It's not a given. It's not true, like sunrise. People like me believe it, not because it can be proven, like gravity, but because we have faith. It's like religion that way: even though certainty is out of the question, believers are not at all afraid of telling you the argument has been and forever shall be absolutely true.
Then again, some of us set a life's agenda on it, maybe even spent our lives practicing it, as if it were a religion. I worked in the field for forty years, trained for it, entered it once that training was over, and never looked back. Have no doubt--I was among its saints, a true believer. Still am.
That's why I'm saddened by what happened last week at West Virginia University. As Leif Weatherby wrote yesterday in the New York Times, "If you’re a West Virginian with plans to attend West Virginia University, be prepared to find yourself cut out of much of the best education that the school has traditionally offered, and many of the most basic parts of the education offered by comparable universities."
Why the warning? Because in this country a verifiable decline in college-age students is coming. All institutions of higher education--well, not all, but most--will feel more than a pinch. Many will experience a drop in enrollment that will force them to cut programs and drop majors. Weatherby laments what happened at WVU: "The university is deciding, in effect, that certain citizens don’t get access to a liberal arts education."
What will they drop? English departments at Briar Cliff and Northwestern were cut back painfully a few years ago already. Why? no majors, or very few. How long can an institution of higher learning keep an English department if no students fill the chairs in American Lit?
Why so few? The teacher shortage in this country is an acute pain. "We are Teachers" website reports that 35 percent of all teachers say they'll be quitting in the next two years, in part, I'm sure, because 89 percent claim they're working harder these days because of teacher shortages. In December of 2022, almost half of the schools in the country--elementary and secondary--were operating understaffed.
But I've wandered. The scars at West Virginia University story show how colleges and universities will cut--history, literature and language, theater, even math, gone. What remains makes WVU look more job oriented. Gone is the commitment, the faith, that the humanities, the liberal arts, will somehow make individual students more human members of the society they join the moment they graduate.
That idea held sway in this country for more than a century, and I believed it--and still do. I can point to the exact place on a campus sidewalk where I was when I decided what I was looking forward to in the very next class was something I could see myself doing when I graduated. I remember that moment--second semester, second year--I told myself I could do worse for a profession than to be able to talk about history and literature. That day I confessed my faith in the liberal arts.
Don't misconstrue. I'm no heretic, but I do believe that a civil society can be best created by people's being familiar and conversant with their nation's history and story. Can something of that content be absorbed from the little screens kids stare into constantly? Maybe. Will that kind of society emerge if the body politic's education has been little more than job training? We'll see.
Once again--it happens often lately--I'm going to sound like an old man; but I can't help thinking how thankful I am for living when I did, in an era when the liberal arts--history and literature, philosophy and theology--mattered.
Today two local colleges begin another term. It's been more than a decade now since I marched off to school, opened my office, pulled books out of my bag, and looked over once again what was coming up that day.
Do I miss it?--no. Am I afraid?--well, maybe, for the life of the culture in which I've lived. Is that normal for someone my age? I think so.
Still, let me just say this. This morning I'm thankful for 40 years in the classroom, good years, but I'm also thankful I lived when I did, at a time I could spend my working days reading and talking about ideas. I believe--I still do--in the liberal arts.
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