Alongside the breakdown of the family, the decline of the church, and the fragmenting of local community over the last third of the twentieth century, I want to propose that the loss of the liberal arts may be having comparably deep and tragic consequences for American society. In examining the quiet tide of hopelessness that has moved in and surrounded many American young people's lives -- in spite of, perhaps even in reverse proportion to, the endless corporate assurances in ads that cheerlead, "Is this the best of times, or what?" -- the diminishing of the liberal arts since the late 1960s has been largely overlooked as a cause. Conservatives have called our attention to the negative trends regarding family, church, and community, and are quick to blame the sixties counterculture. The small American left has pointed out that it may be the unrestrained growth of the only American social institution that is thriving, the corporate market economy, that is leading to the loss of hope. But few have explored the diminishing of the liberal arts as a comparable determinant.

Especially noteworthy is that this decline of the liberal arts has occured exactly over the lifespan of American community colleges. Born in the late 1960s, the American community college might have represented the expansion and democratization of what was a thriving liberal arts culture among the elite in the first two-thirds of the century. But this has simply not occurred. In fact the reverse correlation between the rise of community colleges and the diminishing of the liberal arts may be evidence of negative ripple affects in two directions, backward into high schools and onward into the four-year colleges. For it is not only in community colleges where genuine liberal arts lie neglected, violated, and poorly understood. It is also the case in high school and at the colleges to which community college students transfer. In fact, it seems to be only in smaller and smaller circles of elite liberal arts colleges that genuine liberal arts are still practiced in a full way, relatively protected from the tampering of technocratic and corporate agendas.

Central to the failure to recognize the tragic consequences of the diminishing of the liberal arts has been society's lack of clarity as to their significance in the first place. Whereas family and church have perenially had their contituencies among the broad American public, the liberal arts and their function have not been well understood, even during such high points as the early to middle 1960s. Even in such years, the public only vaguely understood what it meant for societal leadership to be schooled in the rich and subtle arts of reasoning, questioning, dialogue, reflection, interpretation, appreciating complexity, distinguishing truth, balancing tradition and innovation, and exercising judgement.

These are hallmarks of the liberal arts. We in the West have a rich and wonderful tradition of these things, going back to such extraordinary archetypal figures as Socrates and Plato. This heritage was probably only vaguely understood by the American public even during peak years like 1963-6, when I was in high school. Yet this vague understanding had a practical significance that might be characterized as a widespread expectation that power be somewhat wise and moderate. This would apply to power whether in government, business, law, medicine, education -- all the major institutions. Without meaning to overglorify or whitewash a past period that certainly had its portion of greed, cruelty, and particularly racism, still the Establishment of my childhood brought a sense of adulthood to its work that has simply not held up in the years since, particularly the 1990s.

Part of this adulthood -- or manhood for males, since much of what I will go on to say will be about males -- had to do with morality in the ancient sense of the exercising of the virtues. By virtues I mean the cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, moderation and justice, but also the intellectual virtues, faculties of reasoning, questioning, seeing shades of gray, distinguishing truth from advertisement, and the like. Moreover, the central societal training ground for these virtues was the liberal arts college, or the college of arts and sciences within a larger university. In fact, what left dim or vague the public's understanding of liberal arts was its being a process hidden away in liberal arts schools that only the elite experienced. Therefore what transpired within the halls of Princeton, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr always seemed somewhat mysterious and partially suspect to the public; and therefore when the vast new direction in higher education began to gather steam, i.e. the increase from 20 to 60% in the percentage of people experiencing at least some college, largely through the birth and growth of community colleges, the passing on the torch that we might have hoped for -- the passing on of the genuine torch of liberal arts training -- was not well managed by public officials, business leaders, and taxpayers. The great democratic promise of a liberally educated public -- something of Haverford and Bryn Mawr transmitted to every American working person -- would become a tragic failure.

