Losing the Liberal Arts

The Temple of the Liberal Arts

We're on a panel, two of the five presenters introducing a book that's to be published about the Big Sioux River basin, a humanities approach really, with contributions from a wide-range of study--from geography to hard science, from literature to religion. We're at a Western History Confernece. We take turns. We've got 12 minutes a piece to summarize what it is we're contributing

When he gets up, he begins by announcing that he has no job anymore, that his position has been cut by the college's administration in an attempt to stanch the financial bleeding that's going on where he's taught for a couple of decades. Just like that, the English department is gone, history, he says, and he's troubled. You can see it, feel it. 

I know the guy. He's a fine writer who's taught in the English Department of a Roman Catholic school not far away. Last year he asked me to come and talk about things I do for a local NPR station, to read some short pieces about the region. Maybe ten people showed up, most of them students who tramped in as if having to attend was a death sentence. There was, at that moment, some strange handwriting, so to speak, up on the white board behind me. 

His program and his teaching position, I might have deduced back then, was in trouble. Still, when he announced his not having a job, I could have cried because the sadness he outlined--and reflected in what he said and read--was a take on life-and-death on the Big Sioux River.

Honestly, his being erased from the white boards at Briar Cliff University is not a new story. Just down the road, Northwestern had its English department decimated by huge cuts meant to salvage something from the changes occurring in higher education all around. A long article in Christian Century describes in detail what happened and is happening at a number of colleges further east, traditional "liberal arts" colleges more than a century old who are reading the enrollment tea leaves and making immense and not-to-believed cuts in history, English, philosophy, religion, and foreign languages because students--and their parents--know darn well that if they spend 100 grand, they better leave the institution with something more than a sparkling good paper on gender issues in the minor essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Kills me. It just kills me because I remember the place on a sidewalk just outside the classroom where I was heading for American Lit, a lecture on Emerson, when I decided that this whole lit thing was something I could do for the rest of my life, something I might just love. I enrolled in Dordt College because it was a tribal school (Christian Reformed Church) and I was a tribal member--and I determined to go there because I thought it was the place I could play basketball. Besides, someday I wanted to coach. That's about it for the future--I wanted to coach.

That agenda transformed when, in English 101 I had a teacher who insisted--flat-out insisted--I could write. That was news. Her directions led me into a closer look a literature, and when I got there, in truth, I never left.

So this friend of mine--friends, really, because he's not the sole suffering victim of administrative cuts--cut me to the quick with his announcement: he was "let go" as the college narrowed its focus to more emphasis on pre-professional programs.

"How can an institution call itself a Methodist college if it has no religion department?" That's a headline in the Christian Century article. And that's a good question.

I'm sure dozens of college administrations have answers to that question because Briar Cliff and Northwestern are not the only institutions making savage cuts that point the institutions in new, more economically-enriching directions.

Do graduates with humanities majors get jobs? 

I think the facts are clear. The truth is, they get hired. If you can write and speak with strength and authority, if you have a solid grasp of issues from a strong historical perspective, you can work just about anywhere.