Faith and the Fate of the Liberal Arts

By Rebekah Spearman | June 2, 2015

Saturday night. Too much had already been drunk for the evening to go anywhere good. I slumped down in my chair to watch the spinning record and hear the low drone of voices, offended and offending with rhythmic regularity. So this is the future of academia, I mused: a bunch of twenty-somethings getting drunk on cheap whiskey.

The future of academia, and in particular of the liberal arts, does not merely gnaw at the minds of anxious Ph.D. students; it has taken a good deal of bytes out of the internet as well. In his recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Terry Eagleton argued that liberal arts are in jeopardy, not merely because of the decline in interest in the humanities, but also because of the current structure of the university.

As academic institutions become more economically driven, Eagleton argued, their emphasis shifts more and more toward STEM fields. Scientific research offers tangible and monetary goods, while research in philosophy or English offers intangible benefits, if it offers benefits at all. Eagleton lays the blame for the humanities’ decline at the feet of capitalism: Education for its own sake stands no chance in a production economy.

While Eagleton gives an illuminating analysis of the state of the university, I fear he overlooks the real issue at the heart of education. For the liberal arts to thrive, our attitude toward education can be neither utilitarian nor its opposite : education as a means of production is as meaningless as education for its own sake. On that lonely Saturday night, as I walked home through deserted Hyde Park streets, my friend chivalrously accompanying me, his tragic mask, whether through fatigue or the peculiar intimacy of late-night walks, fell away. “But, don’t you want to be happy?” I asked. “Oh, Rebekah,” he replied, “I’ve given up on that.” The topic of conversation was the academic life, why we do what we do. Through my friend’s brief response, I realized what is destroying the university. It is the greatest sin against the Holy Spirit. It is despair.

The liberal arts have been separated from their end. The humanities exist to to cultivate love: love of God, love of neighbor, love of the terrifying beauty that is this world. But to love a thing truly, one must know the truth about it. Having given up on finding truth in our studies, we liberal artists have launched ourselves on a slow descent into nothingness. Engaged in the futile exercise of thinking for its own sake, we have no hope. Academia has become what Auden describes in his poem “Limbo Culture”:

The language spoken by the tribes of Limbo [read: the college of the humanities]

Has many words far subtler than our own

To indicate how much, how little, something

Is pretty closely or not quite the case,

But none you could translate by Yes or No,

Nor do its pronouns distinguish between Persons.

Even in my first year as a Ph.D. student, I have noticed that nothing is wrong, but is merely “problematic,” a “question.” We do not say what things are but what they’re not. Our studies are divorced from the world in which we live. We do not revel in the beauty of creation but in man-made theories, the gobbledygook spoken by the chimera tribesmen of Limbo.

At the funeral of my late professor and friend, Karl Maurer, his brother related how while in the hospital Karl was listening to “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel’s Messiah when the doctor walked into the room and began a long string of questions. With the authority of the pope, Karl rapped, “Listen!” And, silently, doctor and patient listened to the end of the piece together. As teacher just as patient, Karl ceaselessly directed the gaze of his friends and associates toward what was beautiful. His love for it was inexhaustible and infectious. In my year as a graduate student, his example has been both a reminder to love truth and beauty and an invocation to be the model Karl was for me.

The university’s current obsession with gibberish, with meaningless theory, distinction, and sub-distinction is ultimately a rejection of the goodness of reality. But, as lovers of the beauty of all created things, it is ours to insist fiercely upon this beauty and to share continually our joy in it. In “The Chimeras,” Auden warns, “No one can help them; walk on, keep on walking, / And do not let your goodness self-deceive you. / It is good that they are but not that they are thus.” Some people are too lost to save, and we endanger ourselves by associating too much with them. But, John promises us that “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). We cannot change anyone, but we can love the light and reflect it in ourselves. And this, for however long I am given, is what I hope to do.

NDaniels

Beautiful! There are some who may seem too lost to save, but The Light continues to shine in the darkness, and the darkness can not overcome Him. We can continue to Hope and Pray, the rest is up to God.
CSD

Soon the intellectual activities you describe will have to be pursued outside academia, which will eventually choke the life out of them through its systematic disinvestment in them. But I’m not sure what you mean by liberal arts; the end for which we study the liberal arts, namely, love of God and love of neighbor, seems more directly applicable to theology. Or maybe your implicit philosophy of education is Ignatian, in which case liberal arts would be a propaedeutic to the study of theology.
Charlie Ducey