My personal biography parallels the story of that failure. In retrospect, I can see now that I was one of the cadre entrusted to make sure that this failure did not happen. I was blessed to have a fine liberal arts education. It was hard to realize at the time just how bright the sky of 1965 and 66 was, how much it represented the crest of postWar optimism -- built on the shoulders of what Tom Brokaw has called "the greatest generation," but which at any rate was certainly a generation of grown-ups. This in spite of the looming Vietnam War.

From Mr. Nelson at Punahou School, my senior English teacher who introduced me to Albert Camus, Victor Frankl, and Hamlet; to the extraordinary collection of learned and vital men that constituted the Haverford philosophy department of the late 1960s, particularly Paul Desjardins, whose store of Christian and Greek learning still awes me; to George Schrader at Yale in the early 1970s, modeling for me what a seminar of adults could be, as we studied "Conflict" during the height of the Vietnam bombing: I have come to appreciate how special was that legacy passed on to me, and comparable ones to others of my generation. I also have come to think that Paul Desjardins was uncannily right when he told us that we had a responsibility to become the Guardians in the coming years, in Plato's sense. My liberal arts cohorts and I were riding the crest of a wave of learning that had arisen over many decades and now was overflowing at the peak of post-War prosperity, stability, and hope. It was out of such a background that could come the dream-plan to spread this legacy of the liberal arts to the broader American public through the new vehicle of community colleges.

But unexpectedly, the rich liberal arts background that we inherited in the mid sixties would contrast starkly with the primary motor of 1980s and 90s society, which like a sports utility vehicle would steamroll ever more relentlessly over the liberal arts and anything else fragile that might lay in its path. This was the motor of marketization, of advertising, and of high-tech technocracy. In hindsight, I should have noticed this monster truck more quickly and embarked with others on a plan of defense. Our new generation of liberal arts initiates were entering an era in which we would be required to fight unflaggingly. This is where Plato's terminology became relevant, in that we who were trained to be Guardians were rendered powerless for want of Auxiliaries. We have needed liberal arts fighting specialists -- special forces, marines -- to protect us from the attacks that would come when powers inimicable to the gentle and intangible work that we do would become unprecedently dominant. For we have been all too defenseless before the triumph of the mechanical and the measurable, spin and image, the short-term and the marketable -- all spurred by the tragic confluence of the computer revolution with the ideology Harvey Cox has aptly called "the market as god." The liberal arts is here in the same position as the family and the local church: all three represent something tender that needs to rely on certain protectors. Before the expansion of higher education, such protection was somewhat taken care of, mainly by the philanthropy of the old rich. This arrangement remained a quasi-secret, of which the public had, and needed, only a dim understanding. The secret was that behind the more demonstrative forms of societal power -- legislatures, law courts, police, armies and companies -- there were people educated in the liberal arts at Harvard, Yale or Swarthmore.

But the post 1960s spread of the liberal arts to a broader population has not extended the cover of that same protection. As a result, the liberal arts have been ravaged by small mechanistic, market-oriented minds that never did understand them and by acts of government officials and taxpayers who can be easily seduced to take away just about anything's funding if it doesn't show "measurable" results. But all such measurable results in our era are inextricably linked to corporate bottom lines, as the whole purpose of society has moved decisively into the corner of making corporate profits. And few things could be more inimicable to the spirit of liberal arts -- the spirit of "reasoning, questioning, critical thinking, etc.," -- than to turn education in philosophy, sociology, et al into a seamless fit for preparation for corporate career-climbing. The most important direction for all critical thinking in the current era is arguably to step back in search of perspective on the kinds of mind control that are becoming endemic, the mind control which French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes as "dripfeeding" its consensus into the public, night and day. How is a good liberal arts education, with any of the integrity it had from earlier times, going to survive in this era if it is held "accountable" to show "outcomes" that are "measurable" within a value system and social structure that answers primarily to the corporate bottom line?

