Saving Liberal Arts

The Displaced Pedagogue of U.S. education is the liberal arts college. Good high schools have improved so much in the last half dozen years that they turn out graduates who already know what they once would have learned as college freshmen. At the same time, many more college students go on to graduate schools--80% of all B.A.s at many a prestige campus--and they want specialized preparation for advanced work. The task of the liberal arts college, traditionally that of giving the common core of humane and scientific training that befits an educated man, is being undermined at both ends of the college time span.

Colleges all over the country are now redefining themselves in ingenious ways to meet the new circumstances. Their problem in essence is to defend humanities and arts from the space-age trend toward scientific specialization--"the new barbarism," as Columbia College's Dean David B. Truman calls it. Says he: "The specialist who is trained but uneducated, technically skilled but culturally incompetent, is a menace."

Honors Courses. One solution for the well-schooled high school graduate is to put him into special added-work honors courses. The University of Colorado is headquarters for a 145-campus network of honors programs. Big public campuses like Michigan State and the University of Oregon run entire honors colleges--in effect, Ivy League campuses within state universities.

Some 40 colleges simply acknowledge that freshmen studies tend to duplicate what modern students learn in high schools, and shove students out after three years and some summer work. In Los Angeles, 250 high school students take courses at U.C.L.A. At nearby U.S.C., other students polish off their senior high school and freshmen college years simultaneously.

Liberal arts colleges are also battling excessive specialization by calling attention to its dangers. Specialization can be a menace even to specialists: knowledge is expanding so fast that a professional with mere trade school training risks being obsolete in a few years. In fields from business and engineering to medicine and pharmacy, the search is on for broader graduate training that lasts. Boston University now turns out M.D.s in six rather than eight years--and gives them more humanities than ever.

Marvelous Morass. The ways that other colleges try to meet the new demands are at first glance mutually contradictory. To preserve liberal learning, Amherst still requires all freshmen to take the same three basic courses. Toward the same end, Vassar and Princeton make no specific requirements. Because they took college courses in high school, 150 of Harvard's freshmen enter as full-fledged sophomores, but Harvard tries to talk them into staying a full four years on the grounds that they need time to grow up.

Yale's faculty wants qualified students to earn B.A.s along with their M.A.s, but Yale intends to ''keep required courses and see to it that a student is well educated before placing him in independent work." Connecticut's Wesleyan has plunged ahead with independent study and tutorials, is reorganizing itself as a federation of colleges grouped around major fields of study. "Unless liberal arts colleges move into some form of advanced learning that at the same time strengthens their undergraduate work," warned Wesleyan recently, "they may well be doomed to become finishing schools, or at best, prep schools for graduate education."

New Curriculums. To avoid that fate, colleges are writing new curriculums with bewildering variety. One widely held view is that "general education" needs a broadening if it aims to synthesize exploding fields of knowledge--all of which increasingly impinge on each other. Harvard's famed general education requires that courses be chosen from three major areas (humanities, natural and social sciences), and a high-level committee is busily pondering changes to give it more depth and breadth. Columbia has revamped its own pioneering (1919) general education program. Contemporary Civilization. The required sophomore part used to consist of smatterings from the works of 50 or so great thinkers; now it offers solid courses from anthropology to economics, a shrewd compromise between specialization and generalization.

"We no longer contend that there is only one way to a general education." says Dean Alan Simpson of the University of Chicago, which in the heyday of Robert Hutchins held fast to a thin, well-read line of "great books" (still the rule at Maryland's famed St. John's College). Simpson argues that now "people can get themselves educated in all kinds of ways," and that a student who probes almost any subject deeply enough these days is likely to wind up needing more knowledge in a broad spectrum of many other subjects. If this is so, colleges may be able to make specialists who are sufficiently generalist. To give Chicago the proper atmosphere for such a development, British-born Dean Simpson envisions a switch to the English system of undisturbed reflection capped by rigorous exams--"a bracing combination of sauntering and sprinting."

No Two Alike. Whatever Chicago devises, it may be hard put to match the remarkable curriculum announced last week by Brown University. Heretofore, Brown had a standard general education setup: required courses in three basic areas (humanities, social studies, science and math), all of them to be completed in the first 2 1/2 years. To foster breadth of interest, students were restricted to a maximum of twelve one-semester courses in their major. But starting next fall, Brown will banish all this for a frankly "permissive" system based on the idea that early specialization may lead to later generalization.

To get breadth, Brown divides college learning into eight areas--linguistics; math or philosophy; physical science; life science; literature; art, music or religion; history, and social science--and requires that each student take a year of all but one. But a student can skip any of them merely by passing a proficiency exam, and from the day he arrives on campus a freshman will freely write his own academic timetable, specializing just as much as he wishes. To spur "professional" learning, says President Barnaby C. Keeney, "a student may avoid further work in certain areas in which he has no interest or real competence."

The idea would panic many another campus, but Brown's Dean Robert W. Morse has a precise aim: "to capitalize on a student's interest at the right time. The key to education is interest, and to deflect or kill interest is the cardinal sin of education." As Morse sees it, freer requirements will produce freer minds and broader education: "A math student, for example, might benefit more from an advanced philosophy course in his senior year than from a general philosophy course in his sophomore year, because he could bring more mature experience to bear." Predicts Dean Morse cheerfully: "It is nearly inconceivable that any two students will go through Brown with identical courses of study."

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