The Endangered Liberal Arts College

In the spirit of a few blogs I follow that make a habit of re-posting, or re-presenting, well-articulated, thought-provoking writing, I offer this selection of excerpts from an article by Eva T. H. Brann. Brann is the longest-serving tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. St. John’s is famous in higher education for its use of the Great Books curriculum.

This article originally appeared as “Straight Talk: About the Small Independent Liberal Arts Colleges” in the fall 1995 volume of “Liberal Education,” produced by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. (AACU: Please don’t sue me for not requesting permission.)

Despite being nearly twenty years old, the article is a gem and still offers rich ideas for understanding present circumstances. I don’t agree with all of Brann’s points, particularly those that smack of private elitism, but I believe her perspective is valuable and worth disseminating amidst continued debate surrounding what knowledge is most valuable and what purposes should constitute the work of higher education institutions in American society.

As colleges and universities sacrifice diversity to pursue prestige and compete for scarce resources by catering to private interests with narrow notions of “relevance,” we must at some point reflect on what we stand to lose and how happy we will be with our ultimate destination.

Eva T. H. Brann

Straight Talk: About the Small Independent Liberal Arts Colleges

CAN ANYONE DOUBT that the small independent liberal arts colleges ought now to be put on the endangered species list? They are threatened materially by an environment inhospitable to smallness as well as institutional diversity, and they are harassed intellectually by a climate unfriendly to the tradition of liberal learning, that is, to learning done for its own sake.

As we cast about for the means of salvation for our schools, we should, I think, consider that not the least of our devices might be a new way of speaking for ourselves: more self-assured, brisk, candid, distinctive. The assumption is that we have a lot to be confident about, and that, current theory notwithstanding, rhetoric becomes persuasive by telling truths in the language of conviction.

[…]

Hence the question is, what might we say in our common behalf to the different constituencies of our world? Let me have a shot at recalling the plain things we might want to say in unison.

To prospective students: We offer you tough freedom. We will constrain your choices to widen your world. We will listen to you until you make sense. We will not teach you to think (an absurdity), but we will give you occasions for thinking. We will not prepare you for careers, but we will give you the chance to discover a vocation. Your business with us is the activation of your intellect and the shaping of your sensibility, and we won’t let other agendas you might have—“experimenting” or partying—interfere with it for long; although it is costly to us in money and reputation, we will ask you to leave if in our opinion you have ceased to learn. But if you stay with us and work hard, your future life will be both more complex and more coherent, more interesting, and more manageable.

To prospective parents: A liberal education, the final good you can give your child, is not a public entitlement. The day of conception is not too soon to begin saving for your child’s college education. It cannot help but be terribly expensive, because only human beings, themselves expensively education and still in the process of learning, can educate other human beings. But if it is expensive, it is also invaluable, for the happiness of your child’s life is at stake: It is education that gives life its significance; these four years of leisure you are giving your child are a necessary luxury. We promise no quantifiable outcome, since the benefits of a good education take decades to show up. Nor can we guarantee that your child will make a good living right away, since education is distinct from training, which comes later in professional school or on the job. Nothing is more expensive, materially and spiritually, than an early but bad career choice.

[…]

To ourselves, the faculties: …Let us acquaint ourselves thoroughly with our situation and be ready to act speedily and flexibly to protect our colleges, but let us also do, in the cause of preserving a human scale in education, what we do best: some inspired footdragging—though with a lively and well-informed appreciation of the current condition. And let us not be ashamed of a little last-ditch fervor…We are entitled to believe that this country depends on its small colleges to ensure their own survival toward the recovery of universal liberal learning, the kind of education that helps people to make not only a living but a life.

To legislators and education officials: The small liberal arts college is a national treasure. The small private liberal arts college is a phenomenon unique to this country. No other nation can boast of so lively a nonsystem. It is the educational analogue to the small business—the fruit of local individual initiative, diverse and hardy. Colleges differ significantly, however, from businesses in being not-for-profit public service institutions. They serve their students in providing a humane education. They serve their communities in bringing educational appointments and jobs. Colleges serve their states and the nation in saving public education dollars and in educating the sort of citizens most need right now: people who have learned how to learn and who reflect on their moral obligations.

We are not ashamed to ask for public support—for work-study, loan, and grant money—to help our dedicated and hard-working students, as well as for direct support to our hard-pressed institutions. We understand that in taking public money we become publicly accountable, and we are determined to be responsive. It is wasteful to strangle our independent educational judgment with bureaucratic regulation and to overwhelm our small resources with pointless reporting mandates.

If you are tempted to think of us as “elitist” because we are small, consider that smallness is no sin, least of all an elitist sin, and that mere largeness is often quite inert. Most of our schools are not, in fact, terribly selective; most of our teachers do the kind of teaching that welcomes and cherishes students of quite various gifts. If you are tempted to think that “small” might mean “ineffective,” consider that it is a small lump of leaven that makes the loaf rise, and the small local initiatives often have great consequences.

To public interest groups: Your manifestos, reports, and position papers help to guide the public policy that influences our fate. These publications, we are convinced, are most helpful when the administrators and educationists who write them seek the advice of teachers in the trenches. Without this advice these papers often advocate directions simply deleterious to education.

For example, these reports often underwrite a fierce vocationalism. They translate education into market terms. Students become clients, schools delivery systems, knowledge a product. The writers have forgotten the student explosions of the sixties, which were largely the result of such impersonal approaches. They forget that these are young human beings and that the business of colleges is the shaping of their lives, of their vocational and moral future.

Educational writers too often think of communities of learning in managerial and quantitative terms. They fail to consider that well-working schools are collegial in their governance and qualitative in the intended effects. Consequently the efficiencies of the marketplace—more products for less cost—can be catastrophes of education—hordes of alienated and undereducated students. These writers address themselves to the projected demands of the future, setting aside the past as if it were not the ground in which our humanity is rooted. They present the perceived demands of the twenty-first century as a fixed fate, rather than as a set of choices t be free accepted and sometimes, when their educated judgment so directs them, to be firmly rejected by our young. They demand that colleges and universities be all things at once: flexible in their approaches and also subject to national standards, inviting to expressions of diversity and also rigorous in technological preparation, tolerant of all views and also supportive of common values. While these are separately excellent purposes, we remind our public that institutional diversity, the best educational “system” for a diverse country, requires a firm and coherent curricular vision within each institution; good colleges do not attempt to be and do all things.

[…]

This teachers’ wisdom is what the small independent liberal arts colleges live by, and it is confirmed in the lives of our alumni. We think that the time will come when the public will be glad that the models of teaching which the small liberal arts college offer have survived.