undergraduate curriculum will no longer provide quality undergraduate education in the modern research university, where would you start to make changes?

Stanley N. Katz:
Nasty question, Karen. In my dream world I would of course create "Liberal U.," where everything would work according to my principles and ideas. But that is not going to happen. I am an incrementalist. I think on most campuses it will be the actions of small numbers of faculty who create courses or small curricular structures to embody the ideas of liberal and general education who will make the difference. And I am committed to the notion that we need to reimagine graduate doctoral education significantly in order to recruit and train the sorts of PhDs who will understand and commit to general education in their teaching careers. We have, of course, a chicken and egg problem here, but a prestigious university with a few departments committed to this sort of program could get away with it -- and they could place their students. This is incrementalist, but it would be a good place to start.

SNK

Question from Cyrus Veeser, Bentley College:
Dr. Katz identifies two developments affecting undergraduate education--structural changes in research universities, and the explosion of knowledge in science, social science, and humanities over the past century. His article is pessimistic about the ability of universities to "recenter" undergrad education given the "breadth and complexity of the intellectual content students now confront." Is that endgame? Or does he have some hope that an "essential core of knowledge" relevant to students in the early 21st century could be devised?

Stanley N. Katz:
It surely is not the endgame. I am not THAT pessimistic! But I do think we need some new strategies for breaking out of the current dilemma. I think that many of them have already been developed in smaller institutions, especially four year colleges. We need to think which strategies make sense for particular institutions, and how to institutionalize them. We have adopted useful new strategies recently, the freshman seminar's recent popularity being a good example -- but we have not tied the institutional innovation to pedagogical content innovation. I think that is the frontier to which we have to address ourselves now.

SNK

Question from Michael Davis, Illinois Institute of Technology:
There is justified concern that undergraduate education tends to be too narrow, too dominated by "the major". The way to resolve that problem is simply to limit the number of courses that can be taken in any one department or that a department can require of its majors (or both). Why assume that, in addition, there is a need for a set curriculum for all students? "Liberal education" seems to be a sort of non-major major. What evidence is there that such requirements actually achieve anything, much less that they achieve what they purportedly aim at? Should not the burden of proof lie with those who claim the right to direct the lives of others?

Stanley N. Katz:
A straightforward answer would be that we have for a century or more experimented with non-structured education. Charles Eliot's elective system paved the way, after all. More recently Brown University and many colleges have versions of low-structure approaches. I would guess (but do not know) that this is effective for some students. But on the whole I think there is a lot to be said for a combination of reasonably deep knowledge (the major)and broad knowledge/process (general education) in preparing a liberally educated young person. That is the balance that American higher education had arrived at by the 1960s, in my judgement, and I think there was a lot to be said for it. But, like everything else, it needs to be reinvented to be suitable to current challenges. The answer cannot simply be to go back.

SNK

Question from W. Jones,Texas A&M:
Should diversity education be a part of the new Core curriculm?

Stanley N. Katz:
At the risk of being thought a curmudgeon, I don't think so. At least not in the sense I suspect you intend. "Diversity" is surely a value in any approach to general education. But diversity as a contemporary social value does not need to be singled out from other values, in my view. Insofar as institutions want structural approaches to promoting diversity (and I favor this), it can and should be done through various kinds of modeling and institutional arrangements.

SNK

Malcolm Scully (Moderator):
We have about 20 minutes left. Keep your questions coming. Malcolm Scully

Question from Michael G. Hall, U. of Texas at Austin:
Could we not raise large issues by insisting on the world history context of the usual history topics? For example, Jamestown could serve as an entryway for discussion of Europe's ongoing encounter with primitive people, the onset and demise of African slavery, comparative New World colonization, the world capitalist system, changes in poliical assumptions from James I to George III, and change from Renaissance to Enlightenment. All these are conexts of Virgina's colonial history.

Stanley N. Katz:
Hi, Michael. Of course! I think that World History is an excellent example of new/old approaches to the revivification of liberal education. World history uses new techniques and traditional historical techniques, but it reveals things that traditional national/chronological history cannot. There are, I feel sure, comparable opportunities in most fields. My own passion at the moment is for comparison -- an old and difficult technique, but one that helps both teachers and students see old configurations in new ways. I am sure you would agree. Like you, I started out in early American history. I now study transitions to democracy in the contemporary world, but having studied Jamestown has given me an enornmous intellectual leg-up in what I am now trying to do.

Best,

SNK

Question from Roger W. Bowen, AAUP:
In your CHE article, you suggest that it will be difficult to make "qualitative judgments" about curriculum reform "unless we are safely beyond the conflicts of the culture wars..." and add that this "seems problematic at the current moment in American history." Why do the culture wars continue to plague higher education; and what should educators be doing to put an end to the "wars"?