Fortunately the West has a tradition of protecting the liberal arts from exactly such situations as these. This is where the need for liberal arts fighting specialists comes in. Unfortunately, I have arrived at this realization rather late. I, like many other liberal arts practicioners, just wanted to teach, or to run a small program. Liberal arts practicioners, almost by definition, aren't the ones who want to play the power and coercion games. But as Plato foresaw 2400 years ago, the Socrates of this world need Auxiliaries who do play that game.

For me, the chronology went like this: in 1979 when I began to teach, I was somewhat surprised to find the mechanistic methodology of someone I had never heard of named Benjamin Bloom semi-in place as the guiding orthodoxy of Burlington County College. But I soon learned that the Bloom method's hegemony, having to do with behavioral objectives, multiple choice tests, and course validations, was actually slipping, and was intelligently ignored by most of the liberal arts faculty. I thought things like this would go away. So I went about setting up an almost opposite model of learning in the mid 1980s: a core liberal arts program, rooted in "rich and subtle arts of reasoning, questioning, dialogue, reflection, interpretation, appreciating complexity, distinguishing truth, balancing tradition and innovation, and exercising judgement." This was somewhat in sync with a minor national movement, or blip, called the "core curriculum" movement, that I thought at the time was promising (although it needed to have its direction wrested away from mechanical thinkers like E. D. Hirsch, whose "cultural literacy" offensive tended to reduce liberal arts to a body of facts to be learned, thus missing the point).

But my liberal arts core seminars remained small, and by the late 1980s, it was clear that the money and influence were collecting rapidly in another place: a great tidal flow toward computers. Funding, good evaluations, pats on the back, everything that signified approval, "good job," "our guy for the future," now had to do with computers -- even in the liberal arts. I could tell right away that what computers were promising was at best supplementary to the rich and subtle arts of reasoning, questioning, dialogue, reflection, etc. But what took me by surprise is how disrupted the whole liberal arts cadre, outside of the old liberal arts elite colleges, became in the wake of the computer tidal wave. Of course, email, web pages, on-line research sources and a few other computer functions had irresistible supplementary advantages. Yet, "supplementary" was the key word: no one suggested, with regard to the Ivy League, that cyberspace activity could actually dislodge the fundamental socialization of the liberal arts elite that was the hallmark of these schools. Yet once one moved outside these campuses to the vast new population to which liberal arts was supposed to be expanding, and where the subtleties of the tradition had not yet taken root, the computer wave was able almost completely to dislodge the agenda. Corporate-backed, mechanistic and market-driven thinking went on a binge in the late 1980s and early 1990s that could only be resisted by the most self-assured and veteran liberal arts establishments. Alisdair MacIntyre suggested that we might need a Benedictine period for Western culture: a period of retreating to protected monasteries of reason, dialogue and virtue while the new barbarism roared over the wider world. Corporations, state legislatures, county officials, and gullible tax payers all were enforcing another agenda on liberal arts faculty. Liberal arts leaders lost a decade from our real agenda, having to respond repeatedly to demands that we contort the liberal arts to fit into what is sold as "the future": "smart" software that generated objectives, goals, syllabi, whole courses; the preoccupation with "distance learning," "on-line courses," and "internet universities" far out of proportion to their real worth.

Then in the later 1990s all the technology-generated coercion was reinforced by a second wave of attack, the "outcomes assessment" movement. Yet the "outcomes" movement, although lethal to the liberal arts if mechanistically applied, may leave more of a possibility of conversation and benefit. We will return to that in a moment. But first, we need to go right to the heart: What is it that happens in a liberal arts seminar that can be compared in importance to the family and church in its offering a counter-offensive against contemporary forms of hopelessness, loneliness, disconnectedness and depression, as manifested for example in tragedies such as the Littleton, Colorado incident?

