The state of the (liberal) arts

Will the liberal arts always be central to university education?  Are they now?  Certainly, they are becoming less central to SUNY-Albany, where several language and arts departments are being pruned (actually, made to wither and die, by executive decision) to save money.  It's not unreasonable to think that their roles will diminish at similar institutions, too.  The more apocalyptic among us might think that we are living in the last days, that this generation (of humanities professors) will not pass before it sees the last of their departments closed down.  Maybe that's going too far, but it is hard to look at the current state of the American university and think that the liberal arts have a bright future.  In fact, I take for granted that they don't.

Am I too pessimistic?  Perhaps the liberal arts are not dying, but merely changing.  Prophets of decline are easy to dismiss, in large part because they have so long been with us.  Perhaps the barbarians have simply always been at the gates, and they always end up being converted and setting up peacefully outside the castle.  The liberal arts have lasted this long, so why not assume they'll continue to last, if under a different, higher-tech form?


But even where liberal arts departments are not being actively removed from universities, these disciplines are not seen as important players in colleges or curricula.  Anecdotally, I can say that I see in my students too little desire to engage long-standing questions through liberal-arts approaches.  For the most part, students see little value in classes like mine.  I hear from colleagues in the English department that students majoring in the professional writing track openly admit that they don't like to read much. 

The liberal arts have often been defended on the grounds of their practical uselessness, the idleness of their pursuit.  Greek philosophy was born of the minds of men with nothing better to do than hang out in marketplaces and on porches.  I'm sure it goes without saying, though, that no state legislature would accept the liberal arts' idleness as good reason to increase funding for them.  And few career-conscious undergraduates will be persuaded to study philosophy or literature if their teachers make appeals to the liberal arts' essential unprofitability.

Those who want to promote the study of the liberal arts today, then, are in a paradoxical bind: if the liberal arts are in danger, then rescuing them will likely involve some sort of betrayal of their traditional detachment from questions of use and profit.

The blog's title is meant to get at one other paradox.  Studying liberal arts is in one sense a leisured activity, but being an active scholar and teacher of them requires an awful lot of work, much of it frustrating or tedious.  It is a curiously hard thing to do, to try to get others to learn about history or religion, things that no one really needs to know much about in order to get by in the world.

In the coming weeks and months, or for however long I can stay in the habit of regular posting, this will be where I work through these and similar questions.  I want to do my job better, and I think that writing and interacting with others here will help me do so.  Thanks for reading.