Stanley N. Katz:
I wish I knew, Roger. Universities are, as you know, part of society, and we live in a very conflicted society. At the moment I am very concerned with the sort of identity politics that is disrupting so many universities in different ways. Take three examples -- Harvard, Columbia and Colorado. We will work these problems out, but they are deep and difficult. That is one side of the problem. The other is the extent to which so many university faculty distance themselves from anything other than their own disciplinary (or, more likely, subdisciplinary) world. They cannot engage the problems most likely to be urgent for undergraduate students -- and they are not likely to be much interested in addressing larger educational problems. So we are caught between overly-intense involvement, and overly-distanced non-involvement. But in the end the universities are here to train people to maintain the democracy, and we have to keep reminding ourselves of that fact.

SNK

Question from Neal Gill and Russell Brickey, Purdue University:
Does the proliferation of cyber-culture, particularly at research institutions, make it even more difficult to pursue liberal arts instruction? In other words, how might we encourage a more deliberative, reflective process in our students while they are being constantly bombarded by the immediate and sensational nature of the online experience?

Stanley N. Katz:
Well, I would say just the opposite. We need to speak to students in the languages to which they respond. I am experimenting myself with teaching on the web and using technology (though I am a novice), and I think there are many exciting possiblities. The digital humanities offer tremendous opportunities to teachers, and the same is true in other fields. The problem is frequently that institutions do not provide the equipment, technical support or reward for faculty to learn and use such approaches. I think we need to incorporate cyber-learning into the mix of liberal education, and I think we can improve liberal education as we do.

Question from Scott Mattoon, Choate Rosemary Hall:
How influential is the current Advanced Placement program in high schools in the shaping (or limiting) of liberal education at the university level? Despite the dependence of high schools on university admissions requirements, do universities feel bound in any way to the kind of curriculum and enterprise espoused by the AP program?

Stanley N. Katz:
Well, I think one of the places the system of higher education is failing us is in building transitions between high school and college. The College Board was originally built to address that problem in a thoughtful and systematic way, but it is not clear to me that it is capable of doing that anymore. This, I think, is both the fault of the CB itself and of the dramatic changes in student population and institutional proliferation. The AP exam and AP courses were meant to enhance the relationship between school and college, but I worry that they are now simply upping the pressure in school without doing much to enhance student experience in college. To the extent that AP course provide elite challenges in the schools (and provide teachers with breathing room intellectually), they can be a very good thing. But to the extent that they are simply an expensive hurdle, and tie students into very traditional disciplinary approaches, they are not necessarily a good thing for liberal education at the tertiary level.

SNK

Question from robin.v.catmur@dartmouth.edu:
In the face of burgeoning research priorities held by "Colleges" (Universities), it is tempting to sacrifice general education to the lure of faculty generated research dollars, scientific PR coups, and reams of peer-reviewed published articles. My first question is institution-specific: if Professor Katz is familiar with Dartmouth College, would he agree or disagree that we manage to walk this tightrope fairly well, compared to others, and to what does he attribute our successes (or, our lack of success, if he disagrees)? Second, what would he propose as the alternative to allowing and even encouraging certain specializations ("majors or concentrations, by any other name) when the undergraduates themselves place a high value on the exposures and opportunities afforded within a liberal arts College "surrounded" by a significant research institution? "The content of knowledge appropriate to our...society", as Professor Katz says, is in fact determined in no small part by what the students want and need, in order to succeed post-graduation in a significantly different world, is it not?

Thank you -
Robin Catmur
Dartmouth College

Stanley N. Katz:
I am a great admirer of Dartmouth, Robin. In fact the original draft of this article was prepared for a conference on liberal education hosted by Prof. Jonathan Crewe at your humanities center last fall. I think that Dartmouth has an enormous advantage, one that it has seized, in its size. It is simply easier with a moderately sized student body and faculty, to keep things in perspective and under control. It also requires enlightened leadership, which you have had in your presidents for some time. Dartmouth is a great liberal arts college, and has used its resources well.

But it is a different question about specialization. Majors serve many students well, but in the ideal I would rather see the option of special created specializations to suit the interests/needs of particular students. A start on that is the current programs focused on problems, not disciplines -- Afro-Am, Women's Studies and the like. But we could also encourage more free-form problem clusters for students interested in poverty, and other discrete issues. This is harder to administer than the current set of majors, and would require new faculty arrangments. But it is not beyond our capacities to be much more flexible in the last two years of college.

SNK

Question from ME Madigan, grad student, Univ Neb Lincoln:
Is the effort to continue to serve the public good creating a push for all of us to become more vocational?

Stanley N. Katz:
I don't think it has to. The "public good" is served by the creation of independent, critically thinking and creative people. The historical aim of liberal education is to prepare students for democratic citizenship, and Dewey and others believed that general education was the best way to do that. So do I. This is not to say that someone who majors in a vocational subject cannot be a good citizen, but it is to say that if that person is also liberally educated (no contradiction), she will be an even better citizen. I really believe that.

SNK

Malcolm Scully (Moderator):
We've come to the end of our allotted time. Many thanks to Professor Katz and to all those who submitted questions. I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them. Clearly Professor Katz has raised a crucial issue, and we appreciate the thoughtfulness of the questions and the answers.