The heart of a liberal arts seminar is the use of reason and dialogue in taking up fundamental questions. It is best led by a skilled practicioner, what Plato called a dialectician. Moreover, it takes place in the company of people who have gone before us and left veritable treasuries of thinking about these questions. These treasuries are called books!

While philosophy may lie at the core of the tradition of such seminars, the practice extends out to other fields as well. In sociology, for example, a liberal arts seminar seeks above all to provoke reflection based on explanations and applications of the great underlying sociological concepts such as socialization, ideology, culture, and social structure. In comparative religion, it may be interpretation of words such as God, Brahman, and Tao in sacred scripture that provides the primary focus.

It is very important that the liberal arts seminar be mainly a face-to-face activity. Supplementary things like cyberspace bulletin boards notwithstanding, it is vital that we see each other, that we are tangible presences to each other, that we are whole people and not just words or talking heads. For the liberal arts seminar is a kind of breaking the bread of real life. To say that physical presence is not necessary would be like saying that having one's "pac man" eat "cyber bread" on a computer screen would be an acceptable form of communion; or to say that a father or mother's presence in a child's bedroom in the goodnight ritual could be replaced by a phone call. Life has many serious, sometimes frightening problems: uncertainty whether God exists, or what is God; uncertainty as to how we should live; confusion about the widespread pursuit of material wealth, fame, power, and sexual success; uneasiness about science and technology; uncertainty over human survival -- ecological threats, world overcrowding, widespread misery, possibilities of nuclear disaster, giving our young people pause as to whether they should even have kids; forlornness about abrupt separation from the past and the deeper truths of that past.

In this generation even more than others within recent memory, many young people are aware that something fundamental is wrong. Yet they are not being trained to think about it. This is the hopelessness for which the liberal arts seminar -- alongside family, church, and local community -- is part of the cure. Most young people today, even college-bound, are not given any training to think about the great problems of life and society. Instead, what young people are exposed to is a relentlessly upbeat world where the market is God, advertising and sales is everything, intelligence is synonymus with the ability to get ahead, time is money, sex is easy -- and there are non-stop come-ons to get aboard. Many young people may suspect that this is superficial. But they are not trained in the powers to think about it, and in that absence the problems become even more frightening. Without liberal arts education, much of this generation cannot even read the thinkers who could help them to think. Unable to read beyond a People magazine level, the companionship of those who have tackled fundamental life problems of this magnitude in the past is not available to them. Society has not provided them with the patient training needed to read   Camus, Dostoevsky, and Hume; Marx, Weber and Mills; Buddhist Sutras, The Book of Job, and Simone Weil. Such training is vital for they themselves to become good at thinking. They need to read, to attempt to interpret, to explain, to reflect and to form educated judgements. They need, as sociologist Parker Palmer has said, to be listened into speech, for at first they may
be silent. They need small enough classes for that. They also need to write, and to know that if they truly attempt to develop their writing, there will be someone whose full-time profession it is to read and offer comment and criticism.

Why can't renewed family and church alone be the citadels of resistance to the tide of techno-market hopelessness? Because, first, family is in too shattered a state; for too many young people, broken families or even just stressed out families have meant neglect and pain; second, for family to carry the torch alone as the only institution where there is a surviving ethos of interdependence and non-market relationships is too much; the family without a surrounding web of moral relationships is too isolated and weak.

Then can the church, added to the family, provide the counter-forces we need? The church is also important, to be sure; the laws of Moses and teachings of Jesus provide vital countervailing orientations to the dominant ethos of our time. Yet the church relies on belief or faith, and in an age where reason and science have so transformed all aspects of life, belief or faith can seem like the anachronistic relics of small-town ministers next to the heady world of the world wide web and the contemporary corporate market system.

