Opinion | Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...s-policy-higher-education.html
liberal arts humanities college universities citizenship vocation technical
shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23
- No Cached
-
Between 2013 and 2016, across the United States, 651 foreign language programs were closed, while majors in classics, the arts and religion have frequently been eliminated or, at larger schools, shrunk. The trend extends from small private schools like Marymount to the Ivy League and major public universities, and shows no sign of stopping.
-
The steady disinvestment in the liberal arts risks turning America’s universities into vocational schools narrowly focused on professional training. Increasingly, they have robust programs in subjects like business, nursing and computer science but less and less funding for and focus on departments of history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and theology.
-
America’s higher education system was founded on the liberal arts and the widespread understanding that mass access to art, culture, language and science were essential if America was to thrive. But a bipartisan coalition of politicians and university administrators is now hard at work attacking it — and its essential role in public life — by slashing funding, cutting back on tenure protections, ending faculty governance and imposing narrow ideological limits on what can and can’t be taught.
- ...16 more annotations...
-
For decades — and particularly since the 2008 recession — politicians in both parties have mounted a strident campaign against government funding for the liberal arts. They express a growing disdain for any courses not explicitly tailored to the job market and outright contempt for the role the liberal arts-focused university has played in American society.
-
Former Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on higher education in Wisconsin formed the bedrock of many later conservative attacks. His work severely undermined a state university system that was once globally admired. Mr. Walker reportedly attempted to cut phrases like “the search for truth” and “public service” — as well as a call to improve “the human condition” — from the University of Wisconsin’s official mission statement
-
But blue states also regularly cut higher education funding, sometimes with similar rationales. In 2016, Matt Bevin, the Republican governor of Kentucky at the time, suggested that students majoring in the humanities shouldn’t receive state funding. The current secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, a Democrat, seems to barely disagree. “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global work force,” he wrote in December.
-
Federal funding reflects those priorities. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ budget in 2022 was just $180 million. The National Science Foundation’s budget was about 50 times greater, having nearly doubled within two decades.
-
What were students meant to think? As the cost of higher education rose, substantially outpacing inflation since 1990, students followed funding — and what politicians repeatedly said about employability — into fields like business and computer science. Even majors in mathematics were hit by the focus on employability.
-
Universities took note and began culling. One recent study showed that history faculty across 28 Midwestern universities had dropped by almost 30 percent in roughly the past decade. Classics programs, including the only one at a historically Black college, were often simply eliminated.
-
Higher education, with broad study in the liberal arts, is meant to create not merely good workers but good citizens
-
this is a grim and narrow view of the purpose of higher education, merely as a tool to train workers as replaceable cogs in America’s economic machine, to generate raw material for its largest companies.
-
Citizens with knowledge of their history and culture are better equipped to lead and participate in a democratic society; learning in many different forms of knowledge teaches the humility necessary to accept other points of view in a pluralistic and increasingly globalized society.
-
In 1947, a presidential commission bemoaned an education system where a student “may have gained technical or professional training” while being “only incidentally, if at all, made ready for performing his duties as a man, a parent and a citizen.” The report recommended funding to give as many Americans as possible the sort of education that would “give to the student the values, attitudes, knowledge and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society,” which is to say the liberal arts as traditionally understood. The funding followed.
-
the American higher education system is returning to what it once was: liberal arts finishing schools for the wealthy and privileged, and vocational training for the rest.
-
renewed funding for the liberal arts — and especially the humanities — would support beleaguered departments and show students that this study is valuable and valued.
-
At the university level, instituting general education requirements would guarantee that even students whose majors have nothing to do with the humanities emerged from college equipped to think deeply and critically across disciplines.
-
Liberal arts professors must also be willing to leave their crumbling ivory towers and the parochial debates about their own career path, in order to engage directly in public life