On October 2, Professor Craufurd Goodwin, who has been on the Duke economics faculty for more than 50 years, gave the Founder’s Day Talk. His remarks centered on the theme that Duke has allowed career training to shove liberal education into the back seat.
“I am convinced,” he said, “that the greatest danger to our university today comes from powerful forces that threaten the survival of liberal education: education to free the mind, rather than to prepare for a career. We are being pushed constantly toward vocational training and thus far we have done little to resist.”
Professor Goodwin went on to explain just where the pressure comes from. First, from students who mostly think of their college education as just a step in the job search, and second, from the faculty, most of whom have accepted the idea that sharp undergraduates should be steered into academic programs that have an occupational focus.
He isn’t even happy about the fact that so many undergraduates are majoring in economics: “I would like to think that this is because of the excitement of our field and our brilliant teaching. But I know that, to the contrary, this is because economics sounds most like a way station to Wall Street.”
Perhaps those last two words should be changed, but you see his point.
Duke’s curriculum does require students to fulfill the standard sort of distribution requirements. They have to take at least two courses in arts, literatures, and performance and two that study civilizations. That’s all right, but Goodwin would like to see the university go further, suggesting that “the best approach is to integrate the fine arts and humanities throughout all the fields and disciplines.”
Exactly how a chemistry professor, for example, should integrate the fine arts and humanities into his course is something Professor Goodwin doesn’t make clear. I am sympathetic, though, to his call for exploring big ideas, opening student minds, and creating genuine intellectuals. Just fulfilling the distribution requirement of a handful of courses doesn’t go far toward those goals.
In his new book Real Education (which I reviewed here), Charles Murray makes the same argument Goodwin does. He decries that fact that so many college graduates today are “innocent of any systematic thought about the meaning of life, oblivious to all the shortcomings of their education, and oblivious to their own intellectual limits.” For the majority of young people who just want some career training, he advocates non-college certification programs. For the relatively small percentage who are really intellectually gifted, he wants to see college focus much less on career training and much more on mind-broadening studies that will help to make them wise human beings in time. Sharp undergrads who are thinking about a legal career, for instance, shouldn’t waste their time on a smattering of “pre-law” courses. They will have time enough later on to learn about the law; as undergraduates they would benefit more from, oh, learning what Beethoven was doing in his Ninth Symphony and what Adam Smith thought about humanity in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Unfortunately, there are severe difficulties entailed in the plea Goodwin and Murray make for a curriculum that gives students a true liberal education. One is the faculty. Most professors like things pretty much the way they are. They have narrow specialties and would grimace at the idea that students would be better served by broad courses taught with the goal of encouraging students to think about life’s big questions.
Another is the fact that most students come out of high school with blinders on – focusing only on the job world ahead. “How am I ever going to use artsy, philosophical stuff?” they say. Colleges will need to do an excellent sales job if they adopt a liberal education curriculum. They will have to convince potential students that obtaining a liberal education is not going to hinder their career plans and will probably enhance them. In that regard, it’s possible to show that many top-notch companies prefer applicants who haven’t just taken a raft of career-oriented courses along with a polyglot of others to get enough credits.
Selling liberal education to bright students shouldn’t be all that difficult. Murray cites Aristotle’s insight that one of the deepest forms of human enjoyment is the exercise of one’s realized capacities. The challenge of doing exactly that in courses taught by excellent professors should draw top students like bees are drawn to flowers.
I tip my hat to Professor Goodwin for bringing up this important topic.