What is needed in addition to family and religion is a kind of reason that is wide and deep, versatile and compelling enough to put the narrower forms of thinking in their place. In an age that, overall, trusts rationality more than faith, it is only the renewal of a better, more whole thinking, applied to the study of the most fundamental problems of life, that can offer a full response to the prevailing techno-market forces. A critical mass of young people need to know there is a place where grown-up men and women sit down with emerging adults and use the power of thinking to its utmost in addressing the problems of God, truth, goodness, justice, and love. At these seminar tables there needs to be a passing on of the rich and subtle arts of reasoning, questioning, dialogue, reflection, interpretation, appreciating complexity, distinguishing truth, balancing tradition and innovation, and exercising judgement. Books need to be present, including whole, not dismembered, books, that show attempts to grapple with problems in completed works of art. (Whole books are not so manipulable as textbooks. The best can become companions that speak to one in different ways over a lifetime, not get sold back to the bookstore.) Such a liberal arts seminar, while referable to purposes beyond itself, also serves as an end in itself, something that is intrinsically good. This is especially important in case young peopleÕs families, churches, local communities and other hopes for sustenance have failed them; then the seminar becomes the rock of what is real, communal, and dependable, where the big questions are not avoided.

To do this well we need to be freed from the tyranny of at least the more mechanistic varieties of outcomes assessment that are currently ravaging the liberal arts in its most defenseless sectors, those fledgling sectors who in the 1970s and early 80s were still not quite confident as to what the liberal arts were and how they could be taught to the broader public, and who then were interrupted by the two disorienting waves of computerization and outcomes assessment. In fact, we need to occupy ourselves with inputs more than outcomes now, we need to train each other and our successors in what the liberal arts really are, and how the liberal arts seminar can be adapted to community college education. The core activities of the liberal arts seminar cannot be measured well by the predominantly short-term, quantifiable, objective, performance-based approaches that outcomes assessment offers. They may fit into computers better, they may make the transition to corporate jobs more seamless, they may make the not-so-liberally educated taxpaying public temporarily impressed in terms of accountability, and they may make managing large volumes of adjuncts easier for efficiency driven, cost-cutting corporate-style administrations in an era of downsizing. But they miss the point of what we do in the liberal arts.

The outcome of good liberal arts seminars, like the outcome of a good family, is a very long term matter; we have to think of a much broader, deeper, and longer lasting responsibility than the short-term numbers games of quasi-social science. These are our children and their generation. We aim at people who years from now can analyze, question, interpret, reflect, draw on the past, and exercise good judgement, in what may be new, very trying situations. We cannot be so concerned that what we teach does not entirely please Walmart or Microsoft, or even a Middle States examining board that has been infected by the passing trends of today. A 1995 statement on outcomes assessment by the American Philosophical Association suggests that outcomes in philosophy, the heart of the liberal arts, probably cannot and should not be made much more specific than the above. Outcomes assessors ought to expect that the most honest and appropriate goal in the liberal arts might simply be that the student will be able to read, think, and write on fundamental problems with a greater degree of sophistication recognizable by practicioners in the field.

In closing, let me emphasize this: There is wide agreement that education since the 1970s has not been good enough. But do we really think we are going to improve education by the current trend of more tests and more "accountability" alone? What we liberal arts teachers have been through in the past two decades has drained us of our richness. If there is no richness left, how will making us more "accountable" help? Surely, the answer is to restore the richness. .
 

Annotated Bibliography

Books

Bellah, Robert, et al. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1995 (reprint of 1984 edition with a new introduction).

Bellah and his colleagues have written a classic plea for a sociology rooted in public dialogue, not pseudo-value-free science, the kind of sociology that could become the substance of liberal arts seminars and help create a path toward community and hope, not isolation and hopelessness.

Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? New York, North Point Press, 1990.

Berry has a wisdom for the generations that can only come from someone rooted in agriculture. "We do not need to plan or devise a world of the future," he writes. "If we take care of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, ... and in the good things of human culture that we have now." (188)

Bourdieu, Pierre. On Television. New York, New Press, 1998.

Bourdieu leads the way in the kind of sociological critique we need of those forces that control us. His works have recently been translated into English.

