Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Logo of The Middlebury Campus
Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Who Are You?

I am sure we are familiar with the resounding voice of Roger Daltrey screaming out the words “Who are you?” in the smash hit by The Who that bears the same name as the lyric. While I have listened to Daltrey sing this over Townshend’s guitar riffs for years, only recently have I actually taken the time to answer his question. Now just as Daltrey asked us I am asking you Middlebury, who are you?

I am sure when you toured the campus or went to an information session or got those incredibly annoying pamphlets in the mail, Middlebury claimed to know exactly what it was. Why it’s so simple! We are a small liberal arts college in northern Vermont. We are really good at languages and environmental science. Robert Frost hung out here for a little bit and we take credit for Alexander Twilight and the food is free. Oh, and Bihall is pretty nice.

This is my bias: I love Middlebury. It was not always the case, but I can say it with full certainty now. However, I cannot help feeling a little deceived by the message sold to me three years ago. I find myself often questioned on the merits of liberal arts and unable to provide an adequate response. In an age where technical and specific knowledge seems to be more employable, what use is a liberal arts education? Well I am not sure. I guess we take classes in some different areas to get a few requirements. That is enough to claim liberal arts status right?

Our identity as a liberal arts institution has changed. The liberal arts are not what they were. Leo Strauss defined liberal education as, “…the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” I want to believe Leo Strauss and more and more I believe his perspective is one we should aspire to, yet often fail in our conversations on campus. Our identity as a place of liberal education needs an update for a changing world or at the very least a reaffirmation of some kind.

Yes, we have lost our way somewhat. We take the bare minimum outside our respective majors/minors and it seems few of us identify as students of the liberal arts rather than students of our given discipline. A liberal education has to be something more, something still relevant in a modern age. We do not have the technical facilities or faculties of many our peer institutions, so what do we offer in its place? What tangible skills do we gain from the liberal arts that make us identifiable as products of a liberal education?

We will never be experts in one very specific thing. That has never been the focus of a liberal education. However, we can perfect a broader more applicable skill that unites all disciplines. That skill is of course communication. If there is anything we should pride ourselves on, it should be our expertise in not only written argument, but verbal debate as well. The quintessential student of the liberal arts should not be recognizable by the degree on their wall, but by their skill as negotiators, mediators, diplomats and the very best debaters. So, when you are sitting at an awkward dinner party and someone whose had too many drinks questions the value of a liberal education, we can actively convince them that we do possess a certain tangible set of skills.

Persuasion and well reasoned argument has not been our forte lately, Middlebury. It seems of late not only has our academic ideology revolved around competition but also our debates outside the classroom. Our conversations have not been filled with well-reasoned debate. Instead we have opted to bash our opponents over the head with blunt ideology or simply ignore them. We have taken the easy road in the hopes of preserving a sense of elitism, a sense of infallibility that should be revolting to any student of the liberal arts. We should be better than that. We should take pride not in how stubbornly we hold to our given views but in the confidence that we have listened to argument and arrived at what we believe to be the best possible perspective.

Liberal education has never been for everyone. It takes a certain type of personality, a certain openness of character perhaps. We signed up for a liberal education whether we like it or not. We should count ourselves lucky, we get to define the liberal arts for the future. It will be us who decides how liberal education remains relevant in a rapidly changing world. So when The Who asks us, “Who are you?” we will have a good answer.

Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS


Comments