Thank you for the much needed commentary. As a person studying the liberal arts (and considering the post-graduate study of them), your article reminds me of my own anxieties regarding the disconnect between academic theorizing and living out what one is learning. At the undergraduate level, what seems to be happening, in my own limited experience, is that liberal arts courses are not so much disappearing as becoming secondary. Someone might study finance, but take a few literature courses, major in accounting, but minor in Spanish. “Major in what can get you a job, minor in what you love” is a mantra I have heard numerous times. Students still have the desire to take these courses, but there is an obvious push toward majoring in a more vocational course of study. Alongside this, we hear the talk of “transferable skills” — clarity of written expression, analytic capacity — which the liberal arts cultivate, which to me seems like a way of buying into the economic side of making one’s studies seem marketable. However, it isn’t as though talking about the skills the liberal arts develop is a bad thing, nor is it the case that liberal arts are being funneled toward providing certain skills. The skills have always been a part of it. It’s the emphasis on marketability and employability that’s new.
Rebekah Spearman

One would hope the liberal arts are already being pursued outside of academia, and we don’t have to wait for the ivory walls to crumble.
What a dreadful world if the liberal arts were propaedeutic to theology! As Simone Weil says, “Evil makes distinctions.” It seems to me that some evil made the distinctions between the liberal arts. They’re all oriented towards the same goal (loving and understanding the World and God), but we categorize them as if they were not oriented towards the same goal. It seems bizarre to insist that theology and theology alone can study God. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth forth his handiwork.” If we’re not constantly perceiving God, we are living wrong. All the liberal arts (as disciplines) should be refining our instruments of perception.
CSD

Thanks for the reply. Unless I am misunderstanding you, you are only conceding the point I made. To the extent to which you study the liberal arts to achieve deeper theological insight, how is liberal arts not propaedeutic to theology, defined more broadly as faith in search of understanding? Perhaps you would prefer the phrase “ancillary to theology” to “propaedeutic to theology”?
Rebekah Spearman

Thanks for the comment! Both ancillary and propadeutic smack of theory, which troubles me. They also suggest the liberal arts are of lesser importance than theology, which troubles me. It simply seems like an unnecessary and dangerous distinction to make, like saying “Woman is ancillary to Man.” While given a certain definition of the terms, it may be true, but given the way most people understand the terms, it obfuscates and offends. I would suggest that as woman and man are parts of a unity that cannot exist without each other, so are theology and other branches of the liberal arts. They help each other as organs in a body help each other, not as a servant helps his master….
Rebekah Spearman

Thank you!
Rebekah Spearman

Thank you! I sympathize with your anxiety and am always frustrated by utilitarian defenses of the LAs. Ultimately, I think the only way to overcome these fears and critiques is to be filled with joy and love for what you study.
LawProf61

I was a liberal arts major (English, but took everything else I could cram in) and adored it. I teach in a business school now, and am amazed at how ignorant most people are about what employers are looking for - they are desperate for graduates well-educated in the liberal arts, and say so! The problem is not that our colleges and universities have become “too capitalistic,” but that - as Professor Spearman notes (much more gracefully) - too many liberal arts programs have become cesspools of negativism, nihilism, and nonsense. Without a redemptive worldview, interest has waned, and students have sought meaning elsewhere: in engineering and the sciences, for the role they play in the betterment of humanity, in business for free commerce and economic development, to name two examples.

The putrefaction within the liberal arts is was already happening when I was in college 35 years ago - I saw it and steered clear of the professors that taught those classes, instinctively. But it is more widespread now (every week, it seems brings another horror story about some pointless college class or repugnant professorial behavior), and with tuitions TEN TIMES what they were then, students AND parents now avoid it. Therefore, enrollment is shrinking.

The liberal arts professoriate loves to blame the “commoditization” of education. But the problem is much closer to home. Even so, since we are using the business metaphor, I’ll continue with it: I submit that far too much of what is now taught in the liberal arts wouldn’t have been worth what it would have cost 35 years ago. It certainly isn’t worth what it costs now. Not because “there are no jobs,” but because it no longer edifies. And people know it.

That may be a coarse way for the public to tell academe what they think of its “product.” But it sends a message, loud and clear. Past generations were no more “commoditized” than ours - and in some instances, may have been more so. And yet the liberal arts thrived, nevertheless. (Consider how many business magnates funded the establishment of those programs.)

I hesitate to say it, but tenure has permitted this to permeate academia. To continue to use business as a comparison, if any other enterprise in any other industry was as arrogantly insistent upon putting forth products and services of such poor quality, over the objections of its customers - and often insulting them in the process! - the employees would be fired, the CEO removed by the board, and the company would eventually be bankrupt. As that has not taken place (yet) in academe, the only option consumers have is to vote with their feet.

And they have.
http://newarkistheplace.com/ Thomas Mullally

Bravo! The sidelining of liberal arts is part of the American culture, of “productivity” at all costs. The only productivity that is lacking, is that which produces the joy of life.

On the academic front there is another terrible use of empiricism- to the written word. Computers are parsing language, into the simple metrics of majority rule and efficiency. Professors are expounding on the application of thesis-driven writing in every sphere. It is not enough to expose any more, you must determine and summarize in paragraph one, for the top dogs to know whose “side” you are on.

There are those who say the written word is dying, but the problem is the contrary: the written word has become everything, but meanwhile it is full human expression, which is being thrown by the wayside.