The Liberal Arts Aren’t Broken, American Colleges Are

Learning for learning’s sake doesn’t have to preclude career advancement. (Photo Credit: Columbus Metropolitan Library)

The liberal arts in America have moved away from their traditional mission of providing students a space for inquiry while educating them about the intellectual foundations of their civilization. The intellectual garden of liberalism welcomed the matriculating student to frolic within the bounds of firm walls that excluded rabble rousers, left and right alike. This educational model was rejected en masse from the 1960s onwards, by research-heavy academia demanding that professors “publish or perish” rather than teach, and by students who sought to deconstruct their moral foundations. Thus, the walls of the liberal garden have been torn down, and the weeds have set in. The rise of niche academic identitarianism coupled with a wider decline in intellectual diversity has narrowed academia’s scope so as to prevent genuine free thought. The fault of this decline does not fall on traditional disciplines of the liberal arts, but on the colleges meant to tend to the garden of ideas.

In his 2005 work Privilege, Ross Douthat observes that elite college circles became the forges of an American cultural decline that began in the 1960s. Harvard pioneered the sexual revolution and pop culture drug use, its students content to rely upon easy access to birth control pills and healthy finances. This culture gradually trickled down to the rest of the American populace as students at these institutions became the premier producers of media, from Hollywood to literature. This cultural shift wrought moral havoc by making casual sex the norm. Even worse, most Americans lacked elite college students’ trust funds and secure family institutions, contributing to higher rates of child rearing outside of marriage and divorce. The decline of morality in these colleges brought about the wider erosion of American culture. This eventually reached those who had to reap the worst of the move away from traditional values. Working-class Americans were left parenting more children outside of marriage and taking more drugs than their upper-class peers. 

Douthat observes how little his fellow students seem to care for the merits of their liberal arts education beyond its pre-professional dimensions, a strange decision at an institution where students are almost sure to find their way to a comfortable living. Douthat himself is far from immune to the worst of Harvard culture, chasing admission to prestigious social clubs and, of course, monetizing his young adult gossip into a memoir to propel his way to the top of The New York Times. 

A third of the American professoriate leaned right forty years ago, but the ideological bent of academia to the left has accelerated since. The lack of ideological diversity fails all students. Left-of-center students often find themselves interacting with a hollow shell of their ideologies centered on identity politics rather than a historical tradition. Surveying the Claremont Colleges catalogue on Hyperschedule, for instance, one finds more opportunities to interact with Africana Marxists or the gay liberation movement than, for instance, 18th-century radical Thomas Paine or even Vladimir Lenin. 

Conservative students are perhaps failed most of all. Left without faculty mentorship, these adrift aspiring activists instead find themselves under the wing of anti-intellectual right wing radicals. When conservative students stumble upon “mainstream” conservatism they do so under the aegis of figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos that stand either apart from or against the intellectual conservatism students might have found in their departments. Very few colleges offer much in the way of teaching about the intellectual tradition of the right. It should be no surprise that students of conservative inclination, deprived of the chance to discover the anchor of history, sway into the storm of the far-right’s excesses.

Liberal arts colleges in America today often claim to be the last bulwarks of educational tradition, but the problem of intellectual diversity is particularly strong there.The institutions have an average Democrat to Republican ratio of 12.7:1 among their professors, and several top liberal arts colleges have no Republicans in their faculty at all. Conservatives in the humanities, such as those studying literature (where two percent of professors leaned right as of 1999), find themselves alienated as their field suffers from analysis steeped in niche fundamental presuppositions or ideological perspectives. The same study aggregated professors across gender studies, Africana studies, and similar fields at liberal arts colleges, finding that none at all were registered Republicans. 

Ideological bias in the humanities and interdisciplinary studies has drawn conservative talent away from these fields. Searching Google Scholar, one finds over 1,350 articles on the subject of “xenofeminism.” The whole of work found on “conservative literary criticism” yields a mere 75 results. Other disciplines that may be seen as having a more practical application face similar failures. For instance, sociologists often fail to consider history’s most consistent social institutions — those of religion. 

The liberal arts have historically balanced free inquiry with the bequeathment of a grand heritage of thought. The field of American education today seems polarized to the most radical of both views. At many schools, pursuing truth is jettisoned entirely. For instance, Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple sees the author, a Brown University student, visit Evangelical America’s premier educational institution: Liberty University. Here, free inquiry is discouraged and doctrinal inheritance becomes the paramount aim of education, thus presenting a different rejection of the liberal arts. However, Liberty may have more in common with its nemeses in “woke” academia and elite pre-professionalism than it admits. Liberty may adhere to a full ten, but, at dear old Claremont McKenna, the universal commandment is apparently to line thy pockets. Meanwhile, elements of academic postmodernism seem to hold, at the very least, the universal truth that there is no universal truth. Enforcing adherence to conservative beliefs is little better than constraining intellectual freedom within the bounds of leftist postmodernism.. 

Academic institutions are failing because they have turned away from traditional liberal arts values. The answer to decline is not rejecting the liberal arts wholesale, but returning to historical understandings of their worth. 

This article was published in conjunction with The Forum.