Over the course of this semester, a group of Super Senior Febs and I will publish a series of op-eds detailing what Middlebury used to be like and what it could be. We hope to provide a similitude of institutional memory. We have conducted hours of interviews with alumni, professors and students, and we plan to conduct dozens more. Throughout our research, it has become increasingly clear that something within our great school is wrong. Our culture, traditions and support for curiosity have decayed over the past decade. I leave in January; all I can do now is write. However, the Earth belongs to those who live upon it: For those of you with more time left than me, I aim to impart to you that you deserve more than what Middlebury is offering. You deserve what they promise: a liberal education.
The number of people who are reconsidering the value of college has grown considerably over the last decade. Many Americans balk at four years of spending rather than four years of earning. Colleges, including Middlebury, have responded by adding computer science and data science courses that appeal to students who view college as a pathway to high-paying jobs. Those students' assumptions, in fact, are not entirely accurate, and Middlebury still slid in the infamous U.S. News rankings. Critical thinking is a marketable skill. However, regardless of major, one comes to Middlebury expecting an elite liberal arts education, and as I will argue in the first entry of this series, because of our school’s responsiveness to career-anxious and incurious students, we have failed to deliver on that promise.
Originating in classical Greece, liberal arts education consists of two parts: quadrivium and trivium. The former comprises arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music; the latter grammar, rhetoric and logic. Notably, vocational curriculum is absent, and students study all disciplines. Sound familiar? In true liberal arts education, no student mistakes the part for the whole — that is, the attainment of specific knowledge for the greater good that is the ability to order one’s soul. By this, I simply mean that the telos of pursuing a liberal education is understanding the world and the self. Middlebury recognizes this, saying its purpose is preparing students “to solve the world’s most challenging problems…by engaging them in the life of the mind and soul.” However, we do not live up to our potential in this regard because we do not take the intellectual life seriously.
As Middlebury searches for a new president, we must demand the leader shift our institution’s culture and curriculum toward a radical embrace of education. Rather than adding vocational classes, we should focus on our strengths: languages, social sciences and the humanities. The world needs actuaries, lawyers and coders; they are professions worthy of praise. Still, large universities provide fantastic opportunities for vocational education. There is no need to make Middlebury like every other college, because, frankly, we are not nearly as good at teaching computer science as the 8th-best state university in California, and, well, we cost a lot more.
The liberal arts do not include skill-first classes because their primary objective is not to impart how to understand the world, only how to change it in accordance with other’s ideas. Philosophic education is no career death. Top law schools like Yale University often spend relatively little class time teaching the practice of law; instead, they teach the philosophy of law and the ethics of practice. Even without devoted class time, students at elite institutions still pass the bar exam because they are capable. Students from schools like Middlebury and, if I dare compare us, Yale Law, are better prepared to serve as “ethical citizen[s],” because we know what ethics are and why they matter. Praxis, the practical application of theory, is a part of liberal arts, but only when its final goal is to impart something higher than the skills itself.
Many will ask: Can we not do both? Do I need to draw such a hard line? Is lessening the intellectual burden on students by reducing credit requirements or devoting class time or an entire department to pre-professional skills, such as computer science, a net negative? I respond that no credits were added to make up for these changes. The telos of Middlebury as an institution is the production of virtuous, intellectual people. This takes time. Just like a trade, a particular education — an education of the soul and mind — is best suited for the successful development of these individuals.
An education that truly stretches the mind — that objective upon which these Artes Liberales are founded — is and should be uncomfortable. Formulating our culture and curriculum around student’s intellectual safety and pleasure is antithetical to our purpose. As Plato, the father of liberal arts, said, students must be dragged from their caves; only through pain can our minds open. We must be presented with Charles Murray and Ryszard Legutko every day, not because we must agree with them, but precisely so that we can disagree successfully. Our failure to invoke protest is just as grave as our attempts to control it. Liberalism and justice grow stronger with critique and die in ignorance. One does not know or believe anything until they seriously consider alternatives.
If students are unwilling to accept discomfort in service of knowledge, liberal arts may not be their place, and that is okay. The wonderful thing about having 5,300 colleges and universities in the U.S is that intellectual exclusivity in our institution is not a societal harm. Our duty is to attract students who would benefit the most from a Middlebury education. There is no shortage of intellectually curious students across all strata of society.
Private college is a business, or so I have heard. Students demand x, and the administration must give them x or risk that future students’ $86,850 won’t come. Responsivity to students is not entirely bad. Still, I caution that believing students’, or worse, administrators’ comprehension of education trumps that of professors’ is, irony noted, troubling. Watching Middlebury spend thousands of dollars on bingo prizes and simultaneously attempt to remove professorships in the English department was difficult. We must devote ourselves entirely to our purpose, education. The truth about what is good in the world is not responsive to supply and demand. If we have trouble filling our halls with those who want to be here for the sake of being here, then we must sacrifice the back row for the purpose. It is with this in mind that I contend the next captain of our ship of state mustn’t be a professional fundraiser or executive but a liberal arts professor.
Learning as a vocation is leisure. It is the greatest opportunity many of us will ever be afforded. We must take a brave stand in support of it.