Erikson, Erik H., ed. Adulthood. New York, W. W. Norton, 1978.

The issue of learning to be adults is explored wonderfully in this collection of essays by Erikson, Tu Weiming, William J. Bouwsma, and a dozen others. Included are psychoanalytic, Confucian, Christian, Islamic, and other thoughtful approaches that need reviewing by a society that may have lost the art of being or raising adults.

MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame, Indiana, Notre Dame University Press, 1984 (reprint of the 1981 edition with a new afterword).

The greatest philosophy book of the 1980s ends up concluding that that liberal arts people may need to become neo-Benedictines in the next century, holing up in enclaves where the virtues are still practiced amidst a new barbarism. He explores the triumph of Nietzsche over Aristotle, and the way that the foundations of morality collapsed when the trend became "everyone's own personal value system" without societal dialogue about a tradition of the virtues appropriate for good human beings.

McGrath, Dennis, and Spear, Martin B. The Academic Crisis of the Community College. Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1991.

By far the best book I have read on community colleges, it is required reading for Mid-career Fellows in Theodore K. Rabb's program at Princeton (a wonderful example of emphasizing inputs, not just outputs in the lives of community college professors.) The book critiques the emphasis in community college on "bitting," little bits that are measurable, rather than "texting," the putting of things into contexts or structures.

Articles

American Philosophical Association. "Statement on Outcomes Assessment." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association. 69.2 (1995): 65-67.

The APA gives us a clear warning that "some of the most important sorts of education cannot be captured by Outcomes Assessment, and indeed may be endangered by it." (67)

Christian Science Monitor (editorial). "How To Use School Tests." September 21, 1999: 10.

The editors question the value of a "one size fits all" orthodoxy enforced through tests. "A certain yeastiness in teaching might be lost. ... Such tests can help .... But a drive for test results can also put schools in straightjackets on curricula and teaching. Standards cannot be enforced in school as they are in a factory."

Cox, Harvey. "The Market as God." Atlantic Monthly. March 1999: 19-23.

The longtime professor of religion at Harvard writes a warm and humorous, yet indicting account of how warped our ideology has become since the Market won the Cold War.

Knickerbocker, Brad. "Mapping the Journey from Boy to Man."  Christian Science Monitor. October 13, 1999: 11, 14-15.

Actually an interview with Michael Gurian, author of  The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of our Boys and Young Men, Knickerbocker's brief article conveys Gurian's startling finding that American boys may have "the least moral development of any boys in the world."

Jago, Carol. "Thoreau-lite: Anthologies Leave Students with only some Snippets. Christian Science Monitor. October 19, 1999: 21.

A California English teacher questions how students can discuss Thoreau's challenging ideas with only one-liners to work with. She tosses the textbook, and takes out the original "On Civil Disobedience." Then a student asks if all things they were reading in their textbook came from "real books like that."

Palmer, Parker J. "Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery." Change. January/February 1990: 11-15.

This is the best article on teaching that I have found in recent years. Palmer portrays a variety of vital approaches to teaching that can mean so much to students but are often inimicable to mechanistic measurement.

Shervais, Marie. "Distrusting Educational Accountability." Christian Science Monitor. April 19, 1999: 9.

The mother of a second grade student discusses why she considers the accountability trend harmful to her child's education. A "huge component of teaching is intangible and cannot be measured. ... Now we're looking to find out if there is any place left where the teachers are given the time and respect to teach as they were before testing became an end in itself."

Video

de Graaf, John, and Boe, Vivia (a co-production of KCTS Seattle and Oregon Public Broadcasting Company). "Affluenza." Oley, Pa., Bullfrog Films, 1997.

Scott Simon narrates this expose of how our young people are socialized to be consumers . By the time we get them in college, society has so filled them up with market culture that there is hardly any where else to start than to try to reflect on what the previous years have done. This video works well in introducing the concept of "socialization" in sociology.